speech detailing the enhancements he had in mind for S'uthlam and concluding with an explicit admonition: This is received with predictable religious outrage, and Mune is barely able to extract Tuf from the clutches of an angry S'uthlamese mob. "A Beast for Norn" Tuf is approached by Herold Norn, senior beastmaster of the Norn House of Lyronica. The House of Norn requests beasts for gladiatorial fighting in Lyronica's Bronze Arena. After seeing an example of the Arena battles (and, it is strongly implied, being appalled by its barbarity), Tuf agrees to provide a breeding stock of cobalcats (and a stock of innocuous-looking prey animals from the cobalcats' homeworld to be released into the cobalcats' new Lyronican habitat) for the House of Norn. As the House of Norn racks up victories with their cobalcats, Tuf is approached seriatim by the other houses for ever-more-lethally-effective beasts (and compatible prey animals), until the greatest of the Houses, namely House Arneth-in-the-Gilded-Wood at last approaches him for a beast and also with a demand for him to cease all further dealings with the Houses of Lyronica. Tuf graciously accepts the offer. Norn returns to Tuf to complain about the cobalcats not mating (and about the prey species reproducing without effective suppression and overrunning the Norn lands, making it impossible for the House of Norn to return to breeding their original Arena beasts). Tuf gets the last laugh, as the introduction of the various prey species into each House's territory irrevocably changes the regional ecosystem such that all become incapable of sustaining the large predators upon which the gladiatorial contests had originally depended, thus leading to the (unstated) end of the Bronze Arena. "Call Him Moses" While peaceably eating in a restaurant, Tuf is attacked by Jaime Kreen. Kreen is convicted for the attack and bonded to Tuf as a servant in debt. Kreen explains that his society (a technologically advanced secondary colony established as an arcology on the planet Charity) has been taken over by a primitivist religious leader named Moses. Taking his cues from the Bible, Moses had unleashed plagues on the inhabitants of the arcology, driving them out of their city into the countryside to labor and suffer under Moses' back-to-nature Holy Altruistic Restoration. Kreen had attempted to murder Tuf because he blames Moses' plagues upon Tuf, who has gained an interstellar reputation as an ecological engineer, and Tuf realizes that Moses' "plagues"