I nodded, and another silence passed. I answered: "If he has formed a plan at all, and doesn't just rush in on a blind faith in his luck." We sighed. All was speed now, but a melancholy languor was on us. Insistent despair, soliciting yet again our weary hearts, woke no more fight in us. We were almost emptied, and beginning at last to accept our destruction.

Glumly, with audible loathing, Barnar said, "That seems to be our only adequate vantage." He nodded toward the hirsute carcass of a gigantic slothlike beast that lay on a debris-hill of smaller corpses and their broken chariots of war. Somehow, we started walking toward it. "Yes," I said, "we can climb up that spike it has strapped to its head."

It appeared that the beast had died among-upon-its own cavalry. The eyeless, beetle-jawed apes whose multitudes underlay it had died in a wreckage of chariots whose prows projected great spikes identical in all but size to that the giant wore. These eyeless charioteers were small only beside their monstrous ally, for their vehicles were the size of galleons, and they, when standing, could have spread their nasty jaw-scythes and clipped the crow's nest off an Astrygal windjammer's mainmast.

The sloth's flesh, puddling in cheesy wrinkles around each huge shaft of its hair, stank. Dead fleas the size of yearling horn-bows lay half sunk in the charnal mire. We kept to the spine-ridge, which was a little balder of this stinking pelt. "Corpse-fleas!" Barnar raged as we clambered past an ear, and stumbled onto the knoll-top of the cranium. "That vile, willful little moron makes corpse-fleas of us!"

Death had frozen the giant's head at only a slight forward droop, and the steel spike strapped to his forehead jutted a hundred feet farther out at the half-vertical. We started shinning up the bright needle. Already we saw all we needed to, but we climbed mechanically, up and out, our eyes lost in what confronted us.

The dreadful grandeur of that monstrous, chambered muscle, shapely as a Shallows wine-jar, bottling the - colossal vintage of the demon-giant's vitality, thundering endlessly with the stoppered power of these contents- it was more than a life of looking could truly take in. The great vein serpenting up its flank was itsel f a t h i n g o f a w e . T h e p u l se and volume of more than one mighty river charged through that gargantuan blue pipe.

And we now saw just how that vein was tapped, and saw more clearly too the genesis of those things which tapped it. A tough, glassy capsule both sheathed and vaguely displayed the fibers of the heart's underlying sinew.

And all this inmost, toiling demon-meat was infested-riddled with encysted shapes, slimly tapered ellipsoids like sarcophagi of carven wood.

These could be seen at every stage of growth, in fluid-filled bubbles that slowly swelled with their growth, sundering the muscle of the giant's tortured, consenting heart. Ultimately the bubbles' swelling ruptured the heart-sheath. Everywhere across the living wall, stilt-legged, stingered monsters were to be seen wrenching their drenched and folded wings from broken natal husks. They hatched, they spread and dried their wings, they took flight, and moved toward the vein.

Around halfway up its length, at perhaps half a dozen different places, the vein had been clamped by vast brazen collars, each of which bristled with steel couplings. It was upon these couplings that the winged Regatherers converged. Each one in its turn sank its caudal barb into one of those sockets and waited as its hive- mates worked spigot-wheels, which diverted into its tail-bulb its alloted iota of the Master's blood. Not infrequently, the strength of the current they tapped mocked their precautions. Spigot-wheels would stick, and helplessly coupled individuals would claw the air with panicked legs, their bodies swiftly burgeoning, then exploding in a fine, red mist. Then every nearby worker flew crazily, lapping the bright spray from the air till others succeeded in reclosing the spigot, whereat-unfalteringly-another would take its turn at the coupling.

