Free The Nonborn King by Julian May Page B

if I won't love you?" she repeated
    "I think you know."
    He gave her his hand and they entered the lightless lower, leaving the last of the meteors exploding in cool darkness.
    JUST ONE MORE DAY. AND TONY WAYLAND WOULD HAVE MADE his escape. Just one more day, and he could have gone out normally with the caravan to Fort Rusty, then made his getaway with nobody the wiser.
    But the Howlers had attacked the iron Maiden Mine before the caravan left- And now Tony knew he was going to die ...
    As that Pliocene rara avis, a metallurgical engineer and fully sane ex-silver (his psychocreative faculty was modest at best; he owed his high status under the Tanu to an improved refining technique introduced at the Finiah banum mine), Tony was under strictest orders from his new bosses in the Lowlife Steering Committee to avoid life-threatening situations He usually undertook troubleshooting tours among the Iron Villages only during daylight, when hostile exotics were seldom abroad. Sir Dougal, the stalwart bodyguard assigned to him by Old Man Kawai, shadowed him everywhere Dougal's pseudomedieval eccentricities were more than counterbalanced by a fanatical devotion to duty and by expertise with the compound bow And, truth to tell. Tony was also gratified to have at least one person left who still addressed him as "Lord." The majority of the Lowlife iron-working community were offensively egalitanan, if not downright contemptuous of a declasse silver such as himself. He had cooperated with the Tanu, and done it willingly Thus he was a traitor to the human race.
    Not that anyone dared snub Tony to his face' Far from it. since his talents were invaluable If the free humans of the Vosges wilderness, Lowhves and Finiah refugees, now united , were to avoid Tanu enslavement, the Howler menace, and possible Firvulag treachery, iron production was a strategic necessity The "biood-metal" was poisonous to all branches of the extragalactic race that shared Pliocene Europe with em battled humankind, and the use of iron weapons had been a key factor in the destruction of Tanu Finiah by a coalition of Lowlives and Firvulag Tony Wayland had been one of the top prizes in that human triumph Most of the other noncombatant silvers had been flown safely to Tanu territory when Lord Velteyn evacuated his doomed city But Tony had been unlucky
    A sneering band of Lowlife invaders had caught him flagrante delicto in the Finiah Pleasure Dome, too besotted after an interlude with a Tanu charmer to distinguish the skyrockets going off in his head from the noise of the city's Gotterdamnierung So they frogmarched him off, hauled him before a Lowlife tribunal, and gave him the choice faced by every other torced human following the fall of Fmidh. Live free or die Tony, a total pragmatist, had submitted to the abscission of his silver torc and the ensuing weeks of agonizing psychic adjustment But he hadn't forgotten, or forgiven He would have run away to the Tanu in a tnce, except for the still greater disaster that had destroyed the exotics' capital of Munah and snuffed out most of the ruling nobility The Great Flood had bred such havoc that he was at a loss to sort out the main chance Fort Onion River and the other gray-torc guard stations along the track to Castle Gateway were long abandoned The stronghold itself, useless now that the time-gate had closed, was reputed to have been taken over by the Firvulag The Little People had also seized the small citadel of Burask on the dangerous western trail leading to Armonca and Goriah
    By and large. Tony had little choice but to remain in the Vosges with free humanity He pretended to cooperate wholeheartedly with the Lowlife insurgents, even though life in the newly established Iron Villages along the Moselle was a brutish comedown irom the fine-honed delights of Finiah
    There were six of the settlements, with a total population of about 400, mostly male Five villages were clustered in the vicinity of the future French city ot