PART ONE

THE FIRE IS LIT

I

Now the sun was down, the barq was growing tired. The current opposing her was swift, and there was a real risk she might be driven against the rocks that beset the channel and puncture her gas-bladders. After countless attempts to sting her into more vigorous activity, the steersman laid by his goad and grumpily tipped into her maw the last barrelful of the fermented fish and seaweed which served to nourish boat, crew and passengers alike. Waiting for the belch that would signal its digestion, he noticed Jing watching from her saddle of lashed planks, as anxious as though his weather-sense were predicting storms, and laughed.

“You won't be a-dream before we get where we're bound!” he promised in the coarse northern speech which the foreigner had scarcely yet attuned his hearing to.

It was hard to realize there was anywhere worth traveling to in this barren landscape. Most of the time the shore was veiled with rags of fog, because the water was so much warmer than the air. What a place to choose for studying the sky! Even though, with the sun setting so much earlier every day, it was possible to believe in the legend which had lured him hither: a night that lasted almost half a year. Not that there could ever be total darkness; here, as everywhere, the Bridge of Heaven-what these northerners called the Maker's Sling-curved in its gleaming arc across the welkin. And, near the horizon, less familiar and altogether awe-inspiring, the New Star was framed in its irregular square of utter black like a jewel on a pad of swart-fur.

But neither that celestial mystery, nor the prospect of going hungry, was what preyed most on the mind of Ayi-Huat Jing, court astrologer and envoy plenipotentiary of His Most Puissant Majesty Waw-Yint, Lord of the Five-Score Islands of Ntah. Compelled by his sworn oath, a whole miserable year ago he had set forth in state, riding the finest mount in his master's herd and accompanied by forty prongsmen and ten banners inscribed with his rank and status. His mission was to seek out wise folk beyond the mountains that ringed the Lake of Ntah and inquire of them the meaning of the New Star. His countrymen had long imagined that they understood the reason why the heavens changed-for change they definitely did. He carried with him a fat roll of parchment sheets on which had been copied star-maps depicting the sky on the accession-dates of the last score rulers of Ntah, and on the date of every eclipse during their reigns. Sixteen stars were shown on the most recent which in olden times had not been there, and marks recorded others which had appeared and faded in a matter of days. But there had never been one so brilliant, or so long-lasting, or in so black a patch of sky. According to the philosophers of Ntah, right action was reflected in heaven, and sufficient of it earned a diminution of the darkness. Eventually, they promised, the time would come when the heavens would be as bright by night as by day.

And it had happened, and it had ceased, and everyone was grievously disturbed, for blight and plague had followed what should have been a sign of unprecedented good fortune...

Jing's journey had been fruitless so far, but it was not yet doomed to failure. His store of pearlseeds from the Lake was less than half-exhausted, for they grew stranger and more precious as he traveled, exchangeable for more food and longer lodging, and he had clung to his roll of maps even though in all the lands and cities he had visited he had met only one person who appeared to grasp their significance. He had expected students of heaven-lore as dedicated as himself, libraries too- albeit in alien script on unfamiliar materials-because tradition told of merchants from Geys and Yown and Elgwim who had brought amazing horns, hides, seeds and spices along with boastful tales about the riches of their homelands. What he had actually found...

Half-starved mud-scrabblers incapable of distinguishing dream from reality, ascribing crop-failure, blight and murrain to supernatural beings, imagining they could protect themselves by sacrificing most of what remained to them-whereupon, of course, weakness and fatigue allowed dreams to invade their minds ever further. Madness, madness! Why did not everybody know that the heavens bodied forth an impersonal record of the world below, neither more nor less? How could anybody, in these modern times, credit a god prepared to launch missiles at random with a view to killing people? The welkin shed messages, not murder!

His whole course since leaving Ntah had been a succession of horrid shocks. Geys, one of the first cities he had planned to visit, stood abandoned and overgrown, for-so he was told-a flaming prong from the sky had struck a nearby hill and everyone had fled in panic. Moreover, of the escorts and banners who had set out with him (any other of the court officers would have had concubines as well, but Jing was obliged by his calling to accept celibacy) most had deserted on finding how squalid was the world beyond the mountains, while not a few had succumbed, as had his mount, to bad food or foul water.

One alone had survived to accompany him into the branchways of the great city Forb, where first he had encountered learned men as he regarded learning. Yet they were parasites, Jing felt, upon their city's past, disdainful of sky-shown truths, able only to expound concerning inscriptions and petty relics which they claimed to be older than anything elsewhere. Jing was reticently doubtful, but it was impolitic to speak his mind, partly because he was unfluent in the speech of that region, partly because its masters exercised very real power which he had no wish to see turned against Ntah, and chiefly because of the nature of that power.

His tallness, and the fact that his companion was taller yet, made him remarkable. The nobility bade him to banquets and festivities as a curiosity. It was a time of dearth, as he had discovered on his way; nonetheless, the fare at such events was lavish. It followed that the lords of Forb must control vast domains-not, however, vast enough to satisfy them, as was apparent from the way they spent all their tune maneuvering for advantage over one another, and instructed their interpreters to ply Jing with questions concerning weaponry. They were prepared to descend as far as spreading disease among a rival's crops, than which only the use of wildfire could be baser. Were such monsters to be let loose in the peaceful region of Ntah...!

Shuddering, yet determined to pursue his quest, Jing eventually discovered the secret of their dominance. It lay not in their armies, nor their treasuries. It consisted in the deliberate and systematic exploitation of the dreams of those less well-to-do than themselves, a possibility which had never occurred to him, and which the language barrier prevented him from comprehending until a lordling he had disappointed in his hope of brand-new armaments set sacerdotes upon him at his lodgings.

He had frequently seen their like bringing up the tail-end of a noble's retinue, always gaunt in a manner that contrasted greatly with the glistening plumpness of their masters, and initially he had assumed them to be nothing more than servants: scribes, perhaps, or accountants, though it was hard to conceive how such dream-prone starvelings could be relied on.

Acting, however, more like persons of authority than underlings, these visitors interrogated him concerning Ntah. Pleased to meet anyone prepared to discuss what he thought of as serious subjects, Jing answered honestly, hoping to show that the relationship between Ntah and its satrapies, being sustained by trade in information concerning what the heavens portended, was more civilized than rule by force.

Did he not-they responded in shocked tones-acknowledge the ex-ample of the Maker of All, who daily surveyed the world with His all-seeing eye, the sun, and nightly dispatched fiery bolts by way of warning that His way must be adhered to on pain of uttermost destruction? Was he not aware that the arc in the sky was the Maker's sling, that the Maker's mantle was what lighted the heavens with the glimmer of marvelous draped colors? Then he was in peril of imminent disaster, and were he still to be in Forb when it overtook him, scores-of-scores of innocent people would be caught up in the catastrophe! He must leave the city at once, or they would execute the Maker's will upon him themselves!

Jing's lifelong faith in the beneficence of the universe had been shaken, but he was not about to enter someone else's fever-dream. He did his best to scorn the warning-until the day when his sole surviving escort, Drakh, was set on by an unknown gang and attacked with weapons such as would never have been permitted in Ntah: prongs steeped in the ichor from a rotting carcass, warranted to poison the slightest cut even though it was not deep enough to let out life.

Now Drakh lay delirious beside him, as for days past, shivering less at the bitter air than the racking of his sickness. He would have been dead but that Jing's treelord-a Shreeban, well accustomed to being shunned by his Forbish neighbors and mocked by their children when he went abroad-had called a doctor, said to breed the best cleanlickers in the city.

And the doctor had saved not only Drakh's life (so far, Jing amended wryly, for the licker was weakening and the sorbers it passed repeatedly over his wound were turning yellow) but also the mission they had been sent on. Forgetful of his other clients, he had sat for days greedily studying Jing's star-maps, mentioning now and then that such-and-such a one of his forebears had claimed to be older than this or that star: heretical information in Forb where the Creation was supposed to have been perfect from the Beginning.

How could such dream-spawned nonsense survive the appearance of the New Star, which for a score of nights had outshone the Bridge of Heaven, and still after four years loomed brighter than anything except the sun and moon?

It might well not, explained the doctor. As people became more prosperous and better fed, so they naturally grew more capable of telling dream from fact. This led them to mock the sacerdotes, whose power had been decreasing from generation to generation despite their deliberate self-privation. Now they were reduced to claiming that the New Star was a delusion due to the forces of evil, which-they said-dwelt in that bleak zone from which the Maker had banned all stars as a reminder of the lightless eternity to which He could condemn transgressors. But there were those who maintained that one supremely righteous person was to be born-now: must have been-who could hold up a lamp where the Maker had decreed darkness, and lead folk out of mental enslavement.

Looking at the glowplants that draped the walls of his rented home, Jing prompted him to more revelations. Were there none here in the north who studied star-lore?

The chief of them, the doctor said, had taken refuge with the Count of Thorn. Branded by the sacerdotes as victim of a divine curse, that lord had retreated to an arctic fastness where hot springs bubbled out of frozen ground-clear proof, said the sacerdotes, of his commitment to evil, for in the absence of sunlight water could be heated only by fire, the prerogative of the Maker: hence those who usurped it must be on His adversary's side. Where Thorn had gone, besides, report held that a night might last for half a year, and evil dwelt in darkness, did it not? Yet it was also rumored that those who had followed him were prosperous while everywhere else epidemics were tramping in the pad-marks of famine...

“There has been some land of change,” the doctor whispered. “My best remedies have ceased to work, and many babies bud off dead or twisted. Also there is a taint in this year's nuts, and it seems to drive folk mad. If I had more courage I too would go where Thorn has gone... Pay me nothing for the care of your man. Promise only to send news of what they have found out in that ice-bound country. It is a place of ancient wisdom which the sacerdotes interdicted, saying it was dream-stuff. I think they were in error in that also.”

Now Jing, so weary he too was having trouble telling dream from fact, was come to Castle Thorn at the head of the warm channel. The fog parted. The moon was rising, gibbous in its third quarter, and as usual its dark part sparkled.

II

If Forb was old, then Castle Thorn was antique. Guarding the entrance to a bowl-shaped valley, it loomed as large as a city in its own right-not that its whole bulk could be seen from the outcrop of rock serving it as a wharf, despite the glowplants which outlined it at a distance, for its defenses were elaborate and far-reaching. On either bank bomas trembled ready to collapse their spiky branches, while masses of clingweed parted only in response to blasting on a high-pitched whistle. Prongsmen came to hitch the barq's mooring-tentacles, accompanied by enormous canifangs.

Just before docking Jing had realized that a range of hills on the horizon was gleaming pure white in the moonshine. He had said, “Snow already?”

And the steersman had grunted, “Always.”

So there truly was a place where ice might defy summer. For the first time Jing felt in his inmost tubules how far he was from home.

But there was no time for reflection. A voice was calling to him in city-Forbish: “Hail to the foreigner! I'm told your prongsman is sick. As soon as he's ashore I'll see what I can do for him. I'm Scholar Twig, by the way.”

Who was a person of advanced years, his tubby shortness-characteristic of these northerners-aggravated by loss of pressure in his bracing tubules, but his expression alert and manner brisk. Grateful, for Twig was the name the doctor had told him to ask for, Jing returned the greeting.

“How you know I coming?” he demanded.

“Oh, you've made news over half the continent,” was the prompt reply. “Sorry we don't have anyone around who speaks Ntahish, but until you showed up most people thought your homeland was just a legend, you know? Say, is it true you have star-maps going back to the Beginning? How soon can I look at them?”

Groping his way through the rush of words, Jing recalled the protocol which attended ambassadors to Ntah.

“Not I must at once pay respect the lord?”

“He's dining in the great hall. You'll meet him in a little. First let me present my colleagues. This is Hedge, this is Bush, this is-”

It was impossible to register so many strangers when he was so fatigued. “But my man-at-arms...?” he ventured.

“Ah, what am I thinking of? Of course, we must get him and you to quarters right away!”

Detailing some junior aides to carry Drakh, Twig led the way at half a trot.

