Dekkeret knew little about sorcery and had even less liking for it.

Manifestations of the supernatural and irrational made him uncomfortable . "Is that anything we need to worry about, do you think?"

"Depends on what kind of spell it is, I suppose," Akbalik said, with a shrug. "But maybe he's just planning to hold a bargain sale for amateur wizards. Nobody would ever use all those different things in a single spell." And he began to point out and identify the different implements for Dekkeret. That triangular stone vessel was called a veralistia: it was used as a crucible in which powders were burned that permitted a -view into things to come. 'The complex device with metal coils and posts was an armillary sphere, which showed the positions of the planets and stars so that horoscopes might be cast. The thingmade of brightly colored feathers and animal hair woven closely together-Akbalik could not recall its name-was employed to facilitate conversations with the spirits of the dead. The one next to it, an arrangement of crystal lenses and fine golden wires, was called a podromis: wizards used it in restoring sexual virility.

"You seem to be quite the expert," said Dekkeret. "You've had personal acquaintance with all of this, I take it?"

"Hardly. I don't often have occasion to converse with the spirits of the dead, and I haven't had much need of podromises, either. But you hear about these things wherever you turn, nowadays. -Look, he's still got more! I wonder what that one is supposed to do. And that, with all the wheels and pistons!"

The suitcase was finally empty. A good-sized crowd had gathered by now. Word must be getting around the ship, Dekkeret thought, that some kind of demonstration of magic was about to get under way. You could always draw a big crowd for that.

The gaunt magus-for that was surely what he was, a magus-took no notice of his audience. He was seated crosslegged now before his neat semicircular row of strange glittering apparatus and appeared to be off in some other realm of consciousness, eyes half closed, head rocking rhythmically from side to side.

Then, abruptly, he rose. Raised his foot and brought it down with savage force on the fragile instrument that Akbalik had called a podromis.

Mashed it flat, and went on to trample the armillary sphere, and the device of wheels and pistons, and the small, delicate machine of interlocking metallic triangles just beyond it. The onlookers gasped in amazement and shock. Dekkeret wondered if it might be blasphemous to destroy such things as these, whether doing so would bring down the vengeance of the supernatural spirits. If indeed such spirits existed at all, he added.

The magus now had systematically destroyed almost his entire collection of magical equipment. Those that he could not smash, like the veralistia, he hurled overboard. Then, calmly, purposefully, he walked to the rail and in a single smooth movement surmounted it and leaped into the river.

This time there was to be no rescue. The man had gone straight under, vanishing instantly from sight as though the pockets of his robe were filled with stones. Once again the riverboat came to a halt and crewmen went out in a dinghy, but they found no trace of the jumper, and returned after a time, grim-faced, to report their failure.

"Madness is everywhere," Akbalik said, and shivered. "The world is turning very strange, boy."

After that, members of the crew patrolled the deck two by two at all hours to guard against further such incidents. But there were no others.

The two bizarre events left Dekkeret in a somber, brooding mood.

Madness was everywhere, yes. He could not now keep the memory of Sithelle's incomprehensible terrible death, which for months he had worked hard to repress, from flooding back into his mind in all its full horror.Thatwild-eyed lunatic-those clotted, unintelligible cries of rageSithelle stepping forward-the flashing blade-the sudden startling spurt of bloodAnd now a giggling clownish fellow jumps overboard in m id-river, and then a magus who has evidently reached the end of his tether.

Could it happen to anyone at any time, the onset of irresistible madness , the utter unstoppable flight of all reason from the mind? Could it happen even to him? Worriedly Dekkeret searched his soul for the seeds of insanity. But they did not seem to be present within him, or, at any rate, he could not find them; and after a time his normal high spirits reasserted themselves, and he went back to his pastime of peering at the passing cities of the riverbank without fear that he would without warning be seized with the unconquerable urge to hurl himself over the rail.

When the splendor of Ni-moya burst abruptly upon him he was utterly unprepared.

For several days, now, the river had been growing wider. Dekkeret knew that a second great river joined the Zimr just south of the citythe Steiche, it was, coming up out of the wild Metamorph country-and where the two rivers flowed together, their union would of necessity form one much larger than either of its components. But he had not expected the joining of the rivers to create such a vast body of water. It made the mouth of the Zimr at Piliplok look like a trickling stream.

Crossing that great confluence was much like being on the ocean again.

