annot! Courage is what I lack. Our world is rotten, Race, rotten
all through, and I'm as rotten as the core of it. I could have killed
you today, and I'm here in your arms. Our world is rotten, but I've no
confidence that the new world will be better!"

I put my hand under her chin, and looked down gravely into her face,
only a pale oval in the darkness. There was nothing I could say; she had
said it all, and truthfully. I had hated and yearned and starved for
this, and when I found it, it turned salty and bloody on my lips, like
Dallisa's despairing kisses. She ran her fingers over the scars on my
face, then gripped her small thin hands around my wrists so fiercely
that I grunted protest.

"You will not forget me," she said in her strangely lilting voice. "You
will not forget me, although you were victorious." She twisted and lay
looking up at me, her eyes glowing faintly luminous in darkness. I knew
that she could see me as clearly as if it were day. "I think it was my
victory, not yours, Race Cargill."

Gently, on an impulse I could not explain, I picked up one delicate
wrist, then the other, unclasping the heavy jeweled bracelets. She let
out a stifled cry of dismay. And then I tossed the chains into a corner
before I drew her savagely into my arms again and forced her head back
under my mouth.

* * * * *

I said good-bye to her alone, in the reddish, windswept space before the
Great House. She pressed her head against my shoulder and whispered,
"Race, take me with you!"

For answer I only picked up her narrow wrists and turned them over on my
palm. The jeweled bracelets were clasped again around the thinly boned
joints, and on some self-punishing impulse she had shortened the chains
so that she could not even put her arms around me. I lifted the punished
wrists to my mouth and kissed them gently.

"You don't want to leave, Dallisa."

I was desperately sorry for her. She would go down with her dying world,
proud and cold and with no place in the new one. She kissed me and I
tasted blood, her thin fettered body straining wildly against me, shaken
with tearing, convulsive sobs. Then she turned and fled back into the
shadow of the great dark house.

I never saw her again.

CHAPTER TEN

A few days later I found myself nearing the end of the trail.

It was twilight in Charin, hot and reeking with the gypsy glare of fires
which burned, smoking, at the far end of the St