Seamus O’Neill moved his finger to the button to fire the last retrorocket, glanced quickly behind at the inky blackness where the TPS Iona continued its silent orbit. A twinge of sentimentality, not totally uncharacteristic, jabbed at his soul. The Iona wasn’t much to look at, you understand—an old battered titanium hulk fixed up to look like a monastery, yet it had been home for the quarter century of his life, the symbol of the Spirit of Exploration for which the Holy Order of Saint Brigid and Saint Brendan stood. Like all the second-generation Wild Geese, he had railed against its confining walls.
Still, he reflected with a sigh of self-pity that came as natural to Tarans as breathing, at least up there you were with your own kind, not set down alone on a heathen planet.
Sure they call it loneliness, he told himself ruefully. Would you believe it, Commandant Seamus O’Neill, lonely, and on the first day too. Ah, ‘tis going to be a grand adventure, isn’t it? Just grand.
Irony was as natural among the Tarans as self-pity.
He scanned the countdown readout … five seconds to fire. He thought of Tessie’s blond hair and white limbs. You win some, you lose some. ’Course, so far you’ve lost them all. Seamus was good at the first stages of courtship, something less than sensational at all later stages. He sighed again, a sigh which other earth-descended folk they met on their pilgrimage thought indistinguishable from an acute asthma attack.
He softly pushed the firing button; the shuttle-craft Eamon De Valera jumped in faint protest, then slowed its descent toward the jungle clearing. Seamus O’Neill, not a paragon of religious devotion by a long shot, but not exactly an agnostic either, breathed a short prayer.
“If it’s all the same to Yourself, I’d like it to be a safe landing; well, one I can walk away from anyway.
“And while I have your attention, I’d certainly not be rejecting any help and protection you be after willing to provide for this little jaunt of mine, begging your pardon for seeming forward.”
Seamus assumed that Himself (or Herself, as you pleased) was fully aware of the situation. Still, it didn’t hurt to bring matters up occasionally—with proper respect, of course.
The old shuttlecraft settled onto the firm red soil of the clearing with as much dignity as its weary hull could manage. There was little dust, just as Podraig the foulmouthed computer had predicted. “Touchdown,” Seamus informed the stars, in case they were listening.
And then he sighed for a third time, this one intended for Himself, the stars, the Lady Deirdre, and anyone else in the cosmos who might be listening—the immemorial protest of the Celt against his unfair destiny.
It was a historic moment about which no one cared, the landing on a new planet. Even a thousand years after the Second Great Exploration, landing on a new planet should be a major event, shouldn’t it? he asked the Deity.
The latter Worthy did not deign to answer.
Well, admittedly, the dominant species here is supposed to have come about the same time the Proto-Celts came to Tara. We became pilgrims because we wanted to keep alive our culture; they because they wanted to build a perfect society. So my belated arrival here is something of an anticlimax.
But still …
But still, what?
Repressing an urge for yet a fourth—and even louder—sigh and removing his crash helmet, Seamus gazed out the shamrock-shaped observation window above the Dev’s console. A terrible, unfriendly, lonely heathen planet it was—as well as the final chance for the end of the Iona’s pilgrimage. Still, Zylong was indeed the most beautiful planet he had ever seen—perhaps, as Commodore Fitzgerald had said, one of the most beautiful in the galaxy. During the decades of the Iona’s erratic and dubious pilgrimage in search of a world that wanted its scholarship and service, O’Neill had set foot on many life-supporting planets. Sometimes he had landed in peace, sometimes armed to the teeth in the company of his fellow soldiers of fortune, the Wild Geese—mind you, only in self-defense, for the Tarans were basically a peace-loving and noncombative people.
Why fight with others when you can fight much more constructively and with no bloodshed among yourselves?
Anyway, the Rule of the Holy Order was strict: their mission was to keep alive the Spirit of Exploration during the long interludes between the Great Explorations and to land and establish a permanent monastery on only the planets that needed and wanted them.
God knows, if herself’s analysis is to be believed, they need us. Ah, but do they want us? That’s the issue, my boy, isn’t it?
The Holy Order no more made converts than did St. Columcile in Switzerland or St. Donatus in Italy or St. Killian in Bavaria long ago during the First Exploration. Peregrinationes pro Christo. If the natives were so impressed by the scholarship and service of the monks that they became interested in the Faith, that was another matter.
