The air which Sparrow drew into his lungs was as humid as the contents of a warm bath; the tang of salt was gone.
The dog yipped in startlement. The smith set her down. She ran from one plant to another, snuffling furiously at their spreading roots. There was no true ground cover; thin, russet mud splashed the dog's feet and belly, though the muck slid from her leg braces like grease from heated iron.
Sparrow shrugged to loosen his woolen blouse. A streak of sweat between his shoulderblades already glued the fabric to his back. He could see the tops of trees kilometers away; some of them spiked, others with ribbons of foliage clumped into pompons. Closer to hand grew horsetails and low cycads like scaly balls tufted with fronds. They disappeared into the mist within a hundred meters.
Sparrow didn't bother to sigh. He was a hunter, long used to the punishment of climate and terrain: bitter cold, sleet storms, or this muggy swamp—it was all the same, and all to be accepted.
Besides, he knew what Hell was. On a plain so cold that metal cracked, frozen souls oozed forward like slime molds; infinitely slowly and forever, until the Final Day ended time. This was not Hell.
When Sparrow opened his small mirror to determine his course, the face immediately beaded with condensate. He took off one gauntlet and wiped the screen with the edge of his palm; then repeated the motion. The difference in temperature across the discontinuity—and the saturated atmosphere here—had blurred the surface a second time.
Mala's fortress bower squatted on the screen. Part of the haze fogging the image was on the far side of the view. A red bead on the mirror's bronze frame gave Sparrow a vector to his destination.
"C'mon, you fool dog!" the smith called as he set off. Mud swelled over his feet at every step, but the high laces would prevent the sandals from being stripped off. Not that Sparrow couldn't go on barefoot—or naked and weaponless—but he didn't intend to do so.
The dog could find her master by scent easily enough, but Sparrow was worried about the sorts of things he knew lurked in this swamp. Not worried for himself, but the fool dog didn't have any sense at all. . . .
When there was something like firm ground running in the proper direction, they followed it. When open water crossed their path, Sparrow waded and the dog swam. The warm, sluggish waters didn't disturb the bitch the way living surf had done.
The dog barked in a high-pitched, enthusiastic tone and with the regularity of a metronome while she paddled. Sparrow glowered until there was a sudden commotion on the far bank of the stream they were crossing. The unfamiliar yapping had panicked a fat-bodied amphibian, three meters long and far too big to prey on fish. It bolted through the marsh in the opposite direction.
The dog hopped onto the bank and shook herself violently. "Fool animal . . . ," Sparrow murmured as he climbed out beside her. He scratched between her ears, his touch as delicate as a delivering midwife's despite his gauntlets.
They passed numbers of sail-backed edaphosaurs chewing vegetation with peglike teeth. For the most part, the herbivores ignored the human and his dog, though one—a male with scarlet wattles—grunted a challenge. All the edaphosaurs wore collars of black plastic: control devices, marking these beasts as members of a herd.
Nainfari's cattle; so Nainfari's hold would not be far distant.
After three hours of slogging, Sparrow paused and sat on a cycad. Fronds, squashed outward by the smith's weight, tickled the backs of his calves. Insects were lured by pink flowers growing from the cycad's scaly hunk. They buzzed around Sparrow in confusion at his mammalian odor.
The smith and his dog had just crossed from a headland between a pair of streams emptying into a pond. It had been deep wading, and for a moment Sparrow thought he too would have to swim. His equipment was waterproof, and the smith wouldn't shrink either; but it was a reasonable time to settle for a moment and wring some of the muck from his blouse and breeches.
Edaphosaurs browsed the horsetails on the margins of the pond. A swimming reptile, scarcely the length of the smith's forearm, surfaced in the center of the standing water. A fish glittered in its tiny jaws. It vanished again as suddenly into the black fluid again.
