Four Lords of Diamond - Book 1 by Jack L. Chalker

and very humid with minimal seasons. Latitude and elevation would be responsible for the main temperature variations on Lilith, not what month it was. Elevation loss was a near-standard 3 degrees centigrade per 1,800 meters.
    And even latitude wasn't all that much of a factor. Equatorial temperatures were scorchers—35 to 50 degrees centigrade, 25 to 34 or so in the midlatitudes, and never less than 20 degrees even at the poles. No ice caps on Lilith. No ice, either, which in itself might explain why there was only one enormous continent on Lilith, along with a bunch of islands.
    A day was 32.2 standard hours, so it would take some adjusting to the new time rate. A lot, I thought. That was over 8 hours more than I was used to. But I'd coped with almost as bad; I could cope with this one, too. A year was 344 Lilith days. So it was a large world, as worlds go, but with low gravity, which meant no metals to speak of. Pretty good prison, I thought.
    The Lord of Lilith is Marek Kreegan, Krega continued. Most certainly the most dangerous of the Four Lords, for he alone is not a criminal or convict but instead was, like you, an agent of the Confederacy, one of the best. Were he able to leave the Warden system, he would probably be considered the most dangerous man alive.
    I felt a thrill go through me for more than one reason. First, the absolute challenge of tracking down and hitting one like myself, one trained as I was and considered the most dangerous man alive—it was fantastic. But more than that, this information offered me two rays of hope that Fm f airly sure Krega hadn't considered. If this man was a top agent sent down on a mission, he'd have been in the same position as I would be upon its completion—and he hadn't been killed. There could be only one reason for that: they had no way of killing him. He'd figured the way out and taken it. Perfect. If Kreegan could do it, so could I.
    And he'd worked himself up to being the Lord of Lilith.
    The logic still held. If he and I were judged at least equal, then that meant that I potentially have the same powers as he has—greater powers than anyone else on the planet or somebody else would be Lord. And what he could do, I could do.
    Still, to find Kreegan, let alone kill him, could prove to be an almost impossible task, Krega continued. First of all, he rarely makes an appearance, and when he does, he is always concealed. Everyone who discovers what he looks like is killed. He has no fixed base, but roams the world, always in disguise. This keeps his underlings on their toes and relatively honest, at least toward him. They never know who he might be, but fear bun tremendously, as he can- kill them and they can do nothing to him. At last count there were a little over 13,244,000 people on Lilith—that's a rough estimate, of course. A very small population, you'll agree—but Kreegan can be any one of them.
    Well, actually he couldn't, I noted to myself. For one thing, Kreegan was a standard from the civilized worlds. That meant he was within fairly definite physical limits, thus eliminating a lot of people. Of course, since I knew he was male that eliminated close to half the population right there. He was also seventy-seven, but he'd been on Lilith for twenty-one years, which would change him a great deal from any picture of him as a younger man. Still, he'd be an older man, and on Lilith older men would stand out anyway—it would be a rough world. So we call him middle-aged, standard height and build, and male.
    When you were starting with 13,000,000, that narrowed the field down more than, I suspect, Krega himself realized.
    A challenge, yes, but not as impossible as it i sounded. Even more important, as the Lord and ad- \ ministrator there would be certain places he'd have to ' hit, and certain functions he'd have to attend. Still , more narrowing down, and I wasn't even on the j planet yet. , j
    The rest of the briefing was pretty routine. After it I was over I simply