But Gettlesand and the lands along the Alketch border have carried on a long battle with the Empire to the south, and I doubt that the breach will be healed, whatever Alwir's policies may be.' He glanced up, a bright glint of crystal blue between the shadows of his hood and the muffler that wrapped the lower part of his face, the firelight reddish gold on his long, straight eyelashes. 'But as you can see,' he went on, 'the plains themselves are all but deserted.'

Rudy selected a long stick and poked at the tiny fire. 'How come? I mean, I see all these animals, antelope and bison and jillions of different kinds of birds. You could make a pretty good living in this part of the country.'

'You could,' Ingold agreed mildly. 'But it's very easy to die in the plains. Have you ever seen an ice storm? You get them in the north. Once in the lands around the White Lakes I found the remains of a herd of mammoth, chunks of frozen flesh scattered in head-high snow. The beasts had been literally ripped to shreds by the inferno of the winds. I've heard stories that the cold in the centre of those storms is such that grazing animals will be frozen solid so swiftly that they do not even fall, but stand, turned to ice and half-buried in snow, with the flowers they were eating frozen in their mouths. And the storms strike without warning, out of a clear sky.'

'That would sure kill the property values,' Rudy assented with a shiver. But something undefined stirred in his memory, something he had read, or had heard read to him... Wild David's Body Shop in Fontana came back to him, with himself slouched in the erupted mess of split vinyl and filthy padding of David's old swivel chair, leafing through decayed copies of the Reader's Digest while a crowd of the local bikers argued profanely about what they wanted him to paint on the tank of somebody's Harley...

'And if you haven't seen the effects of an ice storm,' Ingold continued, 'at least you have seen the work of the White Raiders.'