They let Dane out of the hospital to attend his parents' funeral. He sat in a wheelchair at the doctor's insistence. His Aunt Saliah wheeled him up and placed a handful of earth into his hands to throw into the graves. Melody and Rocket waited for him in Saliah's van. He would be going home with her after the service, and she was taking the hounds with him, even though she wasn't fond of dogs. She had been attacked by wild dogs as a child and all large dogs made her nervous. Dane had heard the story many times as an explanation for how they had to put up their dogs every time she came to visit. Still, she held her fear in check now; they had saved her nephew's life and she felt she owed them. Dane had not needed to beg for his dogs at all.

The boy felt hollow as the funeral drew to a close and Saliah wheeled him to the van. She settled him in the passenger seat and Melody immediately put her head between the seats to lick his face. Dane wrapped his arms around her head and held onto her with a desperation that brought a look of pity from his aunt's face.

Saliah reached and scratched between Melody's ears while she let the engine warm. "They are good dogs. They will not bite me."

"They only bite the bad guys..." Dane replied, trying to show her a strong face.

"And I am not a bad guy."

"No, Aunt Sally, you're not a bad guy. You aren't a guy at all," Dane struggled with a small joke and then choked on a fresh sob.

Saliah stroked his head for an instant and put the van in gear. They headed off down Highway Six for Saliah's home in Morgan Province. They drove through the hills of Virjira Province in silence for a long time. Then out of the blue, Saliah said to him in a low, troubled voice, "the gods are dead, Dane. The Gods of Light are dead."

Dane looked up at her sharply, feeling a chill rush over him. "They can't be."

"The hellgods got them all; I felt them die. All but one and she's vanished."

Dane wanted to protest, but if anyone would know it would be his Aunt Saliah. She was a witchwoman. She'd know. "What do we do?"

"Whatever we can."

Dane stared at his hands until Melody put her head between the seats and whined at him. He slipped an arm around her again and pressed her big head to his face. "Who made the vampires?"

Saliah considered as they turned onto Highway 5 West. "Mother Damnation."

"Everyone knows that, but what is her name?"

Dear Dane,

I fear the Great Game is drawing to a close and Lareine may just have outplayed us. Our efforts to sow discord have served us well lately, but unless we do something now he'll undo everything we've accomplished over the years. He's just announced another of his parties, his biggest one yet, and with a few exceptions anyone who's anyone will be in attendance. I've briefed you about Lareine before: if anyone can get them all singing from the same score, he can.

If this little soir�e goes ahead the enemy will turn all their attention on us rather than each other. If we do something to break it up we shan't be able to accomplish much else in our usual way. At the same time I don't think there'll ever be as good a chance to strike against so many of Mother Damnation's officers and nobles as this one. I have enclosed maps and a copy of my invitation. I've made my excuses, so naturally I shan't be there.

The rest is up to you, my friend.

F.

Major Dane Truman Jayce drove slowly through the village that had grown up around old Fort Necessity. It was market day and stalls sprawled across the center. He spied a small group of Nabaren chattering. They looked almost human at a distance--unless you caught sight of their small tightly curled tails. There was not much to distinguish the males from the females; Nabaren menfolk were scarcely taller than the women, and to the human observer there was hardly any difference in musculature. Nabaren usually went nearly nude, but if they wished to attend the markets they were ordered to cover up. The majority of younger Nabaren accepted this rule under protest: the males wore loincloths and the females added a bandeau; while some of the older women adopted a sari. It barely passed for decent in the eyes of the Borderer population, but the military intervened and allowed it. They didn't need the local native tribes making trouble over being left out--not with a war on. Especially since the army had grown increasingly dependent on Nabaren scouts. That was one of Dane's ideas: he had created units of Nabaren scouts attached to every fort along the river. No one could find their way through the swamps and forests like a Nabaren; his men had taken to calling them 'marsh cats' and the scouts had taken the term as a badge of pride. Mostly the scouts were males, but in some places where he could not hire and vet enough of them, he recruited females.

One Nabaren female wore more than her fellows. She opted for cut-off shorts and a half-shirt made from cammies, with bandoleers crossing between her breasts and a machete at her shoulder. Her name was Akee and she always gave Dane trouble. She had been his guide and principal scout through the southern swamps of Morgan province in Louistrana until she caught some shrapnel. After seeing Akee hurt, he had sworn off using female guides. She was healthy and whole now, Nabaren healed faster than humans, but he couldn't get the image of her out of his mind: lying there with one leg torn open, peppered with fragments of metal, howling like a wounded jaguar.

