Akare made a quick, lightning-like jerk from Moljar's grasp. The half-breed sank his dagger in to the hilt, ripped sidewise. Then he leaped away, covering the girl against the wall. A stream of bright thin blood spurted from Akare's pulsing side as he crawled toward the far side of the cavern, mewing with pain. Mahra's hands clutched Moljar's shoulders as they crouched against the coruscating colors of the veined granite. Her breath came in short, jerking gusts. "For a half-breed," she breathed, "you have honor." Her hands stiffened, dug into his skin. Moljar's hair bristled on his neck. Intuitively, he raised his dagger, though it was a useless, silly gesture now. From the far side of the cavern, moving ghost-like from a massive opening, a dense vaporous sphere floated toward him. It eddied and pulsed, and in its center was the dim outline of a human shape encased in plastic, its head helmeted by a faint glowing light. "A Mistman!" Mahra gasped. "Moljar...." The half-breed had no time to think. Capture or death would find him moving, though there seemed no hope in it. A yellow beam of light slashed outward from the man in the sphere. Moljar dropped beneath it. But it caught the girl full. His eyes saw her stiffen into a hard stone mannikin and tumble forward. From his hands and knees he sprang upward like a maddened beast, straight toward the pulsing heart of the Mistman's vaporous shell. There was one rending burst of pain. Then an explosion that seemed to shatter his brain. Its million floating fragments drifted through blackness. IV He was aware of low chanting rhythms, the blood heating throb of unknown instruments. He stirred and found himself wallowing in a bed of incredible depth and softness. Heady scents that twisted his soul with sweet pain floated across his face, and his wild barbarian heart was instinctively repelled by the suggestion of sensual, soft decadence. When he opened his eyes, oscillating lights bathed him in sense-drunkening sweetness that sickened even as it lured. He turned his head. A boudoir out of the abyss of a drug dream. Black drapes littered with flashing jewels. A black floor that seemed to undulate with sentient life, mosaicked in red veins. Weirdly-plumaged birds with serpent's heads hissed in a golden cage. And Alhone stood by his couch and sang to him. When she spoke, her voice had been unpleasantly whiny and shrill. But now, singing the dissonant cries of some alien song, it was high and piercingly sweet like a violin's cry. Small furred breasts rose and fell gently as she sang. Lithe hips swayed. Her cat's eyes searched his with a cruel dreaminess, and, for him, there was no malice there.