It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in the Northern Territories. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New Citadel and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous cliffs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of The Devil’s Belt. They are a near perfect oval—like an egg that is cracked in the middle, split in two and crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West End, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the crack, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand gold a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some fortress in the old Northland, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of training lawn and cultivation gardens. It was Gatsu-be's manor. Or rather, as I didn't know Mr. Gatsu-be it was a manor inhabited by a cultivator of that name. My own bungalow was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of the wealthy elite—all for eighty silver a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East End glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I traveled over there to have dinner with the Tomas Buth-Chanains. Dai Zee was my second cousin once removed and I'd known Tomas in training. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Second City.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful Light Shields that ever competitively fought at Heaven’s Strike Dojo—a legendary hero in a way, one of those warriors who reach such an acute limited excellence at the jade rank that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family had enormous chi-reserves—even in training his freedom with chi was a matter for reproach—but now he'd left Second City and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance on the way he'd defeated a herd of Aquamares from Forest Lake. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was formidable enough to do that.

Why they came east I don't know. They had spent a year in the Free Lands, fighting the Frankish barbarians there for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people fought and endlessly cultivated together. This was a permanent move, said Dai Zee over a letter, but I didn't believe it—I had no sight into Dai Zee's heart but I felt that Tomas would drift on forever seeking a little lustfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable quest to vanquish the mightiest opponent.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I traveled over to East End to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their estate was even more elaborate than I expected, a rousing crimson and white Gorgian Colony manor overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-concentrators and stone battlements and an amazing garden of flame chi—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of ether-strengthened windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tomas Buth-Chanain in sparring clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his Heaven’s Strike years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of peak-gold with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning in an aggressive forward stance. Not even the utilitarian austerity of his sparring clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those well-worn boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his armored Gi. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at Heaven’s Strike who had hated his guts.

"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We were in the same Legionnaire Caste, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he favored me and wanted me with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We sparred for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

"I've got a nice place here," Tomas said, his eyes flashing about restlessly. I chose that moment to strike out with a quick left jab and followed with spinning back elbow. He easily slapped my jab aside and caught my elbow mere centimeters from his face. He had not flinched in the slightest at my attacks.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken earth and water garden, a half acre of deep pungent vitality roses and a snub-nosed boat that bumped the tide off shore. I slipped his grasp with a duck and spin. His torso was exposed to me so I lashed out with a straight right but I met nothing but air.

"It belonged to Demaine, the oil warrior." He pivoted to dodge then turned me around again, politely and abruptly with an easy hand on my shoulder. "We'll go inside." He was already standing halfway between the home’s entrance and me.

Our joust, which primarily consisted of me relentlessly pursuing Tomas with of flurry of un-connecting offensives, continued through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by windowed-doors at either end. Tomas was unperturbed at all my attempts and merely smiled as he dodged and weaved. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house.

I grew tired of the game and focused my chi while leaping up into the air and performing a double-kick. Time stagnated as my form hung suspended and I moved the energy to empower my attack. My feet flashed forward one after the other in a blur of movement where I was sure would land. Tomas focused his own chi as he swiftly blocked and a an ether breeze blew voraciously through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.