"I am, Colonel. Any time a ranker behaves the way Polynt did is a matter of concern."

"I can see that, but Captain Mykel reacted well under the circumstances."

"He reacted. That was the problem. He never should have let it happen, Colonel. Good officers anticipate matters like that."

Dainyl had trouble seeing how the captain could have foreseen an unpremeditated murder by a man who had successfully hidden his background from a number of Cad-mian officers. Polynt had obviously changed his name enough so that he would not have been linked to a murder in Dramuria. He'd also enlisted in the Cadmians in a place remote enough from Dramur that no one would have thought to have checked his ankle for a prisoner's tattoo.

"I can see your concerns," returned Dainyl. "Still... Captain Mykel should not be judged too harshly. He wasn't the first one who failed to discover that Polynt was an escaped prisoner."

"If you will pardon my directness, Colonel... Captain Mykel's difficulties cannot be excused by the failures of others."

"That is true," Dainyl replied smoothly. "A commander's shortcomings should not be blamed on those above or beneath him. Your point is well-taken, and all officers in the Myrmidons and Cadmians should be held to that standard."

Once more, Dainyl sensed the faint and distant feel of Talent about Vaclyn, yet he could sense nothing beyond that-and he knew he should, but not what or how. Not for the first time, he wished he had been givengreater training in Talent, but because he had not manifested Talent when young, he had never been afforded that opportunity.

"Thank you, Colonel."

Dainyl doubted Vaclyn would be thanking him, not if the majer truly understood the meaning behind his words. "Thank you very much, Majer.

I wish you and Third Battalion well in your efforts to deal with the rebels."

"Thank you, sir. We'll make sure that there isn't a real rebellion, choke off this unrest before it gets out of hand."

With a last smile, Dainyl turned and walked briskly toward the officers'

mess, where the food was barely edible, but the ale not too bad.

49.

There are those who claim life is sacred in and of itself, or on behalf of some deity, yet they do not refer to all life, but that of their own kind. If they do claim that of all life, then they are either ignorant, or hypocrites, or both. To live, every being steals from another, for to live one must consume food. Consuming food is taking the life of another, or eating what another might have consumed to live, if not both. All cannot be equally sacred if one is prey to the other, and thus less than the other.

One who truly believes that the end purpose of life is but to create more life-for whatever purpose-is not a thinking being, but a steer as fit for slaughter as any in a livestock pen. The smallest of creatures strive to reproduce to the limits of the food at hand. If beings capable of thought and reflection only strive to eat, pleasure themselves as they can, and reproduce to the limits of their world, what makes such beings any different from those millions of so-called lower creatures who live but to eat and reproduce? Can such beings be truly said to reflect any higher purpose than that of all other animals?

Such beings will claim that they are indeed different, for they have tools, and they have developed weapons and cities. Yet the jackdaws and ravens use tools, and a weapon is but one form of tool. The ants and termites have cities. To say that one's own form of life is special, or sacred, does not make it so. Nor does the assertion that some unknown and unproved deity has declared a people or a faith special make either a faith or a people special. Again, that is but an assertion based on a faith thathas no root in what is, except a desire for it to be so.

The actions and the purposes of a species are what determine its worth.

Those actions must be more than the assertion of privilege and blind reproduction. Those actions must challenge the worlds and the stars. They must create beauty, art, and devices that none have seen before.

Life is not sacred or exceptional merely because it exists, or because one asserts that it is, but by what it attempts, and by what it achieves.

That is what has always distinguished us. We have not striven merely to reproduce, or to comfort ourselves with toys, pleasures, and food. We have changed whole worlds, and we have created art and beauty where there was none before.

What we have done is what has given us the right to claim that we are above the steers...

Views of the Highest Illustra 1513 W.T.

50.

A good two glasses before dawn on Sexdi morning, Dainyl walked across the courtyard from the temporary quarters that had become less and less transient, and more and more cramped. The night before, he'd been up late writing the report on the court-martial, included in the weekly dispatch to the marshal that Quelyt would be taking back to Elcien in a glass. Ahead of Dainyl, beside one of the squares, waited Falyna and her pteridon.

The colonel adjusted the shimmersilk flying jacket and heavy gloves.

While they weren't necessary in the light east wind blowing across the compound, they would be in the chill heights above and around the Murian Mountains.

Falyna inclined her head to the colonel. "Good morning, sir."

"Good morning, Falyna. You ready to fly me up there?""Yes, sir." The Myrmidon ranker paused, then added, "If you'll pardon my asking, Colonel, and I wouldn't ask anyone, but you were a flier for a long time-"

"You'd like to know why I keep asking you to fly me out to where that ancient tunnel is? There's something that keeps coming back there.

