His eyes only lost the look of pain this put in them when he raised them, upon exiting the main gate, and viewed the Flockwarden's grotesque, jerry-built encasement. Scaffolding now enveloped the glass block. Lybis, still robed for the Solicitation, stood about two-thirds of the way up the vertical maze. She was attended not only by the detested acolyte Krekkit but by Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp, and Smalling. The entire population spread upon the plain, though its flock-ward border stayed well withdrawn from those unpredictable beasts. The Sexton - appeared to derive little pleasurable sense of consequence from this fact. Nifft received the hammer from him and passed it up to workers higher on the scaffold. He grasped Minor's shoulder encouragingly.

"Be comforted, honest Minor. Can't you see, from the way she treats the Aristarchs, that there's no way to win if you argue with her eccentric demands: Confront it, friend-she enjoys rubbing your set's faces in your - covert cynicism toward the Goddess all these years. I mean, it's an unlovely, vengeful act, but surely understandable in someone who's been dedicated to a covertly ridiculed mystery for years?"

"There was simply no need to insist on a used forge-hammer, especially if one light blow is sufficient for the job," the Sexton sulked. But the Priestess now had the hammer, and despite his professed scorn, Minor seemed to catch some of that breath of apprehension which swept faintly through the entire multitude at that moment.

In the manner-oddly, under the circumstances-of one who gives comfort, Nifft said: "Oh, I'm sure it will do the job, Minor. If she can trace the deepest mountain-bones from where she lies, she can surely find one faint seam of critical weakness in her own coffin? Come, come. The Goddess is about to be, in her own term, 'divested.' Ye gods, Minor, wasn't that a rousing set of lines-I mean for their expressiveness, apart from its import to all of us."

Nifft cocked his head back appreciatively, like one about to recite some admired verses. It was unlikely that the Sexton was going to hear him, for at this moment he watched fascinated as Lybis, with an address surprising in one of her diminutive stature, was hoisting the hammer above her shoulder, hefting for the swing. Nifft, -instead of reciting, pointed to one of the copies of the latest oracle, which had already been posted throughout the city, scant hours after its delivery. He read aloud from it:

Can shackled Mistress bind and rule her slave?

Unsheathe my limbs, so long the air denied-

(Lybis now carefully took a wide-legged stance, and calculatingly applied the hammer nose to the ribbon- circled spot of any impact's maximum disruptive effect upon the glass.)

-Divest me, that my power, which never died Might flow undammed, as when, before the grave Did cover me, I governed in my pride!

The priestess slowly drew back the hammer for a second time above her head, and swung the steel slug lustily to the marked spot. A dull, disappointingly flat whack echoed over the heads of the crowd. The people roared softly. The entire crystalline vitrolith had grown milky, utterly opaque. And then it collapsed-smoothly as dry, heaped sand, it rivered off the giant, alien frame.

The scaffolding had been built rigid and close to the block, in order that it might catch and at least partially sustain the Flockwarden's pithless remains once their support should have fallen away. The precaution was needless. The Flockwarden did not fall. She stood springily upon her jointed legs, and her iridescent wings delicately essayed the air.

The noise this raised from the crowd was such that it brought Nifft's head around in sudden, surprised appraisal . For the outcry was a curiously relief-tinged groan, as might greet a thing that has been all but foreknown. The Flockwarden's wind-spawning wings sped up. They were now scarcely visible, yet for all their power of vibration they did not even graze the narrowness of her enclosure. Smoothly vertical she rose, and cleared the box of scaffolding. Smoothly across the plain she moved, bearing the message of her mastery directly to her refractory herd.

And as her assault commenced, her mastery proved never for a moment to be contested by the swinish giants.

It seemed a strangely ritualistic scourging she gave them, too-not to all of them, but to perhaps a hundred individuals, one after the other. Over each of these she hovered, and bowed downward-dead contrary to her tapered abdomen's normal bent-her caudal prong. This she thrust into the beast beneath her, and thus linked, she did no more than hang in the air a moment, her body shuddering rhythmically. Then she unanchored herself and flew to another, seemingly randomly chosen member of her flock.