Sparrow rose to his feet. His dog, panting and mud-stained except for her nose and forehead, remained sprawled on the ground with only her head lifted. "All right, dog," the smith grumbled. "You wanted to come, so I brought—"
The dog jumped up with a snarl.
Sparrow turned, quick as a baited bear. The dimetrodon, ten meters from them and poised to rush, hunched back in surprise. Its jaws of large, ragged teeth gaped wider, but the blush darkening the big carnivore's fin indicated fear and consternation rather than anger.
The dimetrodon grunted. The dog backed between Sparrow's legs. Her growl sounded like a saw cutting rock many kilometers away.
"There's no need for trouble," Sparrow murmured. His arms were splayed at his sides. He began to edge away. The pond was to his right.
The herd of edaphosaurs shuddered into a slow-motion stampede. Those nearest to the dimetrodon waddled off, and their motion warned the next rank of the beasts. The edaphosaurs' sails wobbled with the sinuous motion of their lizardlike bodies.
"No trouble at all . . . ," the smith said.
The dimetrodon rocked forward and back on its four splayed legs. It wasn't likely to charge now; but there was limited room for reflexes in the sail-backed carnivore's small brain. You couldn't be sure which one was going to trip the beast into motion.
Spray like the base of a waterfall lifted from the far edge of the pond. A dozen figures on repulsion skimmers tore through the horsetails, heading across the surface of the black water. Edaphosaurs which had splashed midway into the pond for fear of the carnivore now swam in terrified circles.
The leader of the band on skimmers was a four-armed android, but the remainder of his party wore slave collars. The bulk of them were either humans from the Open Lands or Lomeri, the scaled, bipedal lizardmen who inhabited Plane Two. One female had the squat somatotype of Plane Five.
The newcomers were dressed in leather harnesses and rags which they wore for their brilliant hues rather than protection or modesty. Knives, handguns, and shoulder weapons on slings bounced and jangled as the party crossed the water.
The android held his skimmer's controls with one pair of hands and aimed a multibarreled weapon with the other. The gun belched a white flash and a hypersonic c-crack-k-k from its twenty muzzles. A volley of fléchettes spewed toward the dimetrodon.
The beast blatted in surprise. At least a half dozen of the miniature projectiles punched out scales or made bloody dimples in the thin fabric of the carnivore's sail. The animal sound was submerged by the slave gang's roaring weapons.
Bullets, laser light, a sulphurous bolt of plasma, and a sheaf of thumb-sized rockets raked the area of the dimetrodon in a deafening salvo. Most missed their intended target. A human's laser sheared through the control column of a Lomeri's skimmer, sending the latter tumbling wildly across the water.
Enough of the salvo hit to rip the carnivore to bloody rags. Explosive projectiles sawed almost through the dimetrodon's short neck, while the plasma bolt reduced the beast's sail to blackened spines from which the connecting tissue had burned.
The reptile thrashed in the mud. Individual muscles retained vitality which the entity as a whole had lost.
The hunters swept up onto the bank. They grounded their skimmers, then got off and formed a semicircle around Sparrow at the distance of two or three meters. The Fifth Plane female scooped up the lizardman from the disabled skimmer. She tossed him negligently to the mud at the edge of the pond.
The band's weapons smoked or glowed from the recent firing. They pointed in various directions, but most of them pointed at Sparrow. The dog crouched between the smith's legs, growling below the range of audibility.
"Hey, Morfari," the squat female called to her android leader. "Give him t' me, hey? He's just about the right size."
"Balls to that!" snorted the human male with the laser. He was grinning. "I'm not getting sloppy tenths again!"
"You can share, can't you, Lilius?" Morfari said. He broke open his volley gun, ejecting the fired casings so that he could reload with another bundle of fléchettes from a belt pouch. "You don't need the same part, after all."
"Use the Chewer," chittered a Lomeri slave, pointing his snub-nosed rocket launcher at the quivering dimetrodon.
"Naw, it's a female. That rules it out for Lilius."
