THE MORNING mist had burned off the hills, but still lay thick in the valley. Above the bank of pinkish cloud, the red sun hung in a bath of thinning mist. Larry looked down at the treetops emerging from the top of the cloud, and drew a deep breath, savoring the strange scents of the alien forest.

He rode last in the little column of six men. Ahead of him, Kennard looked round briefly, lifted a hand in acknowledgment of his grin, and turned back.

Larry had been at Armida, the outlying country estate of the Altons, for twelve days now. The journey from the city had been tiring; he was not accustomed to riding, and though at first it had been a pleasant novelty, he found himself thinking regretfully of the comfortable ground-cars and airships of Terran travel.

But the slow trip through forests and mountains had gradually won him to its charm: the high rocky trails reaching summits where crimson and purple landscapes lay rainbow-lovely below them, the deep shadowed roads through the forests, with here and there tall white towers rising high against the horizon, or glowing faintly luminescent in the night. At night they had either camped along the roadway, or now and again been guests in some outlying farmhouse where the Darkovans had treated Valdir and Kennard with extreme deference—and Larry had come in for his own share of this respect. Valdir had told no one that his son's guest and companion was one of the alien Terrans.

The home of the Altons was a great gray rambling structure, too low for a castle, too imposing to be a house. He found himself fitting into the place easily, riding with Kennard, helping him train his hunting dogs, learning to shoot with the curiously shaped crossbows they used for sport, savoring the strangeness of the life he lived. It was all very interesting, but certainly nothing that he could tell Reade which might be of benefit to the Terrans—and he was glad of it. He hadn't liked the idea of being what amounted to a spy.

Mostly the days were too full for much introspection, but sometimes when he was in bed at night, he found himself wondering why the invitation had been issued in the first place. He liked Kennard, they were friends, but would that alone cause Valdir Alton to ignore the long tradition on Darkover of ignoring the Terrans?

He found himself wondering if Valdir's reason for issuing the invitation were not very much the same as Reade's reason for wanting Larry to accept it—that Valdir just wanted to know something about the Terrans, close up.

 

He was, by now, used to riding, and a three-day hunt had been arranged partly for his benefit. He had managed to shoot well enough to bring down a small rabbitlike beast on the first day, which had been cooked over the campfire that evening, and he was proud of that, even though it was the only thing he had hit during the long hunt.

At the top of the hill he drew even with Kennard, and they sat breathing their horses, side by side, looking across the valley.

"It's nice up here," Kennard said at last. "I used to ride this way fairly often, a couple of seasons ago. Father feels that now it's too dangerous for me to come alone." He gestured at their escort, Darkovans Larry did not know: one a well-dressed young redhead from a nearby estate, the others men from the Alton farms, workmen of various sorts. One was in the uniform of the Guards, but Kennard himself was wearing old riding-clothes, slightly too small for him.

"Dangerous? Why?"

"It's too near the edge of the forests," Kennard said, "and during the last few seasons, trailmen have spread down into these forests. Usually they stay in the hills. They're not really dangerous, but they don't like humans, and we stay out of their way, as a rule. Then, too, this is on the border of mountain country, and men from the Cahuengas—"

He broke off, stiffening in his saddle, looking intently across the valley.

"What is it, Kennard?" Larry asked.

The Darkovan boy pointed. Larry could see nothing, but Kennard called to his father, a shrill insistent shout, and Valdir turned his horse and came cantering back.

"What's wrong, Ken?"

"Smoke. The mist lifted just for a minute, over there—" Kennard pointed, "and I saw it. Right at the edge of the Ranger station."

Valdir frowned, narrowing his eyes, shading them with his thin brown hand. "How sure are you? It's a good hour's ride out of our way—damn this mist, I can't see anything." He flung back his head like a deer sniffing the wind, peering into the distance, and finally nodded.

"A trace of smoke. We'll ride and check." He glanced at Larry. "I hope you don't mind the extra riding."

"Not at all, but I hope nothing's wrong, Lord Alton."

"So do I," Valdir said, his brows drawn down with worry, and touched his horse's flank with a light heel. They were off down the trail, the sound of hoofs making a dull clamor on the leaves underfoot. As they neared the bottom of the valley, the mist lifted slightly and the men pointed and shouted. Larry's nostrils twitched at a faint, acrid whiff of strange smoke. The sun had swung southward, and they were turning their horses up a widened trail that led to the top of a  little hill, when Valdir Alton let out a great curse, rising in his stirrups and pointing; then he clapped his heels to his horse's side and vanished over the top of the rise. Kennard spurred after him, and Larry, urging his horse forward, felt a surge of excitement and fear as he followed. He came over the rise in the road and heard Kennard cry out in consternation; he pulled up his horse and looked down, in dismay, at a grove of trees from which black smoke was coiling upward.

Kennard slid from his horse and began to run. The man in the Guardsman's uniform called to him and drew his crossbow up to rest, and Larry realized, with a shiver, that they were all looking warily at the surrounding trees. What might lie behind them?

Valdir leaped from his saddle; the other men followed suit, and Larry slid down with the rest. The deathly silence seemed more ominous because it was cut through with the soft chirping of birds from a distance, twittering in the grove.

