The man in question, by allowing only a grey stubble to occupy t h e p a t e o f h i s o t h e r w i s e s e v e r e l y s h a ven head and face, had made the more manifest an unusual squareness of visage. Hamp regarded Lybis morosely, the glumness of his mouth complaining in advance that his answer was going to be mistreated.

"I entreat you, Lord Hamp," the oracle urged, "can't we dispose of the obvious with more dispatch? What did the oracle tell you?"

With the prompting of many supportive gazes, Pozzle's among them, Hamp cleared his throat , and avai led himself of his jaw's massive hinge. "Well, what she means essentially, as you predicted she was going to in the Aristarkion, is the interpretation that the way to solve the problem is to go and bring her flock back, which again as you were saying was exactly the same si tuat ion of a year ago."

Hamp cleared his throat again, with a faint note of optimism engendered by Lybis' silent, thoughtful gaze.

She shook her head slowly, still looking at him. She grinned. Her head tilted back and she emitted a big, braying laugh. At length she brought herself more or less under control.

"Oh, my dear Lord Hamp," she said. "Anvil, Staff, and Hammer bless us all! Mind that I don't say this disparagingly, for knowing you and hearing your views has always given me the liveliest kind of pleasure, but that's precisely the kind of cretinous irrelevance I've come to count on from you over the years. Obviously she wants the flock brought back home! What could be plainer? But does no one see what the significance of this will be, once it is accomplished? Why has her thought and will endured throughout the countless centuries of her death? Why has she always helped us? In short, why has she held this posthumous sentinel's post all along, if not precisely for this moment? The return of her flock to its home, the restoration of her world as it was when, anciently, men destroyed it? And whose luck is this? Who inherits those long-lost mountain-makers and mountain-destroyers and mountain-miners now? To think that we had to be forced to accept this staggering enrichment! So greedy you all are in the short term, so lazy and unimaginative!"

"Yes, forced!" erupted Director Pozzle. "That's exactly what I'm talking about!"

"Eh? Have you been whispering to yourself, Director Pozzle?"

Pozzle had surged to his feet with an accusing finger thrust up toward the Goddess, but in the same instant that he struck this posture the huge countenance of the accused caused his legs to wobble slightly, and the voice to leak out of his throat momentarily, as if the Flockwarden's mute giantism confuted anything he could say.

"Extortion," he managed at last. It came out muted, like a comic attempt at confidentially addressing the whole chamber without the giant's hearing. "It's blackmail. We talked in the Aristarkion." His challenging look elicited some uncomfortable nods and murmurs of support from his fellow Aristarchs. "The Goddess knew about the deceptive support-vein-that it wasn't nearly as thick as it looked from outside. The lode she revealed to us lay deeper, and if she knew about that, she must have known about the support vein we were counting on to-"

Lybis had held up her hand, and was nodding calmly. "Lord Pozzle. The Goddess doesn't condescend to discuss her divine motivations with her humble servitor, but do you think I'm a fool? Isn't it more or less staring us in the face? And I will say to you what I told myself when I had the same realization: So what? Will you gentlemen undertake to punish her? And if she has seen how to make a mountain bow down above our city, surely she's the only one who can help us decapitate a mountain. Who else will you go to for help? But of course, the city's purse is yours to command. I will leave you to reach whatever agreement you see fit with our military friends here. Do let me know what you decide. I'll be in the atrium."

Nifft followed the shrine-mistress from the chamber. "Dame Lybis, could I speak with you?" He held out to her a string-tied packet of vellum. "A very dear friend of mine in Karkmahn-Ra, a scholar of the highest reputation, sends you this. Perhaps you have heard of Shag Margold?"

Her brows rose and she took the packet. "Margold? His History of the Kolodrian Migrations stands on the shelf of my most prized books. Why has he written me?"

"He's at work on a history of the world's most prominent religious cults. He's always followed yours with - interest, and has gathered a fair amount of information on it." Nifft paused, dropped his eyes, and cleared his throat. "He's asked you a number of questions which he hopes you'll be so good as to answer for him, to fill out his account of Pa-of Anvil Pastures. Forgive my impertinence, but that's a charming ring you have on. Is that an anvil?"

