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“But will he honor his word?” asked Liegeus, clearly alarmed. “If he tried yesterday to gain control over her, he may …”

“He’ll do what he’s told,” snapped Ashgad. “As will Dzym.”

“No,” said Liegeus softly. “He won’t. And Dzym won’t.”

“You worry too much,” said Ashgad, too loudly and too swiftly. “I’ll be back in three days.”

“But—”

“I said, don’t worry about it!”

Leia heard his footfalls retreat and felt through her knees on the terrace’s tiles the heavy whoosh of a closing door. She sat back against the railing, feeling curiously sick with dread.

Ashgad was leaving. She would be alone in this house with Beldorion. And with Dzym.

“You find your friend?”

Luke raised his head quickly from the valves he was cleaning—in a dust-heavy atmosphere like Nam Chorios’s, engines needed almost constant regrinding and refitting—as the doorway of Croig’s Fix-It Barn darkened, and he grinned a greeting at Umolly Darm. The prospector had the grimy look of one just into town from the wastelands, her baggy trousers and thick, padded jacket pregnant with dust. Beyond her, in the street, Luke saw her heavy X-3 Skid piled high with a load of boxes, crystals glimmering like great heaps of broken blue-and-violet glass in the thin sun.

“Not yet,” he said. He wasn’t terribly surprised to see Darm. Arvid had told him when he’d recommended him for the job as mechanic at Croig’s that it was the biggest repair shop in Hweg Shul, which meant on the planet. And it was big, for Hweg Shul, meaning it housed about thirty repair bays that refitted anything from pumps to speeders to small household appliances for little more than the cost of a cheap lunch for his workers. Like every other Newcomer building it sat on stilts—the T-47 being worked on in the next bay had shorted all its coils from being too close to the ground during the recent storm. Croig was a Durosian, and Luke was positive he had connections to half the smugglers in the sector.

“What can I do for you?” He set aside the valves and crossed the dirty, oil-streaked floor. Unshaven and clad in the local mix of homespun and blerd-leather, after three days in Hweg Shul, Luke had so completely blended with the scenery that even Taselda’s tame fanatics would not have noticed him in the street.

Darm handed him a banthine sonic drill. “Ruptured core sheath,” she said. “I don’t know whether you can do anything with it or not. And I wanted to ask your boss if I could bring in the skid after I unload it—again. We’re sending a shipment up tonight, or trying to. Loronar’s got a pick-up cruiser in high orbit.”

“Loronar?” asked Luke, suddenly curious. “You sell the crystals to Loronar Corporation?” The way Arvid had spoken, he’d gotten the impression of a small-time operation—Darm digging around in the desert for crystals to make some kind of obscure optical or medical equipment, useful only to high-level boffins at the university research labs. Loronar was anything but small time.

“Sure.” Darm dug in the pocket of her sand-scored red vest and fished forth a hunk of crystal the length and width of two of Luke’s fingers, and perhaps twice the depth. “Smokies we call them, or Spooks. This one’s a little small for what they want, and they look for better color than this—see how pale it is?—but they’ll buy as many as we can ship. Watch this. Hold it up to the light?”

Luke nodded.

“See the shadows in it? Those gray lines? Now watch.” She carried it across the bay floor to where the heavy coils of the recharger—smuggled in piecemeal and Croig’s pride and joy—crouched like a greasy metal monster in the corner, the center of an organic-looking nest of cable and tube. Gingerly—the recharger had been set up in a corner of the room to protect it from sand, and because it was in the dark, it was always crawling with drochs—Darm pulled out a recharger block, set the terminals against the crystal, and thumbed the switch.

Luke flinched, appalled and disoriented, though Darm didn’t appear to feel anything: The disturbance