Then Kennard called he was kneeling in the road beside what Larry thought to be a gray boulder, but he put out his hand to turn it and Larry, his stomach cramping in horror, saw that it was the hunched body of a man in a gray cloak.

Valdir bent over the man; straightened. Larry stood frozen looking down at death. He had never seen a dead body before, let alone the body of a man dead by violence. The dead man was young, little more than a boy, a shadow of thin beard on his face. A great wound in his chest gaped black and bloody. He had been dead some time.

Kennard was looking pale. Larry turned away, feeling faint and sick, and struggling not to show it, as Valdir turned away from the dead man.

"Cahuenga—his cloak is Cahuenga from the far hills," he said, "but boots and belt are from Hyalis. A raider—but no beacon flared when this station was attacked." He stepped warily around the corpse. The Guardsman shouted, "Don't go up there alone, Lord Alton!" and, sliding from his saddle, crossbow lowered, ran to follow him. Kennard followed, and Larry, as if compelled, ran after them.

A blackened ruin, still smoking, showed the vague outline of a building. On a little stretch of green at one side lay the crumpled body of a man. When Kennard and Larry reached Valdir's side, Valdir was already kneeling beside the body. After one glance, Larry turned away from the glazed, pain-ridden eyes; the man was bleeding from a great gash across his side, and from his lips a little dark-flecked foam stirred with his rasping breath.

Over the inert body the other Darkovan aristocrat looked at Valdir; gripped the limp wrist. His, forehead was ridged with dismay. Valdir, looking up, said, "He must speak before he dies, Rannirl. And he's dying anyway."

Rannirl's mouth was set. He nodded, fumbled at his belt, and from a leather wallet drew forth a small, blue-glazed vial stoppered with silver. Handling it carefully, and keeping his own face free of the small fumes that coiled up from the open mouth of the vial, he measured a few cautious drops in the cap: Valdir forced the man's mouth open and Rannirl let the fuming liquid fall on the man's tongue. After a moment a great shudder ran through the frame of the dying man and the eyes fluttered.

His voice sounded harsh, far away. "Vai dom—we did what we could—the beacon-fire—"

Valdir gripped the limp hands, his face terrible and intent. There was something in his hands, something that glittered cold and blue; he pressed it to the dying man's forehead, and Larry saw that it was a clear blue jewel. Valdir said, "Do not spend your strength in speaking, Garin, or you will die before I learn what I must know. Form your thought clearly while you can, and I will understand. And forgive me, friend. You may save many lives with this torment." He bent close to the dying face, his own features a grim mask, lighted blue as the strange jewel suddenly flared and burned as if with inner flame. A spasm of terrible anguish passed over the dying Ranger's face; he shuddered twice and lay still, and Valdir, with a painful sigh, released his hands and straightened up. His own forehead was beaded with sweat; he swayed, and Kennard leaped to steady his father.

After a minute Valdir passed his hand over his wet brow, and spoke: "They didn't sell their lives cheaply," he said. "There were a dozen men; they came from the North, and hacked Balhar to pieces while he was trying to reach the beacon and set it aflame. He thought at first that they were Cahuenga, but two were tall pale men who were hooded almost like the kyrri, and one was masked. He saw them signal; they carried a mirror-flash device of some sort. After he fell, Garin saw them ride away northward toward the Kadarin."

Rannirl whistled softly. "If they could spare so many to prevent one beacon being lighted—this doesn't look like a few bandits out after a raid on the farms in the valley!"

Valdir swore. "There aren't enough of us to go after them," he said, "and we've only hunting weapons. And Zandru alone knows what other devil's work has been done along here. Kennard"—he turned to his son—"go and light the beacon, at least. Quickly! Garin tried to crawl there, when they had left him for dead, but his strength failed—" His voice went thin in his throat; he bent and covered the dead face with the Ranger's cloak.

"He didn't fight me," he said. "Even for a man weakened with many wounds and after a dose of that devil's drug of yours, Rannirl, that takes a rare kind of courage."

He sighed, then, recovering himself, told two of the workmen to bury the dead Rangers. The sound of mattock and pick rang dully in the grove; after a few minutes, Kennard came running back.

"No way to light the beacon, father. Those devils took the time to drench it with water, just in case!"

Valdir swore, again, moodily, biting his lip. "The people along the valley should be warned, and someone should track them and find which way. We can't go to all four winds at once!" He stood for a moment, scowling, thoughtful. "If we had enough men we might take them at the fords, or if we could warn the countryside by beacon—"

Abruptly he seemed to come to a decision.

"There aren't enough of us to follow them, and they've too big a head start in any case. But this probably means a good-sized raid. We've got to warn the people in the valley—and we can find a tracker there who can get on their trail and follow it better than we could. Nothing's likely to happen before night." He glanced up at the sun, trembling crimson at the zenith. "The hunt's over; we'll eat a bite and then start back. Kennard, you and Larry—" he hesitated. "I'd like to send you both back to Armida, but you can't cross this country by yourselves. You'll have to ride with us." He looked at Larry. "It may mean some hard riding, I'm afraid."

