Angel with The Sword

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NOW in all the world there were above a hundred cities; which was a good deal better world than the Ancestors had left. There was the heptapolis of the Chattalen strung up and down the Black Sea like a line of black pearls; and there was the prosperous river-land of Nev Hettek, which sent its boats chugging down the great Det to the Sundance Sea. There were settlements near the strange ruins of Nex. Wherever human stubbornness could find a toehold, trade went; and the world, which was named Merovin on the charts, got along as best it could, poised between the sure knowledge that outworld humanity had no interest in it and the eternal hope that the inhuman sharrh had no use for it, present or future. Certainly the sharrh had no intention of letting Merovin's scattered inhabitants off the planet and into space.

So the world—it was only in the religious context the inhabitants ever called it Merovin—managed for itself, these hundred cities descended from humans too stubborn to quit the world when the human-sharrh treaty demanded the removal of the colony; descended from colonists clever enough to have hidden out from the search teams; and tough enough to have survived the Scouring which took out the tech. The sharrh ignored Merovin's inhabitants thereafter. (Though there were rumors that there were sharrh onworld who had not kept their side of the treaty.) The uproar and the commotion died down; the human fugitives came out of the hills, rebuilt their ruins and begat offspring. And twenty generations of descendants cursed them for absolute fools.

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