Dane tried to duck down a bit in the Land Rover to hide his long-limbed body, however the move came too late, and Akee started running after them.

"Major-Saee! Major Dane-Saee!"

He straightened, shifting his lanky legs to a more comfortable position than when he had tried to cram himself out of her sight. "Go home, Akee."

"Akee can guide you better, Dane-Saee. Akee can. Tirtuu is lazy. You don't want Tirtuu. You want Akee."

His men, piling into the three vehicles assigned to this mission, chuckled at his discomfort. They were heading for another reconnaissance through the swamps surrounding the fort. Tirtuu, riding behind Dane, caught the edge of the forward seat and stood up. He snarled at Akee, showing his impressive fangs. "Akee no good!" He pounded his chest with one fist. "Tirtuu better! Tirtuu strong, Tirtuu smart! Akee stupid female, not take good care of Major-Saee."

Akee let out a shrill scream of protest in her native language, followed by a derisive ululation. By that time she had to trot to keep up with the vehicles, and leaped onto the back. The Land Rover bumped through a pothole as Akee slithered between Tirtuu and Lieutenant Aristotle Sinclair, a barrel-chested man of average height with a swart complexion and fair hair. She tumbled forward and landed in his lap, causing her shirt to ride up and reveal sweet small breasts. Sinclair shook head ruefully at the sight. Standing orders forbade fraternizing with the natives, especially in the clinches--although everyone knew that growing numbers of Nabaren sold themselves in the red-light districts of the small community that had sprung up around Fort Laurie, some twenty miles to the north, and probably a few worked Fort Necessity's brothels too.

Dane glanced back, caught a flash of brown nipple, and barked, "Akee, cover yourself and get out!"

"Akee get out when Tirtuu gets out!" spat Akee.

Dane signed a halt, shifted to his knees, and dragged her across the seats. "Do this again, Akee, and I'm going to turn you over my knee and spank your ass red raw." His voice had a slow, soft drawl and a wry twist. Then he opened the door and put her out.

Akee's lower lip trembled. "Major-Saee, you want Akee with you! Irrfelghau get you if stupid Tirtuu guide you!"

The vehicles rolled on, leaving Akee staring after them with tears in her eyes.

The stretch of swamps to the west and the forests to the north were mostly a no-man's land of skirmishes and raids with each side striking back and forth across the river. Trade still came down Old Muddy, a river so wide it took a pair of binoculars to see completely across it, but it was a dangerous business. A series of major battles had been fought along its length ten years past, when despite all of Dane's efforts to slow the enemy's advance through allied regions, the forces of the hellgods finally reached the borders of Louistrana. Warfare had taken their toll on the river and the dirty, rusting hulks of ships and gunboats broke its surface in long patches in some places and short clusters in others. Both sides seemed to have settled in to wait and watch, breaking the tense monotony with brief skirmishes and raids that achieved little. This made for hazardous boating, but no amount of raiders and flotsam could match the danger presented by the clusters of unexploded limpet mines that bobbed here and there along the river, threatening to wipe out any vessel that passed nearby.

The Louistranans were not certain what had earned them this respite, if it could be called that. Some said it was Dane, the Fox, who they also called the Old Man of the River, who had won them this. Others said that the Hellgod, Bellocar, had overextended his powers when he destroyed the Yurpan continent to replace his dwindling supplies of oil. They said he slept and might do so for centuries, leaving his wives to continue their war on the last free nation on their world. Certainly, the wives and their get, having staked out their own domains, spent too much time being jealous and suspicious of each other to cooperate and crush Louistrana. That worked in Dane's favor and he did all he could to perpetuate that. He had used his contacts throughout the continental resistance to heighten that jealousy and suspicion as far as he could.

There were still more humans and their allied races in existence, but they were mainly a broken and beaten lot under the yoke of the masters and their minions. When each nation fell, a mixture of informers, secret police, midnight raids, spot searches, and predatory monsters that walked openly at all hours kept the populace terrified. An underground existed comprised of equal parts smugglers and resistance fighters, most of them as undesirable as those they defied, which was why Dane preferred to keep his own hand on their necks and in their pockets. What he couldn't get freely, he would force from them; few knew that he was the Fox and both sides could only guess at his motives.

