Hansen barked out a laugh. “You don’t think I owe it to honor to meet the challenge, then?” he asked.
“Taddeusz would think that,” said the veteran very carefully. “And it might be that I would think that, were it me whom Taddeusz challenged. But just as being a warrior is different where you come from, laddie . . . I think honor is different as well. Not so?”
Hansen looked at him. There was no light and no expression at all. Maharg drew in his breath.
“Which is not to say,” said Malcolm, “that I ever doubted you were a warrior either, you must see.”
Hansen relaxed. “Yeah, I guess I do,” he said.
He laughed harshly again. “Look,” he added, “the main thing I see is that there’ll be time after a night’s sleep for anything we can figure out to do. And I’ll be in better shape to deal with it then.”
Malcolm squeezed his shoulder again. He and Maharg went to their own cubicles.
Dawn streamed through the hole in the roof. The weather had finally broken, and the sky was clear.
Hansen raised his head from the cocoon of furs—blinked—snatched up the pry-bar. There was a meter-long snake, probably disturbed from its winter burrow in the thatch, coiled in the open front of his battlesuit.
He got stealthily to his feet. The snake turned its head.
It had one bright eye and a milky globe for the other.
“Well, Hansssen . . . ,” Walker said. “Are you ready to be my man for a battlesssuit? For a sssuit that a god would envy, to be my man . . . ?”
Walker’s forked tongue flicked and toyed with something scarcely visible, caught in the latch of the armor.
“I’d need it in three days,” Hansen said. “Otherwise—”
He took a deep breath and made the decision that his mind had waited till dawn to confirm. “Otherwise I’ll fight him with what I’ve got.”
“In no time at all, Hansssen,” the snake replied. “I have told you that you musssn’t think of duration here, you musssn’t. . . .”
Hansen tossed the pry-bar onto his bed. It rang on the planks. “All right,” he said. “What do I have to do?”
A ray of sunlight caught the thing Walker was playing with and turned it to a wire of gold. It was a strand of blond hair, long blond hair—
The hair of Golsingh’s wife Unn.
Chapter Twenty-two
The door of Eisner’s palace slid open as smoothly as oil moving in water.
Eisner laughed humorlessly from within. “You’re alone, Rolls?” she asked. “No troupe of jugglers or dancing girls in attendance?”
Rolls ducked as he stepped into the library. He felt but could not hear the door close behind him.
“I don’t need to put on side with you, Eisner,” he said. “In fact, I walked instead of riding.”
“Should I congratulate you for that?” she asked tartly. “We can do anything we please, can’t we? We gods.” There was bitterness in the final word.
Eisner sat at the hub of a semi-circular desk whose surface, a gorgeous expanse of burl walnut, was covered with various forms of paper.
Books were interfiled with their open edges together, each marking a place in the other, and in worms of six or eight volumes with each spine thrust into the open edge of the next. Cards and sheets of paper, some of them covered with cryptic notes, marked other places. Swathes of gate-fold hardcopy peeked from the stacks of bound volumes.
There was no dust in the room.
Eisner had a collection of bound sheet music open in front of her. Light fell on it from a hidden source, providing perfect illumination.
“Yes, the problem’s always been to decide what to do rather than whether or not it’s possible,” Rolls agreed.
He held his left hand closed. Eisner glanced at it, then back to his face, but for the moment the big man ignored her interest.
“Did you come for a reason?” Eisner demanded.
“My, what a greeting,” Rolls said with a rueful smile.
Eisner rubbed her forehead in self-annoyance. “I’m sorry, Rolls,” she said. “With all the time in—” her lips twisted “—in the world, I can certainly talk with a friend. And you’ve always been as much of a friend as I allowed.”