Dekkeret was aware that Ni-moya was somewhere to the north; there were other great cities over on the other shore; but it was hard for his stunned mind to take in the immensity of the scene, and all he could see was the dark breast of the water stretching to the horizon, dotted everywhere by the bright pennants of the hundreds of local ferries that crossed it constantly in all directions.

He stared for what seemed like hours. Then, as he stood gaping, Akbalik took him by the elbow and turned him to one side.

"There," he said. "You're looking in the wrong direction.'That's Nimoya up yonder. Some of it, anyway."

Dekkeret was astounded. It was a magical sight: an endless backdrop of thickly forested hills, with an enormous city of shining white towers in the foreground, each one seeming taller than its neighbor, row upon row of titanic structures descending right to the shore of the river.

Was this a city? It was a world in itself. It went on forever, following the river's course as far as he could see, and continuing onward, obviously , for a long distance beyond-hundreds of miles, maybe. Dekkeret caught his breath. So much! So beautiful! He felt like dropping to his knees. Akbalik began to speak like a tour guide of Ni-moya's most famous sights: the Gossamer Galleria, a mercantile arcade a mile long that hovered high above the ground on nearly invisible cables; and the Museum of Worlds, where treasures from all over the universe were on display, even, so it was said, things from Old Earth; and the Crystal Boulevard, where revolving reflectors created the brilliance of a thousand suns; and the Park of Fabulous Beasts, full of wonders from remote and practically unknown districts- 'There was no end to the recitation. "That's theOpera House, there on the hill," said Akbalik, indicating a many-faceted building gleaming so brightly that it made Dekkeret's eyes ache to look at it. "With a thousand-instrument orchestra, creating a sound you can't begin to imagine.

That big glass dome over there with the ten towers sprouting from it, that's the municipal library, which holds every book that's ever been published. Over there, that row of low buildings right at the water's edge, with tiled roofs and turquoise and gold mosaics on their fronts, the ones you might think are the palaces of princes, those are the customs buildings. And then, just above and to the left of them-"

'What's that one?" Dekkeret broke in, pointing toward a structure of great size and transcendent beauty, a good way down the shore, that rose above everything else in supreme majesty, imperiously summoning the attention of every eye even amidst this phenomenal concatenation of architectural wonders.

"Oh, that," said Akbalik. 'That's the palace of the Procurator Dantirya Sambail."

It was a white-walled building of unthinkable splendor and grace: not of such prodigious size as Dekkeret knew Lord Prestimion's Castle to be, but quite large enough to meet almost any prince'srequirements, and of such wondrous elegance that it dominated the waterfront by its sheer perfection.

The Procurator's palace appeared to hover in mid-air, floating above the city, although in actuality, Dekkeret saw, it was situated atop a smooth white pedestal of stupendous height-a more modest version, in its way, of Castle Mount itself. But instead of sprawling off in all directions, as the Castle did, this building was a relatively compact series of pavilions and colonnaded porticos that made ingenious use of suspension devices and cantilevered supports to give the appearance of complete defiance of gravity . The uppermost floor was a series of transparent bubbles of clearest quartz, with a row of many-balconied chambers below it and a wider series of galleries in the next level down, reached by a cascading series of enclosed staircases that bowed outward like knees and swung sharply back inward again in a manner that seemed to defy all geometry.

Squinting into the glare of Ni-moya's radiantly white towers, Dekkeret could make out hints of other wings flanking the building on both sides below. At its gleaming base a single sturdy octagonal block of polished agate, at least as big as an ordinary person's house,jutted from the facade like an emblazoned medallion.

"How can any one person, even the Procurator, be allowed to live in anything so grand?"

Akbalik laughed. "Dantirya Sambail is a law unto himself. He was only twelve, you know, when he inherited the procuratorial fief of Nimoya . Which had always been an important fief, you understand, the most important one in Zimroel, but that was before Dantirya Sambail.

took control of it. Everyone assumed there would have to be a regency, but no, not at all, he disposed of his cousin the regent in about two min- utes and took power in his own right, and then, thanks to at least three marriages and half a dozen informal alliances and a lot of very desirable inheritances from an assortment of powerful kinsmen, he put together what amounts to a private empire. By the time he was thirty he held direct rule over a third of the continent of Zimroel and indirect influence over just about all the rest of it except the Metamorph reservation.

If he could have figured out some way of taking that over too, he probably would have done it. As it is, he rules Zimroel pretty much as its king. A king needs a decent palace: Dantirya Sambail has spent the last forty years improving the one he inherited into what you see before you now."

"What about the Pontifex and the Coronal? Didn't they have any objections to all this?"