Morfari's arms were muscular and well-shaped. He waggled his reloaded volley gun in a one-handed arc that lifted the weapon's point of aim over Sparrow's head and lowered it again to the other side.
"Greetings, stranger," the android said. "I'm Morfari. My father, Nainfari, is the king hereabouts, and me 'n the crew guard his cattle."
The big female chuckled. One of the Lomeri began to pick his pointed teeth theatrically with a dagger.
"Now . . . ," Morfari continued. "Just who might you be?"
The smith shrugged. "My name's Sparrow," he said. "I'm passing through your father's domains, but I'll do no hurt to his herds."
"You can say that again, sweetie," said a human slave whose automatic rifle was pointed at Sparrow's belly. The slave ran a finger around his collar in a habitual action. The plastic had chafed a callus on his neck.
"We saved his life," said the Fifth Plane female, more than half serious. "He owes us a little entertainment at least."
"Lady . . . ," said the smith in a voice as detached as distant lightning. "My master sent a man who could fight his own battles."
He opened his iron-shod hands. Sparrow's grip would span the trunk of the largest tree on this island. "I thank you for killing the monster, but I would have avoided it had you not arrived . . . and if the beast would not be avoided, then I would have torn its head off—"
He smiled, an expression of power and implacable determination. "—as you have done yourselves, with your weapons."
Sparrow cocked his right hip so that he could scratch his dog behind the ears with his left fingertips. The touch wouldn't calm her, but it would keep her steady . . . and it would keep the smith steady also, at a time when death could come as easily as when the rock of a sheer cliff began to flake under the weight of the climber.
Three of the lizardmen chirped to one another in their own language. A human said, "You know, he just mighta done that thing," as his thumb polished a worn place on the receiver of his grenade launcher.
"I'm a courier," Sparrow said as he straightened. "My master sent me with a message for the Princess Mala. I'll deliver it and leave."
The slave gang responded with hoots and guffaws. Their collars were control devices. A signal, from the lavaliere bouncing on Morfari's chest or from the base unit at Nainfari's hold, would inject pain or even death through the collars.
But Morfari and his hunting party were clearly united in enthusiasm for what they did—and the ways they were permitted to do it.
The android chuckled. He rubbed his chin with one hand and scratched his back with another. All the time, his remaining pair of arms kept the volley gun aimed at Sparrow's belly.
"Well, Master Sparrow," Morfari said. "I don't think that's a good idea at all. Even if you got past—and I grant you might, big fellow—the Chewers—"
He nodded toward the dimetrodon; one of the beast's hind legs still clawed the air slowly.
"—and the Gulpers, there's what my sister's put up to keep her privacy."
To the side, a joke between a pair of Lomeri turned ugly. One of the lizardmen snatched out a knife. The Fifth Plane human, apparently Morfari's adjutant, knocked the knife-wielder down with a clout across the temple.
"The outer ring," Morfari continued, seemingly oblivious to the fuss among his slaves, "that'll cut you apart while you're still a kilometer away, even if you—"
His pale, perfect face smiled.
"—slide on your belly through the mud. Inside her walls, nothing bigger than a roach can live, without dear Mala gives it special dispensation. That's pretty good defenses, don't you think?"
Sparrow shrugged. His eyes were on Morfari; his expression calm, almost bovine.
"And besides that . . . ," the android continued.
His tone was sharper from irritation at the smith's placidity. The slaves stopped their japes and looked to their weapons.
". . . my father's told his cattle guards to slay all vagabonds they find in the neighborhood of Mala's bower. What do you think of that, Master Vagabond?"
Sparrow shrugged again. "My master sent me with a message," he said calmly. "I have to deliver it."
"What would you say," Morfari snarled, "if I told you that we were going to kill you right here in the mud?"
"Gloves," said Sparrow as he spread the thumbs and forefingers of his arc gauntlets. "Cut!"