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  She shook her hand and the mantis went whirling away, and in all truth its tumbling flight did mimic that of a leaf sent sprawling by the wind.

  Hatch saw little of his daughter these days, for he was fiercely training toward his final examinations. His last year of study was more than half-gone. Seven of the year's thirteen moon-months had waxed and waned, and only six remained. In a bare 160 days, Asodo Hatch would have to fight Lupus Lon Oliver for the instructorship of the Combat College. It was what everyone expected.

  It had been what his father had expected, and his father had told him as much on the day before he went to his death. And now that death was a completed fact, a part of history, and the old man's body lay atop a funeral pyre by the river. The wood of the pyre was saturated with aromatic oils which Hatch could smell from where he stood, one hand on Onica's shoulder.

  The costs of this funeral would have bankrupted the family Hatch but for the fact that all those costs were being met by Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor who ruled the city of Dalar ken Halvar and the Empire of Greater Parengarenga, the Silver Emperor who, in the service of the motto "divide and rule", had established the small minority Frangoni colonies in both Dalar ken Halvar and the Ebrell Islands alike.

  Lamjuk Dakoto Hatch, father of Asodo Hatch and of Oboro Bakendra Hatch, had served the Silver Emperor well, and so Plandruk Qinplaqus, that ancient and much-wizened Ashdan-bred wizard of Ebber, honored Lamjuk Dakoto in death. As Hatch was thus standing there with his daughter Onica, he was verbally accosted when someone said:

  "Startrooper Hatch."

  "What is it, Combat Cadet?" said Hatch, acknowledging the presence of Yolombo Atlantabara.

  Hatch felt the Combat College titles became grotesque if spoken out in the open, out in the sun beneath the sky. They belonged to the world inside the minor mountain of Cap Foz Para Lash, and only there could he take them seriously.

  But Hatch said nothing of this to Yolombo Atlantabara, for the young Frangoni warrior had just turned 18, and was taking a break from his Combat College training to enter Parengarenga's imperial army. Like Hatch, Atlantabara would return to the Combat College at age 25 to complete his education.

  "Startrooper," said Atlantabara. "I'm joining the army tomorrow."

  "You have my blessing, then," said Hatch, not sure what Atlantabara wanted.

  "But," said Atlantabara, blurting it out as if the very confession was a statement of horror, "I don't want to."

  "You don't want to!" said Hatch.

  "Well," said Atlantabara, already ashamed of his confession. "I'd ... I'd rather not. Put it that way. I'd rather not. If it was possible to stay, I | | "

  "If you'd wanted to stay," said Hatch, "you should have been an Ebrell Islander. Go to the army. Do your seven years. It's a good system. You'll benefit from it."

  This was obviously not the answer Atlantabara had been wanting to hear. Making no effort to hide his disappointment, he retreated.

  Hatch watched him go.

  Asodo Hatch had some sympathy for the young Frangoni warrior, but not much. It was a good system - breaking Combat College training to spend a few years in the real world. The system had long ago been forced upon the Combat College by the Silver Emperor, who had pondered the problem for the better part of a century before presenting Paraban Senk with an ultimatum.

  Paraban Senk, the unembodied Teacher of Control who ran the Combat College, was obedient to one prime and overriding imperative: train Startroopers! Train Startroopers for the Stormforce of the Nexus! The Silver Emperor could make that impossible by the simple expedient of placing guards at the lockway to kill anyone who tried to leave or enter. Negotiating from such a position of strength, Plandruk Qinplaqus was able to win considerable concessions from the Combat College.

  Ordinary Combat Cadets studied straight through from age 11 to age 27, graduated as Startroopers and went out into the world absolutely useless for any practical purpose. After years spent training for the sanitized high tech warfare of the Nexus, they were unsuited for an army of leather boots which lived, fought and died in the dirt.

  The Silver Emperor's Frangoni levies, however, were a different story. In early manhood they made their home in the armies of the dust for seven long years, and so could easily be integrated back into those armies when they finally graduated from the Combat College at age 34. By then, that was the only place for them to go.

