Hardan shrugged and headed off up the lake toward the stream that fed it. If the obstinate little sarif girl wanted to follow him let her. He had almost forgotten that he was born into an impoverished Consar family, these last few years, but now he remembered the vast social gulf between them. Yet he would gladly have given up his rank had Ylda agreed to mate with him. And now she scorned him. It was as though she were the Consar and he the sarif. The months she must have spent with the priests and priestesses of Ung Roth and Zo Aldan had given her a false conception of a woman's place on Osar. Let her have her soft-bellied old lover in Gron Lake. She'd get her fill of battling the half-dozen other sarif girls he'd collected there already.... Hardan's knuckles whitened on the handles of his swords, and he cursed all the Serid Jerns of the Wetlands. * * * * * Abruptly he came to a halt. Beside the rough trail he followed a peculiar-looking dwarfish creature lay sleeping at the stream's brink. His body was hairless, save on the top of his skull and under his nose and on his cheeks, and he was weaponless save for a short thick bow and a club. A cloak of muddy green covered his tattered unpadded coveralls. Hardan stirred the sleeping creature with his toe and it sat up. He spoke to it in Tarnish, and in the scanty tongue of the great Dryland Apes. And at this the sunken monkeylike little eyes blinked with a certain measure of intelligence. It rose to its meager six feet of height and faced him. "I am called Kern Rensom," he cried shrilly. "I am from Aarth," his puny arm made an indefinite circling motion. "Long ago we came to Osar to conquer it all." Hardan grinned. "Little Drylanders like you better keep hid or the winged soraps will carry you off. You couldn't lick a couple of bladts." The little Aarthman's arms and body flashed into movement so swift that Hardan could not see what was happening. He felt himself flying through the air and jolted down a dozen paces away, his breath gone. He heard Ylda's amused laughter, and the sound spurred him to bound to his feet and leap toward the little man. Ylda cried out in protest--the Aarthman had drawn no weapon but stood with arms folded--and Hardan's pace slowed. He could not run through a man who would not protect himself. "Take up your club!" he cried savagely, "or one of my swords!" The little man grinned impishly, his wide mouth red in the uncouth tangle of his scrubby brown whiskers. "Try to hit me," he invited. Hardan's anger overcame his scruples. He swung his right hand sword in an arc that would have bit a respectable nick out of the Aarthman's shoulder. And the sword seemed to freeze in midair!