Jing could have wished to move more slowly, because nothing had prepared him for the luxury he discerned all about him. The very stones were warm underpad. The gnarled trunks of the castle were thicker than any he had ever seen, and even at this season they were garlanded with scores of useful secondary plants. Steaming ponds rippled to the presence of fish, while fruit he had not tasted the like of since leaving home dangled from overhanging boughs, and everywhere trailed luminescent vines. Through gaps between the boles, as he ascended branchways in Twig's wake, he caught glimpses of a landscape which reminded him achingly of parts of Ntah. He had thought in terms of a mere clawhold on survival, but the valley must support a considerable population. He saw three villages, each with a score of homes, surrounded by barns and clamps large enough to store food for a year-and that was only on one side of the castle. Amazing! His spirits rose.

And further still when Drakh was laid in a comfortable crotch and a maid brought warm drink. Passing him a huskful, Twig said dryly, “In case you're superstitious about fire, it's untouched by flame. We keep the bags in a hot spring.”

Jing's people cared little about fire one way or the other, so he forbore to reply. Whatever its nature, the drink effectively drove away dreams. Meanwhile Twig was inspecting Drakh's licker and saying in disgust, “This should have been changed days ago! Here!”-to the maid-”take it away and bring one of my own at once. They're of the same stock,” he added to Jing, “though here we have fewer outlandish poisons they can learn to cope with. Faugh! They do stink, though, don't they, at that stage?”

Now that Jing's perceptions were renewed, he had realized that the very air inside the castle stank-something to do with the hot springs, possibly. Never mind. He posed a key question.

“Drakh will live, yes?”

“I'm not a specialist in foreign sicknesses, you know! But... Yes, very probably. I'll send for juice which can be poured between his mandibles. Wouldn't care to offer him solid food in his condition.”

Jing nodded sober agreement. Reflex might make him bite off his own limbs.

“Are those your maps?” Twig went on, indicating the rolled parchments. “How I want to examine them! But you must be hungry. Come on. I'll show you to the hall.”

There, at its very center, the true antiquity of the castle was revealed. Despite the dense clusters of glowplants which draped the walls, Jing could discern how the ever-swelling boles of its constituent bravetrees had lifted many huge rocks to four or five tunes his own height. Some of them leaned dangerously inward where the trunks arched together. None of the company, however, seemed to be worrying about what might happen if they tumbled down. Perhaps there were no quakes in this frozen zone; the land might stiffen here, as water did, the year around. Yet it was so warm...

He postponed such mysteries in order to take in his surroundings.

The body of the hall was set with carefully tended trencher-stumps, many more than sufficed for the diners, who were three or at most four score in number. Not only were the stumps plumper than any Jing had seen in Forb; they were plentifully garnished with fruit and fungi and strips of meat and fish, while a channel of hollow stems ran past them full of the same liquor Twig had given him. Entrances were at east and west. At the south end a line of peasants waited for their dole: a slice of trencher-wood nipped off by a contemptuous kitchener and a clawful of what had been dismissed by diners at the north. Jing repressed a gasp. Never, even in Ntah, had he seen such lavish hospitality. It was a wonder that the Count's enemies in Forb had not already marched to deprive him of his riches.

“So many peasants isn't usual,” murmured Twig.

“I believe well!” Jing exclaimed. “Plainly did I see villages with land enough and many high barns!”

“Except that on the land the trencher-plants are failing,” Twig said, still softly. “Take one of these and transplant it outside, and it turns rotten-yellow. But save your questions until you've fed, or you'll spend a dream-haunted night. Come this way.”

Jing complied, completing his survey of the hall. In a space at the center, children as yet unable to raise themselves upright were playing with a litter of baby canifangs, whose claws were already sharp. Now and then that led to squalling, whereupon a nursh would run to the defense of its charge, mutely seeking a grin of approval from the fathers who sat to left and right. Each had a female companion, and if the latter were in bud made great show of providing for her, but otherwise merely allowed her to bite off a few scraps.

And at the north end sat the Count himself, flanked by two girls, both pretty in the plump northern manner, but neither budding.

The Count was as unlike what Jing had been led to expect as was his castle. He had been convinced by the doctor that he was to meet a great patron of learning, more concerned with wisdom than material wealth. What he saw was a gross figure so far gone in self-indulgence that he required a sitting-pit, whose only concession to stylish behavior was that instead of biting off his trencher-wood he slashed it with a blade the like of which Jing had never seen, made from some dark but shiny and very sharp substance.

“Sit here with my compeers,” Twig muttered. “Eat fast. There may not be long to go. He's in a surly mood.”

Thinking to make polite conversation, Jing said, “Has two lovely shes, this lord. Is of the children many to him credit?”

The scholar's colleagues, Bush, Hedge and so on-names doubtless adopted, in accordance with local custom, when they took service with the Count-froze in unison. Twig whispered forcefully, “Never speak of that where he might overhear! No matter how many women he takes, there is no outcome and never has been, except... See the cripple?”

Previously overlooked, there sat a girl by herself, her expression glum. She leaned to one side as though she had been struck by an assassin's prong. Yet she bore a visible resemblance to the Count, and she was passably handsome by the standards of Ntah where the mere fact of her being a noble's daughter would have assured her of suitors. She was alone, though, as if she were an unmated or visiting male. Had he again misunderstood some local convention?

Twig was continuing between gobbles of food. “She's the reason I'm here-eat, eat for pity's sake because any moment he's going to order up the evening's entertainment which is bound to include you and over there”-with a nod towards a trio of emaciated persons whom Jing identified with a sinking feeling as sacerdotes-”are a bunch of charlatans who would dearly have liked to sink claws in you before I did except that I put it about I wasn't expecting you before the last boat of autumn in ten days' tune. Anyway, Rainbow-who is much brighter than you'd imagine just looking at her-is his sole offspring. Naturally what he wants is a cure for infertility and an assurance that his line won't die out. So our real work keeps getting interrupted while we invent another specious promise for him.”

For someone afraid of being overheard, Twig was speaking remarkably freely. But Jing was confused. “You not try read his future from stars?” he hazarded. “You not think possible?”

“Oh, it may well be! But before we can work out what the sky is telling us, we must first understand what's going on up there. My view, you see, is that fire above and fire below are alike in essence, so that until we comprehend what fire can do we shan't know what it is doing, and in consequence-Oh-oh. He's stopped eating, which means the rest of us have to do the same. If you haven't had enough to keep you dreamfree I can smuggle something to your quarters later. Right now, though, you're apt to be what's served him next!”

In fact it didn't happen quite so quickly. With a spring like a stabber-claw pouncing out of jungle overgrowth, a girl draped in glitterweed erupted from shadow. She proved to be a juggler, and to the accompaniment of a shrill pipe made full use of the hall's height by tossing little flying creatures into the air and luring them back in graceful swooping curves.

“She came in on the first spring boat,” Twig muttered, “and is going away tomorrow-considerably richer! Even though she didn't cure the Count's problem, he must have had a degree of pleasure from her company...”

Certainly the performance improved the Count's humor; when it was over he joined in the clacking of applause.

“We have a foreign guest among us!” he roared at last. “Let him make himself known!”

“Do exactly as I do!” Twig instructed. “First you-”

“No!” Jing said with unexpected resolve. “I make like in my country to my lord!”

And strode forward fully upright, not letting the least hint of pressure leak from his tubules. Arriving in front of the Count, he paid him the Ntahish compliment of overtopping him yet shielding his mandibles.

“I bring greeting from Ntah,” he said in his best Forbish. “Too, I bring pearlseeds, finest of sort, each to grow ten score like self. Permit to give as signing gratitude he let share knowledge of scholars here!”

And extended what was in fact his best remaining seed.

For an instant the Count seemed afraid to touch it. Then one of his treasurers, who stood by, darted forward to examine it. He reported that it was indeed first-class.

Finally the Count condescended to take it into his own claw, and a murmur of surprise passed around the company. Jing realized he must have committed another breach of etiquette. But there was no help for that.

“You have no manners, fellow,” the Count grunted. “Still, if your knowledge is as valuable as your pearlseed, you may consider yourself welcome. I'll talk with you when Twig has taught you how to address a nobleman!”

He hauled himself to his pads and lumbered off.

“Well, you got away with that,” Twig murmured, arriving at Jing's side. “But you've pressurized a lot of enemies. Not one of them would dare to stand full height before the Count, and they claim to have authority from the Maker Himself!”

Indeed, the three sacerdotes he had earlier designated charlatans were glowering from the far side of the hall as though they would cheerfully have torn Jing mantle from torso.

III

“And here is where we study the stars,” said Lady Rainbow.

It had been a long trek to the top of this peak, the northernmost of those girdling the round valley. Their path had followed the river which eventually created the channel used by boats from the south. It had not one source, but many, far underground or beyond the hills, and then it spread out to become a marsh from which issued bubbles of foul-smelling gas. Passage through a bed of sand cleansed it, and thereafter it was partitioned into many small channels to irrigate stands of fungi, useful trees, and pastures on which grazed meatimals and furnimals. Also it filled the castle fish-ponds, and even after such multiple exploitation it was warm enough to keep the channel ice-free save in the dead of winter. The whole area was a marvel and a mystery. It was even said that further north yet there were pools of liquid rock which bubbled like water, but Jing was not prepared to credit that until he saw it with his own eye.

Despite her deformity, Rainbow had set a punishing pace, as though trying to prove something to herself, and Twig had been left far behind on the rocky path. He was in a bad temper anyway, for he had hoped to show off his laboratory first, where he claimed he was making amazing transformations by the use of heat, but Rainbow had insisted on coming here before sunset, and Jing did want to visit the observatory above all else.

However, he was finding it a disappointment. It was a mere depression in the rock. Walbushes had been trained to make a circular windbreak, and their rhizomes formed crude steps enabling one to look over the top for near-horizon observations. A pumptree whose taproot reached down to a stream of hot water grew in the center where on bitter nights one might lean against it for warmth. A few lashed-together poles indicated important lines-of-sight. Apart from that-nothing.

At first Jing just wandered about, praising the splendid view here offered of Castle Thorn and the adjoining settlements. There were more than he had imagined: almost a score. But when Twig finally reached the top, panting, he could contain himself no longer.

“Where your instruments?” he asked in bewilderment.

“Oh, we bring them up as required,” was the blank reply. “What do you do-keep them in a chest on the spot?”

Thinking of the timber orrery which had been his pride and joy, twice his own height and moved by a pithed water-worm whose mindless course was daily diverted by dams and sluices so as to keep the painted symbols of the sun, moon and planets in perfect concordance with heaven, Jing was about to say, “We don't bother with instruments small enough to carry!”

But it would have been unmannerly.

Sensing his disquiet, Twig seized on a probable explanation. “I know what you're tempted to say-with all that steam rising from our warm pools, how can anyone see the stars? You just wait until the winter wind from the north spills down this valley! It wipes away mist like a rainstorm washing out tracks in mud! Of course, sometimes it brings snow, but for four-score nights in any regular year we get the most brilliant sight of heaven anyone could wish for, and as for the aurorae...!”

Touching Rainbow familiarly, he added, “And you'll be here to watch it all, won't you?”

“You must forgive Twig,” she said, instantly regal. “He has known me since childhood and often treats me as though I were still a youngling. But it's true I spend most of my time here during the winter. I have no greater purpose in life than to decipher the message of the stars. I want to know why I'm accursed!”

Embarrassed by her intensity, Jing glanced nervously at her escorting prongsman, without whom she was forbidden to walk abroad, and wished he could utter something reassuring about Twig's abilities. But the words would have rung hollow. He had pored over Jing's star-maps, cursing his failing sight which he blamed on excessive study of the sun- in which Jing sympathized with him, for his own eye was not as keen as it had been-and exclaimed at their detail, particularly because they showed an area of the southern sky which he had never seen. All he had to offer in exchange, though, were a few score parchments bearing scrappy notes about eclipses and planetary orbits, based on the assumption that the world was stationary, which had been superseded in Ntah ten-score years ago, and some uninspiring remarks about the New Star. It was clear that his real interest lay in what he could himself affect, in his laboratory, and his vaunted theory of the fire above was plausibly a scrap from a childhood dream. Jing was unimpressed.

