WHEN HE COULD, TUF FOLLOWED THE NEWS FROM THE BRONZE Arena, although he never again ventured forth to the soil of Lyronica. The cobalcats continued to sweep all before them in the latest featured encounter; one of the Norn beasts had destroyed a prime Arneth strangling-ape and an Amar Island fleshfrog during a special triple match.
But Varcour fortunes were also on the upswing; the newly introduced tyrannoswords had proved a Bronze Arena sensation, with their booming cries and their heavy tread, and the relentless death of their bone-swords. In three matches so far, a huge feridian, a water-scorpion, and a Gnethin spidercat had all proved impossibly unequal to the Varcour lizards. Morho y Varcour Otheni was reportedly ecstatic. Next week, tyrannosword would face cobalcat in a struggle for supremacy, and a packed arena was being predicted. Herold Norn called up once, shortly after the tyrannoswords had scored their first victory. “Tuf,” he said sternly, “you were not to sell to the other Houses.”
Haviland Tuf sat calmly, regarding Norn’s twisted frown, petting Dax. “No such matter was ever included in the discussion. Your own monsters perform as expected. Do you complain because another now shares your good fortune?”
“Yes. No. That is—well, never mind. I suppose I can’t stop you. If the other Houses get animals that can beat our cats, however, you will be expected to provide us with something that can beat whatever you sell them. You understand?”
“Sir. Of course.” He looked down at Dax. “Herold Norn now questions my comprehension.” Then up again. “I will always sell, if you have the price.”
Norn scowled on the comm screen. “Yesyes. Well, by then our victories should have mounted high enough to afford whatever outlandish price you intend to charge.”
“I trust that all goes well otherwise?” Tuf said.
“Well, yes and no. In the Arena, yesyes, definitely. But otherwise, well, that was what I called about. The four young cats don’t seem interested in breeding, for some reason. And our Brood-tender keeps complaining that they are getting thin. He doesn’t think they’re healthy. Now, I can’t say personally, as I’m here in the City and the animals are back on the plains around Norn House. But some worry does exist. The cats run free, of course, but we have tracers on them, so we can…”
Tuf raised a hand. “It is no doubt not mating season for the cobalcats. Did you not consider this?”
“Ah. No, no, don’t suppose so. That makes sense. Just a question of time then, I suppose. The other question I wanted to go over concerned these hoppers of yours. We set them loose, you know, and they have demonstrated no difficulty whatever in breeding. The ancestral Norn grasslands have been chewed bare. It is very annoying. They hop about everywhere. What are we to do?”
“Breed the cobalcats,” Tuf suggested. “They are excellent predators, and will check the hopper plague.”
Herold Norn looked puzzled, and mildly distressed. “Yesyes,” he said.
He started to say something else, but Tuf rose. “I fear I must end our conversation,” he said. “A shuttleship has entered into docking orbit with The Ark. Perhaps you would recognize it. It is blue-steel, with large triangular grey wings.”
“The House of Wrai Hill!” Norn said.
“Fascinating,” said Tuf. “Good day.”
BEAST-MASTER DENIS LON WRAI PAID THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND standards for his monster, an immensely powerful red-furred ursoid from the hills of Vagabond. Haviland Tuf sealed the transaction with a brace of scampersloth eggs.
The week following, four men in orange silk and flame red capes visited The Ark. They returned to the House of Feridian four hundred fifty thousand standards poorer, with a contract for the delivery of six great poison-elk, plus a gift herd of Hrangan grass pigs.
The Beast-Master of Sin Boon received a giant serpent; the emissary from Amar Island was pleased by his godzilla. A committee of a dozen Dant seniors in milk white robes and silver buckles delighted in the slavering garghoul that Haviland Tuf offered them, with a trifling gift. And so, one by one, each of the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica sought him out, each received its monster, each paid the ever-increasing price.
By that time, both of Norn’s fighting cobalcats were dead, the first sliced easily in two by the bone-sword of a Varcour tyrannosword, the second crushed between the massive clawed paws of a Wrai Hill ursoid (though in the latter case, the ursoid too had died)—if the great cats had escaped their fate, they nonetheless had proved unable to avoid it. Herold Norn had been calling The Ark daily, but Tuf had instructed his computer to refuse the calls.
