Simeon said: "Why don't you go and look it up in the big medical encyclopedia?

Have you finished unpacking?"

"Of course not. There's a whole crate yet."

"Well, go and finish it. We'll come up in a moment."

Boyd turned to Niall. "Do you want to come?" It was the first time he had acknowledged Niall's existence.

Simeon said: "No, he'll come up with us. Go and unpack the other crate."

Boyd exchanged a glance with Niall and pulled a wry face. As he ran off down the corridor, Phelim said resignedly: "My younger brother is brilliant, but he's a terrible pest."

In fact, Niall had taken an instant liking to the boy, whose eyes radiated intelligence.

Simeon had already turned back to the girl, and was studying her forearm. "Give me the viper serum."

Phelim handed him a small glass bottle containing a yellow fluid. But as Simeon filled the syringe, Niall experienced an odd sense of misgiving.

"Wouldn't it be safer to try a small quantity first?"

Simeon shrugged. "It shouldn't do any harm. But perhaps you're right -- I don't want to waste the serum." He squeezed some of it back into the bottle by pressing the plunger.

Niall looked down at the girl's sleeping face. She was a pretty, dark-haired teenager with an olive skin and full lips. There was something very attractive about its serenity. Almost without being aware of it, his consciousness passed beyond her sleeping face and into her brain. It was like plunging into a sea of oblivion, total absence of being.

Through this nothingness, Niall continued to be aware of his own body, standing there and looking down at her. Yet he was no longer inside his body. Nor did he possess any identity. He was like a newborn baby, gazing blankly out on the world.

Yet this consciousness of nothingness was dimly illuminated by flashes of somethingness, like a faint dawn on the horizon. This was the girl's sleeping consciousness, dimly aware of her body and of the room she was lying in. This vague, almost nonexistent consciousness became momentarily more aware as Simeon drove the needle into her arm and pressed the plunger.

Simeon said: "Do you realize this is the first time in a thousand years that one of these things has been used?"

His voice produced a slight shock that brought Niall back into his body. It was pleasant to reenter his own identity and to become aware that he was Niall, and not a fragment of nothingness.

The three of them stood there in silence, looking down at the girl's face, and at the rising and falling of her breasts. After about a minute her breathing became faster, and spots of color appeared in her cheeks.

Phelim said: "It's working."

Simeon shook his head. "Don't speak too soon."

As he said this, Niall once again probed the girl's mind. As soon as he did so, he realized that something was wrong. There was an acute sense of discomfort, a feeling of suffocation, and a scalding sensation in his veins. The waves of delirium made him feel so unbalanced that he hastily withdrew.

The girl was now breathing fast, as though in a fever, and Simeon was beginning to look concerned. Phelim reached out and raised her eyelid. Niall could see that the eye was moving around rapidly, showing the white of the eyeball; the effect was unpleasant, as though she were a frightened animal. Simeon, who was holding her wrist, shook his head.

"You were right. Thank heavens I didn't give her a larger dose."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. The two neurotoxins may have opposed one another."

Phelim took another bottle from the medicine chest. "How about belladonna?"

Simeon shook his head emphatically. "Fatal. Atropine stimulates the heart and her pulse is already a hundred and thirty. Hyoscin might work. But I don't want to take any more risks." He dropped the wrist. "I think she'll be all right."

But Niall, who was aware of the feverish tumult in the girl's brain, was less confident. Even to share her consciousness at second hand produced a burning sensation of thirst and an irrational longing to plunge into cold water.

Simeon said: "There's nothing more we can do for now. Let's go and see how Boyd's getting on."

It was a relief to follow him out of the room. It was not until Niall was halfway along the corridor that the burning sensation disappeared.

The large room at the top of the stairs had been recently vacated by the carpenters, and smelled of freshly sawed wood and varnish. The five packing cases from the warehouse now stood against the wall; the floor and two large trestle tables were covered with an assortment of objects, from rolls of bandages and cotton wool to strange items of medical equipment that reminded Niall of things seen in the control room of the white tower.

