"If we stay on Ulna, sooner or later Sark or Xaymar or the coleoptera will hunt us down. We've got to blast off, somehow, and that quickly." She looked at him for a long moment, and it suddenly came to him that he had never realized before that her eyes were blue. Blue, and calm, and very steady. She said quietly, "I'll never leave Ulna, Haral." There were the words he'd feared, already spoken. They tied a knot of tension in him. "Not even after all this? Not even with your life at stake?" "No, Haral. Not even if it means death in Sark's arena." He smiled again, wryly, because he knew that if he didn't smile, the dark thoughts that came with his tension would boil over. "It's up to you. But I've no taste for Sark's tender mercies, and even less for Xaymar's." She said, "I'm sorry," and would have turned away. But now he would not, could not, let her. He lashed out: "What do you mean, you're sorry? Sorry for what? That not everyone's fool enough to want to die on your crazy rockpile planet?" Her eyes flashed. "Are you so afraid of death, then, blue man?" "You ask it?" His fury ate into his words like acid. "You _dare_ to ask it, after the blood I've shed just to save your lovely neck?" The blue eyes lost their fire. "Haral, I'm sorry. Truly sorry--" But the rage that was in him now would not let him take up the peace he knew she was trying to offer. "What do I care for dying? I've gambled my life a thousand times, a thousand ways. But curse me for a _chitza_ if I want to die for nothing! What would it gain me or anyone else if I stayed here and drowned in my own blood in Sark's arena? If I perish, at least let it be somewhere along the road to empire, not here in the backwash of this pest-hole you call Ulna!" The words quenched his fire, and as it died a strange confusion churned within him, a discomfiture that seemed to come only when he spoke with this slim girl, Kyla. Furiously, he riveted his gaze straight to the pathless wilderness ahead, trying to lose himself in scrutiny of the rocky course the _hwalon_ followed. But Kyla asked, "Is that, then, your only dream, Haral? A dream of empire? Is that the height of your ambition?" "What--?" He turned in the saddle to stare at her, as much for her tone as for her words. He thought he almost caught a note of sadness. Or perhaps it was disillusion. * * * * * In spite of him, it brought back the old, hot-blooded, restless, reckless fever: the fever that had carried him through all these years of blood and battle. He threw out his challenge fiercely: "What better dream can a fighting man have than one of empire, priestess? What higher ambition?" She bit her lip. Her eyes fell before his onslaught. "They spell out power, my priestess!" he cried in bitter triumph. "Power, do you hear? Without it, a man's as nothing--sport for the rabble, fair game for every passing knave. With it--"