CHAPTER 7Kalif had not overstated—that was the real hell of it. Standing at the summit of the tower overlooking the Kalahari, Varl could taste the vomit that had risen in his throat, feel the crawl of his skin, the hand gripping his bowels. The Comptroller had been wrong—his recovery had not been complete. Watching the holograms in Polar North, he had smelled again the char of his burning flesh, cringed at the remembered agony of his ravaged hands, became a beast flinching at the threat of pain, one who had died to become a man.
He straightened, checking the activity below, in a clearing rested a ship readying for space, a tough freighter, small but strongly built to withstand the tug of high gravities, the savage thrust of rockets. Men crawled like ants over the hull, the flare of their