"Yes."

"It's a beautiful piece of silverwork-by the same artisan as made your staff and hammer?"

Lybis, whose eyes had grown rather remote, absently touched the latter two miniatures, which hung from a chain around her neck. "I presume so. They are temple heirlooms, made long before my time."

"Well. I'll be in the city for some time-frankly, I'm looking for a bit of employment-and perhaps you'll find it convenient to answer Shag's letter in time for me to take your reply back with me." Lybis nodded, not speaking. "So! Thank you again. I think I'll go stroll around a bit and take the view from this marvelous plaza outside. Good-bye for now."

Nifft had loitered outside the temple for perhaps ten minutes when the Aristarchs came out, and after them, the commanders-the former grave, the latter rather buoyant, in a decorous way. Nifft told Kandros to go on without him, and that he would meet him back at the quarters where the mercenaries had been housed. When he had been alone again for perhaps another ten minutes, Dame Lybis came hurrying from the temple, spied him, and made straight for him, wearing a rather strained smile.

"Still here, then? You know, I'm curious-have you read your friend's letter?"

Nifft straightened indignantly. "Why-well, certainly not!" His awkward expression did nothing to repair the lack of conviction in his tone.

"Naturally not," Lybis said. "Forgive me for asking. You know, I'd like to express my admiration for Margold in some more substantial way than merely answering this. You mentioned you were looking for employment? You seem to be a handy and active sort of man-it would be my pleasure to secure you a commission on our expeditionary force, at an officer's pay, if that would suit you."

"You are extremely kind! I would undertake it most gratefully and faithfully!"

VI.

The expedition, being lucky in the winds, had crossed the Sea of Catastor and found t h e n e a r e s t s u i table anchorage to their goal by the afternoon of their ninth day out of Anvil Pastures, with seven hundred leagues of their journey accomplished. To cross the remaining fifty miles, and then re-cross it with the Goddess' flock in tow, took three weeks.

This sloth was, in part, due to the mountainous jungle they had to penetrate with every step of their inland journey. Partly, too, it was their mode of pathfinding. On the open sea, the directive emanations of the Goddess-her extended filament of sentience-though attenuated by distance, reached unobstructed over the level seas. But crossing the fernchoked gorges and vine-webbed groves-following the narrow watercourses slick with mist, mud, and moss that were often their sole means of traversing the ridges that opposed them-here, Lybis was often forced to diverge from this psychic connective to the point of so diminishing her sense of it that she must find high ground whence she could relocate its course, and correct their tedious path accordingly.

And a third circumstance retarded them-the fact that when they reached the flock, they found an army in possession of it, and a second army besieging the first.

The first army was in possession of the lucrative monsters in a technical sense only. The beasts were in a kind of fortress of their own making-they had eaten a broad, flat-bottomed gulf out of the flanks of two adjoining hills. Raggedly vertical walls some ninety feet high encompassed them, easily enough descended from the hills with ropes, but impossible as an escape route. Consequently the besiegers bent their main effort against the impressive wood-and-stone wall the defenders had strung across the pit's one open side: the narrow valley-floor whence the herd had approached the hills they found so appetizing. And the defenders possessed the giants only in the sense that those behemoths were gnawing too leisurely at the hills' flanks to be very far away by the time the battle was likely to be decided, and were too torpidly indifferent-if not, indeed, blind-to events of so small a scale as human warfare to contest the claims of the army that had strung the wall behind them.

They had tough, laquered-looking bodies, plated so that they appeared staved or planked, and they were shaped like the overturned hulls of ships. They hauled themselves along on clusters of crooked, relatively dwarfish legs, and swinishly pushed their black, four-lobed mouthparts-when closed together, they resembled tulips-against the nourishing bones of the earth.