They had emerged only to drink in this manner, and, having drunk, each immediately set about the work of its return. Each engorged Regatherer began a steady, hovering descent toward the war-strewn flesh that floored this cosmos. Each settled on this floor in the zone closest to the heart and clearest of debris. Settling on this floor, each sank its jaws into its master's skin and chewed until its head was wholly buried. While its front end ate this anchorage, each monster's stern half compacted-its legs and wings folding up tight-and started a rhythmic convulsion. Swiftly, the folded body began to split. Now it was a husk. A great, shining maggot's body moulted from the husk and started worming its way underground after its sunken head. The obscene, ribbed barrel of its new body was little more than a cistern, a tiny-legged tank wherein to convey another jot of the tyrant back to his dominions. And though these grubs ate their way all the way under with truly sickening speed, their tapered body-casks did protrude defenseless for several minutes during the process of their descent. We came to this realization at about the same time.

"Hmph," Barnar muttered. "Notice the next-highest ones waiting their turn to settle down and moult-they hover on guard over their siblings while they wait for them to dig in."

"Yes. Still, it has that first-glance look of feasibility. If the boy takes note of it, his eagerness will see it as a sure-fire tactic."

Barnar nodded, somewhat disinterestedly. It was the spectacle as a whole that absorbed him. "Such a labor,"

he mused. "Since the Red Millennium, did he say?"

"Yes." "Did they ever sing you that cradle song when you were small?" Amazingly, he began to sing me the song he meant. His frayed basso rendered the simple tune with surprising sweetness:

". . . And that Neverquit bird, though small and weak, Lights again and again on Neverend Strand.

And he packs into his narrow beak One little bite of that infinite beach, And recrosses the sea till he reaches that land- That land of his own he is building to stand In a sun-blessed place beyond harm's reach, That land he is making with stolen sand And a will that will not be denied what it seeks."

It made me smile to hear those lines, which I knew, sung here by my friend as we hung there dreamingly, hugging the great sloth's spike-tip, looking rather like sloths ourselves, I suppose.

"And when they've regathered his essence," I asked, "when the Elixir's been brought below again? Though Sazmazm's spirit might live in the brew, what freedom will the titan have if he must lie in a vat, a bottled ocean of bodiless soul?"

"You know, I asked Gildmirth that question. He didn't have an answer. He'd heard a rumor that the giant's slave-hosts have long been at work building him a second body out of stone."

I shuddered, trying to throw off the stupor that lay on me. "Come on," I said. "We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony."

We shinned down the spike, and repeated the verminous traversal of our dead host. We reached the major claw of its left hind paw and, with a leap, departed from its rankly meadowed slopes. We jogged toward the naked mountain, carrying our shields and spears at half-ready, watching for ambuscades-for we had noted that many of the giant dead surrounding us had been quarried for their meat. The carrion-appetites that haunt all battlefields most surely haunted this one. Mechanically we jogged toward the moulting grounds, near the heart of the thunder that filled this morgue-ish world.

And we had almost reached it when we came across a corpse worth pausing over. It was one of the stingered, stilt-legged giants, a dead Regatherer. A toppled siege-tower had, in falling, sunk a spur of its broken beamwork through the middle segment of the creature, which was the segment its legs and wings were jointed to. The spur had pierced it laterally so that the corpse lay on its side. It was huge partly in its great lengths of leg and wing, for its slim-built, tri-part body had perhaps somewhat less overall bulk to it that the hull of a mid-sized merchantman.

We took our lances to it, climbing to prod its body for vulnerable features. It was everywhere as supple as leather and as unpierceable as steel. Finally we stood near its head, looking up bitterly at its face. I saw in the black moons of its eye-bulbs, in the cruel barbs and shears of its mouth-tool, a pitiless amusement with our littleness, our urgent, dwarfish ambition to do its demon hugeness harm. In my gloom and mortification I contrived, unthinkingly, an excuse to hurl my hate against the thing.

"You see between its eyes and jaws that 'X' of muscles, or nerves, or whatever they are? X marks the spot."

I got a lot of run behind my throw, and heaved the stick up toward the alien planets of its extinguished eyes.

