Kurland and the girl moved forward, their eyes on Gion, sitting in silence, his hands buried wrist-deep within the tumbled fortune spilling from the leaden box. He made no move, nor spoke.
They paused, standing by the table's edge, a golden heap of ancient rings winking clean white sparks through their coils. A look of infinite wonder darkened Kurland's face as he studied Gion's.
"He has escaped us," the outlaw said. "And so easily. He never knew."
The woman nodded. "They said of him, like Midas, that he had the golden touch, that everything on which he laid his hand was his. He made it so, and came to this. A fatal gift, Kurland."
The Marward's garments stirred to a vagrant draft, shifting in a silver ripple across his massive chest. But a chest of human flesh no longer. The Orion jewels had gone, dissolved into air like dreams, and before the silent Marward lay the empty settings, flaunting their remaining simpler jewels in barren poverty, but the loss no longer troubled Gion. Beneath his simple robe his flesh shone with a thousand lustrous lights, his muscles ridged with Phidian carving in purest emerald green. His deep-sunk eyes were topaz gold, shot through with jetting bits of white, and his startled lips were purple as fire-shot jade. His massive head was translucent through and through, a vein-sprayed sculpture in Venusian glass where truant silver bubbles froze in silent thunder as they burst. His hands were coral white, the bones within curling to and fro like vagrant bits of scarlet ruby, all caught and held forever in one eternal crash of living color. The Jewels of Orion had but changed their form, burst from the ancient golden settings to plunge and explode and freeze anew in living human flesh.
Gion, Marward of Jupiter, had become himself a jewel.
Slowly Kurland sheathed his blaster.
"Our work is done, Irene. And by the Marward himself."
She looked up at him, pale-faced, dark-eyed, watchful. "I could have told him as much." Her eyes fell to the table, to the four boxes remaining unopened, then rose to his. "Must I tell you?"