The night sky dripped silver. The world called Kharali lay in the heart of the cluster, and the system to which it belonged was close to Corvus Nebula. That great cloud was a gigantic glowing sprawl across the heavens, with the burning glory of the cluster stars around it, so that soft light and deep black shadows lay always over the planet by night.
Chane stood in the shadow of the ship and looked across the small and quiet spaceport toward the lights of the city. Those reddish lights hung in a vast pyramid against the sky. A soft wind laden with spicy scents that had an acrid background blew toward him from that direction, and it brought him the sound of a distant buzz and hum.
Hours before, Dilullo and one other Merc had been taken secretly by a Kharali car to the city under cover of darkness.
"You'll stay here," Dilullo had told them. "I'm taking Bollard with me, and no one else, to talk to those who want to hire us."
Chane remembering that, smiled. The other Mercs were in the ship, gambling. And what was there to keep him here?
He walked toward the city, under the softly glowing sky. The spaceport was dark and quiet with nothing on it but two dumpy interstellar freighters and several armed Kharali planetary cruisers. No one passed him on the road except that once there was a whizzing roar as one of the three-wheeled Kharali cars sped by. These were a city-loving people, and even those who worked the mines that were this world's wealth returned to the cities at night. The arid, flat lands stretched away, still and silver under the nebula-sky.
There was a pulse of excitement in Chane. He had visited many strange worlds, but always as one of the Starwolves, and that meant that everywhere he had been a feared and hated enemy. But now, alone as he was, who would know that he was anything but an Earthman?
Kharal was an Earth-sized planet and Chane, used to the heavy gravitation of Varna, found himself moving with a soft vagueness. But he had adjusted to that by the time he reached the city.
It was a monolithic city, carved long ago from a mountain of black rock. Thus it was a city-mountain, with high-piled galleries and windows and terraces shining ruddy light, with alien gargoyles projecting out at every level, a mammoth hive of life towering up into the soft nebula sky. Chane looked up and up, and heard the sounds from it now as a dull, throbbing roar.
He went through a great arched doorway in the base of the city-mountain. It had huge metal doors that could be closed for defense but they had not been closed for a long time and were so corroded that the reliefs upon them which pictured kings, warriors, dancers and strange beasts were vague and blurred.
Chane started up a broad stone ramp, ignoring the motoway that slid beside it. At once the bursting life and roar of the place were all around him: Men and not-men, the human Kharalis and the humanoid aborigines, voices high and light, voices guttural and throaty. They jostled under the ruddy lights, with the throng now and then giving way before a hairy humanoid who brought a lowing, hobbled and grotesque beast to market. Smells and smokes of strange foods from cook shops in the galleries, the bawl of peddlers offering their wares, and over all the haunting singsong of the Kharali multiple-flutes echoing and reechoing.
The humans of Kharal were very tall and slender people, none of them under seven feet. They looked down, with contempt in their pale blue faces, at Chane. The women turned away from him as though they had seen something defiling, and the men made remarks and laughed mockingly. A young boy, gawky in his rather soiled robe, followed close behind Chane to show that even he was inches taller than the Earthman, and the mocking titters were redoubled. Other boys took up the game, and as he went upward he acquired a jeering retinue.
Chane ignored them, climbing to still other levels, and after a little time they tired of him and went away.
He thought, This would be a dangerous city to loot. You could easily get trapped in these galleries.
And then he remembered that he was not a Varnan any longer, that he would not again raid with the Starwolves.
He stopped at a stall and bought a cup of stinging, almost acid, intoxicant. The Kharali who served him, when he had finished, took the cup and ostentatiously scrubbed it. There were more titters.
Chane remembered what Dilullo had told them about the Kharalis before they landed.
They were truly human, of course, like the peoples of many star-worlds. That had been a big surprise for the first explorers from Earth after they perfected the stardrive . . . the fact of so many human-peopled worlds. It had turned out that Earthmen hadn't been the first, that many systems had been seeded by a star-traveling human stock so remote in the past that only vague traditions of them lingered. But this human stock had been altered in different ways by ages of evolutionary pressure, and the Kharalis were the result here.
"They consider other humans as much beneath them as their own aborigines," Dilullo had said. "They're utterly insular, and dislike all strangers. Be polite."
So Chane was polite. He ignored the mocking looks and the contemptuous remarks, even though a few of the latter, uttered by Kharalis who spoke galacto, the lingua-franca of the galaxy, were perfectly understandable. He drank again, and studiously avoided looking at Kharali women, and went on climbing the ramps and stairways, stopping here and there to peer at some odd sight. When the Varnans went on a plundering raid, they had little time for sightseeing, and Chane was enjoying a new experience.
