"No! Do not look!" The Lady Maelen's thought reached Farree and only half-consciously he obeyed, bending his arm across his eyes.

He felt a warmth which was not that of sunlight but rather arose to near the torment of a fire as if he had set his hand to pick up a coal from a brazier, and his wings quivered under that fiery assault. The heat which reached them in such a flash must have been a hundredfold worse within that walled courtyard.

Farree heard a scream that lasted only for a second and then was blasted away by the deafening sound rising to a crescendo. What luck had attended him last night when he might have encountered that same trap!

The heat seemed to hold for a long time, but he heard the sound die away and with it the noise of the flitter, in full retreat after losing two of its crew to whatever disaster was the guardian of the tower.

A scent reached the three under the edge of the wood – not of the moon flowers which had perfumed the night, but a horrible stench of meat burnt to a crisp.

"They are gone," Lord-One Krip said. Farree wondered why he had not tried to track them himself by mind touch, catching that emptiness which was a shrouded mind.

"They will be back," the Lord-One Krip added a moment later. "They will not let this puzzle be."

"Have they anything which can unlock the code?" asked the Lady Maelen. "Have you ever heard of such?"

"No. But that does not mean that they do not possess one. The Guild have knowledge beyond that of any Free Trader such as I was. There are stories enough of, what they have achieved."

"Then we must do our best. If this thing which is guarded here is by the will of ancient Thassa, they must not have it!"

She crept on her hands and knees out of the shadow of the bush which had left the scarlet wounds down her arm and reached again for the pictures that had issued from the mirror. Now she turned her attention from those of the courtyard to the patterns Farree had found on the roof of the tower. With her forefinger she traced one design after another.

"They would put their most formidable weapon in the courtyard," she said slowly. "I do not think that they would much expect any to enter from the air. Thus these are the important ones for us." And her finger went once more over the designs, and she was humming again but not the lazy half-sleepy sound which she had uttered in defense against the jungle belt.

"We cannot dare to try until the moon rises – "

"By then," Farree interrupted, "those may be back with something to open that tower as one opens a bra-crab shell."

She nodded. "That is so. Time lies on their side of the balance. But I cannot believe that the Scales of Molester are so weighed against us who would save patterns of time and space and not blast them into nonexistence. We must wait through the day, save our strength – "

"I cannot carry you to the tower and there is the lake to cross," Farree pointed out. He wondered if they would dare to swim – could they swim? The arid country which seemed home to the Thassa might not have given them any reason for the sport. And though Lord-One Krip had been first a Free Trader Spacer, certainly he would have had little enough reason to perfect such a skill either.

"I know," she returned and there was a troubled note in her voice.

"A rope" – Lord-One Krip was looking back into the gloom of the jungle – "one of those lianas, were it tough enough, or a weaving of vines – "

"They live," Lady Maelen told him quickly, "with more of a real life than any rooted thing I have seen before."

"But they also die." He pointed in two places where the full roundness of life had shrunken away and there were brownish loops which were plainly dead or near that state. "Can the dead protest?"

"I do not know," she answered frankly. "It is of importance, this rope of yours?"

"It is the only way, I think, of reaching the island," he returned firmly. Though Farree could not see any reason for such confidence.

"Ah, well – " She arose and went to where one of those dead coils spanned a tree from branch to branch. Slowly she raised her hand and set it on the brown surface, tugging at it a fraction. Nothing around her moved or strove to make her pay for her audacity. She pulled harder and began her humming song. Within a few moments the arc of the dead vine was free of the branches, looping to the ground and beyond out on the gravel of the beach. Lord-One Krip was on it instantly. So she wrought with two other vines, and they were in time laid along the surface of the beach in lengths beyond the height of the tower itself, or so Farree believed.

"Leaves." Lord-One Krip stood up from stretching the last of those vines in place. "Such a leaf as that." Again he pointed to a bush standing taller than his own head. The bottom leaves of that plant – the ones reaching out over the beach – were also spotted with brown and plainly dying. Their hard, thick sides were rolled up so that they formed a half tube and were large enough for the Thassa to lie upon. "Can these be detached also?"

The Lady Maelen went to the plant and knelt as it towered over her. Her singing became another series of notes, and Farree thought he could almost read a petition into that. Then she leaned forward and set a hand to either side of the leaf and strove to draw it to her. There was no movement save the constant tensing of her body. At least, as it had been with the dead vines, the growth itself made no attack. Then the rotted core of the leaf gave away suddenly so that she sprawled backward, the broken stem dripping with a black liquid which gave off the foul odor of decay.

When a second leaf had been so released from a similar plant Lord-One Krip set them all to work, braiding the tough vine lengths into one knobby rope. When he had done, he took one of the long leaves down to the water and floated it, throwing himself facedown upon it and pushing out a little from the shore. Though it bobbed downward under his weight, yet it supported his head and shoulders above water.

"This" – he indicated the rope – "well fastened to a rock over there" – his wide gesture indicated the island – "can be used to draw us through the water."

He would be trusting a great deal to dead vegetation, Farree thought, but there was a small chance that such might work. His own part of the task was simple compared to theirs. What if they reached the water and the flitter returned?

He had great respect for the Lady Maelen's third ring powers, but this they must do now and the sun gave them nothing but light. However, the trial must be made.

With the end of the coil fastened to his belt he soared up and out across the lake, heading directly for a fringe of rocks before the wall of the courtyard. Once there he hastened to make fast the rope's end to the most slender of those rocks. Lord-One Krip had to wade into the water a little, holding the other end, but it did reach, and he was tugging hard on it, testing its stability.

The Lady Maelen came first, lying in her curled leaf with both hands overhead on the rope, pulling herself along. Against a troubled and current-riven water she would not have succeeded, but the pull across the calm surface, though it seemed to take endless time, was at last accomplished, and Farree flew back with the rope's end to the waiting Krip.

For the second time a leaf made that hardly believable voyage and then, the rope coiled about Farree's arm, the three of them stood before the wall surrounding the courtyard.