Chapter Three

"I didn't know you'd be here, North," Hansen said to the man who walked up behind him on the stone-railed loggia of the palace, overlooking Frekka's expanding suburbs.

North chuckled. "I'm selling my wares, Commissioner Hansen. Why are you here?"

"The only thing you have to sell," Hansen said as he turned to face the taller man, "is ways to die. What are you doing here?"

The breeze held a crackling undertone of warriors at battle practice in the near distance, cutting at one another with arcs on reduced settings. Occasionally, suits clashed together like anvils in collision.

Closer at hand, workmen hammered and shouted to one another during the construction of a long two-story building. Snow overlaying the job site had been trampled into muddy slush. The surface swallowed fallen tools and made the footing treacherous for folk carrying heavy loads, but the work continued.

The building would provide another barracks for the Royal Army. Every time King Venkatna advanced the borders of the West Kingdom, he gained an additional number of paid soldiers—for whom he would assuredly have need during the next campaigning season.

"I'm admiring your handiwork, Kommissar," North said coolly. "I may have encouraged warriors to battle, but you've taught the rulers here to conquer and crush their neighbors with an iron fist. My way, it was mostly warriors who died."

He laughed again. "You must be proud of the way you've improved things," he added.

Neither man was heavily built, but North was both taller and older than Nils Hansen. Where North's lanky build was obvious even under the cloak which he now wore in the guise of a trader, Hansen was close-coupled. Planes of muscle stretched over prominent bones framed the younger man's face, while North's visage was all crags and a hooked nose.

No one would have seen a similarity between the two men—unless he looked at their eyes. The certainty that glared from beneath North's deep brow was no colder than that which flashed back in Hansen's fierce gaze.

One eye and two; but both men killers, and both of them very sure in their actions, come what might.

"I didn't—" Hansen said.

The denial died on his lips. He turned and faced out over the city again. He knew what he'd done. . . .

Tooley comes at Hansen over the bodies of the slain. The hostile warrior's battlesuit is striped white and red as blood. No single warrior can stop him, but when Hansen grapples with Tooley, the sidemen strike as Hansen has taught them. Tooley's spluttering armor topples, streaming the black smoke of burning flesh.

It was a cold afternoon. No one came out to share the loggia with the two men, a trader and a warrior traveling from somewhere distant called Annunciation, perhaps in the far south. Clouds lowered from the middle heights of the sky, but the snow had not yet begun for the day.

Down on the practice field, soldiers were trained in the team tactics which were Hansen's gift to Northworld. An army of professionals who fought in groups of three was unanswerably superior to feudal levies whose honor baulked at the subordination needed for the new style of war.

"I wanted them to have peace," Hansen said softly. Construction work was pretty much the same everywhere. That wasn't true about every sort of job, though.

Sometimes when Hansen closed his eyes, he could remember the former life in which he was merely Commissioner of Special Units—the armed fist of the planetary security forces on Annunciation. Then the rules were simple and straightforward: the Commissioner didn't make policy, he only enforced it; and he enforced it with a harsh certainty that left no one in any doubt as to what had been decided.

Now. . . .

"There had to be a central government to keep every lord and fifty-hectare kinglet from fighting his neighbor six days out of seven," Hansen said, speaking to North and to himself at the same time. "But it could have been a just government. It was a just government for years, North."

He glared at the other man. "You know that!"

North shrugged. "I know what I see, Commissioner," he said. He spread a hand idly in the direction of the slave gang unfastening a forty-meter centerpole from the draft mammoth which had dragged it to the site.

"They were from the Thrasey community, I believe," North went on. "The community fell behind with its tribute. A battalion of the royal army swept them all up to work off the debt over the next three years—those who survive."

His eye swept critically over the slave gang. A woman slipped in the slush, but she managed to slide clear before the heavy beam crushed down.

"They didn't have a prayer of resisting, of course," North said. "Not against the army you trained."

The Thrasey warrior has the better armor. Hansen has bitten his tongue and his muscles burn with fatigue poisons, but his arc holds his opponent for the moment it takes.

Hansen's sideman strikes. The already-extended Thrasey battlesuit fails with a bang and a shower of sparks. An arm decorated with black and white checks flies to the side. The paint is seared at the shoulder end, and the limb is no longer attached to the warrior's torso. A stump of bone protrudes as the arm spins away.

"Are you laughing at me, North?" Hansen whispered to the air.

"Yes, Commissioner," North said. "I am laughing at you. How do you like the changes you've made here?"

The woman who had slipped fell again. An overseer uncoiled his whip. The guard watched the proceedings with mild interest. The battlesuit he wore was of poor quality, but it would do against a coffle of unarmed slaves if they chose to object to discipline.

Hansen gripped the railing before him. He squeezed as if he were trying to grind the brown-mottled stone into sand with his bare hands.

"Nobody cares but you and me, Hansen," North said. "You know that, don't you? The others are too wrapped up in their own affairs to notice what goes on among men."

"Those people care!" Hansen snapped, indicating the slave gang with a jerk of his chin.

"The other gods," North said. "As you well know. . . . And if you care so much about the folk here in the West Kingdom, Hansen—perhaps you should undo what you've created?"

