Kay smiled, seeing not a threat, but an opportunity. “I am Kaywerbrimmis. Here are Valavirgillin, my patron, and Sabarokaresh and Foranayeedli. In the other cruisers they are Machine People, too. We hope to persuade you to join our Empire.”

“I am Paroom. Our leader you must address as Thurl.”

Vala let Kay do the talking. Grass Giant sword-scythes had too little reach. Farsight Trading’s guns would make short work of a vampire attack. That should impress the Bull, and then-business.

Grass Giants, scores of them, were pulling wagons filled with grass through the gap in a wall of heaped earth.

“This isn’t normal,” Kaywerbrimmis said. “Grass Giants don’t build walls.”

Paroom heard. “We had to learn. Forty-three falans ago the Reds were fighting us. We learned walls from them.”

Forty-three falans was 430 rotations of the star patterns, where the sky rotated every seven and a half days. In forty falans Valavirgillin had made herself rich, had mated, had carried four children, then gambled her wealth away. These last three falans she had been traveling.

Forty-three falans was a long time.

She asked or tried to ask, “Was that when the clouds came?”

“Yes, when the old Thurl boiled a sea.”

Yes! This was the place she sought.

Kaywerbrimis [sic-should be Kaywerbrimmis] shrugged it off as local superstition. “How long have you had vampires?”

Paroom said, “Always there are some. In this last few falans, suddenly they are everywhere, more every night. This morning we found nearly two hundred Gleaners, all dead. Tonight they will hunger again. The walls and our crossbows hold them back. Here,” said the sentry, “bring your wagons through the gap and prepare them to fight.”

They had crossbows?

And the light was going.

It was crowded inside the walls. Grass Giant men and women were unloading their wagons, pausing frequently to eat of the grass. They looked up as the Machine People moved among them; they gaped, then returned to work. Had they ever seen self-propelled cruisers? But vampires were a more urgent concern.