He said eventually, “Lady, where I from is not believed curses anymore. We hold, as sky tend to fill more with star, so perfectness of life increase down here.” And damned his clumsiness in this alien speech.

“That's all very well if you admit the heavens change,” said Twig bluffly. “But we're beset with idiots who are so attached to their dreams they can go on claiming they don't, when a month of square meals would show them better!”

He meant the sacerdotes, who-as Jing had learned-had been sent to Castle Thorn unwillingly, in the hope of winning the Count back to their “true faith,” and were growing desperate at their lack of success even among the peasants, because everyone in this valley was well enough nourished to tell dream from fact. One rumor had it that they were spreading blight on the trencher-plants, but surely no one could descend that far! Although some of the lords of Forb...

Disregarding Twig, Rainbow was addressing Jing again. “You say I can't be cursed?”

“Is not curse can come from brightness, only darkness. More exact, is working out pattern-I say right pattern, yes?-coming towards ideal, and new thing have different shape. You noble-born, you perhaps a sign of change in world.”

“But if change is coming, nobody will prepare to meet it,” Twig said, growing suddenly serious. “With the trunks of Forb and other ancient cities rotting around them, people shout ever louder that it can't be happening. They'd rather retreat from reality into the mental mire from which-one supposes-our ancestors must have emerged. You don't think Lady Rainbow is accursed. Well, I don't either, or if she is then it's a funny kind of curse, because I never met a girl with a sharper mind than hers! But most people want everything, including their children, to conform to the standards of the past.”

“My father's like that,” Rainbow sighed.

“He's a prime example,” Twig agreed, careless of the listening prongsman. “He thinks always in terms of tomorrow copying today. But our world-I should say our continent-is constantly in flux; when it's not a drought it's a plague, when it's not a murrain it's a population shift... Where you come from, Jing, how does your nation stay stable even though you admit the heavens themselves can change? I want to know the secret of that stability!”

“I want to know what twisted my father!” snapped Rainbow. “Bent outwardly I may be, but he must be deformed within!”

Aware of being caught up in events he had not bargained for, Jing thought to turn Rainbow a compliment. He said, “But is still possible to him descendants, not? Surprise to me lady is not match often with persons of quality, being intelligent and of famous family.”

Later, Twig explained that to speak of a noblewoman being paired was something one did not do within hearing of the party concerned. For the time being he merely changed the subject with an over-loud interruption.

“Now come and see what's really interesting about the work we're doing!”

Yet, although she declined to accompany them to the laboratory, the lady herself seemed rather flattered than upset.

This time their path wound eastward to the place where the hot river broke out of shattered rocks. Alongside it a tunnel led into the core of a low hill, uttering an appalling stench. Yet the heat and humidity reminded Jing's weather-sense of home, and inside there were adequate glowplants and twining creepers to cling to when the going became treacherous. Sighing, he consented to enter.

When he was half choking in the foul air, they emerged into a cavern shaped like a vast frozen bubble, at whose center water gushed up literally boiling. Here Hedge, Bush and the rest were at work, or more exactly directing a group of ill-favored peasants to do their work for them.

They paused to greet their visitor, and Twig singled out one husky fellow who sank to half his normal height in the cringing northern fashion.

“This is Keepfire! Tell Master Jing what you think of this home of yours, Keepfire!”

“Oh, it's very good, very safe,” the peasant declared. “Warm in the worst winter, and food always grows. Better here than over the hill, sir!”

Jing was prepared to accept that. Anything must be preferable to being turned loose to fend for oneself in the barren waste to the north, where no plants grew and there was a constant risk from icefaws and snowbelongs, which colonized the bodies of their prey to nourish their brood-mass. Twig had described the process in revolting detail.

Having surveyed the cavern and made little sense of what he saw, Jing demanded, “What exact you do here?”

“We're testing whatever we can lay claws on, first in hot water, then on rock to protect it from flame, then in flame itself. We make records of the results, and from them we hope to figure out what fire actually can do.”

To Jing, fire was something viewed from far off, veiled in smoke and to be avoided, the flame was a conjurer's trick to amuse children on celebration days. More cynically than he had intended-but he was growing weary and dreams were invading his mind again-he said, “You are proving something it does?”

Stung, Twig reached up to a rocky ledge and produced a smooth heavy lump which shone red-brown.

“Seen anything like this before? Or this?”

Another strange object, more massive and yellower.

Realization dawned. “Ah, these are metals, yes? You find in water?” Sometimes in the streams which fed the lake of Ntah placer-nuggets turned up, softer than stone ought to be, which after repeated hammering showed similar coloration.

“Not at all! This is what we get when we burn certain plants and then reheat their ash. Don't you think some of the essence of fire must have remained in these lumps? Look how they gleam! But I should have asked-what do you already know about fire?”

“Is to us not well known. In dry land is danger for plants, homes, people. But in Ntah is air damp same like here. Is down in this cave possible flame?”

His doubt was plain. Twig snorted.

“I thought so! The more I hear, the more I become convinced we must be the only people in the world seriously investigating fire. Either they think it's blasphemous because it's reserved to the heavens, or they're as wrong as you about the way it works. Let a humble peasant show you better. Keepfire, make a flame for the visitor!”

Chuckling, the peasant rushed to a recess in the cavern wall. From it he produced articles which Jing's poor sight failed to make out in the dimness.

“Long before anyone came here from as far south as Forb,” Twig said softly, “Keepfire's ancestors were priests of a cult which now has vanished-based on dreams, of course. But they found out some very practical techniques.”

“What he do?”

“It's so simple you wouldn't believe it. I didn't when I first came here. He uses dry fungus-spores, and a calamar soaked in fish-oil, and two rocks. Not just ordinary rock, a kind that has some of the fire-essence in it. Watch!”

Something sparkled. A flame leapt up, taller than himself, and Jing jumped back in alarm. He risked tumbling into the hot pool; Twig caught him, uttering a sour laugh.

“Doesn't that impress you?”

“I guess so...” Jing was trembling. “But what to do with? Is not same fire and in-as in sky! Is under the ground!”

Twig said with authority, “The idea that fire belongs to the sky is false. Using it, we've made-not grown but made-things that were never in the world before.”

“Did you make Count's blade?” Jing ventured, prepared to be impressed.

“Oh, no. That's a natural rock you find a lot of around here. But it too must have fire in its essence, or heat at any rate. It seems to be like this stuff.” Twig reached to another ledge and brought down a clawful of smooth transparent objects shaped like half a raindrop, most bluish, some greenish, one or two clear. “The peasants' children use these for playthings. They hate me because I take away the best ones for more important use. On a fine day you can catch sunfire with them and set light to a dry calamar or a dead leaf. What better proof could there be of my opinions? Look, here's a particularly clear one!”

To Jing's touch the droplet was relatively cool, so he could not imagine how fire could be trapped within. All of a sudden, however, as he was inspecting it, he noticed something remarkable. At a certain distance he could see his claw through it, only enlarged.

“It make big!” he breathed.

“Oh, that too! But it's no use holding it up to the sky. Every youngling in the valley must have tried that, and me too, I confess. But it won't make the moon or stars any plainer, and as for looking at the sun-well!”

“I can have, please? Not to start fires. Is good for look my star-maps.”

Twig started. He said in an altered voice, “Now, why didn't I think of that? But of course I never saw maps like yours before, with such fine detail... Sure, take it. We keep finding them all the time. Now we'd best get back to the castle.”

He padded away, exuding an aura of annoyance.

This was no astrologer: Jing was satisfied on that point. Maybe when it came to trying this or that in a fire Twig's record-keeping might be accurate, but given he could overlook such an obvious use for a magnifying drop it seemed unlikely. Anyhow, what value could his data nave? It was inconceivable that fire in heaven could be identical with fire underground!

So perhaps there were several kinds of fire? And surely there must be some way of enlarging the heavens if it could be done at close range...?

Jing sighed heavily. He had to make an immediate decision: whether to remain here in the hope that studying the stars uninterruptedly for longer than he had imagined possible would bring unexpected insights, or leave by the final autumn boat. But the continent was already in the grip of winter; he could scarcely reach home any sooner, if he left now, than if he stayed until spring. And Waw-Yint would certainly not forgive him for abandoning his mission. He was not one to be bought off with such petty marvels as a magnifying drop. True, he was old, and by now might well be dead-

Shocked at his own disloyalty, Jing firmly canceled such thoughts. No, he must remain, and if necessary next year carry on beyond the ocean, riding one of the half-legendary giant barqs of which they spoke in Yown and Forb... if they were not compounded of dreams.

Besides, this magnifier... It had seized his imagination, an ideal tool for astrologers hampered only by its present imperfection. He had been brought up to believe that perfection inhered in everything, even people; it needed only to be sought out.

Just before entering the castle again, Twig turned to him and said bluffly, “Put what I know about the world below together with what you know about the sky, and we might get somewhere one of these days, right? Shall we try?”

It was a formal invitation not just to collaborate but to make friends.

Jing felt obliged to treat it as such, despite his reservations concerning Twig's researches. They locked claws accordingly.

Later, Jing reflected it was as well they concluded their compact at that juncture, for the first person to meet them within the castle reported Drakh's death; the best of Twig's cleanlickers had failed to purify his wound. Grief at being shorn of his last Ntahish companion might have driven him to dreamness and made him reject Twig-friend because of Twig-physician. Yet no blame could attach save to those who had stabbed Drakh a month's journey ago.

When, in compliance with local custom, they consigned Drakh's remains to a pullulating pond surrounding a handsome blazetree, Twig spoke much about loneliness and isolation, and Jing was touched and grateful.

As though the funeral were a significant occasion, the Maker's Sling delivered a cast of long bright streaks across the zenith.

But that was apt to happen any night.

IV

Next day distraught peasants came crying that a snowbelong had killed a child from the furthest-outlying village, and the Count hauled himself out of his sitting-pit and set off to hunt it down with hoverers and canifangs. Twig predicted it might be several days before he returned, and Jing looked forward not only to improving his Forbish but also to cleansing his mind of the nostalgic dreams which since the death of Drakh threatened to overwhelm him.

Taking advantage of his absence, however, the sacerdotes promptly summoned Jing to their chapel, an enclosure within the north wall of the castle which they had been granted because the Count, despite being well fed, was sufficiently at the mercy of his dreams to half believe their dogma.

“You'll have to go, I'm afraid,” sighed Twig.

“Here I thought had they no power. How they force me?”

“Hmm! It isn't quite like that. True, the Count's rule is absolute here, and the people, if they have a religion at all, adhere to superstitions even more absurd than the sacerdotes', though some of their knowledge, especially where fire is concerned... Excuse me. The point is, the Count has opened up this place to trade with the south, and that means contact with southern believers. Most of the summer there are at least half a score of the faithful here, and the sacerdotes incite them to put pressure on the Count, who's growing senile. What I'm afraid of is that sooner or later he may conclude that they're right after all, and hoping to escape the curse he'll go whining to them for forgiveness, and you can guess what'll become of the rest of us then! At all events they're getting bolder, and if you don't obey their summons you could well find your food poisoned or a prong stuck in your back.”

Jing would have dismissed the idea as ridiculous but for what had happened to Drakh. Sensing his dismay, Twig added, “If it's any comfort, though, you should bear in mind that it would be a far greater coup for them to convert you than kill you. They may be a nuisance but they're not likely to be a menace.”

At least these sacerdotes were less determined to execute what they held to be the Maker's will than their counterparts at Forb. They greeted him politely as he entered the chapel, which was decorated with makeshift symbols: the Sling, of course, shiny with glitterweed; a pile of the seared rocks which were held to be what the Sling cast, but looked much like any other rock except for superficial melt-marks; some rather repulsive models of victims of the Maker's wrath, struck down from on high.

For a while there was ordinary conversation, about his homeland and his various travels. Jing answered as best he could, wishing he had asked Twig their names, for they had not offered them and direct inquiry might be rude. There were a chief, a middle and a junior; that would have to do.