"Old Prankipin's main concern, at least before he fell in with the sorcerers , was always commerce: constant economic expansion and the free flow of goods from one region to another, with everybody making a nice profit and the money going around and around. I think he saw the rise of Dantirya Sambail as a favorable contributing factor. Zimroel was a pretty fragmented place, you know, so far fromthe centers of government across the sea that the local lords mostly did whatever they pleased, and when the interests of the Duke of Narabal clashed with the interests of the Prince of Pidruid, it wasn't always healthy for the regional economy. Having someone like Dantirya Sambail in charge, capable of telling all the local boys what they should do and making it stick, played right into Prankipin's plan. As for Lord Confalume, he was even more enthusiastic about the unification of Zimroel under Dantirya Sambail than the Pontifex. Neither of them liked Dantirya Sambail, you understand-who could?-but they saw him as useful. Indispensable, even. So they tolerated his power grab and in some ways even encouraged it. And he was smart enough not to tread on their toes. Traveled often to the Labyrinth and the Castle, he did, paid his respects, loyal subject of his majesty and his lordship, et cetera, etcetera."

"And Lord Prestimion? Is he going to go along with the arrangement also?"

"Ah. Prestimion." A cloud appeared to cross Akbalik's face. "No, things are different now. There's some trouble between Lord Prestimion and the Procurator. Fairly serious trouble, in fact."

"Of what sort?"

Akbalik looked away. "Not of any sort that I'm able to discuss with you right now, boy. Serious, is all. Extremely serious. Perhaps we'll have an opportunity to go into the details some other time. -Ah: we're landing in Ni-moya, it seems."

The section of the city where the riverboat came to shore was called Strelain, which Akbalik told him was the name of Ni-moya's central district . A government floater was waiting for them; it took them up and up through the hilly streets of the great city, and deposited them at last at the tall building that was to be their home for the next few months.

Dekkeret's little apartment was on the fifteenth floor. That a building could have so many floors was something that had never occurred to him. Standing by the wide window, peering out at the tops of the buildings below, and at the river farther on, and the dark line of the Zimr's southern shore so far off that he could barely make it out, he had the giddy feeling that the building might at any moment pitch forward purely of its own unsustainable height and tumble down the hill, scattering its component bricks far and wide as it fell. He turned away from the window, shuddering. But the building stood firm.

The next day he began work at the Office of DocumentaryAppeal.

That was a subdivision of the Bureau of the Treasury, housed in a back wing of the rambling thousand-year-old governmental complex of blue granite known as the Cascanar Building, in south-central Strelain.

It was meaningless work. Dekkeret had no illusions about that. He was supposed to interview people who had had important documentsimportant to them, anyway-garbled somehow by the bureaucracy, and help them straighten out the confusion. From his first day he found himself attempting to unravel disputes about erroneous listings of birthdates, improper delineation of property boundaries, muddied selfcontradictory statements inserted into legal depositions by careless stenographers, and a host of other such things. There was no reason in the world why it had been necessary to ship him thousands of miles to handle such drab and trifling matters, which any career civil servant already working here could be dealing with.

But the point, he knew, was that everyone in the government, from the Pontifex and Coronal on down, was a career civil servant. And every prince of Castle Mount who had any ambition toward high office was required to put in time doing routine work of just this sort. Even Prestimion, who had been born to the rank of Prince ofMuldemar and might have spent a life of pleasant idleness puttering in his vineyards, had had to go through a round of chores like this by way of gathering the practical experience that had carried him to the throne.

Dekkeret, a salesman's son, had never had such grandiose ambitions . 'The starburst crown was no part of his plan; to be a knight of the Castle seemed as bold an aspiration as he could allow himself. Well, he was that, now, thanks to the happenstance of his having been standing Close by the Coronal at the time of the assassination attempt: a knightinitiate , anyway. And therefore he found himself behind this desk at the Office of Documentary Appeal in Ni-moya, plodding through day after day of foolish dreary work and hoping eventually to move on to grander things, closer to the summit of power. But this had to be done first.

Akbalik, whom he never saw during his working hours and only occasionally in the evenings, was someone who already had gone on to grander things, though Dekkeret was not sure just what they were.

Plainly Akbalik was a model worth patterning oneself after. He was very close to the Coronal's inner circle, apparently, if not actually a member of it himself just yet. He was quite friendly with the High Counsellor Septach Melayn; he had the respect of the gruff and businesslike Admiral Gialaurys; he seemed to have easy access to Lord Prestimion.

Surely he was destined to have a swift ascent to the highest reaches of the government.

