yes, they flew, for they were only externally equine; their internal construction included the ability to shift their center of gravity, hollow bones, and a host of other refinements. The creatures were more fragile than they looked, too, for they weighed less than half what anyone would guess.
The lord and master of this, the only major breeding farm for pegasi in all Agitar, had gone there to work over twenty years earlier as a trainer. Thousands of Agitar had learned to ride the beasts in the Wars, but only a special few possessed the affinity for them that made for good trainers. He was one.
His judgment, skill, and plain hard work had been rewarded. First he became Chief Trainer, then Master of Livestock, and now he was General Manager. The government owned the place, of course, but
He was also about 140 centimeters tall. Below the waist his body resembled the hindquarters of a goat— thick muscular calves draped in heavy, curly hair of deep blue became incredibly thin legs that terminated in small cloven hoofs. Like the pegasus, he had a great deal of control over his center of gravity and moved with the grace and ease of a ballet dancer always on point.
Above the waist he resembled a muscular human, skin still deep blue and very porous, whose triangular face sported a blue-black goatee flecked with gray. Between two small, pointed horns, close-cropped salt-and- pepper hair sat atop a demon’s face.
He looked over the place with satisfaction. His name was Renard, an unusual name for an Agitar. Once he was librarian back on a Comworld called New Muscovy. Then he had been picked up by one Antor Trelig, who needed a classicist for his neo-Roman library on New Pompeii and addicted him to sponge. Renard was the one who’d helped Mavra Chang escape and who had originally crashed with her in among the giant cyclops of Teliagin. Mavra kept him alive until rescue, when Ortega ran him through the Well to cure his addiction. He came out an Agitar. The ship he’d crashed in had started the wars, and, before he knew what happened, he was drafted, put atop a pegasus, and sent off to fight—in alliance with none other than Antor Trelig.
Renard deserted, of course, and found Mavra. With two Lata they flew across the seas on his pegasus Doma. In Olborn he kept Mavra from being transformed completely into a mule, and eventually they all witnessed the destruction of the spaceship engines in Gedemondas.
Renard accompanied Mavra Chang into exile, but she drove him off. Even after all these years, he still worried about her. He occasionally received word of her from Ortega, although, because of his responsibilities he had never returned to see her. He felt guilty about that—and knew he should—but it just hadn’t happened.
Mavra had predicted the Agitar would welcome him back as a hero. Well, they hardly did that, but they had dropped the desertion charges because he was a new Entry and did, after all, owe Mavra Chang something. They’d been impressed with his odyssey on Doma, too, and his ability to walk the beast on mountain trails when flying was impossible.
And so the job and the new career. And, except for the lingering guilt about Mavra, so little and helpless and alone, he’d done just fine.
“Renard!” a female voice called to him from the office area. He turned and saw a junior clerk waving at him.
Female Agitar were upside-down males; they resembled a goat in the face and torso, and a more human type below. But that never bothered an Agitar, and it didn’t bother him, either. He’d had a lot of kids by a lot of them.
He ran briskly up to the office. “What is it, Guda?” he called good-naturedly. “Did they raise everybody’s pay?”
She shook her head. Like all Agitar females she was incapable of facial expression, but her eyes reflected something serious. She handed him a telegram just off the government wire. He read it, growing serious himself. He skipped the address and routing codes and read the message:
RENARD, MAVRA CHANG ATTACKED, PROBABLY KIDNAPPED. TRELIG SUSPECTED. SIGNS SHOW THEY MAY HAVE BOTCHED JOB. CAN YOU FLY SOUTH GLATHRIEL ASAP TO HELP SEARCH? CHECK AT ZONE GATES ALONG WAY FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. AM ALSO DISPATCHING VISTARU SAME LOCATION. GOOD LUCK. ORTEGA.
He was stunned. It was the last thing he expected. He hesitated a moment, thinking. Leaving the farm, perhaps for weeks—they weren’t going to like that back in the capital. But, then, it was for Mavra…
“Guda, honey, will you saddle Domaru with at least a two-week field pack? I’m going on a trip,” he said to her. “Tell Vili he’s in charge until I get back.”
He turned and trotted out, leaving Guda behind, her long mouth half-open.
Everod, off the Ecundo Coast
There had been fog through most of the night, and they had been drifting southward. They knew it, but decided to ride with the tide as long as there was deep water, at least until they could get a fix from the sun, which they hoped would burn through after dawn.
And the sun did cooperate a little—a barely visible splotch of light off to starboard and just ahead. After gently rubbing the tubular proboscis jutting from its middle, the captain decided to hoist sail and move a little westward, on the chance that the fog was hugging the coast of the Island. This was likely; land heats up and cools down faster than water, which caused early fogs over many seacoasts in warm weather.
Mavra was enjoying herself, was more animated than any of them could remember her. She spent a good deal of time pumping the crew for current information on Ecundo and Wuckl. Joshi, for his part, could not remember a time outside Glathriel and the compound. So after his initial misgivings, he welcomed the sea voyage as a great new adventure, and was all over the place, asking questions, examining the equipment, and enjoying the smell of the sea and the cool gentle caress of the fog.
The crew was especially helpful; the sailmaker had been working for two days on jackets that the Changs could use to carry with ease their most necessary supplies. Though the crew hadn’t neglected to remove Mavra’s valuables from their storehouse, they were really cooperating not because of the big bribe, but because they sympathized with the fugitives.
Tbisi worried constantly, not only about their impending overland journey but also about what would happen beyond that. He was a chronic pessimist, but Mavra endured his attitude because the concern was genuinely for them.
“All right, so suppose you make it through Ecundo, a remote possibility,” he argued, “and you also get through Wuckl and manage to link up with us or with one of the other packets we’ll alert. If we get you to Mucrol, you still have to cross that hex before you get to this Gedemondas. Then you have to climb into the cold mountains—for which you are not in any way prepared and for which, in any case, you have no provisions. Then what? What will it get you?”
She had thought about it often. “Perhaps help—they know me there, and they are sympathetic to me. They seem to regard me as the coming center of their mystical beliefs. Whether you accept that bullshit or not,
She was adamant; Tbisi couldn’t talk her out of her plan, and eventually he stopped trying—partly out of a healthy respect for her mind and the resourceful ingenuity it represented. He secretly suspected that there was a streak of masochism in her, that she was only happy when surrounded by insurmountable obstacles and hopeless odds just so she could figure a way out.
An odd way to live, but it commanded respect, for she was alive and still going strong after a life filled with such challenges.
That not a single member of the crew regarded either of them as helpless or unnatural was a measure of her tenacity. They were simply another life form on this strange world of multiple liie forms, no more unusual than the others, and no less able to do what they needed to do.
The captain had guessed correctly about the fog; it was thinning, and a bright haze of thin swirling orange