Finally the chief broached the main subject. He said, “What god is worshiped in your land?”

“Most people not,” Jing said. “Is some old and sick folk think of pleasing gods, but to rest of us is imaginary thing. We tell easily dream from fact, same as here.”

“You don't believe in a creator at all?” the middle one demanded. “You don't think the world was created?”

“Is certain,” Jing said. “But very long past. We think”-he groped for words-”world is made as path for us to go on as we choose. Important is to learn from sky whether we take right or wrong way. Creator is watch us, but not for punish, not for want offerings, just for see how done by us. When well done, more star come in sky. Perhaps in farthest future all sky is starry, and all here below walk in light all time.”

He hated to give this bald account of the system Ntahish philosophers had evolved over many score-of-score years, but it was the best he could manage.

The junior, who was better-favored than his colleagues, spoke up eagerly. “But the New Star did light the whole of the night sky! For a while it could even be seen by day! Do you think-?”

“There is no New Star!” the chief snapped. “It's an illusion!”

Humbly the junior said, “Sir, I'm aware of that. But with respect it seems our visitor is not. I only wish to learn what explanation his people have-well, invented for it.”

Gruffly, the chief granted permission for the question.

“We not have explanation,” Jing admitted. “Never saw so much bright star appear in past, not at any rate to stay so long. In Ntah is no great change to explain it. Here why I am sent to ask in foreign lands.”

“You actually imagine there have been other new stars?” asked the middle one. “Dreamstuff!”

“Can show you true. I bring copies of old sky-maps to make proof. Is also much difference in time of rise and set from old days. Will explain meaning of maps when want you!”

“Your star-maps,” said the chief sacerdote coldly, “are of no interest to us. Any apparent change in the heavens must be due to the working of evil forces passing off dreams as reality. Bring your maps, yes, but so that we can burn them and save other people from your mad ideas!”

That was more than Jing could bear. Rising to his full height in the most disrespectful manner possible, he said, “Is your belief, anyone make use of fire is companion of evil, yes? You just propose that same! I say plain: I better tell dream from true than you! And anyway, is not place of you to order foreigner, guest of Count!”

The middle one scowled a warning, aware his chief had gone too far. After a moment the latter rose, glowering.

“The Count is not yet back! He is a reckless hunter and may well not come back at all! And if he doesn't, then we'll see about you!”

He stormed away.

Greatly distressed, the junior sacerdote escorted Jing to the exit, muttering apologies. And, as soon as they were out of hearing, he did the most amazing thing. Leaning confidentially close, he whispered, “Sir, I would like to see your sky-maps! Since coming here, I no longer think the heavens never change! I think new stars signal the birth of righteous persons, and the most righteous of all must now be among us!” Before Jing could recover from his startlement, he was gone.

At first Jing was inclined to hasten straight back to Twig, but a moment's reflection changed his mind. Even in peaceful Ntah there were such things as court intrigues, and while in his profession he had been largely insulated from them, he was well aware of the need to protect himself. Given the Count's absence, might his daughter offer a degree of help, or at least advice? From a passing prongsman he inquired the way to her ladyship's quarters.

They proved to be in a large and comfortable bower on the west side of the castle, where she sat poring over a table of Ntahish mathematical symbols he had prepared for her. He was relieved to find she did not resent interruption; on the contrary, she declared herself delighted, and sent her maids to bring refreshments.

“I'm so pleased you're here!” she exclaimed, speaking as directly as a man. “Here at Castle Thorn, I mean. I'd never say so in Twig's hearing, but I long ago learned all he had to teach me about the sky, and it didn't even include the idea that the sun stands still while we move around it. It makes everything so much simpler when you look at things that way, doesn't it? I look forward to having you as my constant companion at the observatory this winter.”

“To me will much pleasure,” Jing affirmed. “But if to explain correct meaning I want say, must I very more Forbish learn.”

“I'm sure you'll learn quickly, and if you have problems, turn to me. I have little enough to occupy me,” she added in a bitter tone.

Thus emboldened, Jing said, “Is of problem I come now. See you...” And he summed up his encounter with the sacerdotes.

“You're right to beware of them!” Rainbow asserted. “How can I but hate them for claiming that my birth was the sign of a curse on my father? For him I have small love either, since he sent my mother away, but at least he had the kindness to bring me with him when he left Forb instead of abandoning or even killing me, and he provided for my education by offering Twig a refuge here. Without him I think I would have lost myself in dreamness. If only he hadn't more or less quit studying the sky when his eye began to fail... Still, he had only himself to blame for looking directly at the sun. He told you, did he, how he saw dark markings on it?”

“I hear of it in Forb, but he not say himself.”

“Do you think it's credible? Sometimes when there's thin gray cloud, so the sun doesn't hurt your eye, I've imagined that I too... But what do you think? Is it possible for dark to appear out of bright, as bright may out of dark?”

“In not in the knowledge of my people. Where I lived, is either clear day-sky or thick rain-cloud. Was to me new, see sort of thin cloud you mention.”

“Is that so?” She leaned forward, fascinated. “I should ask you about your homeland, shouldn't I, rather than about stars and numbers all the time? Have you been away long? Do you miss it very much? Is it a place of marvels? I suspect it must be, particularly compared to this lonely backwater... But quickly, before my maids return: I'll assign you one of my own prongsmen to replace Drakh. I'll say it's because you need someone to practice Forbish with. I'll give you Sturdy. With him at your side you need fear nothing from the sacerdotes.”

“Am not sure all to be feared,” Jing muttered, and recounted the odd behavior of the junior sacerdote.

“Interesting! That must be Shine you're talking about. I realized long ago he was too sensible to deprive himself of the good fare we can offer, but I'd no idea he'd become so independent-minded. Cultivate him! It could serve us well to have a split in the enemy's ranks.”

Jing noted in passing how swiftly she had begun to say “us.”

“Tonight in hall sit with me,” Rainbow continued. “I'll feed you from my own trencher-stump. That is, unless you're afraid of offending my father's wives. But they have no power; he takes and dismisses them according to his mood, and until one of them buds I remain his sole heir. Now here come my attendants. Let's change the subject. You were telling me about your homeland. The very weather is different there, I think you said. In what way?”

With infinite gratitude Jing slipped into memory, purging the risk of dangerous dreams. He described the subtropical climate of Ntah, and then progressed to a general account of the Lake and its environs-the creeperbridges stranding out from island to island; the Lord's palace at the center, a huge tree sixty-score years old, whose sides were draped with immense waxy blossoms that scented the air for miles around; the western cataract where a broad river plunged over a cliff and kept the Lake from growing stagnant; the delectable flesh of the nut called hoblaq, enclosed in a shell too hard for anyone to break, which people gathered on the hillside and pitched into the river so that the falls would do the work for them and send the shattered kernels drifting across the water V

The slopes and branchways of the castle were eerie in the long darkness, although the glowplants drew enough warmth from underground to provide faint luminance right through until spring. They were, Jing thought, like a model of his mind, a pattern matching himself alone as the sky matched the entire world. Some areas were darkly red, like those deep-lying mental strata concerned with fundamental processes such as digestion, where one might venture only in emergency and at the cost of immense concentration; others were pinker and brighter, like the levels where one might issue commands to oneself about sitting or standing, walking or climbing-or fighting; others again tended to be bluish, like the dreams harking back to childhood incomprehension of the world which could so easily overpower a person when weary, sick, frightened, grief-stricken or undernourished, and which sacerdotes and other fools deliberately cultivated because they had never learned to prize dreams less than memory; yet other levels were greenish as memory was; more still gleamed clear yellow like imagination; and just a few, including the great hall itself, shone with the white brightness of reality.

Contrary to what the chief sacerdote had hoped, the Count had a for everybody to enjoy; the game animals large and small which haunted the copses, the shallows and the water-meadows; the venomous insects and noxious berries which were obliging enough to advertise themselves by distinctive coloring, so even children might avoid them; and of course his prized observatory, with its orrery and its transits and its levels and its gnomons and its great trumpet-shaped viewing-funnel of dried pliobark, which blanked off all light from below and permitted the eye to adjust completely to its task of registering the stars.

“And we think we're advanced!” Rainbow cried. “How could you have brought yourself to leave such a place?”

It was a question Jing was to ask himself countless times during the next few months, particularly after the last boat of autumn had come and gone and the sun had set for the last time in six-score days. successful hunt, and his prongsmen dragged back enough snowbelong meat to garnish a score of winter meals. But he had fallen into a crevasse and ruptured some of his interior tubules. More bloated than ever, he summoned Jing to attend him under the misapprehension that all foreigners were skilled physicians. Jing, having seen a similar case when an elderly man slipped on the approach to the cataract at Ntah, offered suggestions which appeared to give relief from pain, if nothing more. Impressed, the Count made a vague attempt to engage in debate concerning the patterns in the sky, but after that he seemed to lose interest.

Much the same could be said of Twig. Once he realized that Jing's star-maps were not only in an alien script but based on a sun-centered convention, he gave up. It was not because he shared the sacerdotes' conviction that the sun was only the Maker's Eye and therefore could not be the focus around which the planets revolved; enough observations had been amassed here in the north to indicate to him how far superior the Ntahish system was. No, the problem arose from a wholly unexpected source: Keepfire.

As the story came back to Jing, the elderly peasant whose ancestors had been a priesthood was angered by the fact that certain substances resisted change in his hottest flames. He therefore set about interrogating the oldest of his kinfolk in search of ways to make them even hotter. Siting a fire at the spot where a crack in the rock, leading to the outside, was aligned with the prevailing wind made the fuel blaze up violently. Winds, though, were unpredictable; how to cause an artificial one? Well, when a barq's bladder burst... Suppose one made a giant bladder out of hide? But that wasn't the answer by itself. It needed to be filled, and refilled, and refilled, and... How about tethered hoverers?

The problem engaged Twig's total attention. Sighing, Jing left him to get on with it, feeling lonelier than ever.

In absolute contrast, Rainbow was desperate for the information contained in Jing's maps. The regular winter wind had set in, but actual star-study was out of the question; there were constant snow-flurries, and whenever the gale died down the water was warm enough to generate fog. Jing, though, was in no mood to complain. He was taking a long while to adjust to the loss of his last Ntahish companion, and until he had rid his mind of intrusive dreams he was content to tutor Rainbow. He was greatly impressed by her quick wits. She had realized at once how much simpler a sun-centered system made it to keep track of the outer planets, and the inner one which was so rarely visible. Moreover, when she ran across a technical term in Ntahish for which she knew no equivalent, she simply adopted it. Within a few days she was using words nobody else at Castle Thorn would have understood.

Except one...

It astonished Jing when the young sacerdote Shine lived up to his promise and shyly came to beg a sight of the star-maps. Instantly fascinated, he set about matching the names they bore with their Forbish equivalents. Soon his colleagues were openly quarreling with him. One evening only the authority of the Count prevented a fight breaking out in the hall.

Quite without intention, Jing thereupon found himself the center of interest throughout the castle. He could go nowhere without some wench accosting him to demand a favorable horoscope for her family, or a prongsman wanting to be told he would be promoted chief-of-guard over his rivals, or peasants seeking a cure for trencher-plant blight- though luckily the latter had been less virulent of late.

As soon as the air cleared, therefore, he and Rainbow went to the observatory as often as possible. All Twig's extravagant claims proved justified. The stars shone down sharp as stabberclaws, from a background so nearly black Jing almost could not believe it. Even the square surrounding the New Star was barely a contrast to the rest. As for the Bridge of Heaven, it gleamed like a treasury of pearlseeds.

A faint suspicion trembled on the edge of his awareness. But it refused to come clear as he strove with chill-stiff claws to prepare for the portion of the sky not seen from Ntah maps and tables as exact as those he had brought from home. Often dreams threatened to engulf his consciousness, and then he had to break off and embrace the warm trunk of the pumptree until he regained his self-possession.