Would they be interested here in this great, terrible heathen place?
Seamus doubted it. Moreover, he doubted that they would want anything to do with the Iona or anything it stood for. Of course, there were ways of interpreting the regulations.
Heathen place it was, but luxuriant too. A wonderful place to bed a “proper woman,” always supposing that you could find one such to begin with.
None of the planets he had visited compared with the pictures of the Iona’s home planet, Tara, to say nothing of that misty island on Earth from which his remote ancestors had come, but Zylong in its lushness approximated the beauties of those homes more closely than anything he had seen. The painter who had created the scene in his window had laid on all the colors with a wild and heavy hand. It looked like a slick picture taken from one of the tattered old books in the monastery library, too rich, too lush to be real. The greens were too thick, the blues too deep, the reds and purples too rich.
And best of all, it was not rushing through hyperspace at a rate several times the speed of light.
“Ah,” Seamus O’Neill murmured to himself, ’tis the perfect planet for us to settle, save that the locals might not exactly want us, worse luck for them. Give us the slightest hint that we’re welcome, and sure we’ll be here, bag and baggage, to stay. We’ll not interfere with them at all, but give us a few years and they’ll be after sighing just like us.”
O’Neill disliked this mission. If he had come on the Napper Tandy with his lead platoon of Wild Geese, he would not have to wait for the initiative of the other side. He did not think of himself mainly as a soldier; it was something he did because on a pilgrimage you had to have soldiers. Mind you, he was not altogether incompetent as an officer. Weren’t there those on the Iona who, bad luck to them, argued vigorously that he was better at being an officer than he was at his other profession of bard. Spying, however, was not his line of work.
Not at all, at all.
He was prepared for death, if needs be. If it were all the same to Himself, he’d postpone death for a few years. A few decades, even. There were a number of tasks he’d just as soon finish before the account books were closed. Like persuading a proper woman to share his proper bed for the rest of his life.
That thought caused him to sigh again and indulge in a number of harmless if very distracting fantasies about amusements one might enjoy with such a proper woman. First of all, you kiss her very gently and then … Well, if it’s all right with You, he interrupted whatever the Deity was about with another request, I’d like a few years of someone like that next to me at night.
However, mortality rates on pilgrimages were high among both monks and Wild Geese. If his life were to be as short as his parents’ lives had been, well, there was no good purpose served by complaining about it. Spying was different; whatever fancy names the Commodore gave to his mission, he was still a spy. He came along on the tiny Dev, armed not with a laser pistol but with a small harp, dressed not in the proud uniform of a commandant but in the dull gray of a wandering minstrel. There would be no electronic communication with the Iona; the Zylongi were not to be aware of her existence until a final decision to land was made. Only his own telepathic powers would be in use—weak and skittish as they were.
I’m to charm them with my wit and song—and Himself knows I’m a great bard no matter what those blatherskites on the Iona say about me. But while I’m awing them with my songs and stories, I’m supposed to be finding out what makes this heathen place tick.
A hazy sun, turned rose by the thick upper atmosphere, was beginning to decline from its zenith. Its light softened the edges of the surrounding thick green foliage and deep crimson flowers, and the golden stream flowing nearby. A nice place, O’Neill thought. I wouldn’t mind raising wee ones here at all, at all.
It was in the nature of things that the proper woman in your proper bed, properly disrobed and loved, was a requisite for having wee ones to raise. So far, Seamus had not done all that well, despite his brilliant fantasies, in dealing with that requisite. I’ll probably end up a crusty, lonely old bachelor, if I live long enough to become crusty.
Then, having enjoyed his self-pity almost as much as he enjoyed his imagining about the proper woman, he got reluctantly from the pilot’s couch. It was time for work.
He had been briefed to expect a hot humid atmosphere, but the wall of moisture he met leaving the Dev startled him. The fragrance of the flowers was as strong as their color, an overwhelming sweet scent, like the monastery greenhouse at Easter. Or a wake. O’Neill’s poet’s gown began to stick to his body. He unzipped the front of it, thinking again about the proper woman and about the possibilities of zipping and unzipping her garments.
Steady, now, Seamus O’Neill, Commandant in the Wild Geese, you have better things to think about than undressing a woman.
Have I now? Like what, for instance?
Well, like the fact that the Lady Deirdre is monitoring all your thoughts.
