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“Well, I think we’d better talk it over now, if you don’t mind. You see, there’s a picket cruiser sitting not more than a hundred kilometers off our starboard bow. I didn’t see them, so well camouflaged were they, and they’ve fired two warning shots already. Master, they say they’ll cut us in half with the next shot unless we stand by to receive boarders.”

Lando grunted. His mouth tasted like a mynock cave. “That’s the Navy for you, no consideration at all.”

• III •

CONCEALED BEYOND THE reach of civilization lay a place called Tund, a name of legendary repute, one seldom spoken above a whisper. That whispered word named a planet, a system, or a cluster of stars—no one was quite certain which—rumored for ten thousand years to be the home of powerful and subtle mages. Fear was associated with the name, the sort of fear that inhibits mentioning, even thinking about, the thing it represents, so as not to invoke its omniscient, omnipotent, and malevolent attention. Almost no one knew the even more hideous truth.

The planet Tund was sterile, devoid of native life, its surface roasted to a fine, gray, powdered ash where evergreen forests, tropical jungles, and continent-broad prairies had once stretched for countless kilometers. It was a world destroyed by magic.

Or by belief in magic.

At night the planet’s face glowed softly, not merely with the pale blue fire of decaying atoms, but with a ghostly greenish residue of energies as yet unknown to the rest of galactic civilization. Where it flickered balefully, nothing lived, or ever would again. It had been partially to preserve the secret of such power that Rokur Gepta, last of the fabled Sorcerers of Tund, had utterly obliterated every living thing upon the planet, from submicroscopic wigglers to full-flowering sentience. His was a terrible, cosmically unfeeling precaution.

The rest had been sheer malice.

Here and there an oasis of sorts had been permitted its closely regulated probational existence, areas reseeded from which, some billions of years hence, when the evil emerald fires had at long last died, life might resume its pitiably humbled march. Massive force-fields were essential to press the flickering death away from those few havens.

In one such crouched the cruiser Wennis, a decommissioned, obsolete, and thoroughly effective instrument of pitiless warfare, being refitted to her master’s precise specifications. Her crew was an odd but deliberate mixture of the cream of the galaxy’s technical and military elite and its dregs, often represented in the same individual. Her weaponry and defenses ran the gamut from continent-destroying hell projectors to small teams of unarmed combat experts. She had been a gift of prudence from the highest and consequently most vulnerable of sources in the galaxy.

The Wennis would not be recognizable when Rokur Gepta was through with her.

The sorcerer had that way with ships, and planets, and people. The only value anything possessed for him was its utility relative to his inexorable rise to power. Wealth meant nothing more to him than that, nor the companionship of his fellow beings, even—owing to the most peculiar and repulsive of physical circumstances—that of females. He was empty, as devoid of life and warmth as his handiwork, the planet Tund itself. Such an emptiness requires endless volumes of power to fill it even momentarily.

Someday he, too, would bestow gifts of decommissioned battle cruisers—although he would exercise considerably more care to see that they were employed strictly in his interests. And even that lofty seat of power was only a feeble beginning. The million-system civilization ruled from it, after all, was only a small wedge of the galaxy.

And the galaxy itself only a small part of …

Deep within the twisted caverns of the murdered planet Tund, where Rokur Gepta had once personally searched out and exterminated every one of his ancient mentors—the original sorcerers, who had lovingly instructed him in the ways of power that had