  The ranks of the Free Corps were closed to the Frangoni, who were regarded with contempt by the Ebrell Islanders of Dalar ken Halvar. And by age 34 they were usually strangers to their own people, having spent too long eating the bread of strangeness and living amongst those who have no caste.

  Thus the Combat College produced for the Emperor an elite cadre of Frangoni officers whose greatest loyalty was to the imperial army.

  Right now, as Hatch watched, the Emperor himself was touching a torch to the funeral pyre. It caught fire, and the flames began to consume the body of Hatch's father. With due ceremony, the Silver Emperor departed, and Hatch was left alone on the riverbank with his family. On this occasion, Plandruk Qinplaqus had made no contact with Asodo Hatch, for the ceremony had been held to honor the dead Lamjuk Dakoto, and not to honor his son.

  While Hatch was still watching the flames of the pyre, he was accosted by Polk the Cash, a moneylender. Apart from Lupus Lon Oliver, there were two people in Dalar ken Halvar with whom Asodo Hatch found himself at odds. One of those people was Nambasa Berlin, who was not much of a problem as Hatch rarely saw him. The other, unfortunately, was Polk.

  Polk the Cash was a moneylender, a man of the Pang; and it was one of life's great and inexplicable coincidences that Pang shared with Berlin the physical peculiarity of having no nose. Like Berlin, Polk had been born with a nose - but both men had been deprived of their noses in early adulthood. Furthermore, both had lost their noses under similar but unrelated circumstances, which was adding strangeness upon strangeness.

  "You have something for me," said Polk.

  "I do," said Hatch, with a studied politeness which would have made Paraban Senk proud of him.

  Asodo Hatch had agreed to be a guarantor for a debt raised by his brother Oboro Bakendra Hatch, and Oboro had defaulted on the loan. So Hatch had to pay. So it was that, in accordance with his perception of his duty, Asodo Hatch paid up to Polk. Five scorpions. It was a lot of money for anyone to be parting with for no good purpose, and Hatch was by no means rich.

  "Thank you," said Polk. "Any time you want to do business, come and see me."

  "Maybe I will," said Hatch.

  He had absolutely no intention of ever doing business again with Polk or any other moneylender, but had learnt long ago that it is best never to alienate anyone unnecessarily. The Teacher of Control alleged that a universal courtesy to the world in general is the cheapest of all good investments; and Hatch, after much experience of life, saw no reason to dispute this.

  When Polk was gone, Hatch turned his attention to a ceremony which was taking place on the far side of the Yamoda River. It was being presided over by something which looked almost like a horse, at least from a distance. But Hatch had sharp eyes, and could pick the differences. The thing with four legs was Edgerley Eden, the guru who had enthralled his sister Penelope.

  Hatch was distracted from the view by Onica's scream.

  He turned in alarm.

  But it was nothing - only a brute of a thog mauling some small white-skinned dog.

  But Onica was screaming at the thog, and trying to hit it with a stick.

  Hatch strode toward the dog-fight, grabbed the thog by the collar and heaved it over the riverbank. It tumbled down the bank and splashed into the river. On recovering itself, it found the bank too steep to climb, so paddled downstream through the shallow waters, and shortly found itself nose to nose with a large hog which was paddling upstream.

  Hatch did not concern himself with the thog's further fate, but turned his attention to his daughter, who was cradling the dog. An el
egant Janjuladoola woman with a small retinue was approaching.

  "Is this your dog?" said Hatch, addressing the woman.

  "It is mine," said the woman, she whom Hatch was destined to know as the Lady Iro Murasaki. "How is it? Oh ...."

  The Lady Murasaki found to her distress that one of the ears of her dog had been torn away. She said it would have to be put down. Onica begged for it.

  "You can have it," said Murasaki, whose name was yet unknown to Hatch, "if you father agrees."

  "It would be received as a welcome gift," said Hatch.

  The Lady Iro Murasaki smiled upon Hatch, and she departed; and such was the brevity and simplicity of this their first meeting that Hatch thought nothing of it at the time. He thought rather of the expression of pain which he saw on the face of his wife Talanta. As Talanta had never been prone to any fears of infidelity on Hatch's part, Hatch presumed the pain to be physical in origin - and his presumption was strengthened by the fact that he had seen Talanta manifesting such pain at odd occasions in the recent past.