Sooner or later," Dainyl shrugged, "I hope that I'll be there when it is. I want to get there earlier today. We've been too late before. I can't help but think it has something to do with this so-called rebellion."

Falyna frowned, then nodded. "Those locals fired at us from right below there."

"It doesn't seem like coincidence."

"No, sir. You want me to set down and wait?"

"No. You could set down somewhere else, but not close. Give me a glass alone."

"We can do that."

Falyna felt that her colonel was wasting time, and perhaps Dainyl was, but he'd talked and questioned lander after lander over the weeks, read reports, and followed what the Cadmians were doing-and he knew very little beyond what he'd discovered in the first week.

He nodded to Falyna. "Let's go."

In moments, Dainyl was in the rear saddle and harness, and the pteridon sprang skyward, wings propelling it seaward into the wind. Once they were well clear of trees and buildings, Falyna eased the pteridon into a climbing turn toward the northwest over an ocean that was a dark, dark green, with scattered whitecaps. Then they were back over land, climbing above the casaran nut plantations to the north of the compound, headed for the Murian Mountains. The skies were clear, and promised to remain so.

Dainyl could not sense either the soarer or her creatures, but she visited the tunnel every second or third day early in the morning. He hoped that he had guessed correctly. His eyes moved to his left, down at the road to the guano mine, then to the mine itself.Mines-the iron and coal mines in Iron Stem, the guano mine in Dramur-all were having troubles. Iron Stem was close to the towering Aerial Plateau, and the guano mine was in the lower reaches of the Murian Mountains. Was that because the ancients were involved, and because they preferred heights? Or just coincidence?

He could sense the greater use of Talent by the pteridon as it climbed until it was above the peak that held the tun-[ nel, then began to make an approach into the light wind.

As soon as the pteridon touched down and half folded its wings, Dainyl unfastened the harness and slipped out of the saddle. "A glass from now!"

"Yes, sir." The ranker nodded.

Dainyl hurried back to the western edge of the bluff or ledge to get clear of the pteridon's wings. There he turned eastward and watched the wide-winged pteridon launch itself, then glide away, dropping lower as it left the higher peaks behind.

After a moment, Dainyl entered the ancient tunnel, lowering his head.

As so many times before, the only tracks on the fine sand were those of his own boots. There were no scratch tracks of birds, no swirled displacement created by snakes, or even fine lines drawn by insects-just the heavy indentations of an alector's boots.

From the outer metallic archway of the tunnel, he studied the mirror on the floor, a mirror that still puzzled him. Again, he probed it with his Talent. For the slightest of instants, the golden green that surrounded it seemed to stretch endlessly... somewhere.

A flash of golden green light flared before him, and the soarer hovered above the floor mirror. Dainyl's hand went to the grip of the light-cutter in his belt.

Do not touch that if you wish to live.

Faced with that cold green authority, Dainyl decided against trying to use the sidearm.

You have sought us. Why?"Because the indigens seem to worship this place-or you-and because they attacked me. Because miners are disappearing. I thought there might be a link."

You have raised your steers upon our world. Should those among us not also feed?

Feed? What did that have to do with a revolt? Feed? Who was feeding on what?

You see, but you do not see. Go out and look at the world below.

"Why?"

So that you may see. So that you will be warned.

Warned? Dainyl didn't like those words at all. Still, he moved back from the soarer, one step backward after another, never taking his eyes off her.

His Talent revealed nothing about her except the golden green nimbus of Talent-energy surrounding her. The soarer followed him, keeping the same separation.

Once outside the tunnel and the outer unnatural cave, Dainyl stepped sideways. The soarer glided past him, a miniature and perfectly formed winged woman perhaps half his size.

"Now what?" he asked, his eyes and Talent scanning her and the area around them. There was no sense or sign of the violet-red stonelike creatures... but there hadn't been any sign of the soarer until the moment she had appeared.

Behold the world. Look out across the lands.

Warily, Dainyl shifted his glance to the southeast, back toward Dramuria.

Abruptly, he was surrounded by a greenish light or mist. He blinked, forcing himself not to draw the light-cutter. Through the green he still saw the lands below, stretching toward the distant ocean, but in addition to what he had always seen, a weave of color assaulted him, lines and webs of brown, and black, and amber-thin lines, thicker lines, all intertwined. His second sense was that he saw a subtle weave that filled the entiresilver-green skies, the warp and weft of lifewebs that seemed to intertwine, and yet never touch.

Under the sensory assault, he took a single stumbling step sideways before catching himself. What was he seeing? Was she trying to control him, use her Talent to destroy him? Or worse, enslave him?

We do kill, but only as we must. We do not bind. That weakens the lifewebs more than death. You see the webs of life, all life.