The men had finished burying the Rangers; Valdir vetoed making a cookfire, directing the men to get cold food from their saddlebags. They sat eating, grimly discussing the burnt station and the dead Rangers in a dialect of which Larry could understand little. He could not eat; the food stuck in his throat. It was his first sight of violence and death and it had sickened him. He had known that violence was not unheard-of on Darkover, he had himself had a brief brush with it in his fight with the street boys, but now it assumed a dark and frightening aspect. With an almost painful nostalgia, he wished he were back in the safety of the Terran Zone.

Or was that safety, too, a mere illusion? Was there violence and cruelty and fear there, too, hidden behind the façades, and was he just now becoming aware of all these things? He choked over the piece of dry biscuit he was eating, and turned his eyes away from Kennard's too-searching gaze.

Valdir Alton's tall form shadowed him, and the Darkovan lord dropped on the grass at his side. He said, "Sorry that your hunt had to end this way, Lerrys. It wasn't what we planned."

"Do you really think I'd be worrying about a hunt when people are dead?" Larry asked.

Valdir's eyes were shrewd. "Nothing like this in your life before? Nothing like this in your world? Everything in the Terran Zone very neat and law-abiding?" Once again Larry had the feeling that—as with Lorill Hastur—his thoughts were being read. He remembered, with a small twinge of fear, how Valdir Alton had probed the mind of the dying Ranger.

He said, "I suppose there are law-breakers on Earth and in the Terran Zone, too. Only here it seems so—"

"So close up and personal?" Valdir asked. "Tell me something, Lerrys: Is a man more or less dead when he is killed neatly by a gun or a bomb, than when he is—" He moved his head toward where the dead Ranger had lain. His face was suddenly bitter as he added, "That seems to be the main difference between your people and ours. At least the men who killed poor Garin did not do their killing while they were a safe distance away!"

Larry said—glad to have something between himself and the memory of a dead man with a bleeding wound in his chest— "The main thing is that most of our people don't do any killing at all! We have laws and police to handle that sort of thing for us!"

"While here we feel that every man should handle his own affairs for himself, before they spread into wars," Valdir said steadily. "If any man offends me, damages my property or my family, steals my goods—it's my personal duty to revenge myself on that man—or to forgive him, if I see fit, without dragging in others who really have no part in the quarrel."

Larry was trying to fit that together—the contrast between the fierce individualism of the Darkovan code, and the Terran's acceptance of an orderly society, based on rules and laws. "A government of laws and not of men," he said, and at Valdir's raised eyebrow, explained, "that's supposed to be the original theory behind the Terran governments."

"While ours is a government of men—because laws can't be anything but the expression of men who make them," Valdir said. His face was grave and serious and Larry knew that while he might have started this conversation for the purpose of taking his young guest's mind off the scene of unfamiliar violence, now he was deeply involved in what he was saying. "It's one reason we want little to do with the Terrans, as such," he said. "Without offense to you personally. It's true that we have wars on Darkover, but they are small local hand-to-hand skirmishes; they seldom get bigger than this—" again he motioned toward the blackening ruin of the Ranger station. "The individual who makes trouble is promptly punished and the matter ends there, without involving a whole countryside."

"But—" Larry hesitated, remembering he was Valdir's guest. The older man said encouragingly, "Go ahead."

"Kennard has told me something of this, sir. You have long-lived feuds and when a troublemaker is punished, his family takes revenge, and doesn't this lead to more and more trouble over the years? Your way doesn't really settle anything. Really lawless people—like these bandits—ought to be dealt with by the law, shouldn't they?"

"You're entirely too clever," Valdir said, with a bleak smile. "That's the one flaw in the system. We use their own methods to revenge ourselves on them; they raid us, we raid them back, and we're as bad as they are. Actually, Larry, it goes deeper than that. Darkover seems to be in one of those uncomfortable times to live in—a time of change. And having the Terrans here hasn't helped. Again—without offense to you personally—having a highly technical civilization among us makes our people dissatisfied. We live the way men were meant to live—in close contact with real things, not huddled in cities and factories." He looked around, past the burnt station, at the high mountains, and said, "Can't you see it, Larry?"

"I can see it," Larry admitted, but a brief stab of doubt struck at him. When he had said the same thing, his own father had accused him of being a romantic. The Darkovans seemed to want to go on living as if change did not exist, and whether they liked it or not, the space age was here—and they had chosen to let the Terran Empire come here for trade.

"Yes," Valdir said, reading his thoughts. "I can see that too—change is coming, whether we like it or not. And I want it to come in an orderly fashion, without upheaval. Which means I've made myself awfully damned unpopular with a lot of people in my own caste. For instance, I organized this defense system of border stations and Rangers, so that every farm and estate wouldn't have to stand alone against raids by bandits from across the Kadarin. And there are some people who find this a clear violation of our code of individual responsibility." He stopped. "What's the matter?"

Larry blurted out, "You're reading my mind!"

"Does that bother you? I don't pry, Larry. No telepath does. But when you're throwing your thoughts at me so clearly—" he shrugged. "I've never known a Terran to be so open to rapport."

