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Rain was drizzling down thinly, and the little people gathered around and led them into the cavern.

It was airy and spacious, lighted partly by torches burning in niches in the walls, and partly by beautifullyluminescent crystals set to magnify the firelight. Exquisitely worked metal objects were everywhere, but Barron had no leisure to examine them. He drew up beside Melitta as they walked through the lightedcarven corridors, and asked in a low voice, “What’s all the shouting about?”

“The Old One of the forge folk has agreed to help us,” Melitta said. “I promised him, in turn, that the altars of Sharra should be restored throughout the mountains, and that they should be permitted to return, unmolested, to their old places and villages. Are you weary from riding? I am, but somehow—” she spread her hands, helplessly. “It’s been so long, and now we are near the end—we will start for Storn, two hours before the dawn, so that when Brynat wakes we will surround the castle—if only we are in time!” She was trembling, and moved as if to lean on him, then straightened her back proudly and stood away. She said, almost to herself, “I cannot expect you to care. What can we do for you, when this is

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over, to make up for meddling in your life this way?”

Barron started to say, “I do care, I care about you, Melitta,” but she had already drawn away from himand hurried after Desideria.

With jewel lights and with music provided by small, caged tree frogs and singing crickets, there was abanquet that evening in the great lower hall. Barron, though he could eat little, sat in wonder at the silverdishes—silver was commoner than glass in the mountains—and the jewelled, prismed lamps whichplayed unendingly on the pale, smoke-stained walls of the cave. The forge people sang deep-throated,wild songs in a four-noted scale with a strangely incessant rhythm, like the pounding of hammers. But Barron could not eat the food, or understand a word of the endless epics, and he was relieved when thecompany dissolved early—he could understand enough of their dialect to know that they were beingdismissed against the ride before dawn—and one of their guides took them to cubicles carved in therock.

Barron was alone; he had seen Melitta and Desideria being conducted to a cubicle nearby. In the littlerock room, hardly more than a closet, he found a comfortable bed of furs laid on a bed frame of silver,woven with leather straps. He lay down and expected to sleep from sheer exhaustion. But sleep wouldnot come.

He felt disoriented and lonely. Perhaps he had grown used to Storn’s presence and his thoughts. Melitta,too, had withdrawn from him and he was inexpressibly alone without her presence to reach out to, in thatindefinable way. He reflected that he had changed. He had always been alone and had never wanted itany other way. The rare women he had had, had never made an impression on him; they came, wereused for the brief emotional release they could provide and were forgotten. He had no close friends, onlybusiness associates. He had lived on this world and never known or cared how it differed from Terra orfrom any other Empire planet.

Soon it would be over, and he did not know where he would go. He wished suddenly that he had beenmore responsive to Larry’s proffered friendship; but then, Storn had spoiled that contact for him,probably for all time. He had never known what it was to have a friend, but then he had never known orrealized the depths of his aloneness, either.

The room seemed to be swelling up and receding, the lights wavering. He could sense thoughts floatingin the air around him, beating on him, he felt physically sick with their impact. He lay on the bed andclutched it, feeling the room tipping and swaying and wondering if he would slide off. Fear seized him;was Storn reaching out for his mind again? He could
 
see
 
Storn, without knowing how it was Storn—fair,soft-handed and soft-faced, lying asleep on a bier of silks—face remote and his human presence simplynot there at all. Then he saw a great white bird, swooping from the heights of the castle, circling it with astrange musical, mechanical cry and then sweeping away with a great beating of wings.

The room kept shifting and tipping, and he clung to the bed frame, fighting the sickness and disorientationthat threatened to tear him apart. He heard himself cry out, unable to keep back the cry; he squeezed hiseyes tight, curled himself into a fetal position and tried hard not to think or feel at all.

He never knew how long he lay curled there in rejection, but after what seemed a long and very dreadfultime he came slowly to the awareness that someone was calling his name, very softly.

“Dan! Dan, it’s Melitta—it’s all right; try to take my hand, touch me—it’s all right. I would have come

before if I had known—”

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He made an effort to close his fingers on hers. Her hand seemed a single stable point in the unbelievablyshifting, flowing, swimming perspective of the room, and he clung to it as a man cast adrift in space clingsto a magnetic line.

He whispered, “Sorry—room’s going round…”

“I know. I’ve had it; all telepaths get this at some time during the development of their powers, but it usually comes in adolescence; you’re a late developer and it’s more serious. We call it threshold sickness. It isn’t serious, it won’t hurt you, but it’s very frightening. I know. Hold on to me; you’ll be all right.”

Gradually, clinging to her small hard fingers, Barron got the world right-side up again. The dizzydisorientation remained, but Melitta was solid, a firm presence and not wholly a physical one, in the midstof the shifting and flowing space.

“Try, whenever this happens, to fix your mind on something solid and real.”

“
 
You
are real,” he whispered. “You’re the only real thing I’ve ever known.”

“I know.” Her voice was very soft. She bent close to him and touched her lips gently to his. She

remained there, and the warmth of her was like a growing point of light and stability in the shifting dark.

Barron was coming quickly back. At last he drew a deep breath and forced himself to release her.

