With no further word, he doffed the dark spectacles he wore at all times, buckled on a shoulder belt holding his weapons, and donned his full face mask of black smartfabric, and drew up his hood. The weapons were matched antiques like stilettoes with blades of blue glass and scorpion-tail grips; the weapons emitted a dour, mordant aura on the emotion channel, but never spoke. The entire surface of the mask and cloak, not just the area over his eyes, was light sensitive, and fed the images directly into his cortex, so he did not need to don his black spectacles again: but he liked the way they looked, for they gave his facelessness a memorable accent.

Impishly, he flexed his shoulders to trigger the silent billow and hem-floating of his cape. The New Guy did not flinch in instinctive decompression-fear as a spacer would have seeing the black cape a-billow, but he did not react as an earthman either, who would have noticed the glaring exception to the sumptuary laws with a raised eyebrow, or a studied attempt at nonchalance.

This squire fellow instead looked at the cape lining, and his eye motions did the typical posthuman jitter of rapid information absorption. What was going on? The guy was studying how a normal cape-circuit worked? He did not know about living thread?

Norbert could not even remember how long ago living thread had been invented. Was it before the rise of the Fourth Humans, or after? It was a Fox Maiden technology, something they spun from special glands their vixanthropic powers allowed them to control, wasn’t it?

The first Fox, Cazi, had been perfected somewhere near the year Minus 30000. The current year was Minus 17444. One hundred twenty-five centuries later.

How old was this squire? The most distant world in the Empyrean Polity of Man was Uttaranchal of 83 Leonis at fifty-eight lightyears hence. A voyage there and back would only let Einstein steal a century. Had this man made the long faring across the Vasty Deep one hundred twenty-five times? Then he would have been the most famed figure in history, not a squire of marines with some odd name.

Norbert grit his teeth. No. This year was not Minus 17444. Nor was it Minus 18944. The Guild was strictly neutral, which meant that all dates were adding up from some past salvation recalled by the sacerdotes, not counting down to the future salvation anticipated by cliohistorians. He dared not make a gaffe like that, showing favor to one side or the other, even in his thinking, lest he say or send something in an unnoticed moment damaging to the Guild. Killing men was excusable; slips of the tongue were not.

The other option was that this squire was not old, but young. He had been hatched out of some Fox Maiden’s cloning egg an hour ago. If he were too young to have seen clothing before, that explained his staring at the cloak. Also, if he were too young to have permanent structures in his brain, that explained his too-quick adjustment to his vertigo. This was a man with no family and no past, loaded with the earthman equivalent of brashness, the magnetic personality of a bravo. Another expendable. And that meant only one thing. Failure did not mean anything so sweet as being turned over to the seculars.

“So, Squire End Ragon! Is the plan that you kill me if I fail?”

Norbert, who thought he had this man pegged, was astounded. The man’s startled look, the change in his eye, in his stance, was so honest, spontaneous, and unprepared, that nothing could have convinced Norbert more deeply.

The squire was not just angry, he was offended. His sense of honor was wounded.

The man drew his sidearm and presented it to Norbert butt first, and at the same time sunk to one knee. “Many a cruel and untoward thing have I done in my life, and slain men both guilty and innocent as need required, but never in any underhanded way. I do not shoot foes in the back, nor without warning, nor without affording them time to pack their pistol, nor without witnesses! Do I shoot men like dogs? That would make me less than a dog! Shoot me with my own piece, drive a stake through my corpse and bury it at the crossroad, far from sacred ground, if that is the opinion my commanding officer has formed of me within the first few moments of my duty. Shoot me now, or never doubt me again, my lord!”

These were the words born of a mature sense of honor, not some imprinted set of gestures and gland-reflexes. Norbert, ashamed, revised his assessment. Whatever this man was, he was not some hour-old hatchling.

Norbert took the pistol and opened it. It was charged to power and occupied by a serpentine. “Do you vouch for this man?”

The weapon said, “Under these conditions, I would fire and kill him, since his request is lawful, and it is an affair of honor. Your accusation is a stain that his blood or yours must wipe out. The whole conversation from the moment you saw him must be removed from the records and archives of every object you own, including the blackbox recorder.”

“There is no place outside of a graveyard where anyone can find every recording object,” said Norbert. “But I do not balk at this being seen.”

Norbert handed the pistol back. Then he doffed his glove, drew a sampling needle, and made the smallest possible pinprick with the needle point in the ball of his thumb. The blood of Rosycross was black as ink, since the bloodstream was thick and sluggish with nanomachines meant to fend off radiation and fast-moving particles from the flares and sickening sunspots of Proxima. The blood hung from his thumb like a small black gem.

Norbert held the bleeding thumb toward the kneeling man, “Satisfied, Squire End Ragon?”

The man rose and holstered his weapon. “It is said blood erases all records, sir. If there is no recording, it never happened. There is a custom of dueling on your world?”

“Among the hillmen of Dee. We are one of the older parishes, and we all were born in the shadow of the towers of the First Sweep colonists, who perished to the last child. The flare times mummify the bodies by killing microbes, so children sometimes still find corpses if they play in the towers, which all the mothers tell them not to, and none of the boys obey. When you live beneath a boneyard that big and that old, you know life is for spending, not for hoarding. So, yes, my people duel, with sword or stick or sting, spray-torch, depending on their archetype, and any talking whips we find in the ruins.”

Norbert sighed and continued, “I know enough not to wake up the Swans or provoke the Archangels, not to use any weapon that might damage life support or invite the Retaliation. But by the useless Eunuch’s dangle do I hate this work.”

“Sir? Hate it?”

“I am delighted with the art of hunting of human prey, for no sport known to mortal man makes such demands on mind and soul and nerve and gut. Even the great Ghosts and Potentates and Powers have no such sport as this, for they cannot die!”

“Let us pray that is not so,” murmured the squire. Norbert’s hearing was designed to be more acute than the standard allowed to earthmen, who came from a noisier world with denser air, so Norbert was not sure whether he was meant to hear that murmur. Norbert knew many an earthman had a habit of talking to himself, especially if his nervous system lodged more than one personality.

He thought it politer to continue his sentence as if not interrupted. “… But I have blood on my hands, and ever since the Marriage Brokers unionized, murderers do not get invited to pay court on young ladies very often.”

“Being alone is not so bad, sir, surely.”

“Among my people, the word for an unmarried man is a swearword. Every other part of this dark business is honorable, even attractive to women of a certain type. So the only part of being an assassin I hate is the assassination. You smirk? Strikes you as funny?”