"No," Larry said, "it doesn't bother me." To his own surprise, that was true. He found that the idea didn't bother him at all. "Maybe if more Terrans and Darkovans could read each other's minds they'd understand one another better, and not be afraid of each other, any more than you and I are afraid of each other."

Valdir smiled at him kindly and stood up. "Time to get on the road again," he said; then breaking off, added very softly, "But don't deceive yourself, Larry. We are afraid of you. You don't know, yourself, how dangerous you can be."

He walked away, quickly, while Larry stared after him, wondering if he had heard right.

 

The road into the valley was steep and winding, and for some time Larry had enough to do to keep his seat in the saddle. But soon, the road widened and became easier, and he realized that he had been smelling, again, the smoke from the burned station. Had the wind changed? He raised his head, slowing his horse to a walk. Almost at the same moment, Valdir, riding ahead, raised his arm in signal, and stopped, turning his head into the wind and sniffing, nostrils flared wide.

He said, tersely, "Fire."

"Another station?" one of the Darkovans asked.

Valdir, moving his head from side to side—almost, Larry thought, as if be expected to hear the sound of flames—suddenly froze, statue-still. At the same moment Larry heard the sound of a bell: a deep-toned, full-throated bell tone, ringing through the valley. It tolled over and over, ringing out in a curious pattern of sound. While the little party of riders remained motionless, still listening intently, another bell farther away, fainter, but repeating the same slow rhythm, took up the ringing, and a few minutes later, still farther away, a third bell added a deep note to the choir.

Valdir said, harshly, "It's the fire-bell! Kennard, your ears are better than mine—which ring is it?"

Kennard listened intently, stiffening in his saddle. He tapped out the rhythm with his fingers, briefly. "That's the ring from Aderis."

"Come on, then," Valdir rapped out. In another minute they were all racing down the slope; Larry, startled, jerked his reins and rode after them, as fast as he could. Keeping his seat with an effort, not wanting to be left behind, he wondered what it was all about.

As they came over the brow of a little hill, he could hear the still-clamoring bell, louder and more insistent, and see, lying in the valley below them, a little cluster of roofs—the village of Aderis. The streets were filled with men, women and children; as they rode down from the slope into the streets of the village, they were surrounded by a crowd of men who fell silent as they saw Valdir Alton.

Valdir slid from his saddle, beckoned his party closer, Larry drawing close with them. He found himself beside Kennard. "What is it, what's going on?"

"Forest fire," Kennard said, motioning him to silence, listening to the man who was still pointing toward the hills across the valley. Larry, raising his head to look where the man pointed, could see only a thick darkening haze that might have been a cloud—or smoke.

The crowd in the village street was thickening, and through it all the bell tolled on.

Kennard, turning to Larry, explained quickly, "When fire breaks out in these hills, they ring the bells from the village that sees it first, and every village within hearing takes it up. Before tonight, every able-bodied man in the countryside will be here. That's the law. It's almost the only law we have that runs past the boundaries of a man's own estate."

Larry could see why; even in a countryside that scorned impersonal laws, men must band together to fight the one great impersonal enemy of fire. Valdir turned his head, saw the two boys standing by their horses, and came swiftly toward them. He looked harried and remote again, and Larry realized why some men were afraid of the Alton lord when he looked like this.

"Vardi will take the horses, Kennard. They're going to send us forward into the south slopes; they need fire-lines there. Larry—" he frowned slightly, shaking his head. Finally he said, "I am responsible for your safety. The fire may sweep down this slope, so the women and children are being sent to the next town. Go with them; I will give you a message to someone there who can have you as a guest until the emergency is over."

Kennard looked startled, and Larry could almost read his thoughts; the look in Kennard's eyes was too much for him. Should he, the stranger, be sent to safety with the women, the infirm, the little children?

"Lord Alton, I don't—"

"I haven't time to argue," The Darkovan snapped, and his eyes were formidable. "You'll be safe enough there."

Larry felt a sudden, sharp-flaring rage, like a physical thing. Damn it, I won't be sent out of the way with the women! What do they think I am? Valdir Alton had begun to turn away; he stopped short, so abruptly that Larry actually wondered for a moment if he had spoken his protest aloud.

Valdir's voice was harsh. "What is it, Larry? Be quick. I have a place to fill here."

"Can't I go with the men, sir? I—" Larry sought for words, trying to put into words some of the angry thoughts that struggled in his mind.

As if echoing his thoughts, Valdir said, "If you were one of us—but your people will hold me responsible if you are harmed . . . "

Larry, catching swifly at what Valdir had told him of Darkovan codes, retorted, "But you're dealing with me, not with all my people!"

Valdir smiled, bleakly. "If that's the way you want it. It's hard, rough work," he said, warningly, but Larry did not speak, and Valdir gestured. "Go with Kennard, then. He'll show you what to do."

Hurrying to join Kennard, Larry realized that he had crossed another bridge. He could be accepted by the Darkovans on their own terms, as a man—like Kennard—and not as a child to be guarded.