Both armies were Prior Kairns, natives of the continent's lush, cattle rich southern half, competing for the enrichment of two rival provinces. This was learned from the survivors of the besieging army who, while the mercenaries encamped to debate their approach to the siege, attacked them. They had been alert for the arrival of a relief force expected by their enemies, and in the dense jungle had not recognized that they were engaging-not the small contingent their spies had described-but a force larger as well as more seasoned than their own. The mercenaries now found their tactical problems simplified. The next morning they advanced to the rampart. There they compelled the surrender of the skeleton force the besiegers had left to mask their withdrawal from the defenders, and prevent a sortie and assault on their rear. Menodon then called on the defenders to make a peaceful withdrawal, as his force represented the claims of the flock's lawful owner. This suggestion was rudely declined by the army upon the ramparts.

With this eventuality in view, Kandros had already commenced the construction of a single, slender siege- tower . This was brought within some hundred yards of the wall, and Lybis mounted it, Menodon and Nifft accom- panying her and covering her with their shields. She identified herself as the viceroy of the flock's rightful owner, and repeated the request for her property's surrender. Being scornfully invited to come get them, she replied with a smile that this would not be necessary. She stretched her hands, palms out, toward the herd.

The beasts showed a swift unanimity frightening in things so huge and slothful. They turned their backs upon their meal and proceeded thunderously in Lybis' direction. The considerable number of soldiers who were too stunned to abandon the rampart in time were crushed along with it.

Though the expedition did not have to grope for its route back to the coast, the bulk of the five hundred colossi they now had in train compelled them to weave one that was often extravagantly serpentine. Detours were maddening, but failing to find them was worse. Many steeply pitched and densely overgrown ridges were so lubricated by topsoil and wet foliage that even the fearsome, rock-splitting traction the beasts' queer little louse's legs could exert was powerless against the instantaneous obedience of their huge, mud-buttered masses to gravity's imperatives. And all too often a squad of lead-beasts had to set to gnawing through muck into base- rock, and eating a slow-rising trench of rough stone up to the crest, along which the rest of the flock could be channeled.

They returned, at last, to find that the detachment of pioneers Kandros had left with the ships had completed the structures necessary to overcome the difficulties of the flock's embarkation. The greatest of these was getting at least one of the beasts into each hold, as the urgency of hastening their delivery compelled the expedition to make it in only two crossings. For this, a huge, arched ramp stretched from the beach, out along a line of offshore rocks, to deep water a hundred yards offshore-a half-bridge, from whose bowed terminus a giant crane thrust out over the water.

For the binding of the herd into flotillas of a half-dozen that could be towed astern, thirty-five corrals of six- whale capacity (the overall bulk of the beasts had been accurately expressed in terms of whales) had been built on the intertidal sands. Made of thirty-foot posts, their seaward walls were hinged to swing out, gate-wise. When each corral's huddle of tenants had been lashed together and hung with floats by teams working at low tide, high tide would be awaited by the fleet-their holds all loaded previously-at which time they could tow out their stern-cargo simultaneously, and make full sail to convey to Anvil Pastures her deliverance.

The flock marched with clockwork obedience through every phase of the loading operation, and their perfect inertia once in the holds or tied astern gave everyone involved a sense of vast power in total, uncanny vassalage to a governing will that was, after all, thousands of miles distant. Indeed, the Goddess now enjoyed, with only the open ocean separating them, unobstructed governance of the flock's will, and could, Lybis said, perceive the beasts' environment unambiguously, and dictate to them the behavior necessary for their defense against whatever beset them from the inlands. So the half of the flock that could not be taken with the first convoy were left to wait, with a substantial garrison, the fleet's return, and Lybis went back to Anvil Pastures with the first half.

En route, about two days out of Anvil Pastures, the convoy encountered a fleet of Baskinon men-of-war. Their pilot-vessel hailed Lybis' flagship, and a boarding was requested politely enough, given the belligerents'

customary brusqueness with the citizens of their shared arsenal. Lybis' strident cordiality scarcely required the hailing-trumpet she used to invite them aboard. The visiting admiral, sufficiently nonplused by what he saw astern of the Anvilian craft, was even more disconcerted by the inspection of the hold to which his blithely garrulous hostess exhorted him. Afterward she invited him to a glass of spirits in her cabin. By this time the man-a stolid, scar-faced great-uncle, doubtless a merchant in peacetime, according to the pattern in Baskin- Sharpz-had caught the idiom of her insolence and begun to warm toward her. Draining his second glass, and rising to go, he reached forward without the slightest hint of awkwardness, and patted her arm.

