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house that looked like its owners could afford the loss. These long walks in quicktime left me nothing to do but think, and my thoughts were not comfortable ones on this journey. This time, for once, I could look forward to the relief of talking to someone to whom I didn't have to lie, someone who might be able to understand what I had done, who might not condemn me for it. At last I came to the whorehouse and mounted the stairs and found Lord Barton's body cut into dozens of small pieces, already rotting in the heat coming through the south-facing window.

Chapter 13 Treason

How they had found him I didn't know, but it couldn't have been hard. The integrity of the manager was suspect at best; stories of our odd midday arrival might have circulated up through the symbiotic chain of criminals and police until it reached the attention of someone who was aware of Barton's miraculous salvation from the archers. The mutilation of his body was probably because, having seen me again after I seemed thoroughly dead, the illuders and their unwitting assistants wanted to make sure there was no chance of error. And they left him in the whorehouse so I'd be sure to find him.

I was still in qincktime as I surveyed the destruction of my friend. It had been, to me, ten "days" since I left Anderson, nineteen "days" since had left Barton. In realtime, however, it was early evening of the day after I left. I couldn't help wondering if I could have saved Barton by coming back a little faster, or by not leaving him quite so soon. But as I gave him grief, I realized that the guilt I felt because I might have saved him was a trivial thing compared to thie pain of the earth's scream in Anderson. The earth did not hold me responsible for Bartons death, and after the illuders had added Lord Barton's murder to their list of crimes, I couldn't bring myself to feel guilt for the killing of that hideous man in Anderson. So I was able to shrug off the blame for this and remember only that I loved the man, that he was good, and that I had to stop others like him from dying at the illuders' hands.

With Barton gone, I had no reason to delay the next stage in my journey; I had every reason to hasten it. None of the illuders would escape. No matter what it took, Treason would be free of them before I was through. Any doubt I had about the rightness of my intended killings was gone. I was beyond thought, and intended only to carry out the decision I had so reluctantly made, yet was now grimly glad to fulfill.

There was a matter of priorities. Before moving against the Andersons who were running things in other Families, I had to see to it that the home island was depopulated. No replacements, no angry and deceptive and irresistible army from Anderson should be able to rescue the rulers. And the population of Anderson could be as much as a million; certainly it was no less than a hundred thousand. That would be long and weary work in quicktime, with me armed only with my iron knife and forced to go from person to person. It would use up my lifetime before I was half through. Their destruction required a cataclysm they could not resist, that would kill them all at once. It was not something I knew how to do.

I needed help, and there was only one place I could get it. But could I persuade the people of Schwartz to kill, even when that killing would save other lives-- and, perhaps more importantly, make millions of lives more worth living? There was little room for making value judgments in the Schwartzes' thinking, I knew too well. Life was life. Murder was murder. And I, who had left them still innocent, was coming back to them with blood on my hands, asking them to help me with my killing.

For weeks I had lived utterly alone in quicktime, neither eating nor drinking, neither speaking nor hearing another human voice except that of the beautiful girl in Anderson. Yet I had no time to waste. So for another thirty days I traversed the whole southland of the continent, from Wood to Huss. The trees gave way to lush grassland. The grass gave way to brush that