Rocannon's world

In silence they mounted, the Fian riding the high saddle in front of Mogien like a child, and the four steeds rose up again on the air. A rainy south wind favored their flight, and late the next day under the beating of his steed's wing Roca

The people of the castle, blond lords and dark-haired servants, gathered around them in the flightcourt, full of the news of the burning of the castle nearest them to the east, Reohan, and the murder of all its people. Again it had been a couple of helicopters and a few men armed with laser-guns; the warriors and farmers of Reohan had been slaughtered without giving one stroke in return. The people of Hallan were half berserk with anger and defiance, into which came an element of awe when they saw the Fian riding with their young lord and heard why he was there. Many of them, dwellers in this northermost fortress of Angien, had never seen one of the Füa before, but all knew them as the stuff of legends and the subject of a powerful tabu. An attack, however bloody, on one of their own castles fit into their warrior outlook; but an attack on the Füa was desecration. Awe and rage worked together in them. Late that evening in his tower room Roca

Through their distant racket a near voice broke in, startling Roca

The voice stopped suddenly, leaving only the hiss of static.

Roca

"That was the enemy, Kyo."

The Fian's face was very still.

"Kyo," said Roca

In the brief notes from his one visit to a Fian village Roca

"Can you mindhear others of your own kind, in other villages?"

"A little. If I lived among them, perhaps… Füa go sometimes to live in other villages than their own. It is said even that once the Füa and the Gdemiar mindspoke together as one people, but that was very long ago. It is said . . ." He stopped.

"Your people and the Clayfolk are indeed one race, though you follow very different ways now. What more, Kyo?"

"It is said that very long ago, hi the south, hi the high places, the gray places, lived those who mindspoke with all creatures. All thoughts they could hear, the Old Ones, the Most Ancient… But we came down from the mountains, and lived in the valleys and the caves, and have forgotten the harder way."

Roca

The numbers he had noted were 28° 28—121° 40. If they were coordinates of latitude and longitude… He brooded over the maps a while, setting the point of his pencil down a couple of times on blank open sea. Then, trying 121 West with 28 North, he came down just south of a range of mountains, halfway down the Southwest Continent. He sat gazing at the map. The radio voice had fallen silent.

"Starlord?"

"I think they told me where they are. Maybe. And they've got an ansible there." He looked up at Kyo unsee-ingly, then back at the map. "If they're down there—if I could get there and wreck their game, if I could get just one message out on their ansible to the League, if I could…"

Southwest Continent had been mapped only from the air, and nothing but the mountains and major rivers were sketched inside the coastlines: hundreds of kilometers of blank, of unknown. And a goal merely guessed at.

"But I can't just sit here," Roca

He paced down the stone-floored room and back. The radio hissed and whispered.

There was one thing in his favor: the fact that the enemy would not be expecting him. They thought they had the planet all to themselves. But it was the only thing hi his favor.

"I'd like to use their weapons against them," he said. "I think I'll try to find them. In the land to the south… My people were killed by these strangers, like yours, Kyo. You and I are both alone, speaking a language not our own. I would rejoice in your companionship."

He hardly knew what moved him to the suggestion.

The shadow of a smile went across the Fian's face..He raised his hands, parallel and apart. Rushlight in sconces on the walls bowed and flickered and changed. "It was foretold that the Wanderer would choose companions," he said. "For a while."

"The Wanderer?" Roca