His voice faded as he guided the woman along the promenade. To Dumarest she was of normal height, the top of her head coming level with his eyes, but she was at least half a head taller than her companion. Like all the other people of Zakym Dumarest had seen Roland was small, finely built, with a delicate bone structure and a gentle face. The result of centuries of inbreeding, perhaps, or some mutation becoming a dominant genetic trait. Among the scattered worlds of the galaxy such things were common; odd developments produced by the floods of wild radiation which bathed vast areas of space.

In which case Lavinia was an atavar, a throwback to the time when those who had settled this world were taller than now with a more aggressive disposition. That too, he had noticed; a gentleness of behavior which was unusual. Here, on Zakym, it was as if gentle children had come to play, building themselves castles and houses, dividing lands and forming themselves into protective groups, content to let life slip quietly past as they dreamed of endless delights.

A wrong picture, of course, he had seen too little of the place to form a true judgment, but he doubted if it would be too far from fact. A backward world with little commerce and so few contacts with other, more aggressive cultures. A society founded on farms and animals and a little mining. One producing selectively bred beasts and herbs, plants and insects. There would be few gems and little precious metal. There would be hardly any industry.

A near-static world on which it would be hard for a traveler to gather a stake. Harder still for a stranger to gain a fortune.

Well, that worry would have to wait. He was alive and that was enough.

Dumarest leaned back, feeling the warmth of the lichened stone against his shoulders. The suns were sinking, their orbs close and he closed his eyes against their glare. From the courtyard came little, muted sounds and even the calls of one to another seemed to come from a vast distance or be muffled by layers of cloth.

Odd how the air seemed so enervating.

Odd how he had woken to imagine Lallia facing him, stooping a little forward, the mane of her hair a shimmering waterfall over rounded shoulders.

A woman.

The womb of creation.

The natural opposite to the harsh reality of death.

Against the closed lids of his eyes Dumarest saw again the distant burn of scattered stars, the sheets and curtains of luminescence, the somber patches of darkness, the fuzz of remote nebulae-and felt, too, the aching emptiness of the space into which he had flung himself.

To drift in the embracing shimmer of the Erhaft field, to break from it, to hang utterly alone. To die.

To hear the thin, so thin, crying. The crying… the crying…

"No!" He jerked awake with a gasp, aware that he had dozed, feeling the wetness of sweat on his face, the tremble of his hands. He had killed before and had seen men die and had heard them plead before they died but never had it been like this.

The crying. The thin, plaintive, hopeless crying.

"It doesn't matter, Earl." The voice was a familiar wheeze. "It doesn't matter at all."

Chagney!

He stood with his back against the stone wall of the battlement, dressed as Dumarest had remembered, his face the same, the eyes clear, the mouth free of the frill of blood which it must have worn at the last. Now, standing, he smiled and extended a hand.

"We all have to go, Earl. Sooner or later it comes to us all. And what did I lose? A few days? A week? Zakym would have been my last planetfall."

A dead man standing, talking, smiling, his eyes clear- but how?

"Does it matter?" Thin shoulders lifted in a shrug as Chagney turned to look over the crenelated wall. "You have died, Earl. You know more than most. You died-and I died with you!"

"Chagney!" Dumarest stepped forward, reaching, feeling stone. He leaned against it for a moment, feeling tension at the base of his skull. The dominant half of the affinity twin had nestled there-could it still, in some incredible manner, be connected with the part Chagney had carried?

Would death never end?

Dumarest drew in his breath and straightened. The promenade was empty, the navigator had vanished, but some of the tension remained. Theoretically the affinity twin should dissolve when the bond was broken, the basic elements being absorbed into the metabolism, but what if theory was wrong?

"Earl!" Kalin smiled, her hair a rippling flame. "Think of it as a transceiver. You are never really in the host-body at all. It is just that all sensory data is transmitted and received on the ultimate level of efficiency. The rest is illusion."

Kalin? Here?

She vanished as he took a step towards her and he stumbled and fell to a knee, hands outstretched, feeling the rasp of stone on his palms, a growing madness.

The promenade, once empty, was now thronged with figures. Men, women, some strange, others vaguely familiar, a few seeming to gain solidity as he watched. The man he had fought on Harald, falling with blood on his lips, eyes glazed in hatred as he died. The gentle face of Armand Ramhed, the ruined one of his assassin, the sly eyes of an old woman from… from… and then, shockingly, he was looking at himself.

A man lying pale and limp and apparently dead. A man who dissolved and rose and stood tall and menacing in a scarlet robe.

Cyber Broge, his face like a skull, bone which smiled.

"There's no escape, Dumarest. We are too powerful. You can never hope to elude us for long. We shall find you and, when we do, you will pay." The even tones echoed as if rolling down a corridor. "Pay… pay… pay…"

His arm lifted and Dumarest sprang to one side, hand dropping to his boot, the hilt of the knife carried there, rising with it gleaming naked in his hand, lunging forward to send the steel whining through the air in a vicious cut which drew sparks from stone, ripped at fabric-and sent Roland Acrae falling back with a rip on the sleeve of his blouse.

"Earl! No!" Lavinia came running towards him as again the blade rose. It halted in its driving lunge to fall inches from the ruined blouse, light turning the steel into a purple shimmer, luminescent blurs riding the honed edge and point.

"A mistake." Dumarest lowered the knife. "I thought-it was a mistake. I apologize, my lord."

"So fast." Roland lifted fingers to the ripped sleeve. "You moved like the wind."

"A mistake."

"The mistake was mine." Incredibly he was calm. "I should have known, have warned you, at least. Look at the suns."

They were very close, edges almost touching, flares of magenta and violet filling the air with a purple haze.

"I could have killed you," said Dumarest. And would have done if something, instinct perhaps, had not stayed his hand. Lavinia added to the strangeness of the moment with her smile.

"You could have done, I suppose, and if you had I would have regretted it. But it would not have been the tragedy you seem to think."

"My lady?"

"He would have moved on but he wouldn't have wholly gone. At times of delusia he would have returned. We could have spoken to him and he to us."

"Delusia?" Dumarest looked again at the suns beginning to understand. "Is that when the dead come back to life?"

"We can see them and talk to them and they to us. Is that what disturbed you? The presence of an old enemy who threatened you? One who wanted to hurt?"

"One who wanted to kill."

"And so you tried to kill him." Slowly she nodded, her eyes wide, the lift of her breasts prominent beneath her gown as she drew in her breath. "Do you find it easy to kill, Earl?"

He thought of Chagney. "No."

"But, if you are threatened, you will?"

"It is the way of life." Dumarest looked at the knife and thrust it back into his boot. "You breed animals and must know that. The strongest are those who perpetuate their line. To do that they will fight and win. They have to win."