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CHAPTER 1
THE DEATH DWARVES
It was on Zha the Jungle Planet that the strange little yellow men with three eyes finally caught up with the Earthman, Kirin.
They came at him in a muddy alleyway behind the Spaceman’s Rest. It was a stormy night in the Month of Rains. Lightning flared in storm-dark skies; the nine moons of Zha were veiled behind clouds. Rain lashed the red jungles that hemmed in the little trading port the starmen had built in a raw clearing. It thundered on the sheet-plastic roofs of the equipment huts, the cabins, the store sheds, and turned the narrow, twisting alleys between these buildings into glistening rivers of slick mud.
Out on the landing field, intermittent flares of lightning lit the glossy curving hulls of the merchant ships. The tall vessels loomed up into the stormy heavens like tapering steel projectiles. Wind whistled around them, across the jet-baked duracrete, and shook the walls of the flight control center that climbed on stilt-like metal struts into the rainswept darkness.
Kirin was a tall man, lean and sinewy rather than burly. He had a dark, secretive, mocking face, a sardonic smile and clever, sly black eyes. His hair was a curious dark red inherited from his Celtic father, while his Iberian mother had perhaps contributed the swarthy tone of his skin. He was lithe, supple, swift; nimble as any acrobat. Women found him devilishly attractive. Beneath his ironic mask of mockery they sensed a cold, hard core of bitter loneliness. It posed an irresistible challenge to their femininity: They would not be women if they did not long to melt that frozen bitterness. As yet, none had succeeded. Kirin had known many women. But he had never known love. Which was just as well, considering the hazardous career which he pursued.
Kirin was a thief.
There were many like him in those dark, troubled days of the Interregnum, between the collapse of the Old Empire and the rise of the New. Man built many forms of society during his first three thousand years in space. The strongest had been the mighty Carina Empire. For six thousand years it had lasted, and its boundaries had included most of the stars in the Carina-Cygnus arm of the galaxy. At last it crumbled from within, and yielded to the attack of the Barbarians from the Rim. In flame and thunder it fell, man’s greatest experiment in government. With it passed much of what is called civilization. Trade and communications lapsed; commerce ebbed. World was cut off from world. Technology broke down and science became a jumble of half-forgotten formulas. Cluster by cluster, the star worlds slid into the red murk of barbarism. Magic was reborn, built on the mysterious, micro-miniaturized instruments of the legendary Ancients, whose incredible machines, built to last for eternity, were sensitized to mental controls.
With the rebirth of magic came witchcraft and superstition, and dark nameless cults and evil gods. It seemed, to bitter, disillusioned men like Kirin, that civilization had failed—power lay with the cold, hard, unscrupulous men who had courage or strength or cunning enough to seize it. There were many like him on the Frontier Worlds—outlaws, adventurers, treasure hunters. Men who went boldly forward to take what they wanted.
It was said that things were on the mend. In this one-thousandth year of the Interregnum it was now two centuries since Calastor broke the lingering remnants of the Rim Barbarians and founded the beginnings of the New Empire at Valdamar. For two hundred years the sons of Calastor had been busy. A dozen worlds of the Inner Stars were now leagued together under the banner of the Empire, striving to build civilization anew. From tattered books and aged computers, half-forgotten sciences were being rediscovered. Men built starships again for the first time in a millennium. Commerce between the more settled and peaceful worlds had sprung up; lines of communication were being established. Perhaps the long decline was over, and a new day was dawning. Perhaps.
Kirin put no faith in dreams. He valued only material things he could see and handle. Like jewels.
It was because of jewels that he was stuck here on Zha. He had been after the fabulous Stardrop of Kandahar. There were only seven of them known to man, and six were in the crown of the Valdamar Emperor. The seventh was set in the alabaster brow of an idol on Shuthab in the Dragon Stars. Kirin had been after it when he tripped an invisible alarm-ray and had to flee empty-handed with half the warriors of a dozen worlds howling at his heels. Then the Star Legions of the Empire joined the thief hunt, for Shuthab was allied with Valdamar although not a member world of the Empire. He had to run fast and far to elude pursuit; in fact, he had run all the way to primitive Zha.
Here he had been holed up for the past three months, until the chase and furor died down and the Near Stars would be safe for him to venture into again. With the last of his funds he had purchased a hut and rental space on the landing field for his sleek little speedster. The first month or so had not been so bad. He had gone hunting with the savage Zhayana, trekking through the red jungles on the spoor of dragon cat and flying lions and the other exotic beasts of the Jungle World. The twenty or so other starmen who shared the little trader’s encampment with him asked no questions and bothered him little. They were used to mysterious men with shadowy pasts.
But this rude life had long since begun to pall. Kirin was of too active and inquiring a mind, too restless and footloose, to endure this dull existence without boredom. By now he was sick of Zha and everything about it—sick of the little cluster of prefab huts in the raw little clearing hacked by lasers out of the sprawling jungles that covered most of the land surface of Zha—sick of seeing the same hard faces and hearing the same dreary conversation. Even the natives no longer intrigued him, the broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned barbaric warriors with grim eyes and startling manes of metallic crimson who brought priceless dragonskins and mountain crystals and superb native scimitars of ion-steel to trade for power guns and star-man’s liquor and energy tools.
And now, on top of it all, the rainy season had come. The perpetual rains that lasted weeks on end had confined him to his cramped little hut on the edge of the clearing and chained him to the companionship of a handful of dull traders and exporters. There was nothing to do but drink and gamble and sleep. Kirin was sick of it all.
But here, at least, he was safe. No pursuit could follow him here. Zha lay far beyond the limits of the New Empire, among the little known and half-explored wilderness worlds of the frontier. Here beyond the border the monitors of Valdamar had no authority, and the fanatic priesthood of Shuthab had no followers. Here he could hide until he was forgotten. All he had to do was keep cool, watch his temper, and endure stolidly the stinking mud, the endless rains, the vile liquor and the dull company. Another month should do it. If I can last another month, he thought.
They were waiting for him in the alley behind the port’s only bar, a shed called Spaceman’s Rest. There were four of them and they came at him without a word, lunging through the roiling mists, eyes glittering like snakes.
They almost had him in that first half-second, for he was dull-witted from an evening spent hunched over a rear table nursing a bottle of that fiery purple brandy the Eophim distill from the wine-apples of Valthomé. When he reached his limit he paid his bill, drew the hooded weather cloak about his broad shoulders, snapped on the rain-repelling power field, and stepped out into the oily muck of the street, shoulders hunched against the cold drizzle. His mind was lax and befuddled and the last thing in the universe he expected was to be attacked.
But Kirin the thief had not survived this long on the rough Frontier Worlds without developing hair-trigger senses. As the four shadowy figures lunged at him through the fog, he sprang back with a grunt of surprise and tossed back a fold of his cloak to clear his gun hand. The little power gun appeared out of nowhere, so swiftly did he draw. They paid it no attention.
Strange little men they were, surely no monitors from Valdamar, and as unlike the scaly-skinned Reptile Men of Shuthab as could be. They were short,