Boyd was enthusiastically levering the lid off a packing case with a crowbar. He pointed to a large satinwood box on the floor. "That's an electron microscope. Do you know how many times it can magnify?" Phelim shook his head. "Half a million!" He pointed to a gleaming chromium-plated device on the table. "That's a comparison microscope." He touched a button at its base, and a small but powerful light came on, illuminating the slide-holder.

Phelim was astonished. "What made it light up?"

Boyd said scornfully: "A battery, of course. By the twenty-second century they'd invented batteries that could store a thousand volts. How about this?" He picked up a black tube from the table and pushed a button; a powerful beam of light shone on the opposite wall. Boyd pointed it at Phelim's face, and twisted the base; the light became so blinding that Phelim covered his eyes with his hands. "Isn't that marvelous? An emergency operating-theatre light. . . And look at this." He opened a polythene box and took out a flat device with a handle at the center of its base. It was about a foot square, and seemed to be made of cloudy glass.

"What is it?"

"A portable X ray." He turned to Niall. "Put your hand on the table."

Niall did as he was told. Boyd held the clouded glass above it, then squeezed a switch. A pale green light illuminated the glass. Niall gazed with astonishment as his flesh disappeared, and he found himself looking at the hand of a skeleton. Boyd chortled with delight, and held the device up against Phelim's face; Phelim's head immediately turned into a grinning skull with empty eye sockets. As Phelim started to move away, Boyd said: "Hold still a minute." Using both hands, he pushed a slide on the handle.

Phelim's head became slowly clothed with flesh -- not normal flesh, but a kind of semitransparent jelly in which all the veins and arteries were clearly visible. Inside the skull, it was possible to see the outline of Phelim's brain. "There, you see, uncle, you were wrong -- Phelim has got a brain." He ducked a playful blow from Phelim.

Niall picked up a gleaming metal tube from the tabletop; it was a foot long and two inches in diameter. It reminded him of the expanding metal rod he had found in the land of Dira. Like the metal rod, it was startlingly heavy for its size. One end was covered with a frosted glass screen, and the control button on its side rested in a graduated slot.

When Niall pushed the button upward, the glass was illuminated with a green glow.

He asked Boyd: "What's this?"

"I'm not sure." It obviously pained him to admit ignorance. "Some kind of torch?"

Niall shone it on the palm of his hand. To his surprise, the green light produced a pleasant, cool sensation not unlike a breeze. As he pushed the button upwards in its slot, the light intensified, and his hand became increasingly cold. Before the button had reached the halfway mark, his hand felt frozen, as if immersed in icy water. Even when he turned the light away, the flesh remained achingly cold, so that it was difficult to move his fingers. He whistled with pain. "That's freezing!"

Boyd said: "Ah, now I know what it is. It's a cold light. They were invented to replace refrigerators." Phelim was studying a large sheet of paper. "Yes, it's here on the inventory -- Rykov Dethermalizer or cold light. What's an otoscope?"

Boyd said: "A thing for looking in your ear."

"What's an electrodiagnostic analyzer?"

"I don't know."

"Well, there should be one in here somewhere. And a Gullstrand apparatus, whatever that is. . ."

Niall was no longer paying attention. As the freezing sensation gradually disappeared from his hand, he was struck by an interesting idea. While the others were bent over the packing case, he slipped out of the room and tiptoed downstairs.

The girl was now in a fever; her cheeks were flushed, and she was breathing in short gasps. Niall placed the cold light gently against her damp forehead, and pushed the switch. As he did so, his consciousness blended with hers, and he felt her shock wave of relief as the sudden coolness invaded her brain. Within thirty seconds, the flood of emergency signals that had overloaded her nervous system had diminished to a trickle, and her breathing was calmer. Yet as he continued to hold the cold light against her forehead, Niall was aware that he was treating only the symptoms, not the cause of the problem. Her nervous system was in shock as a result of the reaction between the spider venom and the snake serum. And after six weeks of hanging upside down in Skorbo's larder, her vitality was too depleted to cope with the crisis. Even as her heartbeat slowed down, Niall was aware that she lacked the strength to fight off this new invasion of poison that Simeon had introduced into her bloodstream. Trapped in the confused electrical storm of her consciousness, Niall felt completely helpless.

