Razed to the ground, it was all but unrecognizable. What remained was a ring of charred blackness, studded with misshapen lumps which, as they high-stepped over the charcoaled ground, they discovered were the crisped bodies of their compatriots. There were hundreds of them. Had any escaped, save Kin?

They could not be certain, but it appeared not.

The stench of burnt flesh was sickening. A greasy pall hung over the scene of devastation that made them queasy. Cinders clung to their clothes, their hair, the backs of their hands. It was the precipitate of death.

Mechanically, they went about securing the site. When they had a.s.sured themselves that there wereno Khagggun about they reconvened in the center of the circle. There they hunkered down, arms on thighs. They searched each other's faces for an answer, or at least a.s.surance, but they did not speak. So many lives lost, snuffed out like candle wicks, easy as that. They were devastated. There were no words for what they were witness to. What lay about them was too complete, too all-encompa.s.sing. It was as if they had entered a different Cosmos, one that did not support life, that was, in fact, inimical to it. All they could think of was how to get back home, how to remake the world as it had been before. But there was no way, and they knew it. They would have to learn to live with what had happened there, but for the moment, at least, this new, bleak reality seemed merely a very bad dream.

Presently Marethyn heard a pair of gimnopedes calling to one another. Looking up through the pall to the high branches of the Marre pines and the kuello-firs, she saw the bright flash of the birds, an explosion of vivid color.

She got down on her knees and with the edges of her hands cleared a s.p.a.ce free of black ash. Then she began to draw with her fingertip, not thinking about it, allowing her emotions to guide her. She drew the flash of birds, the skulk of mammals, the swift dart of insects, a river rushing, and trees standing shoulder to shoulder. "What are you doing?"

She looked up to see Ba.s.se, dark-faced, staring down at what she had already begun to think of as a memorial. She was about to tell him this, but his expression stopped her cold.

"Come. We have more important things to do." When she did not get off her knees, he stuck his bootheel in the center of the drawing and dragged it first this way, then that.

Marethyn rose then and looked past his shoulder to where Majja stood, a little away from them.

Majja's eyes were neutral. It was as if she did not want to interfere. Did she agree with him? Was it possible that she, too, did not understand?

Marethyn felt heartssick, then chastened. What was she thinking? After all, these were not her species. She saw how she had been fooling herself into thinking that the essential differences between them could be forgotten. V'ornn and Kundalan, conqueror and conquered. With this devastation, how could there ever be a twining? Possibly even a true understanding was beyond their reach. She felt suddenly ashamed, alone amid her newfound friends. She wondered whether they were friends at all, and this thought chilled her. Could she have been so wrong about them? Could she have been so wrong about her calling, about the hope she felt beating like another heart inside her?

Silently, nursing their own thoughts, shock, disappointments, they proceeded down the slope. It felt odd, almost painful, to cross the perimeter of the circle of devastation. They all stopped and turned, looking back at it, and none of them felt free.

They advanced deeper into the woods where Gerwa had stashed the war materiel they had brought with them when they had hijacked the Khagggun convoy. Their hearts leapt when they saw the undisturbed earth, and they moved aside the seven stones that marked the cache and set about drawing it out into the light. New-model ion cannons, proximity mines, ion-pulse projectors, they were all there, wrapped in their monomolecular shipping skins.

Much later, after they had armed themselves, after they had killed, cooked, and eaten a brace of ice-hares, they sat around a crackling fire. The flames warmed them, but they also fitfully illuminated the humped remains of the Resistance cell. Marethyn told stories of her childhood, of her grandmother Tettsie, who had been involved with the Resistance. In this way she tried to draw her compatriots out of their sh.e.l.ls, but even when they spoke in turn of their own childhoods, their faces were clouded in misery and something Marethyn judged far worse: despair. The heavy blanket of night had dispelled the brief elation of finding the weapons cache intact, of knowing that Gerwa had gone to his death protecting that secret.

Marethyn was grappling with her own dreadful vision. In her mind's eye she saw Kin standing at the far side of the dell. Wrapped in the horror of so many deaths, he had ignored the approach of his own.

But perhaps Majja had been right. Perhaps he had known it was coming, but had bravely staved it off until they had arrived. Marethyn suspected that one day, when her grievous wound had sufficiently healed, she would derive some solace from the notion. Now she was simply haunted by it.