Ah, sure she’s a woman of taste and discretion. She wouldn’t be after monitoring my harmless little fantasies, would she?
You’d better not be taking a chance.
Ah, ‘tis yourself, Seamus O’Neill, who has a good point there.
Virtuously, he raised the zipper on his poet’s gown.
“Peace to this planet.” He repeated the usual Taran greeting and knelt on one knee, making a perfunctory sign of the cross. “’Tis neither ours nor theirs,” he added a prayer of his own, “but Yours. Protect it and us and them from all evil. Grant that I may bring to the good that is here something that is better, and to the bad, healing to make it good.”
He paused to consider the elegance of his prayer, simple, heartfelt, appropriate. Not all that bad for a spur-of-the-moment effort.
Pleased with his creativity as a man of prayer—and resolving that he would jot it down as part of the record for future historians just in case the Lady Deirdre missed it—Seamus O’Neill walked around the perimeter of the small landing site. The jungle looked impenetrable. Even so, the briefing officer chose it over the desert, which was supposedly dominated by aborigines; as interesting as those original Zylongi might be, they were not the primary object of his mission.
Podraig, Iona’s foul-tongued computer, had refused to advise about the landing. To set down on the plain outside what seemed to be their capital might be seen as a warlike invasion; the Dev might be blasted out of the air before it touched ground, and Seamus with it, worse luck for him.
“Do they have the weapons to blast anything out of the air?” Seamus had asked the computer.
“No frigging data,” snarled Podraig.
On the other hand, if he landed in the desert or the jungle at some distance from the capital, they might not even notice him. Or if they did, they might not think it worth the effort to rescue him. Maybe they were a race of mystics, like some of the solitary monks on Iona, heaven save and protect us all.
So with the computer refusing to make estimates, the decision was to drop him in the jungle. Better to be marooned in the jungle with plenty of water and food—all of which might be poison—than to be blasted out of the air or die of thirst on the desert.
“Why not put me down on one of the mountains?” Seamus had demanded ironically. “They say freezing to death is a pleasant way to die once you get used to it.”
No one had bothered to laugh.
Anyway, here he was in the jungle. Did the locals know he was here? Did they care? Did they have any intention of rescuing him from this fragrant, hellishly hot landing site? He had nothing but a harp to ward off any animals that might lurk there. In the briefing the monk Kiernan—Kiernan Pat, the one with the Ph.D. in biology, as distinct from Kiernan Tim, the subnavigator—had said, “Sorry, we have little information about nonhuman fauna. There are herds of cattle, which the dominant race—vegetarians, you see—keep for their milk and fur.…”
“Fur … cattle with fur?” Seamus protested.
“Heathenish, isn’t it? The subordinate race are omnivorous and consume small animals, so there’s probably a predatory food chain. There is no reason, of course, to assume that there is an absence of large predators. I’d be interested,” he smiled faintly, “to learn that any of them were hominivorous.”
“You mean man-eating?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll try to let you know, Kiernan, me boy.”
“You do that, Seamus.”
Seamus sat down in the shadow of the Dev and peeled back the top of his poet’s gown. Strumming his harp, he crooned an ancient and mournful Celtic melody, adapted to fit his situation. It went on—interminably, he himself was willing to admit—about a woman mourning for her sweet lover who had gone off to a strange world to spy on the enemy.
If the Zylongi had sound-scanners focused on him, they knew he was a minstrel—that is, if their culture had any sense of such a person. And if they had the good taste to enjoy his music.
Do they even have music here?
All rational life forms have music, the teacher had insisted in the monastery school’s class in xenology.
How do we know? Seamus had demanded.
Well, he had not been designed to be a scholar anyway. “You’re not stupid at all, at all, Seamus Finnbar O’Neill,” the Lady Deirdre had said with some sympathy. “It’s just that your talents are not in the scholarly direction.”
“Not anywhere near it,” he admitted ruefully. “I find it hard to concentrate in a classroom.…”
“Especially when there are young women present.”
“Well,” he admitted with a winning smile, “they do make concentration a little more difficult.”
“Sure you’d be thinking about them even if they weren’t there.”
“It might even be worse,” he agreed.
“You’ll be the death of me yet,” she had sighed. “You’re a terrible cross for an old woman to bear.”
Seamus had refrained from denying that she was old. His instincts said that her displeasure over his grades was not to be turned away by compliments—even accurate ones.