Finally, with eleven Houses as past customers, Haviland Tuf sat across the computer room from Danel Leigh Arneth, Senior Beast-Master of Arneth-in-the-Gilded-Wood, once the greatest and proudest of the Twelve Great Houses of Lyronica, now the last and least. Arneth was an immensely tall man, standing even with Tuf himself, but he had none of Tuf’s fat; his skin was hard ebony, all muscle, his face a hawk-nosed axe, his hair short and iron grey. The Beast-Master came to the conference in cloth-of-gold, with crimson belt and boots and a tiny crimson beret aslant upon his head. He carried a trainer’s pain-prod like a walking stick.
Dax read immense hostility in the man, and treachery, and a barely suppressed rage. Accordingly, Haviland Tuf carried a small laser strapped to his stomach just beneath his greatcoat.
“The strength of Arneth-in-the-Gilded-Wood has always been in variety,” Danel Leigh Arneth said early on. “When the other Houses of Lyronica threw all their fortunes on the backs of a single beast, our fathers and grandfathers worked with dozens. Against any animal of theirs, we had an optimal choice, a strategy. That has been our greatness and our pride. But we can have no strategy against these demon-beasts of yours, trader. No matter which of our hundred fighters we send onto the sand, it comes back dead. We are forced to deal with you.”
“Not so,” said Haviland Tuf. “I force no one. Still, look at my stock. Perhaps fortune will see fit to give you back your strategic options.” He touched the buttons on his chair, and a parade of monsters came and went before the eyes of the Arneth Beast-Master; creatures furred and scaled and feathered and covered by armor plate, beasts of hill and forest and lake and plain, predators and scavengers and deadly herbivores of sizes great and small. And Danel Leigh Arneth, his lips pressed tightly together, finally ordered four each of the dozen largest and deadliest species, at a cost of some two million standards.
The conclusion of the transaction—complete, as with all the other Houses, with a gift of some small harmless animal—did nothing to soothe Arneth’s foul temper. “Tuf,” he said when the dealing was over, “you are a clever and devious man, but you do not fool me.”
Haviland Tuf said nothing.
“You have made yourself immensely wealthy, and you have cheated all who bought from you and thought to profit. The Norns, for example—their cobalcats are worthless.
“They were a poor House; your price brought them to the edge of bankruptcy, just as you have done to all of us. They thought to recoup through victories. Bah! There will be no Norn victories now! Each House that you have sold to gained the edge on those who purchased previously. Thus Arneth, the last to purchase, remains the greatest House of all. Our monsters will wreak devastation. The sands of the Bronze Arena will darken with the blood of the lesser beasts.”
Tuf’s hands locked on the bulge of his stomach. His face was placid.
“You have changed nothing! The Great Houses remain, Arneth the greatest and Norn the least. All you have done is bleed us, like the profiteer you are, until every lord must struggle and scrape to get by. The Houses now wait for victory, pray for victory, depend on victory, but all the victories will be Arneth’s. We alone have not been cheated, because I thought to buy last and thus best.”
“So,” said Haviland Tuf. “You are then a wise and sagacious Beast-Master, if this indeed is the case. Yet I deny that I have cheated anyone.”
“Don’t play with words!” Arneth roared. “Henceforth you will deal no longer with the Gre
at Houses. Norn has no money to buy from you again, but if they did, you would not sell to them. Do you understand? We will not go round and round forever.”
“Of course,” Tuf said. He looked at Dax. “Now Danel Leigh Arneth imputes my understanding. I am always misunderstood.” His calm gaze returned to the angry Beast-Master in red-and-gold. “Your point, sir, is well-taken. Perhaps it is time for me to leave Lyronica. In any event, I shall not deal with Norn again, nor with any of the Great Houses. This is a foolish impulse—by thus acting I foreswear great profits—but I am a gentle man much given to following my whim. Obedient to the esteemed Danel Leigh Arneth, I bow to your demand.”
Dax reported wordlessly that Arneth was pleased and pacified; he had cowed Tuf, and won the day for his House. His rivals would get no new champions. Once again, the Bronze Arena would be predictable. He left satisfied.