"You've got seven devils-full of nerve in you, Priestess, and you're so small! I hope you come out of what you're doing all right. You know, I half believe that if your city is destroyed, we could end up at armistice with Hallam. And I must tell you, my dear, that there's many a place in this world where your city-saving efforts are talked of, and not cheered on. I'm sorry, but that's the truth."

Lybis smiled at him with a strange glee: "But my city cheers me on, Admiral."

Back in the city, Lybis left Kandros with instructions to build a system of ramps encircling the peak just - below its breakage, and to incorporate the existing shoring in its foundation-a function for which the latter was adequate, laughably insufficient though it was for its original purpose. Both going and returning, Lybis kept Nifft on her ship, and occasionally would drink with him in her cabin. At such times she would question him about his life, and she found much to laugh at in his answers.

VII.

The morning after the expedition's return to Anvil-Pastures, Nifft, Kandros, and Minor strolled across the plaza of the acropolis toward its major salience, whence they would have an excellent view of the flock, assembled on the little plain outside the city's main gate. Meanwhile they did not lack for spectacle, for up on the mountain, on the rampway collaring its broken neck, a swarm of tiny figures sent down to them a minuscule, belated noise of construction.

"They'll be off it by noon," said Minor, squinting impassively up against the sky's brightness, "and we'll see if it'll hold the brutes."

"If the brutes will be on it by then," Nifft said. His friends looked at him, and he smiled. "I have a feeling there's to be another Solicitation." He nodded toward the temple, across the square behind him. A procession of coaches was pulling up in front of it, and already several of the Aristarchs were stepping down.

"Damn the woman!" the Sexton cried. "I'm the first functionary on her staff! She told me nothing! She insists on baiting me and slighting me."

Nifft clapped him on the shoulder. "I hope it doesn't make it worse that Kandros and I were told to expect it.

The priestess has a feeling, you see, that the Goddess is going to want something that will require my friend's engineering skills again. Come on-let's go on and take our view. We've got almost half an hour."

As they proceeded, Minor continued to grumble, until Kandros burst out: "Can her hostility surprise you, Sexton Minor? Does she love the Aristarchs? Your connection with them, your debt to their influence for your very position, is a major point of pride with you. You're frankly skeptical of the Flockwarden's divinity; indeed, that's putting it mildly. Meanwhile, the Dame herself is nothing but devout toward-"

"Ah-ha! You see there you're misled!" It was a point on which the Sexton seemed prepared, fervently ready, with an answer. They had reached the balustrade facing the north-most tip of the plaza at the terminus of its slender projection in that direction, and he gave it a slap for emphasis. "View it objectively. There is an object, the corpse of the so-called Goddess, which emanates undeniable power. Like a heated poker, its power beams forth from it, shines out in rays, long after the death of the fire that endowed it with this radiant power. Heat we all know how to use. But suppose it's a power that there's a trick to using, to tapping? You are in a hereditary guild that bequeaths you this trick, in exchange for lip-service to some divine cant that legitimizes your exclusive possession of that vital trick. What would you profess then? Yet it remains raw, residual power in an accidentally preserved alien body, and no more than that. Would a goddess, who could beam her will across the ocean, be - unable to send it curving through a bit of rough terrain to reach her servant's minds? Is such laughable limitation a divine potency? Ha! But a simple beam of power, like a poker's heat and glow, that might well need reflecting, focusing, as a mirror might reflect and aim the poker's glow around a corner."

"But there's a sentience in this reflected power," Nifft said. The amusement in his eyes was lazy, remote, perhaps, from the precise question at issue. "There's directive consciousness in it."

"But who knows what energies these beings from the stars glowed with?" cried the Sexton. "It's still a brute, mechanical thing, and Dame Lybis is as callous and realistic in her manipulation of it as the most cynical - unbeliever."

"Well, well," sighed Nifft. "Who's to say your description, in its main outlines, is wrong?"