It was a marvelous juncture for observation, though. Time had brought all five outer planets into the same quadrant-an event which might or might not have significance. A year ago he would have insisted that it must; now he was growing skeptical. But there was reddish Swiftyouth, currently in a retrograde phase of the kind which had led Ntahish astrologers to center their system on the sun; there was Steadyman, almost white, lagging behind; there was Stolidchurl, somewhat yellower; there were Stumpalong and Sluggard, both faintly green, the latter markedly less bright...

Why were there moving bodies in the sky, and of such different sizes? And why were they so outnumbered by the stars? Shine was eager to explain the teaching he had been brought up to: that each corresponded with a region of the world, and moved faster or slower according to whether the people of that region obeyed the Maker's will. One day they would all rise together at the same time as the sun rose in eclipse, and- Patiently Jing pointed out the fallacies in his argument. Clacking his mandibles, he went away to think the matter through. Apparently it was news to him that a solar eclipse was not simultaneously observed everywhere, a fact one might account for only by invoking distances beside which Jing's journey from Ntah to Castle Thorn was like a single step. It hurt the mind to think in such terms, as Rainbow wryly put it when he showed her how to calculate the circumference of the world by comparing star-ascensions at places on the same meridian but a known distance apart. He found the remark amusing; it was the first thing that had made him laugh in a long while.

Plants which swelled at noon and shrank at midnight were used in Ntah to keep track of time if the sky was clouded over and the weather-sense dulled. Whenever it snowed, Jing occupied himself by hunting the castle for anything which might exhibit similar behavior. The effect the long night was having on his own weather-sense was disquieting; without sunlight to prompt him back to rationality, he found dreams creeping up on him unawares when he was neither hungry, tired nor upset.

He was engaged in this so-far vain quest when he was hailed by a familiar voice. Turning, he saw Twig, filthy from pads to mandibles with blackish smears.

“There you are! I was surprised not to find you in Rainbow's quarters-they tell me you two have grown very close lately!”

For an instant Jing was minded to take offense. But Twig knew nothing of his being compelled to celibacy so long as Waw-Yint lived. And lately he had felt pangs of regret at not having left offspring behind in Ntah. Rainbow and Shine were about half his age; talking to them, he had realized how much happier he would have been had he passed on his knowledge to a son and daughter before setting forth on his travels...

Before he could reply, however, Twig had charged on, plainly bursting to impart information. “Take a look at this!” he exclaimed, proffering something in his left claw. Jing complied, hoping it was not something as irrelevant as Twig's last “great discovery”: a new kind of metal, grayish and cold, which broke when it was dropped. This one, however, he thought he recognized.

“Ah! You found another magnifying drop. It's especially clear and fine, I must say.”

“Not found,” Twig announced solemnly. “Made.”

“How? Out of what?”

“Sand, would you believe? Yes, the same sand you find beside the hot marsh! Keepfire's flames are getting better and hotter-oh, I know people are complaining about the smell, but that's a small price to pay!-and this time he's excelled himself! And there's more. Look at this!”

He produced what he had in his other claw. It was of similar material, equally clear, but twice the size.

“Hold them up together-no, I don't mean together. I mean-Oh, like this!” Twig laid claws on Jing in a way the latter would never normally have tolerated, but it was certainly quicker than explaining. “Now look at something through both of them, and move them apart or together until you see it clearly. Got it?”

Jing grew instantly calm. There presented to his eye was an image of Twig, albeit upside-down... but larger, and amazingly sharp except around the edges.

Very slowly, he lowered and examined the two pieces of glass. They were not, as he had first assumed, in the regular half-droplet shape; they were like two of the natural kind pressed together, but considerably flatter.

“You made these?” he said slowly.

“Yes, yes!” And then, with a tinge of embarrassment: “Well-Keepfire made them, under Bush's supervision. All I was hoping for was better magnifying drops. I never expected that when you put one behind another you'd get even more enlargement the wrong way up! At first I thought I was in a dream, you know? But you agree it works?”

“Yes-yes, no doubt of it!”

“Right! Let's go and look at stars!”

“It's snowing. That's why I'm here.”

“Oh, is it? Oh. Then-”

“Then we'll just have to force ourselves to wait until it blows over. But I promise you, friend Twig, I'm as anxious as you are to inspect the heavens with such amazing aids!”

The moment the weather cleared, he and Twig and Rainbow and Shine-for the secret was so explosive, it had to be shared-along with Sturdy, who hated coming here in the cold and dark, plodded to the observatory, forcing themselves not to make a premature test. Then it turned out that the lenses had misted over, and they had to find something dry enough to wipe them with, and...

“Jing first,” Twig said. “You're the most knowledgeable.”

“But surely you as the discoverer-”

“The credit is more Keepfire's than mine! Besides”-in a near-whisper-”my eye's not keen enough.”

“My lady-” Jing began. Rainbow snapped at him.

“Do as Twig says!”

“Very well. Where shall I look first?” He was shaking, not from cold, but because excitement threatened to release wild dreams to haunt his mind like savage canifangs.

“At Steadyman,” she said, pointing where the gaps in the cloud were largest. “If there's a reason why some stars are wanderers, it may be they are specially close to us. You've taught me that our own world whirls in space. Maybe that's another world like ours.”

It was a good, bright and altogether ideal target. Jing leaned on the walbush stems, which were frozen stiff enough to support him. It took a while to find the proper position for the lenses, and then it took longer still for his sight to adjust to the low light-level-particularly since there were curious faint colored halos everywhere except at the dead center of the field. Eventually, however, he worked out all the variables, so he had a clear view. At last he said:

“Whether it's a world like ours, I cannot say. But I do see two stars where I never saw any before.”

“Incredible!” breathed Twig, and Jing let go pressure from his limbs with a painful gasp and passed the lenses on. In a while:

“Oh! Oh, yes! But very indistinct! Rainbow, what do you see?”

She disposed herself carefully, leaning all her weight on her crippled side. Having gazed longer than either of them, she said, “Two stars beside the planet. Sharp and clear.”

Turning, she sought Stolidchurl, and did the same, and exclaimed. “Not two more stars, but three! At least I think three... I-Shine, you look. Your sight is very keen, I know.”

His mandibles practically chattering with excitement, the young sacerdote took his turn. “Three!” he reported. “And-and I see a disc! I always thought the planets were just points, like the stars! But I still see them as points! And what do you make of the colored blurs these lenses show?”

“Could it be that we're seeing a very faint aurora?” Rainbow ventured. “Jing, what do you think?”

Jing ignored her, his mind racing. If one put such lenses in a viewing funnel-no, not a funnel, better a tube-of pliobark, or whatever was to be had here in the north, and made provision for adjustment to suit different observers...

He said soberly, “Twig, this is a very great invention.” “I know, I know!” Twig clapped his claws in delight. “When I turn it on the sun, come spring-”

“You'll burn out what's left of your sight,” Rainbow interjected flatly.

“Making the sun as much brighter as the stars now appear will blind you.

But there must be a way. Apply your genius to the problem, while the rest of us get on with finding unknown stars. Perhaps they hold the key to what's amiss with cripples like me.”

VI

For the rest of the winter all four of them were embarked on a fabulous voyage of discovery. The world receded until they could wander through it unheeding, like a thin mist; all that mattered was their study of the sky. Shine abandoned his duties altogether, and his superiors threatened to kill him, but he put himself under Rainbow's protection and with Sturdy and her other prongsmen ready to spring to his aid they dared not touch him.

Growing frightened because his ruptures would not heal, the Count occasionally sent for them to demand how their work was progressing, but during their eager attempts at explanation his mind tended to stray, and he invariably wound up by raging at them because they cared more for star-lore than medicine. Nobody else in the castle-not even Twig's aides like Hedge and Bush, who refused to venture forth when the wind was bitter enough to build frost-rime on one's mandibles-seemed to care that a revelation was in the making. Twig said it was because the cold weather had sent their minds into hibernation, like the dirq and fosq which were so abundant in the summer and vanished into burrows in the fall.

There was one signal exception: the peasant Keepfire.

Throughout his life he had scarcely seen the stars. It was a tradition in his family that at winter sunset they should retreat to their cavern until spring reawoke the land. Twig, however, was sure it could not always have been so, and because he was so excited by what the lenses were revealing he patiently taught Keepfire how to store warm air under his mantle and persuaded him to the observatory at a time when the air was so clear the brilliance of the heavens was almost hurtful.

Such was Keepfire's amazement on learning that the glass he had melted from sand could show sparks of light where to the naked eye was only blackness, he returned home full of enthusiasm to improve on what he had already done. It being impossible to find fuel for new and hotter fires at this season-and hard enough at any time-he set about collecting every scrap of glass he could, whether natural or resulting from their experiments. For hours on end he sat comparing them, wondering how each differed from the rest. At last, in what the jubilant Twig termed a fit of genius, he thought of a way to shape the ones which were nearly good until they outdid those which were excellent.

Using the skin of a fish which was sown with tiny rough crystalline points, hunted by people but scarcely preyed on in the wild because swallowing it tail-first as it fled was apt to rasp the predator's gullet, he contrived to grind a poor lens into a good one, at least so far as form was concerned. But then it was seamed with fine scratches. How to eliminate them? There was no means other than rubbing on something softer than the glass, until the glass itself shed enough spicules to complete the task. This he set himself to do.

Nightless days leaked away, and Jing and his companions almost forgot about Keepfire, because every time they went to the observatory some new miracle presented itself.

At first Jing had thought it enough that, in the vicinity of the bright outer planets, there should suddenly appear new starlets which-as time passed-clearly proved to be satellites of what Shine had been the first to recognize as actual discs. But then they looked at the Bridge of Heaven, otherwise the Sling, and save at its midline it was no longer a band of uniform light; it was patently a dense mass of individual stars.

And there were so many stars! Even when the lenses were directed towards the dark square surrounding the New Star, at least a quarter-score (Shine claimed eight) other points of light appeared. At the zenith, near the horizon, it made no odds: wherever they looked, what had always been lightless zones turned out to be dotted with tiny glowing specks.

The New Star itself resolutely refused to give up any secrets. Even Shine's keen vision, which far surpassed the others', failed to reveal more than a bright spot with a pale blur around it, a cloud lighted as a fire might light its smoke from underneath. Was it a fragment of the Maker's Mantle, the aurora which at unpredictable intervals draped the sky in rich and somber colors? In Jing's view that was unlikely. Before coming to Castle Thorn he had only heard of aurorae. Now, having witnessed several, he was satisfied they must partake more of the nature of clouds than of stars, for they affected the weather-sense, as stars did not; moreover they did not necessarily move in the same direction as the rest of the sky. Were they then looking down on starfire from above? The image came naturally to folk whose ancestors had been the top-dwelling predators, but by the same token “up” and “down” meant one thing to them: towards or away from the ground underpad.

Jing and Rainbow debated long about the matter as soon as they realized that the little stars shuttling back and forth beside the planets must in fact be revolving around them, moon-fashion. By that stage Jing's prized star-charts were little more than memoranda; he already knew there was a lifetime's work in filling the gaps the unaided eye had left. The perspectives opened up to him were terrifying. Because if there were any number of different up-and-downs, then not only must the planets be worlds like the world, with their own-plural!-moons, but the sun, whose planets circled it like moons, might be circling something greater yet, and... and... It was dizzying to contemplate!

At least the moon lent them clues. Observations at the full showed that the sparkles visible on the dark part of its disc were only a fraction of what was actually going on. Flash after brilliant flash came and went seemingly at random, lacking even the momentary trace which followed a meteor. And here again Keepfire proved to possess unexpected insight. Shown the moon through his original lenses, he said at once, “It's like when I make a fire!”

And it was. By this time they had all watched his trick of striking rocks together and catching a spark on a tuft of shredded calamar.

Striking...