When at length she returned from the scourging, the Goddess seemed dreadfully enfeebled. She wobbled in her flight, and in settling on the grass not far from her shattered coffin, her legs buckled under her on her left side, and her head drooped.

It was soon learned from Lybis that the city's benefactress lay in grave weakness, and her life-that long-kept secret-was waning within mere hours after its last, long-prepared for vital service. It was not known how long she might survive, and the only assurance she could give the city was that the flock was, at least for now, subdued, and would return to work when the ramp was ready. Her beasts would in any case be showing a marked slowing down, as they were nearing their natural calving-season, but while they approached that period , they should at least obediently-if not energetically-pursue their task.

At least, they should do so while the FIockwarden lived. Their possible behavior if she should die became a matter of terrified conjecture. A great pavilion was erected over the Goddess. Her moribund vastness was constantly visited by the piously solicitous townsfolk, and an outdoors shrine blazed with votive candles as the indoor one had never done. A further oracle was besought, and given.

In her pronouncements, there were some dim foreshadowings of what aid the city might seek in the melancholy event of the Goddess' demise. These could be read on any street in town, as the posting of the oracles had become at this point an invariable procedure:

My life doth gutter, darken toward its close.

If death my governance of the flock o'erthrows, One there is, not far from here, whose name His ancient nearness to our city shows- Pastur. His tomb I'll teach you, should the flame Of my remaining life grow yet more dim.

Before that time I nothing will disclose Lest some too greedy man uncover him And use the buried giant for selfish aim- Vain consequence and power-for among those I shared my world with, Pastur could dispose Their giant bulks to suit his lightest whim; He drove them as he listed, unopposed By me or mine, who cowered when he came.

X.

The herd resumed its lofty pasturage, but in a manner that nourished among Anvilians gloomy speculations on the Goddess' diminishing strength. The flock's obedience was sluggish, balky, and its appetite was dull. Apart from the approach of its breeding season, some of this torpor seemed a plain token of its warden's wavering life- flame. No one could bring himself to seek the abatement of the beasts' remedial labors, nor could they allow - themselves to contemplate the result of a second anarchic frenzy, should such again possess them. So throughout a two-week agony of ambivalence, the citizens stared themselves dizzy at the thronging rampway, and in that time saw the lapsed peak's bulk dwindle by inches to a mass that was still more than two-thirds what it had originally had-and this supported by a spine rather less than the same fraction of its original thickness.

And then the flock abandoned its work en masse. The city woke one morning to find the peak deserted, and the plain outside the north wall again encamped with the motionless colossi.

The populace had soon thronged the walls and the ground outside them to view the prodigious biological event that was occurring out on the plain. It had soon become evident that far more than half the flock were females. Perhaps four hundred of the mammoth livestock on the sward were seen, by noon, to be engaged in the generative process.

The promised breeding was unquestionably in progress. Each female, after establishing a caudal link with the soil for at least an hour, inched her tail-tip up from the earth, hoisting its rubbery apical mouth from around what she had so laboriously, and with so many a shudder, been implanting: a shining, white, ribbed ellipsoid with a barbed peak-and, presumably, barbed tail, the which was snugly planted in the earth, and must have been what permitted the wobbling anchorage that each newly deposited egg exhibited as it rolled lazily with the assaults of the onshore winds that arose at dusk. Each of the giant cows produced a minimum of a dozen eggs, and several huge old cows produced more than fifty apiece.

The egg-laying marked the beginning of an alarming decline in the Flockwarden's already diminished vitality.

She had been lying with her legs half folded under her, her abdomen more tightly curved above her than it had been during her endless immurement in the glass. Her antennae were almost her only active part. They could he seen to move in feeble conference with the veiled priestess during the several non-oracular communions Lybis held with her, during which she acquainted the priestess with the state of her diminishing vigor. Now, however, the Flockwarden's great head hung forward, and her major antennae trailed almost touching the ground. They could be seen to stir now and again. The priestess, prevented by the Goddess' posture from a full and formal Solicitation, could do no more to ease the tormented hearts of her townsfellows than assure them that the Flockwarden, should death truly come for her, would rouse herself a last time on behalf of her human flock (as, said Lybis, the Goddess had come to regard the Anvilian's) and speak again, imparting to them the cue to their - salvation-the means of raising the giant from the past to work their deliverance.