Instant death missed Barnar by somewhat less than a handsbreadth, for that was how far he chanced to be standing beyond the arc of the stinger's thrust. Whip-quick, the great, pinned corpse folded in half on the iron axis of its implement. Its caudal barb stabbed forward with a force that imbedded it deep in the chestplates its legs were jointed to. I saw, above the spasmic working of its mouth-tool, the butt of my spear protruding from the softness it had found to en-scabbard more than two-thirds of its length.

We did not risk the convulsions that might attend retrieving my spear, and found me another among the weapons so profusely littering that waste of carcasses and martial engines.

A short time later we were edging out to the limits of our cover amid the battle-debris, and viewing the more barren moulting-ground's vast perimeter. Looking out over the impossibly broad frontier we planned to prevent the nimble, determined Wimfort from crossing, Barnar burst out with a short, disgusted laugh. "Let him be damned," he said. "He'll break cover where we can see him in time to catch him, or he won't. I'm going to sit here awhile, and sooner or later we'll find out which of these it is to be. To hell with everything else. I'm going to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting still for as long as the opportunity lasts."

I thwacked his shoulder consolingly, but couldn't come up with any comforting reply. I wandered around a bit, looking listlessly along the frontier. And, a quarter-mile or so down that border, across a little clearing that separated two large heaps of wreckage, a small shape moved. The movement was abrupt and dodgy, like that of a lizard sprinting from covert to covert. I was already running, half-crouched, weaving toward the place, keeping all the cover I could manage between me and it.

So fast I went, more flying than afoot! On what strength, drawn from where, I'll never know. I'd more than half reached him when I saw my quarry again-back of a last trash heap bordering the open grounds. There Master Wimfort crouched, and gathered himself for the spring. Just then he put me in mind of a young lion on a first kill. There was that clownish lack of finesse alloyed with mortal seriousness in precisely equal measure. The boy was no longer, in strict truth, a boy. He was abundantly ridiculous, and he was also truly kill-ready. He had been at work on a weapon of scavenged parts. He'd gotten a seven-foot fragment of heavy spear-haft. He'd lashed a battle-ax by the handle to one end of this, and had spiked and lashed to the other the broken blade of a splendid sword-like a falchion, broad and razor-edged at the point. Around his haft's balance point he'd wrapped himself two hand-grips of leather cording. His strategy was p l a i n f r o m his weapon's design. This was n o c a s t i n g -spear-it was to be used like a jousting-lance, the ax at the other end providing an option of chopping blows as well.

Even as I studied him I neared him at a mute-foot sprint, praying for the few seconds' luck that would suffice to get me within range to outrun him before he could bolt far enough onto the moulting-ground to bring the titan slaves down on us. Four seconds would have done it, and of course, I didn't get them. He saw me,

and without the shadow of a hesitation, leapt out on the wounded, wormy plain below the mountain. We pounded across that meaty resilience, our desperate drives converging toward one of the tertiary monsters lying in full moult a scant three-hundred strides ahead of me.

Alas! A scant two hundred and fifty strides ahead of Wimfort. But our ruin was already accomplished-I saw it then, though I couldn't curb the insane persistence of my legs' pursuit. The boy was oblivious. Still running at full tilt, he raised and couched his lance. Beyond and above him, a stingered giant hanging five hundred feet off the plain swung around to us the remorseless black globes of its eyes, and sank gigantically toward us.

The great abdominal cask that was Wimfort's target had thrashed itself clear of its parent-husk and gotten about half-submerged. Up-ended, it towered ponderously, rocking with its gluttonous labor. The boy, uttering a shout of rapture, drove his point full against it.

Obliquely, I noted his weapon's fragmentation, his collision with the grub, his stunned fall-foreseeable details. Primarily, I watched the Regatherer's dive toward the boy as I ran to intercept it. It loomed down, its spike drawn up and under, strike-ready. I vaulted up with the cast, flung myself into free-fall after it to put some heft behind the stick's flight. My eyes popped with the snap I put into the toss. My fall back to the ground seemed almost leisurely as I watched my spear take root, watched the giant's dive become a death plunge as it folded convulsively in the air and sank its stinger hilt-deep in its own swollen underbelly. I tucked my head,

hit the ground, rolled to my feet. The Regatherer's cargo spilled in black cascades behind it as it tumbled toward its ruin. I ran toward the boy, stumbling once at the shock of the giant's fall.

