Oh, let me and my fortune ride the sea, On Ocean's bosom know-at last!-repose!

There nor flame nor thief need dreaded be, And lapping swells lull weary lids to close. . . .

KAIRNGATE HARBOR will forever wear the friendly luster of a safe haven to my eyes, for the way it looked at that day's end. The water wore the setting sun, and the little bay was a single coin of gold. At a shipyard, whose master we caught just locking his gate to leave, we found a yare little caravel he'd just refitted, with a stout four- oar skiff aboard her. We let him wangle a fiveweight for her in our craving for the peace it would give us to have our treasure shipped and safe offshore at last.

Klaskat and Klopp we sent off with two hundred lictors each. We might not have spared so much, but in our impatience to be loaded we let them help us lay our bales aboard, and they, as they worked, allowed their looks to display their doubt that what we shipped was truly larval scrapings. They handled the bundles roughly enough to make them chink metallically. Hence the handsomeness of our stipend. Even so they drove off laggingly, with wistful backward gazes.

4.

We named our caravel Bounty, and by the rising of the gibbous moon, we had sailed her out and anchored her in an untrafficked reach of the harbor. She rode in plain sight of the balconied dockside refectory where we proposed to sup. With our Unguent strapped to our middles beneath our jerkins, and our beloved Bounty never out of our gaze, we could be aboard her in mere seconds at the first sign of threat.

We rowed ashore in silence, in silence took our table on the crowded balcony, bespoke our meal, awaited it and ate it in silence. Our treasure was won, and was shipped. Now came the having, the spending. Now, whenever Barnar and I faced each other, we faced the gulf that yawned between us. And so we avoided one another's eyes.

Down in our little Bounty there, sitting on moonlit water as still as hammered pewter, lay a cargo of wonders.

And contained within that wealth, as the progeny lies in the womb, were deeds to make our names ring down through the ages in the annals of thievery.

And these yet unborn marvels tormented me. I saw my hands, in Pelfer's gantlets, touch the iron gates of Mhurdaal's Manse (all hung with corpses of unsuccessful thieves, still fresh and bleeding though long centuries slain) ; I heard the gates groan, and gape asunder. I saw Mhurdaal 's Library, labyr inth of lore, saw plague- touched cities full of folk a-sweating out pure gold. . . .

And here sat Barnar, also gazing on the Bounty, and seeing forests of skorse, stubbornly dreaming of stands of timber, himself as thick and rooted as a tree in his infuriating willfulness. It did not matter what our halves of this fortune might do. Entire, our fortune was a bridge to glory, to immortal exploit. Half a bridge leads but to an abyss. Barnar had sworn to the exploit, and I could not, would not let it go. So we sat there, the silence between us like a spectral Third at the table.

Until Barnar said, "That woman at the railing . . . do we know her?"

"Is that not Niasynth?"

"Yes, I think it is!" The young-ancient woman looked travel-ready in a shortcape, tunic, boots and shortsword. She sat gazing at the moon and sea. A rapture, a zone of privacy long centuries deep, enveloped her, and we made no move to rupture it. We watched her, and our own memories of the subwor ld's eterni ty seemed to enfold us, so that we jumped when a woman's voice greeted us from close at hand.

"This is well-met, good thieves!" Sha'Urley stood at our table. "Let's have a hug and a kiss, oh thou miserly, greedy, tight-bungholed Nifft!" I embraced her, though I could have wished her ebullience more seemly-spoken.

She sat, and took wine with us. Her accoutrement was like Niasynth's, towards whom her smiling eyes continually slanted as she spoke with us.

"What a delight to meet you like this!" I told her. "Perhaps we can settle that fiftyweight of gold still owed us here and now. Then we need make no stop in Dolmen Harbor."

"Alas, there you must stop, I'm afraid, and deal with Ha'Awley. I've ceded to my brother all my interest in his enterprise of the giants' pap. He is the repository of any and all revenues it may have drawn. The only coin I bear is needed for our travels, Niasynth's and mine."

"Travelling?" I asked, but we understood, I think, even before she explained.

