“Did you find the love-tokens I left you?” I said to Zrenn, gently as he. “All about the hills? The silver-masks peacefully sleeping in their blood?”

“The jackal, slinking up on the baby’s cot. Oh, yes. Like your noble father, Vazkor’s son. You did it winningly.”

I sensed the blade at my back come a half breadth nearer.

“You have too many deaths to pay for,” Orek rasped in his broken boy’s voice.

“He shall pay with many deaths,” Zrenn said, smiling.

It is not simple to kill with Power, once you understand the trick of it. You bring extinction by summoning it from yourself, and it touches you also, like a burning, bloody wing. That is why sickness follows. And when the price is high, you do not spend indiscriminately. This held me, even now, in this second of stupid extremity, poised between a girl’s neck and a boy’s knife.

The savage, who knew only how to wield bludgeon and ax, must learn more subtle weapons.

I indicated the slave. I said, “Did he tell you how I killed the last man, the man in the camp?”

Zrenn, prepared to dally a long while, followed my procrastination almost with approval.

“His face was congested. I presume you choked him with your strong warrior’s paws.”

“Not so. Ask him now, your slave, how Vazkor’s son slew the silver-mask.”

Zrenn, yet smiling, jerked his head to the slave.

“Inform me, clod.”

The slave said in a flat, though thickly accented and unhandy voice, “Black lord stare, and white light come and fair lord fall and die.”

Zrenn’s mouth slackened. He frowned. “What do you mean, you dreg, white light!”

“White light from eyes of black lord. White light strike fair lord. Fair lord fall. Fair lord die. Light go out. Black lord god.”

The slave’s tone was extraordinary. He might have been talking of the weather. I recalled how he prostrated himself in the mud before me, then walked away into the night. It seemed he and his stony people had grown accustomed to recognition and universality of demons in some remote and dismal past.

I was trying to assess what ability lay in me that I dared use. You will see this plight in the brilliant marksman who manages his marvels by instinct. Force him to study his art, to explain how he focuses magically on his target, and he will grow mannered and unsure and presently miss his mark altogether.

Abruptly Hwenit spoke. Striving to alter her predicament, I had forgotten her as a live being. Forgetting, too, that though I comprehended city speech, she did not, and the whole dialogue thus far had been gibberish to her.

“Mordrak,” she said, “don’t bargain for me. This is my fault. Let him kill me if he wishes, but get free.”

At this Zrenn shook her. He asked me, “What does the black wench say? Does she say she loves me, Vazkor?”

I said, to get more time (when would I have had sufficient?), “She wonders how you came here.”