se he
is. Why'd we take him along with you hanging on in a faint if he were
dead? When the snetha-knife kills, it kills completely. They stay dead,
or they don't die. Sagittarian?"

She nodded, and the big man seemed to be doing some calculations in his
head.

"Yeah," he decided. "It would be. There was one second there around
midnight when all the signs were at their absolute maximum
favorableness. Someone must have said some pretty dangerous health
spells over him then." He turned to Dave, as if aware that the other was
comparatively ignorant of such matters. "Happened once before, without
this mess-up of the signs. They revived a corpse and found he was
unkillable from then on. He lasted eight thousand years, or something
like that, before he got burned trying to control a giant salamander.
They cut off his head once, but it healed before the axe was all the way
through. Woops!"

The bird had dipped downward, rushing toward the ground. It landed at a
hundred miles an hour and managed to stop against a small entrance to a
cave in the hillside. Except for the one patch where the bird had
lighted, they were in the middle of a dense forest.

Dave and Nema were hustled into the cave, while the others melted into
the woods, studying the skies. She clung to Dave, crying something about
how the Sons of the Egg would torture them.

"All right," he said finally. "Who are these sons of eggs? And what have
they got against me?"

"They're monsters," she told him. "They used to be the antimagic
individualists. They wanted magic used only when other means wouldn't
work. They fought against the Satheri. While magic produced their food
and made a better world for them, they hated it because they couldn't do
it for themselves. And a few renegade priests like my brother joined
them."

"Your brother?"

"She means me," Bork said. He came in to drop on his haunches and grin
at Dave. There was no sign of personal hatred in his look. "I used to be
a stooge for Sather Karf, before I got sick of it. How do you feel, Dave
Hanson?"

Dave considered it, still in wonder at the truth. "I feel good. Even the
venom they were putting in my blood doesn't seem to hurt any more."

"Fine. Means the Sather Karf must believe we killed you--he must have
the report by now. If he thinks you're dead, there's no point in his
giving chase; he knows I wouldn't let them kill Nema, even if she is a
little fool. Anyhow, he's not really such a bad old g