Just before nightfall, on the second day after the Dancers had vanished, and all of Second Town with them, one of the children approached the two Shield.

They were tense to begin with, and the child was the boy Mica, a known favorite of the Dancer Sedon.

They held their weapons upon the brutish child as he approached, forced him to a halt ten paces away.

"What is your business here, Mica?"

The child held his place. Yet another disturbing thing about him; he spoke in a voice with an accent subtly different from that of any Flame Person. "I wish to see the Keeper."

"That is not possible."

His grammar was off, also: "I got a message for her, from Sedon."

The elder of the Shield said carefully, "Hold there. Do not move." Without moving his weapon from its focus, he tapped the speaker in his collar, said, "My lady Keeper."

A male voice answered. "She sleeps."

"Awaken Her."

In the image, the child waited patiently, hands hanging loosely at his sides. "His name is Mica?"

The Shield Kladdi answered Anton's question. "Aye. I don't know whose get he is. Harmless enough, I think."

Anton said, "You at the lock, ask him his message. Tell him he can't see the Keeper, but he's to deliver his message to you."

The Shield down at the lock started to repeat the message; Mica interrupted him. "I heard you.

Whoever you are, I'm to give the message to the Keeper, and no one else."

Anton glanced at where the Keeper stood, dressing herself. "My lady Saliya, will you receive him?"

She nodded, shaking her hair out as she drew her robes about herself. "With Shield present? Why not?"

Kladdi's Second-Second aboard the entire ship, while Marah was gone-said, "There were rumors at one time that Sedon attempted to teach the Dance to the exile children."

"That squat, hairy thing? A Dancer?" Anton snorted. "I think not. Bring him through."

They had him remove all of his clothing before they allowed him to enter the airlock. Mica did not allow that to throw him; Sedon had told him to expect it. He undressed slowly, as clumsily as he dared, for the benefit of those watching him, and then fumbled with the clothing they gave him in replacement. The cloth was smoother than anything Mica had ever worn before in his life, and in fact he did have trouble with the fastenings. The Shield Bo aided him, showed him how to lay the seals together so that the tunic held tight.

He had trimmed his facial hair only the night before, or the tunic's neck might not have fit over his head; as it was the fastenings tangled slightly. He knew enough of their customs to know that the clothing they had given him was an insult, the plain brown tunic of a prisoner.

He held his breath as he pa.s.sed through the glimmering ward, into the airlock. Not even Sedon had been able to tell him what would happen when he pa.s.sed the wards, only that he did not think it would kill him.

Mica felt nothing but a distant tingle, a resistance as though he were walking under water.

Even that much of a reaction, had they known of it, would have terrified those awaiting him inside the ship. Indo had told him that; no one but a Dancer should have felt that warding at all, and a Dancer should have died in agony at its touch.

The Shield who had entered with him showed Mica where to hold on to the walls of the airlock. Mica grasped the handles, and waited while the Shield stepped back out of the airlock.

The airlock doors closed on him, and Mica found himself in a dim, poorly lit enclosure. He was pleased to see that his heartbeat had not risen, displeased to feel the slight but uncontrolled twitching in his stomach muscles.

He guessed that they would be scanning him now.

When it happened, it happened so quickly that Mica was not sure about the exact sequence of events.

For just a moment the floor beneath his feet seemed to move, as though the entire enclosure were about to turn upside down. Gravity flickered as it moved, and for a brief moment Mica found himself falling- -the enclosurejerked upward- -fell downward, and then came to a gentle stop.

The floor was the floor again, and Mica found himself trembling slightly. Suddenly heweighed more, his limbs dragging at him in a way he was not accustomed.

The airlock doors opened again, and Mica found himself looking down a long, high corridor of some grayish red metal-or perhaps that was just the light. The corridor curved away from him, so that it seemed he stood at the top of a gentle, rolling hill. A pair of Shield with weapons drawn stood a ways down the corridor, and gestured for him to follow them. He moved forward into the corridor, testing his balance. A cross-corridor ran off to his right, and another pair of Shield, weapons likewise drawn, stood off a few paces down that corridor.

This would be Sixth Deck. Mica followed the Shield, without needing any further prompting. He wondered at the weapons behind him; the light weapons Indo had spoken of, or projectile weapons?

They would not try the kitjan, not on him, and he was glad of that; he suspected that its effect might be similar to that which it had upon Dancers.

