The wind or stirring out of nowhere died. Farree tried hard to pick up that nothingness which was the mark of the shielded enemy. There! He had touched one – quickly he searched but there seemed to be no others. Toggor had sunk down, drawn in his eyestalks as he did when he must rest.

Rest! Parree leaned sidewise against the stone, his wings together and folded, an ache in his head and a feeling of emptiness inside him. He was as hollow now as if he had been squeezed by some great hand and flung aside to lie without substance.

For how long that lasted he could not tell. There was a feeble stirring in his mind that they must be again on guard ready for death coming from the skies. Yet he must have slept, for he awoke from that place of nothingness with a hand shaking him, and then Lord-One Krip forced into his hold some of the rations which they had relied upon so long – dry and tasteless, yet he choked mouthfuls down.

The sun no longer burned down upon them but sped across the sky into red sunset clouds, and the Lady Maelen was sitting up, turning her head slowly from one side to the other as if she had awakened out of a dream and could not recognize where she was. Then recognition came back to her eyes and she smiled wearily.

"Let Sotrath rise," she said slowly, "then we shall see whether, though I am wandless, I am still too lacking in the Gift to do what must be done. At least this day past I have wrought more than 1 would have believed possible. This is truly a place of power."

"Lacking!" Lord-One Krip burst out. "When you awoke the woods rang ..."

Her smile grew a little stronger. "Yes, that I did. I am still a Singer.''

"One of the mighty ones!" Lord-One Krip said forcibly.

"Let them try to deny you your due now!"

"Hush." She put her hand to his lips. "I do what I can, but to claim full mastery is false." She reached out to touch that line set in the stones, to fit fingertip to each of the stones in it. "That this answered the three of us after all the lost time – that is not my mastery but that of those great ones who set it here."

"And those who hunt us?" Farree sputtered through dry crumbs.

"Ask that of them." She pointed toward the wood. "They are a greater barrier than even I could guess. Look!"

She pointed now to the eastern sky where the dusk crept down like a curtain. Showing just a tip about it was a thing of glitter which he had come to cherish. The third ring was beginning to rise – the time of the Thassa power at its height was coming!

It seemed to Farree that the dusk came more swiftly than usual. As if the very longing of the Lady Maelen had the power to summon up Sotrath and the moon rings. Yet she did not look to the sky but ran her hands up the curving side of one pattern and down the arabesque of another as if her touch could find what she sought quicker than her sight. Perhaps that was so far; just as she had chosen certain stones to rub when she sang their partnership to the woods, now did she settle at last at the farther side of the roof, waving the other two to the blank border beside the parapet while she settled herself on her knees, leaning well forward so that the palms of her hand each cupped a series of three greenish stones which gleamed the brighter as the third ring crept up the sky behind her head.

Once more she began to sing – this time no hum without words, but rather a chant that accented some syllables with the beat of a drum. That sound gripped Farree and perhaps also the Lord-One Krip, for Farree noted that the spaceman's hands were opening and closing, where they hung by his sides, in time to that beat in words.

Farree had begun to believe that indeed she could accomplish great things by her words alone. He had seen sound shatter crystals once or twice in the Limits, when some sleight-of-hand dealer was showing off skills. Why then could such not pick up the resonance of a voice at proper pitch and be moved by it as was a lock with a key laid into its proper slot?

By the time Sotrath itself was showing on the horizon and the arc of the third ring well advanced, bringing rainbows of light from the pavement, she did indeed achieve what she had set to do. There was another sound across the beat of her voice and before her a dark outline framed a good section of the roof.

Her voice arose in a triumphant crescendo and the block so outlined was sucked downward out of their sight.

Farree gave a cry, clapping his hands to his head. Into his mind there burst such a flash or lash of sights and sounds, of places and people, he felt that his very head would split open, not being able to hold or control this wave of otherness. Lord-One Krip likewise doubled near over as if some mighty blow had sent him reeling, and his hands also clawed over his ears; while the Lady Maelen crouched low, her face drawn and contorted into grimaces, her whole body tensed and resisting.

It was, Farree decided, as if a whole world of different thought had been launched at them. He fought, trying to set in his mind a wall behind which that that was he himself could crouch protected.

Half expecting a company of Thassa or their like to come boiling up through the door, a company the Lady Maelen had sung into their defenses, Farree could see only the dark oblong at their feet, and in that nothing moved nor climbed to meet them.

Wall! Think a wall! Farree's wings moved without conscious thought and he was up—into the night, soaring above the top of the tower. Yet those hundreds, thousands of thoughts (though they were a little muffled) beat at him. He thought a wall, barrier so tight set that nothing could breach it. As he circled on wings about the tower, unwilling to desert those two who did not have his advantage for a quick escape, he was aware that the thought stream was thinning, that now only a trickle of such came through.

The Lady Maelen was on her feet, though Lord-One Krip still crouched low, his head swinging from side to side as if the very weight of that storm of thought was launched against him in one wave after another. The Lady Maelen held forth the light globe which had guided them through the mountain passage, and that gathered to it the ring's glory until she had cupped a great ball of fire. With that hand stretched before her, she approached the opening, looking down into the depths beneath.

What she saw there Farree could not imagine. When he watched her prepare to descend through that opening he swooped, determined to catch her before she was swallowed up by that maelstrom of mind speech. But he was too late, and, in spite of all his efforts, the clamor caught him again, driving him in self-protection to the edge of the parapet where he strove to shake the Lord-One Krip into action.

Only, it would appear that the man was also still caught in the invisible storm they had loosed. He moaned a little, and his eyes had turned upward in his head so that the whites were visible.

Had he been able to manage the other's weight Farree would have hoisted him up, gotten him away from that perilous open door. Now he could only stay beside him, strive to move in his own mental picture of a wall set against the flood.

The light beamed upward from the opening. He did not think he could have entered, even with his mind at rest. It was not big enough to take his spread of wings no matter how much he could try to compress those. But for the Lady Maelen to go alone into that place! Urgently he shook Lord-One Krip until the other's head flopped forward and backward on his shoulders. Then he felt the other begin to gain control, and a moment later the man's eyes were turned up to meet his.

"The . . . m-minds," he stammered, "they are – "

"Can such a place hold an army?" demanded Farree. "Whence comes all this?"

"Memories, all the thoughts – of a race!" Lord-One Krip straightened in his hold, and Farree released him.