"None at all?" somebody down the table cried. "Then we are indeed under the ban."
Her father rapped with the pommel of his poignard. "You've heard the worst, now. What's in your minds that we should do? You first, Phosg."
The peasant representative rose and cleared his throat. "Lord Prince, this castle is no more dear to you than my cottage is to me.
I'll fight for mine as you would for yours." There was a quick mutter of approval along the table. "Well said, Phosg!"
"An example for all of us!" The others spoke in turn; a few tried to make speeches. Chartiphon said "Fight. What else."
"I am a priest of Dralm," Xentos said, "and Dralm is a god of peace, but I say, fight with Dralm's blessing. Submission to evil men is the worst of all sins."
"Rylla," her father said. "Better die in armor than live in chains," she replied. "When the time comes, I will be in armor with the rest of you." Her father nodded. "I expected no less from any of you." He rose, and all with him. "I thank you. At sunset we will dine together; until then servants will attend you. Now, if you please, leave me with my daughter. Chartiphon, you and Xentos stay."
Chairs scraped and feet scuffed as they went out. The closing door cut off the murmur of voices. Chartiphon had begun to fill his stubby pipe.
"I know there's no use looking to Balthar of Beshta," Rylla said, "but wouldn't Sarrask of Sask aid us? We're better neighbors to him than Gormoth would be."
"Sarrask of Sask's a fool," Chartiphon said shortly. "He doesn't know that once Gormoth has Hostigos, his turn will come next."
"He knows that," Xentos differed. "He'll try to strike before Gormoth does, or catch Gormoth battered from having fought us. But even if he wanted to help us, he dares not. Even King Kaiphranos dares not aid those whom Styphon's House would destroy."
"They want that land in Wolf Valley, for a temple-farm," she considered. "I know that would be bad, but… "
"Too late," Xentos told her. "They have made a compact with Gormoth, to furnish him fireseed and money to hire mercenaries, and when he has conquered Hostigos he will give them the land." He paused and added "And it was on my advice, Prince, that you refused them."
"I'd have refused against your advice, Xentos," her father said. "Long ago I vowed that Styphon's House should never come into Hostigos while I lived, and by Dralm and by Galzar neither shall they! They come into a princedom, they build a temple, they make temple-farms and slaves of everybody on them. They tax the Prince, and make him tax the people, till nobody has anything left. Look at that temple-farm in Sevenhills Valley!"
"Yes, you'd hardly believe it," Chartiphon said. "Why, they even make the peasants for miles around cart their manure in, till they have none left for their own fields. Dralm only knows what they do with it." He puffed at his pipe. "I wonder why they want Sevenhills Valley."
"There's something in the ground there that makes the water of those springs taste and smell badly," her father said.
"Sulfur," said Xentos, "But why do they want sulfur?"
CORPORAL Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police, squatted in the brush at the edge of the old field and looked across the small brook at the farmhouse two hundred yards away. It was scabrous with peeling yellow paint, and festooned with a sagging porch-roof. A few white chickens pecked uninterestedly in the littered barnyard; there was no other sign of life, but he knew that there was a man inside. A man with a rifle, who would use it; a man who had murdered once, broken jail, would murder again.
He looked at his watch; the minute-hand was squarely on the nine. Jack French and Steve Kovac would be starting down on the road above, where they had left the car. He rose, unsnapping the retaining-strap of his holster.
"Watch that middle upstairs window," he said. "I'm starting now."
"I'm watching it." Behind him, a rifle-action clattered softly as a cartridge went into the chamber. "Luck." He started forward across the seedling-dotted field. He was scared, as scared as he had been the first time, back in '51, in Korea, but there was nothing he could do about that. He just told his legs to keep moving, knowing that in a few moments he wouldn't have time to be scared.
He was within a few feet of the little brook, his hand close to the butt of the Colt, when it happened.
There was a blinding flash, followed by a moment's darkness. He thought he'd been shot; by pure reflex, the.38-special was in his hand. Then, all around him, a flickering iridescence of many colors glowed, a perfect hemisphere fifteen feet high and thirty across, and in front of him was an oval desk with an instrument-panel over it, and a swivel-chair from which a man was rising. Young, well-built; a white man but, he was sure, not an American. He wore loose green, trousers and black ankle-boots and a pale green shirt. There was a shoulder holster under his left arm, and a weapon in his right hand.
He was sure it was a weapon, though it looked more like an electric soldering-iron, with two slender rods instead of a barrel, joined, at what should be the muzzle, by a blue ceramic or plastic knob. It was probably something that made his own Colt Official Police look like a kid's cap-pistol, and it was coming up fast to line on him.
He fired, held the trigger back to keep the hammer down on the fired chamber, and flung himself to one side, coming down, on his left hand and left hip, on a smooth, polished floor. Something, probably the chair, fell with a crash. He rolled, and kept on rolling until he was out of the nacreous dome of light and bumped hard against something. For a moment he lay still, then rose to his feet, letting out the trigger of the Colt.
What he'd bumped into was a tree. For a moment he accepted that, then realized that there should be no trees here, nothing but low brush. And this tree, and the ones all around, were huge; great rough columns rising to support a green roof through which only a few stray gleams of sunlight leaked. Hemlocks; must have been growing here while Columbus was still conning Isabella into hocking her jewelry. He looked at the little stream he had been about to cross when this had happened. It was the one thing about this that wasn't completely crazy. Or maybe it was the craziest thing of all.
He began wondering how he was going to explain this. "While approaching the house," he began, aloud and in a formal tone, "I was intercepted by a flying saucer landing in front of me, the operator of which threatened me with a ray-pistol. I defended myself with my revolver, firing one round..
No. That wouldn't do at all. He looked at the brook again, and began to suspect that there might be nobody to explain to. Swinging out the cylinder of his Colt, he replaced the fired round. Then he decided to junk the regulation about carrying the hammer on an empty chamber, and put in another one.
VERKAN Vall watched the landscape outside the almost invisible shimmer of the transposition-field; now he was in the forests of the Fifth Level. The mountains, of course, were always the same, but the woods around flickered and shifted. There was a great deal of randomness about which tree grew where, from time-line to time-line. Now and then he would catch fleeting glimpses of open country, and the buildings and airport installations of his own people. The red light overhead went off and on, a buzzer sounding each time. The conveyer dome became a solid iridescence, and then a mesh of cold inert metal. The red light turned green. He picked up a sigma-ray needler from the desk in front of him and holstered it. As he did, the door slid open and two men in Paratime Police green, a lieutenant and a patrolman, entered. When they saw him, they relaxed, holstering their own weapons.
"Hello, Chief's Assistant," the lieutenant said. "Didn't pick anything up, did you?"
In theory, the Ghaldron-Hesthor transposition-field was impenetrable; in practice, especially when two paratemporal vehicles going in opposite "directions" interpenetrated, the field would weaken briefly, and external objects, sometimes alive and hostile, would intrude. That was why paratimers kept weapons ready at hand, and why conveyers were checked immediately upon materializing. It was also why some paratimers didn't make it home.