"She has a new world to learn," Sha'Urley said. "And as I tried to tell her about this world, I discovered how little I knew it myself. I found that I have the same world to learn as she does. The pair of you too had a part in rousing me. The places you will go on a venture! You are both no less than inspirational!"

"There's no finer thing than setting out to see what you can see!" I told her. I was envying her a bit for some reason, as if I weren't as footloose as she. "We congratulate you. But, dearest Sha'Urley, forgive our closer inquiry into your brother's affairs. He does indeed have our fiftyweight of specie, does he not?"

Sha'Urley laughed. "Whatever his other difficulties, lack of specie is not one of them. Bunt Hivery remains one of the foremost in the Angalheim chain."

"I beg your leave to press a bit," Barnar told her. "How does his enterprise with the ichor fare?"

"To be honest, good Barnar, that is precisely what I am studiously trying not to know. This is as far south as we came with him, and we have not seen him for near a month. We have toured southern Kairnheim while Niasynth regained her strength. We are here only to set sail with the morning tide for the Minuskulons. I have avoided even news of Dolmen, lest it ensnare me. 'Who means to fly, takes wing at once.'"

"Dearest Sha'Urley," I put in. "Believe me, I appreciate the perilous poise of spirit you have come to, and we do not wish to jar you, but-"

Smiling, she raised a preventing palm. "Peace, sweet thief. I know why you have grounds for fear. Costard's doings, and his fate, have reached us here."

"Even his final attainment of the sea?"

"No. We knew he crawled coastward, no more."

When she had heard from us the details of Costard's recent plunge into the deep, which we strove to render vividly, she covered her face a moment, concealing some emotion which caused a slight tremor of her shoulders.

"Well," she said at length, with a solemn face, "I can tell you only that poor Costard's . . . abandon is not a flaw my brother shares. If profit can be had from this ichor outside its ordained sphere, Ha'Awley will extract it, both methodically and cautiously." A shadow touched her eyes here. "It has been impossible not to gather that some kind of unrest lies on Dolmen in recent days. And looking across the channel this morning, I noticed in the oblique light of sunrise some shadowy suggestion of airborne turmoil above my homeland's heights. More I cannot say, and will not know. Indeed, we're going to board our ship within the hour, and lie safe from hearing further news before we sail."

I could not help but sigh. "Well, it is a nuisance to have to put in at a troubled port! Still, a fiftyweight of specie is no trifling sum."

"Forgive me if I smile," Sha'Urley said. "Forgive me if I'm wrong in thinking you have ten thousand times that value even now in hand, perhaps down in that caravel anchored there, that your eyes seldom leave for long."

"Even as yours seldom leave Niasynth for long?"

She gr inned at this. "Yes. Even so. And I hope your obsession wi l l make your hear ts soar as high as mine does, - every time I look at my dear Niasynth. But just consider, friends: why don't you let that fiftyweight go? Not for my brother's sake, but in a spirit of libation, of a little thanks-offering to Luck? The way you've been squeezing and grabbing pelf down in the underworlds, madly fanatic as demons yourselves . . . I'm saying you need to unclench, to ease out of avarice's frenzy. Forget the fifty as a purely moral exercise."

Plainly, Sha'Urley's heart being light, her reason too had slipped its tether. I forgave this grotesque suggestion as the mere ebullition of a fevered fancy.

We lingered drinking with her a while, and then parted with great affection-and before Niasynth had yet come away from her revery at the railing. She seemed to sit in a space still too far from this world for our voices to reach her. Surely a speech that was more than words was all her mind could really hear as yet, a speech such as Sha'Urley must use with her.

XXVII.

Come golden sweetness! Overbrim each cell Of Fortune's labyrinthine honeycomb.

Swell! Gather to one shining drop, and fall, Delicious sphere, upon my tongue, thy tomb!