But he did not think much of the Shield, if this was how they escorted a prisoner. The ones in front of him were endangered by the ones behind him, if the ones behind had to shoot at him. Had Mica been escorting a prisoner, he would have tied the prisoners hands, attached a rope to the prisoner, and followed the prisoner, alone, from a good distance back.

They do not respect me,thought Mica.I will change that.

He walked always downhill, the corridor slightly soft beneath his feet. After a bit the corridor widened into a place where a small platform had been placed in the floor. The Shield gestured to Mica that he was to stand on the platform, and he did so; it sank beneath him.

He barely saw Fifth Deck; a single Shield stood in the corridor at Fifth Deck, watching him with weapon still hanging at his belt. A surge of contempt that he could not contain touched Mica. Had it been his intent, even in this gravity he could have been upon that Shield well before the man could have brought his weapon to bear.

The platform dropped another level, descending toward the gravity ball at the center of the ship.

Fourth Deck.

Again they surrounded him, two ahead of him and two behind, weapons drawn. They walked him through a series of corridors, and came at last to a doorway where another four Shield stood guard; the Keeper's quarters, Mica guessed. The guards made way, and Mica pa.s.sed through the open portals, and into the room where the Keeper of the Flame awaited him.

Hangings everywhere, like the inside of Sedons house but more so; it was clearly upon a dwelling of this sort that Sedon had modeled his home. The hangings, many of them, bore images from the history of the Flame People. Mica recognized only one, because Sedon had a copy of it hanging in his house: the Renunciation, when a group of early Dancers had broken away from their fellows, to embrace the service of the Flame.

Five persons inside. Two of them were Shield, men he knew, standing with weapons drawn, pointing not exactly at him, but at a spot slightly ahead of where he stood, between Mica and those it was their duty to protect. It was very nearly the first thing Mica had seen aboard the great ship of which he approved.

Mica came to a stop where they indicated, stood waiting.

The other three he had never seen before. The Shield Kladdi's duty kept him aboard ship, protecting the Keeper. Mica recognized him from Sedon's description; he stood a step to the right, and behind, the Keeper.

The Keeper of the Flame, pale skinned and dark haired in a dark robe, was a woman such as Mica had rarely seen before; similar, in appearance at least, to the exile breeders, she held herself with an aloof dignity that reminded Mica of nothing so much as Sedon himself.

The third man stood slightly off to one side, wrapped in a long cloth that Mica guessed would, in proper light, be white; a shadow cloak, perhaps, though far longer than those the Shield wore sometimes on duty. The courier, Mica guessed; a glance told him that the man was no Dancer or Shield, and whatever else he was, was no problem of Mica's.

Three Shield, then, each of them more used to this gravity than himself.

The man in white spoke first. "What is your name?"

Another insult,thought Mica calmly. Among the Flame People, he knew, so blunt a demand for a name was as rude a thing as one man could say to another. "Mica, sir."

"They say that you are one of the children, the children of the exiles."

"I am, sir. My mother is Mai, and maybe my father too."

The Shield Kladdi snapped, "Your motherwas Mai."

"Kladdi, quiet." The man in white did not seem disturbed. Mica studied him briefly. Pale, as pale as the Keeper beside him; Mica had never seen two humans so bleached of color. It was as though the man in white had read Mica's thoughts; his next words were, "Your skin is offensive, Mica. It looks to me like the skin of an animal, not a human."

"I'm sorry, but it's a thing I got no hold on. The Sun does this to us. If we don't spend enough time out in it, when we do go out our skin gets red and sore."

"I was told that there were natives on this planet, shambling dumb creatures with whom we shared some common ancestor. I did not expect to meet one, to hear it speak to me as though it were one of the Flame People."

The pale man wanted to talk, then. Mica was not unwilling; the longer they talked, the likelier the Shield were to relax some fraction. "I'm not a native; I saw some once, they was traveling along following a herd they hunted. Didn't look much like me. I been told," said Mica slowly, "that some of the Aneda look like us, short and heavy, the ones as were alive when the Zaradin left the World."

"So," murmured the pale man, "Sedon has continued to spread his heresies among the natives here."

Mica shifted his weight restlessly, saw the Shield stiffen slightly. He snorted loudly. "Look, the weight here, I'm not used to it. I didn't come here to die, all right? I'm standing as still as I can get."

The Keeper spoke for the first time, a cool, soft voice, controlled and lyrical; another way in which she resembled Sedon. "Why are you here, then, Mica?"

