There was a croaking whisper in his ear, Estrel's voice. Ahead of them a clump of high cottonwood boles loomed like starving wraiths in the snow, and Estrel was tugging at his arm. They began to stumble up and down the north side of the snow-choked creek just beyond the cottonwoods, searching for something. "A stone," she kept saying, "a stone," and though he did not know why they needed a stone, he searched and scrabbled in the snow with her. They were both crawling on hands and knees when at last she came on the landmark she was after, a snowmounded block of stone a couple of feet high.

With her frozen gloves she pushed away the dry drifts from the east side of the block. Incurious, listless with fatigue, Falk helped her. Their scraping bared a metal rectangle, level with the curiously level ground. Estrel tried to open it. A hidden, handle clicked, but the edges of the rectangle were frozen shut. Falk spent his last strength straining to lift the thing, till finally he came to his wits and unsealed the frozen metal with the heatbeam in the handle of his gun. Then they lifted up the door and looked down a neat steep set of stairs, weirdly geometric amidst this howling wilderness, to a shut door

"It's all right," his companion muttered, and going down the stairs—crawling backwards, as on a ladder, because she could not trust her legs—she pushed the door open, and then looked up at Falk. "Come on!" she said.

He came down, pulling the trapdoor to above him as she directed. It was abruptly utterly dark, and crouching on the steps Falk hastily pressed the stud of his handgun for light. Below him Estrel's white face glimmered. He came down and followed her in the door, into a place that was very dark and very big, so big his light could only hint at the ceiling and the nearer walls. It was silent, and the air was dead, flowing past them in a faint unchanging draft.

"There should be wood over here," Estrel's soft, strain-hoarsened voice said somewhere to his left. "Here. We need a fire; help me with this…"

Dry wood was stacked in high piles in a corner near the entrance. While he got a blaze going, building it up inside a circle of blackened stones nearer the center of the cavern, Estrel crept off into some farther corner and returned dragging a couple of heavy blankets. They stripped and rubbed down, then huddled on the blankets, inside their Basnasska sleep-rolls, up close to the fire. It burned hot as if in a chimney, drawn up by a high draft that also carried off the smoke. There was no warming the great room or cave, but the firelight and heat relaxed and cheered them. Estrel got dried meat out of her bag, and they munched as they sat, though their lips were sore with frostbite and they were too tired to be hungry. Gradually the warmth of the fire began to soak into their bones.

"Who else has used this place?"

"Anyone that knows of it, I suppose."

"There was a mighty House here once, if this was the cellar," Falk said, looking into the shadows that flickered and thickened into impenetrable black at a distance from the fire, and thinking of the great basements under the house of Fear.

"They say there was a whole city here. It goes on a long way from the door, they say. I don't know."

"How did you know of it—are you a Samsit woman?"

"No."

He asked no further, recalling the code; but presently she said in her submissive way, "I am a Wanderer. We know many places like this, hiding places…I suppose you've heard of the Wanderers."

"A little," said Falk, stretching out and looking across the fire at his companion. Tawny hair curled about her face as she sat huddled in the shapeless bag, and a pale jade amulet at her throat caught the firelight.

"They know little of us in the Forest."

"No Wanderers came as far east as my House. What was told of them there fits the Basnasska better—savages, hunters, nomads." He spoke sleepily, laying his head down on his arm.

"Some Wanderers might be called savages. Others not. The Cattle-Hunters are all savages and know nothing beyond their own territories, these Basnasska and Samsit and Arksa. We go far. We go east to the Forest, and south to the mouth of the Inland River, and west over the Great Mountains and the Western Mountains even to the sea. I myself have seen the sun set in the sea, behind the chain of blue isles that lies far off the coast, beyond the drowned valleys of California, earthquake-whelmed…" Her soft voice had slipped into the cadence of some archaic chant or plaint. "Go on," Falk murmured, but she was still, and before long he was fast asleep. For a while she watched his sleeping face. At last she pushed the embers together, whispered a few words as if in prayer to the amulet chained around her neck, and curled down to sleep across the fire from him.

When he woke she was making a stand of bricks over the fire to support a kettle filled with snow. "It looks like late afternoon outside," she said, "but it could be morning, or noon for that matter. The storm's as thick as ever. They can't track us. And if they did, still they couldn't get in this place…This kettle was in the cache with the blankets. And there's a bag of dried peas. We'll do well enough here." The hard, delicate face turned to him with a faint smile. "It's dark, though. I don't like the thick walls and the dark."

"It's better than bandaged eyes. Though you saved my life with that bandage. Blind Horressins was better off than dead Falk." He hesitated and then asked, "What moved you to save me?"

She shrugged, still with the faint, reluctant smile. "Fellow prisoners…They always say Wanderers are clever at ruses and disguises. Did you not hear them call me Fox Woman? Let me look at those hurts of yours. I brought my bag of tricks."

"Are Wanderers all good healers, too?"

"We have certain skills."

"And you know the Old Tongue; you have not forgotten man's old way, like the Basnasska."

"Yes, we all know Galaktika. Look there, the rim of your ear was frostbitten yesterday. Because you took the tie from your hood for me to hold."

"I can't look at it," Falk said amiably, submitting to her doctoring. "I don't need to, usually."

As she dressed the still unhealed cut on his left temple she glanced once or twice sidelong at his face, and at last she ventured: "There are many Foresters with such eyes as yours, no doubt."

"None."

Evidently the code prevailed. She asked nothing, and he, having resolved to confide in no one, volunteered nothing. But his own curiosity got the better of him and he said, "They don't frighten you, then, these cat-eyes?"

"No," she answered in her quiet way. "You frightened me only once. When you shot—so fast—"

"He would have raised the whole camp."

"I know, I know. But we carry no guns. You shot so quick, I was frightened—it was like a terrible thing I saw once, when I was a child. A man who killed another with a gun, quicker than thought, like that. He was one of the Razes."

"Razes?"

"Oh, one meets with them in the Mountains sometimes."

"I know very little of the Mountains."

She explained, though as if unwillingly. "You know the Law of the Lords. They do not kill—you know. When there is a murderer in their city, they cannot kill him to stop him, so they make him into a Raze. It is something they do to the mind. They can turn him loose and he starts to live anew, innocent. This man I spoke of was older than you, but had a mind like a little child. But he got a gun in his hands, and his hands knew how to use it, and he—shot a man very close up, like you did—"

Falk was silent. He glanced across the fire at his handgun, lying atop his pack, the marvelous little tool that had started his fires, provided his meat, and lighted his darkness all his long way. There had been no knowledge in his hands of how to use the thing—had there? Metock had taught him how to shoot. He had learned from Metock, and grown skillful by hunting. He was sure of it. He could not be a mere freak and criminal given a second chance by the arrogant charity of the Lords of Es Toch…