THE SUMMER NORTHERLIES were done. A southwest breeze with a nip of autumn in it arose some hours before dawn, and we hoisted sail and tacked for Dolmen. Sunrise found us scudding smartly, keel kicking spray from the chop. Our little Bounty's friskiness seemed to coax me to sail straight out for the open sea. Forget Dolmen, forget further complication. Drive straight to the open Agon; make landfall in the Minuskulons in a twenty-night, make Pardash and Karkmahn-Ra in the same again. Perhaps the morning wind whispered the same to Barnar.

But then I asked myself: What sane man could leave a fiftyweight of gold lying by when he might have it for three or four steps out of his path? Was it not blind foolishness not to take one's own? And no doubt Barnar asked himself the same.

The wind dropped as Dolmen's peaks loomed bigger, but the channel current pulled us steadily along.

Dolmen was mantled in some thin cloud and haze, and we had drawn quite near when the noon sun thawed the sky and raised the winds again, and blew the island jewel clear. There was indeed a fretful turmoil in the air above the highlands; bursts of smoke roiled up into the winds, and were snatched to tatters. There was a scent, too, on the breeze, a taunting whiff that was and yet was not like burning flesh. . . . And was there not a fierce music as well, that came to us fitfully on the wind? A humming, buzzing ground-note, and the shrill voices of men, as at war?

"Smoke. What next?" I said bitterly. "Will we never have done with obstacles and complications?"

"Look how the harbor swarms!"

Taking in canvas, we slipped round the harbor's northern spur. We peered a long tense moment at the bustle of ships, the throngs on the quays, the laden wagons jostling on the upland highways, before determining, with relief, that this was a swarming more of business than disaster.

Nonetheless we anchored our Bounty well outside the thick of the traffic, then lowered our skiff and oared in toward the docks. "Shall we make for that wine shop?" Barnar suggested. "The outside tables should give a good view of her."

All the moored ships loomed big above us, and not a few of them were Bunt Hivery's freighters, big but graceful vessels, castle d f o r e a n d a f t , w i t h B u n t ' s e s c u t c h e on on the foresail, and more of these appeared to be offloading than taking cargo on. Teamsters held their dray wagons steady to take on packets of heavy lumber, kegs of pitch and bales of torches, stacks of hinged, folded timbers that might be collapsible derricks or siege - weapons, and packets I could not at first identify, but which proved with closer looking to be bundled darts for a large ballista, each missile near big as a man.

"Seems we have a distinctly military kind of commerce here," Barnar mused. "And at the same time not a few of the locals look to be taking up travelling." For mixed with the freighters were not a few other craft taking on passengers, while everywhere on the docks the dray wagons were interspersed with little knots of folk waiting to take ship, most of them caped for open sea breezes and hovering protectively round their little cargoes of baggage.

"Yes. Things are definitely a-boil," I answered. "Bounty's well anchored outside this mess. If Bunt's in a pickle I'd best have the coin straight out of him, in case he's a-sinking. I'll try his manse first."

Barnar climbed up to the quay and took an outside table at the wineshop, beginning his watch on Bounty.

With his Unguent strapped to his middle beneath his jerkin, he would not need the skiff, which I rowed cross- harbor, weaving easily amid the larger craft, and making better time than I would afoot through the crowds on the quay.

I tried to read Dolmen's situation as I oared my way. Whatever was going on up in the highlands, there was much of war and siege about it. An unbroken snake of traffic rippled up the switchbacks of both the main upland highways. The downcoming wagons were mostly empty, and those climbing bore baled torches and barrels of pitch and the like.

"Ho, lanky Karkmahnite! Sweet Nifft! Withstay thy sinewy arm a moment from thy toils, my lizardly darling!" This merry salutation, brazen as trumpets, blared down upon me. Looking up, I saw perched in the forecastle of one of Bunt's freighters, lissom Higaia-in arms, and looking quite dazzling so. She wore a snug pectoral plate of brass, molded to the ripe economy of her breasts, which it enshrined in lovely sculptures of themselves. She had a stout gaffing hook for cargo handling which she gripped two-handed, its shaft across the back of her neck-the way a resting trooper will wear his javelin like a yoke-but in the next instant her vessel's creaking cargo boom caught her attention. She whirled and brandished the gaff like a baton of office then: "Ease it there! Slow on that windlass! Easy down, Hoofa! Easy down!" Her freighter was one of the few taking on rather than discharging goods.