Hansen looked at him. North stared off into the distance. The clouds over the practice field occasionally flickered with the light of the arc weapons spluttering beneath.

"The fellow you were talking to in the audience hall," North asked, careful not to catch Hansen's eye. "Salles. . . . Do you suppose he'll get the tax burden for Peace Rock reduced?"

"He won't get his petition heard," Hansen said flatly.

North hadn't picked up Salles' name and seat during the hubbub within the hall. He'd checked on Salles, as surely as he'd known the answer to the question he'd just asked Hansen.

"A moment . . . ," North murmured.

The tall man stepped to the door into the interior of the palace and snapped his fingers to bring a footman to him. The two held a brief, low-voiced conversation. At the end of it, coins clinked from North's purse and the palace servant scurried off on an errand.

Hansen's mind remained wrapped around the question, though he knew North had asked it only to goad him. "They'll fight, though, Salles and his neighbors," he said in a tone of cold analysis. His job on Annunciation had been a reactive one. He wasn't a strategist, but he was very good at predicting what somebody else would do next—so that he could smash them down with overwhelming force.

"They've seen what happened to Thrasey, so they won't be taken by surprise." Hansen took his hands from the railing and dusted the palms softly together. He was clearing them of the grit that might cause a slip if he needed suddenly to draw a pistol.

Not here, not now; but when Hansen's conscious mind moved on these paths, his reflexes ran down their checklist of actions that had kept him alive in former days and places.

"It won't help," his hard, emotionless voice continued. "Venkatna knows they'll be waiting, so he'll send sufficient force to deal with anything a bunch of yokels can raise. But they'll fight anyway, long odds on that."

Their three opponents wear suits as good as any on Northworld. Hansen's armor glows with the charges that are about to overload its circuits. His lungs burn and his right arm swells as though he had thrust it into an oven.

Arnor, Hansen's sideman, cuts home. An enemy falls. Another of the hostile warriors swipes sideways, slashing through the neck of Arnor's tan-and-gray battlesuit.

"If you really cared . . . ," came North's voice from somewhere in the world outside of memory. ". . . you could change it all back, Kommissar. You do know that, don't you?"

"I can't unteach team tactics!" Hansen snapped. "Or do you want me to collapse the whole continent in an earthquake, North? Swallow up everybody who knows anything or even might know anything? Is that what you'd do?"

"I wouldn't have caused the problem in the first place, Kommissar," the taller man said. All the play, all the mockery, had left his voice. His tones were as gray and certain as the promise of snow in the clouds above. "I was satisfied when my Searchers gleaned only the souls of warriors killed in skirmishes which hurt no one but those involved."

"You—" Hansen began.

North overrode his protest. "It's not a joke, Hansen. I've seen it! When the Day comes, we'll need all the warriors we can get—and even that won't be enough to stop the hordes that come from other planes when the walls of the Matrix grow too thin to prevent them."

North swallowed, forcing his mouth to close against its own dryness. He stared in Hansen's direction, but he was looking at something much farther away.

Captain North had led the foremost team of troubleshooters in the Exploration Service of the Consensus of Worlds. The expression that Hansen saw flash across the other man's face was fear or bleak despair. Either emotion was as out of place as love in the grin of a leopard.

There were rumors among the gods about what it was North had seen in the Matrix that cost him his left eye.

The wind skirled through the stone railing, reaching under Hansen's short dress cape and tugging the fastenings of North's heavier traveling garment. The taller man grinned, fully himself again in his smirking assumption of what he knew that others didn't.

"If you're asking me for advice, though, Kommissar . . . ," North resumed. "As a friend and fellow, that is . . . the way men fight isn't the—cause of this."

He pointed deliberately toward the job site. The woman who had fallen was managing to stay upright only by clinging to a naked doorpost. She was obviously either sick or malnourished.

"It's the state you created to impose peace," North said. "There's where the trouble is. Bring down the West Kingdom and you'll end the worst of that."

At the job site, the overseer who had lashed the woman to her feet was about to administer another whipping.

"Go back to constant wars, each lord against his neighbor, you mean?" Hansen asked harshly.

Unexpected movement caught the corner of Hansen's eye; he looked back at the construction site. A man in the ruffed livery of Venkatna's footmen was talking earnestly with the overseer and the battlesuited guard.

"They'll still be human beings, Hansen," North said softly. "They just won't be ground into the dirt by a single tyrant. . . . But I don't care."

"What's going on down there?" Hansen demanded.

The footman left with the sick woman in tow. Gold winked in the overseer's palm and the armored gauntlet of the guard.

North shrugged. "A little bribe," he said. "Enough that she'll be reported dead—not so very unlikely an outcome, is it, given her condition. The servant will send her on to Peace Rock, where she'll be safe for a time. She has relatives there."

He laughed. North's smile was like the crags of a cliff face, and his laughter was the surf hitting those rocks.

"You imposed this on the Open Lands against my will," North said. "Now we'll see if you're man enough to do something about it."

Snow began to fall onto the roofs of Venkatna's palace, but it was no colder than the ice in Hansen's glare.