Seamus had no objection to accurate flattery, but he never considered his creativity to be limited by accuracy—especially when women were the issue.
The Captain Abbess’s comment on his intelligence was motivated by a mistake he had made in one of the planning sessions for this mission. She had been giving the standard lecture about the origins of space exploration. In the middle of the twenty-first century, it was said, the abundance of cheap energy, combined with a long period of tranquillity on Earth, had produced the Second Great Exploration, during which many pilgrimages went forth for wealth or adventure or faith or ideology or in search of a better world.
Seamus had been daydreaming about the glorious swelling breasts of his “proper” woman. He felt he ought to say something to indicate that he was listening.
“Columbus and Leif and Brendan and them fellas, and them all being Irish too…”
Herself was quite upset. “No, that was the First Exploration, a thousand years and more before the settlement of Tara.
“Our Holy Order exists,” she said icily, “to keep alive the Spirit of Exploration that brought our forebears to Tara so long ago.”
“’Tis true,” Seamus had said, as though giving the woman good grades on her historical knowledge. The Tarans wanted to keep alive the era of adventure, and the Zylongi, apparently, wanted to forget all about it.
While he sang of the lamentations of his unfortunately imaginary lover, O’Neill considered his chances. Carmody, a Brigadier serving as the Iona’s Operations Officer, assured him that the best data indicated no serious danger in this reconnaissance. The Zylongi were far below normal on the aggression scale; they would probe, find him harmless, and release him.
“Will they now?” O’Neill strummed a chord on his harp that was supposed to indicate irony. “Would you care to offer an estimate of the probability of such a happy outcome?”
Carmody, shrugging his massive shoulders, a frown crossing his craggy face, muttered, “Between sixty and seventy-five percent.”
O’Neill laughed out loud. Fitzgerald, Carmody, even the sainted Podraig were guessing.
A lavender twilight was descending, and with it a powerfully sweet, enticing smell, one which brought back all of his virtuously dismissed fantasies. It would be a good place to bring the proper woman on a proper honeymoon. Sure wouldn’t the smell turn her on too? His daydreams returned to the issue of her breasts, a subject on which Seamus had a tolerant and open mind, so many different arrangements were there that might prove satisfactory.
You bed the woman here and then you take her back to Tara, where you’ve never been yourself, and maybe on the Green Hills impregnate her there, and then you go on to Earth and your child is born in the Old Ground or on the shore of the Great Lake. ‘Twould be a fine honeymoon and religious pilgrimage all combined into one. He made the sign of the cross reverently. Sure there’d be nothing wrong after you’re married with mixing lovemaking and praying.
With the Transit stations developed half a millennium ago, Tara was only two weeks from Earth. If ever the components of such a station, long stored in the hold of the Iona, were assembled here on Zylong, it would be only a little more than two months from Zylong to Earth, and the Transit circuits were not crowded in this era between Explorations—save of course for Tarans, who were incorrigible travelers and pilgrims.
The Holy Rule said that no pilgrim could return to Tara or to Earth, unless his monastery had found a planet that would accept it. Then that planet became your home, but you could visit previous homes for reasonable times, “so long as the purpose is educational and religious.”
Sure that was all I had in mind. Education and religion.
The pilgrim ships were wisely forbidden contact with the planet they had left behind, save for purposes of canonical obligations (like the Captain Abbess’s participation in Roman elections). Zylong was, of course, even more isolated because, except for an occasional wandering space tramp, it had no contact with the world its founders had left behind for a millennium, by their choice at that. They wanted no part, the Abbess said with a twist of distaste in her aristocratic mouth, of the “corruption” of earth.
She was not exactly naive about human nature, but as she added, “Seamus, corruption comes with the genes and not with the place. Isn’t that true?”
He had agreed, of course, though he did not know either Earth or Tara. Born on pilgrimage, he had never seen either, save in pictures. To visit the Old Worlds with your proper woman would be almost as much fun as making love with the proper woman.
He was so pleasantly occupied with his daydreams that he almost missed the Zylongi patrol. They crept stealthily through the jungle, like the pack of heathen savages they probably were. O’Neill read their presence before he heard them. His rather dull psychic sense—dull compared to the real experts like herself, anyway—felt five “persons,” anxious but not hostile. That foulmouthed computer, Podraig, insisted that they would be humanoid. “Somewhat different from us in their biology after a thousand years and more,” Commodore Fitzgerald said at his briefing, “probably not so different as to exclude crossbreeding,” adding, with a faint touch of irony, “not that you need feel obliged to make any experiments in that direction.”