Jing felt he was being not so much struck as battered. It had been hard enough to accept the distances he had been taught about in childhood, necessary to let Sunbride race around the sun, the world stride around it, and the outer planets follow at their own respective speeds. What to make of a cosmos in which scores-of-scores-of-scores-of-scores (but it was pointless to try and count the stars in the Sling) of not just suns but their accompanying planets must be allowed for? If the sacerdotes were right in claiming that their sacred stones had fallen from heaven, and they were so tiny, could those brilliant lights above also be minute? Shine suggested as much, for he desperately wanted not to forsake all his former beliefs; in particular he clung to the notion that the New Star must indicate some great event in the world below. During a late snowstorm, however, Jing set him to making calculations based on the new observations, couched in the Ntahish symbols which were wieldier than what obtained in the north, and the results overwhelmed the poor exsacerdote, even though he had been properly fed for moonlongs past and learned to separate dream from fantasy as never before in his young life. They demonstrated beyond doubt that in order to leave room for planetary motions the lights in the sky must be not only far off but enormous. Did not a lantern fade to imperceptibility, no matter how skillfully you bred your gleamers, almost before its bearer was out of hearing? And when one added in an extra fact which Shine himself had drawn to their attention-that Swiftyouth sometimes appeared out of round, as though attempting phases like the moon's-there was precisely one explanation which fitted the evidence. The universe must be full of suns, and therefore presumably of planets too faint and far away for even their precious lenses to reveal.

A cosmic hierarchy of fire evolved in Jing's imagination: from the Sling compound of giant stars down to the briefest spark made by clashing rocks. Something pervaded all of them, something luminous, hurtful, transient, imponderable, yet capable of being fixed and leaving traces. Perhaps it penetrated everything! Was it the same force which made treetrunks strong enough to lift gigantic boulders, the same which brought forth blossoms, fruit and nuts? It might be, surely, for fire shone brightly and so did glowplants and glitterweed although they were cold to the touch and in color much like Stumpalong or Sluggard. So was there a connection? Suppose it was a matter of speed; suppose the slowness of plant-growth, and of the outer planets, meant cool, and the rapidity of flame meant hot: what did that imply about the stars? Remaining visibly the same for countless scores of years, must they not also be cool? Yet did not some of them now and then flare up? What about the bright streaks that nightly laced the firmament-must they not be cool, because manifestly the air was warm only when the sun had long shone on it? Yet Shine declared that those who had come on one of the Maker's sling-stones immediately after it landed invariably stated that it was too hot to touch, and indeed the surrounding area was often charred! What fantastic link was there between light and heat?

Vainly Jing sought to convey his thinking to his companions. He was as fluent now in spoken Forbish as Rainbow in the use of Ntahish numbers. She, though, had not yet escaped her original obsession; she had only come around to the view that it was pointless to try and read from the heavens the true reason for her deformity, because if there were so many invisible stars there might be one for everybody, and you could waste a lifetime seeking out your own. Before leaving home, or even as recently as the first time he looked at the sky through lenses, Jing might have considered such an argument valid; since getting over Drakh's death, however, he had experienced preternatural clarity of thought, and ideas which for half his life he had treated as rational had been consigned to memory, reclassified as imaginary or as dreamstuff. Perhaps this was due to the plain but nourishing diet he was eating; perhaps it had something to do with the monotonous environment of the long night, when he was free from the cyclic shock of sunrise and sunset; it didn't matter. What counted was that he could now clearly envisage other worlds. What a plethora of individuals might not inhabit all those planets, seen and unseen! What marvels might he yonder in the dark, more astonishing to him than Ntah to those who knew only Castle Thorn!

And what daunting celestial oceans of knowledge remained to be traversed, when by happenstance a humble peasant could open people's eyes to the miracles inherent in plain sand!

“We'll learn more of the answers,” Twig kept promising in what he intended as a tone of comfort, “when the sun rises again. Darkness makes one's mind dull... as the saying goes!”

Yet Jing's was not, nor Shine's. Could this be due to their constant intake of starfire? Could the mind as well be driven by the mysterious force? Was that why Keepfire, shut away in his foul-smelling cavern, believing in nothing and nobody save his traditional lore, was able to choose and pursue a course of action when Jing's mind was foggy with whirling symbols? Hedge and Bush became angrier and angrier with him, and subsided into sulky grumbling, so that no more new results emerged from the laboratory. Yet Keepfire worried on, and polished and pondered and talked to himself and polished some more, and...

And on that spring day when the sun's disc cleared the horizon entire for the first tune since fall, he came in triumph to Twig and Jing and Rainbow, and unfolded a scrap of the softest icefaw-hide, and revealed a pair of lenses of such impeccable shape that all the results of nature, or of early pourings, faded into insignificance.

Proudly he said, “Do I not bring the gift you wanted most? So I'll ask for what I want. You have shown me stars. They are little fires like the ones I understand. Now I want to see the biggest fire. Show me the sun!”

“But-” Rainbow began, and clipped off the words. Mutely she appealed to her companions, who could envisage as well as she the effect of looking at the sun through nearly perfect lenses.

Twig, however, was oblivious. He breathed, “To see the sun once with these would be enough to sacrifice my sight for!”

“Oh, shut up!” Jing roared. They shrank back as he erupted to his full height, every muscle and tubule in his body at maximum tension. “You're talking like a senile fool, and I speak to you as a sworn friend! Don't you think your eyesight will be useful tomorrow, too? What we need is a way to look at the sun without going blind!” He rounded on Keepfire. “Would you give up all vision for one fleeting glimpse of the sun? You'd rather see it over and over, wouldn't you?”

Alarmed, Keepfire signaled vigorous agreement.

“Very well, then!” Jing relaxed into a more courteous posture, but still tenser than his usual stance among friends. “What do we know of which makes a scene darker without blurring detail? In Ntah old folk some-tunes protected their sight on a sunny day”-he used the past tense unconsciously, and later thought of it as a premonition-”by using thin gray shells. But those deformed the image. Well?”

There was a long pause. At last Rainbow said, “You find membranes inside furnimals that are no good for parchment because you can see through to the other side.”

Shine clacked his claws. “Yes! And stretching them can make them thinner still, yet they diminish light!”

“They make everything yellower!” Twig objected, and at once caught himself. “Ah, but the thinner, the clearer! So if we put several one behind another, and take away each in turn until the eye hurts... Jing, I'm pleased to be your friend! Once again you see to the core of the matter when I spring to premature conclusions.”

“If you want to honor someone, honor Keepfire,” Jing said, and reached a decision not foreshadowed by intention. Taking the new beautiful lenses one in either claw, he shrank from his overweening posture to the lowest he could contrive without pain, and remained there while he uttered unpremeditated words.

“You know and I know, without putting it to the test, that these will reveal to us yet more amazing private knowledge. It should not be private; it would not be private, had anybody else within this castle shared our interest. But it is so, and must not remain so. Already we have learned so much, I want to share our findings with Ntah. The dullwits of Forb and every other city I traversed to come here ought to have their eyes opened-no? Even if like your fellow sacerdotes, Shine, they decline to take advantage, do they not deserve to have this knowledge pointed out to them?”

Shine shouted, “Yes-yes!”

Thus encouraged, Jing yielded to a half-guilty, half-ecstatic temptation and let his mind be taken over by the dream-level Imagination was not enough; it was handicapped by rational considerations like distance, delay, expenditure of effort, the obstinacy of other people. But already their new discoveries had made it plain that everyday knowledge was inadequate to analyze the outcome. For once his dream faculty might be wiser than his sober and reflective consciousness.

Suddenly his head was roaring-loud with revelations, as though he had tapped the sap-run of time. He marveled at what he heard himself say- or rather declaim.

“Oh-hya-na-ut thra-t-ywat insk-y-trt ah-bng-llytr-heethwa ibyong hr-ph-tnwef-r heesh-llytr-kwu-qtr-annibyong-ah, but I tackle poorly this speech of foreigners and wish I could say what is needful in the speech of the folk I grew up among! But I am far away and lonely beyond bearing so now my community is these who welcome me as friends and I speak to them and to the world because I overflow with knowledge born of fire! I have been set alight like dry crops on a distant hill and the scent of smoke from what I know must carry on the wind and warn the world of what's in store when heaven's fire descends to burn the densest wettest jungle and boil the Lake of Ntah! Vast fires surpassing number or belief loom yonder in the dark and we are cast away upon a fragile barq, this little world, and more and more fires loom and every night the dark is pierced with streaks of fire and what it is we do not know but we must master it or it will utterly consume us! We must pledge ourselves to spare the world the doom of ignorance, not keeping any knowledge private that we've found, but spreading it about to last beyond our lifetimes! You three and I must make a vow together, and in token of it take half another's name. The half is fire! It leaves a crust of duty ash but in another season it may turn to life anew and so our world must do although the prong of heaven strike us down! Take the vow, I beg you, I beseech you, and let not our secret knowledge vanish from the minds of those who on this lost and drifting orb hope to make something greater than themselves!”

He was almost screaming with the fury of his visions, for the countless stars were crashing together in a colossal mass of flame, and the world itself was ripe to be their fuel.

Fuel-?

Abruptly he was back to normal consciousness, and wanted to say something quiet and ordinary, though perfused with unexpected insight, but he could not, for Shine was clutching his claw and crying at the top of his voice.

“I know now what the New Star signified! One is come among us who has wisdom we have never guessed! I'll take the extra name and vow my service!”

“I too!” Old Twig was lowering himself, though his agony was plain. “You have united fire above and fire below and we must tell the world your teaching!”

Last, Rainbow, awkwardly, with her lopsided gait, drew close and said, “I vow the same. For what it's worth I'll bind my followers as well.”

There was a pause. She looked at him uncertainly and said at long last, “Jing...?”

The tempest of impressions was fading from his mind. He rose, a little shyly, as though embarrassed. She said again, “Jing!” And continued: “What did you see? What did you see?”

But it was useless to try and describe everything that had so briefly stormed into awareness. He said eventually, “If stars are fire, then new stars happen when fresh fuel is fed to them. What fuel is there, barring worlds like ours? If we would rather not be fuel for a star, there's no one who can save us but ourselves... I've dreamed. It's made me weary. I must rest.”

VII

That evening Rainbow sent for Keepfire to share food publicly with them and cement their compact, which the peasant did nervously yet with obvious glee. This act made Shine a formal enemy of the other sacerdotes; it was, however, scarcely necessary, since he had long disdained the asceticism they relied on to make their dreams vivid. Afterwards Jing found his companions hanging on his every word as though he were indeed the ultimately righteous person harbingered by the New Star. He did his best to dissuade them, but the force of his vision had profoundly affected them, and it was useless. He resigned himself to being adulated. When they pressed him for some new revelation, all he was able to say was what they must already have known: “It will be spring tomorrow.”

Further revelations from the sky, though, were delayed. Warm air from the south, drawn in by the constant thermals rising above the valley, met the still-frozen ground beyond the mountains, and fog and cloud veiled the sun. The ice which had temporarily blocked the access channel began to fracture with noises like a gigant snapping trees, and Jing was moderately content to occupy himself by preparing a detailed report of their discoveries for the doctor in Forb, which he planned to send south by the first barq of spring.

It arrived, and like the one which had brought him and Drakh, it carried a sick passenger.

Leaving Rainbow to polish his final draft, Jing went to the wharf to see the barq come in. He was unprepared to hear a voice hail him in Ntahish.

“It is the Honorable Jing? Here am I, Ah-ni Qat!”

Supported by two youthful aides, a boy and a girl, a stooped yet familiar figure limped ashore. Jing said disbelievingly, “The son of my dear friend the Vizier?”

For he remembered Qat as a sprightly youth, and this personage looked so old and moved so slowly... and his skin was patched with ugly scars.

“Indeed, indeed! All whiter I've struggled across this snowbound continent because at Forb I heard rumors concerning your whereabouts. I'd not have had the endurance to continue but that my father laid on me the duty of seeking you out and telling you: Ntah is no more!”

For an instant Jing stood frozen. Then he said uncertainly, “Young friend, you're sick. You're ruled by dreams.”

“Would that I were,” Qat whispered. “After your departure plague ran wild among us. Never were such horrors witnessed by a living eye! People died where they stood, their bodies fell into the lake and river until the water grew so foul the very fish were poisoned. Those who survived lost their reason and fled under the lash of horrid dreams. Most went south. I doubt they escaped like me and my companions. Our northern route must have saved us. It seems the plague loves heat.”

