did most of
the leaders of the disaffected group. The story I get is that this
Labdurg arranged the marriage, in the first place. It looks to me as
though the Chuldun emperor is intending to take over the Hulgun
kingdoms, starting with Zurb.

[Illustration:]

"Well, these Chulduns all worship a god called Muz-Azin. Muz-Azin is a
crocodile with wings like a bat and a lot of knife blades in his tail.
He makes this Yat-Zar look downright beautiful. So do his habits.
Muz-Azin fancies human sacrifices. The victims are strung up by the
ankles on a triangular frame and lashed to death with iron-barbed
whips. Nasty sort of a deity, but this is a nasty time-line. The
people here get a big kick out of watching these sacrifices. Much
better show than our bunny-killing. The victims are usually criminals,
or overage or incorrigible slaves, or prisoners of war.

"Of course, when the Chulduns began infiltrating the palace, they
brought in their crocodile-god, too, and a flock of priests, and King
Kurchuk let them set up a temple in the palace. Naturally, we preached
against this heathen idolatry in our temples, but religious bigotry
isn't one of the numerous imperfections of this sector. Everybody's
deity is as good as anybody else's--indifferentism, I believe, is the
theological term. Anyhow, on that basis things went along fairly well,
till two years ago, when we had this run of bad luck."

"Bad luck!" Brannad Klav snorted. "That's the standing excuse of every
incompetent!"

"Go on, Stranor; what sort of bad luck?" Verkan Vall asked.

"Well, first we had a drought, beginning in early summer, that burned
up most of the grain crop. Then, when that broke, we got heavy rains
and hailstorms and floods, and that destroyed what got through the dry
spell. When they harvested what little was left, it was obvious
there'd be a famine, so we brought in a lot of grain by conveyer and
distributed it from the temples--miraculous gift of Yat-Zar, of
course. Then the main office on First Level got scared about flooding
this time-line with a lot of unaccountable grain and were afraid we'd
make the people suspicious, and ordered it stopped.

"Then Kurchuk, and I might add that the kingdom of Zurb was the
hardest hit by the famine, ordered his army mobilized and started an
invasion of the Jumdun country, south of the Carpathians, to get
grain. He got his army chopped up, and only about a quarter of them
got back, with no grain. You ask me, I'd