After a confused interval, he found himself part of a group of horsemen, Valdir in the lead, Kennard at his side, half a dozen strange Darkovans surrounding him, riding toward the low-lying haze. As they rode, the smell of smoke grew stronger, the air heavy and thick with curious smells; flecks of dust hung in the air, while bits of black soot fell on their faces and stung their eyes. His horse grew restive, backing and whinnying, as the smoke thickened. Finally they had to dismount and lead their horses forward.

As yet, the fire had been only a smolder of smoke lying against the sky, an acrid and stinging stench; but as they came between the two hills that cut off their view of the forested slopes, Larry could see a crimson glow and hear a strange dull sound in the distance. A small rabbitlike beast suddenly scudded past, almost under their horses' hooves blindly fleeing.

Valdir pointed. He made a sharp turn past a high hedge, and came out into a broad meadow whose grayish high grass was trampled and beaten down. A large number of men and boys were milling around at the center; there was a tent pitched at the edge, and after a moment of confusion Larry realized that the random groupings were orderly and businesslike. An elderly man, stooping and hobbling, came to lead their horses away; Larry gave up his reins and hurried after Kennard to the center of the field.

A boy about his own age, in a coarse sacking shirt and leather breeches, motioned to them. He nodded to Kennard in recognition, looked at Larry with a frown and asked, "Can you use an axe?"

"I'm afraid not," Larry said.

The Darkovan boy listened briefly to his accent, but shrugged it aside. "Take this, then," he said, and from a pile of tools handed Larry a thing like a long-toothed, sharp rake. He waved him on. Raising his eyes to the far end of the meadow, Larry could see the edge of the forest. It looked green and peaceful, but over the tops of the trees, far away, he saw the red glare of flame.

Kennard touched his arm lightly. "Come on," he said, and gave Larry a brief wry grin. "No doubt about which way we're going, that's for sure."

Larry put the rake over his shoulder and joined the group of men and boys moving toward the distant glow.

Once or twice during that long, confused afternoon, he found himself wondering, remotely, why he had gotten himself into this, but the thought was brief. He was just one of a long line of men and boys spread out, with rakes and hoes and other tools, to cut a fire-line between the distant burning fire and the, village. Crude and simple as it was it was the oldest known technique for dealing with forest-fires—create a wide space where there was nothing for it to burn. With rakes, hoes, spades and shovels, they cleared away the dry brush and pine-needles, scraped the earth bare, chopped up the dry grass and made a wide swath of open ground where nothing could burn. Men with axes felled the trees in the chosen space; smaller boys dragged the dead trees and brush away, while behind them came the crew that scraped and shoveled the ground clear. Larry quickly had an ache in his muscles and his palms stung and smarted from the handle of the rake, but he worked on, one anonymous unit in the dozens of men that kept swarming in. When one spot was cleared they were moved on to another. Younger boys brought buckets of water around; Larry drank in his turn, dropping the rake and lowering his lips to the bucket's edge. When it was too dark to see, he and Kennard were called out of the line, their places taken by a fresh crew working by torchlight, and they stumbled wearily down the slope to the camp, lined up for bowls of stew ladled out by the old men keeping the camp, and, wrapping themselves in blankets, threw themselves down to sleep on the grass, surrounded by young men and old.

Larry woke before dawn, his throat and lungs filled with smoke. He sat up. The roar of the fire sounded ominous and harsh in his ears; men were still gathered at the center of the camp space. He recognized the tall form of Valdir Alton, heard the sound of excited voices. He wriggled out of his blanket and stood upright, then was aware of Kennard, rising to his feet beside him. Against the dimness, Kennard was only a blurred form. He said, "Something's happening over there. Let's go and see."

The two boys picked their way carefully through the rows of sleeping men. As they came closer to the lighted fire, the firelight shone on a tall man in a somber gray cloak, dull-red hair splotched with white, and Larry recognized the stern, ascetic face of Lorill Hastur; close at his side, in a close-wrapped cape, shivering, was a slight and fragile woman with masses of burning, fire-red hair.

Kennard whistled softly. "A leronis, a sorceress—and the Hastur-Lord! The fire must be worse than we thought!" He tugged at Larry's wrist. "Come on—this I want to hear!"

Quietly they crept to the outskirts of the little group. Valdir Alton had spread a blanket on the trampled grass for the woman; she sat down, staring at the glow of the distant fire as if hypnotized.

"The fire's leaped the lines on the North slope," Valdir said. "They were too close to the flames, and had to leave the area. We brought up donkey-teams to plow lines and clear away faster, but there weren't enough people working there. We had only one clairvoyant, and he couldn't see too clearly where the fire was moving."

Lorill Hastur said, in his deep voice, "We came as quickly as we could. But there's not much we can do until the sun rises." He turned to the woman. "Where are the clouds, Janine?"

Still staring fixedly at the sky, the woman said, "Too far, really. And not enough. Seven vars distant."

"We'll have to try it, though," Valdir said. "Otherwise it will cross the hill to the west, and burn down—Zandru's hells, it could burn all the way to the river! We can't afford to lose that much timberland."

Larry heard the words with a strange little prickle of dread. He found himself thinking, painfully, of his own world.