Yet when he was once again looking down at her flushed face, he experienced a surge of anger at this pointless waste of her life. It seemed absurd that there was no way in which he could transfer some of his own excess vitality into her body. On a sudden impulse he switched off the cold light and placed one hand on her forehead and the other on her solar plexus. In doing so, he was consciously imitating the posture he had seen his brother adopt earlier that morning. He recognized immediately that it established a sense of contact between their physical organisms. As his consciousness blended with hers, he instinctively synchronized their vibrations so she could absorb the energy he was trying to give her. A warm sensation flowed down his arms and through his fingertips. And since the sense of contact was still inadequate, he bent over and pressed his mouth against hers. Her lips were dry, so he moistened them with his tongue. And now that contact was fully established, her body responded to the flow of vital energy as parched ground responds to water. It was a curious sensation -- allowing his vitality to be sucked into the vortex of her need. It felt as if their sexes had been reversed, and that he had become the female, she the male. Then, just as the strain of the position was beginning to turn into physical discomfort, he felt the power inside her respond to the power that was flowing out of his own body; like waterlogged soil she had taken as much of his vitality as she could absorb. A moment later, he felt her lips move, and knew she was returning to consciousness. As he straightened up, he experienced a sudden dizziness that made him sway on his feet and grip the edge of the table. The darkness passed, and he saw that her eyes were open. He smiled at her, but she stared back blankly, without recognition. Then she sighed deeply and closed her eyes as the weakened spider venom once more plunged her nervous system into a state of paralysis. When the others came into the room a few minutes later, she was breathing normally and peacefully. Simeon noticed the change immediately.

"Hello, she's looking much better." He took her wrist. "Yes, her pulse is back to normal."

Niall said: "I think your serum must have worked after all."

Simeon gave him a suspicious glance from under his bushy eyebrows, but said nothing.

His charioteers were waiting for him when he came out of the hospital. He was grateful to them for their foresight; the events of the past half-hour had filled him with a dreamy but not unpleasant tiredness. He told them to take him to the slave quarter, then, with a sigh of gratitude, relaxed into the cushions, wishing the journey ahead was longer.

In spite of the tiredness, he was in a curious state of inner excitement. The world around him seemed marvelously fresh and real. This, he realized, was because he had made a voyage outside his own body and into the mind of the unconscious girl; now his own identity seemed new and strange, like a suit of new clothes.

This excursion into the mind of a stranger had also made him aware once again of the odd mental vacuity of these citizens of the spider city. The spiders had gone to a great deal of trouble to breed all the imagination out of their human servants. Yet what had intrigued him about the girl was that, in spite of her lack of imagination, she was obviously happy -- like the crowds of people who were now enjoying the sunlight in the main square, or strolling down the tree-lined avenue that led to the river, mingling freely with wolf spiders and a few bombardier beetles. She had never been outside the spider city, yet she was contented with her lot in life. And was he, in spite of his imagination, so much better off? He had freed his fellow humans from their slavery, and he was the ruler of this spider city. Yet in spite of this, he continued to experience an obscure feeling of discontentment, almost of anticlimax.

Oddly enough, these thoughts caused him no distress. On the contrary, as the cart crossed the bridge that led to the slave quarter, he experienced a curious feeling of satisfaction, as if he was at last coming to grips with the problem. If he was not to surrender to the mindless contentment of the spider servants, then he had to learn to develop his own deeper sense of purpose. And what had just happened seemed to offer him a clue: to leave his own body behind, to be able to float freely in the open space that exists around all human beings. . .

The charioteers paused on the far side of the bridge. "Which way, highness?"

Broadus had not given precise instructions, but he had said that the house faced the river. Niall said: "Turn right here."

Half a mile to the east, the explosion of a vast underground ammunition store had destroyed a large area of the slave quarter, and the river flowed into the crater, forming a lake. Bloated bodies still occasionally floated to its surface, to be fought over by the razor-bill gulls who had now come to nest around its edges. These gulls, whose wingspan was more than two feet, occasionally attacked children, and had stolen at least one baby from its carriage, which had been left outside a front door; for this reason -- and also because they were afraid of the rats, who were as big as small dogs -- the slaves had moved away from the houses adjoining the lake. This suggested to Niall that men who wished to remain unnoticed might choose the roughly triangular area bounded by the lake to the east and the river to the south.

