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"You are here! Spirit free of earth, as promised," he said. "Did you hear the funeral? I made the oration." He drew himself up. "She died of three wounds: Var, Ketry, Viyato. She, the joy of those who could love her, immolated in the fires of their hatred. The death mongers, the robbers and the perverters of faith killed her because they could not abide the righteousness of her tenacious loving. Look at her body--her ribs are crushed. Her neck is broken. Her face and arms are so burned that it is only by her size I know my daughter. Var, Ketry and Viyato have murdered their hope of pity. Who will save them?" His shoulders drooped. He must be crying. He went on softly, "Did you hear it? Now, there's no--I feel as though I don't exist. No one is left now but me. What does it matter, this group? Nothing matters. When you were alive, everything mattered. The smallest event was full of significance. There was an abundance--there was a glory of things I cared about. Things illuminated by an endless profusion of caring. They knew in Merced when I was thinking of you. The whole town--the whole Outland--was proud. Even Greyesar shut his mouth when your name was mentioned. Now they don't talk about you when I'm in earshot. A father's love is boundless as the wind and eternal as the air, eh? Sevit and Pravela warned me--so help me, every bit of it was true. I held to you and I should have known better."

Fuego was standing in the middle of the tent, head tilted to one side. He straightened up to ask, "Will they let you come with us?"

The reply came in Eyimalian, a woman's voice. "Yes."

The figure moved from a patch of moonlight into shadow. She must have picked up the word from Fuego, she must have. Paula heard another rustle and looked away.

"You will come!" Fuego rushed toward her, arms extended. The woman came into the moonlight. Quaking with fear, Paula blocked the way. Fuego embraced her.

"You're a little girl again," he said. "No matter. Are you free, or have you found a body yet?"

"Free, papa," she squeaked. Her own father's image came unbidden, and the words re-echoed, I'm free.

"Then stay with us. We'll find a body for you. I'll marry someone. I can have children and you will be my daughter again. Would you like that?" He sobbed.

Paula remembered a time when her father wept on her shoulder, saying, "You were such a pretty little girl. What have I done to you?"

Fuego stroked her hair. "There, there, don't cry now." He looked up. "Your mother is here, too. Let's go see her."

He ran toward the woman. She held out her hands to him.

The husband darted from the shadows and slammed against him, punching and kicking. When Paula tried to help Fuego, the woman attacked her.

Paula was trained in fighting, but the woman had more experience. They were evenly matched, and for a long time they darted about, feinting, doing little damage when they connected. Then Paula realized what the woman was after. She left her face open and the woman went for it with both hands. Your dream betrays you, Paula quoted to herself--her father's words. She socked the other in the back of the neck. Stunned, the woman dropped down.

Tiyar had arrived and subdued the husband. "Let us return these two to their tent," he said.

"How do you know which one it is?"

"I followed them earlier," Tiyar answered, again smiling. His teeth are going to freeze this winter, she thought. They'll shatter when he sneezes.

"Can you carry the woman?" she asked. Eyimalians were not built to carry. Their bones were too thin. She expected Tiyar to say no, but he draped the woman over his shoulder, ignoring her groan, and started off. Paula hefted the man and staggered after. "He smells like gin," she said. "Pretty advanced. They must have bought it."

"Possibly," Tiyar gasped.

After a minute or so, the husband and wife awoke. Tiyar and Paula released them. They went off, shouting at one another.

"Your face is bruised," Tiyar observed.

"Rutting-cat grabbed my cheek and tried to rip it off," Paula grumbled.

"She misunderstood--"

"Misunderstood nothing. She saw Fuego hug me."

Tiyar sighed.

"He thought I was Luz," Paula explained in a tone that forbade inquiry. "Now you sleep in his tent. I'm going to bed. We've got to get this business with whose tent is whose straightened out. If you'd bought good ones, we wouldn't have all this trouble." And you, she told herself, stop shaking like a two-year-old.

Paula went into her tent, leaving the night to Tiyar. Some time later she saw him through the viewpatch, looking at the pines under which, no doubt, Akiva stood. A goat nibbled his cuff and he scratched its back. "If you were Greyesar, would you be laughing at me?" he asked it.

"Go watch!" she yelled, but Tiyar had already gone. Paula covered her face with her arms. "I am Paula, they are changed," she chanted to herself, thinking of Huey. In the forest the moonlit arms had dropped. She could hear Akiva move among the uko and the evergreen.