The Regatherer's torrential wound had drenched him, yet he was almost dry by the time I got to him. Not from that black brew's running off him, but from its soaking into him. It drained into his skin as quick as water melts into dry sand. But his hair was still half soaked, and in picking him up, I slipped my left hand under the back of his head to support it, and the demon blood sizzled on my palm.

I had to put him down again-he was coming around in any case-and dance around trying to shake the pain off my hand. The stuff couldn't be rubbed off; it burnt me for a bit, and then it became a painless black dust which I blew on, and was cleansed of. Yet I must testify to an unnatural thing the Elixir bred in the part of me it touched-for since that occasion I have been what I never was before-perfectly ambidexterous, and have long - behaved right-handedly from habit only.

Seeing the boy gain his feet, I seized his arm and hauled him back toward the cover of the battle-zone's mortuary maze. He promptly had his legs well under him and was running with a will. Having what he sought, and craving to get it safely home, the boy now became scrupulously cooperative. At least two Regatherers were moving toward their fallen sibling already, and scanning around for an enemy. I told Wimfort where to dive and he did it instantly and flawlessly-under a toppled chariot. I flung myself supine on a heap of relatively anthropoid dead, and ceased to move.

We were not discerned-the stingered giants were soon patroling the area in force, but not knowing what they sought, they seemingly spared scant lookout for things of our order of magnitude. How many whales ever die of fleas? And once a second squad of Regatherers had completed our victim's obsequies-completed, that is, the - lapping-up of all that its broken belly had spilled-these patrollers retired, and returned to their hovering-places above the moulting-grounds.

Just as we were setting out to find Barnar, he came stealing into the clearing. Together we guided our now obedient charge to a clearing farther back from the unspeakable mountain. Barnar had seen what had happened, and we found nothing to say to each other. We sat ourselves down, not knowing what else to do. Listlessly, I began a minor repair of my boot-binding. My friend sprawled back against a broken battering-ram. He balanced his ax on the toe of its handle on his fingers' ends. He would hold it upright awhile, shifting his hand to keep the balance, and then he would let it fall forward through one fu l l t u rn and bite into the cheesy w h i t e w o r l d - f l o or-into Sazmazm's vastly mislaid skin. Then he would pry it free, and repeat the process.

For a while, Wimfort poked around cheerfully in the debris, savoring his deed, his successful rite of passage into the pantheon of heroes. He sang, he whistled, he whispered to himself, like a carefree child gathering shells in a beach.

But soon his exaltation began to fill him, swelled in him unendurably. Big with the sense of being already in possession of everything the Elixir could obtain for him, continued calm became a visible agony for Wimfort.

He'd been poking with a mace he'd found among a heap of armor, and muttering ever more feverishly. I saw him pry out of the heap a particularly fine piece of work-a brazen shield, graven with a stylized earth-wheel surrounded by astronomical symbols. I thought he was going to try its weight. Instead, he began to hit it with the mace. Each blow released an even greater shout of triumph from him. He danced like a demon, whooping and smiting the shield till it rang like a gong, marring the artful metalwork. By the time Barnar had wrenched the mace from his hands, he was entirely transported. He grinned unseeingly at us, who were at that moment in his eyes but two more of the legion of scoffing oafs who had long mocked and thwarted his ambitions, and who were now, with the rest, about to witness his vindication.

"Ha!" he shouted. "Ha! Now who's going to be laughing, and who's going to be gnashing his teeth, eh?

How's it going to be now? What about the jabobos, hey my friends? Do those slimy Priors argue and debate with us about our ancestors' sacred herds? Do they presume to tell us who our herds belong to? Will they still presume, now that there's no tract of earth I can't encompass with the mere spreading out of my ten fingers here?