The hard packed dirt of the road turned moist and muddy as they hit the lowlands along the edge of the swamps. Their recce took them to the border between Louistrana and Myssitarpin, the most recent nation to fall to Bellocar's hordes. The guards and the borderers with the aid of the Nabaren had held the line for seven hard, bloody years. They had a twofold mission: while Dane concentrated on espionage and infiltration, the rest of the platoon under the command of Lieutenant Sinclair would scout out the area surrounding the Ch�teau Lareine and destroy both the ch�teau and its inhabitants.

Killing Lareine would be a significant victory, boosting Louistrana's morale and removing several thorns from the side of the resistance.

As they rolled along Dane could not stop himself from thinking about it all. No one ever expected matters to get this bad. Certainly not so swiftly. People said the gods were dead. Bellocar's jihad erupted in the night thirty years ago with a pyroclastic flow of burning temples, crumbling cities, and terrified people. It swept across the world with technology and magic: nuclear holocausts, biological warfare, genetic mutations, and ecological disasters. The continent of Yurpa simply died; scoured clean of life in the first ten years of fighting.

Dane had served both on the front lines and as an intelligence officer since the jihad began. He enlisted at sixteen, two years after the deaths of his parents, foregoing formal officer's training at the academy in his overwhelming desire to simply get into the field and shoot slurps. His father's old army buddies, all generals now, had eventually managed to blackmail him into the academy just after he made sergeant. He spoke Nabarese, which led to his command here. His units were going to raid along the borders while he attempted to slip into Myssitarpin once more to check on his agents there and maintain his other contacts that provided his cover when traveling in Myssitarpin.

Over the years he had turned down numerous offers of promotion to hang onto his place in the field. He was no desk-jockey; he did not want to rot in an office while generals pushed forces around like pieces on a chess game. He belonged in the field, leading his men from the front, where he believed he could do the most good; if he had to fight both sides to stay here, then he would. That Louistrana had managed to hold off the enemy for so many years was a testament to men like Dane Jayce and those under his command, and he knew it. Although the price came high. His refusal to trust anyone else with network and operations here bordered on the obsessive, but he always found grounds to justify it. His style of leadership worked.

The ground descended through scrubby patches and scattered trees. By mid-afternoon the humid air and heat made them sweat, leaving their fatigues as damp as if they had been caught in a rainstorm. They smelled the swamp long before they saw it. The old growth trees with thick, twisted trunks surrounded them in thicker clusters. Orvill Putnam, Dane's driver, slowed as the road narrowed and shallow water began to appear in scattered patches that broadened around them. Tall, sharp-bladed water grass carpeted the water, giving it an illusion of firm ground.

They drove down to the cypress long shack and the boats. The swamp was a no-man's land and had been so for the past year, with raiders from both sides tearing through and across the marshlands, contesting every square inch of territory as if each handful of mud meant the difference between survival and annihilation.

A man emerged from the shack at the sound of their engines and shoved open a corrugated iron door to a barn like structure so that they could put their vehicles inside it. He chewed on a twig as he moved, nodding to Dane. "Major."

Tirtuu sprang out before the doors opened and scampered to the amphib rovers as soon as they stopped.

"Brode," Dane acknowledged the man, his voice low-key and soft. "What have you got for me?"

"Let's go inside for minute and I'll show you." The stick went round and round in Brode's mouth as he spoke. Dane had set Brode up here twenty years ago when the man had been medically discharged from the Rangers after losing half his right hand in a firefight on the West Bank of Lake Chauntalain. They knew each other well, and by unspoken agreement neither needed to salute the other. The house had a jetty on the far side, descending from the plank veranda of the house, section secured to the dense red cypress growth. Brode Blair led Dane through his sitting room where the furniture was mostly handmade from cypress and red maple, covered with cushions, quilts and spreads that Noawhane made for him. The Nabaren woman that lived with Brode came out of their small kitchen wearing a white t-shirt proclaiming "hairy bitch and proud of it" over loose legged black pants. Mixed marriages were forbidden, but it did not stop people like Brode and Noawhane from living together in obscure places, far away from disapproving humans and Nabaren alike. She tossed her dish cloth into the sink before running to Dane and bear-hugging him.

"It's been too long!" she cried, grinning like a happy cat.