  "What is it?" said Hatch. "What is it?"

  "It is nothing," said Talanta.

  But Hatch suspected that she might be seriously ill. He wished he could take her into Cap Foz Para Lash to be examined by the Combat College's cure-all clinic, but that was reserved for Combat College personnel; and the Combat College as a whole was off-limits to all outsiders at all times, except during the competitive examinations for the instructorship, when guests could be invited to spectate.

  The pyre which was consuming the body of Hatch's father would burn for a long time, and the ashes from the body would be brought to Hatch in due course. He had no need to stay by the riverside any longer, and such were the demands of his days that he could ill afford to linger. With the essential part of the funeral well over, Hatch hired an ox cart to take Onica and Talanta back to the Frangoni rock, for it was a long and weary walk. He trusted that Talanta could make the uphill climb - far too steep for any ox cart - from the road to their house.

  When Talanta was gone, Hatch lingered by the riverside for a little longer, torn between his need to get back to his training schedule in the Combat College, and by the fact that this was after all his father's funeral. They had never been close, but even so - the old man's death had come as a shock, even though there had been difficult times in the past when Hatch had felt that he could have cheerfully murdered the brute.

  Lamjuk Dakoto Hatch had been a monster of overbearing stubbornness, and bad-tempered into the bargain. And surely his death was nothing to mourn, for he had his own brother, an act for which there could surely be no forgiveness.

  And yet ....

  As Hatch lingered, he was approached by his elder brother, Oboro Bakendra Hatch, who had been ostentatiously bathing himself in the river, thus publicly shunning his father's funeral.

  "Asodo," said Oboro Bakendra.

  "Speak," said Hatch, using less courtesy to his brother than he had done to the moneylender Polk the Cash.

  "I want to tell you something," said Oboro.

  "Tell," said Hatch.

  "The old man's not welcome on Cap Uba. Get rid of his ashes somewhere else."

  "He is your father as much as mine," said Hatch.

  "He's no father of mine," said Oboro. "Not since what he's done. I renounce him. I disown him."

  Lamjuk Dakoto Hatch, father of Asodo and Oboro, had renounced the Frangoni faith, the worship of the Great God Mokaragash. Poto Skinskoro Hatch, brother of Lamjuk Dakoto, had taken him to task over the matter. Consequently, both were now dead. As a priest of the Great God Mokaragash, Oboro Bakendra could not forgive his father for either his apostasy or for the death of Poto Skinskoro.

  "Renounce him, then," said Hatch. "Disown him, then. But do your renouncing and disowning elsewhere, for this is my father's funeral."

  Oboro Bakendra took the hint, and left.

  Once Oboro had departed, a grayskinned Janjuladoola servant, who had been keeping his distance till all earshot witnesses were gone, approached Asodo Hatch.

  "What can I do for you?" said Hatch.

  "The lady whose dog your child accepted," said the servant.

  "Yes," said Hatch. "What does she want? Does she want the dog back? I can return it tomorrow if that's her requirement."

  "No no no," said the servant, clearly shocked to think anyone would fancy that his employer would give houseroom to a maimed animal. "She - she wishes me to appraise you of her name. She is the Lady Iro Murasaki."

  From the tone in which this was said, Hatch gathered that ownership of that particular title was meant to be a matter of some consequence.

  "We are a long way from Yestron," said Hatch. "I confess my ignorance as to the import of the title. Who is the Lady and what does she want?"

  "She is who she is," said the servant. "As for what she wants, why, she wishes to extend to you an invitation. The Lady Iro Murasaki invites you to visit her house, which is the house of Pan Lay on the heights of Cap Gargle."

  "I will bear the information in mind," said Hatch, making no commitment.

  The servant seemed to be waiting for something more, but Hatch had nothing more to say, so walked close to the pyre. The enormously expensive heavywood pyre was in full blaze, burning hot as it would till sundown and beyond. Hatch stood in the heatwash of the fire and bathed himself in the heat of his father's death, the heat of his father's burning.

