There was a constant clamor from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his training grounds men and girls came and went like moths among the incantations and the potions and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests practicing katas from the wobbly tower of his raft or improving their body cultivation on the hot sand of his beach while his two war-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing ballista laden aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his private coach became a horse-bus, bearing parties of cultivators to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his stage wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all caravans. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the week before.

Every Friday five crates of Orange and Lemon Razor Fluffs—furry balls of sharpened teeth that resemble the fruits from which they’re named — arrived from a monstereer in New Citadel, and every Monday these same Oranges and Lemons left his back door in a pyramid of emboweled halves. There was a gauntlet of fighters which could extract the ether of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if they were each struck once with the fighter’s hardened knuckles.

At least once a fortnight a corps of Catkin came down with a several hundred-foot long Corralled Hydra with enough snarling heads to make a hellish landscape of Gatsu-be's enormous training area. On oaken tables, garnished with glistening stilettoes, reinforced buckler shields crowded against mallets of harlequin designs and steel swords and axes enchanted to increase damage. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with elixirs and potions and with alchemical concoctions so long forgotten that most of his iron-cored guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the adventurers have arrived—no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of tanks and damage dealers and chi-manipulators and healers and rogues and rangers and dual sword and shields. The last cultivators have come in from the beach now and are donning their armor upstairs; the carriages from New Citadel are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and parlors and verandas are gritty with subdued colors and weapons held in strange new ways and protective wards beyond the dreams of Castle Town. The blood lust is in full swing and floating round stepping stones that permeated the garden outside are spinning in the air until the atmosphere is alive with war cries and chants and focused incantations and pledges forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic matches between warriors who never knew each other’s names.

The torches grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the adventurers are practicing crimson battle plans and the cacophony of pre-battle pitches a key higher. Ferocity is greater, minute my minute, spilled with bloodlust, tipped out at a focused glance. The battle groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath—already there are multipaths, confident fighters who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, raucous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these experts in ringed mythril, seizes an elixir out of the air, dumps it down for a chi boost and weaving hand signs like Friscan monks strides out alone against the provoked hydra. A momentary hush; the adventurer’s leader varies his strategy obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda the Gray Fist’s apprentice from her Sect.

The hand signs complete and a purple fractal comes to life behind her. It is large and intricate with ten points and four internal rings. Even if her apprenticeship is false, a fourth ring spell is powerful. It spins like an out of control helm but stops abruptly as her hands shoot forward. Her palms are facing the hydra and her ten fingers are splayed wide and lavender energy streams from the point of fractal and connects with large arcs to the fingers of the woman. The power is visible as it moves down her fingers and into her palms and then forms into an orb in front of her hands. The power builds until it is the size of a grapefruit and it begins to tremble and the female warrior pulls it back for a moment then pushes it back out with tremendous force. The ball of power seems at first to not want to separate from the caster and then it abruptly flies forward at incredible speed as if broken from a lease. It hits the hydra square in the chest, sending purple tendrils of electricity up the multiple necks of the monster and as it rears up in pain, the electricity arcs between the reptilian heads.

“Now!” Bellows the leader of the adventurers. His call to attack is loud but drowned out by the roar of pain emanating from the hydra and crackling of electricity from the powerful fourth circle spell.

A bevy of shurikens and stars and arrows whistle through the air to impact the trapped monster all over its body and all the other cultivators present rush in to participate. The fight has begun.

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I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsu-be's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. Warriors were not invited—they went there. They got into carriages which bore them out to the island and somehow they ended up at Gatsu-be's door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsu-be and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with fighting coliseums. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsu-be at all, came for the battle with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin's egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer—the honor would be entirely Gatsu-be's, it said, if I would attend his "little slaying party" that night. He had seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it—signed Gatsu-be Jai in a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white leather armors I went over to his lawn a little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of cultivators I didn't know—though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting caravan. I was immediately struck by the number of young foreign practitioners dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous chi-masters. I was sure that they were selling something: enchantments or spell scrolls or portal spells. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the thick chi in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the elixir table—the only place in the training garden where a single warrior could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

I was on my way to get ragingly enhanced and then fight the hydra alone from sheer embarrassment when Pan-ya Jor came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the training grounds.

Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.

"Hello!" I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden, I must have unwittingly added a bit of chi.

"I thought you might be here," she responded absently as I came up. "I remembered you lived next door to—"

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she'd take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow pauldrons and bucklers who stopped at the foot of the steps.

"Hello!" they cried together. "Sorry you didn't win."

That was for the martial tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.

"You don't know who we are," said one of the girls in yellow armor, "but we met you here about a month ago."

"You've dyed your hair since then," remarked Jor, and I started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket. With Jor's slender golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and sauntered about the area. A tray of elixirs floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Master Momelen.

"Do you come to these festivities often?" inquired Jor of the girl beside her.

"The last one was the one I met you at," answered the girl, in an alert, confident voice. She turned to her companion: "Wasn't it for you, Lucia?"

It was for Lucia, too.

"I like to come," Lucille said. "I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last my cuisse tore open from a camel-lion claw, and he asked me my name and address—inside of a week I got a package from Citidel Armor's with a new full set in it."

"Did you keep it?" asked Jordan.

"Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was dyed gas blue with lavender, steel studs. Two hundred and sixty-five silver."

"There's something funny about a fellow that'll do a thing like that," said the other girl eagerly. "He doesn't want any trouble with anybody."

"Who doesn't?" I inquired.

"Gatsu-be. Somebody told me—"

The two girls and Jor leaned together confidentially.

"Somebody told me they thought he killed a demon lord once."

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Master Momelens bent forward and listened eagerly.

"I don't think it's so much that," argued Lucia skeptically; "it's more that he was a demon assassin during the war."

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

"I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him close to the demon lands," he assured us positively.

"Oh, no," said the first girl, "it couldn't be that, because he was in the Northern Territory legion during the war." As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. "You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody's looking at him. I'll bet he killed a demon lord."

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucia shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsu-be. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.