As his eyes widened to note the cluster of seventeen small moons
whirling past the window he heard the sputtering flight of the skar.
Quickly he faced the explosion of moonlight that silhouetted the
kri-kri's cage against the window screen.
Taen said it isn't strong enough, he thought, fumbling for the light
switch, then thinking better of it. The light might attract the skar.
Louder than the ventilators atop the transparent dome of the city
rose the staccato airblasting of the skar. With a haunting shriek, it
collided with its long, wingless shadow against the window screen. A
twang, the glint of a spear quivering in the wire. A hiss and a rustle
and it was gone.
By the time it struck again, Jeff had lifted the amulet Taen gave him
from the night table. As he squeezed the release button, he could feel
the angry vibration of the minute warrior within. A mosquito-like whine
faded after a red fleck of light no larger than the eye of an insect.
Like a tiny meteor, the prisoner of the amulet flashed across the
mirror and quenched within the skar.
The long airsquid stuttered and blundered against the laughing mask
with a crackle of its exoskeleton. As it tumbled out of sight behind
the foot of the bed, Jeff slid his feet to the rug and fished for his
slipper. He was in time to catch the skar slithering weakly across the
rug, pumping air like a man with a crushed chest. It popped when he hit
it with his slipper. Bending, white-muscled, across the moonlight, he
searched for his minute defender. But its light had gone out. What he
did see was the ugly gleam of man-made poison on the beak of the skar.
"Konrad, no, please," Kit's little-girl voice called from her sleep.
Then she breathed regularly again.
The young doctor gritted his teeth as he closed the window and
cautiously fished his pajamas from beneath the bed covers.
* * * * *
Tip-toeing down the cold tile hallway, buttoning up against the cold
breath of the dome ventilators with his left hand while he gripped the
skar with the strong, surgeon's fingers of his right, he looked more
like a tousled-headed boy than a doctor, until a year ago chief surgeon
on an intergalactic liner.
Quiet as he was, Taen's huge, fierce eyes met his around the
varicose-veined marble pillar in the vestibule.
"Poisoned, sire." Taen's harsh voice contained more statement than
question as he hopped forward, three-jointed legs still folded in his
servile stance, for erect he would have stood even taller than Jeff,
and rising from one's customary place indoors, according to Taen, was
unthinkable. At Jeff's suggestions that he stand, he would wave his
white, prosthetic hands in horror. It was not in accord with "the
unwritten laws."
"Sire, see the three-circle brand on its thorax. And listen: it is
said The Assassin has repurchased the necklace of his profession from
the moneylenders. A very broad-shouldered Earthman masked in brass
climbed the long path to The Assassin's crags two nights ago. No doubt
he purchased your wife's life, enabling The Assassin to reclaim his
necklace."