Flane stirred himself, stepped forward into the shadows, stalking toward the temple entrance where the guards talked. There were only two of them, and Flane had a great deal of confidence in his sword-arm, confidence that had been justified again and again.
He leaped from the darkness, his blade a thing of lightning in his hand. The guards came around on their heels, yanking out their weapons, laughing gutturally.
"Flane! We have him, too!" rasped one of them.
His blade drove in like a beam of light, twirled the blade of the nearest guard in a circular envelopment, wresting it from his fingers to send it flashing high in the air. Sidestepping the lunge of the other guard, Flane slithered his blade through his opponent's neck, watched him gargle blood in his throat as he plunged.
In a moment the second guard lay beside his fellows, lifeless. Flane stepped across their still legs, out into the cool night air. Above his head the three moons of Klarn whirled high in the heavens, flooding the court with light.
"The Dragon Gate," Flane whispered, and ran.
As his feet pounded on back streets and alleys, he dwelt on the threat of the Darksiders. They were like the Klarn, yet they possessed none of their scientific ability. Centuries ago, so many that the Klarnva had lost count of them, the Darksiders ruled all of Klarn. Then had come the Klarnva, who consisted of the _dulars_ and the _mekniks_, in ships of the sky, from somewhere beyond the triple moons of Klarn. From where, had been lost in the shrouding veils of antiquity.
Their leader had been Norda, a thin genius with a mind as curious as a question. It was Norda who put the machine together, who directed that the people should live in walled city-states against the inroads of the vast numbers of barbaric Darksiders. In the machine Norda had stored power, endless quanta of it. That power gave the Klarnva their lights, their heat, their luxuries. They grew used to it. The Machine even furnished them with weapons, so far superior to those of the Darksiders that the latter looked on them with awe.
When the Machine went dead twenty-five years ago, the city-states of the Klarnva went dead, too. There was no light, no heat. Gone were the power-driven vehicles, the entertaining-screens. People groped upward as from a fog, seeking the source of that power. They recalled that the Keeper of the Machine had disappeared around the same time as the Machine stopped. Moreover, the vast prism in the desert was smashed. Something from outer space had crushed it.