  And thought of his wife, and the pain which had showed on her face, and wondered if he would be adding her body to just such a pyre before the year was out.

  Chapter Three

  Asma: dominant computational machines of the Nexus. To observe reality is to change reality; and, as an intelligent observer, an Enabled asma can manipulate reality by processes analogous to those used by the wizards of the Confederation.

  Reality manipulators typically use Screens to protect themselves against destruction and Enhancers to boost their powers. To Enable an asma, its makers equip it with actual physical devices designed to fulfill these functions, though other approaches are possible. Wizards, for example, use the Meditations of Balance to build protective metashells to serve as Screens; through the Meditations of Power each Enhances his strength by drawing upon those resources which are available to him through his alliance with one or more of Those Who May Not Be Named.

  The asma which runs Dalar ken Halvar's Combat College - the entity known to the world as Paraban Senk - is a machine of Medium Enablement. The Combat College also contains other asma (the word is both singular and plural) of Minor Enablement, and these perform such minor miracles as the fabrication of food (though some are misperforming in their old age, and others have expired entirely as a consequence of twenty thousand years of neglect).

  None of the asma in the Combat College are of any great consequence, for even Paraban Senk himself is but a mosquito in his powers when compared to one of the world's Great Dragons, such as the delinquent asma self-named Jocasta. Fortunately for the world, the delinquent Jocasta - an asma of Maximum Enablement - is currently held prisoner by Anaconda Stogirov in the Temple of Blood in the far-distant city of Obooloo, an ocean away from the city of Dalar ken Halvar, and hence of no consequence whatsoever to this particular history.

  Upon the pool there lies

  A sun tricked out as sun,

  Though truth in truth the lair -

  And step you to illusion to think

  Its weight sustain you?

  Again the burning sun, again the downstrike, again the wrenching turn, again the searing explosion, again the downfall of the enemy. Lupus Lon Oliver had done this for what seemed like a lifetime, pitting himself against machine-generated enemies time and time again. But what good would any of this training do him? None, if he failed against Hatch. And he could still fail, he knew it. He could fail, wasting a lifetime's chance, the unexpected opportunity of a lifetime.

  As the wreckage of his latest machine-generated opponent fell through the burning sky, Lupus circl
ed, thinking of Asodo Hatch and the murder-in-the-fact which had stained the Frangoni warrior's blade. As if in image of Lupus's own inner turmoil, the clouds writhed pink and purple. Bulbous. Swollen. Brutal. The image of a monstrous indigestion.

  Fearful of those writhing clouds, fearful of the possibility of some idiosyncratic illusion tank glitch plunging him into a living hell, Lupus aborted the training sequence with a curt command. When he found himself back in the initiation chair, Lupus looked at the communications screen built into the combat bay. Paraban Senk's face did not appear there, which implied that the Teacher of Control had not been monitoring this training session. Instead, the screen was dominated by the combat bay's own identification logo.

  Lupus Lon Oliver addressed the communications screen, giving the combat bay his next command:

  "I'm logged to train with Dog Java on the MegaCommand. Give me Dog Java's status."

  Dog Java was a Combat Cadet who was by birth one of the Pang. As a redskinned Ebrell Islander, Lupus Lon Oliver usually had little to do with the brown-skinned Pang, for he thought them his racial and social inferiors. Certainly Dog was a social inferior, for Dog belonged to the Yara, Dalar ken Halvar's Unreal underclass. But Lupus was cultivating Dog for a special purpose. As it says in the Book of Battle: even a broken stick can be used to kill.

  "Dog Java is waiting for you on your MegaCommand Cruiser," said the combat bay.

  "Then take me there," said Lupus.

  The world melted, buckled - and Lupus found himself standing on the bridge of a Galactic Class MegaCommand Cruiser in deep space. Dog Java was there, but Lupus did not at first acknowledge Dog's existence. Instead, Lupus stood studying the star patterns shown by the big visual display screen. Studying the star patterns, and covertly watching Dog for signs of intimidation. He wanted Dog to be intimidated. To be pliant. Obedient. Reliable. A sure and secure tool for his purposes.

  "You're late," said Dog Java, with an emphasis which owed nothing whatsoever to intimidation.