"And whether I can kill," Dirk added.

"And whether you can kill," Janacek acknowledged. "I can give you no better chances, t'Larien."

"I accept the ones you offer," Dirk said. Then they flew in silence for a long time. But when the black knives of the mountainwall had finally fallen behind them, and Janacek had doused all the aircar's lights and begun his slow, careful descent, Dirk turned to speak to him once more. "What would you have done," he asked, "if I had refused to play along with your deceit?"

Garse Janacek swiveled in his seat and laid his right hand on Dirk's arm. The untouched glowstones burned very faintly in the iron of his bracelet. "The bond of fire-and-iron is stronger than any bond you know," the Kavalar said in a grave voice, "and far stronger than any bonds of fleeting gratitude. Had you refused me, t'Larien, I would have cut your tongue from your mouth so you could not tell the Braiths of my plans, and I would have proceeded. Willing or unwilling, you would have played your role. Understand, t'Larien, I do not hate you, though you have earned my hate several times over. At times I have even found myself liking you, as much as an Ironjade may like an outbonder. I would not have hurt you out of malice. Yet I would have hurt you. For I have considered carefully, and my plan is Jaan Vikary's best hope."

As he spoke, not the faintest trace of a smile could be seen on Janacek's face. For once he was not joking.

Dirk did not have long to reflect on Janacek's words. They dropped down through the night like some impossibly light boulder and flitted wraithlike above the tops of the chokers. The wreck still smoldered a dim orange (the light seeping from the core of a blackened, fallen tree), and a haze of smoke obscured its contours. Janacek hovered over the crash, opened one of the great armored doors, and tossed the laser rifle to the forest floor a few meters below. At Dirk's insistence, he also threw out the Braith jacket Dirk had been wearing, whose fur and heavy leather would be a godsend to a man running naked through the forest.

Afterwards they soared straight up again, high into the sky, and Garse bound Dirk hand and foot, the thin cords tight and painful, threatening to cut off circulation, and so very authentic. Then, after flicking on his headlamps and running lights, Janacek took them swooping toward the circle of lights.

The hounds were staked out and sleeping by the water's edge, but they woke when the strange aircar descended, and Janacek landed in the midst of their wild howling. Only one of the Braiths was about, the skin-and-bones hunter whose unkempt black hair stood out as stiffly as if it had been fried to a charcoal crisp. Pyr's teyn, Dirk knew, though he did not know his name. The man was sitting by a low campfire near the Braith hounds, a laser rifle by his side, when they first saw him, but he scrambled to his feet swiftly enough as they came down.

Janacek unsealed the massive door again, swinging it up and open and letting the cold night flow into the warmth of the cabin. He pulled Dirk to his feet and shoved him roughly outside, forcing him to kneel in the cool sand.

"Ironjade," the man on guard said harshly. By then his kethi had started to gather, pulling themselves from their sleeping bags and piling out of the aircars.

"I have a gift for you," Janacek said, his hands on his hips. "An offering from Ironjade to Braith."

The hunters were six in number, Dirk saw as he looked up from where he knelt; all of them had been in Challenge. Bald, bulky Pyr had been sleeping outside near his teyn; he was the first one on hand. Soon afterwards Roseph high-Braith and his quiet muscular companion joined them. They too had been asleep on the ground near their aircar. Lastly Lorimaar high-Braith Arkellor, the left side of his chest wrapped in dark bandages, came slowly from the domed red air-car, leaning on the arm of the fat man who had been with him before. All six of them appeared as they had slept-fully dressed, and armed.,

"The gift," Pyr said, "is appreciated, Ironjade." He wore a sidearm on a black metallic belt, but his baton was missing, and he looked almost incomplete without it.

"Your presence is not appreciated," Lorimaar said, as he struggled to join the circle. He was leaning much of his weight on his teyn, so that he seemed hunched and broken, no longer quite the giant he had been. And Dirk, looking at him, thought he could see new creases in the dark, deeply lined skin-fresh-carved runnels of pain.

"It is obvious now that the duels for which I was named arbiter will never come to pass," Roseph said evenly, with none of the heavy hostility that thickened Lorimaar's voice, "so I have no particular authority, and I cannot pretend to speak for High Kavalaan, or Braith. Yet I am certain that I speak for all of us. We will not tolerate your interference, Ironjade. Blood-gift or no."

"Truth," Lorimaar said.

"I do not seek to interfere," Janacek told them. "I seek to join you."

"We hunt your teyn," Pyr's companion said. "He knows that," Pyr snapped. "I have no teyn," Janacek said. "An animal roams the forest, wearing my iron-and-fire. I would help you kill it, and reclaim the thing that is mine." He sounded very hard, very convincing.

One of the hounds was stalking back and forth impatiently on its chain. It growled and stopped long enough to wrinkle its rat's face at Janacek and bare a row of yellowed canines. "He is a liar," Lorimaar high-Braith said. "Even our dogs smell out his lies. They do not like him."

"A mockman," added his teyn. Garse Janacek turned his head very slightly. The shifting firelight woke red highlights in his beard as he smiled his thin and threatening smile. "Saanel Braith," he said, "your teyn is wounded and thus insults me with impunity, knowing I cannot call on him to make his choices. You enjoy no such safety."

"For the moment he does," Roseph said harshly. "That is a trick we do not allow you, Ironjade. You will not duel us, one by one, and save your outbond teyn."

"I have sworn that I have no wish to save him. I have no teyn. You cannot strip me of my rights under the code."

Small, shriveled Roseph-the smallest of the Kavalars by half a meter-stared at Janacek and refused to flinch. "We are on Worlorn," he said. "And we do what we will." Several of the others muttered agreement.

"You are Kavalars," Janacek insisted, but a flicker of doubt passed across his face. "You are Braiths and highbonds of Braith, bound to your holdfast and your council and its ways."

"In years past," Pyr said with a smile, "I have seen many of my kethi and even more the men of other holdfasts abandon the old wisdoms. 'This and this and this are wrong,' the mincing Ironjades would say. 'We will not follow them.' And the sheep of Redsteel would echo them, and the womanly men of Shanagate, and sadly many Braiths. Are my memories false? You stand and preach code at us, but do I not recall the Ironjades in my youth telling me that I may hunt mockmen no longer? Am I misremembering the soft Kavalars who were sent to Avalon to learn spaceships and weaponry and other useful things, who returned full of lies about how we must change this way, and that way, how so much of our old code was a thing of shame, when it had been so long a pride to us? Tell me, Ironjade, am I wrong?"

Garse said nothing. He folded his arms tightly against his chest.

"Jaan Vikary, once high-Ironjade, was the greatest of the changers, the liars. You were not far behind," Lorimaar said.

"I have never been to Avalon," Janacek said simply.

"Answer me," Pyr said. "Did you and Vikary not seek to change old ways? Did you not laugh at the parts of the code you disliked?"

"I have never broken code," Janacek said. "Jaan… Jaan would sometimes…" He faltered.