Then, pacing, he would reach the edge of the roof and turn back the way he had come, and everything would be changed. The left side of his face was inhuman, a landscape of twisted plains and angles that no face ought to have. The flesh was seamed in a half-dozen places, and elsewhere it was shiny-slick as enamel. On this side, Bretan had no hair whatsoever, and no ear-only a hole-and the left half of his nose was a small piece of flesh-colored plastic. His mouth was a lipless slash, and worst of all, it moved. He had a twitch, a grotesque tic, and it touched the left corner of his mouth at intervals and rippled up his bare scalp over the hills of scar tissue.

In the daylight the Braith's glowstone eye was as dark as a piece of obsidian. But slowly night was coming, the Helleye sank, and the fires were stirring in his socket. At full darkness, Bretan would be the Helleye, not Worlorn's tired supergiant of a sun; the glowstone would burn a steady, unwinking red, and the half-face around it would become a black travesty of a skull, a fit home for an eye such as that.

It all seemed very terrifying until you remembered -as Dirk remembered-that it was all quite deliberate. Bretan Braith had not been forced to have a glowstone for an eye; he had chosen it, for his own reasons, and those reasons were not hard to comprehend.

Dirk's mind raced back to the earlier part of the afternoon and the conversation by the wolf's-head air-car. Bretan was quick and shrewd, no doubt about that, but Chell might easily be in the early years of senility. He had been painfully slow to grasp anything, and his young teyn had led him by the hand at every point, Dirk recalled. Suddenly the two Braiths seemed much less fearful, and Dirk could only wonder why he had ever been so terrified of them. They were almost amusing. Whatever Jaan Vikary might say when he returned from the City in the Starless Pool, surely nothing could happen; there was no real danger from such as these.

As if to underline the point, Chell began to mumble, talking to himself without realizing it, and Dirk glanced over and tried to hear. The old man jiggled a little as he spoke, his eyes vacantly staring. His words made no sense at all. It took Dirk several minutes to think things through, but he did, and it finally dawned on him that Chell was speaking in Old Kavalar. A tongue that evolved on High Kavalaan during the long centuries of interregnum, when the surviving Kavalars had no contact with other human worlds, it was a language that was quickly melting back into standard Terran, though enriching the mother language with words that had no equivalents. Hardly anyone spoke Old Kavalar anymore, Garse Janacek had told him, and yet here was Chell, an elderly man from the most traditional of the holdfast-coalitions, mumbling things he had no doubt heard in his youth.

And so too Bretan, who slapped Dirk soundly because he used the wrong form of address, a form permitted only to kethi. Another dying custom, Garse had said; even the highbonds were growing lax. But not Bretan Braith, young and not high at all, who clung to traditions that men generations older than himself had already discarded as dysfunctional.

Dirk almost felt sorry for them. They were misfits, he decided, more outcast and more alone than Dirk himself, worldless in a sense, because High Kavalaan had moved beyond them and could be their world no longer. No wonder they came to Worlorn; they belonged here. They and all their ways were dying.

Bretan in particular was a figure of pity, Bretan who tried so hard to be a figure of fear. He was young, perhaps the last true believer, and he might live to see a time when no one felt as he did. Was that why he was teyn to Chell? Because his peers rejected him and his old man's values? Probably, Dirk decided, and that was grim and sad.

One yellow sun still glinted in the west. The Hub was a vague red memory on the horizon, and Dirk was thoughtful and in control, beyond all fear, when they heard the aircars approach.

Bretan Braith froze and looked up, and his hands came out of his pockets. One of them came to rest, almost automatically, on the holster of his laser pistol. Chell, blinking, got slowly to his feet and suddenly seemed to shed a decade. Dirk rose as well.

The cars came in. Two of them together, the gray car and the olive-green one, flying with an almost military precision side by side.

"Come here," Bretan rasped, and Dirk walked over to him, and Chell joined them so that the three were standing together, with Dirk in the center like a prisoner. The wind bit at him. All around, the glowstones of the city Larteyn were radiant and bloody, and Bretan's eye-so close-shone savagely in its scarred nesting place. The twitching had stopped, for some reason; his face was very still.

Jaan Vikary hovered the gray manta and let it float gently down, then vaulted over the side and came to them with quick strides. The square and ugly military machine, roofed over and armored so the pilot was not visible, landed almost simultaneously. A thick metal door swung open in its side, and Garse Janacek emerged, ducking his head a trifle and looking around to see what was the problem. He saw, straightened, and slammed the door with a resounding clang, then came over to stand at Vikary's right arm.

Vikary greeted Dirk first, with a curt nod and a vague smile. Then he looked at Chell. "Chell Nim Coldwind fre-Braith Daveson," he said formally. "Honor to your holdfast, honor to your teyn."

"And to yours," the old Braith said. "My new teyn guards my side, and you know him not." He indicated Bretan.

Jaan turned, weighed the scarred youth quickly with his eyes. "I am Jaan Vikary," he said, "of the Ironjade Gathering."

Bretan made his noise, his peculiar noise. There was an awkward silence.

"More properly," Janacek said, "my teyn is Jaantony Riv Wolf high-Ironjade Vikary. And I am Garse Ironjade Janacek."

Now Bretan responded. "Honor to your holdfast, honor to your teyn. I am Bretan Braith Lantry."

"I would never have known," Janacek said with the barest trace of a smile. "We have heard of you."

Jaan Vikary threw him a warning glance. There seemed to be something wrong with Jaan's face. At first Dirk thought it was a trick of the light-darkness was coming fast now-but then he saw that Vikary's jaw was slightly swollen on one side, giving his profile a puffed look.

"We come to you in high grievance," said Bretan Braith Lantry.

Vikary looked at Chell. "This is so?"

"It is so, Jaantony high-Ironjade."

"I am sorry we must quarrel," Vikary replied. "What is the problem?"

"We must question you," Bretan said. He put his hand on Dirk's shoulder. "This one, Jaantony high-Ironjade. Tell us, is he korariel of Ironjade, or no?"

Now Garse Janacek grinned openly and his hard blue eyes met Dirk's, laughing just a little in their icy depths, as if to say, Well, well, what have you done now?

Jaan Vikary only frowned. "Why?"

"Does your truth depend on our reasons, high-bond?" Bretan asked harshly. His scarred cheek twitched violently.

Vikary looked at Dirk. Clearly he was not pleased.

"You have no cause to delay or deny us your answer, Jaantony high-Ironjade," Chell Daveson said. "The truth is yes or the truth is no; there cannot be more to it than that." The old man's voice was quite even; he at least had no nervousness to conceal, and his code dictated each word that he would say.

"Once you were correct, Chell fre-Braith," Vikary began. "In the old days of the holdfasts, truth was a simple matter, but these are new times and full of new things. We are a people of many worlds now, not simply of one, and so our truths are more complex."

"No," said Chell. "This mockman is korariel or this mockman is not korariel. That is not complex."