"Farree," a voice called. Reluctantly he crawled back up out of the darkness in answer. He looked up into the face of the Lady Maelen. She passed a damp cloth over his nose and mouth, and it showed the dark red of blood. He felt an ache through his whole body, but he caught at the webbing of the seat, which had been loosened, and drew himself up.

"I am all right," he made quick answer, refusing to let them believe that he was merely a charge upon them, as if he were indeed one of the "little ones" – those to whom cages came as prisons.

He felt her probe and met it quickly. No, he wanted no care, only to be treated as she would treat one of her own straight-backed kind.

She drew back. "You are of our kind, Farree." She did not speak that mind to mind but with her lips, as if she acknowledged relationship by word instead of thought.

He did not try to answer her. One needed only to look at him to know that she spoke in pity only, and the notion of her pity brought a fierce surge of anger which he could not voice.

Lord-One Krip was still seated in the captain's swinging chair, and now his fingers played across the board which the Lady Maelen had earlier used. Farree became aware of something else: the vibration that had been a part of him while they were en route was gone. The ship was motionless and silent. On the looking screen there were tall rises of bare rock. They had indeed landed and, from the look of it, not at any port.

There was a greenish light upon those rocks. Lady Maelen took a step forward and touched the man's shoulder lightly. Though no word or mind speech Farree could catch passed between them, the scene outside the ship changed.

Gone were the light-touched rocks with their deep indentations of shadow. Instead they saw a moon in a sky which was not dark. For around the globe of that gold-bright coin were two rings of light, stark and clear. Beyond them, a hazy surround of a third was yet but a palid shadow of the others.

The Lady Maelen flung her arms up as if she stood in the open reaching to touch that wonder.

"Three rings – not yet but soon!" Her voice held a triumphant sound as if she had won through some hard battle to reach this time and place.

"And where" – Lord-One Krip leaned back in his seat, his still hands resting upon the edge of that board of many buttons – "are we?"

"Sotrath will lend us light. If I only had long sight I would – "

But the three in the cabin of the ship were not to hear her words, for ringing into the mind of each of them came a challenge, so clear and sharp that Farree reeled and saw that even the Lord-One Krip had caught at the edge of the board, holding so tensely that his grazed knuckles stood out as white knobs.

"Who comes thus into the Quiet Places?"

For a long moment Farree thought that there would be no answer. Then the reply came from the Lady Maelen.

"I am she who was judged, she whose rod of power was taken from her. She who wore fur and fangs and – "

"And comes again in a new body! Whence got you that, Singer who was and now is not?"

"Thus." There was a tingle in Farree's mind; that was the only way he could describe it. No passage of thought, rather a high sweet sound as if someone sang without words. How long it continued he could not have afterwards said. It trailed up and up into notes he could not hear but which still fed that tingle in his mind.

Once more that other voice spoke. It came from nowhere but arrived with all the authority of a guard: "This is a thing which must be thought upon. Not lightly are the People answered by a flouting of their Law."

Lady Maelen bowed her head as if she stood before a speaker and surrendered her will to that other.

"Let it lie upon the Scale of Molester. For such a judgment I am ready. Those with me are guilty of naught save striving to help – "

"All those with you?" resounded the voice. "What of the two who lie prisoner in body within that ship?"

"They shall be delivered to the judgment of their own kind."

"They are trespassers by your aid into a place which is forbidden to all save the People and those they summon."

"Sotrath has summoned us. Three rings will shine and then that which is crooked can be made straight – "

That which is crooked – straight!

Farree took a single step forward. Surely she did not mean that! She and the Lord-One had picked him out of the Limits, cast off his casing of Dung, but there was no magic in the world – this or any other – that could straighten him, three rings around an unknown moon or not!

There was a bitter taste in his mouth as he swallowed, not born of his blood this time but from his thoughts. Yet he was given no time to sift those, for again the voice rang clear.

"Unto Molester shall it be, even as you have said, you who are not – "

There was a kind of echo in his mind, but the words were sharply cut off and Farree knew that the speaker had withdrawn. Once more the picture screen in the control cabin showed, not the sky, but towering cliffs about them. The bright light of the moon brought those sharply into focus, and the picture began slowly to move from right to left as if the ship itself was turning on some giant spindle. The cliffs ended. Before them now stretched a wide plain unbroken by any growth higher than a few thick patches of dead-seeming grass.

This was an empty land appearing only as a wasteland. Then once more cliffs arose to wall them in. Lord-One Krip leaned a little closer to the screen.

"This I have seen."

"He did well, that Hnold. We are within short distance to the meeting place," Lady Maelen returned. There was warm satisfaction in her voice. "Let me but go and all shall be readied."

"Wait!" His hand went up as if to back his command. "Look to the – "

He pressed thumb hard upon a button and the screen ceased its turn. Before them were still tall cliffs under the clear moonlight, but in the sky above the ragged edge of those cliffs something moved, striking fire now and then from the same moonlight.

"A flitter!"

The Lady Maelen's lips flattened against her teeth in a grimace. She, too, leaned closer to the screen. "But this is the Land of Beyond where only the Thassa move. And the lordlings of the inner lands have no sky flight!"

"Others do," he returned grimly. "Such as those we have on board."

"Wait and watch!" Her hand on his shoulder pushed him fully down into his seat again.

The airborne transport came on, fully into the moonlight, where the rocks seemed to reflect back the glory of the rings to show the clearer what passed either on earth or through the air. The craft had no riding lights, and yet it appeared to hold a course that would bring it to their own landing place. Guild? But how could the two prisoners have summoned such support?

"They were waiting," said Lord-One Krip in a low voice.

"That they could not have been!" she protested. "The tape was unchanged and brought us – "

"Perhaps they expected their men might fail," he returned. "They had ready then a secondary plan."

"Which will not serve them either." Her fingers dug into his shoulder as she watched the oncoming flitter closely but with no expression of alarm. "See!"

The small craft boring through the moonlight had nearly reached the lip of the cliffs. Then it seemed to waver – almost as if the same wind which rippled the grass patches was strong enough to seize the flitter from the control of those on board. The craft sideslipped to the right, drew level with what Farree could believe was an effort, slipped again. It near-skimmed the top of the cliff, and then it made an abrupt turn and half circled to put itself back on the same course it had followed toward them.

Only no longer was its flight swift and sure; it slipped from one side to the other in jerky motion. The craft could have been a bird netted by a sure fling of a hunter, struggling for its freedom to no purpose.