Most of the houses along this riverfront area were damaged; some had lost their roofs, most had broken windows. If the ammunition store had not been so deep and so well protected, the explosion would have destroyed half the city. Now, as they approached the lake, and a few curious gulls squawked and soared above them, Niall observed that one of the birds was behaving in an unusual manner. It was swooping upward, turning a backward somersault, then losing control and fluttering frantically toward the ground before it readjusted itself and soared again on outspread wings. When it carried out this strange maneuver a third time, the other gulls took fright and flew off toward the lake, leaving their companion to swoop upward and repeat the same clumsy and incongruous somersault, squawking with alarm. This time it failed to regain control and crashed into a chimney, then rolled, bumping, down the side of a roof. Niall observed the spot where it had disappeared from sight.

"Turn left at the next street."

A few white feathers showed where the gull had hit the pavement; the bird itself was now in the mandibles of a wolf spider, which was standing guard outside a house a few yards down the road. Niall had guessed he would find it there; the gull's behavior could only be explained in terms of a bored wolf spider indulging its sense of humor.

(Wolf spiders were hunters who enjoyed swift movement, and lacked the immense patience of other species.) It was now so absorbed in its prospective meal that it failed to notice their approach, and started nervously as they moved into its field of vision. When it recognized Niall -- telepathically rather than visually -- it dropped its prey and made a clumsy gesture of obeisance; the bird squawked and fluttered feebly. Niall pretended not to notice the spider's embarrassment, and hurried past it through the open front door.

He noticed immediately the tidiness of the hallway. Although large slabs of plaster were missing from the walls, and the floorboards were worn and uneven, the floor itself looked as if it had been scrubbed. For a house in the slave quarter, this was unusual; slaves were notoriously untidy, and even slave women were sluttish housewives. The next thing he observed was the smell -- a smell that for a moment eluded him, because he had encountered it late in life. Then he remembered: it was the iodine-like smell of seaweed, and it seemed to blend naturally with the cry of the gulls above the rooftops.

He tried the nearest door, which should have led into the front room; it was locked or jammed. But the next door stood slightly ajar. He found himself in a large room whose floor space was almost entirely occupied by furniture -- four beds, several chairs, and a chest of drawers. Otherwise, it was a bare, uncomfortable-looking room, like most other bedrooms in the slave quarter. It differed in only one respect; the beds had been tidily made up, and the floor space between them looked as if it had been scrubbed. Like the hallway, it had a distinctive sea smell.

He found himself unable to suppress a feeling of disappointment. The room seemed to contain no personal belongings, nothing to offer a clue to those who had lived in it. At this point, he recalled a remark of the bald-headed little councilor, Fergus: that these people could not have been slaves because they possessed too many clothes. He picked his way between the beds -- there was barely space to walk -- toward the chest of drawers in the corner. Halfway across the room, he halted and listened intently: a faint creaking of floorboards had sounded from the room above. A few moments later, soft footsteps descended the stairs. Niall groped in his pocket, cursing himself for not bringing the expanding metal rod or some other weapon. For a moment he considered lying between the beds, then realized that, in the silence of the house, the creak of the floorboards was bound to give him away. A moment later, alarm turned to relief as the huge body of a spider blocked the doorway.

"Dravig! What are you doing here?"

Dravig was able to sense his relief. "I apologize for alarming you. I was with the Death Lord when your message arrived. He ordered me to see what you had discovered."

"This is the hideout of Skorbo's killers." Niall looked around the bare room. "Did you find anything upstairs?"

"Nothing. The rooms are unused."

"Then for some reason, they all lived in this room. Probably because they didn't want to draw attention to themselves. Look at the windows." Dravig did so, but obviously failed to comprehend. "They're thick with dust, yet the room itself is spotlessly clean.

Clean windows might have given them away -- slaves never clean windows."

He crossed to the chest of drawers, and pulled open the top one. Inside, as he had half-expected, were slave garments, neatly folded. He pulled these out in armfuls and tossed them onto the nearest bed. The drawer contained nothing else. The second drawer also contained slave garments, and several pairs of sandals; Niall was intrigued to observe that, unlike the sandals usually worn by slaves, these were of excellent workmanship. They might have been made by the workmen of Dira.

