A World of Difference Read Free Page B

I stood—I daresay the damned water I’d drunk had something to do with that, too. I never imagined the strange thing could be alive. I didn’t stop to think. I just took a whack at it with the stave I was carrying.”
    “I would have done the same thing,” Fralk said. “Or else run.”
    “I hit it over and over. What a racket it made! It was hard, harder than anything alive has any right to be. Feel for yourself if you like—it’s like midwinter ice, or even stone. It didn’t fight back, and all I can say is that I’m glad. I only quit hitting it when pieces came off. If it wasn’t dead then, it never would be.”
    “Has it moved since?” Fralk asked.
    “No; I guess I did kill it. My sons and grandsons and I spent days hauling it back here to the castle.”
    “What a job that was,” Ternat said, whistling with remembered strain.
    “Yes,” Reatur agreed. “It made me wonder all over again how the strange thing could ever have been alive. It’s as heavy as stone, and as hard to get from place to place. But it did move by itself.”
    Fralk turned an extra couple of eyestalks on it again. “You could tell me it sang songs and I would not argue with you. It might do anything; it might do nothing.”
    “It’s done nothing since it’s been here,” Ternat said.
    “Well, not quite,” Reatur said. “Most travelers I charge food or tools to see it. Over the years, now that I think, it’s earned me a tidy sum.”
    “That I do believe,” Fralk said. “It’s worth traveling a long way to see.”
    A well-spoken young male indeed, Reatur thought. “Guest with me tonight,” he said expansively. “My ice is yours.”
    “I thank you,” Fralk said. Then he proceeded to wreck the fine impression he had made, for he took the old proverb literally. He reached out a couple of arms, used his fingerclaws to scrape a good handful of ice from the wall, and put it in his mouth. “Very nice,” he said.
    Reatur saw Ternat turn yellow with anger. The domain-master glanced down at himself. He was the same color, and no wonder. “Envoy of the Skarmer domains, you forget yourself,” he said. His voice was stiff as glacier ice in midwinter.
    “No, domain-master, I do not. For this I was sent here.” Fralk took more ice and put it in his mouth as calmly as if he were munching it from the walls of his own castle. Suddenly, his politeness seemed something he had assumed at will, not native to him.
    “This is insolence,” Reatur said. “Why should I not send you back to your clanfather without the arms you have used to prove it?”
    Fralk spun round in a circle. “Which arms are those?” he asked when he stopped. Yes, he was mocking Reatur.
    “Any two will do,” the domain-master growled.
    He had to give Fralk reluctant credit; the Skarmer envoy went neither blue from fear nor an angry yellow. “You would be unwise to take them,” Fralk said. He was the very odor of good manners again. Reatur, whose moods ran fast and deep, began to see why this young male had been chosen ambassador. Like smooth ice reflecting the sun and hiding whatever lay beneath, he did his clanfather’s bidding without revealing himself in the process.
    “We come down to it, then,” Reatur said, still trying to provoke a reaction from him. “Why should I not?”
    “Because I aim to inherit this domain from you,” Fralk said. “That is why I treated it as my home to be.”
    The chamber with the strange thing had no weapons in it. Reatur knew that. His encircling eyes glanced around it anyway, just in case. One of the things he saw was Ternat’s eyestalks twisting in a similar search. Another was that Fralk had turned blue. He was afraid now.
    If he had been standing on Fralk’s claws, Reatur would have been more than afraid. “Shall I think you have gone mad, andset you free on that account?” he said. “I could almost believe it. Why else would you speak so, in the presence of a domain-master and his eldest?”
    Fralk slowly