Keeping his eyes averted from the chauka, Paul followed Dorland past the odd pedestals and out through the wide doorway. There they stopped to listen.
Paul signaled Dorland to stay where he was, then moved cautiously to the open archway. He drew in a breath of cool air to steady his nerves. There was no sound except the bleating of insects from the darkened courtyard. He moved close enough to the archway to give himself a view outside. As far as he could see, the courtyard was empty.
He slipped outside to the blessed cover of darkness. A moment later Dorland stood beside him. Crouching low, they made their way to the low wall. Paul lifted his head just far enough to see over
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it. There was no sign of the sentries. He motioned to Dorland, and they silently climbed over the wall and started across the roadway.
The sentry must have been standing in the deep shadows down by the comer. Paul was unaware of his presence until he heard the shout. Then he and Dorland were running across the roadway. Shadowy figures loomed suddenly in front of them. Paul fumbled for his knife, and a hand grasped his arm.
'This way!' Karyn hissed.
Several hundred meters down David's Tube they stopped to rest. They had lost the pursuers in the maze of roadways before they went up the access port to the tube.
'Are you okay?' Selmer asked.
Dorland kept silent. Paul nodded, but he didn't feel okay, and he was sure it showed. He felt as if he had been . . . raped. Something slimy had entered his mind. It had pulled open his private thoughts and memories and pawed through them. He wasn't sure he would ever feel totally safe again. Karyn and Selmer were full of questions, but Dorland was withdrawn and uncommunicative. In a few halting sentences Paul described the ceremony he and Dorland had witnessed. Without even considering why he did so, he kept silent about the other experiences—the shadows that had reached out to his mind, the visit from Shari. That part was private between him and Dorland.
'You actually saw Lord Tern in there?' Karyn asked when he had finished.
'We saw something. It came out of the chauka.'
'High Elder Brill. . . called it?' Paul hesitated. Somehow it was hard to remem-ber exactly how that had happened. 'I think so. He was chanting and making motions with his hands. Then it came.'
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William Greenleaf
'Came from where?' Selmer asked, making no effort to hide his skepticism. 'You said the chauka was shaped like a shallow bowl. That's the same way Cleve described it. You also said Lord Tern was almost as big as a man. How could he come out of a shallow bowl?'
'Well. . .' Paul thought back to what had happened when High Elder Brill waved his hands over the chauka, and the appearance of the creature above the chauka like a spindly insect. 'We saw something.'1'1 But Selmer was right. There was no way Lord Tern's body could have been concealed inside that shallow dish. And there was something else—
He looked up at Dorland. 'But I'm beginning to wonder if what we saw was really Lord Tern.'
'High Elder Brill called him,' Dorland said. 'He came. How can you doubt it was Lord Tern? We saw him.'
'I know.' It was clear that Dorland's statement carried a deeper meaning. We felt his black heart. That was the bothersome part. 'But he didn't look . . . solid. I could see through him.' K-aryn's brow pulled down. 'Lord Tern was . . . transparent?'
Paul shook his head. 'Not exactly transparent. But he didn't look completely solid. He moved around a lot. A couple of times, when he turned at the right angle, I could see the light globes shining through his body.'
Karyn was watching him with interest. 'I don't understand.'
'I'm not sure I do, either. I guess—' We felt Lord Tern in the room with us. He could come up with theories about