“Your father-” Jing began.

“Died among the first. So did Lord Waw-Yint. There is no use in speaking of his heir. Ntah is a land of rotting carcasses, and all who used to live there have run away.”

Qat's girl companion uttered a groan of misery. Jing said slowly, “We must find you quarters. The Count has treated me kindly, as has his daughter. You will be made welcome.”

Surrounded by the high-piled parchments on which he was recording their discoveries, Jing sat blindly staring at the overcast sky. His mind was fuller of despair than ever in his life before; he wanted to renounce consciousness and retreat to dreams, where Ntah would last for all eternity and its glory never fade.

Behind him creepers rustled. A soft familiar voice said, “Is it true about your homeland?”

He did not turn. “Yes, Lady Rainbow. If Qat says so, he speaks the truth. I no longer have a home.”

“You have made one here,” she said. “By your kindness to me from the beginning, when first you told me I was not after all accursed; when you said you were surprised I had not found mates in spite of my misshapenness; when you opened my sight to a heaven full of so many stars it's absurd for any one of us petty beings to count on reading his or her fate up yonder-Oh, Jing!” Spreading her mantle, she embraced him as he made to rise. “You have caused me to love you, poor twisted creature that I am! Let me prove that you have a home wherever I am and for as long as I may live!”

She hesitated, and added in an altered voice, “That is, if you do not find me totally repulsive.”

There was a moment of absolute stillness. Jing looked at her, and saw through her outward form, to the bright keen mind within. And his oath of celibacy was to lost Ntah...

They were both very clumsy, but they found it funny, and afterwards he was able to say, in full possession of his rational faculties, “But your father? He cares nothing for our work, and may despise me.”

“He is sad and sick and this winter has shown him he too can grow old. He has spoken much about over-close breeding, as one sees with canifangs, and has even mentioned the idea of a grandchild. Inwardly I think I may be normal, and most certainly you and I cannot be cousins to any degree. We shall find out. If not-so be it.”

She refolded her mantle about her. Checking suddenly, she said, “Jing, if tomorrow you decide you never want to see me again-if you feel it was only misery which made you desire me-I shan't care, you know. You've given me such a gift as I never hoped for.”

“And you,” he said fondly, “have given me such courage as an hour ago I thought I'd never enjoy again.”

“So you want my ill-starred daughter?” grunted the Count, when with difficulty his attendants had roused him from the mist of dreams in which he now passed most of his time. His ruptured tubules had been unable to heal, owing to his corpulence, and he slumped in his sitting-pit like a half-filled water-bladder. “Well, I always thought you were crazy and now you're proving it. Or have you scried something in the stars to show she's fitter than she looks? Wish you'd do the same for me!”

“I want her,” Jing said firmly, “because she possesses a sharp mind, a keen wit and an affectionate nature.”

“More than I could say of most of the women I've taken,” the Count sighed. “Had I been gifted with a son... You want a grand celebration? You want mating-presents?” Suddenly he was suspicious.

“Nothing but your authority, Father, to continue our work together as mates as well as friends,” said Rainbow.

“Hah! Work, you call it! Wonderful benefits it's brought us all your gabble about stars the naked eye can't see-and the same goes for your people, Jing! Wiped out by plague, so they tell me! Still, you're of good stock, and maybe cross-breeds are what's been lacking in our lines. I'd rather believe too many cousins mated with cousins to keep control of the best homes and richest land, than that I was cursed by the Maker!”

“You are perfectly correct, sir. We too, after all, arc animals.”

“Hah! What animal could find more stars in the sky than the sacerdotes say were put there at the Beginning? Oh, take her, and bring me a grandchild if you can. For myself, I'm beyond hope. And-” He hesitated.

“Yes, Father?” Rainbow prompted, taking his claw in hers.

“Dream of me as long as you can after I'm dead. Try not to let the dreams be ugly ones.”

“Look, Jing!” Rainbow exclaimed as they left the Count's presence. “The skies are clearing! In a little we shall see the sun!”

But there were other matters to attend to. Qat was weak, and his servants in scarcely better shape. All of them bore plague-scars. Apparently the illness began with sacs of fluid under the skin, accompanied by fever and delirium. If they burst outward, the patient might survive, at the cost of being marked for life. If they burst inward, the victim died. Applying cleanlickers was useless; none could digest the foul matter exuded by the sores. Neither Jing nor Twig had heard of any disease remotely similar.

“Maybe this was what the New Star heralded!” said Qat in an access of bitterness.

“Were that so,” Jing responded stonily, “would not I, the most dedicated seeker of its meaning, have been the first to be struck down?”

Thinking how pleased the sacerdotes would be to hear of such a notion.

By then it was midday, and the sun shone clear, albeit not very bright, being at this season close to the horizon. Rainbow was eager to get to the observatory, and Jing-reluctant though he was to abandon these three who might well be his last surviving compatriots-was on the point of consenting to accompany her, when Keepfire came hurrying with news that settled the matter.

“Sir, Scholar Twig is at the observatory with Shine, and they have shown me yet more marvels! Come at once!”

All else forgotten, they rushed in his wake.

“I was right!” Twig crowed. “I did see dark patches on the sun! Now Shine has seen them too!”

“It's true,” Shine averred. He had stretched layers of furnimal membrane across branches of walbush so that one might look at the sun through them. Even so, long staring with the tubed lenses had made his eye visibly sore. “And something more, as well!”

“What?” Jing seized the tube.

“Look to right and left of the sun's disc, and you'll notice little sparks! They're very faint, but I definitely saw them. Perhaps they're distant stars, far beyond the sun, which just happen to lie in that direction, but your charts show that some of the brightest stars in that area of sky must lie near the sun right now, and I can't see any of them!”

Jing did not need to consult his maps to know what stars were meant. Bracing himself on a stout branch, he aligned the tube. At first his sight, after the low light-levels of winter, would not adjust, and he saw only a blur.

“Too bright? I can add another membrane,” Shine proposed.

“No, I'm getting a clearer view now...” Jing's ocular muscles were adapting with painful speed. “And-oh, that's incredible!”

What he saw was not a blank white disc. There were three dark spots on it. How could that be?

“Do you see the bright sparks?” Shine demanded.

But his vision was overloaded. He stood back, relinquishing the tube, and for a long while was unable to make out his immediate surroundings.

“I was right, wasn't I?” Twig exclaimed.

“Yes,” Jing said soberly. “Yes, friend, you were right.”

This too must be added to his report on their discoveries. And, given the delay caused by his grief, it could not possibly be ready for the barq presently in harbor here. At all costs, however, it must be sent by the next one. He said so, and Twig objected, “But if we have to take time to write up our findings-”

Jing cut him short. “Did we not pledge to share what we learn with as many other folk as possible?”

“So we did,” Twig admitted humbly.

“Well, then! Let's have a score, a score-of-scores, of keen young eyes like Shine's at work on this! I want a full account of our fantastic news in circulation during the coming summer. Even without the resources of Ntah, there must surely still be people on this continent who will respond and imitate what we are doing-and some of them, with luck, may do it better!”

Shine had reclaimed the lenses and was staring through them again. Now he gave a gasp.

“I see half of Sunbride!”

“What?” The others turned to him uncertainly.

“Half!” he repeated obstinately. “Tiny, but perfectly clear-half a disc, like half the moon, and as far from the sun as she ever wanders! Our conclusions must be true! They must!”

VIII

Parchments in one claw, pearlseed in the other, the steersman of the barq about to depart said, “So you want this delivered to your doctor friend in Forb, do you?”

Something about his tone made Jing react with alarm. He said, “The price is fair, surely! If you doubt the quality of the seed, come and see what a jeweltree the Count sprouted from one I gave him last fall. Even during the winter-”

“So you can still grow jeweltrees, can you? When your trencher-plants rot in the ground!”

It was true; with the return of warm weather, the blight which had affected last year's crop was spreading again, and trencher-plant was their staple diet.

“What does that have to do with-?” Jing began. The steersman cut him short.

“Your doctor had better be cleverer than most! We aren't going as far as Forb this trip. The Maker knows whether anyone will want to go there ever again!”

“What are you saying, man?” Jing advanced, clenching his claws.

“The plain truth! Some filthy plague spawned of the far south is rife in Forb, and a murrain is abroad among the livestock, and the very brave-trees are wilting! We've been here three days-how is it this is the first you've heard?”

“I've... uh... I've been preoccupied,” Jing muttered.

“Dreamlost, more like it!” The steersman returned the parchments with a contemptuous gesture and-more reluctantly-the pearlseed too, adding, “You'll need this to pay for medicine, I've no doubt! If you yourself plan on returning to Forb, which I don't counsel!”

He turned away, shouting orders for his crew to pry loose the barq's tentacles and head down-channel.

“Sure we came by way of Forb,” Qat husked. “I told you so. But we aren't sick any more, none of us. Maybe I'm still softer than I should be, but that's a matter of time.”

“Yes-yes, of course,” Jing muttered comfortingly. He nonetheless cast a worried glance at all three of them: Qat still limp enough to hobble rather than walk, and the boy and girl with their disfiguring scars. Not, according to rumor, that that had prevented their being taken up as curiosities by the younger members of the staff. When even the Count presently approved of outcrossing, and had let his own daughter choose a foreigner for her mate, it was the fashionable thing. Besides, the sacerdotes maintained that no plague could smite those who defied it boldly, so...

Their influence was rising again since news of Ntah's downfall. Was this not, they declared, perfect proof of the Maker's vengeance against those who defied His will? In any normal year, such a claim would have been laughed out of conscience; now, though, the blight on the trencher-plants meant that many families were facing a hungry summer, and famine went claw-in-claw with madness, even when no plague exacerbated the victims' predicament.

Jing had witnessed, on his way hither from Ntah, how precarious was sanity among his folk-how a single year's crop-failure might entrain surrender to the tempting world of dreams. When he paid full attention to his imagination, he was chilled by the all-too-convincing prospects conjured up. The Count's illness was withdrawing one psychological prop from the minds of the people of the valley; it was certain that when he died some of his old rivals from Forb, or their descendants, would come to squabble over his legacy-that was, naturally, if they weren't caught by the plague already. Hunger and sickness might withdraw the others, and then...

Jing trembled at the threat the future held.

Yet his companions declined to worry, even about a means of getting their knowledge spread abroad. If this barq's crew refused to return to Forb, they said, another steersman could be found more susceptible to a handsome payment, more prepared to run risks. It was with some reluctance that they agreed to make extra copies of the parchments Jing had already drafted; Keepfire, of course, could not write, and Twig was constantly on call to administer medicine to the Count. Shine and Rainbow, however, did their best, and by the time the next barq arrived there were six copies of the report at least in summary outline-enough, with luck, for learned folk elsewhere to repeat their studies.

But they, and Jing too, would far rather have continued investigating the dark spots on the sun, and the bright nearby sparks which so far Shine alone had actually seen. Only their sworn pledge, Jing sometimes thought, made them obey his orders. How quickly they were defecting from their brief period of professed admiration!

Could it be because-?

He roused one morning from reverie with a firm and fixed dream-image in his mind, and it was shocking in its import. At once he rushed in search of Twig, and found him coming away from the Count's chamber with a grave expression.

Not waiting for an exchange of greetings, he said in a rush, “Twig, I believe the plague is at work among us!”

Twig gazed soberly at him. He said at length, “How did you know? I thought you said the disease was new to you, and you were unacquainted with its preliminary symptoms.”

Jing tensed in horror. He said, “But I guessed it from a dream!”

“Then your weather-sense is far sharper than mine! Did you know the Count attempted to mate with the girl your friend brought here?”

“I'm not surprised, but-No, I didn't know!”

“It was futile, of course, but... Well, today he exhibits all the signs Qat laid we should watch out for. I'm on my way to check out the other partners she and her brother have engaged with. Have you-? No, forgive me. I'm sure neither you nor Rainbow would consider the idea. But I must ask you a physician's question. Is the Lady Rainbow successfully in bud?”