Of course, Akbalik was the nephew of the wealthy and powerful Prince Serithorn, and that surely helped. But although high birth could get you fairly easily to high places in the Castle hierarchy, Dekkeret knew that ultimately it was merit, intelligence, character, perseverance, that brought you to the top. Fools and sluggards didn't become Coronals, although they might, by good luck and the accident of family connection, attain illustrious lesser posts despite their blatant deficiencies . Count Meglis of Normork was a good example of that.

Nor did great riches or noble birth suffice to get one to the throne, or else Serithorn, descended from half the great Coronals of antiquity, would have had it. Prince Serithorn, though, was not the kind of man who was suited for the job. He lacked the necessary seriousness.

Septach Melayn, the High Counsellor, would never be Coronal either, it seemed, for the same reason.

But Lord Prestimion, obviously, had proven himself fit for the post.

So had Lord Confalume before him. And Akbalik, too, that calm, steadyminded , quick-witted, hard-working, reliable man, might have the stuff of Coronals in him. Dekkeret admired him inordinately. It was much too early even to speculate about who might succeed Prestimion as Coronal when he became Pontifex; but, Dekkeret thought, how splendid if it turned out to be Akbalik! And how good that would be for Dekkeret of Normork, too, for he could plainly see that Akbalik looked upon him favorably and regarded him as a highly promising young man. For a moment, just a moment, Dekkeret allowed himself the wild fantasy of picturing himself as High Counsellor to the Coronal Lord Akbalik. And then it was back to correcting misspelled names on deeds of trust, and sorting out conflicts in land titles that went back to Lord Keppimon's day, and authorizing refunds for taxes that had been levied in triplicate by overenthusiastic revenue inspectors.

Two months went by in this fashion. Dekkeret grew enormously restless at his job, but he plodded gamely onward and allowed no hint of discontent to pass his lips. In his free time he roamed the city, bowled over again and again by the splendors he found everywhere. He made a few friends at the office; he met a couple of pleasant young women; once or twice a week Akballk joined him at a local tavern for an evening's amiable exploration of the excellent Zimroel wines. Dekkeret had no idea what sort of assignment it was that had brought Akbalik to Ni-moya, and he did not ask. He was grateful for the older man's company , and wary of seeming to probe matters that obviously did not concern him.

One night Akbalik said, "Do you remember that time when we were in the Coronal's office and Septach Melayn spoke about our going on a steetmoy-hunting expedition while we were here?"

"Of course I do."

"You're bored silly with the work you've been doing, aren't you, Dekkeret?"

Dekkeret reddened. "Well-"

"Don't try to be diplomatic. You're supposed to be bored silly with it.

It was designed to bore you. But you weren't sent here to be tortured.

I'm about ready for a break in my own work: what say we take ten days up north, and see how the steetmoy are running this time of year?"

'Would I be able to arrange a leave of absence?" Dekkeret asked.

Akbalik grinned. "I think I could manage to get one for you," he said.

The countryside changed very quickly once they were north of Nimoya . The climate of most of Majipoor was subtropical or tropical , except along such high mountain ridges as the Gonghar mountains of central Zimroel and atop Mount Zygnor in far-northern Alhanroel. Castle Mount itself, where the weather-machines devised by the ancients eternally fended off the bitter night of the stratospheric altitude , enjoyed an endless springtime.

But one sector of northeastern Zimroel reached far up toward the pole and therefore had a cooler climate. In the high, mountain-bordered plateau known as the Ehyntor Marches, snow was not at all uncommon during the winter months; and beyond that, walled off behind the tremendous peaks known as the Nine Sisters, there was an unknown polar land of perpetual storm and frost where no one ever went. In that grim and virtually inaccessible region, so legend had it, a race of fierce fur-clad barbarians had dwelled for thousands of years in complete isolation , as unaware of the comfort and warmth and prosperity enjoyed by Majipoor's other inhabitants as the rest of Majipoor was of them.

Akbalik and Dekkeret had no intention of going anywhere near that myth-shrouded land of constant winter and unyielding ice. But even just a short distance back of Ni-moya, its stark influence on the territories bordering on it was quickly apparent. Lush green subtropical forests yielded to vegetation more typical of a temperate climate, dominated by curious angular deciduous trees with bright yellow trunks, set very far apart from one another in stony meadows of scruffy pallid grass. And then, as they entered the foothills of the Khyntor Marches, a further increment of bleakness became evident. The trees and grass were far sparser, now. The landscape here was a gradually rising terrain of flat gray granite shields with swift cold streams slicing down out of the north. In the hazy distance the first of the Nine Sisters of Khyntor was visible: Threilikor, the Weeping Sister, whose dark facade was glossy with a multitude of rivulets and streams.