All three fell to gazing where their eyes had dwelt for some time-upon the Flockwarden's cattle. Seen from this vantage, the flock might have been a little town built just outside the city wall-a bizarre settlement of loaf- shaped buildings, perhaps just such an alien-looking town as might be found on other worlds. Its background of tortured, carcass-gaunt peaks, wherein strands of a half-dozen bright metallic colors-silver, copper, bronze, brass-were twisted inextricably with black ribbons of the flock's age-old fecal coal, did nothing to dispel the illusion. Indeed, it was the mighty, walled city of pale stone, Anvil-Pastures itself, which struck all three witnesses as the least "real," most ephemeral fraction of that panorama.

" 'By Anvil, Staff and Hammer,' " murmured Nifft. "Where's the Anvil, Minor?"

"Eh? What do you mean? What Anvil?"

"The Anvil that goes with the Staff in yon bay, and the Hammer in yon wall. 'Anvil, Staff, and Hammer.'

Your mistress is always saying it."

"Oh!" The Sexton chuckled. "There isn't any. There in the harbor is Anvil's Staff. There, in the wall, is Anvil's Hammer. There before you, you have Anvil's Staff and Hammer." He seemed quite pleased with the neatness of this, and Nifft laughed in his turn, catching a look from Kandros. "I see. Silly of me. You know, huge though the Goddess is, one wonders how she, or even all her race - together, wielded such tools."

Minor snorted, but his answer was not as immediate as before. Finally with a shrug he said, "A curious thought. I suppose they were a kind of statuary, memorial landmarks-perhaps together they formed a sort of signboard identifying the town to its airborne customers as they flew near!" The Sexton was pleased anew by this explanation. Nifft nodded. "Now that's ingenious," he muttered, smiling still.

They returned to the temple. As they mounted the steps to its entry, it was the elderly acolyte already - encountered by Nifft who ushered them through the door, and on seeing him, the Sexton flew into a rage.

"Krekkit! You senile weasel-I suspended you for two weeks!"

"Rig a noose and suspend yourself from a rafter beam," the old man answered, still leading them onward.

Minor seized his shoulder, detaining him in the sanctum's doorway where, in the same instant, Dame Lybis appeared.

"Unhand my acolyte!" she blazed.

Minor obeyed before he protested: "I discipl ined him! I caught him peeking through the Veil at the Goddess' . . ."

"At the Goddess' what?"

"Her private zone, her veiled part which only yourself . . . I mean, does it not clearly say in the protocol that- ".

"Be still! Is there one shrine-servant out of the whole two score of you who hasn't peeked there? Including - yourself? And put their hands, experimentally, to her . . . private parts?" Lybis grinned wickedly. "I tell you, oh Sexton Minor, acolyte Krekkit came here after working forty years in the forges, and volunteered his services out of piety, and has served here since then for twelve of the fourteen years I've served. You understand? It was out of respect for her power-" (the priestess pointed toward the sanctum) "-and not the Aristarchs'. And if anyone is going to be peeking at the Flockwarden's privates, I'd rather it were Krekkit than you, given the nasty, acquisitive frame of mind I'm sure you do it in. Now you're to attend to the Solicitation and stop making trouble.

I have a feeling that today's oracle is going to leave us all with much new business."

In singing tones, the Shrinemistress-raising from time to time enraptured eyes from her tablet-read out the oracle:

Oh, bear the brood-nurse to her hatchlings' side!

Though she within her ancient death be pent, Deliver her-herself, her hearse-beside Those on whom her former life was spent, To the nursery of those tender innocents Bear her so that they, of Knowing void May with fruit of her Great Knowing be supplied, And fully may conceive of her intent.

What though in death her frame stand vitrified?

You know her Knowing part doth yet abide- More nearly let it work their government!

With unwonted tenderness the Priestess tucked the tablet into her apron pouch. Her stylus she did not put away, but turned slowly in her fingers as she gazed at it, and began to speak. Her voice was a supple, compelling current of calm ardor: "Ye gods, gentlemen! If our interest didn't lie in fulfilling her desire, how could our hearts resist doing so?