“Persons” probably meant humanoid. And as for breeding, all thought of anything related to that praiseworthy and perennial process faded from Seamus O’Neill’s frightened head as he waited for them.
I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not an explorer. I’m a soldier and a second-rate bard. What the hell am I doing here?
And you’re just as dead if you’re killed by “anxious” folk instead of “hostile” folk.
Then the Zylongi slipped out of the jungle. Seamus lost some of his fear. They didn’t look all that scary. In fact, they looked almost as frightened of him as he was of them.
“Sure isn’t that always the way,” he spoke his profound wisdom aloud. “Everyone is scared of everyone else.”
The Zylongi stopped in their tracks at the sound of his voice, as though his words had frozen them in place. There were three men and two women. Shorter than Tarans, with darker skin, brown hair, European faces, the Zylongi showed their Earth origins. Four of them carried spears; one of the men had a rather ancient carbine-type weapon that he pointed directly at O’Neill’s skull.
The women were lovely—short and full-figured like vest-pocket Venuses. Their dark arms and shoulders invited a caress despite the wicked spears they carried. One was a little older than the other, a dusting of gray in her curly brown hair.
Well, they don’t know what to make of my voice. What will they think of my music?
He reached for the harp. The man with his weapon raised it warningly. Seamus struck a chord. The fellow lowered the weapon—a little.
Mostly to offend the Lady Deirdre, whom he was sure was listening, he devoted his long song to highly clinical praise of the women and their attributes, which would have made them proper bed partners indeed.
The Zylongi listened, their faces still blank and wary, but their bodies relaxing as the melody went on.
Sure they know it’s sensual music and they can’t help but like it. Good thing for me they don’t know exactly what I’m suggesting might be done with those wee lasses.
Finally he stopped and waited. The man who seemed to be in charge spoke, softly but as though giving an order. The younger woman walked gingerly toward him, touched his harp, and when she realized that he would not resist, gently took it out of his hand. She strummed its strings with a nervous smile. O’Neill patted her approvingly on her head. Well, they know about music, O’Neill thought.
There was nothing about the men’s slender, smooth bodies to suggest they would be particularly competent in a brawl. They were handsome in a diminutive sort of way—much like Taran boys in their early teens.
I could lick a dozen of them without working up a sweat. I could disarm this crowd in a couple of seconds. Knock out the men and carry off the girls. They’d probably come willingly enough. They seem fascinated by my six feet four and red beard.
Seamus O’Neill, you’re an idjit for even thinking such things.
Well, it’s all right to think about them as long as you have no intention of doing them. The Rules say you don’t exploit the locals sexually or any other way. And God knows, Seamus O’Neill, you’ve always been one to keep the Rules.
All of his captors were clad in wraparound, turquoise-colored kilts with markings that suggested they were uniforms. The men’s garments were fastened at the waist; the women’s under their arms. Despite the heat and humidity, the light fabric showed no sign of wilt or wrinkle.
There ought to be no trouble removing such garments, if it ever came to that.
Hey, Seamus O’Neill, what about the Rules?
I’m only thinking those things because I have no idea how to be a spy. A man is entitled to calm his nerves, isn’t he?
The local with the gun approached the captive and began speaking in a soft musical language. O’Neill was reluctant to reach for his universal translator with a spear point just an inch from his bare chest. He kept his hands high and smiled in what he hoped was a winning way. The young girl tentatively touched his red beard. Don’t they have such things here?
In a sharp tone the armed man spoke directly to her. She blushed, pulled her hand back quickly, lowered her eyes, and murmured what sounded like an apology to Seamus.
“’Tis no problem at all, at all,” Seamus said soothingly. “Sure, even Taran women like red-bearded men.”
The girl blushed more deeply. Isn’t it remarkable now, how much you can convey by a tone of voice.
Seamus began to relax. The police patrol probably had orders to bring him in alive if he didn’t seem hostile. (Carmody’s prediction had suggested this.) They hesitated. The man with the gun gave an order and the older woman set down her spear. There were a lot of fancy gold stripes at the top of her uniform, which didn’t hurt the view of her full breasts at all, at all. Probably the insignia of some kind of senior medical type. She looked efficient and competent, the kind that was used to giving orders and being obeyed.
