I settled down about them, contracting, feeling the textures of the various materials of which they had been formed. Cold, lifeless. It was only the words of the men which laid any mystery upon them.

Continuing this commerce of surfaces, I grew even smaller, concentrating my attention now upon that figure which Pol had momentarily bound. My action then was as prompt as my decision: I began to pour myself into it, flowing through the miniscule openings--

The burn! It was indescribable, the searing feeling that passed through my being. Expanding, filling the room, passing beyond it into the night, I knew that it must be that thing referred to as pain. I had never experienced it before and I wanted never to feel it again.

I continued to seek greater tenuosness, for in it lay a measure of alleviation.

Pol had been correct concerning the figure. It was, somehow, alive. It did not wish to be disturbed.

Beyond the walls of Rondoval, the pain began to ease. I felt a stirring within me ... something which had always been there but was just now beginning to creep into awareness....

"What was that?" Pol said. "It sounded like a scream, but--"

"I didn't hear anything," Mouseglove answered, straightening. "But I just felt a jolt--as if I'd been touched by someone who'd walked across a heavy rug, only stronger, longer ... I don't know. It gave me a chill. Maybe you stirred something up, playing with that statue."

"Maybe," Pol said. "For a moment, it felt as if there were something peculiar right here in the room with us."

"There must be a lot of unusual things about this old place--with both of your parents having been practicing sorcerers. Not to mention your grandparents, and theirs."

Pol nodded and sipped his wine.

"There are times when I feel acutely aware of my lack of formal training in the area."

He raised his right hand slightly above shoulder-level, extended his index finger and moved it rapidly through a series of small circles. A book bound in skin of an indeterminate origin appeared suddenly in his hand, a gray and white feather bookmark protruding from it.

"My father's diary," he announced, lowering the volume and opening it to the feather. "Now here," he said, running his finger down the righthand page, pausing and staring, "he tells how he defeated and destroyed an enemy sorcerer, capturing his spirit in the form of one of the figures. Elsewhere, he talks of some of the others. But all that he says at the end here is, 'It will prove useful in the task to come. If six will not do to force the wards I shall have seven, or even eight.' Obviously, he had something very specific in mind. Unfortunately, he did not commit it to paper."

"Further along perhaps?"

"I'll be up late again reading. I've taken my time with it these past months because it is not a pleasant document. He wasn't a very nice guy."

"I know that. It is good that you learn it from his own words, though."

"His words about forcing the wards--do they mean anything at all to you?"

"Not a thing."

"A good sorcerer would find some way to learn it from the materials at hand, I'm sure."

"I'm not. Those things seem extremely potent. As for your own abilities, you seem to have come pretty far without training. I'd give a lot to be able to pull that book trick--with, say, someone's jewelry. Where'd you get it from, anyway?"

Pol smiled.

"I didn't want to leave it lying around, so I bound it with a golden strand and ordered it to retreat into one of those placeless places between the worlds, as I saw them arrayed on my journey here. It vanished then, but whenever I wish to continue reading it I merely draw upon the thread and summon it."

"Gods! You could do that with a suit of armor, a rack of weapons, a year's supply of food, your entire library, for that matter! You can make yourself invincible!"

Pol shook his head.

"Afraid not," he said. "The book and the jumble-box are all I've been keeping there, because I wouldn't want either to fall into anyone else's hands. If I were traveling, I could add my guitar. Much more, though, and it would become too great a burden. Their mass somehow gets added to my own. It's as if I'm carrying around whatever I send through."

"So that's where the box has gotten to. I remember your locating it, that day we went back to Anvil Mountain ..."

"Yes. I almost wish I hadn't."

"You couldn't really hope to recover his body or your scepter from that crater."

"No, that's not what I meant. It was just seeing all that--waste--that bothered me. I--"

He slammed his fist against the arm of his chair.

"Damn those statues! It sometimes seems they were behind it all! If I could just get them to--Hell!"

He drained his glass and went to refill it.

The sensation ebbed. I did not like that experience. The room and its inhabitants were now tiny within the cloud of myself, and more uncertainties were now present: I did not know what it was that had caused me pain, nor how it produced that effect. I felt that I should learn these things, so as to avoid it in the future. I did not know how to proceed.

I also felt that it might be useful for me to learn how to produce this effect in others, so that I could cause them to leave me alone. How might I do this? If there were a means of contact it would seem that it could go either way, once the technique were mastered....

Again, the stirring of memory. But I was distracted. Someone approached the castle. It was a solitary human of male gender. I was aware of the distinction because of my familiarity with the girl Nora who had dwelled within for a time before returning to her own people. This man wore a brown cloak and dark clothing. He came drifting out of the northwest, mounted upon one of the lesser kin of the dragons who dwell below. His hair was yellow, and in places white. He wore a short blade. He circled. He could not miss the sign of the one lighted room. He began to descend, silent as a leaf or an ash across the air. I believed that he would land at the far end of the courtyard, out of sight of the library window.

Yes.

Within the room the men were talking, about the battle at the place called Anvil Mountain, where Pol destroyed his step-brother, Mark Marakson. Pol, I gather, is a sorcerer and Mark was something else, similar but opposite. A sorcerer is one who manipulates forces as I saw Pol do with the statue, and the book. Now, dimly, I recalled another sorcerer. His name was Det.

"...You've been brooding over those figures too long," Mouseglove was saying. "If there were an easy answer, you'd have found it by now."

"I know," Pol replied. "That's why I'm looking for something more complicated."

"I don't have any special knowledge of magic," Mouseglove said, "but it looks to me as if the problem does not lie completely in that area."

"What do you mean?"

"Facts, man. You haven't enough plain, old-fashioned information to be sure what you're up against here, what it is that you should be doing. You've had a couple of months to ransack this library, to play every magical game you can think of with the stiff dolls. If the answer were to be found that way, you'd have turned it up. It's just not here. You are going to have to look somewhere else."

"Where?'" Pol asked.

"If I knew that, I'd have told you before now. I've been away from the world I knew for over twenty years. It must have changed a bit in that time. So I'm hardly one to be giving directions. But you know I'd only intended to remain here until I'd recovered from my injury. I've been feeling fine for some time now. I've been loathe to leave, though, because of you. I don't like seeing you drive yourself against a crazy mystery day after day. There are enough half-mad wizards in the world, and I think that's where you may be heading--not to mention the possibility of your setting off something which may simply destroy you on the spot. I think you ought to get out, get away from the problem for a time. You'd said you wanted to see more of this world. Do it now. Come with me--tomorrow. Who knows? You may even come across some of the information you seek in your travels."