Narliat looked to Nylan, who nodded again.

"We will bring some goods," answered Narliat.

Skiodra lifted his hand, and the four carts began to wind their way up from the road at the bottom of the ridge.

Ryba turned and gestured. Four armed marines moved toward the piles of supplies near the top of the ridge.

Nylan looked westward to the darkening clouds that promised the first real rain since they had landed.

The first cart held barrels.

"That-the orange one," explained Narliat, "that is dried fruit from Kyphros. The white ones are flour. The seal means it was milled in Certis . . ."

"How much do they - generally run?" asked Ayrlyn.

Narliat glanced nervously from the redheaded comm officer to Skiodra, who cleared his throat.

Ryba put her hand on the hilt of the blade Nylan had laser-forged.

"Uh ... I couldn't be saying, ser, not exactly, since it'd depend on when Skiodra bought them and where."

"Three silvers for the flour and a five for the fruit," said Skiodra.

Narliat's eyes widened.

Nylan snorted. "That's about triple what the trader paid for them."

"You wish to travel to Kyphros to get them for yourself?" asked Skiodra.

"Excuse me," said Nylan. "Four times what he paid. Maybe five."

The slightest nod from Narliat confirmed his revised guess.

"So, the noble trader paid-what?-half a silver for each barrel of flour, and he wants three. Six times ... that's nice if you can get it." Nylan laughed.

"Ah ... my friend ... how would you pay for the feed for all those horses and men? It is not cheap to travel the Westhorns-and the flour, it came from Certis, and those fields are on the other side of the Easthorns . . ."

The engineer repressed a sigh. A long afternoon lay ahead, and the air was getting moister with the coming of the storm. "A half silver a barrel for your expenses, for each two barrels, I could see," he added. "That would be more ..."- he groped for the word-"fair."

"Fair? That would be ruin," declared Skiodra. "You mages, you think that because you can create something for nothing that every person can. Bah! Even two silvers a barrel would destroy me."

Narliat's eyes flicked back to Nylan.

"Such destroying ... that would buy you fine furs. Even a handful of..." He looked at Narliat.

"Coppers?"

"Coppers. Even two coppers in gain a barrel would make you the richest trader."

"I said you were a mage. That may be, but your father had to be a usurer. You would have my men eat hay, and my horses weeds. Even to open trading, as a gesture of good faith, at a silver and a half a barrel, I would have to sell the cloak off my back."

In the end, they agreed on nine coppers a barrel for the ten barrels of flour.

"What do you have to offer?" asked Skiodra, as a boy, acting as a clerk, chalked the number on a long slate and showed it to Nylan. It looked like a nine, but Nylan still glanced toward Ayrlyn and Narliat, who nodded.

"Try the small sword," suggested the armsman.

Nylan presented it.

"A nice toy for a youth, but scarcely worth much," snorted Skiodra.

"Lord Nessil paid a gold for it," asserted Nylan.

"A gold, and he was a rich lord who was cheated, or sleeping with the smith's daughter . . ."

It was going to be a longer afternoon than he had thought. Nylan refrained from taking a deep breath. "Lords don't have to bargain, noble Skiodra. If they think they are being cheated, they kill the cheater. The blade is probably worth two golds, but a gold is what he paid, and it's scarcely touched."

"Your father and your grandfather both were usurers, Mage. How your poor mother survived... I might consider, out of sentiment, and because of your audacity, five coppers for that excuse of a weapon ..."

The sun, had it been visible through the heavy clouds, would have been nearly touching the western peaks before Skiodra packed what remained back into his carts and departed-not quite smiling, but not frowning, and promising to be back before harvest.

"So what do we have?" Fierral's eyes went from the carts of Skiodra to the supplies, but the redheaded marine officer's hand stayed on her sidearm.

The piles, bales, and barrels represented a strange assortment of goods. Besides nearly thirty barrels of flour, corn meal, and dried fruit, and a waxed wheel of yellow cheese, there were bolts of woolen cloth, a pair of kitchen cleavers, two large kettles and three assorted caldrons, two crude shovels, an adz, two sets of iron hinges big enough for a barn door, but no screws or spikes.