She took from a pocket in her wrap something that looked suspiciously like a syringe. The police doctor, thought O’Neill slowly and carefully, for the benefit of the readers on Iona, must have been ordered to put me under.
The woman approached O’Neill slowly, apprehensively, a gauzelike pad in one hand, the needle in the other. The others moved a step closer, their spears poised, ready to strike. Her head came barely to his chest, her deep brown eyes looked up into his blue ones. She seemed to plead with him not to hurt her. O’Neill felt a wrench of desire. His heart went out gently toward her fear. For a moment their eyes locked. She looked away quickly. Then resolutely she looked up at him again. Her brown eyes, deep, dark, and inviting, were even more frightened. O’Neill had always been a sucker for terrified women.
She’s probably old enough to be my mother. There were lines around her eyes, hints of wrinkles on her pretty face, touches of fleshpads on her neck and chin. She was, however, very nicely built and poignantly attractive.
“Don’t be afraid of me.” O’Neill touched her cheek. “I’m not going to hurt you, and unless our biologies are more unlike than they seem, whatever you have in that great terrible needle isn’t going to hurt me much either.”
She lowered the needle and waited, as though submitting, not at all unwillingly, to a heathen greeting ritual.
“I’m not the heathen.” Seamus laughed. “You are.”
She laughed lightly too, probably assuming that was part of the ritual.
It was a pleasant face to touch, warm and smooth. Almost without realizing what he was doing, Seamus caressed it lightly, first with his fingers and then with his whole hand. The woman seemed to sag, as though she were yielding to him completely.
Seamus glanced around. The others did not seem angry or offended. Rather they watched with intent fascination.
So, because it couldn’t possibly do any harm, he kissed her forehead. The woman tensed in surprise but did not try to fend him off. Her friends gasped. More in astonishment than in outrage, he thought.
“Keep your hands off the women, Seamus,” the Captain Abbess had said, “and yourself with more than enough of the chemicals of the young in you.”
Well, she didn’t forbid a little ritual kiss at the beginning, did she? Besides, what kind of a Taran bard would it be that didn’t brush his lips against hers? His kiss was quick, and her startled lips were firm and warm. Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, and her head tilted down. Seamus noted with interest that firm nipples were pressing against the fabric of her uniform.
Ah, now, it wasn’t that much of a kiss. But then, you’ve never been kissed by a red-bearded giant before.
The second gasp from the rest of the gang seemed more like envy than anything else.
See, Your Ladyship, I am skilled at this spy business after all. The kissing isn’t really to calm my fears. Sure I’m not afraid at all, at all.
Well, not as afraid as this poor thing is.
Hesitantly, the woman lifted the syringe and nodded at it, as if asking his permission.
“No problem at all, at all.” Seamus took her hand and guided it toward his arm. She was trembling; he felt her pulse racing through her arm and imagined her heart beating rapidly.
“Nothing to be afraid of.” He rolled the gown off his shoulder and pointed at his upper arm muscle. “Is it here you’re wanting to stick me?”
She nodded dubiously, still not sure that he wouldn’t break her back.
He thought about kissing her again but, instead, drew her hand to its target. He hardly felt the needle when it plunged into his arm.
Well, it was a pleasant enough feeling to go out with.
As his limbs began to weaken, he wondered vaguely whether the programming the geniuses on the Iona had built into him would resist probes for lust. It won’t do to have the Zylongi know how you reacted to one of their mature police medical types. They might not approve at all of such exchanges. Still, they didn’t object too strongly. Maybe they don’t object to a few minor exchanges of affection now and then with weird outworld giants.
Even if he’s the first weird outworld giant they’ve ever seen.
O’Neill felt very peaceful and very sleepy. He began to slide toward the ground. The medical woman threw her arms around him and shouted. The others raced to help her. Very gently they lowered him to the turf that he had so recently claimed, albeit tentatively and subject to approval by the locals, for the pilgrimage of the Iona.
Everything’s gone according to plan so far. Isn’t that nice.
His second-to-last thought was not of the Zylongi woman or his mission; it was of herself, the Holy Captain Abbess Deirdre Cardinal Fitzgerald. His last thought was that it had suddenly turned very dark.
Ritual kiss or not, the woman doctor tried to kill me.