Oh, mark me now, my friends: Let my return be on First Market Day; and if that's the day I get back home, then on Second Market Day, let them step outdoors and look about their countryside, and see if they can find anywhere in all Prior Kairnlaw one jabobo, one blade of grass, or even one muddy streamlet in all their parched dominions. They won't find any of those things-but then, they won't even get outside their doors to look for them either. Because before first light on that same morning, their own swords will jump from the scabbards on their wall-pegs, and hew them all to pieces in their beds, and spare not a babe or a greybeard among them!"

There was more, much more. When his histrionics ceased to be dangerously loud, they abated nothing in intensity, and we sat down again, unspeakably melancholy, and let them roll through our ears. There was a lot about Kine-Gather's great future as its nation's capital of rivers, prime pasture-land, and jabobo herds. There was a good deal about which of Kine-Gather's sister cities would share but subordinately in her fortune, and expiate their various crimes against her with shovel-work in her offal-yards. Following this, there was abundant information about every folk or city the wide world over which had ever had dealings with Latter Kairnlaw, and about how their fates were to accord with their treatment of his beloved fatherland.

We sat morosely as this wealth of data was lavished on us. With our eyes we questioned one another, and saw no answers.

XIX.

Freedom! That belabored word! It is a big, empty word, and yet, when some experience reminds us what freedom is, how clear and particular its meaning becomes, how unspeakably sweet, and full! I once had the experience of walking up to that word, and gazing into its measureless amplitude, upon all that it contains. I could see the word as I approached it-it looked like a small, raggedly square patch of blue. I walked through a stony, steel-paved dimness. My mind was mostly numb, with little more than one idea in it, which I muttered to myself for my own instruction: "That is freedom."

I kept walking, and as I got closer to the word it began to fill out. A minute blackness swam into the blue patch. Its shape told me it was a hawk, and its size-in telling me its distance-reminded me of the depth of that blueness. With a pang, I remembered that depth.

"That is the sky," I pointed out to myself. I began to walk faster. Beyond the hawk-far beyond-was one small, gauzy scarf of cloud. Steadily I approached. Distant mountains sprouted from the bottom of the sky's frame, then the intervening plains unrolled toward me from their feet.

And then I stood on freedom's very doorstep, and looked directly into it. It was made of stone and sand and tough, green scrub, and was studded with blunt, grey mountains on whose crests unmelting snows lay, sugar- white. And over these lay a blueness so deep and rich you felt it like a chill down to your bones. Across all of this the winds moved at liberty, and these winds were inhabited by japes and corbies and hawks and crooked- winged finches. "The thief! The lanky one! He's back!"

The garrison, all rousing at once to the soldier's cry, swarmed to assemble. I nodded to myself. The thief, the gaunt one, was back, and the thick one too. I believe I beamed down at them one brief, idiotic smile before I went back to beholding freedom. I viewed the inching movement of a herd of horn-bow being driven across a stream out on the plain. I noted the low, tender hum the wind made crossing a patch of dry spar-grass just down the slope from Darkvent. And, observing that the sun was westering toward a fragile net of cloud-wisps on the horizon, I foresaw the red-and-gold fire-trellis that would frame its setting in half an hour or so. After these few brief discernments, it startled me to find that the garrison was all mounted and drawn up a few yards below the shaft-mouth, with Charnall and Kamin mounted at their head, and Kamin looking as if he'd been waiting awhile for my attention. The necessity of focusing my attention on the Rod-Master caused me to heave a deep sigh. I did it unthinkingly, and the moment after, realized its agonizing ambiguity to a father all coiled up to seize on my first expressions for the report of his son's fate. I almost smiled.

"We've got your boy back for you, Rod-Master."

Perhaps some private resolution had frozen his jaw till I should speak the first word, for it thawed now and his lips parted. Still, nothing came out of them.

"Hello Charnall," I smiled. "How does it go with you, my friend?"

