might not be time enough later to do anything.
Early attempts at linking up with an expedition resulted in failure. Although the hunting parties were composed of females as well as males, the Dillians having few sexual distinctions when there was a job to do, she was too soft, too pretty for them to take seriously. It was a frustrating experience for her. All her life she had been not merely small but tiny, and had never been taken seriously then, either—until it was too late. But now, to be scorned because she was too attractive, that was an unkind blow. Not that the hunters, particularly the huge, strutting males, weren’t interested in her—they just weren’t interested from the business standpoint.
She felt as if she were going back to her beginnings, when, poor and trapped on a backward frontier world, she had gained money, influence, and eventually a way out by renting her body and other services. But things were different now; Dillia had some similarities, but not that way out—not now and not here. And she had nothing else, not even a thick coat for the wintry cold of the hunting grounds, nor any real weapons skills. Oh, she knew a laser pistol and its related cousins inside and out, but this was a semitech hex, where nothing beyond combustion weapons would work; and the hunting ground, Gedemondas, was a nontech hex, where killing was accomplished with bows and arrows and similar weapons, weapons that required a constant honing of skills, of which she had almost none, particularly in this new and larger body.
She was becoming discouraged, and some attempts with both bow and crossbow hadn’t given her any more of a lift. She was lousy with them.
Still she continued to meet, greet, and talk to the parties still coming in, now in a rush to make sure they would still be able to stake out some unclaimed hunting territory. They were all at the bar, and one man, the leader of a party, was gustily downing huge mugs of ale and telling the locals about Gedemondas. Most had never been there and never would go there; it was a mysterious and dangerous place even for those who knew it well, and what common sense didn’t prevent, superstition did. Despite the fact that Dillian young could discuss hexes and creatures halfway around the Well World, nobody knew much about their next-door neighbors. They maintained no embassy at Zone, and histories said nothing about them. Geographies generally described them as shy, but nasty, savages glimpsed only from distances. Dillia did not have permission to hunt in Gedemondas, but there had never been an objection. All these made the hex an eerie, forbidding place of legend.
The hunter, whose name was Asam, was a big burly Dillian in early middle age but aging extremely well. His tanned lean, muscular figure was matched by a craggy, handsome face that looked as if it had seen the misery of the world; yet, somehow, there was a kindness there, perhaps accented by his unusual deep-green eyes. His beard, flecked with white, was perfectly trimmed and he was, overall, rugged but well-groomed. His voice matched his looks: thick, low, rich, melodic, and extremely masculine.
“It’s always winter up there,” he was saying between long pulls on a two-liter-plus mug of ale. “Aye, a warm summer’s day could freeze yer hair solid. We hav’ta take extra care, rubbin’ each other down regular so the sweat don’t turn into little iceballs. And y’do sweat, make no mistake. Some of them old trails are almost straight up, and yer’ carryin’ a heavy pack. Sometimes you lose the trail completely—hav’ta go out onto the snow and ice, which is double bad this time o’ year, for snow melts from the ground up and the sun do beat down, it does. So y’get hidden crevasses that can swallow a party whole and never leave a trace, and nasty slicks and soft spots, and snow bridges, where it looks like solid ground but there’s nothin’ underneath ya but air when ya try it.”
His accent was peculiar; it translated to her brain as something out of a children’s pirate epic, colorful and unique. She wondered how much of it was put on for the show of attention, or whether, as with some others she had known, he had put on the act so often that he had become the character he liked to play.
His audience was mostly young, of course, and they peppered him with questions. Mavra eased over to one of them and whispered, “Who
The youngster looked shocked. “Why, that’s Asam —the Colonel himself!” came the awed reply.
She didn’t remember anything about rank in Dillia. “I’m sorry, I’m new here,” she told the awe-struck youth. “Can you tell me about him? Why is he called the Colonel?”
“Why, he’s been completely around the world!” her informant breathed. “He’s served more’n fifty hexes at one time or another. Doin’ all sorts of stuff—smugglin’, explorin’, courier—you name it!”
A soldier of fortune, she thought, surprised. A Dillian soldier of fortune, an adventurer, an anything-for-a- price risk-taker—she knew the type. To have gotten this old he had to be damned good even if half the stories told about him probably weren’t true. If in fact he had been around the Well World, he was one of the very few who ever had. That alone said something about him—and was the kind of accomplishment to make a legend right there, thus probably true.
“And the Colonel part?” she pressed.
“Aw, he’s been every kind’a rank and stuff you can think of in a lotta armies. When he got the plague serum from Czill to Morguhn against all the Dhabi attempts to stop him, why, they made him an honorary Colonel there. Dunno why, but he stuck with that. It’s what most everybody calls him.”
She nodded and turned again to the powerful and legendary center of attention, who was off on a tangent, telling some tale of fighting frost-giants in a far-off hex long ago.
“If he’s that kind of man, what’s he doing here? Just hunting?” she asked the youth after a while.
An older man edged over, hearing her question. “Pardon, miss, but it’s his obsession. Imagine being all over the world here and doing all he’s done and have Gedemondas right next door—he was born here, Uplake. It’s a puzzle for him. Off and on he’s sworn to capture a Gedemondan and find out what makes ’em tick before he dies.”
Her eyebrows arched and a slight smile played across her face. “Oh, he has, has he?” she muttered under her breath. She stood there for a while, until the story was done, then pressed a question through the throng to him. “Have you ever seen a Gedemondan?” she called out.
He smiled and took another swig, eyes playing appreciatively over her form. “Yes, m’beauty, many times,” he replied. “A couple of times some of the creatures actually tried to do me in, pushing avalances on me. Other times, I seen them at a distance, off across a valley or makin’ them strange sounds echoin’ off the snow- cliffs.”
She doubted the Gedemondans had ever wanted to do him in. If they had, he would be dead now, she knew.
She had Asam on the right track now, and finally he looked around and asked, “Anybody else here seen a Gedemondan? If so, I wanta know about it.”
There it was. “I have,” she called out. “I’ve seen a whole lot of them. I’ve been in one of their cities and I’ve talked to them.”
Asam almost choked on his ale. “
The bartender looked over at her, following the gaze of the rest of the patrons, also staring at her, mostly wondering if the insanity was contagious.
“A recent Entry,” the bartender whispered back. “Only been here a few days. A little batty if you ask me.”
Asam turned those strange green eyes again in her direction. “What’s yer name, honey?”
“Mavra,” she told him. “Mavra Chang.”
To her surprise, he just nodded to himself. “Ortega’s Mavra?”
“Not exactly,” she shot back, somewhat irritated at being thought of that way. “We don’t have much mutual love, you know.”
Asam laughed heartily. “Well, girl, looks like you’n me we got a lot to talk about.” He drained the last of the mug. “Sorry, folks, business first!” he announced, and made his way outside.
The structure, like most, was open to the street on one side, but even then it was a problem for the two of them to make it outside. Still, the youngsters followed in what looked like a slow-motion stampede, Mavra thought with a chuckle.
Asam was using a hunter’s cabin, the kind of place built for working transients, and it was to that log structure, one with walls and a door that shut, that they went.
Finally assured of some privacy, he sighed, relaxed a bit, and took out a pipe. “You don’t mind if I light up, do you?” he asked in a calm, casual tone that retained some of the accent though not nearly as much as he had put on in the bar.
