IT DID NOT STARTLE him, for the word was softly spoken and for a moment he had forgotten that Sipar was dead—dead with a half-smile fixed upon its face and with its throat laid wide open.
“Mister?”
Duncan stiffened.
Sipar was dead and there was no one else—and yet someone had spoken to him, and there could be only one thing in all this wilderness that might speak to him.
“Yes,” he said.
He did not move. He simply sat there, with the rifle in his lap.
“You know who I am?”
“I suppose you are the Cytha.”
“You have done well,” the Cytha said. “You’ve made a splendid hunt. There is no dishonor if you should decide to quit. Why don’t you go back? I promise you no harm.”
It was over there, somewhere in front of him, somewhere in the brush beyond the fire, almost straight across the fire
