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If you died, so would they, and then both monthrael and yithrael-per-sonal honor and pride honor-would be forever stained.

Ah, but sport hunting, when there were none depending on you... well, that was completely different. If you were stronger, smarter, and better armed than your prey, where was the challenge? Any well-armed mind-less drone could kill. The quarry of a real hunter should have a chance to win. If you made a mistake hunting a predator, it should cost, and if that cost might be your life, that was the spice that made the game taste best.

Mathal might be only a messenger boy now, but Bleyd knew that Black Sun operatives usually began their careers at the basic levels. Once upon a time, be-fore he had been recruited by Black Sun, Mathal had been freelance muscle, paid for his ability to offer vio-lence or even death. He was not a grass eater, Bleyd knew. He was a predator.

Hardly in Bleyd’s class, of course. Bleyd was a first-rate hunter. Armed with naught but a lance, he had stalked Shistavanens on Uvena III. He had taken a ran-cor with a pulley bow and only three quarrels. He had tracked and killed unrepentant Noghri with a pair of hook-blades whose cutting edges were no longer than his middle fingers.

He could not remember the last time he had made a potentially fatal error on a sport hunt.

Of course, it took only one...

He reached the knife a few minutes before Mathal could possibly circle around the length of the torus. There were three places that afforded a good view. One was at deck level, three steps away, in a shadowed cor-ner. The second was behind a massive heating/cooling coil across the corridor, at least a dozen steps away. The third hiding spot was inside a ventilation shaft almost directly over the weapon’s location, and, while two body-lengths in distance, it was a straight drop.

There was no real question of where he was going to hide. His ancestors, like those of the humans, had origi-nally come from the trees and the high ground.

Bleyd gathered himself, squatted low, and sprang. He caught the edge the ventilation shaft, pivoted aside the grate covering it with one hand while clinging to the edge, and pulled himself into the shaft feetfirst. He turned around, rotated the grate back into place. Sup-porting himself by the strength of his arms upside down in the narrow shaft, he began to breathe slowly and evenly, dropping his heart rate into hunting mode. A tense hunter could not move fast.

He did not have long to wait. Two minutes, three... and here came the human, stomping along and vibrating the deck loudly enough for a deaf old pride elder to hear.

Mathal arrived in the vicinity of the knife. He looked around warily, then snatched the blade up. Bleyd heard him sigh in relief, and his grin became wider.

The knife was a good weapon, one of Bleyd’s fa-vorites. It had a thick haft; the blade as long as the man’s forearm and nearly as wide as his wrist. It was made of hand-forged and folded surgical stain-free flex-steel, a drop-point fighter with a circular guard of flex-bronze and a handle of hard and pebbled black rass bone, so it wouldn’t slip in a sweaty or bloody grip. After all, it would hardly be sporting to provide one’s prey with a poor weapon. And his research had told him that Mathal was an expert knife fighter. Bleyd knew he would need skill and strength to prevail. Luck was not a factor.

He took a final breath, pivoted the grate cover aside, and dived for the man, headfirst.

He screamed the blood cry of his pride:

"Taarrnneeesseee..."

Mathal looked up, terror on his face. Too late, he raised the knife. Bleyd brushed it aside and reached for the man’s throat.

Then they were joined...

The spy had less trouble with this kind of thing. After all, anyone could blow things up and assassinate tar-gets. While it was true that a certain amount of skill was required to do such acts without being caught-and the spy had more abilities in that direction than anyone here could possibly know-the real challenge in this project was in a different arena.