If these truly are divine messengers, Sabium thought, they are doing an excellent job of concealing it. They ate, they drank?they drank quite a lot?they produced full chamber pots as foul as anyone else's. Among themselves they spoke a language no one knew, but from the sound of things they mostly used it to quarrel. The priests had already broken up three or four fights before they got well under way. Divinities, by Sabium's lights, ought to act better than that. She certainly tried to herself.

Were it not for the curious objects the priests had confiscated from the strangers, she would have judged them mere men, foreigners from some distant land masquerading as subjects of hers. But those enigmatic objects were like nothing known in her dominions. Whatever they were made of, it was neither wood nor metal nor pottery nor bone. Some could be felt to quiver, almost as if alive, when held in the hand.

None of which would have made them any more than strange, but when an incautious priest pushed a button she should not have, the two people beside her and two more in the next room were suddenly rendered unconscious. Every one of the strangers carried a device like the one that produced that remarkable effect. None of Sabium's scholars and savants had any idea how it worked or how to make anything like it.

The discovery had not surprised Sabium, not after the way the last two of these?personages?vanished out of her palace. And how, if not divine, had the woman changed her coloring so completely? Its implications, though, worried her. With powers such as the strangers possessed, where in the world did they come from? Why hadn't her own folk found them long before, or they her empire? Even more to the point, why had they not come as conquerors? They were no normal people, that was certain.

And if they weren't people and weren't gods either, what did that leave? The only way to find out, Sabium told herself, was to ask. She had seen she could read the strangers almost as if they were her own subjects; they could not hide their bodies' involuntary responses to her questions.

When the goddess came to a conclusion, she wasted no time acting on it. "Fetch me the woman who was here before, the one who then had hair the color of copper," she told Bagadat. "Bring her new companion as well, the lean young man."

The majordomo gave a doleful nod. He resented the strangers for disrupting the smooth routine of the palace and even more for vexing his deity. "Do you wish guards, goddess?"

"No, no," Sabium said impatiently. "There is no danger in these?personages; that is another thing about them that puzzles me. Go now, if you please. I assure you, I will be safe."

"As you say, goddess." Bagadat had trouble disbelieving her, but did not sound convinced, either.

"Why does she want me, too?" Stavros asked for about the fifth time as priests hurried him and Magda through torchlit passageways toward the goddess. They were perfectly polite and made no move to touch the Terrans, but Stavros thought they would simply drag him if he faltered or balked. When Sabium bade them do something, they were not used to getting no for an answer.

Magda, on the other hand, was by then out of patience with the question. "How should I know why?" she snapped. "For all I can tell, she's divined what you said back on Topanga and intends to invite you into bed with her."

For a moment, Stavros waited for the priests to react in horror to her words. Then he realized that, unlike him, she had spoken in Federacy Basic. Some of her slips of temper, he thought, were very calculated things. Annoyed, he shot back, "Then it's you who ought to be asking what you're along for."

"Maybe just to give helpful advice," she said sweetly.

He refused to be drawn. "With the experience Sabium has, I doubt she needs it."

"I didn't mean her," Magda murmured.

Feeling his cheeks grow hot, Stavros gave up. The banter was making him nervous anyway. Wondering what bedding a woman fifty times his age might be like was one thing back on Topanga: a topic of academic interest, so to speak. Even there, the prospect had been daunting. It was quite a bit more so when in the goddess's power.

Besides which, Sabium had shown about as much attraction for him as for one of the local draft animals, beasts that seemed to combine all the worst features of camels and zebras. In its own way, Stavros thought, that was reassuring.

Certainly the goddess's chamber was not set up for a seduction. Sabium waved the Terrans into chairs and seated herself in one facing them. A servant brought in wine and cakes, then silently departed.

"What would you do if I told you I had ordered you put to death?" the goddess asked without preamble.

Magda and Stavros exchanged appalled looks. Magda had been thinking for some time that Sabium was not showing the group from the Hanno the same deference Irfan Kawar and she had gotten, but there was a lot of difference between less deference and a death sentence.

"Are you telling us that, goddess?" she asked.

"Answer my question as I asked it." Sabium's face was an unrevealing mask; her words might have issued from one of the countless images of her that were reverenced over this whole continent.

"First I would ask why, then I would start trying to figure out how to evade your doom," Magda said.

Sabium's gaze swung to Stavros. "First I would ask if you are telling us that," he said after a moment's thought. That drive for precision was part of him, Magda thought, and a valuable part when he did not, as sometimes happened, let it run away from him. He got no reply from the goddess; seeing he would not, he sighed and resumed. "After that, I would do as Magda said, though in the opposite order."

Humanity returned to Sabium's features. "That is as good an answer as I could have hoped for," she said with a small, amused smile.

"Why are you trying to make us afraid, goddess?" Magda asked, sensing no trip to the headsman lay in the immediate future.

"To see what you are, of course." Secure for ages in her power, the goddess did not bother dissembling. "You and yours seek to hide your purposes from me, just as you hide your true appearance beneath colors that ape my people's."

Since that was exactly so, Magda kept her mouth shut.

"And you." Sabium returned to Stavros. "What do you really look like, without your false pigments?"

"Me? I am a dragon, goddess, about twice as tall as this temple," he said in a sober, reasonable voice. "I breathe fire."

She gaped at him, then burst out laughing. "Are you indeed? I must say, you hide it very well."

Seeing Sabium's mood softened, Magda dared ask, "What do you seek of us, then, goddess?"

"Still I do not know." Sabium frowned, as if she did not care to make that admission. "At times I feel in your folk the condescension a grown man might show watching children playing with toys. And yet at other times your comrades have in them more awe of me than my own people display. You would help me if you could explain how both these things can be true at once."

Magda knew she was treading on dangerous ground, even more so than in past conversations with the goddess. She picked her words with care. "For the first, I can only apologize; rude people are part of my nation, as they are of any other. For the second, well, your people know you, as they have for so long. Mine, on the other hand, have heard only travelers' tales. Those so often grow in the telling that the wonder is all the greater at finding them, this once, less than the truth."

"That is it precisely," Stavros agreed. He did not think he could have done such a smooth job of telling the literal truth without giving away the essential secrets behind it.

It did not do to count on too much in that regard, he discovered. Sabium's years let her fit together seemingly irrelevant bits of data as well as one of the mainframe computers back at the Federacy capital.