During this suspension of the herd's activity-for though they milled restively from time to time, they were generally almost comatose, each cow standing stupidly, flanking her egg-cluster-the city agonized ceaselessly over the oracular implication that the beasts were indeed capable of a second anarchic outburst if the Goddess should die. An assault upon the city itself was not thought impossible. Within four days of the egg-laying the Aristarchs had dwelt so vociferously upon this topic that a plan was developed, in concert with Kandros and his staff, for the city's defense in the event this hair-raising possibility should eventuate.

As the powerlessness of stone to oppose the advance of the flock was the original cause of worry, ramparts or other vertical barriers were discounted at the outset-they would go down too quickly, by mere pressure alone, unless the town should be given an unlikely amount of time for construction on a major scale. A great, straight- walled trench was deemed the best thing to slow them, and the digging was commenced by truly massive gangs of conscripted citizens, working side by side with the mercenaries and swelling their numbers to an extent that made it possible to finish the trench in less than a week. It ran almost a mile and a half, dividing the north wall from the little plain. It was more than a hundred feet broad, and as many deep, and from its inner, wallward lip a thick palisade of spike-tipped timbers projected at an angle above the pit, wherefrom the defenders could harrass the ascent of the besiegers. A short time after this impressive feat of engineering was accomplished, while gangs of grimed Anvilians still lolled in the parks and squares of the city, numbly awaiting the next dreadful exigency that should come to rouse them to maniacal efforts, the priestess sent out a city-wide summons to a Solicitation- for the Flockwarden had lifted her antennae, and feebly besought the oracle's attendance. It appeared this might be the Goddess' last revelation for her human flock. There was the more reason for hasty attendance, the message added, in that the eggs of the flock were beginning to hatch, and the congregated giants showed signs of waking from their torpor-indeed, showed signs of advancing upon Anvil itself.

When Lybis emerged from the Veil, her pallor, and the cold, impassioned determination on her face were such as to distract the populace for some moments from the dreadful organic unfoldings out on the plain, a short quarter mile beyond the just-completed trench.

"The Goddess, The Flockwarden, is dead. Long live the Goddess! Long live the Flockwarden!"

With a vast, low grumble, the multitude repeated her words-a hopeless outcry of shocked piety, for all now saw what, in their absorption flockward, they had missed: the Flockwarden's slack neck, her antennae like dead - pythons on the grass.

"We have done well to defend ourselves," Lybis said, gesturing toward the spike-rimmed ditch. "They will - advance-they begin already, do you see? Those which are hatching now-soon they too will advance. Watch them. Give me your ears only while you watch them. View what threatens us-behold in all its meaning the calamity that descends on us, while I speak its remedy in your ears. And then upon your own heads let it be if, after hearing, you do not spur hell-bent directly and speedily to accomplish the great labor which must purchase that remedy."

And so she brought her tablet from her pouch, and read the Goddess' last oracle to the city. As she read, they watched the plain, whereupon there was much to be seen. For though all the flock's eggs were identical-each the size of a four-passenger coach, tapered top and bottom, identically ribbed and colored-two radically different kinds of creature were erupting from their rupturing husks.

The most numerous of these were clearly infants of the flock. Though their leg-clusters were rudimentary, scarcely more than blackish nubs, their overall conformation was that of their parents, in bud.

But there were some egg-clutches, perhaps a hundred of them, whence very different hatchlings dragged themselves out amidst these bona fide calves. These had spiny black barrels for bodies, leg-clusters that were much more developed and elaborately jointed and barbed, and jaws of an equally elaborate structure, entirely distinct from the rock-guzzling snoutlets of the more numerous calves.

Both breeds of hatchling began to feed instantaneously once their heads were free, even though the rest of their bodies had still to be dragged free of the shell. The calves fed upon the first bare rock they found beneath them. The black hatchlings began with equal speed to feed upon the calves.