With tractors and earth-movers they could cut firelines twenty feet wide in a few hours! With chemicals, they could douse the fire from the air, and have it out within the hour! Here, they didn't even have helicopters or planes to see from the air which way the fire was moving!

Kennard looked at him a little wryly, and Larry again wondered if he had spoken aloud, but the Darkovan boy said nothing. The darkness was thinning, and through the thick sooty air the sky was flushing purple with dawn.

"What are they going to do?" Larry asked.

Kennard did not answer.

The woman motioned to Lorill Hastur; he lowered himself and sat, cross-legged, on the blanket before her. Valdir Alton stood behind them, his face wiped clean of expression, intent and calm.

The woman was holding something in her hand. It was a blue jewel, glimmering, pale in the purplish dawn, and Larry thought suddenly of the blue jewel Valdir had held in his hand when he probed the mind of the dying Ranger. A curious little prickle of apprehension ran down his spine, and he shivered in the chilly, soot-laden wind.

The three forms were motionless, tense and still as carven images. Kennard gripped at Larry's arm and Larry felt the taut excitement in his friend; he wanted to ask a dozen questions, but the intentness of the three redheaded forms held him speechless. He waited.

Minutes dragged by, slowly, and the blue jewel gleamed in the woman's hand, and Larry could almost see the tension radiating between the three of them. The pale dawn brightened, and far away at the eastern horizon a dimmer crimson glow lightened the lurid red of the faraway fire. The light strengthened, grew brighter in the pale clear sky.

Then the woman sighed softly, and Larry felt it as a palpable darkening and chill. Kennard gripped his arm, pointed upward. Clouds were gathering—thickening, moving in the pale windless sky, centering, clustering from nowhere. Thick, heavy, high-piled cumulus, thin wispy fast-moving cirrus, raced from the horizon—from all the horizons! Not moving with normal wind, but coming, collecting from all corners of the compass, the clouds gathered and darkened, piling high and higher above them. The sun was blurred away, the meadow gradually darkened and Larry shivered in the sudden chill—but not with cold. He let out his breath in a long sigh.

Kennard loosed his clenched fists. He was staring at the sky. "Clouds enough," he muttered, "if only they would rain! But with no wind, if the clouds just sit there—"

Larry took the murmured words as license to break his silence. Questions tumbled one over another, condensed themselves to a blurted, "How did they do that? Did they bring those clouds?"

Kennard nodded, not taking it very seriously. "Of course. Nothing much to that—I can even do it myself, a little. On a good day for it. And they're Comyn—the most powerful psi powers on Darkover."

Larry felt the chill run up and down his spine with cold feet. Telepathy—and now clouds moved by the power of trained minds!

His Terran training said, Impossible, superstitious rubbish! They observed which way the clouds were moving and bolstered up their reputation by predicting that clouds would pile up for rain. But even as he said it, he knew it was not true. He was not in the safe predictable world of Terran science now, but in the cold and alien strangeness of a world where these powers were more common than a camera.

"What now?" he asked, and as if in answer, Valdir said from the center of the circle, "Now, we pray for rain. Much good may it do us."

Then, raising his head, he saw the boys, and beckoned to them.

"Have some breakfast," he said. "As soon as it's a little lighter they'll send you out on the fire-lines again. Unless it rains."

"Evanda grant it," said the woman huskily.

Lorill Hastur raised his still face and gave Kennard a smile of greeting, which turned impassive as he saw Larry. Larry, under the man's gaze, was suddenly aware of his soot-stained face, his raw and blistered hands, the torn and sweaty state of his clothes. Then he realized that Valdir Alton was in little better state. He had vaguely noticed, yesterday, that the men on the fire-lines were of all sorts: some soft-handed, in the rich clothing of aristocrats, some in the rags of the poorest. Evidently rank made no difference; rich and poor alike worked against this common danger. Of all those in the field, only the two telepaths were unstained by hard work.

Then he saw the gray look of fatigue in the eyes of the woman, the deep lines in the face of the Hastur. Maybe their work has been the hardest of all—

Kennard nudged him, and he accepted from one of the old men, a lump of bread and a battered cup of a bitterchocolaty drink. They found an unmuddied stretch of grass and sat to eat, their ears tuned to the distant roaring of the fire.

Kennard said, grimly, "They can bring the clouds and pile them up, but they can't make them rain. Although sometimes just the sheer weight of the clouds will condense them into rain. Let's hope."

"If you had airplanes—" Larry said.

"What for?"

"On Terra, they can make rain," Larry said slowly, thinking back to half-learned lessons of his schooldays. "They seed the clouds with some chemical—crystals—silver iodide," he used the Terran word, not knowing the Darkovan one, "or even dry ice will do. I'm not sure how it works, but it condenses the clouds into rain—"

"How can ice be dry?" Kennard demanded, almost rudely. "It sounds like nonsense. Like saying dry water or a live dead man."

"It's not real ice," Larry corrected himself. "It's a gas—a frozen gas, that is. It's carbon dioxide—the gas you breathe out. It crystallizes into something like snow, only it's much, much colder than ice or snow—and it burns if you touch it."

"You're not joking?"