She might have been lying. Dainyl doubted that he could tell if she were, not with the power she projected, but he did not think so. Somehow, he did not doubt that the ancients could see the ties that bound the lifemass of Acorus. Why couldn't Talented alectors? Why hadn't he?

Look at yourself, alector. Look at yourself.

Almost unwillingly, he looked down at himself. Purplish pink threads sprang from him, merging into an ugly purple thread that arched away from him toward the northeast. Compared to the soft and warm colors of the web stretching out below the peak, the purplish pink that surrounded him was wrong, not subtly wrong, but oppressively so, a color and shade that did not belong on Acorus, that conflicted and fought with the tapestry formed by the softer lifewebs.

Yet he was an alector, and that purplish pink was him. Could he do anything about that purpleness? Should he? Why him? If he had seen the web and the clash of life-forces, surely, others had also perceived it. He couldn't have been the first one, the first alector to sense that. Or could he?

You see? You are not of the world.

He repressed a shiver.

You must become one with the world--and of the world- or you will perish.

"That sounds like a threat."

As suddenly as it had come, the greenish mist had vanished-and so had the soarer. Dainyl stood alone outside the cave, looking down on theland. The warp and weft of the lifewebs had also vanished. Once more, he blinked. Had it all been illusion? He shook his head No, the soarer had been real, and so had what she had shown him.

He tried to call up what he had seen, but the only aspect he could sense was the purpled skein that was his own lifethread. He had always been able to sense a slight purplish aura around other alectors, and the faint silver-black-green around the few landers who had Talent, but he'd never seen himself that way.

What had he seen? Had it really been a web that linked all the lifeforces of Acorus? Or that of the higher life-forms? He knew that he had seen those interweaving and converging threads, yet he could not call up what he had seen, not by himself, anyway. That he could sense his own aura, and that it was similar to those of other alectors, was enough itself to suggest that what she had shown him was real, but why couldn't he sense beyond himself? Was his Talent that weak, compared to that of the soarer?

He took a long and slow deep breath, then turned and walked back to the amber-green-gold archway that framed the tunnel. His eyes lighted on the mirrorlike device in the floor of the tunnel. It had to be a transport device, something like a Table.

Slowly, he walked into the tunnel, his head low, until he stood on the mirror. He'd never used a Table, but according to Lystrana, the key was to visualize where you wanted to go. He concentrated, thinking of the one Table he had seen, in the Hall of Justice in Elcien.

Nothing happened.

He tried reaching out with his Talent, into the depths that had to be within or behind the mirror, but he could find nothing there.

After a good half glass of trying everything he could think of, Dainyl finally walked out of the tunnel to wait for Falyna to return. The mirror was a transport device, but how it worked... he couldn't determine, and he doubted that either he-or any alector-would ever understand or be able to use it.

The other phrase that the soarer had used... that those among them...fed. That suggested strongly that the other creatures, the ugly ones,had fed on the missing miners. Dainyl had no proof, but it all fit. It would explain why some of the miners vanished-and why the miners would do anything to escape.

Dainyl walked to the eastern end of the blufflike ledge, thinking. That might explain the disappearances-and the reason why those miners who had escaped were trying to create a revolt, but they were merely a handful.

The soarer's revelations might explain the missing miners, but they didn't make anything any clearer as far as the Highest and the marshal were concerned.

What had become all too clear was that far more was happening than any of those involved knew or understood. Yet, if he reported what he had seen, he would reveal his own Talent and possibly threaten the marshal and the Highest-and, considering the fate of Submarshal Tyanylt, risk his own destruction. If he did not report on the ancient soarer, he might well betray his duty as a Myrmidon.

As the white sun rose out of the dark green ocean to the east, he stood and waited for Falyna to return.

51.

On Septi, Mykel was back patrolling the mining road with fifth squad.

The morning sweep had gone without incident, and the local Cadmians had escorted the prisoners to the mine and taken up their guard positions in the towers and along the perimeter. Mykel and fifth squad had continued to patrol the access road, but had seen nothing. The cool winds around and below the mountains felt refreshing after the days spent in the Cadmian compound in Dramuria. There, Mykel had felt as though the walls were closing in around him. He'd never experienced that feeling of constriction in any other Cadmian compound. It had to be the situation facing him, where he. could see no way out, no matter how hard he tried to avoid the traps set for him by Majer Vaclyn. Mykel knew all too well that people, even senior officers, often disliked others for no good reason, but much as he told himself that, he still kept trying to puzzle out why the majer had suddenly targeted him.

Now, in the late afternoon, he and fifth squad rode back to the mine, sweeping the road once more before the local Cadmians escorted the prisoners back to their camp. As the chestnut carried Mykel toward the mine, less than half a vingt away, the captain surveyed the road to thenorth. In the late afternoon the slope was shadowed, making hiding easier.