“You must go to him,” she said, her voice urgent. “You have to do battle tonight, while there is time. Please go.”

Aton stared, absently noting her lovely pallor. “Do battle? Why? I don’t know anything about this, this ‘evil one.’ What’s the hurry? Why can’t you explain?”

“Please,” she said, and there were tiny tears on her cheeks.

“Let me touch my hvee,” he said, bargaining for time to comprehend the mystery. Coquina stood still, a frozen doll, while he lifted the little plant from her hair: the token of love that he would reclaim permanently when they married. She loved him, strange as her actions might be; the hvee attested to that. Now she was acting as inexplicably as had the minionette, so long ago at the spotel. Were her reasons as valid?

In his cupped hands, the hvee withered and died.

“The hour of the waning of love has beset us,” he thought, astounded. But lost LOE was no comfort now.

Whom the hvee cannot love—

He stared at the limp green strand. It had condemned him as unfit to be loved, and there could be no appeal. Had all his aspirations come to no more than this?

The clouds were dull and gray in the fading light: ashes in the sky.

Seventeen

Cold Coquina had not told him where to find the evil foe, but Aton strode over the fields in a familiar and purposeful direction. Three miles into the dusk he came across the black silhouette: the ship from Chthon.

For almost a year this man had waited for him, not as an arm of he law, but as the emissary of a god. Coquina’s vigor had repulsed him. She had not been bluffing when she had spoken—so long ago, when love was rising—of her ability to subdue aggressive men. But she had not been able to defeat the power of Chthon which backed this man. That was for Aton himself to do.

He did not mean to return to prison on any basis.

The lock was open. Foolish man, to forget your defenses! Aton found the inset rungs and climbed.

His head came level with the port, reminding him of a prior climb and a prior hope. Something pricked his nose. He held himself rigid while his eyes probed the shadows.

It was a tiny, thin-bladed knife, held with a surgeon’s precision. The squatting figure’s slightly luminescent eyes bore intently on him, and Aton knew that the potent contact lenses rendered the gloom—vincible. The lips below were pursued in a silent whistle, part of a tuneless distraction. “Hello, Partner,” he said.

“Partners we shall be,” he man replied. “But not as we have been. You know me now.” The knife did not waver.