Three weeks later, a fleet of twelve glittering gold-flecked shuttles and a dozen work squads of men in gold-and-crimson armor arrived to remove the purchases of Danel Leigh Arneth. Haviland Tuf, stroking a limp, lazy Dax, saw them off, then returned down the long corridors of The Ark to his control room, to take a call from Herold Norn.
The thin Beast-Master looked positively skeletal. “Tuf!” he exclaimed. “Everything is going wrong. You must help.”
“Wrong? I solved your problem.”
Norn pressed his features together in a grimace, and scratched beneath his brass coronet. “Nono, listen. The cobalcats are all dead, or sick. Four of them dead in the Bronze Arena—we knew the second pair were too young, you understand, but when the first couple lost, there was nothing else to do. It was that or go back to ironfangs.
“Now we have only two left. They don’t eat much—catch a few hoppers, but nothing else. And we can’t train them, either. A trainer comes into the pen with a pain-prod, and the damn cats know what he intends. They’re always a move ahead, you understand? In the Arena, they won’t respond to the killing chant at all. It’s terrible. The worst thing is they don’t even breed. We need more of them. What are we supposed to enter in the gaming pits?”
“It is not cobalcat breeding season,” Tuf said.
“Yesyes. When is their breeding season?”
“A fascinating question. A pity you did not ask sooner. As I understand the matter, the female cobalt panther goes into heat each spring, when the snowtufts blossom on Celia’s World. Some type of biological trigger is involved.”
“I—Tuf. You planned this. Lyronica has no snowthings, whatever. Now I suppose you intend charging us a fortune for these flowers.”
“Sir. Of course not. Were the option mine, I would gladly give them to you. Your plight wounds me. I am concerned. However, as it happens, I have given my word to Danel Leigh Arneth to deal no more with the Great Houses of Lyronica.” He shrugged hopelessly.
“We won victories with your cats,” Norn said, with an edge of desperation in his voice. “Our treasury has been growing—we have something like forty thousand standards now. It is yours. Sell us these flowers. Or better, a new animal. Bigger. Fiercer. I saw the Dant garghouls. Sell us something like that. We have nothing to enter in the Bronze Arena!”
“No? What of your ironfangs? The pride of Norn, I was told.”
Herold Norn waved impatiently. “Problems, you understand, we have been having problems. These hoppers of yours, they eat anything, everything. They’ve gotten out of control. Millions of them, all over, eating all the grass, and all the crops. The things they’ve done to farmland—the cobalcats love them, yes, but we don’t have enough cobalcats. And the wild ironfangs won’t touch the hoppers. They don’t like the taste, I suppose. I don’t know, not really. But, you understand, all the other grass-eaters left, driven out by these hoppers of yours, and the ironfangs went with them. Where, I don’t know that either. Gone, though. Into the unclaimed lands, beyond the realms of Norn. There are some villages out there, a few farmers, but they hate the Great Houses. Tamberkin, all of them, don’t even have dog fights. They’ll probably try to tame the ironfangs, if they see them.”
“So,” said Tuf. “But then you have your kennels, do you not?”
“Not any more,” Norn said. He sounded very harried. “I ordered them shut. The ironfangs were losing every match, especially after you began to sell to the other Houses. It seemed a foolish waste to maintain dead weight. Besides, the expense—we needed every standard. You bled us dry. We had Arena fees to pay, and of course we had to wager, and lately we’ve had to buy some food from Taraber just to feed all our housemen and trainers. I mean, you would never believe the things the hoppers have done to our crops.”
“Sir,” said Tuf. “You insult me. I am an ecologist. I know a great deal of hoppers and their ways. Am I to understand that you shut your ironfang kennels?”
“Yesyes. We turned the useless things loose, and now they’re gone with the rest. What are we going to do? The hoppers are overrunning the plains, the cats won’t mate, and our money will run out soon if we must continue to import food and pay Arena fees without any hope of victory.”
Tuf folded his hands together. “You do indeed face a series of delicate problems. And I am the very man to help you to their solution. Unfortunately, I have pledged my bond to Danel Leigh Arneth.”