Nylan looked away from the assorted goods and held out his hand, feeling the tiny droplets of rain. As he listened to the rumble of distant thunder, he frowned, feeling that the clouds almost held something like the Winterlance's neuronet.

Ayrlyn looked from the clouds to Nylan. "I know."

Ryba frowned, then asked Narliat, "You think they'll be back?"

Narliat shrugged. "Maybe yes, maybe no. It matters not."

"It doesn't matter?" asked Ayrlyn, brown eyes questioning.

"Others will come, now."

Nylan hoped so. They needed more supplies, a lot more, if the winter were anything like he thought it was going to be. And they needed something like chickens. He thought chickens could last the winter if they were in a place above freezing out of the wind. Then he took a deep breath, realizing that was just a hope. What did he really know about anything like that?

"I hope so," said Ryba, echoing his thoughts. A low rumbling of thunder punctuated her words. "We need to get this stuff into the landers or under cover."

Ryba turned. "Fierral? Have your people get this stored. The cloth needs some dry places-maybe lander three. Nylan, how much covered space is there in your tower?"

"Not a lot yet," the engineer admitted. "Only the bottom level of the center is covered yet, and that's where the lasers and firin cells go."

"Then it will all have to go in the landers for now. That will make things tight."

"I'll see about getting the next level floored and roofed," said Nylan. As he hurried back to ensure that the lasers were stored against the oncoming rain, he wondered if he would ever get caught up to the needs they faced.

He fingered the torch in his pocket, and gave a half-laugh. He'd never even thought about using the beam. That was the way so many things worked-when it came time to use them, he forgot or did something else.

Overhead, the thunder rolled, and the fine rain droplets began to get heavier, and the sky darker.

XIX.

THE RAIN STILL fell the next morning, but the droplets were fine and sharp, carried by the winterlike wind out of the ice-covered heights to the west. Low clouds obscured Freyja and all the mountains, except for the ridges closest to the landers. Even the partly built tower seemed to touch the misty gray underside of the clouds.

Nylan paused in the door of the lander, looking down at the gooey mess below.

After a moment, he stepped into the mist-filled air, and his boots squushed in the mud. Some of the clumps of grass-even the yellow flowers-bore a snowy slush, and he looked back at Ryba. "This is one of the better reasons to get the tower finished. We're not going to have dry and sunny weather all the time."

His eyes dropped to the mud underfoot, and he frowned. "We need clay."

"Clay? What does that have to do with rain and weather?" Ryba stepped into the gusting rain.

"I should have thought of it sooner. We'll need bricks, and maybe I can make some clay pipes for water and the furnace. The right kind, and I can make a big stove so people won't have to keep cooking over fires."

"You're still hung up on that furnace, aren't you?"

"The main hall will have a big hearth and fireplace in case it doesn't work." He shrugged. "We also need to get water from the springs to the tower, and that means pipes."

Ryba laughed. "You'd think you'd been born doing this sort of thing."

"Hardly. I hope I don't make too many mistakes. I'm overlooking a lot of things, except"-he snorted-"I don't know what they are because I've overlooked them."

They stopped before reaching the cook fires, and Ryba studied the fields, wiping the water from the ongoing drizzle from her face. A long, boot-deep trench crossed one corner of the potato field, and one hill had been undercut by the running water. Two marines were reclaiming it, while a third was digging a diversion trench across the uphill side of the field.

"Denalle, would you finish that demon-damned diversion so we're not fighting water and the frigging mud?" demanded one of the two trying to keep the potato hill from collapsing into the narrow stream of cold water.

"Stow it, Rienadre. You want to fight through these plants, you do it. They got roots tougher than synthcord. I'll be happy to change places with you."

"Shiiittt. . ."

The two marines in the field stood up as the gooey mass of soil collapsed into the still-widening trench.

"We're going to help you, Denalle, before we lose more." Rienadre and the other marine trudged toward the edge of the field.

