Var the Stick

      The Master seemed stricken. 'Sol! You sent Sol?

      'Ask your supposed champion,' Bob said.

      The Master turned slowly to Var. 'Sol would not have gone. But if he had'

      'No,' Var said. 'It wasn't Sol.' He didn't understand why the underworld leader should play such a game.

      'Perhaps, then, his mate, if the term is not unkindly euphemistic,' Bob said, his glance possessing a peculiar Intensity. 'She of the deadly hands and barren womb.'

      'No!' Var cried, knowing now that he was being baited, but reacting to it, anyway. The Master, astonishingly, was sweating. It was as though the real battle was taking place here, rather than on the mesa. A strange contest of deadly words and savage implications. And Bob was winning it.

      Bob looked at his fingernails during the pause. 'Who, then?'

      'His-daughter. Soil. She had sticks.'

      The Master opened his mouth but did not speak. He stared at Var as though pierced by a bullet.

      'I apologize,' Bob said smoothly. 'Var was there, after all. He did kill our designated champion. Her parents were too wary to cooperate, so are in our bad graces; but she was, shall we say, cooperatively naive. Of course she was only eight years old-eight and a half or better, technically and I think we'll have to delay further action on this matter in favor of a rematch....'

      Var realized that the man's over elaborate words signified his intent to renign. But the Master was not protesting. The Master conthued to stare dumbly at Var. There was another wait. 'You killed Soli?' the Master said at last, so hoarsely as to be hardly comprehensible.

      Var did not dare tell the full truth, here before the underworld leader. 'Yes.'

      The Master's whole body shook as though he were cold. Var could not understand what was the matter. Soil was no relation to him; the Master had not even known her when She begged food from him. True, it was unkind to kill a girl but he had had to meet the mountain's chaimpion, in whatever guise. Had it been a mutant lizard, he still would have fought. Why was the Master so upset now, and why was Bob looking so smug? They were acting as though he had lost the battle.

      'So I was correct about her,' Bob said. 'Sol never let on. But obviously'

      'Var the Stick,' the Master said formally, his voice quivering with emotion. 'The friendship between us is ended. Where we meet next, there is the circle. No terms but death. In deference to your ignorance and to what is past, I give you one day and one night to flee. Tomorrow I come for you.'

      Then he whirled and smote the television set with his massive fist. The glass on the face of it shattered and the box toppled over. 'And after that, you!' he shouted at the dead machine. 'Not one chamber will escape the flamethrower, and you shall roast on the pyre, alive!'

      Var had never seen such fury in any man. He understood none of it, except that the Master intended to kill both him and the underworld leader. His friend had lost his sanity.

      Var fled from the hostel, and kept on running, confused and ashamed and afraid.

CHAPTER TWELVE

      He whirled, grabbing for his new set of sticks. Then he relaxed. 'Soil!'

      'I saw you run from the hostel So I came, too. Var, what happened?'

      'The Master' Var was stopped by an misery.

      'He Wasn't he happy that you won?'

      'The Bob reniged.'

      'Oh.'  She took his hand solicitously. 'So it was for nothing. No wonder the Weaponless is mad. But that isn't your fault, is it?'

      'He says he'll kill me.'