"I hope not," said Valdir abruptly from behind them. "Kennard, what was Larry saying to you just now? I picked it up, but I can't read him—"

With a curious prickly sensation again, Larry realized that Valdir had been well out of earshot. The Darkovan lord was looking down at him with an almost fierce intensity. He said, "Make rain? It sounds, then, as if the Terrans have a magic greater than ours. Tell me about this rainmaking, Larry."

Larry repeated what he had said to Kennard, and the older man stood scowling, deep in thought. Without a word, Lorill Hastur and the frail, flame-haired woman had approached them, and stood listening.

Lorill Hastur said, "What about it, Valdir? You know something of atomic structures. Is it practical at all?"

The men who had slept in the meadow were collecting their tools now, forming in groups, getting their orders for the day's work. Larry looked at the forest edge. How green it looked. Yet above it rose the blanket of smoke and the omnipresent dull roar of the fire. Valdir turned, too, and looked at the cloud that hung over the burning woods.

He said, "Fire throws off the same gas as breath. There must be an enormous quantity of carbon dioxide going off into the air."

"We can move it into the cold of the outer sky," Lorill Hastur said. "That's easy enough. And from there, if it falls on the clouds—"

"There's no time to waste," the woman said. Her eyes were closed, her voice remote, as she added, "A fire-storm has broken out on the far side of the forest, and the main blaze is racing toward the villages there. The fire-lines will never contain it. Rain is the only hope. There is enough moisture in those clouds to kill the fire—if we could only get it out of them."

"We can try," Valdir said. The three of them went into one of those intent silences again, the very air between their still forms seeming to tremble with invisible force.

Larry looked at Kennard. "Do you know what they're going to do? How can they—?"

"They can teleport the gas above the clouds," Kennard said. "If the cold can freeze it—"

Larry was becoming a little hardened to these curious powers now. If telepathy was possible, teleportation was only a minor step—

"If they can teleport, why don't they just teleport enough water from a river, or something, to put out the fire?"

"Too much weight involved," Kennard said gravely. "Even the clouds—they didn't move the clouds themselves, just enough air to create a wind to move them here." He fell silent, his eyes on his father, and when Larry started to speak, motioned him, impatiently, to silence.

The silence in the dawnlit meadow deepened; there was no sound at all, except for the distant, indistinct sound of the fire. The clouded sky seemed to darken, grow thick and dreary. Larry watched a group of men moving away toward the fire-lines; he and Kennard should have been with them. And they stood here, waiting, watching the three telepaths—

Abruptly there was a great WHOOSH from the distant fire; Larry, whirling round, saw a tremendous uprushing billow of smoke and flame, and seemed to feel, rather than hear, the wild roaring sound. Then silence again, hushed, tense and deep.

Above his head the clouds moved, writhed, seeming to form and reform into tossing shapes and worms of moisture; they curdled, coalesed, the sky darkened and darkened as the cloud-gray deepened.

Then the sky and cloud-layer suddenly dissolved—that was the only way Larry could describe it, afterward—and flowed into dark, thick lines of teeming, pouring rain. The burning forest sizzled, crackled in a sort of desperation. Great thick clouds of smoke and steam and soot billowed upward, and a rushing wind flung great sparks upward. Larry was soaked through in a moment, before the rain localized itself, pouring heavily down over the forest, but leaving the meadow untouched except by the brief spit of rain. The flames, visible over the treetops, sank and died beneath the upsurge of steam and smoke. The hissing sound grew louder, roared, then dimmed and was still.

The rain stopped.

Soaked, shivering, Larry stared in blank wonder at Valdir and the two gray-clad telepaths. They had cornered the clouds; they had harnessed the very force of the rain to combat the fire!

Valdir beckoned to the boys. They walked across the damp grass, Larry still a little dazed. He had boasted of Terran science; could it match this?

"That's over with, at least," Valdir said, in a tone of profound relief. "Larry, I wanted to thank you; without what you told us, none of us would have known how to do that. I hardly know how to thank you."

It was more confusing than ever. These men had forces and powers undreamed of by science—and yet they were ignorant of a simple notion like cloud-seeding! Because he could not have spoken without revealing that mixture of awe, mingled with surprise at the incompleteness of the knowledge, Larry was silent. Valdir turned to Lorill Hastur and said, "Now you can see my point, perhaps! Without their knowledge—"

But before he could finish the sentence, a wild clamor of bells broke out from the village below. Valdir stiffened; the two telepaths darted looks at one another. From further away another bell and another sounded the alarm; not now in the known pattern to signal a fire, but a wild, clamorous cry of warning. The men in the camp, the men trooping back from the dead fire, dropped their tools and axes and looked up, startled. There was a rising murmur of apprehension, of dread.

Valdir swore, furiously. "We might have known—"

Kennard looked at him in astonishment "What is it, Father?"

Valdir's mouth twisted bitterly. "A trick—the fire was obviously set to draw us away from the villages, so that the bandits could attack in peace—and find no one to meet them but women and old men and little children!"

