Chapter One

For the eleventh time, Ussakk the Astronomer pored over the most recent collated readouts while trying to decide how best to kill himself. Whichever method he chose, it would be faster and cleaner than what was coming. While the last time the Iollth had ravaged Hyff had been well before his birth, abundant records were available to illustrate in gruesome detail their appetite for destruction. Given the history of their visitations to Hyff, it was remarkable that any of the populace would continue to resist. Yet invariably, outraged at the periodic demands for tribute and treasure, some did. And just as invariably, they died deaths that were as horrible as they were futile.

That much could be tolerated, if not for the disagreeable Iollth habit of slaughtering out of apparent boredom the occasional batch of innocent civilians.

Ussakk felt he would be as fated to be among the latter—that is, if the authorities did not kill him outright as the bearer of bad news. He sympathized in advance with their probable reaction. There was always the hope among his people that the Iollth would tire of their cyclical visits to Hyff, that they would seek to enrich themselves at the expense of others elsewhere and leave the Hyfft to their peaceful, widespread communities and to the tending of the crops of which they were so proud.

A fool’s dream, Ussakk knew. So long as the Hyfft fashioned beautiful objects out of rare materials, so long as their mines produced rare and unsynthesizable raw materials, the Iollth would return: to plunder, and not to buy.

The astronomer knew they could not be put off with excuses. A hundred years a