I knew what I had to do, knew it from the beginning, but I lay there anyway and stared into the fire as though no answer would come to me. Partly that was because I was still so physically weak and such a bad match for the obvious strength of Torgmund, but partly also it was because I did owe him my life, and he was operating out of a simple view of the world, doing nothing that seemed to him wrong. A trapper was a trapper. Daysiders were daysiders. And slaves were slaves. Forever.

Still there was what had to be done. I fell asleep knowing it.

When I awoke he was indoors again, making more stew. When he brought me my bowl he said, "How you coming?"

"Slow but steady," I said, although I was much improved.

During dinner and for a while afterwards Torgmund spoke to me of trapping, and of skinning the hides, and of those other activities of his Me in which he expected me from now on to take part. But eventually he stretched out on his makeshift bed—furs spread out on the floor—across the room, and I pretended at once to fall back asleep.

But I had never been more awake. My eyes were closed but my ears were open, listening to the sound of his breath going in and out of his body. When the unchanging evenness of that sound convinced me he was fully asleep I crept slowly from my bed.

I was still weak, very weak. Standing made me dizzy, and

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I wasn't entirely sure I had the strength to do what had to be done. If I were to wait till I was stronger ...

No. In another two or three days he would know I was stronger and he would no longer expose himself so freely to me. He would most likely lock me away in the room he was building when it was time for him to sleep. So if it was going to be, it had to be now.

I made no noise. I inched around the room, hanging to the walls, my bare feet moving forward tentatively at every step, my hand clutching the wall. It had to be somewhere.

It was. The knife he used in skinning his catch, a long curving steel blade in a sheath hanging on a nail beside the door. Slowly I grasped the hilt and drew the blade out of its sheath, and then I moved to Torgmund.

I had neither the time nor the strength for any sort of stroking cut. All I could do was drive the blade straight down into and through his throat.

It didn't kill him all at once, but the point of the knife was into the floor, pinning him there, and his thrashings finished the job, while I leaned spread-eagled against the wall, gasping and terrified, watching.

When it was over, I pulled the knife free and dragged the body outside into the snow. Then I went back in and latched the door and staggered to my bed, too exhausted to do any more.

For hours, the firelight played nightmares around the room.

XXII

it was odd to think of moonlight as signifying day, but the period without moon was so utterly black that the time of moonglow by comparison took on a radiance as bright as day on any world in the cosmos. The moon itself was abut half again as large as the moon of Earth, and much yellower in color, the result no doubt of the red sun it was reflecting. The light it produced on the ground was pale and luminescent, with perhaps a touch more of a swollen yellow than in moonlight on Earth.

This moon didn't exactly rise in the normal sense of the term. It appeared at first as a thin curving crescent low to-

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ward the horizon, thickened to half-moon shape by "mid-morning," was a full moon when at its zenith in the sky, and reversed this process as it slid down the curve of sky toward the horizon again, ending as a crescent, thinner, thinner, then abruptly slicing out, as though a switch had been clicked in some massive control room in the sky.

The night, that time when the moon was blindly groping through the dayside sky, was almost utterly black. Hell stood lonely in a sparsely-starred sector of space, as though ostracized for its sins from some civilized star cluster; only a few stray spots of light broke the blind blackness of the sky.

I never left the cabin at night. Once the afternoon moon had reached three-quarter I went inside for good, bolting the door and listening often for the sounds of my enemies approaching. I no longer slept in the bunk, but made for myself a mounded bed of skins and blankets by the door, and slept there with a pistol close by my hand. In the mornings I left the cabin cautiously, clutching Torgmund's rifle as I opened the door inch by inch, prepared to fight off those who might be skulking just out of sight against the outer wall. I felt a great and continuous fear during those days I spent at the cabin, believing the world to be full of faceless enemies out to capture me. I was never afraid that they might murder me, but only that they would capture me. I allowed my beard to grow, dressed myself in Torgmund's home-made clothing, and when walking about outside did my best to change my normal posture and manner—all to keep those unknown watching enemies from recognizing me. Because it was me I believed they were after, me personally, though I couldn't have said why.

I was full of strange thoughts then, like the business of Torgmund's body. Killing him had affected me badly, given me nightmares and worried my mind. I had returned now to a full awareness of what I had come to Anarchaos for in the first place, the vengeance of my dead brother, and it seemed to me that if I were to be worthy and capable of avenging him I would have to have a stronger and more impersonal attitude toward death, so for the first few days I wouldn't bury him. He kept well, lying in the cold and the snow, and I made a point of eating one meal each day outdoors, where I could see him, forcing myself to watch him as I downed a

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bowl of stew or gnawed at the hard biscuits. But after three days I could stand it no more, and decided to bury him anyway.

It was then I discovered that the cabin was not built on the ground but on a thickness of permanent ice down under the snow. I chopped through it with Torgmund's pick, swinging it one-handed, and reached dirt about a foot down. My pick bounced back from that ground as though it were hitting iron. So Torgmund would have to do without burial.

Eventually I merely dragged him some distance away from the cabin and covered him with snow. In the night after that I heard the moaning and yapping of animals a little way off, but I never went to look and so I don't know precisely what happened.

I stayed at the cabin ten days, building my strength. Torgmund had left me almost endless provisions, including a separate unheated shack filled with smoked and frozen meat. Also there were sacks of flour, quantities of a root vegetable like a cross between a potato and a carrot, and commercial tins of powder which combined with hot water to make that coffee-like drink.

All in all, Torgmund had created a fine principality for himself, consisting of three and a half structures, the half being the slave quarters for me that he had never had a chance to finish. In addition to the cabin itself and the storage shed there was a kind of squat barn containing quantities of hay and two hairhorses, with his wagon sitting just out front. Also in the barn were a number of traps, mostly looking as though they'd been brought in for repairs.

I spent many of the moonlight hours in the barn, familiarizing myself with the hairhorses and them with me, since I would need them eventually to take me out of here and back to the Anarchaos version of civilization.

They never shied away from me at all, not even at first. Perhaps, with Torgmund's coat on, they thought I was their master. I doubt they had a much-developed sense of smell, since their own odor was quite strong and likely to blot out subtler aromas. The smell of them reminded me of rancid soup.

Before this I had seen hairhorses only at a certain distance and in passing. Now that I was close to them I saw they were