“You shouldn’t be here. If Desideria discovers you are gone—”

“What would it be to her? She could have done more for you; she is a Keeper, a trained telepath, and I—but I forgot, you don’t know the sort of training they have. The Keepers—their whole minds and bodies become caught up into the work they do— must keep aloof and safeguard themselves from emotions—” She laughed, a soft, stifled laugh and said, almost weeping, “Besides, Desideria doesn’t know it, but she and Storn—”

She broke off. Barron did not care; he was not interested in Desideria at the moment. She came close tohim, the only warm and real thing in his world, the only thing he cared about or ever could…

He whispered, shaken to the depths, half sobbing, “And to think I might never have known you—”

She murmured, “We would have found one another. From the ends of the world; from the ends of theuniverse of stars. We belong together.”

And then she took him against her, and he was lost in awareness of her, and his last thought, before allthought was lost, was that he had been a stranger on his own world and that now an alien girl from analien world had made him feel at home.

XIV

«^»

THEY STARTED two hours before dawn in a heavy snowfall; after a short time of riding the forge folkon their thickset ponies looked like polar bears, their furred garments and the shaggy coats of the ponies

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being covered with the white flakes. Barron rode close to Melitta, but they did not speak, nor need to. Their new awareness of one another went too deep for words. But he could feel her fear—the growing preoccupation and sense of desperation in what they were about to dare.

Valdir had said that the worship of Sharra was forbidden a long time ago, and Larry had been at somepains to explain that the gods on Darkover were tangible forces.
 
What was going to happen? Thedefiance of an old law must be a serious thing
 
—
 
Melitta’s no coward, and she’s scared almostout of her wits
.

Desideria rode alone at the head of the file. She was an oddly small, straight and somehow pitiable littlefigure, and Barron could sense without analyzing the isolation of the one who must handle theseunbelievable forces.

When they came through the pass and sighted Storn Castle on the height, a great, grim mass which hehad never seen before, he realized that he had seen it once through Storn’s eyes—the magical vision of Storn, flying in the strange magnetic net which bound his mind to the mechanical bird.

Had I dreamed that?

Melitta reached out and clasped his hand. She said, her voice shaky, “There it is. If we’re only intime—Storn, Edric, Allira—I wonder if they’re even still alive?”

Barron clasped her hand, without speaking.
 
Even if you have no one else, you will always have me,beloved
 
.

She smiled faintly, but did not speak.

The forge folk were dismounting now, moving stealthily, under cover of the darkness and crags, up thepath toward the great, closed gates of Storn. Barron, between Desideria and Melitta, moved quietly withthem, wondering what was going to happen which could make both Melitta and Desideria turn white withterror. Melitta whispered, “It’s a chance, at least,” and was silent again, clinging to his hand.

Time was moving strangely again for Barron; he had no idea whether it was ten minutes or two hoursthat he climbed at Melitta’s side, but they stood shrouded by shadows in the lee of the gates. The skywas beginning to turn crimson around the eastern peaks. At last the great, pale-red disc of the sun cameover the mountain. Desideria, looking around her at the small, swart men clustered about her, drew adeep breath and said, “We had better begin.”

Melitta glanced up uneasily at the heights and said, her voice shaking, “I suppose Brynat has sentries upthere. As soon as he finds out we’re down here, there will be—arrows and things.”

“We had better not give him the chance,” Desideria agreed. She motioned the forge folk close around her, and gave low-voiced instructions which Barron found that he could understand, even though she spoke that harsh and barbarian language. “Gather close around me; don’t move or speak; keep your eyes on the fire.”

She turned her eyes on Barron, looking troubled and a little afraid. She said, “I am sorry, it will have tobe you, although you are not a worshipper of Sharra. If I had realized what had happened, I would havebrought another trained telepath with me; Melitta is not strong enough. You”—suddenly he noticed thatshe had neither looked directly at him, nor spoken his name, that day—“must serve at the pole ofpower.”

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Barron began to protest that he didn’t know anything about this sort of thing, and she cut him off curtly. “Stand here, between me and the men; see yourself as gathering all the force of their feelings and emotionand pouring it out in my direction. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. I’ve been trained for eight years to judgethese things, and I know you can if you don’t lose your nerve. If you do, we’re probably all dead, sodon’t be surprised, whatever you see or whatever happens. Just keep your mind concentrated on me.” As if moved on strings, Barron found himself moving to the place she indicated, yet he knew she was notcontrolling him. Rather, his will was in accord with hers, and he moved as she thought.

With a final, tense look upward at the blank wall of the castle, she motioned to Melitta.

“Melitta, make fire.”

From the silk-wrapped bundle she carried, Desideria took a large blue crystal. It was as large as achild’s fist, and many-faceted, with strange fires and metallic ribbons of light. It looked molten, despitethe crystalline facets, as she held it between her hands, and it seemed to change form, the color and lightwithin it shifting and playing.

Melitta struck fire from her tinderbox; it flared up between her hands. Desideria motioned to her to dropthe blazing fragment of tinder at her feet. Barron watched, expecting it to go out. Desideria’s serious,white face was bent on the blue crystal with a taut intensity; her mouth was drawn, her nostrils pinchedand white. The blue light from the crystal seemed to grow, to play around her, to reflect on her—andnow, instead of falling, the fire was rising, blazing up until its lights reflected crimson with the blue on Desideria’s features—a strange darting, leaping flame.