It was a stunning, gaudy carnage, for the babes in question were on the general scale of a large battle-chariot with its team. The calves seemed to lack all awareness of, or powers of resistance to, the assaults of their carnivorous nestmates. They squirmed ineffectually, some even continued to devour the stone as they were flensed to blubbery fragments by their scissors-jawed siblings, and guzzled down. Meanwhile the parent beasts displayed no more reaction than did their victim offspring, but continued an inchoate, milling advance in the general direction of the watching city. Long after Lybis had finished reading the oracle, the multitude watched, and saw the pattern emerging in the flock's movement. The hatchling carnivores remained more or less stationary, usually surrounded by a blood- spattered mess of half-a-dozen c a l f carcasses, where they continued feeding methodically on their swiftl y captured feasts. At the same time, the calves that had escaped their predation-never ceasing to graze-gradually completed their eclosions, and b e g a n f o l l o w i n g t h e movement of the adult beasts. These latter now made steadily, in an ominous unison of apparent intent, toward the recently completed trench.

Strangely, few of the townsfolk afterward found that they needed to read the posted copies of the Flock- warden's last oracle. Sunk in astonishment as they had been while gazing on that vast unearthly and disaster- pregnant spectacle, Lybis' voice seemed to have imprinted itself upon their minds, and most recalled both the burden, and the sweet, ambiguous music, of her message:

In Ossuaridon, where priest and seer Seek insight, and in visionary gloom Within the giant's bones themselves inhume, And dwell in dark that they might see more clear, There seek great Pastur's catastrophic bier.

Exhume him and return his remnants here.

For his bones-if from their accidental tomb You take, and with them work his frame's repair- Have might to master those that threaten doom, Seek the magic of my murdered more-than-peer!

Haste to find him and convey him where Great Anvil-town doth offer greatest room- Oh, haste! Lest that should fall which now but looms!

And the flock my death leaves lawless, do not fear.

All things their hungry jaws have power to tear, Save gold alone-this can they not consume.

Weigh then your wealth, and judge if i t's more dear To you than life. If not, your course is clear.

XI.

Dame Lybis, in the company of Kandros and Nifft (generally recognized now as being her chosen strategic counselors for the many emergency labors her position was imposing on her), went on the expedition sent to - retrieve Pastur's bones. She stayed there long enough to see the work commenced, and then sped back to the city to oversee the last phases of its wall's "thickening."

If she had made a special effort to rouse an energetic responsiveness in her fellow citizens, her success was striking. A sort of de facto communalism had developed. The city's material stores were disbursed city-wide on a strict basis of need according with amount and importance of work done, and people of every class joined in a wholehearted furtherance of whichever aspect of the city's need they were assigned to assist. At work on the wall, or on the arduous convoy of hugely laden wagons bearing back Pastur's bones from Ossuaridon, or on the work-gangs frenziedly constructing the wagon train's roadway (and working a scant league ahead of the vanguard's rumbling advance) the townsfolk struggled shoulder-to-shoulder with the mercenary squads, distinguishable from them only by a peculiar, taut-faced singlemindedness, a rapt concentration that was almost glassy-eyed, like the look of a desperately driven slave.

By far the most herculean labor fell to those sent to exhume the bones. Ossuaridon-until now no more than the name of an obscure hamlet of religious fanatics to most Anvilians-was a mere five days' journey inland through the mountains fencing Anvil-Pastures against the sea. But this was the time that a mobile expedition of foot with lightly laden wagons took to traverse that distance. Their return necessitated the highway already - referred to, and even this it took the burdened wains more than eight days to traverse. The hamlet, built against the flank of a sheer, glacially carved escarpment, was founded upon the giant's bones themselves, in both an - architectural and cultural sense. Its inhabitants all had in common, despite the diversity of their origins, a shamanistic turn of mind. The age of ice which had seemingly intervened between the era of Pastur's death, and the historical past, had sheared away most of the rock that encased his bones. These had been even more fully exposed by subsequent erosion, and many of them thrust gigantically from the escarpment. In particular the skull had been frontally exposed to an extent that made it possible for the mystic devotees to enter either of the orbits of the eyes and, within these bony caves, enjoy the dream-producing vigils which had for centuries drawn others like themselves to the place and, effectually, created Ossuaridon. And yet, though all the meagre structures of this religious outpost clung variously for support to the ribs and femurs of the broken titan, their inhabitants never offered the slightest opposition to what amounted to the complete (and swift) dismantling of their habitations, nor to the extraction and removal of the object of their cult.