Under these, at the back of the drawer, lay five small objects, wrapped individually in cloth. When Niall touched one of them, he observed that the material was damp. Inside the cloth was a layer of brown seaweed, like the fragments Niall had already seen on the flesh of the unconscious girl. When this was removed, he found himself looking at an object made of smooth green stone. It was about two inches high, and his first impression was that it was a carving of a frog or toad. It was a small, squat creature with bulbous eyes, a flat face and a large slack mouth. As a desert dweller, Niall had seen very few frogs or toads; but this one struck him as too humanoid for either. To begin with, the tiny feet on which it supported itself looked more like human hands, although they had webbing between the fingers. The fat little belly had a navel, and the chest had two diminutive nipples. What struck Niall as most intriguing was that both the bulging eyes had darker patches of green that might have been pupils. These seemed to be a natural part of the stone; it must have taken the sculptor a long time to find a stone with two such dark patches in exactly the right place.

He held it out to Dravig. "What do you think this is?"

Dravig reached out both feelers, then quickly withdrew them. "Do not touch it.

Put it back."

"Why?" Niall stared at him in surprise.

"Can you not feel it?"

Niall withdrew into the still center of his mind and opened all his senses. Now, suddenly, he understood what Dravig meant. There was something strange about the object in his hand, a kind of force or energy that was not unlike the force of a living creature. And as he looked at the toadlike face, it now seemed oddly malevolent -- although a better word might have been predatory, like a hunter lying in wait and watching the approach of its victim. Niall had observed it many times among the carnivorous plants of the Great Delta. Even so, the emanation from the stone was mild, almost undetectable; Dravig must have possessed remarkable sensitivity to observe this without even touching it.

Niall rewrapped it and replaced it in the drawer. Then, one by one, he removed the others and unwrapped them. Each, he observed, had been placed with its face toward the back of the drawer. Each was subtly different from the others, although there was a strong basic resemblance. Some had more humanoid faces than others, and one had an open mouth inside which teeth were visible. But these teeth were like no others that Niall had ever seen. They were not triangular and pointed, like the teeth of a fish, nor flat like those of a herbivore, but a combination of the two, with oddly irregular points. One figure had a curious protuberance, not unlike a short trunk, and one had closed eyes, although the face seemed to have the same vaguely menacing watchfulness as the others.

Dravig watched all this with an air of doubt that amounted to disapproval. Niall was aware that he seemed to feel that all this curiosity was unnecessary, almost indecent - - much as humans might feel about ransacking someone's personal possessions. Once again he was struck by the alienness of the spider mind, its strange lack of curiosity.

Spiders were intelligent and observant; yet they seemed to have very little of the natural inquisitiveness of human beings.

He asked Dravig: "Why do you suppose they keep their lucky charms wrapped in seaweed?"

Dravig replied: "They are not lucky charms. They are their personal gods."

Now, suddenly, Niall understood. Spiders had a highly developed sense of the unknown forces of nature, and a boundless awe for the great goddess. This was why Niall himself was now treated as a kind of god; the spiders regarded him as an emissary of the goddess. Dravig was perturbed because Niall was failing to display respect for sacred things. Yet his disapproval was muted since Niall himself shared their sacred nature.

Niall carefully rewrapped the last of the images, and replaced it in the drawer. "I'd still like to know why they wrap them in seaweed. I thought they lived underground."

He was trying to open the bottom drawer, but it yielded only with difficulty; its wood seemed to be swollen and damp. The drawer proved to contain a flat wooden box, about eighteen inches long and a foot wide. Niall had often come across such boxes in the kitchens of deserted houses, during the hours of rambling exploration; they usually contained cutlery, although on one occasion he had found one full of small bottles containing herbs and condiments. He placed this one on top of the chest of drawers and pushed up its catch. To Niall's surprise, it proved to contain nothing but a mass of brown seaweed and a quantity of liquid, presumably sea water. The iodine-smell of the weed filled the room. He lifted a corner of the weed and looked underneath; there was nothing.

