“Yes, in the official police. We had a tradition of such work in our family.
Some of that may have come from the Cherokee side of it, if the name
means anything to you. However, we also claimed collateral descent from
one of the first private inquiry agents on record, back on Earth before
spaceflight. Regardless of how true that may be, I found him a useful
model. You see, an archetype-”
The man broke off. Unease crossed his features. “Best we go to sleep,” he
said. “We’ve a long distance to cover in the morning.”
She looked outward. “Here is no morning.”
They retired. Mistherd rose and cautiously flexed limberness back into his
muscles. Before returning to the Sister of Lyrth, he risked a glance
through a pane in the car. Bunks were made up, side by side, and the
humans lay in them. Yet the man had not touched her, though hers was a
bonny body, and nothing that had
passed between them suggested he meant to do so.
Eldritch, humans. Cold and claylike. And they would overrun the.beautiful
wild world? Mistherd spat in disgust. It must not happen. It would not
happen. She who reigned had vowed that. .
The lands of William Irons were immense. But this was because a barony
was required to support him, his kin and cattle, on native crops whose
cultivation was still poorly understood. He raised some Terrestrial plants
as well, by summerlight and in conservatories. However, these were a
luxury. The true conquest of northern Arctica lay in yerba hay, in
bathyrhiza wood, in pericoup and glycophyllon, and eventually, when the
market had expanded with population and industry, in chalcanthemum for
city florists and pelts of cage-bred rover for city furriers.
That was in a tomorrow Irons did not expect that he would live -l to see.
Sherrinford wondered if the man really expected anyone ever would.
The room was warm and bright. Cheerfulness crackled in the fireplace.
Light from fluoropanels gleamed off hand-carven chests t and chairs and
tables, off colorful draperies and shelved dishes. The outwayer sat solid in
his high seat, stoutly clad, beard flowing down his chest. His wife and
daughters brought coffee, whose fragrance joined the remnant odors of a
hearty supper, to him, his :s guests and his sons.
But outside, wind hooted, lightning flared, thunder bawled, rain crashed on
roof and walls and roared down to swirl among the courtyard cobblestones.
Sheds and barns crouched against hugeness beyond. Trees groaned, and did
a wicked undertone of laughter run beneath the lowing of a frightened
cow? A burst of hailstones hit the tiles like knocking knuckles.
You could feel how distant your neighbors were, Sherrinford
thought. And nonetheless they were the people whom you saw
oftenest, did daily business with by visiphone (when a solar storm
didn’t make gibberish of their voices and chaos of their faces)
or in the flesh, partied with, gossiped and intrigued with, inter-
a
,s
married with; in the end, they were the people who would bury you.
The lights of the coastal towns were monstrously further away.
William Irons was a strong man. Yet when now he spoke, fear was in
his tone. “You’d truly go over Troll Scarp?”
“Do you mean Hanstein Palisades?” Sherrinford responded, more
challenge than question.
“No outwayer calls it anything but Troll Scarp,” Barbro said.
And how had a name like that been reborn, light-years and centuries
from Earth’s Dark Ages?
“Hunters, trappers, prospectors-rangers, you call themtravel in those
mountains,” Sherrinford declared.
“In certain parts,” Irons said. “That’s allowed, by a pact once made
‘tween a man and the Queen after he’d done well by a jack-o’-the-hill
that a satan had hurt. Wherever the plumablanca grows, men may fare,
if they leave man-goods on the altar boulders in payment for what
they take out of the land. Elsewhere” -one fist clenched on a chair arm
and went slack again-” ‘s not wise to go.”
“It’s been done, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes. And some came back all right, or so they claimed, though
I’ve heard they were never lucky afterward. And some didn’t; they
vanished. And some who returned babbled of wonders and horrors, and