Once the mining-out of the skeleton was well begun, and the first of the great wains were laden and on their way back to the city on the still embryonic highway, Lybis led Nifft and Kandros, along with a small group of mercenary officers, back toward Anvil on horseback. Just as she was setting out she abruptly turned her mount aside, and rode to the shamans' encampment. They had quietly removed their belongings out on the plain to some tents provided them at the oracle's orders. A man was standing in front of the nearest of these, and she reined up on reaching him. His eyes, which were flat and flinty black, were old, though he did not seem particularly aged in the rest of his lean, raggedly garbed person.

Lybis leaned forward in the saddle. "You are content that this-" she swept her arm toward the sprawling, -scaffold-decorated exhumation "-should be?"

"I am content, Mistress."

"May I ask you why?"

The man's mouth smiled, an operation that did not involve the rest of his sun-blackened face (Ossuarionites'

days-long vigils were not restricted to the cult-object's skull). "Are you not restoring him? Would this, in us, be thanks for his infinite, history-spanning insights, to obstruct his resurrection?" Lybis smiled, and nodded as if to herself. Then, delicately, she cleared her throat, and said, "I am glad and grateful. I am especially glad you do not mingle with our workmen, trouble their labors. . . ."

"Nor speak to them either, about anything at all, Mistress," the man nodded calmly, not even his mouth smiling now. "And that is as we shall keep matters. We do not wish to obstruct your labors in any way."

"Bless you, shaman."

"Equally to you, oracle."

When she had rejoined her companions and they had been some moments on their road, Nifft murmured wonderingly: "Marvelous, those caves of his eyes. Did you go inside, Kandros?"

"No. Somehow I didn't get the chance."

Nifft glanced a smile at his friend, then resumed his musing. "So warm it was in there! And once they'd broken out some of the overhanging rock that shadowed the interiors, you know what we saw? The back of the left socket is cracked-there's a hole in its rear wall-and you could see just a bit of a huge metal sphere, imbedded in the bone where the brain would be. I'll tell you, my friend, that's going to be the heaviest piece of all."

Back in the city they found the civil defense project well in progress. It had not been initiated without the most anguished and repetitive deliberations up in the Aristarkion. The agonized Aristarchs, from whose pockets must come the bulk of the protective gold, pointed out that it was a futile defense, as the flocks, however effectively a layer of gold might repel their destructive appetites from the wall itself, could always simply tunnel under any gilded bulwark that opposed them, and bring it down by collapse, as sappers do.

As the days of debate lengthened, the flock advanced. They and their greedy, ever-growing calves, appearing to dread a precipitous fall into the trench (though many of the adults had survived a far more dizzy plunge when the ramp had collapsed under them) had eaten their way down into it at an oblique angle. And then, once down in it, they had begun to eat their way out again, creating a second oblique rampway, and proving impervious to all the missiles hurled down on them by the troops on the log palisade. As this rampart began caving in and had to be abandoned, and as the time before the beasts should regain ground-level outside the wall shortened, the urgency of the citizenry for concerted action grew so ardent and demonstrative that the dilatory Aristarchs yielded. Huge bellows-powered pumps were constructed. These fed off of melting-vats into which, with pathetically evident reluctance, the Aristarchs fed their hoarded bullion, along with all the specie they had cached in the several banks of the city. When Lybis returned, the first quarter of the wall had already been gilded with the finest lamination of gold the Aristarchs had been able to procure from their closely overseen staff of engineers. Lybis quickly put the rest of the task in the hands of Kandros and his staff, with Nifft assisting their efforts. It was a labor to which the workers engaged in it welcomed any additional support, as the flock had already eaten more than half their way up from the pit, and those constrained to work the bellows and the melting-vats did so in the most urgent anxiety. Nifft and Kandros ordained some alterations in procedure, and the gilding of the walls moved ahead apace. Pastur's bones began to reach the city.