Akbalik had hired a team of five hunters, March-men, lean leatheryskinned mountaineers of the northlands who dressed in rough, crudely stitched robes of black haigus-hide, to guide them into the Marches.

Three of them seemed to be male, two female, although it was not easy to tell, so thoroughly were they engulfed in their bulky robes. They said very little. When they talked to each other, it was in a harsh mountain dialect that Dekkeret found practically impossible to understand. In addressing their two Castle lordlings they took care to use conventional speech, but he had trouble with that too, because the thick-tongued mountaineers spoke with heavy accents tinged with the rhythms of their own tongue, and also Dekkeret was often unfamiliar with the Nimoyan idioms that peppered their speech. He let Akbalik do most of the talking.

The mountain folk appeared to regard their city-bred charges with amusement verging on scorn. They definitely had no great respect for Dekkeret, who had never been in wilderness country before, and who was obviously uncertain of himself despite his size and strength. They looked upon him, he was sure, as an inept and useless boy. But they seemed not to have much esteem even for Akbalik, whose aura of competence and capability usually won quick recognition anywhere. Whenever he asked them something they would reply in curt monosyllables, and sometimes could be seen to turn away with sardonic smiles, as though barely able to suppress their contempt for any city man who needed to ask about something so self-evident that any child would know it.

"The steetmoy are forest creatures," Akbalik told him. "They don't like it much out here on the open tundra. That's their home territory down there, that dark place in the shadow of the mountain. The hunters will scare up a pack of them for us in the deep woods and drive them into a stampede. We select the ones we want to go after and chase them through the forest until we have them cornered." Akbalik glanced at Dekkeret's oddly short legs, heavily knotted with muscle. "You're a good runner, aren't you?"

"I'm no sprinter. But I can manage."

"Steetmoy aren't especially fast either. They don't need to be. But they have plenty of stamina and they're better than we are at barreling through thick underbrush. It's easy for one to make his way into dense cover and get away from you. The problem then is that they sometimes come slipping around behind you and attack from the rear. They live primarily on berries and nuts and bark, but they don't mind eating meat, you know, especially in winter, and they're very adequately equipped for killing."

Turning to his pack, he began to draw weapons from it and lay them out in front of Dekkeret.

"These are what we'll take with us. The hooked machete is for cutting your way through the brush. The poniard is what you use for killing your steetmoy."

"This?" Dekkeret asked. He picked it up and stared at it. Its blade was impressively sharp but no more than six inches in length. "Isn't it a little short?"

"Did you expect to be using an energy-thrower?"

Dekkeret felt his face going hot. He remembered, now, that Septach Melayn had talked about how steetmoy are hunted with poniard and machete. Dekkeret hadn't given it much thought at the time. 'Well, of course not. But with this thing I'd have to be right on top of the steetmoy for the kill."

"Yes. You would, wouldn't you? That's the whole point of the sport: hunting at close range, great risk for high reward. And also, doing as little damage to the valuable fur as possible. If it comes down to a matter of your life or the steetmoy's, you can use your machete, but that's not considered very sporting. Imagine Septach Melayn, forinstance, hacking away at a steetmoy with his machete!"

"Septach Melayn has the quickest reflexes of any man who ever lived. He could kill a steetmoy with an ivory toothpick. But I'm not Septach Melayn."

Akbalik seemed unworried. Dekkeret was big and strong; Dekkeret was determined; Dekkeret would look after himself quite satisfactorily down there in the steetmoy forest.

Dekkeret himself was less confident. He had never asked for this adventure. It had all been Septach Melayn's idea originally. He had been eager enough to undertake it, yes, back there in the Castle, but that was without any real awareness of what hunting steetmoy in their native territory might involve. And, though he had heard plenty of exuberant hunting tales from other young knight-initiates during his first few months at the Castle, and had envied them greatly, he realized now that it was one thing to roam the walled hunting preserves of Halanx or Amblemorn in search of zaur or onathils or bilantoons, but it was something else entirely to be roaming around in a cold northern forest looking for a ferocious steetmoy that you planned to kill with a tiny dagger.