He looked absently into my eyes, rubbing his baldness gently with his left hand, as if to force into his brain the reality of my return.

"We knew you were near," he said slowly. "I knew it through the Life-Hooks." Suddenly, he smiled back at me. "Didn't I foretell it? Didn't I have a feeling about it? You found the Privateer of Sordon-Head?"

"We did indeed. He is a rare m a n , C h a r n a l l . A great man."

"Yes. So I thought he must have been-must be."

"Show me my son!" It was a choking roar. We looked at Kamin. His beefish face was congested with rage.

He thought we were playing with him-that there was nothing else in the wide world but his particular concern to occupy anyone's mind. So like his son he was! But his concern, at least, was for someone other than himself.

"I'll show you your son," I told him quietly. "And only that-show him to you. When our Life-Hooks are removed, your men withdrawn and our payment arranged before us, when these things are done, we will release him to you." I turned, and called back down the shaft: "Barnar! Bring him out to the light!" I turned to Kamin.

"Come in, you and Charnall. You can bring two guards for your person if you distrust us, but no more."

I almost laughed at the needlessness of the last admonition. Kamin had to use his most compelling scowl to get even his captain and one other man to attend him. I led them in, and felt them grow tense behind me when they heard a rumble welling out toward us. I led them a few strides within and bade them halt. We watched a murky bubble of torchlight rise at us from Darkvent's gullet. In the bubble was Barnar, the torch in one hand, and his other hand on a rope across his shoulder. Beyond him you could just make out the ore-cart he was hauling up the gentle grade.

He stopped a short distance from us, lashed the rope to a beam, and waved cheerily to Charnall. To Kamin he said: "Here's your boy, Rod-Master." Holding his torch above it, he reached one arm into the cart and sat the neatly trussed boy upright on the shredded cable we'd packed him in, so Kamin could see him plainly.

"Father," the boy said.

Barnar drew his sword. "And here is our safeguard against any treachery you might intend. Note the tautness of this rope." He laid the sword's edge upon it. "The slope here is gentle, but constant. In a few seconds he would be rolling right along. Farther down, the pitch grows exceedingly steep."

"Before anything else," I said to Kamin, "the Life-Hooks Here and now." The Rod-Master nodded to Charnall. The mage plucked from his tunic a bit of parchment which his lips voicelessly rehearsed before he set his hand to my chest and spoke the spell. I did not despise this in him. On the contrary, in matters of sorcery give me every time the careful plodder over the slap-dash man. I felt a terrible pain which at first made me think I had been betrayed. It was the hook coming loose from my heart like a rusted-fast spike from dried wood, and I recognized what had seemed agony to be an intense pang of relief. When Charnall had done the same service for Barnar, my friend took the control-ring from him and pocketed it.

From the mouth of the shaft, I showed Kamin where we wanted beasts with our gold and weapons drawn up, and how far off his men must be deployed, before we'd let him lead his boy out of the shaft. The Rod-Master didn't move at first. He looked at me with hate and scorn. "How cooly you carrion-birds barter with the life of a - defenseless boy."

I was paralyzed with rage myself a moment. All that I might say to him surged into my throat, and died away there, since I knew its futility. At last I said: "I tell you this, Oh Rod-Master, and no more than this. In paying what you do, you underpay us shamelessly. I do not cavil-we asked as much as we could carry and still outrun you if you proved treacherous. I don't expect to convince you, but I simply tell you, for the record, we shall always consider you and your people to be greatly in our debt. And now, let us have done with one another, for in all truth, I loathe the very sight of you."

Stolidly, Kamin turned, then checked himself and, as if in afterthought, disdainfully waved to Charnall his dismissal. The mage jumped up, clicked his heels in the air, and then solemnly bowed to his former captor.

Kamin strode out into the waning light-all red and gold on the hillside-and the three of us, as from another world, watched his arms waving and his soldiers dispersing to his will.