But he noted that the inside of the box had been treated with some gray substance that looked slimy, but was, in fact, quite hard to the touch; it was evidently intended as waterproofing. The weed itself had a slippery, leathery consistency, and as he raised it, he noted that it was not, as he had first thought, a mass of separate leaves, but a single sheet of weed. When he lifted it in the air, holding it in both hands, it became clear that it was a roughly rectangular mat which had been folded in two. One side of the mat was smooth and leathery; the other side consisted of sucker-shaped buds, each one about half an inch across. At the edge of the mat there were a number of trailing stems or tendrils; these made it clear that this was a single piece of natural weed which had been removed in its entirety.

He held it out toward Dravig, its water dripping onto the floor. "What do you make of that? What do you suppose they did with a piece of seaweed?" Dravig made a mental gesture that was like a head-shake. Niall replaced it in the box and closed down the lid. When he rubbed his wet hands down his tunic, he noticed that a few fragments of brown weed stuck to the cloth.

The rest of the room yielded no further clues. A cupboard in the corner proved to be empty except for two grubby slave tunics. Niall tossed these onto the bed with the others, then looked through the pockets. As he had expected, these were empty. Finally, he left the room and explored the rest of the ground floor. When the locked door of the front room failed to yield to a determined push, he turned the handle, and rammed it with his shoulder. The door burst open. But the room, as he had expected, contained only dusty furniture, and had evidently not been used for a long time, possibly centuries. All the windows were broken, and shards of glass still lay on the floor.

Since this was a small house, the only other room on the ground floor was the kitchen. This proved to be spotlessly clean, and the few cups and dishes had been washed and left to drain. A dish towel hung from a rack above the sink, and two dish cloths had been spread out to dry from the edge of the draining board. Saucepans and other utensils were upside down on a shelf. The stove contained burnt wood ash. A waste bin underneath the sink was half full of decaying remains of vegetables and some rabbit bones.

The kitchen drawers contained knives, forks, and other implements, some of them rusty and evidently dating back to the days when humans ruled the earth. The cupboard underneath was locked, and an attempt to force it open with a rusty pair of scissors only broke the blade of the scissors. But by removing the drawers, Niall was able to look down into the cupboard; in the middle of the top shelf lay a key. He tried it in the lock; the cupboard door opened. His first impression was that it was empty. Yet in that case, why hide the key? Kneeling on the floor, he peered sideways into the bottom shelf, and gave a grunt of satisfaction. In the far corner there was a small wooden box, which had been placed so far back that he was able to reach it only with his fingertips. It proved to be a few inches square, and made of a black, polished wood. What puzzled him was that it appeared to have no lid; there were no hinges and no sign of a catch. It took him several minutes of careful study to realize that it had a sliding lid, so carefully crafted that its groove was virtually invisible. When he placed his hand firmly on the lid and pushed, it slid open. Inside, there was a brown glass bottle, and a curious device whose purpose eluded him. It was made of the quill of a bird, and one end was sharpened to a point; the other was covered with a small bulb made of a rubberlike substance. Niall uncorked the bottle and sniffed it; the liquid inside had a medical smell. He dipped the quill into it and squeezed the bulb; a yellow liquid was drawn up into the tube. But he still found it impossible to guess why the end was pointed. After squeezing the liquid back into the bottle, he replaced them in the box, and dropped it into the pocket of his tunic. Simeon would certainly find it interesting.

He concluded by looking at the upstairs rooms. But these, as Dravig had said, were empty and showed no sign of occupation; except for Dravig's footprints, the dust on the floors was undisturbed. Back in the bedroom, Dravig was waiting with that infinite patience Niall found so admirable -- he had apparently not even changed his position since Niall left the room.

Niall sat down heavily on one of the beds and surveyed the room. Dravig could sense his frustration. He asked with carefully controlled courtesy -- so as not to imply that Niall had been wasting his time: "What message shall I take to the Death Lord?"

Niall sighed. "You mean what have I learned? Not much, I'm afraid." Dravig's mind transmitted a wordless sympathy; in fact, the direct communication between them meant that his sympathy was plainer than words. Niall said: "All I can tell you is this.