The relative lightness of these bones was the one fortunate circumstance the gangs of laborers on the caravan had encountered. Those citizens at all conversant with such matters vowed that the cyclopean remains had to be less than a third the weight which normal animal bones of similar size would have possessed. The acropolis was still crowned with the derricks that had facilitated the Flockwarden's abandonment of it, and as that great square was the only place in the city that appeared adequate to accommodate a skeleton of the size they were dealing with, these machines were once more enlisted in the city's salvation, hoisting up Pastur's fossil as fast as its pieces could make their progress through the city from its eastern gate. Further demolitions, which largely or completely destroyed some thirty-seven buildings, were required to create the necessary passageway for the broken skeleton's approach to the base of the great eminence, and before the work of reassembly up in the plaza had progressed very far, it was evident that supplementary support must be created for the huge memento mori. A gigantic platform was extended from the broad end of the elevation. When, about two weeks after Lybis' return, the skull arrived, it was, with vast effort and exquisite care, laid upon that north-projecting horn of the acropolis from which Nifft and his friends had formerly viewed the flock out on the plain. With the spine largely com- pleted, and the legs and feet assembled on the platform at the eminence's opposite end, it became evident that Pastur, when he lived, had stood about eighty stories high.

At this point the Aristarchs brought in to Dame Lybis a very shrilly voiced complaint against her generalship of the city's defenses, most particularly as regarded the wall-gilding project. Their mathematicians had scrupulously worked out a volumetric equivalence of unit gold per area of wall coverage, based on the desired thickness of application per square foot, and the wall, now all but covered, had consumed more than one and a half times the gold computed as adequate for its surfacing. Nifft's and Kandros' crews pursued their labors even as their rectitude was being subjected to these lofty (and heated) examinations up in the Aristarkion. It was well this was so, for long before the Aristarchs, under the moderation of Dame Lybis, had brought their deliberations to any conclusion, the wall had been completely gilded and, in the same hour, the ravening columns of the besiegers had swarmed out of the trench and attacked it. The citizens fled within the gates, and crowded anxiously atop the walls, manning the defenses there and breathlessly watching for the first decisive contact of the flock with their now priceless defenses. The giants crowded to the wall like pigs to a trough, applied to it their all-destroying snouts, and recoiled.

Their will to assault the citadel never flagged in the tense days that followed this first rebuff. The flock, - recoiling sullenly and undamaged from the projectiles and boiling oil the defenders poured down upon them, tirelessly returned to their attack, but this never involved the use of their dreaded jaws, which indeed the golds appeared to inhibit their use of. Instead, they reared as high as their short legs permitted, and butted thunderously against the barrier. This was far from a futile ploy. As the days passed, there were several points in the wall where cracks began to develop, and even inward bucklings of an ominous appearance. The herd could fairly be numbered at around two thousand now-the calves had speedily swelled in size, and at present had half their parents' bulk and most of their adult bodily features. An army of these proportions, which never ceased its ramming, was bound, eventually, to break down an even more considerable bulwark than that of Anvil Pastures.

The citizens toiled unremittingly, manning the battlements or shoring the wall from within wherever it showed signs of weakening.

Two small mercies were discerned in the situation by some of the more optimistic Anvilians. First, the herd never seemed moved to resort to the under-tunneling tactic which the Aristarchs had dreaded, and which would surely have brought the walls down in swift and utter ruin in half the time that had thus far elapsed since the flock's onset. And second, the menacingly carnivorous cohatchlings of the calves had, far from showing any disposition to join in the siege, shown a reassuringly passive temperament. All of them, shortly before the battle was joined round the wall, had burrowed themselves halfway into the ground and lain perfectly dormant. In the course of the first few days following this occurrence, observers from the wall noted that the beasts' exposed upper bodies had developed an opaque ensheathment of tough, dark material. A kind of second eggshell, it seemed, was enveloping them. Now, after more than ten days had passed, they showed no sign of further life, and their new encapsulations had grown quite rigid-looking.

