The furious intensity of the nightmare yanked him awake, sitting up with a racing heart. Dwer stared wide-eyed, glad to find the real woods intact, though dark and threaded by a chill breeze. There was no raging firestorm. He had dreamed the whole thing.

Still, uneasiness gnawed. Something felt wrong.

He rubbed his eyes. Different constellations swarmed the sky, fading in the east under a wash of predawn gray. The biggest moon, Loocen, hovered over silhouetted peaks, its sunlit face spangled with bright pinpoints — the domes of long-abandoned cities.

So what’s wrong?

It wasn’t just intuition. The clock teet had stopped. Something must have disturbed it before the time to chatter its alarm. He checked the area and found the noor snoring on quietly. The glaver tracked Dwer dully with one thoughtless eye, the other still closed.

All at once, he knew the problem.

My bow!

It wasn’t where he’d left it, within arm’s reach. It was gone.

Stolen!

Anger flooded the predawn dimness with blinding adrenaline outrage. Dozens had spoken enviously of his bow-a masterpiece of laminated wood and bone, fashioned by the qheuenish craftsmen of Ovoom Town. But who…?

Calm down. Think.

Could it be Jeni Shen? She often joked about luring him into a poker game, with the bow at stake. Or might it be—

Stop!

He took a deep breath, but it was hard disciplining his young body, so full of need to act.

Stop and hear what the world has to say…

First, he must calm the furious spilling of his own unspoken words. Dwer pushed aside all noisy thoughts. Next he made himself ignore the rasping sound of breath and pulse.

The distant, muttering waterfall was by now familiar, easy to cancel out. The wind’s rustle, less regular, soon went away, too.

One hovering sound might be the clock teet, cruising in hope of more tobar seeds. Another flutter told of a honey bat-no, a mated pair-which he also disregarded. The noor’s snoring he edited, and the soft grind of glaver-molars as the prisoner rechewed her cud.

There! Dwer turned his head. Was that a scrape on gravel? Pebbles rattling down a scree, perhaps. Something, or someone-bipedal? Almost man-size, he guessed, and hurrying away.

Dwer took off after the sound. Gliding ghostlike in his moccasins, he ran some distance before noting that the thief was heading the wrong direction. Away from the coast. Away from the Slope. Higher into the Rimmer Range.

Toward the Pass.

Padding up the rocky trail, Dwer’s angry flush gave way to the scrupulous cadence of pursuit-a tense, almost ecstatic concentration on each thrust of heel and toe; the efficiency of motion needed for silence; an eager probing beyond his own soft noise to seize any trace of the pursued. His head felt clear, no longer poisoned by fury. Whatever the reason for this chase, tie could not help feeling a kind of joy. This was his art, the thing he loved best.

Dwer was near the notch of gray light separating two shadowy peaks, when a problem occurred to him.

Wait a minute!

He slowed to a trot, then down to a walk.

This is stupid. Here I am, chasing off after a sound I’m not even sure I heard — maybe a hangover of a dream — when the answer was there all along!

The noor.

He stopped, beating his fist against his thigh and feeling like an idiot.

It’s just what a noor would do-stealing things. Swapping a villager’s chipped cup for a treasure, or vice versa.

When he returned, would a pile of ligger turds sit where the bow had lain? Or a diamond wrested from the crown of some long dead Buyur king? Or would they all-noor, bow, and glaver-simply be gone? Mudfoot had been quite an actor, snoozing by the coals. Did the beast cackle when he hightailed off, chasing his own outraged imagination?

Alongside anger, there arose a grudging appreciation.

A good one. He really got me.

Then again, this noor might have a surprise coming. Of all the humans on Jijo, perhaps only Dwer was qualified to find the beast and get even.

It would be a difficult chase. Maybe impossible.

Or else the hunt of a lifetime.

Sudden insight filled Dwer with wonder. Was that the noor’s gift? To offer Dwer—

Ahead of him, in the vague dimness, the corner of a shadow moved.

His unfocused eyes had been open to peripheral vision, habituated to a static scene. A reflex hunter’s trick that made one especially sensitive to motion — as when a “boulder” shifted to the left, then moved onward toward the Pass.

Ears snatched distant tickling scrapes, softer than the wind. Dwer’s eyebrows knotted as he started forward again, slowly at first, then stealthily faster.

When the blurry shadow stopped, he stopped, splaying his arms for balance.

Profiled against predawn gray, the silhouette waited a few duras more, then turned and continued on its way.

Trust your instincts, Fallon the Tracker used to teach. The old man was nobody’s fool.

Mudfoot had been the obvious suspect. Perhaps that was why it didn’t occur to Dwer, back at the campsite. He would have wasted valuable time blaming the logical culprit. His first impulse had been right, after all. The initial clue, a true one.

The shadow turned again. Dwer traced a human shape, alarmed now, fleeing with his purloined bow. This time he sprinted, forsaking stealth for speed. Pebbles flew, rattling the pass with echoes. The other swiveled too, leaping away like a striped gusul in flight.

Only three humans on Jijo could outrun Dwer, and none at all in rough terrain.

End game, he thought, bearing down for a final dash.

When his quarry turned, he was ready. When it drew a knife, he knew this was no joke. Dwer launched into a tackling dive, primed to hear shouts of anger and dismay.

Unexpected was the thief s face, looming as he hurtled forward.

Human.

Female.

Terribly young.

Above all — a complete and total stranger.

Fate had fallen from the sky.

To Jijo.

To the Slope.

To the Glade of Gathering.

To the nexus of our fears, much sooner than expected.

Across megaparsecs, a ship from the Five Galaxies had come! Such a vast distance… the least we poor exiles could do was march a short way to where it landed, and courteously greet it.

Vubben declined the honor of leading. Jijo’s gravity so hobbles our dear g’Kek, they must rely solely on wheels, using their stilt-legs for balance only, moving over rough ground almost as slowly as a traeki. So, Vubben and i hobbled along, urging our hoon, qheuenish, human, and urrish counterparts to forge ahead.

Do i/we sense a foul odor of envy fuming in our central core? Do some of you, my several selves, resent our awkward slowness compared to those long hoonish legs or nimble urrish feet? Things might have been different had our traeki exile-ship come equipped with the full menagerie of rings our kin were said to own. Legends tell of adroit running limbs-gifts of the mighty Oailie- limbs to make even a heavy stack like ours as speedy as a song jackal. Speedy as a Jophur.

But then, would we also have carried Oailie arrogance? Their madness? Would we have fought wars, the way qheuens and urs and hoons and men did for centuries here on Jijo, bickering until the Commons grew strong enough for peace? Those traeki who fled to Jijo had reasons to leave some rings behind. Or so we believe.

But again, digression thwarts our tale. Discipline, my rings! Give the fumes another spin. Stroke the waxy imprints, and remember -

Recall how we marched, each at ers own pace, toward the side valley where the intruder ship had set down. Along the way, Vubben recited from the Book of Exile, greatest of scrolls, the one least altered by quarrel, heresy, or waves of new arrivals.