Chapter Fifty-eight

Sparrow sat in the saddle of the dragonfly he had built, looking down on the rest of what he had done. The smoke was so general that only strong gusts swept it from the roofs of Solfygg, and those same winds whipped flames across the tiles.

The army arrayed to the west of the city was disengaging cautiously. Servants had struck the tents. Warriors, a score at a time, handed over their battlesuits to be loaded on draft mammoths.

The sky around Sparrow darkened. His dog wormed into the fold of the smith's tunic. The beast opened its mouth as if to howl, but its jaws closed again each time with a dry smack.

Sparrow thought for a moment that a column of smoke had enveloped him, but the dragonfly did not respond when he lifted the control wheel on its axis.

He—they; he stroked the dog, to reassure it and to assure himself of its presence—were in a globe of deep amber light. Sparrow could see hints of motion through the surface in one direction.

It was a tunnel, not a globe. A figure appeared, walking toward the dragonfly and its riders. A woman—

Not a woman. A man with fine oriental features, wearing flowing robes.

The hem of each sheer garment showed beneath the hem of the next above. There were at least a dozen robes. All of them were basically green, but the shades were graduated by what seemed to be no more than a few hundred angstroms.

The dog shivered.

"Who are you?" the smith demanded.

"My name is Saburo," the slender man said. "I'll guide you. You're to be my servant now."

"Am I, milord . . . ?" Sparrow said. He had no feeling of motion, but striations in the wall of the tunnel suggested that something was happening. The color slipped down through the spectrum into orange.

"I was recently in the service of the King of Solfygg . . . ," Sparrow's tongue added.

Saburo looked into the smith's eyes and jerked back from what he saw there.

"Of course, of course," Saburo muttered. "I should have known, given where the recommendation came from."

He smiled formally at Sparrow.

"Nothing like that, master smith," Saburo explained. "You do, after all, have to go somewhere now. I am offering you a home with me, with better conditions and services than you could possibly find anywhere in the Open Lands. In return, you would be expected to act for me in those instances when I need a skillful craftsman."

He cleared his throat. "And you could leave my service at any time," he added with his face slightly averted.

"You said 'recommendation,' " Sparrow said. "Whose?"

Saburo smiled again, minutely looser than the first time. "From Commissioner Hansen," he explained. "He says that you are as skillful as the servant he recently lost himself. I trust his judgment implicitly on anything of this sort."

"Actually," Saburo added with a frown at the memory, "Hansen said the friend he recently lost. But he meant servant, I'm sure."

Sparrow still said nothing. His face was opaque. His fingers moved, gently massaging the fur of the dog huddled to his warmth.

"Ah . . . ," said Saburo. "Ah, Master Sparrow, you would honor me if you accepted my offer of employment."

"All right," Sparrow said at last. "We'll come with you willingly. My lord."

The walls of the tunnel now were a streaky red, as bright as the flames which devoured Solfygg.