Janazik nodded, very slowly. "Give me your sword," he said.
"Eh?" Anse looked at him. The blue eyes were unseeing, blind with pain,
but he handed over the red weapon. Janazik slipped his own glaive into
the human's fingers.
Then he laid a hand on Anse's shoulder and smiled at him, and then
looked away.
_We Khazaki don't know love. There is comradeship, deeper than any
Earthling knows. When it happens between male and female, they are
mates. When it is between male and male, they are blood-brothers. And a
man must stand by his comrades._
Ellen came in, pulling her way along the walls by the handholds, and
Anse looked at her without saying a word, just looking.
"What happened?" she said. "What is the--_Oh!_"
Carse's body floated in midair, turning over and over in air currents
like a drowned man in the sea.
"Carse--Carse--"
Ellen pushed from the wall, over to the dead man. She looked at his
still face, and stroked his blood-matted hair, and smiled through a
mist of tears.
"You were always good to me, Carse," she whispered. "You were ...
goodnight, brother. Goodnight."
Then turning to Anse and Janazik, with something cold and terrible in
her voice: "Who killed him?"
Anse looked at her, dumbly.
"I did," said Janazik.
He held forth the dripping sword. "He stowed away--was going to take
over the ship. Alonzo threw him off balance by turning the rockets back
on. He killed Alonzo. Then I killed him. He needed it. He was a traitor
and a murderer, Ellen."
"He was my brother," she whispered. And suddenly she was sobbing in
Anse's arms, great racking sobs that seemed to tear her slender body
apart.
But she'd get over it.
Anse looked at Janazik over her shoulder, and while he ruffled her
shining hair his eyes locked with the Khazaki's. _This is the end.
Once we land, we can never see each other, not ever again. And we were
comrades in the old days...._
_Farewell, my brother._
* * * * *
When the star ship landed outside Krakenau's surrendered citadel, it
was still raining a little. Janazik looked out at the wet gray world
and shivered. Then, wordlessly, he stepped from the airlock and walked
slowly down the hill toward the sea. He did not look back, and Anse did
not look after him.