The fire camp, until now so orderly, was suddenly a scene of milling confusion as men formed into groups, stirred around restlessly, broke away for their horses, and within a few minutes the crowded field was almost empty, men vanishing silently in all directions. Valdir watched, tightmouthed.

"The raiders may get a surprise," he said, at last. "They'll never guess we could have conquered such a fire so quickly just the same"—he looked grim and angry—"I had no chance— Tell me, Larry, how would your people handle such an attack?"

"I suppose we'd all get together and fight it," Larry said, and Valdir's mouth moved in a brief, mirthless laugh.

"Right. But they won't understand that it's as urgent as a fire—" he broke off, with a violent gesture. "Zandru seize them all! Kennard, where did they take our horses?"

Fifteen minutes later they were riding away from the village, Valdir still silent and grim, Kennard and Larry not daring to break in on his anger. Larry was still strangling with the sense of wonder. The powers these Darkovans had—and the slipshod, unsystematic way they used them!

He was beginning to formulate a theory as to why Valdir had invited him to his estate. Valdir evidently had some inkling of the value of a quality which seemed alien to the Darkovan way of life, something the Terrans had. Larry hardly knew how to describe it. It was the thing Kennard had jeered at when he said, "You Terrans can't handle your personal problems by yourselves—you have to call in everyone else." Perhaps it could be called a community spirit, or the ability to work together in groups. They didn't know how to organize; even in firefighting there had been no single leader but each group had worked separately. Even now, there was no way they could get together against the common danger of the bandits. And Valdir, who could see the history of failure behind these scattered efforts, hoped to change this old pattern. But they hadn't given him a chance.

The other Darkovans who had originally been a part of the three-day hunt—how long ago that seemed!—rode several paces behind, not wanting to break in on their master's preoccupation. To Larry, Valdir's feelings seemed as clear as if he, himself had felt them. Kennard, too, riding silently at Larry's side, was mulling it over in his mind, the disparity behind the old codes and his father's attempt to change things. To Larry it seemed almost as if Kennard spoke his thoughts aloud—his father could do no wrong, and yet how had he come to these conclusions?

Once away from the site of the fire, there was no sign of clouds or of the brief rain; only the high-hanging cloud of smoke and soot over the forest told where the fire had been. Even that had vanished behind the hills by the time they paused, where the road forked at the foot of a thickly wooded slope, to breathe the horses and to eat cold food from their saddlebags.

Kennard said idly, "It's going to be good to be home."

Larry nodded. He still ached from the unaccustomed labor in the firelines, and his hands were raw and blistered.

"Mine too," Kennard said, displaying his hands ruefully. "Though you'd think they were hardened enough by now. The arms-master in the city guard wouldn't have much sympathy for me. He'd say I'd shirked sword-practice too many times."

Larry reached in his saddle-bag for the small first-aid kit he had brought along. It had the emblem of the Medical HQ on it, and Kennard looked at it curiously as Larry opened it and glanced at the small bottles and tubes.

"Here. Try some of this on your blisters," he suggested diffidently, sprinkling the powder on his own. Kennard followed suit, smelling the antiseptic curiously.

"May I see it?" Kennard examined the small bottles and tubes with interested curiosity. "Your people make the damndest things!"

"Some of yours are just as strange," Larry retorted. "The idea of telepathy still seems weird to me. And teleportation!"

Kennard shrugged. "I suppose so, though of course to me it's very simple." He looked at his father; Valdir, looking somewhat less unapproachable now, turned, nodded to his son, fished in the pocket of his jerkin and tossed something to Kennard. Kennard caught the small object—it was shrouded in a small chamois bag and wrapped in silk—and from it, drew a glimmering blue jewel.

"Of course I'm not as good at it all as my father, but still—here, take a look in this."

Gingerly, Larry touched the blue jewel. It felt faintly warm. He hesitated, remembering how Valdir had probed the mind of the dying Ranger.

"It's all right," Kennard said gently, reassuringly. "You don't think I'd hurt you, do you?"

Abashed at his own fear, Larry looked into the blue jewel. Within the depths, faint colors seemed to move and writhe; suddenly, as he looked up at Kennard, some barrier seemed to drop. The Darkovan boy seemed nearer, and easier to understand. Larry caught, in one quick flash of understanding, a sudden blaze of Kennard's thoughts, as if the essence of his friend's personality was made clear to him: Kennard's intense pride of family, his tremendous sense of responsibility for his work, the fears with which he sometimes struggled, the warmth Kennard felt for his father and his young foster-sister, even—to Larry's shy embarrassment—the warm friendliness Kennard felt for Larry himself, and the emotion verging on awe with which he regarded Larry's travels in space and his Terran origin . . .

All this in a brief flash, as the blueness of the jewel blazed; then it faded, the barrier dropped in place again, and Kennard was smiling at him, somewhat tentatively. It occurred to Larry that Kennard now knew as much about him as he knew about Kennard. He didn't mind—but it took some getting used to!

At least, having had a sample of it, he couldn't doubt the existence of telepathy!

Kennard shrouded the jewel again. Larry, realizing that the medical kit was still in his other hand, thrust it quickly into his pocket.

He had no way of knowing that the moment of rapport between himself and Kennard was to save both their lives . . .