Exiles of the Stars

She did not answer, only gave me a long, level look. Then she turned once more to the woman with her now wildly writhing crown, as if she must imprint that image so firmly in her mind that a hundred years hence she would still see it in detail.

The wand trembled, wavered from side to side. I could see that with both her hands Maelen fought to hold it steady. To no avail, for it leaped from her grasp.

I opened my eyes. My neck and shoulders were stiff where they rested against the stone of the wall. I felt an inner chill which my thermo clothing was no proof against. My hands moved over fur engrimed with dust and grit. I looked down. The glassia head rose from its pillow on my arm.

'Maelen?' So vivid had that dream been that I half expected to find her still as she had been moments ago.

'Look yonder!'

She used her nose as a pointer to indicate the globes. Some of those were glowing brighter, giving more light to the chamber. It took me only a moment or two to be sure that not all of them had so awakened —just those with the reptilian design.

'Griss!' I put the only name I knew to that menace.

'Griss Sharvan?' Her thought was surprised. 'What has this to do with him?'

'Much, perhaps.' Swiftly I told her of what had happened to me since I had been taken captive by that thing wearing Griss's body, and of the visit to the crystal-walled chamber where he had endeavored to give my body to his fellow being.

'She is also there, is she not?' Maelen asked.

I did not mistake her. There was only one 'she'— the woman of the cat crown.

'Yes! And, Maelen, just now I dreamed—'

'I know what manner of dream that was, since it also spun me into its web,' she interrupted again. 'I had thought that no one could surpass the Thassa in inner powers. But it would seem that in some things we are as children playing with bright pebbles, making patterns on the earth! I think that these have slept here to preserve their race against some great peril in the past. But only those four you have seen survived, able to rise to full life again.'

'But if they can be revived, why do they want our bodies?'

'It can be that the means of revival on their own cannot now be used. Or it may be that they wish to pass among us as beings of our own kind.'

'To take over.' That I could believe. Had the seeming Griss Sharvan concealed his alienness, posed perhaps as a captive among the jacks, we would have been deceived and so in saving him could have brought disaster among ourselves. I thought of the men I had left behind on the cliff. They were facing worse than jack blasters—and now I was impatient to be away, to warn them.

I had found Maelen. Now we must find our way out, return to theLydis , or to the force of our men. What was happening here was vastly larger and worse than any jack looting!

'You are right.' Maelen had followed my thoughts. 'But as to discovering the path out—that I do not' know. Can you even now find the door which, you entered?'

'Of course!' Though I could not see any opening, I was sure I knew just where I had come through to this ledge. Gently I lifted her aside and arose. To make certain I would not miss what I sought if the opening were disguised in some manner, I put my fingers to the surface of the wall and edged along back toward that place where I thought I had entered.

I reached the far end of the ledge. There was no opening. Sure that I had made some mistake, yet somehow equally certain I could not have, I made a slow passage back, this time reaching both above and below my former tracing of the surface. I returned to Maelen. There had been no break in that solid wall.

'But Idid come through!' I burst out, and my protest echoed hollowly through that space.

'True. But where?' Her question seemed a mockery of my vehemence.

Then she continued. 'Such an experience is not unknown here. This has happened to me twice. Which is why I have been so completely lost.'

'Tell me!' I demanded now.

So I learned how she had made her way from the ship valley, found the sleeper with the amplifier, how she had come to witness the looting of the cache, even as I guessed it might all have happened. But for the rest it was a tale of a strange journey, of her will battling that of another reaching out for her. Not, she felt, for her personally, but as one might fling a net in hope of catching something within it. But that compulsion was not continuous in its powers and she was able to fight it at intervals. It had brought her to where the ship of the jacks was finned down, and through the cavern there into the passages beyond. But there, bemused by the ebb and flow of the current which held her, she had been lost. Then she had contacted me, had been drawn toward my call in turn.

'I had believed that Thassa could not be so influenced,' she admitted frankly. 'Always I have been warned that I was too proud of my powers. If that was ever so, it is no longer. For here I have been as one played with by something infinitely greater, allowed to run a little, then put under restraint again. Yet this is the strangest of all, Krip—I will swear by the Word of Molaster that this power, this energy, whatever it may be, was not as conscious of me as I am of it. It was rather as if it flexed muscles in exercise so that it might be ready to use all its strength at a future call.'

'The four of that inner place?' I suggested.

'Perhaps. Or they may be only extensions of something else, infinitely greater still. They are adepts, without question—very powerful ones. But even an adept recognizes something above and beyond himself. We name Molaster in our petitions. But that is only our name for what we cannot describe, but which is the core of our belief. These others are—'

What she might have added to her speculations was left unsaid. Those yellow globes with the reptilian masks,