Valduma laid sharp-nailed fingers in his hair and pulled his lips to hers. “Basil, I want you back.”
He held her close, feeling the lithe savage strength of her, recalling the flame-like beauty and the nights of love such as no human could ever give. His whisper was thick: “You got bored last time and sent me back. How long will I last now?”
“As long as you wish, Basil. Forever and forever.” He knew she lied, and he didn’t care.
“This is what you must do, Donovan.” said Morzach.
He listened with half his mind. It was a question of guiding the army into a narrow cul-de-sac where the Arzunians could perform the delicate short-range work of causing chains to bind around them. For the rest, he was thinking.
They hunt. They intrigue, and they whittle down their last few remnants with fighting among themselves, and they prey on the fringe stars, and they capture living humans to hunt down for sport. They haven’t done anything new for ten thousand years, creativeness has withered from them, and all they will do if they escape the Nebula is carry ruin between the stars. They’re mad.
Yes—a whole society of psychopaths, gone crazy with the long racial dying. That’s the real reason they can’t handle machines, that’s why they don’t think of friendship but only of war, that’s why they carry doom within them.
But I love you, I love you, I love you, O Valduma the fair.
He drew her to him, kissed her with a terrible intensity, and she laughed in the dark. Looking up, he faced the blaze that was Morzach.
“All right,” he said. “I understand. Tomorrow.”
“Aye—good, good, well done!”
“Oh, Basil, Basil!” whispered Valduma. “Come, come away with me, now.”
“No. They’d suspect. I have to go down to them or they’ll come looking for me.”
“Good night, Basil, my darling, my vorza. Until tomorrow!”
He went slowly down the hillside, drawing his shoulders together against the cold, not looking back. Helena rose when he approached her campfire, and the glimmering light made her seem pale and unreal.
“Where have you been, Basil? You look so tired.”
“Just walking around. I’m all right.” He spread his couch of stiff and stinking animal hides. “We’d better turn in, eh?”
But he slept little.
6
The highway curved between great looming walls of cragged old rock, a shadow tunnel with the wind yowling far overhead and the sun a disc of blood. Men’s footfalls echoed from the cracked paving blocks to boom hollowly off time-gnawed cliffs and ring faintly in the ice. It was cold, their breath smoked from them and they shivered and cursed and stamped their feet.
Donovan walked beside Helena, who was riding Wocha. His eyes narrowed against the searching wind, looking ahead and around, looking for the side track where the ambush waited. Drogobych was very near.
Something moved up on the ridge, a flapping black thing which was instantly lost to sight. The Arzunians were watching.
There—up ahead—the solitary tree they had spoken of, growing out between age-crumbled fragments of the road. The highway swung west around a pinnacle of rock, but here there was a branch road running straight south into a narrow ravine. All I have to do is suggest we take it. They won’t know till too late that it leads up a blind canyon.
Helena leaned over toward him, so that the long wind-whipped hair blew against his cheek. “Which way should we go?” she asked. One hand rested on his shoulder.
He didn’t slacken his stride, but his voice was low under the whine of bitter air: “To the right, Helena, and on the double. The Arzunians are waiting up the other road, but Drogobych is just beyond that crag.”
“Basil! How do you know—”
Wocha’s long hairy ears cocked attentively, and the little eyes under the heavy bone ridges were suddenly sharp on his master.
“They wanted me to mislead you. I didn’t say anything before for fear they’d be listening, somehow.”
Because I hadn’t decided, he thought grayly. Because Valduma is mad, and I love her.
Helena turned and lifted her arm, voice ringing out to rattle in jeering echoes: “Column right! Forward—charge!”
Wocha broke into a trot, the ground booming and shivering under his huge feet. Donovan paced beside, drawing his sword and swinging it naked in one hand, his eyes turned to the canyon and the rocks above it. The humans fell into a jogging run.
They swept past the ambush road, and suddenly Valduma was on the ridge above them, tall and slim and beautiful, the hair like a blowing flame under her helmet. “Basil!” she screamed. “Basil, you triple traitor—”
The others were there with her, men of Drogobych standing on the heights and howling their fury. They had chains in their hands, and suddenly the air was thick with flying links.
One of them smashed against Donovan and curled itself snake-like around his waist. He dropped his sword and tugged at the cold iron, feeling the breath strained out of him, cursing with the pain of it. Wocha reached down a hand and peeled the chain off, snapping it in two and hurling it back at the Arzunians. It whipped in the air, lashing itself across his face, and he bellowed.
The men of Sol were weltering in a fight with the flying chains, beating them off, stamping the writhing lengths underfoot, yelling as the things cracked against their heads. “Forward!” cried Helena. “Charge—get out of here—forward, Empire!”
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