Then Charnall looked at us. "I do not believe you have done this," he said. "And I never really believed you could do it, save in brief flashes of irrational excitement."

"We've just had a great deal of irrational excitement," Barnar nodded. "We'll tell you about it on the way to Shormuth Gate."

Charnall nodded, smiling. "Shormuth Gate sounds just fine." He turned to notice the boy then, and made a half-step to approach him. I stayed him gently.

"Best not, my friend. He is in a serious kind of shock-as you might imagine."

The mage's face darkened. He nodded gravely. "It was something I thought of when I went so far as to imagine you might find him. How . . . much of him, psychically speaking, you would be able to bring back after he had suffered such a captivity." The three of us regarded the boy, who sat in the cart and stared back at us, his eyes dark and frightened.

"We've brought you back as much as you see," Barnar said solemnly. The answer grieved the mage. It startled me-though I had never doubted the man's bigness of heart-to see his eyes fill with tears just short of spilling over. He brought himself a little straighter and cleared his throat, sighed and wiped his eyes briskly on his sleeve. "I remember," he said, "once having a particularly clear thought about the boy. He was, at the time, unwillingly practicing his High Archaic hand by copying over one of the spells I had just procured him. If he had a copy of the spell and knew how to read it aloud, he had all he needed, he would tell me. He saw no point in learning how to form the letters on the page.

"So I was watching him there. He sat hunched over, scowling closely at his hand as it performed the detested calligraphy, and the thought came to me: He carries selfish ambition almost to the point of selflessness. And now, poor boy, he is selfless indeed."

I squeezed Charnall's shoulder. "Don't feel so badly. The boy's full self persists, undestroyed, although the rigor of his experiences may have rendered it remote from us at present."

The sun had set. The movements of men and beasts, framed for us in Darkvent's mouth, seemed-in the gold- shot cerulean light-a kind of swimming, as if the frame held a window into an immense tank of oceanic light.

Their liquid jostling began to show pattern-the mounted forms retired, and a rank of riderless beasts remained, hobbled together near the shaftmouth. Three of them were saddled and had packets of arms lashed to their pommels, and the rest were saddle-bagged, and tight-legged with the strain of heavy loads.

I nodded to Barnar. He lifted the boy from the cart, cut his bonds, and brought him to stand between us on Darkvent's threshold. Kamin was already climbing toward us. We stood aside from the boy and urged him forward.

He stepped out uncertainly, seeming to cringe from the open air, as if it was thronged with harmful presences.

"Father," he said to the man who sped to embrace him; his voice was small, its tone wavering eerily. "I was with the Bonshad, Father. I was his. I breathed the water, and all the black smoke that was in it."

Kamin reached him, grasped his shoulders. Strangely, the boy was not looking at him now, but at the full moon which had just risen from the ridgeline directly opposite the still blood-smeared zone of the sun's vanishing. His father , f r ightened by the oddness of his look, embraced him.

It was an embrace from which the Rod-Master quickly recoiled. The boy's limbs never stirred, but his whole frame made a terrible, fierce movement, a growth. His body swelled to almost twice its mass, and lost an inch of its height. His eyes grew bigger, his mouth sank within a pale, brambly beard that sprouted twisting from his jaw.

Kamin took a slow, staggering backwards step; his soldiers, across the dale, reached uncertainly for their swords, all of them watching Gildmirth as he drew a dagger hanging from what had been Wimfort's middle, and slashed the front of the boy's doublet to give himself breathing-room. Then, reaching behind him, he made two vertical slashes in the fabric covering his shoulders. The Privateer, turning his plum-red eyes to Kamin, then smiled courteously, and said: "Be at ease. I'll do none of you any harm."

Kamin lunged, and his soldiers started forward. Gildmirth raised his left hand, and all of them froze-the very beasts they bestrode became as stone. Kamin's sword, which his arm had been in the act of swinging forward, spilled from his petrifled fingers. Barnar and I signed Charnall to follow us. We went down to our pack- train, got him mounted, and mounted ourselves.