"Coincidence?"
"Yes. That we should come so close to meeting here." Eagerly, with all the false sincerity he could muster, he asked, "How is Seri? Is he well and flourishing?"
"He is well," said Flay. "He did not tell us you were back."
"He doesn't know it."
"Oh?" said Flay. "Well, it is different in different lands. With us, a friend and partner would be the first to know."
"Not," said Kettrick, "if your friend and partner is an honest man and wishes to stay that way…and you contemplate a crime."
Now he reached resolutely for the cup and laughed to cover his unsteadiness.
"You knew, perhaps, that the I–C drove me out of the Cluster, under pain of arrest if I ever came back."
"I knew that. Seri himself told me when he first came here."
"Ah," said Kettrick. "Then you must understand that I came back secretly."
He drank, aware that Flay was watching him with eyes like two little bright hard stones. Aware of Boker drinking, desperately silent. Aware of Chai in a corner, always in a corner watching, and her muzzle twitching as it did when something smelled wrong to her.
"Secretly?" said Flay. "And yet you are trading."
"Boker is trading. My friend and I are only shadows." He grinned at Flay. "Boker is transporting shadows to a certain place, and in the meantime we're depending on my friends to keep the secret in case the I–C asks." He leaned a little closer. "Because of that the trading will be extra good…if you haven't already stripped yourselves for Seri. We can afford it, you see, because in a very short while we'll be rich."
"Shadows," said Flay. "Well, well. And when will the shadows come out into the light? Where does a trader who cannot trade go to get rich in the Cluster?"
"To the White Sun," said Kettrick, "to buy heartstones from the Krinn. That's where I was going when they caught me, just a hair's breadth away from a million credits. I couldn't forget that, Flay. That's why I came back, and that's why Boker is risking a stretch at Narkad to help me."
Flay's eyes opened wider, losing some of their hard glaze. "A million credits," he repeated. Suddenly he was roaring with laughter. "We don't give a hang for money here, but we like courage, and we like independence, and we don't greatly like the I–C, who come meddling with their damned spot-checks every so often to see if we're sending out drugs or poisons."
He leaned over and shook Kettrick by the shoulder. "Good luck, Johnny. I'm glad to see you again, and since I will not see you again after you go, we must make this week a special one, a sort of hail and farewell from the Firgals." He filled the cups again, all bluff good fellowship and honest joy. "How's that? We'll hunt, and eat, and drink, and shower each other with gifts, and we'll trade, even though Seri was just here. We'll do you better than you did on Gurra." He thrust the cup at Kettrick and another at Boker. "The women have been weaving a great deal of cloth, and last winter's pelts were especially…"
Kettrick caught it. "Gurra?"
"You just came from there, didn't you?" asked Flay. "I thought you said…"
"No," said Kettrick. "We came from Pellin—" naming one of the alternates to the Gurra route " — and the trading was good there."
"Pellin," said Flay, shaking his head. "I must have heard wrong. Well, it's no matter. No matter at all." He went to the stairway and hollered down it in his own tongue. While his back was turned both men tossed back their drinks and wiped the nervous sweat off their faces, and Boker's lips formed silently a word that meant, "There was a dirty one!"
The tension seemed to have disappeared. A buxom girl with thick red braids swinging down her back brought up a huge tray of food, and they ate, and Flay's strapping sons began to come in from their work, and they ate and drank, and after a while everyone was happy and roaring out songs.
At a quite early hour, because the Firgals went early to bed, Kettrick and Boker rode back to the ship in the dark blowing dusk, loaded with food and drink. Three of Flay's sons went along as escort, to keep them from straying in the hills. When they reached the ship the sons went in with them, smiling and interested, chattering in fluent lingua. They were fascinated by ships, they said, and wanted to look around.
They looked, while Hurth and Glevan stuffed themselves and fell gratefully into their bunks. Kettrick had half expected something like this, so the sons peered everywhere without finding the spare bars hidden among the cargo, seeing only the obvious break in the pump linkage that fed the air supply. They stood around watching for quite a while after Boker and Kettrick went to work on the jump unit, and Kettrick fumed inwardly because they had to keep the pace leisurely while the audience was around. Finally the sons got bored and drifted off to the bridgeroom and went to sleep on the seats. After that Boker and Kettrick worked like madmen.
When at last it was Kettrick's turn to sleep it was easy to believe that everything would go all right now. The sons would be a nuisance, but as long as that link bar was missing they would be content. Boker and Hurth and Glevan would work around the clock. Kettrick would do the trading and keep Flay happy, and help the others as much as he could. They would have Grellah jump ready in record time and…
And go on after Seri with their hands reached out to catch the Doomstar.
And how much chance did they have to catch it, or stop it, or even slow it down.
The Firgals were in on it. They knew. Perhaps somewhere in that honeycomb town they had hidden away a piece of another world's destruction, bribed by Seri's glibly friendly, subtly threatening tongue. Just one thing promised to them would be enough for these people…safety for their own sun, their own cherished world. "The Doomstar will never shine for us." They had given their lives, their devotion, and endless hard work to this dying land. It would be a little thing to them to sacrifice some other planet, some other sun, to the ambitions of other men, as long as Thwayn was safe. The quarrel was none of theirs. All they knew was what belonged to them, what they made with their own strong hands and kept at the price of their own blood.
He did not know that he could entirely blame them.
But he could and did hate Seri with a vicious and dreadful hatred.
He slept and dreamed, and this time he walked in the sick light of the Doomstar with Boker and Nillaine and Flay and a host of others, all led by Glevan beating solemnly on a muffled drum. Presently Kettrick left them and ran by himself, searching and calling through the twisted streets, because Larith was somewhere there and needed him. He heard her voice quite clearly, crying out his name. Once or twice he saw the vanishing flutter of her skirts. He did not find her.
Next day he began the trading. It was too cold for an outside fair around the ship such as they had had at Gurra. Long lines of pack animals carried the bales of boxes into the city, to the Council Hall, and carried the furs and woollens and raw yarns back to Grellah.
If Seri had actually done any trading here, it had not made a noticeable dent in the Firgals' wealth. Kettrick traded all day and then took his turn with the others at night in the rusty bowels of the ship, getting glassy-eyed for lack of sleep but pleased all the same that Grellah would be ready in a little over two days instead of four.
Next morning Flay came out to the ship with no pack animals, but with a dozen men accoutred for the hunt, and a gaggle of "hounds," hairy creatures all tooth and claw and snuffling eagerness.
"There is no haste, Johnny," he said. "My son the smith, and he is the best smith even though he is my son, says it will take him more than seven days to make your bar. Perhaps as many as ten, because he must get a special metal."