I tied up to the ladder she dropped me, and climbed it. We hugged each other with a will, Higaia and I, while over the crown of her raven-black head I saw a big flat packet of canvas lowered into her freighter's hold.

And her freighter it was, or half hers. She was cargomaster-boss of the freight and its handling, coequal, in Bunt's commercial fleet, to the vessel's captain. This was Radula, a nervous, friendly man with an unusually fair skin that ran heavily to freckles and sunburn, unfortunate skin for a sea-captain. He greeted me very civilly and then told Higaia, an odd quaver to his voice, "I'd like to be standing well away within the hour, my dear. Can you manage it?"

"With ease, Raddy, with ease. I'm going down now to see the comb secured. Come on, Nifft. Are you heading south? We're bound for the Minuskulons."

"As are we, and beyond them to the Ephesions. There rides our little carrack Bounty, yonder. We're just putting in to collect a fiftyweight Ha'Awley owes us."

Higaia paused at the hatchway, looked at Bounty, and then looked at me rather sharply, before she led me down the ladder into the hold. Its gloom was fragrant; aromas of brine and sweetness warred. Her voice echoed below me, "A fiftyweight's no trifle, I suppose . . . but you'll have to go up to the meadows for it."

"Do you imply that this is difficult, or dangerous?"

"Let me show you something."

Leading me over to the canvas balke that had just been laid upon a dozen like it-and the whole hold was stowed full of the same-she plucked from her belt a dagger honed sharp as a razor, and, crosswise down one corner of the packet, she slashed out a narrow flap perhaps a cubit long. Within it was honeycomb, half a cubit thick. Each cell could have coffered the head of a man. In the shadowy hold, the sheen of the wax dimly glimmered, and the liquid gold within it looked dark as amber. It made the scalp prickle with that flush of danger riches give you.

"It was for harvesting this," Higaia told me, "that I got my promotion from the bath-house. For you see, when they were producing comb on this scale, though huge, the bees could still fly, at least for short stretches, and they had begun attacking men and women. Bunt suddenly needed men-at-arms. For thrice the pay of the baths you may be sure I made my skills known to him."

"I knew you were a dancer. I don't wonder you're mistress of the dance of arms," I answered, distracted. I was picturing this monstrosity that had come to pass in Bunt's flower fields. "These giant bees," I prompted, - "defended their comb, then, from the harvesting?"

"No. Their attacking seemed spontaneous, a kind of hunting. They had a week before devoured the last of the flowers right down to the roots-all the meadows are bald dirt now. The bees were evidently trying to eat their victims, but naturally their mouthparts were wrong for the work. It is of course as fatal to suffer an attempted eating, by an insect of that size, as it is to be eaten."

"You distinguished yourself, plainly, to be given this command."

"I did indeed, my dear. I'm quite an adept of both axe and cudgel, and though this was shield-and-torch work, I distinguished myself in many a battle. It has been Bunt's salvation that, with a bit of pitch flung on them, these monstrosities will burn so readily. When the pressure of battle declined, he was quick to redeploy us for shipping the harvest out-he needs to recoup the hemorrhage of gold he has suffered from this nightmarish metamorphosis."

"The battle has slackened off, then?"

"Not exactly. Rather, the defense needs somewhat fewer troops, for when the newer, bigger generation emerged from the hives-which are now great dug caverns in the earth, under where the hive houses stood before-when this flightless generation emerged from the earth, we found they could be barricaded; dammed up in their sluggish, lurching onslaught, and burnt by the score. Still, they come out of the earth in numbers that our decimations barely match."

"To what dimensions have they now attained?" I asked, a touch of frost upon my spine.

"Big as titanoplods, or near. Their legs do them little good anymore, but they have a slow, blundering power, lurching like grubs. At favorable points of terrain, our troops have grown adept at throwing up collapsible barricades across the bees' line of progress, and while the brutes are baffled, pitch and torch them."

