The jewels vanished into the pocket again. "If you're interested," Benjin said, "come with me."
Herndon nodded. "I'm interested."
"Follow me, then."
CHAPTER II
Herndon had been gone from Borlaam for a year, before this day. A year before—the seventeenth of the reign of the Seigneur Krellig—a band of looters had roared through his home village in Zonnigog, destroying and killing. It had been a high score for the Herndon family—his father and mother killed in the first sally, his young brother stolen as a slave, his sister raped and ultimately put to death.
The village had been burned. And only Barr Herndon had escaped, taking with him twenty thousand stellors of his family's fortune and killing eight of the Seigneur's best men before departing.
He had left the system, gone to the nineteen-world complex of Meld, and on Meld XVII he had bought himself a new face that did not bear the tell-tale features of the Zonnigog aristocracy. Gone were the sharp, almost razorlike cheekbones, the pale skin, the wide-set black eyes, the nose jutting from the forehead.
For eight thousand stellors the surgeons of Meld had taken these things away and given him a new face: broad where the other had been high, tan-skinned, narrow-eyed, with a majestic hook of a nose quite unlike any of Zonnigog. He had come back wearing the guise of a spacerogue, a freebooter, an unemployed mercenary willing to sign on to the highest bidder.
The Meldian surgeons had changed his face, but they had not changed his heart. Herndon nurtured the desire for revenge against Krellig—Krellig the implacable, Krellig the invincible, who cowered behind the great stone walls of his fortress for fear of the people's hatred.