Cowardice, though, was no part of Dekkeret's makeup. What lay ahead sounded like a tough assignment, but perhaps the hunt wouldn't turn out to be as risky as it seemed just now, with his imagination leading him to anticipate the worst. So he picked up his poniard and his machete and hefted them and took a few fierce swipes through the air for practice, and told Akbalik cheerfully that on second thought the poniard seemed more than adequate for the job and he was ready for the steetmoy hunt whenever the steetmoy were ready for him.

Akbalik had a new surprise in store for him as they followed the five March-men down a long boulder-strewn slope into the dark glade where the steetmoy lived. Reaching into his pack, he drew forth two blunt-nosed metal tubes, stuck one into his belt next to his poniard, and handed the other one to Dekkeret.

"Energy-throwers? But you said-"

"Lord Prestimion's orders. We want to behave like proper sportsmen , yes, but I'm also supposed to bring you back from here alive. 'The poniard is the prime weapon, and if you get into difficulties you use the machete, and if you get into real difficulties you blast the damned animal with the energy-thrower. It's not the elegant way, but it's a sensible last resort. An angry steetmoy can rip a man's guts out with three slashes of his claws."

Feeling more ashamed than relieved, Dekkeret tucked the energythrower into one of the loops of his belt, wishing there were some way of pushing it down out of sight to keep the March-men guides from noticing it. But that hardly mattered. They had already made it quite clear that they looked upon Dekkeret and Akbalik as a pair of shallow self-indulgent fops so doltish that they could find nothing better to do with their time than take themselves off into the forests of the north and hunt dangerous animals for no motive more worthy than their own amusement. It could scarcely lessen them in the March-men's eyes if one of them suddenly happened to pull out an energy-thrower and blaze away at an inconveniently rambunctious steetmoy. All the same, Dekkeret quietly vowed that he would not use the weapon even as a last resort. The poniard and-if necessary-the machete would have to do the job.

It had snowed during the night. Though the temperature was a little above freezing now, the ground was white everywhere. A few solitary flakes still were coming down. One of them struck Dekkeret's cheek, causing a little burning sensation. A strange feeling, that. The whole concept of snow was new to him, and very curious.

The trees in this glade had yellow trunks like those farther to the south, but they carried heavy growths of blackish-brown needle-like leaves rather than showing bare deciduous branches, and instead of having their trunks and branches contorted into odd angles these trees stood tall and straight, with their thick crowns meeting far overhead.

Underneath, a dense darkness prevailed. A stream dotted by big boulers flowe past on one si e, and on e o er, e one c osest to e mountain, the land dropped sharply away into a swooping valley.

The five hired hunters led the way, with Dekkeret and Akbalik close behind, following in the tracks that the March-men left in the snow.

Gradually the pace picked up until they were trotting through the forest, moving in easy loping bounds along the bank of the stream. Hardly ever did the hunters look back toward them. When one of them did-it was one of the women, a flat-faced, wide-mouthed one with big gaps between her teeth-it was to give Dekkeret a mocking grin that seemed to say, In five minutes you will be frightened entirely out of whatever wits you may have. Perhaps he was wrong about that. Perhaps she was just trying to look encouraging. But it was not a pretty grin.

"Steetmoy," Akbahk said suddenly. "Three of them, I think."

He pointed off to the left, into a dark grove where the yellow-trunked trees stood particularly close together and the snow lay thick on the ground. At first Dekkeret noticed nothing unusual. 'Then he glimpsed a zone of whiteness in there that was different from the whiteness of the snow: softer, brighter, with a lustrous gleam instead of a hard glitter.

Large furry white animals, moving about. The sound of their low muttering growls came toward him on the wind.

The hunters had paused by the edge of the grove. A few unintelligible muttered words passed among them; and then they began to move toward the trees, fanning out in a wide arc as they did so.

Quickly Dekkeret came to understand what was happening. The steetmoy-three of them, yes-had picked up the scent. They were moving slowly about amidst the trees, as if working out their strategy.

Dekkeret could see them clearly now, thick-bodied beasts built low to the ground, with long jutting black snouts and flat triangular heads out of which golden eyes, rimmed with red, were staring intently. They were about the size of very large dogs, but heavier and sturdier. They looked graceless but powerful: their thighs and haunches we-e massive , their forearms plainly held great strength. Long curving claws, black and shiny, jutted from their paws. Dekkeret could not believe that he would be expected to kill one of these creatures with a mere handheld dagger. But that was what was done, supposedly. It seemed improbable. He hadn't forgotten Septach Melayn's words: "Beautiful thing: that thick fur, those blazing eyes. Most dangerous wild animal in the world, so far as I know, the steetmoy."

The gap-toothed mountain woman was gesturing at him.