Jing nodded. “We realized yesterday. Last night we went to the observatory, but there was a bright aurora, so we talked about the future. We're both afraid.”

“Internally she's as sound as any woman,” Twig assured him. “All the normal pressures are there; only her stance is distorted. But given that the Count, already weakened... Your weather-sense informs you of what I mean?”

“Even more. Even worse.”

“Very likely.” Twig hesitated. “Tell me: how did you decide the plague had got a grip here?”

“Because you in particular-forgive my bluntness-seemed to forget your enthusiasm for my leadership so quickly. A pledge is given with full rationality; dreams erode the recollection of it. I don't speak now of your duty to the Count, of course, but it was never my intention to prevent you serving him. It's a matter of priorities.”

“You're right,” Twig said after reflection. “In my present mood of calm, I see what you mean. Service to the whole world, which can be performed by spreading our knowledge, is more important than service to an old man whose life I can't prolong with all my skills. We must get those reports away at once, in all possible directions. I'd have realized this truth myself but that-yes, you guessed correctly: I'm being pestered by hideously persuasive dreams such as I haven't known since long before I came to Castle Thorn. And fever due to the onset of the plague would best explain that.”

“I think I must believe the same,” Jing muttered.

“Oh, no! You of all people! No, you must survive! It would be unbearable to think that the greatest discoverer of our age must be struck down randomly! Far better you should escape to tell the world your tale!”

But I've kept company with Qat,” Jing said stonily. “Out of nostalgia, I've spent half-days at a time talking with him and neglecting my own greater duty. Miraculously I believe Rainbow still to be unaffected. She and the child she buds must go away and take our reports. Might I beg you to attend her before you continue with other matters?”

“Yes! Yes, certainly! But I must warn you that nothing I say or do can alter an established fact. She may already-”

“I know there's a risk. I want to diminish it. We'll buy the steersman of the next barq, give him all my pearlseeds so he can make for the great ocean and find one of the monster barqs that legend says can ply across it to another continent.”

“Legend? You want to trust in legends now? Surely you must after all be afflicted!”

“I speak out of imagination rather than dream-though the two sometimes become so intermingled... Yes, I think there's no alternative. In one of the visions which haunted me this morning, I saw the bravetrees of Forb rotting from the base wherever a corpse had been deposited. What manner of sickness can attack trees as well as people?”

“A new kind,” Twig said slowly.

“As new as the New Star?”

“Ah, but it was only a dream-guess!”

“I think we'll see the same when the first victims die at Castle Thorn.”

Clenching his claws, Jing added as he turned away, “I wish with all my might it may just be a dream. But I fear it may well be correct imagining. The blight upon our trencher-plants, at any rate, is real enough.”

IX

When next they heaved the Count out of his sitting-pit to cleanse and salve him, there were the betraying sacs beneath his skin. And they were readily recognized, for a girl at one of the outlying villages who had partnered the boy from Ntah had died from their inward rupturing that very day.

Instantly the sacerdotes announced that this was the doom pronounced by the Maker against anyone who harbored heretics from foreign lands, and in the grip of the fever which preceded the visible outbreak of sores the peasants forgot what those same sacerdotes had been saying only days earlier about confronting the risk of plague with boldness. Keepfire managed to prevent his family and followers from being deluded from one of the confusing visions that now beset him, part sane imagination and part lunatic dream, Jing almost extracted a clue concerning life below the massive layers of rock that sheltered Twig's laboratory, but it evaded him at last because he cared more about the survival of his wife and child.

For a little it seemed that Hedge and Bush were certain to escape, which would have dealt a logical blow to the sacerdotes' argument, especially since Twig's sole ulcer had burst outward and his cleanlickers proved able to deal with it. All three had been particularly close with Jing, and it was being claimed that associating with the Ntahans was the key to guilt and the Maker's punishment. But the day came when Bush succumbed, and admitted contact with the Ntahish girl, and a frenzy of hate exploded like one of the geysers that snowbelong-hunters reported far to the north.

“On the way to the observatory they set their canifangs at me,” Rainbow said. “Only Sturdy's quickness with his prong prevented me from being badly hurt.”

They sat in her bower, high in the castle and well defended, at a time when normally the night would be quiet but for distant icefaw screams and maybe a little music.

They all cast uncertain glances toward Sturdy. Were a trained prongsman to become delirious before he was restrained there could be considerable slaughter, especially when reflex due to killing had already been established in his mind. And killing canifangs was normally no part of an escort's duty.

Still, there were no marks to be seen on him.

“It's essential now for you to get away,” Twig said to Rainbow. Her condition was barely perceptible, fortunately, owing to her lopsidedness. But her attendants could not be trusted to keep such a secret. Let the sacerdotes once get news of it, and they would no longer be confronting angry peasants, but a systematic series of clever attempts to frustrate the budding.

Jing drew a deep breath. “You don't yet know how essential,” he said, and spread the right side of his mantle in a manner he would never normally do in anybody's presence except hers... but these were intimate friends.

“You too!” Twig blurted as he recognized what Jing was now revealing.

“It would appear,” Jing said with all the detachment he could command, “that even those who make a good recovery, like Qat and his companions, still carry the plague with them.”

“I'll kill him! I'll kill Qat!” Shine screamed, erupting to his full height. “He's going to deprive us of-”

“You will do no such thing,” Jing decreed. It was strange, he reflected, how cold he felt, when he knew abstractly that he must be in the grip of fever. Just so long as he could continue to separate dream from reality... “You will hew to your oath. You will undertake the protection of Lady Rainbow and her bud and all the parchments on which we have copied details of what we have discovered. You will escort her away from Castle Thorn before the peasants storm it, which will doubtless be the day after they notice its bravetrees rotting where corpses have been consigned to feed the roots.” This, with a meaningful glance at Twig. “I have no homeland. I have no future. I have used my life as it befitted me to do. You have sometimes appeared to look on me as a substitute for the imaginary Maker who so long ruled your life. I'm not a god. If there is one, He watches us but does not interfere. He speaks to us, perhaps, but if His voice is couched in the language of the stars it's up to us, not Him, to spell out the message... Oh, I ramble!”

“Not at all!” cried Shine. “You tell me what I most need to be told!”

“Believe it when I'm gone, and you'll do well,” Jing said. Already he could feel the sac he had exposed starting to throb. “Now, take the future in trust. You here-you, Shine; you, Scholar Twig; you, Keepfire, who made us the tools to reveal unknown truth; you, my lady, who bear something of me which would otherwise be as hopelessly lost as Ntah itself-all of you must listen to my words and cherish what I say as proudly and as fiercely as when we took our oath. And by the way, Shine!”

Humbly the ex-sacerdote looked a question.

“Don't ever speak again of killing. Qat will die young; he was weakened anyhow by his suffering. Or it not, some crazy fool with a mindful of lunatic dreams will dispose of him. But this is neither justice nor vengeance. No, we must speak always and forever of life instead of death; we must fight the foolishness of dreams and concentrate on sanity. We must feed and shelter and educate our people, until the day dawns when we know how to conquer sickness and famine, blight and murrain. Then, and only then, shall we be fit to understand the message of the sky. Then, and only then, will the tools Keepfire created for us fall into the proper claws. And yours too, Twig, and mine-the star-charts created by my people... my former people.”

He was briefly silent, and the pause was full of sorrow.

“But let nothing that has been well done go to waste!” he resumed at length. “Not that it can, if it's recorded in the stars... but we don't speak that language yet, and maybe it will be a long time before we do. Knowing now how many more stars there are than we believed, we must never be arrogant again! In all humility, going as it were in a mental crouch, we must patiently await the time when we are entitled to stand up to our full height, and that height shall reach the stars to take them in our grasp like ripened fruit! I say to you-”

At that moment he felt the sac under his mantle rupture.

Inward.

While they looked at him in wonder, for his peroration had been charged with the same power which persuaded them to join him in their common pledge, he said gently, “I am as good as dead, my friends. Tomorrow I shall surely be insane. I speak to you with the last vestige, the last shred, of what was Ayi-Huat Jing, court astrologer to His Most Puissant Majesty Lord Waw-Yint of Ntah, who set forth upon a journey longer than any of his nation previously, and must now die as my nation died. Dream of me. Make others dream of me. Or all my work will go for naught.”

He added silently, “Would I had said that in my own speech. I could have expressed it so much better...”

X

The day after the Count's death, another of the regular barqs came to the castle wharf. Her steersman was horrified to learn that the plague was here ahead of him, and was in mind to put about at once and risk her starving under him on the return trip. But Twig ceded him all the pearl-seeds left in Jing's store-enough to buy the barq and her crew a score of times over-and he was reassured that at least this journey would not be as fruitless as he had feared. The peasants were in the grip of delirium; only the precarious loyalty of Sturdy and the other prongsmen kept them at bay while Rainbow and Shine, in obedience to Jing's order, scrambled on board with the precious parchments.

“But where shall we go?” the steersman cried. “Forb is rotting like a blighted fungus! I saw its bravetrees lean towards the river as though they had been snapped by gigants!”

“Any place the water carries you away from plague!” Twig retorted. “Do they not tell of folk who ply the ocean aboard barqs that make yours look like half-grown pups?”

“We'd have to chance the rapids of the Sheerdrop Range!”

“Then chance them, on a route you never dared before! It's better than the certainty of plague!” Rounding on the prongsmen, Twig ordered them to prod loose the barq's tentacles despite her groans of hunger.

“Won't you come with us?” Rainbow shouted. “Even if-”

“Your father's dead. Your husband told me he would rather you did not watch him follow the same course.” Twig descended to the wharf's edge and gently touched her claw. “No, Shine is to take care of you now. I've had my life, as Jing had his. If only we could read the stars more clearly, we might know why. But what you bear with you will instruct the future. You are the wife, my lady, of the greatest man it's been my privilege to know. Create a posterity for him. If the bud fails, then do so anyhow. I cannot; I'm old and weak and I must resign myself to facts.”

“If by some miracle-”

“Qat has told us positively there are no miracles with this disease. Only if the sac ruptures to the outside like mine... and Jing's did not.”

“Couldn't you have made it rupture?”

“That too was tried, in Ntah. It always failed.”

The steersman was glancing nervously from one to other of them. He said, “If this woman has the plague-mark on her-”

“No, she does not!” Twig flared. “That's precisely why we want to get her out of here! You have pay for twenty voyages! Go as far as you can, go anywhere you can, and deliver our message to the world. Next time, perhaps, we may know enough about the universe to conquer such a plague! But without the information that you carry, someone else in the far future will have to start all over again! Oh, get under way, will you? The castle will be stormed within the day!”

The steersman flogged the barq's tentacles, and they unwillingly let go their grip; she put about and made down-channel. Watching, Keepfire- who had had the chance to travel with Rainbow, but refused because he feared the water more than fire-said, “Do you think, sir, that our work has gone to waste?”

“I sometimes fear it, sometimes think it can't,” was Twig's reply. “Sometimes I feel it's like the seed funqi sow on the spring wind, so numerous that a few at least must find a lodging in good ground; sometimes I can imagine it being like a trencher-plant, at risk from unknown kinds of blight predicted or maybe not predicted by the New Star... At all events I know one thing. We are to consign the remains of Master Jing to your hot pool, instead of to a pool with fishes in or the roots of a tree.”

Startled, Keepfire said, “This is to do more honor to me and my family? Sir, it's already been enough!”

“Not honor,” Twig sighed. “He said when he still possessed some trace of rationality that he'd been told how hot pools can break up a dead animal. Did Hedge or Bush mention this, or was it you?”

“I think I did!” said Keepfire with a trace of pride.

“He wants to die more completely than anyone before, dissolved if possible into his finest shreds. He wants to leave a legacy of health and information, and not a rotting body to convey more plague. Come with me. He said he had chosen to die on the departure of his wife, and when we enter his chamber we shall find a corpse for sure.”

“But we shall dream of him,” said Keepfire, following. “We shall make sure he is dreamed of for all time.”