By her estimation, Ba.s.se was changed the most. Possibly this was not so surprising. She had heardthat those who recovered from the point of death were reborn in every way. He seemed to her remote, almost removed from the new reality they faced. He refused the laaga stick Majja offered him. Even Marethyn took a puff or two to calm her nerves. But Ba.s.se sat with his new ion cannon across his knees and stared out into the blackness. Every time his finger slipped into the trigger guard she wondered if he was concentrating all his energies on conjuring up the enemy. He wanted to kill, that much was plain enough to see. But there was about him an icy calm that belied any sense of recklessness. She could almost hear the gears in his mind clicking and meshing, working out how his revenge would unwind once he came upon the perpetrators of the atrocity. But she wondered whether she was right. She wondered if she even knew him now.

At last, her eyelids grew heavy, and she slept.

Lujon," Kurgan said, "what are you doing here?" "Coincidence," Lujon said.

Kurgan laughed at the lie, the sound cut off prematurely by the whiff of foul smell he swallowed.

"Personally, I do not believe in coincidence." His fist tightened on ion-pistol grips. "What is your business here? Somehow you knew this was my destination. How?"

Lujon spread his hands. "When we walk a crooked path, brambles cannot hurt our feet."

"Meaning?" The reek. Decomposition, bacteria forming colonies, eating into dead flesh.

Lujon pointed to the banestone. "Only a child or a fool asks for an explanation to the obvious, regent."

Kurgan stood his ground. "The banestone told you? Impossible. The banestone is mine."

"What is your explanation then?"

"I don't need to give one." The blades swung by overhead. "I am V'ornn." Drawing his ion pistol.

"What are you?"

"You don't want to fire that, believe us, regent."

Kurgan was infuriated. "You are nothing, an insignificant bloodfly crawling on the a.s.s of the universe."

Why hadn't he seen that all along? Dimly, he realized that his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, for power, was causing him to miss the small signs of betrayal the Old V'ornn had taught him to seek out.

"The moment we asked you about the banestone we suspected you were the one who had found it."

Lujon took a step toward Kurgan. "Foolish to think you could hide it from us."

Kurgan shook his head. "Back off. I will kill you."

"The banestone belongs to us. You must understand this, regent."

"What I understand, Lujon, is your place in the Cosmos. At my feet, licking my boots."

"An uncomfortable position, is it not?"

"Too bad. For you."

"In any event, you do not want to keep the banestone. As long as it is in your possession it will continue to behave erratically. It has already begun to affect you in ways you cannot imagine. But it is not too late. Hand it over and-"

"Stay where you are."

"Give us the banestone."

Kurgan aimed the ion pistol at Lujon's chest.

"Careful, regent."

"This one is mine now, Lujon. You are sorely mistaken if you think I will give it to you."

The Sarakkon had a smile reminiscent of teeth sunk deep into flesh. A carnivore's delighted expression at fresh prey. "It would be disingenuous'to expect a V'ornn to treat us with respect, let alone give us anything."

"Respect is for equals. From the moment I met you, you have been operating as if you have the run of Kundala, as if you do not understand your situation at all."

"With respect, regent, it is you who does not comprehend your situation." Lujon opening his left hand, a pearly length of intestine, glistening with secretions, was revealed there. He wrapped it around his wrist.

"What are you-?" Kurgan spat, taking a step back.Lujon kicking a dark ma.s.s in the shadows. Rolling over, a Deirus' pale, unlovely face appeared in dusty sunlight. Streaked with blood. A newly rendered corpse. The stench rose from the open cavity where his guts had been.

"Necromancy, regent." Dark eyes gauging Kurgan's evolving reaction. "A sauromician specialty, but we are a quick study. Interested?"

Kurgan said nothing. On the other hand, his gaze remained on the grisly bracelet.

"It gives us extraordinary power." Lujon's eyes closed for a moment, moving rapidly beneath the lids.

When he looked at Kurgan, he said, "Friends of yours are on their way here. Two females and-astonishingly enough ..." c.o.c.ked his head. "Was this the Rappa that bit you?"

Kurgan silent, watching. Eleana. Hearts pounding in his chest, taste of his own blood in his mouth. No time for self-loathing now.

Lujon's silky voice. "Is this of interest to you, regent?"

"How close?" A hoa.r.s.e rasp ejected from his throat.

"Our present to you, regent. We would not want it said that Sarakkon aren't generous."

In the middle of the night Marethyn awoke, not with a start but with full consciousness. She had been dreaming of the treacherous slope of the southwest escarpment, of Kin, of him slipping, of her reaching out for him, of her being that tiniest bit too late, so that when she grabbed him his momentum took her off their feet. They were both falling when she awoke.

She was cold and wet. She breathed deeply of the forest air, which never seemed so sweet to her. A rain had settled the pall, the last hovering detritus of death, onto the ground, but it had stopped. The black circle glittered all around her.