"Sedon says I'm supposed to tell just you."

The Keeper shook her head. "He knows that will not happen. You will tell me here, in front of these Shield, what it is he has to say."

Mica spoke as reluctantly as he could. "Well-all right." He did not miss the flash of contempt from the Shield; they made no attempt to hide it. Mica knew that none of them would have disobeyed an order on such a flimsy pretext from the mouth of an enemy. "The Dancer says to tell you he has no wanting to fight you; that you will never find him no matter how you look. He asks you to leave us alone, to leave this planet alone. We will live or die depending on how we do for ourselves."

"That's not acceptable," the pale man said instantly. "Can you bear him a message?"

Mica nodded. Sedon had said they would ask that, and that they would plan on placing a locator on him if he said aye. "I."

He did not miss the glance that pa.s.sed between the pale man and the Keeper. "Very well. We must meet with him ourselves. We can arrange it in such a fashion that he will not be endangered; but there are questions regarding the resolution of this problem that can only be ironed out directly, between Aneda and the heretics."

"Is that the message for him?"

The pale man glanced at the Keeper, more for an opinion, Mica thought, than permission. She nodded, and the pale man said, "Aye. Repeat it to me."

"You got to meet with Sedon yourself. You can arrange it so he's safe, but there are"-Mica hesitated, and not for show, as they already had a poor enough opinion of him; he had real difficulty with some of the words-"questions regarding the resolution of this problem-that you got to work out straight between you and the Dancer."

"That's close enough." The pale man gestured at the two Shield. "Escort him back to the airlock, and let him go."

Mica turned away, toward the portal through which he had just entered, saw in his peripheral vision the Shield leaving their position, the two armed Shield in motion, and turned back toward the three who stood watching him, the two Shield walking, feet coming up out of contact with the deck. It seemed to Mica that the turn back to them took forever, he heard himself saying, "Oh, and-" as he turned, the turn slow enough that no one there found it threatening, just a casual continuation of the movement that had started him toward the door, the toes of his right foot digging down into the soft surface of the deck, knees just beginning to bend, and in that instant, as the word "and" left his mouth, for only the third time in his life, Mica called the living Flame down upon himself.

It sheeted across his form for the barest instant, glaring white and blue, so brilliant it blinded, and then Mica let go of it, moved forward while the outlines of the Flame still traced the spot where his body had been. The two Shield who had been moving toward him fired now, half blinded, toward the afterimage, laser light flickering out to bring a glow to the walls of the Keeper's quarters. Mica was three steps away from their fire now, four steps, knees pumping, moving forward in a controlled fall toward the spot where the Keeper stood, and then he wasupon her, taking her to the deck with him, and they struck the deck together rolling. He snapped her neck while they rolled, fetched up against the bulkhead and took the necessary time to do it correctly, brought his fist up high and then hammered it down, into the side of her skull, as the beams of their weapons found him.

Mica lived just long enough to see the pulp of the Keeper's brains spread across the deck.

They had given him twenty-seven years to get ready.

Twenty of the Shield hunted for him and his. Sedon thought himself prepared; before the night was out, he would know for sure.

Seven of the eight heretic Dancers lay buried beneath a loose blanket of earth, nothing but their eyes and noses showing, twenty paces back from the edge of the trees, as they had for the last four days. Motion sensors would not find them, for they did not move; nor infrared sensors, for they were cold as death. It was one of the secrets Sedon had kept despite the failure of their rebellion, the discipline the Dancers had learned that let them slow their breathing and heartbeat down to almost nothing, cool the surface of their skin until it was of the same temperature as its surroundings.

Through the long day, while the floats came and went, the seven Dancers waited together. Late in the day, one of the breeder children, a girl of eight years, crept up through the trees until she was near the spot she had been told the Dancer waited, and said aloud, "Indo says the Folk are safe at the caves."

She had not waited for a response, but turned and ran, as fast as her small feet could take her, back the way she had come.

Sedon waited, patiently. The same message would have gone to Mica. Just before sunset, he saw Mica approach the ship, talk briefly, strip, don the clothing the Shield brought for him, and go inside.

The last scarlet rays of the sun faded while Mica was inside. In the darkness of the partial moon, the steady blue gleam of the ward protecting the airlock became visible as the merest tracing around the edges of the airlock.

In the first moments after sunset, the ward guarding the airlock flickered once.

For the barest instant, Sedon found himself floating in the midst of a savage joy so vast it had no end.I was right!