Meanwhile, the bones of the city's savior-to-be passed one by one through its eastern gate and, amid the shouts of men, the grunts of dray-beasts, and the rattle and groan of massive tackle, inched their way up the vertiginous side of the acropolis to join the steadily growing framework of the recumbent titan that crowned it.

The work never faltered, even at night, when the great plateau was draped with torch-swarms, and seemed, once again, to shed cascades of sparks.

XII.

Late in the afternoon, Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp and Smalling stood outside the temple, talking gravely with Sexton Minor. To stand where they did, or indeed, anywhere on the acropolis, was to stand under a monstruous, stark forest of megalithic shafts and arches, one where swarms of men on ramps and crane arms were-not - timbering-but supplementing, multiplying its growth. If this overlooming industry caused the Aristarchs to cringe somewhat, to crouch resentfully, it seemed to add something to Minor's stature. Perhaps this was due to a certain unconscious pride he was beginning to take in this stupendous productiveness of his hitherto disregarded temple. Power, in his understanding, was clearly taking on a broader definition than he had formerly accorded the term. His posture lacked the deferential tilt it normally exhibited when he was in the company of the power- elite, and he looked particularly fresh and spruce. This trio of the elite, on the other hand, looked gravely worn, almost shabby, as though mired by the exhausting defrayal of endless costs.

"I am very sorry, gentlemen," Minor was saying smoothly. "Dame Lybis is at this very moment searching the repository of sacred texts for some clue. We can do no more than wait. Believe me, I regret the anguish this subjects you to. But try to be comforted. Hasn't the temple proved to be the source of an astonishing variety of powers and insights, just in these past few months alone? I must confess to you, gentlemen, that I feel an irrepressible optimism myself, however grim things are in a general way. After all, every danger the Goddess and her cult have gotten us into, they've gotten us out of again-try to be encouraged by that." Pozzle regarded the Sexton with a just-barely repressed bale. Members of the power-elite tend to keep a close accounting of all the little taxes of deference and flattery they levy from their subordinates, and the Aristarch looked particularly incensed at being short-changed in this regard by the Sexton-and short-changed with an impunity bestowed by the very cult which had so deeply involved his finances in the general ruin. In a thick voice, but managing an even tone, he said: "To have done so much, Sexton Minor-" he gestured overhead "- and then to find the skeleton imperfect in so relatively small a way, and its power entirely unavailable as a result, and when it's so incomprehensible in the first place how simply reassembling a skeleton is going to help us in any way against those monsters outside-it is all exasperating in the highest degree. It is infuriating in fact-"

Aristarch Smalling, a slight, dapper man, laid a soothing-and preventive-hand upon Pozzle's arm. "It is not dif- ficult to observe, Sexton," he said, smoothly in his turn, "from the north promontory-" he pointed toward the giant's skull, its orbits aimed skyward "-that the wall under attack is now deeply buckled in several places, and that even the most extreme counter-bracing measures will not hold some of those ruptures for more than a few days longer. Is it certain the hand does not lie somewhere in the same stone as contained the rest of the remains?

If need be, we'll tear the entire escarpment to rubble to find the thing, and damn the expense."

Pozzle emitted a low moan of impotent anger here, and the square-faced Hamp looked distinctly greenish at the corners. Minor shook his head, his brows rising in a regretful shrug. "That's the heart of the trouble, gentlemen, but, like so much else in this affair, it's also going to be our salvation. You see, Dame Lybis was assured of the hand's separation from the rest of the giant's body when she remembered a part of her instruction as a tyro that mentioned Pastur's loss of it-indeed, it was so obscurely referred to that it took our failure to find the hand to recall it to her at all. But do you not see? Once she has found the textual foundation of that tradition in the archives, she will also find therewith, in all likelihood, a description of the place where the hand may be found."

"If it has survived to be found at all." Pozzle murmured this almost to himself, looking a trifle feverishly up at the great work above him.

