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Updated: June 29, 2025
There was sporadic fighting in a dozen places on Gram, now resistance to efforts on the part of King Angus to collect taxes, and raids by unidentified persons on estates confiscated from alleged traitors and given to Garvan Spasso, who had now been promoted from Baron to Count. And Rovard Grauffis was dead; poisoned, everybody said, either by Spasso or Queen Evita or both.
Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso were simply beyond astonishment and beyond words. The looting of Eglonsby then began. They gathered up machinery, and stocks of steel and light-metal alloys. The city was full of warehouses, and the warehouses were crammed with valuables.
"But then, this Duke of Wardshaven will be running it, not us," Valkanhayn objected. "The Duke of Wardshaven," Harkaman reminded him, "is on Gram. We are here on Tanith. There are three thousand light-years between." That seemed a satisfactory answer. Spasso, however, wanted to know who would run things here on Tanith. "We'll have to hold a meeting of all three crews," he began.
"You know," he said, at length, "I'm going to do everybody a favor. I'm going to let Spasso and Valkanhayn persuade me to take this planet away from them." Harkaman, who was piloting, turned sharply. "You crazy or something?" "'When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means. Who said that?" "On target," Harkaman grinned.
"Suppose Dunnan comes and finds nobody here but Spasso and the Lamia?" "Chance we'll have to take. Personally, I think we have a year to a year and a half before Dunnan shows up here. I know, we were fooled trying to guess what he'd do before. But the sort of raid I have in mind, we'll need two ships, and in any case, I don't want to leave both those ships here while we're gone, even if you do."
"That's what we've been telling you, all along," Spasso broke in eagerly. "This is a wonderful planet " "It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We'd need a spaceport, for one thing." "Well, what's this, here?" Valkanhayn wanted to know. "It was a spaceport," Harkaman told him. "It could be one again. And we'd need a shipyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work.
On civilized planets, the language had been frozen unalterably in microbooks and voice tapes. But microbooks can only be read and sound tapes heard with the aid of electricity, and Tanith had lost that long ago. Most of the people Spasso and Valkanhayn had kidnaped and enslaved came from villages within a radius of five hundred miles.
Either Valkanhayn and Spasso had more men than the size of their ships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work for them. More than the population of the moribund city, at least as Harkaman remembered it. There had been about five hundred in all; they lived by mining the old buildings for metal, and trading metalwork for food and textiles and powder and other things made elsewhere.
"He thinks he's Lord Trask of Tanith," Harkaman said. "He's right, too; he is." He looked searchingly at Trask for a moment, then turned back to Spasso. "I'm just as tired as he is of hearing you pop your mouth about a lousy two million stellars. Nearer a million and a half, but two million's nothing to pop about.
She was wearing a blue bathrobe several sizes too large for her, instead of the poncho things the slaves in the hallway wore. She had dark brown hair and gray eyes; if she had not been so obviously frightened she would have been beautiful. She set the jugs on the table and brought silver cups from a chest against the wall: when Spasso dismissed her, she went out hastily.
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