Morning found them unready. The herbalist convinced one of her students to try the new crop, so they spent most of the day planting a part of someone's worst field in potatoes. It was hard work, and the cold mud chilled Paula even through her suit, but she preferred it to the task of the evening.

Tiyar was in a bad humor when they returned to the camp. He had decided to stand constant guard over the prisoners and taken a mild dose of Love's Arrow to keep himself awake. Bored, he was angel-fighting, boxing against his own neural responses with a simulation headset he kept in the supply cart. He took it off when he saw Paula.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"You agreed not to use that thing here," she said.

"We must decide at once--" He slipped the flexible headset into his pocket.

"All right, all right. We'll decide. I'll get Fuego."

Fuego was studying a tape. "Anarchic Groups in Isolation," Paula read. "Are you studying the herbalists? They're not isolated."

"No, these prisoners," he answered. "We're in trouble. They won't take any action, that's obvious. What I'm afraid of is that we won't either."

"We won't?"

"I've been very depressed. I've gotten drunk. Part of it is my fault. I can't fall apart every time someone is killed, though, as Akiva points out, I'm not omniscient. If I were a god, seeing everything, I would see her as small as she was." Fuego took the tape out of the reader and tapped it down into its canister until the preservative oil closed around the beads. "The Pravelany say the dead find a place to live again. I dreamed that Luz came in the body of--" He hesitated. "She came as a local woman and promised to stay with us. The traditional answer, you know, would be to marry and have children so she could inhabit one of them. That would be bad. I knew a guy who was supposed to be the reincarnation of his uncle. Rotten stuff. He lost his mind."

"We've got to have a meeting--" Paula interjected.

Fuego spoke over her voice. "You see, according to the Pravelany, no one really dies. You cannot simply kill someone. It doesn't work because your enemy will come back in another form. This is a way of saying conflict itself never dies. That's what I'm worried about."

"Conflict?" Paula wished he would hurry up. She had the uneasy feeling he made perfect sense but she couldn't understand what he was talking about.

"Yes, broadly defined. Conflict."

"You mean by killing them we'll be creating divisions in the group?"

"Not create--they're there. I mean by killing we don't necessarily get rid of them."

"I do wonder what's happening back on Eyimalia," Paula said without knowing or wondering why it occured to her at that moment.

As they were leaving the tent, Fuego said, "That dream--I think I'm over the worst now."

"--that it would be murder. Whatever else we decide," Clark was saying in Eyimalian when they came to the ruin. Tiyar had taken a fallen pillar as his seat and directed the prisoners to a crater on one side while the Daybreakers and Akiva convened on the other, so he could see both groups at once.

"I'm against it," Clark said. "We can bring them with us. They're half on our side already."

"Half," Fuego echoed.

Tiyar spoke with Akiva. "He says they have killed without regret."

Clark folded his arms. "We can keep them from killing again. He's talking about the past, and you're going to talk about the future of the planet and so forth. Neither is an excuse for outright murdering them."

Fuego reddened. "We came here for a reason," he said. "We are going to find Sevit Uchide, and we are going to break apart a system that has held this planet in servitude for more than seven hundred years. If we hesitate over these six--five--people and only one of them escapes and reports back to the Vars, not only we but Akiva's contingent will be killed, and we will fail and we will have achieved nothing, and it will be years if not a generation or more before the Daybreakers can send anyone else in. Because no matter who winds up in possession of Paffir Haretz, they will be Vars. By one name or another." He exhaled and drew in another big gulp of air. "The question is not just what will happen to them--"

"Happen," Paula repeated.

"--but also what will happen if we fail. People are dying here, who would have lived. And these five, these Outlanders, are partly responsible. They're not bystanders. They are tax collectors. They have been traveling around the continent, brutalizing people, robbing and murdering. You heard their story. I don't think we should feel any compunction about killing them."

"But then, Sevit talks about the technicians of the ruling class. The ones who run the system day to day have to be won over," Paula said.

"Look, if you're going to start a revolt, you have to be willing to kill people!" Fuego burst out. "I don't know how to make it any clearer. You people don't seem to have thought about it."

"When the time comes," Clark said.

"Can we trust these five, then?" Tiyar asked.

"I suppose not."

"Can we keep them prisoners indefinitely?"

He sighed. "No."

"Do you know of any other way?"

"Give me a few days," Clark said.

Paula groaned. "In a few days we'll go through all this again, and then again, until they run off and make the decision for us. Fuego's right."

"All right. Be my guest." Clark began to walk away.

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CONTINUE.....................

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