* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * After the torchlight, the night was very dark. Clark and Paula soon wandered into a newly-plowed field. Cheering in the ruin told them the moons had met.

Paula cursed. "Have you got a light?"

"But people will see it."

"I know. They'll think we're wizards and blame the attack on us. Listen, my father says rules are for people who don't have judgment. With these suits on we don't exactly blend in, anyhow."

"You keep quoting your father," Clark muttered, giving her his palmlight.

"Learn from the enemy. Marlow Maxwell, personal communication," Paula snapped. She shone the light around them. Beyond the field, trees flashed out and sank back when the ray passed. "Too far to walk around it," she observed.

"How much time do you think we have?" Clark asked as they struggled on, covering themselves with mud in their haste.

"I don't know. Generally, you don't want to be sending for too long ahead of time because people like us might detect it. One trick is to put a lot of them around and just leave them, for decades if necessary, and then activate them at the last minute. They're trying to keep out of sight here, though, so they're probably using the really cheap kind that only last a few weeks. We used to use them in demolab, on field trips. They're hand-activated and they transmit for about a day before the signal starts drifting."

Clark understood by this monologue that Paula did not want to argue. He said, "Isn't it dangerous to have a bunch of students using those things?"

"No, they were rigged up with lights and beepers so you could find them right away."

When at last they had traced the signal to its source, they found tethered in a thicket at the field's edge a small beast of burden. The animal looked so doleful that he almost fancied it knew.

"There it is. They must have fed it to him," Paula said.

"I guess so. Kill him?" Clark rested his hand between its ears. Paula nodded.

Clark had a Puro and a light knife. Since the Puro would leave a shell in the victim, while the light knife made a cut indistinguishable from a blade's, he decided to use the knife. Both weapons were in his hands when he was startled to hear voices behind them. The voices fell silent, and as Clark turned toward them, two women emerged from the darkness.

"Hey! What are you--whoa. Easy now," the older one said in the Intersystems Language, seeing the Puro. She was heavyset and rather tough-looking, with unevenly cut hair and a deep scar on her neck.

The younger one either did not notice the Puro or ignored it. She ran to the animal, flung herself upon it and spoke in the Outlander dialect. When Paula tried to draw her away, the woman turned and punched her square in the mouth.

"Clara!" the older called sharply just as Clark was about to shoot. The younger came meekly to her side.

"Watch them," Paula mumbled.

Clark held the Puro as confidently as he could, wondering what he would do if they tried to stop Paula. Shoot them, he assured himself, because their action endangered many lives, including his own. Suppose instead they ran away. Could he bring himself to shoot them then, even knowing they were murderers? He was uncertain. Surely if they got away they would strike again. Yet they might be unaware of what they were doing. After all, they had activated the transmitter but not yet fled.

It was true they did not seem at all murderous. The younger was sobbing about the little carrier beast, and the older one, embarassed but not wholly unmoved, whispered consolations.

She must be saying, hush, he's not going to hurt us. Because, he realized, the younger one was not crying about the animal. She was simply terrified, and suspected that after the beast was dead the next one killed would be she. A rough life had taught her the laws of violence, he concluded as surely as though he knew her. That was indeed one of the laws, that the Puro brought a sudden intimacy to their relations. Under its influence he felt kindly toward them.

"Where should I cut?" Paula asked, taking the knife from his hand. She read the inscription: "To Clarkwell with love. Work for Harmony."

"Between the vertebra in the neck. Push its head down," he replied. He glanced at her. The two captives started forward, he recovered and they shrank back so quickly that he thought he must have imagined it.

"Hold still, damn it," Paula was muttering. The younger woman turned her head away.

The beast of burden was never harmed. In thinking about it later, Clark found this the hardest to comprehend, that so many people died so horribly and this animal was spared.

The first explosion came not behind them, where the crowd was celebrating, but somewhere on the other side of the thicket. Either through some mechanical defect, or because the trees screened it from the more densely-packed crowd, a stray firebomb landed in a village. It demolished two homes and vaporized, leaving no trace in the ashes.

Clark nearly fainted in terror, but when he opened his eyes, his prisoners had not moved. The three stared at one another. If he tied them up, they might be caught in the fire and burned alive. If he let them go, they would tell the Ketries, or whoever had sent them, where to find the Armies of Daybreak on Paffir Haretz. Killing them in cold blood was out of the question. Staying to watch them was unfeasible. Even as he weighed the alternatives, Clark was running. He forced himself to stop long enough to toss his weapon to Paula, though later he remembered that she had several, and then he fled away from the sound of the blast, toward the crowd.

Fires and explosions surrounded him when he came near the ruin. Despite the rainy weather, the underlayer of the vines and moss that covered the walls began to char. People ran in all directions. At times they fell into the smouldering vegetation and then their clothes burst into flame. One bomb landed so near Clark that his fire-resistant suit turned brown on that side and beneath it the hair on his leg was singed.

Klyne ran toward him, carrying a child in each arm. Two more ran after her. When the bomb exploded near him, she fell with no hands free and took the impact full face. Clark raised her up by the shoulders. He took the bigger of the children she carried, whom he recognized as the priest's son. They ran, the bowlegged boy leading.

A man shrieked, his clothing in flames. Clark flung himself down and smothered them, but when he got up he saw that the man was dead. The boy on Clark's back, who had been wailing, fell silent, clinging for life. A fireball landed nearby. As people burned, their smoke attracted more of the missiles and they became the centers of hideous florets, with those who had tried to help in flames all round them.

The earth roared as the blanket of vegetation ignited. Clark felt a blast of wind. Cool air rushed in from all sides to collide in the center and raise a tower of flame that shed sparks as far away as the river. He turned into the wind and ran with the others.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * CONTINUE

AKIVA MEETS CLARK RUNNING| |EYIMALIANS| A DEATH BY FIRE|

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