I've often been moved by the Goddess, in touching the living flow of her emotion, her immemorially ancient knowledge and desire. But this time . . ." Now her eyes flashed upon the mute congregation. "I tell you, it's - almost as if she were alive! The soulful urgency of her will to be near her children, as she seems to call them- yes! She seems almost to feel toward them as a mother to her children. So deep must her care-taker's bond have been with the flock! I promise you that I haven't managed to translate even a tithe of the emotional resonance, the motherly passion there was in her wordless behest!

"And I can understand this gentlemen, though there be no blood kinship between her and those beasts! Have I not known the service of an alien being, known a devotion to the excellence and beauty of an entity foreign to my kind, and known this devotion to achieve a degree of joy and proud commitment that's like love itself!? I make bold to detain you with these personal sentiments, but I tell you I rejoice that the Goddess will at last enjoy in death that nearness to her beloved charges which was once so central to her life.

"For she must have what she wants, of course. It's a tricky bit of surgery she's going to be doing with those brainless giants of hers and her hand must be set as firmly upon the scalpel as possible, that's mere common sense. . . . It's obvious her glass-muffled emanations will benefit from all the amplification they can get. The sweet maternal propinquity she craves, honest Aristarchs, is also our greatest security. It's also obvious she will not command them to our salvation until she has the conditions she specifies, and so it is scarcely a matter of choice. What remains to be done is clear. . . ."

VIII.

The Goddess' multitudinously attended procession out of the city was a stately one. It took four days and, - despite the most cunning devisement of its route, necessitated the partial or complete dismantling of nine sizable buildings to make passage for the cyclopean corpse. Before this laborious pilgrimage could even be undertaken, the Goddess' equally arduous descent from the acropolis had to be accomplished. The vitreous megalith was lowered wi th an immense block-and- tackle f rom a boom of unheard-of proportions, whose skeleton the city's forges had finished and assembled in less than forty-eight hours of cacophonous, febrile toil. It was just before dawn when her hugeness inched down from the blocky plateau's beak-like promontory. The catwalks built up against the plateau's sheer wall swarmed with torches of workmen attending her descent, and the plaza was also teeming with lights, so that a shower of sparks seemed to be spilling down from the great mesa as the Goddess deserted it for the first time in recorded history.

At length the great crystalline block had ground its way-rollered on the countless trees which its vast bulk devoured by the hundreds in its progress-out through the main gate. That giant portal admitted its exit by scant inches only. The sun had been down for an hour by the time it had been positioned in the field where the flock was gathered, and cordoned round with a screen of temple tapestries draped from pole-strung cables to designate the periphery of sacerdotal privilege, into which lay-folk must not penetrate. Dame Lybis, already half-veiled by the deepening shadows, entered this screen under the silent gaze of the townsfolk, whose torches washed the field with unsteady orange light, and made the immobile herd seem to stir and shift restlessly. And indeed, before ever she reappeared from her sequestration with the Flockwarden, a shock went through the crowd as those nearest the beasts leapt and cried out in startlement. The flock had begun a shambling progress toward the moun- tains.

Darkness masked their ascent of the slopes and occupation of Kandros' monumental feeding ramp, but both proceeded in flawless order, as the contingent of mercenaries sent up to observe the beasts reported during the first lightless hours of their watch. Sunrise revealed them to the city already well at work.

For the next ten days, the spectacle was tirelessly observed by Anvil's citizens. The beasts' huge forms were plainly visible even at that remove; less so was the small army of men endlessly clearing the rampway of the - giants' waste products and-since these consisted of various pure metals and tons of furnace-nourishing fecal coal-conveying them down the slopes to the city. In this period the mass of the great natural hammer that threatened the city was substantially reduced-by as much as a fifth to a quarter, according to the best estimates of Kandros and his staff.

The lofty rampway became the focus of many a festive gathering of friends. Anvilians began to make a pastime of congregating on the acropolis or out on the field before the north wall to eat, drink, disport themselves with music and dancing-all the while rejoicing in that magical, miniaturized activity upon the peak which was so steadily and painlessly reducing the lethal menace that had for so many weeks overhung their rooftops.