Majja was curled up, asleep, but Ba.s.se was sitting just as he had been when she had dozed off. She stirred to ease an ache, and his gaze fell against her like the weight of a wall.

She smiled at him, but his eyes locked her out. There was something dark and frightening about them.

"What is it?"

He shook his head and turned his head away. Marethyn scrambled up and moved into his line of vision. She nodded uncertainly.

"V'ornn did this," he said.

A small chill swept through her. And now she understood his expression; she had seen that look of hatred before. "But you know me. You know how I feel?"

"How could I-a Kundalan-possibly know what you feel."

"Ba.s.se, we have fought side by side. We are comrades in arms."

"I thought that once."

"I don't understand."

"You think I don't see what is happening here, how you are taking control?"

"I am just-"

"Maybe Majja will put up with it, but I won't."

"What will I put up with?"

At the sound of Majja's voice they both turned. So intent on each other had they been that they were unaware their voices had awakened her. She stood over them, fists on hips.

"What will I put up with that you won't, Ba.s.se?"

"She is ordering us around, taking over."

Majja squatted in front of him. "Which orders did you object to? Which ones were stupid or wrong?"

He sat there, silent and unmoving.

"Which ones, Ba.s.se?"

He turned his head away.

"Answer me!"

"I don't have to answer to you or to her!""Will you go it alone?" Majja asked.

"If need be!"

"But it doesn't need to be." She took his hand between hers. "We are a unit, Ba.s.se. We have been ever since we were ambushed. We've looked out for each other, faced death together, killed together.

What is the matter with you?"

He tugged his hand free. "Look all around you," he said fiercely.

"Look what they've done to us. For the love of Miina, she's one of them]"

"So you'll condemn her, even after all she has done for us."

"This is war, Majja. We can't afford to trust her."

"Ba.s.se, we can't afford not to." She put her hands on either side of his face so she could look into his eyes. "If we forget everything she's done for us, if we forget our connection together, then what have we become? Nothing more than the animals the V'ornn believe us to be. Is that what you want? Really? I can't believe-"

She stopped in midsentence, silently watching the tears roll down his cheeks.

"I've tried to make sense of it, but I can't. I almost died, and the others here, they're all dead. Why was I saved, Majja? Why?" His shoulders began to shake as he took great sobs of air.

"Oh, Ba.s.se," she whispered, and enfolded him in her arms. She rocked him back and forth, kissing the top of his head. She looked at Marethyn, who squatted nearby, and Marethyn gave her a sad, little smile.

Long after the others fell asleep, Marethyn remained awake. She listened to the tiny symphony of the forest sounds and was somewhat comforted. How many times had she thought of Sornnn? How many times had she strained to conjured up his face? Though part of her continued to long for his arms, that life now seemed very far away. She could scarcely remember what her atelier looked like, and when she thought about Axis Tyr she kept confusing Divination Street and Momentum Boulevard.

She pulled the night sounds of her new home around her as if they were a blanket. She listened harder, waiting for another, deeper stirring. She wondered if Ba.s.se heard the voices of the dead calling him in his sleep. She summoned the thought of h.e.l.lespennn. So many V'ornn dead, an entire fleet annihilated. She knew at least a semblance of the anguish Ba.s.se must be going through. But how deeply had his near-death experience changed him? Would even Majja be able to say? She sighed softly. If he did not hear the voices of the dead, surely she did. With that thought in mind, she slowly drifted off.

The next morning dawned bright and chill, with none of the threat inherent in yesterday's incipient storm. Sunlight made bright, quick sparks within the black circle and a deep blue sky stretched itself overhead. After a light breakfast, Marethyn filled a cauldron she and Majja had scavenged with water and put it over the fire Ba.s.se had relit. Last night, they had found it difficult to eat meat that had about it a blackened edge, but this morning they ate hungrily, for they knew some sense of normalcy had to be restored to their lives in order for them to go about living it again.

Ba.s.se avoided her gaze, and she thought it best not to talk to him. She had awakened with another idea. Possibly the voices of the dead had whispered it in her ear while she slept.

As the water heated up, she scooped handfuls of charcoal into the cauldron. Her companions looked aghast.

"What are you doing?" Ba.s.se said, renewed anger flushing his face. "Is this another stupid piece of art? Why don't you go back to Axis Tyr with the other V'ornn?"

Even Majja was uncomfortable. "Those are likely our compatriots," she said.

Marethyn continued scooping. They did not help her. Ba.s.se glowered but he did not stop her.