"Do you tell me, then, that Bunt holds disaster at bay?"

"Seemingly. There are some grounds for anxiety. As I've said, the hives expanded, and the bees dug them underground as they grew. I have been down here this last two days but people have been telling me the earth in the uplands is unquiet. And more than one person has also said that the ground around the hives is swelling, rising, doming up, as at huge movement underneath. My dear-may I presume a bit?" Here Higaia reached up and affectionately touched my cheek. She had an air of soothing me as she spoke, as if I suffered from some fever. "You have a nice little carrack, sweet Nifft, and your moneybelt feels quite hefty when I hug you. Let go of this fiftyweight. For one thing, Bunt must be nigh paupered. His bees devoured all the flower fields, including those of the other Dolmen hiveries, and Bunt stands liable to enormous indemnities. And for another thing, I feel to my bones that the worst hasn't happened yet, and I'm glad to be gone from here myself inside the half hour.

Quit this place when I do, Nifft! Run with us down across the Agon, and in a fortnight we'll be having some fine mulled tartle together at an inn I know in Quincipolis!"

Leave fiftyweight lying, and walk away? What was this madness that seemed to run like plague among my woman friends? There was something almost ominous about it, and I frankly gaped at her. There was a commotion of voices topside. Higaia sprang up the ladder, and I followed her.

A shouted conversation was in progress between a group of cargo handlers at the port rail, and some mercenaries on the dock below. These men-at-arms-the loudest their seeming captain, a gnarled man with a scarred face-seemed to be demanding something the handlers denied. Higaia came to the rail, silencing her crew, and greeted the captain, "Good morrow, Hob. What are you after?"

"We need half a dozen of your longshoremen, Higaia. We're short troops round the South Dandinnia."

"Come up and talk to me, Hob."

As the gnarled veteran came up the gangplank, Higaia explained, "The South Dandinnia is one of Bunt's hives. It's the one lying nearest the highway, just beyond that crest up there."

We led Hob to the forecastle for privacy after Higaia set her crew back to shipping the last bundles of giant comb. "Is it Bunt sends you?" she asked Hob. "When last he was down here he was most urgent this cargo should be shipped and away-he needs the capital."

"He needs a hundred more men round South Dandinnia, Higaia, whatever else he thinks he needs. I haven't seen him and there was no time to go asking. The ground is shaking and around the hive it's swollen into a hill!

If a wave of even bigger bees comes out we'll need a big wall ready for them and torchmen enough to man it!

Bunt's over in the central fields, on the barricades round the oldest hives. I'd be longer getting there and back than coming down here."

"Well, take them, if they'll go, though if any want to set sail with me I won't deny them passage." She and Hob locked eyes here a moment. The veteran's flinty gaze conceded something. "I might go with you myself,"

he said, "but I don't like leaving conflicts unresolved."

I had been listening with a sinking heart, as it grew plainer that Bunt, encircled by disaster, would probably be powerless to pay us our fiftyweight out of pocket. But then I was inspired with a solution. "Good Hob, might I follow you back up to the highlands, and be directed thence to where Bunt is?"

"How not? But let's make haste."

"One minute more I beg! Dear Higaia, if I came back with a fiftyweight draft signed by Bunt, could I not draw it in shares from the sale of your comb?"

"With a properly drawn instrument, my dear, greedy Nifft, how not?"

Hob took some little further time to recruit more men from another of Bunt's ships, and Higaia's freighter was already getting under way as we trotted single file up the first few switchbacks of the highway. As our line threaded its way up between wagons heaped with bales of torches and kegs of pitch, I could see tiny Higaia standing with Radula on the foredeck, conferring over something, their little features so plain in the limpid air I could make out the bright red of Radula's sunburned nose. Another ship-not one of Bunt's-was standing out across the harbor at about the same time. A knot of emigrants crowded amidships at the port rail, their heads turned in troubled unison toward the home they were leaving, some of them gazing upwards past us at the heights, whence ragged scarves and banners of smoke still blew, and the gusted noise of strenuous multitudes at work, or war, or both.