He did not even have a word for whatever thing it was the child Mica had made of himself; not Dancer, not Shield, and not Keeper.

But a deadly thing, whatever its name.

The ward flickered again, and failed.

The two Shield, standing with their backs to it, did not notice.

The Keeper was dead.

A weapon is a device for imposing force upon an opponent. It is one of the teachings of the Shield, and one Sedon had taught himself.

The staffs and bows, pikes and long knives that had been employed during the earliest years of the Splinter Wars were no true concern of a modern Shield; but Dancers, who must use such weapons in Dance, in dramatization of the history of the Flame People, were drilled extensively in their use, until it was borne in on them, at the deepest levels, that a weapon was not just a gun, or a kitjan or tangler or sonic stunner;everything was a weapon.

At the edge of town, immediately on the other side of the clearing that separated the ship from First Town, sat a dozen lengths of iron tubing. When the waterworks was completed, the iron tubing, inner surfaces appropriately glazed, would form a conduit to take water from the holding bin at the edge of town to a central bathing area, so that folk would no longer have to bathe in the river. The tubing had been convenient, and when the moment came, Sedon had used them; had the time come later, or earlier, he would have found something else.

For perhaps ten heartbeats the ward sat dead.

Then the tubing exploded.

They had been laid with their open mouths facing toward the ship, and filled at that end with nails, such sc.r.a.p metal as the colony had, and the odd stone or two. Explosives-chemicals that expanded rapidly upon burning-had been placed in the other end of the tubes, and that end of the tubes sealed firmly shut.

Only a small fuze extruded back out, to be lit.

The results were about what Sedon had expected: not so good as he might have hoped, not so bad as he had feared. Most of the tubes pointed at the ship tore themselves open under the force of the explosion. A few held tight, spat their loads out toward the ship in a good imitation of cannon fire. One of the Shield went down instantly, and the other staggered slightly- The Dancers were up and running. They came out of the forest at top speed, seven silent figures clad in black from head to toe, moving like wraiths across the open clearing toward the ship. Sedon drew close as the Shield who was still standing finally caught their movement; without anything like time for conscious thought, some instinct told the Shield what he faced, and he pulled free not an energy weapon, but the kitjan.

From forty paces' distance Sedon threw. The heavy chunk of metal struck the Shield's arm, and then the kitjan screamed. Sedon was peripherally aware of one of the Dancers, he did not know who, stumbling, going down, and the Shield bracing himself, holding the kitjan with both hands, about to fire- From somewhere behind Sedon a twinkling silver piece of metal flashed through the air, struck the Shield square in the throat, and the lash of the kitjan struck not a Dancer but the dead earth, which did not care.

Sedon left the Shield for his Dancers to deal with; if they were not both dead now, they would be, and their weapons become the weapons of the Dancers. He leapt up into the open airlock, slapped the control to cycle it. Nothing; they'd had that much warning, then, inside the ship.

The two Dancers bringing up the rear, Miertay and Dola, were no slower than the other Dancers, but they had carried the package.

A chemical explosive, again; the best that twenty-seven years of preparation had let them pack into a cylinder that would fit inside the airlock. They muscled the cylinder, taller and wider around than any man, into the airlock, placed it up against the ship's hull, set the fuze and leapt backward- The airlock began to cycle; Shield were preparing to come out. A piece of luck for which Sedon had not dared hope. The Dancers ran along the circ.u.mference of the ship, got the bulk of the ship between themselves and the airlock. The fuzes were of uncertain length; if the explosive went while the airlock was in motion, rising up into the ship's local gravity- It did.

The huge shiprocked with it, shifted position slightly. The roar of the explosion was astonishing, a clap of thunder that went on, and on andon, and left Sedon's head ringing when it was finally over. Sedon had seen an explosive of similar size detonated at Second Town; he had thought himself prepared, and was slightly amazed to find he was not. Who but an engineer would have thought that oxidizing certain chemicals together could have caused an explosion that rivaled that of a pinched nuclear grenade?

With the other five Dancers-he did not even know yet who it was that had fallen to the kitjan-he circled back around the ship. The stink of the explosion hung acrid on the air, and thick white smoke curled about the place where the airlock had been. Near the airlock itself the air, blisteringly hot, scorched his nose. The intricate mechanism that lifted the airlock up into ship gravity hung in shattered fragments; from the gaping ragged hole where it had been mounted, red light streamed forth.