He came into a wide gallery whose one whole side was open to the nebula sky. Under the ruddy lights, there was a small crowd of Kharalis, gathered around something Chane could not see, and there was laughter from them and now and then a strange hissing sound. He worked his way, without shoving or jostling, through the ring to see what it was they watched.
Several of the humanoids were here, hairy creatures with too many arms and mild, stupid eyes. Some of them carried leather ropes curiously looped at the ends. Two of them had such ropes tied to the legs of a winged beast that was between them. It was a semi-reptilian creature half as big as a man, its body scaled and wattled, its fanged beak striking the air in brainless fury. When it made a lunge in one direction, the rope on its other leg pulled it back. When that happened, the creature's wattles turned bright red and it hissed furiously. The tall Kharalis found it amusing. They laughed each time the wattles crimsoned, each time the wild hissing began. Chane had seen beast-baiting on many worlds, and thought it childish. He turned to make his way out of the ring.
Something whispered, and a loop wrapped itself around each of his arms. He swung around. Two Kharali men had taken trapping-ropes from the humanoids, and had used the clever cast-and-loop to fasten onto Chane. A burst of malicious laughter went up.
Chane stood still, and put a smile on his face. He looked around the circle of mirthful, mocking blue faces.
"All right," he said in galacto. "I understand. To you, an Earthman is a strange beast. Now let me go."
But they were not going to let him go that easily. The rope on his left arm tugged, pulling him sharply. As he reacted to keep his balance, the rope on his right arm pulled so that he staggered.
The laughter was very loud now, drowning out the distant flutes. The wattled beast was forgotten.
"Look," said Chane. "You've had your little joke."
He was keeping down his anger, he had already disobeyed orders by being here and there was no use in making it worse.
His arms suddenly flew up to horizontal, grotesquely pointing in each direction, as both Kharalis pulled simultaneously. One of the humanoids came and capered in front of Chane, pointing at him and then at the wattled beast. It was a joke that even his simple brain could understand and his merriment triggered new bursts of laughter from the blue men. They rocked with it, looking at the humanoid and then at Chane.
Chane turned his head and looked at the Kharali who held the rope on his right arm. He asked softly, "Will you let me go now?"
The answer was a sharp and painful tug on his right arm. The Kharali looked at him with a malicious smile.
Chane moved with all the speed and strength that his Varna-grown muscles gave him on this slighter world. He leaped toward the Kharali on his right, and the surging strength of that lunge pulled the man with the left rope off his feet.
Chane dived in close to the tall, startled Kharali and thrust his arms under the man's arms, reaching upward. His hands curved out to grab the front of the Kharali's arms, near the shoulders. He put all his strength into a levering, surging embrace. There was a dull double crack, like the sound of wet sticks breaking, and Chane stepped back.
The Kharali stood, his face a mask of horror. His long, slender arms hung limp, both of them broken near the shoulders.
For a moment, the Kharalis stared silently. It was as though they could not believe it, as though a despised cur dog had suddenly become a tiger and pounced.
Chane used the moment to slide between them across the gallery to a narrow stair. Then a raging chorus went up behind him. He started running then, going up the stairs, taking three steps at a time.
He was laughing as he ran. He would not soon forget the Kharali bully, and how his face had changed from malice to open-mouthed horror.
The stair came up into a dark corridor in the rock. His eyes picked out another stairway angling off and he took it. The whole city-mountain was a labyrinth of passages.
He emerged into a broad, red-lit bazaar that seemed to run away forever and was crowded with the tall people chaffering at stalls. Behind a stall that was festooned with statuettes of blasphemously hideous little snake-armed idols, Chane spotted a narrow stair that led downward. He slid through the crowd toward it, as blue faces looked down at him in surprise.
Going up was no good; he could only get out of this place by reaching the base of the city-mountain. He had been in worse places than this, and he was not greatly worried.
The narrow stair he followed downward suddenly opened into a big room in the rock. The glowing pink lights here showed it was a little amphitheater, with robed Kharalis sitting all around its edge, looking down at a small central stage.
Three nearly-naked Kharali girls were dancing on the stage to the wailing of multiple-flutes. They danced amid glittering points of steel, six-inch pointed blades that bristled from the floor, set about fifteen inches apart. The slender blue bodies leaped and whirled, and the bare feet came down close to the cruel blades and leaped up again, and as they danced the girls threw back their long black hair and laughed.
Chane stared, fascinated. He felt an admiration that was almost love for these three girls who could laugh as they danced with danger.
Then he heard the echo of distant gongs, and a scrabble of feet coming down the stair behind them. He started to run again as his pursuers came out of the stair.
He had not thought that someone with a weapon might have joined them. Not until he heard the stungun buzzing behind him.