Therefore when, on the morning of the eleventh day, things went awry, it was before the complacent gaze of thousands of such happy spectators. The first panicked contingents of workmen reached the city with the news half an hour after the catastrophe had begun to develop, and even by this time the city at large had not yet grown alarmed. At the most, a certain hyperactivity on the part of the scarcely perceptible swarms of workmen had been here and there observed, and some people had thought they noted a faintly erratic quality enter the movements of the flock. By the time the disaster bad been reported throughout the city, its effects were just becoming visible.

The rampway was beginning to sag and buckle, and little avalanches of loose earth had begun to stream down the neck of the mountain. An ever-growing efflux of panicked citizens began to swell the near-hysterical multitude thronging the meadow round the Flockwarden.

The flock had run amok. They h a d n o t o n l y a b a n d oned their orderly feeding pattern round the outermost edges of the peak, but they had begun a restless, almost rhythmic milling about on the ramp which had already caused a vibrational break-up of its pilings. Worst of all, several dozen of t h e b e a s t s h a d turned their ruinous appetites upon the naked metal of the already bent mountain spine itself. Th i s l a s t n e w s almost caused the assembled Anvilians themselves to run amok.

Dame Lybis had stepped within the hieratic screen to perform an emergency Solicitation of aid and enlightenment, and she had not yet emerged when the entire rampway was seen to collapse, and the monstrous peak itself bow down a farther heart-freezing three yards. The mutinous giants were already tumbling down the slopes when the roar of this ruin fell upon the ears of the multitude. Eternal moments unfolded during which the peak-universally, breathlessly regarded-settled no farther. Meanwhile, the indestructible behemoths, having ceased their uncontrolled plunge down the slope, began to extricate themselves from the jumbled jack-straws of the fallen timbers and sluggishly-unwillingly, one might have said-to assemble and descend the rest of the way to the city. It was then Dame Lybis emerged from her colloquy with the Flockwarden and proclaimed what she had learned. The Goddess, who for some days had exerted her control of the flock with ever-growing difficulty, had at last become exhausted with the effort, and the mammoth brutes had slipped her control. It was only through the most titanic efforts that she was now reasserting her government sufficiently to bring them back down to the plain.

IX.

Sexton Minor, on every feature of whose face was stamped distaste for his mission, walked into the forge room of one of Anvil's larger foundries, which stood not far from the main gate in the north wall. He threaded his way through it, vainly shouting requests for attention from various of the thousand sweating devils producing the fire and brain-numbing clangor that made his efforts so futile. Each man moved like a single, task- concentrated muscle in the toiling body politic of the desperate city. The feeding-ramp had to be rebuilt around the peak, presuming the priestess' current efforts to secure some kind of aid from the Flockwarden produced a remedy for the flock's sudden recalcitrance. To ponder in the interval whether she would provide a remedy- indeed, to ponder whether the enfeebled arm of the mountain-hammer would hold long enough to permit remedy-was far more agonizing than even the most infernal labors, and every smith and furnaceman was demon-eyed wit h h i s a b s o r p t i o n in his work upon the braces, bolts, collars, groinings and crossbeams the new ramp was going to require. Sexton Minor wove his way, glaring resentfully at every hiss of steel in tempering tub, every gasp of a down-draft forge-as at some intentional im- pertinence.

In one corner he found a smith snatching a nap atop his anvil while his forge was a-heating. The man was curled peacefully on his side, his ankles neatly crossed upon the anvil's horn, his head on his palms. Minor could see that a forge-hammer leaned against the wall just beyond the man. He shook the smith awake. The man, balding and tuft-jowled, gaped glassily as Minor bellowed in his ear: "There has been a new oracle. Dame Lybis sends me here to get a forge-hammer. Give me your hammer!"

Having shouted this, Minor stood tight-lipped in the inscrutable majesty of his office, trusting that the man's sleep-drugged amazement would procure him the hammer without the pain of further howling. The man rolled off the anvil and fetched him the hammer. Minor, mistaking the weight of the tool which the knotted arm tendered him by the handle-tip as one might a spoon, gave his arm a painful wrench in taking it.