“Is it hopeless, then? Tuf, I am a man begging, I, a Senior Beast-Master of Norn. Soon we will drop from the games entirely. We will have no funds for Arena fees or betting, no animals to enter. We are cursed by ill fortune. No Great House has ever failed to provide its allotment of fighters, not even Feridian during its Twelve Year Drought. We will be shamed. The House of Norn will sully its proud history by sending dogs and cats onto the sand, to be shredded ignominiously by the huge monsters that you have sold the other Houses.”
“Sir,” Tuf said, “if you will permit me an impertinent remark, and one perhaps without foundation—if you will permit this to me—well, then, I will tell you my opinion. I have a hunch—mmm, hunch, yes, that is the proper word, and a curious word it is too—a hunch, as I was saying, that the monsters you fear may be in short supply in the weeks and months to come. For example, the adolescent ursoids of Vagabond may very shortly go into hibernation. They are less than a year old, you understand. I hope the lords of Wrai Hill are not unduly disconcerted by this, yet I fear that they may be. Vagabond, as I’m sure you are aware, has an extremely irregular orbit about its primary, so that its Long Winters last approximately twenty standard years. The ursoids are attuned to this cycle. Soon their body processes will slow to almost nothing—some have mistaken a sleeping ursoid for a dead one, you know—and I don’t think they will be easily awakened. Perhaps, as the trainers of Wrai Hill are men of high good character and keen intellect, they might find a way. But I would be strongly inclined to further suspect that most of their energies and their funds will be devoted to feeding their populace, in the light of the voracious appetites of scampersloths. In quite a like manner, the men of the House of Varcour will be forced to deal with an explosion of Cathadayn tree-slugs. The tree-slugs are particularly fascinating creatures. At one point in their life cycle, they become veritable sponges, and double in size. A large enough grouping is fully capable of drying up even an extensive swampland.” Tuf paused, and his thick fingers beat in drumming rhythms across his stomach. “I ramble unconsciously, sir. Do you grasp my point, though? My thrust?”
Herold Norn looked like a dead man. “You are mad. You have destroyed us. Our economy, our ecology…but why? We paid you fairly. The Houses, the Houses…no beasts, no funds. How can the games go on? No one will send fighters to the Bronze Arena!”
Haviland Tuf raised his hands in shock. “Really?” he said.
Then he turned off the communicator and rose. Smiling a tiny, tight-lipped smile, he began to talk to Dax.
GUARDIANS
HAVILAND TUF THOUGHT THE SIX WORLDS BIO-AGRICULTURAL Exhibition a great disappointment.
He had spent a long, wearying day on Brazelourn, trooping through the cave
rnous exhibition halls, pausing now and then to give a cursory inspection to a new grain hybrid or a genetically improved insect. Although the Ark’s cell library held cloning material for literally millions of plant and animal species from an uncounted number of worlds, Haviland Tuf was nonetheless always alert for any opportunity to expand his stock-in-trade.
But few of the displays on Brazelourn seemed especially promising, and as the hours passed Tuf grew bored and uncomfortable in the jostling, indifferent crowds. People swarmed everywhere—Vagabonder tunnel-farmers in deep maroon furs, plumed and perfumed Areeni landlords, somber nightsiders and brightly garbed evernoons from New Janus, and a plethora of the native Brazeleen. All of them made excessive noise and favored Tuf with curious stares as he passed among them. Some even brushed up against him, bringing a frown to his long face.
Ultimately, seeking escape from the throngs, Tuf decided he was hungry. He pressed his way through the fairgoers with dignified distaste, and emerged from the vaulting five-story Ptolan Exhibit Hall. Outside, hundreds of vendors had set up booths between the great buildings. The man selling pop-onion pies seemed least busy of those nearby, and Tuf determined that a pop-onion pie was the very thing he craved.
“Sir,” he said to the vendor, “I would have a pie.”
The pieman was round and pink and wore a greasy apron. He opened his hotbox, reached in with a gloved hand, and extracted a hot pie. When he pushed it across the counter at Tuf, he stared. “Oh,” he said, “you’re a big one.”
“Indeed, sir,” said Haviland Tuf. He picked up the pie and bit into it impassively.
“You’re an offworlder,” the pieman observed. “Not from no place nearby, neither.”
Tuf finished his pie in three neat bites, and cleaned his greasy fingers on a napkin. “You belabor the obvious, sir,” he said. He held up a long, calloused finger. “Another,” he said.