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→“I have.”

→Kalgan nodded. “She could be yours, Tharg, or mine, but the choice is hers.” He sighed and stared into his goblet. “You called me Golden,” he said. “But it comes to me that you heard me called by another name.”

→“Then?” Hope flamed in the grey eyes.

→“Can it buy love?” There was a thin bitterness in the bronze man’s voice, bitterness and an aching pain. “Leedora is not mine, Tharg, not as you think she is. I bought her because I knew her of old, and I once had cause to value the friendship of her father. It was a debt too easy to repay.”

→“Then she is yours?” Tharg thinned his lips and the heavy metal of the goblet bent beneath his hand. “Someone called you Kalgan the Golden,” he said bitterly. “I never valued gold until now—now that I know what ten thousand stellars can buy.”

→“She could be yours,” said Kalgan, and sipped at his wine.

→“Is she yours?” Tharg didn’t ask how the other knew of what he was thinking. He had learned her name and now....

→Kalgan stood at his side, straight and tall, the flaring light reflecting from his bronze in shimmering glory. He sat and ordered wine, then sipped, his cold blue eyes never leaving those of the big man.

→“Her name is Leedora,” said an even voice. “A dancer.”

→A woman’s face, dark-haired and with eyes of trapped midnight, with a crushed rose for lips and old ivory for skin. Flesh there was too, the half-remembered sheen of firm young curves and lithe muscles, dancer’s muscles and a dancer’s art in their subtle underplay.

→At the tavern he ordered wine, the rich purple wine of Selleda, and gulped his goblet empty in one gigantic swallow. Irritably he snapped his fingers towards the serving wench, and she simpered at him as she tilted the wine skin at her hip, pouring a purple stream into the hammered brass of the cup. Again he gulped, again, then sat staring somberly at the surface of the dark fluid, twisting faces from light and shade, painted with golden light and purple wine.

→Tharg pressed on.

→A fight boiled to a red-stained climax before and a little to one side. A blond Eddorian hissed at a dusky nomad, and flaring light from giant flambeaux rippled on steel blade and blaster. The blaster whined and seared the air with incandescence, the bolt missed, and the Eddorian died, coughing blood through a gash in his throat and trying to fire a blaster with a severed hand. The nomad grunted as he wiped clean his blade, then roared for wine and the pleasures of a blue-haired female, cause of the argument.

→“No!”

→“He was....”

→“But....”

→* * *

→* * *

→“I am immortal?” Tharg stepped from the machine. “I feel no different, are you sure?”

→“It is done.”