"This really isn't that good a locale for crops," Nylan said.

"I know, but until we can develop more trade and maybe find some animal that does well up here .. ."

"Sheep or winter deer or something. Even chickens or some sort of domesticated fowl."

"None of which we've seen," Ryba answered curtly. "Not chickens, and the goats scatter into the rocks if they so much as hear a hoof click."

They walked through the drizzle to the cook-fire area, where Nylan got a slab of bread that Kyseen had tried to bake in a makeshift oven and some purple food concentrate. He looked at the off-white center and nearly black crust of the bread, so flat that it looked more like a pancake. He supposed that was because Kyseen had no yeast or whatever made bread rise. After another look at the black-edged mass, he broke off a section and chewed. The bread was only half-cooked and soggy in the middle, but-if he avoided the carbonized outside-it tasted better than the purple concentrate.

Nylan frowned. Some of the partitions in the landers were thin metal. Perhaps he could unbolt them, and without too much power usage, turn them into baking sheets for the oven he hadn't built. After a laugh, he took another mouthful of the soggy bread. He was thinking about making items to fit in things he wasn't sure he could build, and that assumed that he found something like clay, that he could turn it into brick, and that the laser held out-just to begin with.

He finished the last bit of the heavy slab of bread and the slice of the pungent yellow cheese, rinsed his wooden plate, and set it back with the others, and went to find Ryba.

He found her talking with Fierral at the far side of the cook fires.

"Rain or no rain, we need some sentries. The locals are tough, and I don't want someone lofting arrows into us. Or whatever." No bowman was going to risk ruining good strings in the rain, Nylan felt, but he said nothing.

"Yes, ser," Fierral answered, then looked toward Nylan, her red hair plastered against her skull by the dampness.

"I wanted to talk to Istril about where I might find some clay." Nylan brushed the water off his forehead to keep it from running into his eyes.

"You're not going to work on the tower?" asked Ryba.

"I'm not about to take out the lasers in this weather. The timbers will have to dry anyway before they're mortared and wedged in place."

"What about the clay you're using in the mortar?"

"That's not quite the same. Without the ash . . ." Nylan shook his head. "Besides, I'm hoping to find something that's easier to use and fire. Istril said that she'd seen some spots that might be clay, somewhere down below."

"Wouldn't the locals already be using it?"

"Large deposits, yes. I just want enough for bricks to build some inside walls, maybe a stove, and some water pipes." Ryba shrugged and turned to Fierral. "Can you spare Istril?"

"That won't be a problem, Captain. Or should we start calling you marshal?"

Ryba grinned. "Whatever works."

Istril was still sleeping in the third lander, and, while Nylan washed up and went to find out something about the horse situation, she ate.

When Istril arrived, the slim marine vaulted into her saddle. Nylan climbed into his, banging himself with the blade he had forged and still barely knew how to swing without hitting himself.

Thankfully, Istril let her horse walk uphill toward the tip of the ridge that seemed almost into the mist that hung below the clouds. Nylan let his beast follow.

"I don't know as what I saw, ser, is what you want, and it's down a little ways. It wasn't like dirt, and it was almost slimy."

"All we can do is look. That sounds promising. Even if it is clay, it will take some experimenting to see if we can fire it."

"Fire it?"

"Turn it into things-pipes for water, bricks, maybe things like plates or pots.

That means building a kiln or an oven of sorts." He grabbed the horse's mane as the beast lurched downhill.

They rode in silence until they reached the exposed section of the ridge, little more than a narrow way bordered on each side by rocks that dropped sharply away. Most of the rocks on the north side were still covered with ice left from the winter that held some of the night's snow above it.

Nylan looked down toward the forests that began well below the bottom of the ridge. They would have to circle back along the bottom of the ridge on the north.'In the distance, kays below, he could see and sense a narrow stream emerging from the rock pile. He massaged his back. "How long will this take?

Isn't there a shorter way?"

Istril led the way down the ridge line, keeping her mount close to the windswept hard rock near the center. "Be a while, ser, but you don't want to take the short way down there."