And, toward the end of that day, as the sun neared its setting, that work was essentially one of final adjustments. By that time, all of Pastur's bones thus far exhumed had been put in place-and this comprised the entire skeleton except for the right hand. Throughout the day Aristarchs in various combinations had come, stood outside the temple, stepped into it and out of it again, and departed. Now, as the skeleton's shadow reached its maximum elongation across the rooftops of the eastern half of town, and lay upon them like a cage of vast and alien design, a large number of these dignitaries had collected before those-hopefully-pregnant doors.

The doors burst open. Out of them, and halfway down the steps, the Shrine-mistress stormed, brandishing a scrap of parchment. Her tiny figure too cast a long shadow, and the swarm of notables condensed close to her.

Her voice, a small but strident sound audible from afar though indistinct, wandered through the forested acres of stone, weaving itself into the cathedralled ossuary. The rapt flock of other miniatures stood paralyzed, and close to her. Then her voice changed key, her arms moved expressively and, shortly, the swarm of Aristarchs dispersed, as if exploded by some verbal bomb. Nifft turned to Kandros, with whom he shared a seat upon a length of scaffold draped across the crest of the giant's high-arching ribs. Nifft's eyes, which had lazily abandoned the scene directly below them, had risen toward the wall on the northern side of the city. "Do you notice, Kandros, beyond the parts of the wall not directly assaulted by the flock, there still seems to be a kind of assault-like activity, but one carried on by small, shadowy forms?" He handed to the captain the wineflask they were sharing. Kandros applied himself comfortably to this before he answered: "Yes. Men, I make them out to be. One wonders what they're after. Perhaps some of that gold smeared all over the wall. They're certainly drawing a lot of fire from the archers."

Nifft nodded with the solemn, enlightened expression of one who hears a very ingenious theorem propounded. "Thieves. Of course. They've probably been swarming here from every city on the coast since the word went out about the gilding." He was returned the flask, and paused to utilize it. "You know, Kandros, in the spirit of the great friendship I bear you, I must declare something to you. I am myself not unacquainted with the workings of thieves."

Kandros nodded in his turn, receiving the flask. "No man who is acquainted with the world at large, is unacquainted with the workings of thieves," he said. He utilized the flask.

By the time full dark was settling on the city, a large party of belanterned wagons was speeding from the base of the acropolis, down to the harbor. There, with that day's end, was the beginning of new labor.

By dawn, a big raft was launched from the dockside. It supported a massive crane, whose boom overreached its side. Heavy pontoons of welded metal casks gave it counter-support for its work. This work, which began with the first rays of the sun, was the retrieval, assisted by divers, of a series of large, weed-bearded, shell- crusted blocks, the longest of them some eighteen feet in length. A considerable heap of them soon accumulated on the dock. All were found in one narrow zone quite near the Staff, about midway out along it. Indeed, half of these objects were winched out from under the Staff, whose underlying sand and muck had to be laboriously sucked away with bellows-driven pumps supported by several auxiliary rafts, and serviced by dozens of additional divers and mechanics. Once deposited on the dock each piece was scraped by crews of men with saws and scaling-axes used by fishermen on the larger marine reptiles. The cleansed products that ended up loaded on wagons to make their way through the harbor gate were rather remarkably identifiable as bones; so undamaged were they, beneath the ocean's encrustation, that once cleansed, they were to be seen even by a man innocent of anatomy as the building blocks of a gigantic hand.

As night drew on again, most of the city was massed on the walls, expectantly attending the results of the completion of Pastur's skeleton, for this would be accomplished, all were informed, within the hour. Pozzle and Smalling stood in the privileged spot near the pylons of the north gate, an area reserved for the Aristarchs as one of the best posts for observation, and one of the rampart's strongest parts.

"Where is the little weasel?" Pozzle rasped, squinting toward the fossil-encumbered plateau. Smalling, who did likewise, answered: "I believe that temple landau just coming down from the acropolis bears toward us the unctuous little eel. Seems to be making remarkably fast time too. I wonder what it was he was so mysterious about 'investigating.' "