The droplet hit the plug of grease and went poof! The flash lit up the whole area, and the grease burned merrily.

Sturm reached for it, and the lamp popped and sputtered, sending bits of flaming grease in all directions.

"Are you sure this is safe?" he asked.

"Well, after a few minutes, the tin will melt," Flash said.

"But it should be all right until then."

"Wonderful." He picked up the violent little lamp by its slim metal ring and started through the hole. The gnomes clustered around the opening, their pink faces and white beards facing upward like so many daisies seeking the sun.

Sturm walked up a curving ramp and soon entered a chamber of profound silence. Even the lamp's sputtering declined to a fitful flicker. He stepped off the ramp and onto the roughly cleared stone floor and beheld a sight that no mortal had seen in millennia.

Dragon eggs. Row upon row of carved niches, each hold ing a single melon-sized egg. Row after row, tier upon tier, stretching far beyond the feeble range of light from the Col lapsing Self-Igniting Pocket Lamp Mark XVI. The lips of each niche glittered with dew, formed when the steamy air below met the cooler air of this chamber.

A gnomish voice drifted to Sturm. "What do you see?"

"This is it," he called back, hand cupped to his mouth.

"The great egg chamber!"

The gnomes scrambled up the ramp and spilled into the cavern, jostling past Sturm for a better view. They oohed and aahed and uttered fervent exclamations to their holy trio: Reorx, gears, and hydrodynamics.

"How many eggs do you suppose there are?" breathed Fit ter. Sturm shot a glance at Sighter.

"In view, there are eight tiers," said Sighter. "And sixty two per tier."

"For a total of -" Cutwood figured frantically.

"- 496, said Sturm, recalling the figure that Cupelix had given him.

"That's right," said Stutts, totting up his numbers.

They walked forward with Sturm leading. Wingover hovered at the rear, since the lamp dazzled his piercing eye sight. He could see through the velvet darkness, so he was able to keep their entry hole in sight.

"Ow," Sturm muttered, shifting the lamp to his other hand. The ring was getting very hot.

"This way! Turn this way!" said Roperig suddenly. Sturm turned to his left.

"What was it?" he asked.

"Something moved over there. I didn't see it very clearly."

A jet black thing scuttled out of the niche behind the eggs and leaped into the air toward Sturm's light. He recoiled clumsily and dropped the lamp. Something small and furry feeling brushed over his foot and was gone. The gnomes were all yelling and stamping their feet.

"Silence! Silence, I say!" Sturm roared. He found the lost lamp. Its fuel was almost extinguished. Only a faint corona of blue flame circled the lump of grease. Sturm sheltered the tiny fire with his hands and it grew brighter. He picked up the lamp and faced the gnomes.

They were not scared in the least. Wingover had bounded forward from his place in line and planted his foot on the thing that had burst from the egg niche. It squirmed under his toes, trying to get away. At first sight, it resembled a fat, hairy spider, but as Sturm brought the lamp nearer, they all recognized it.

"It's a glove!" said Stutts.

"One of Kit's gloves," said Sturm, recognizing the pattern of stitching on the back. "It's one of a pair she left behind on the Cloudmaster when we went off on our ore expedition."

"How'd it get here?" asked Rainspot. Birdcall twittered a question of his own.

"He says, 'Why is it alive?"' Stutts added.

Rainspot grasped the glove by its 'fingers' and told

Wingover to lift his foot. The weather seer brought the wriggling thing to eye level and grunted. "Strong little thing!"

Sighter glared through his ever-present lens. "This glove is made of cowhide and rabbit fur, but the seams have disap peared." He pressed a finger into the soft leather side. "It has a heartbeat."

"Ridiculous," Flash said. "Gloves don't come to life."

"On Lunitari?" said Stutts. "Why not?"

Sturm remembered Cupelix's remark about the cumula tive life force of all the dragon eggs being responsible for the intense aura of magical power on Lunitari. He offered this bit of information to the gnomes.

"Ah," said Sighter with a sage expression. "The level of magical force must be particularly high in these caverns. " dare say, any animal or vegetable product left down here long enough might develop a life of its own."

Roperig looked down at his own pigskin boots. "You mean my shoes might take on life and run away with me?"

"We shan't be down here long enough for that to happen,"

Stutts assured him.

Rainspot put the glove down on its back and pinned it with his foot. Cutwood suggested that they dissect it to see what internal organs it had.

"Let it go. It's harmless," said Sturm. "We don't have time to fool around with it."

Rainspot raised his foot and the glove flipped over. It scampered into the recesses of the egg niches.

"I wonder," said Flash, "what a living glove eats?"

"Finger food," said Fitter. Roperig cuffed him lightly on the head and his hand promptly stuck there.

"Are you finished?" Sturm said impatiently. "There's more of the cave to see, and I don't think the lamp will last much longer." Indeed, even as he spoke, silver drops of mol ten tin dripped off the lamp's front end.

They hurried down the tunnel. Sounds of movement came to them and they halted. The rear legs and teardrop abdomen of a working Micone maneuvered out of the dark ness. The Micone sensed their light and scuttled around to face the intruders. Its antennae almost straightened while it studied the man and gnomes. Sturm had a momentary flash of fear. If the Micone attacked, his lone sword would never prevail.

The Micone kinked its feelers again and turned away.

Sturm and the gnomes let out a collective sigh of relief.

They inched past the giant, who was busy chipping away glassy 'dew' from the shelf below a row of eggs. A fragment of the clear encrustation landed at Rainspot's feet, and he pounced on it. He dropped it in a tiny silk bag and pulled the drawstring. "For later analysis," he said.

The caverns gave no sign of ending, and after penetrating a hundred yards or so into them, Sturm called a halt. The place they stopped was thick with Micones, and the giant ants swept past the explorers without any heed. Cupelix had told the ants to ignore them, and the ants obeyed, in their precise, unswerving way.

"We'd best go back before we get trampled," Sturm said, dodging a flurry of Micone legs.

Rainspot drifted away from the others to where the ants were engaged in cleaning the dragon eggs. As they chipped and anointed and turned the blockish eggs, the ants exposed the undersides of the eggs to the air. Some of the shells had a scabrous layer peeling off, and the ants scrupulously removed this dead layer. It was this cast-off shell that made the parchmentlike skin they'd found in the first chamber.

Rainspot picked up a sheaf of cast-offs below the lowest egg shelf. A Micone turned sharply toward him and snatched the leathery shell fragment with its mandibles.

"No!" said Rainspot stubbornly. "It's mine, you threw it away!" The gnome dug in his toes and pulled. The shell wouldn't yield and neither would the ant. Rainspot got angry. His enveloping cloud thickened and lightning flashed within it.

"Rainspot, leave it. We'll take samples from the outer cave," said Wingover. But the Micone's implacable resist ance made the usually mild gnome madder and madder. A cyclone four feet wide lashed at the ant, and miniature claps of thunder reverberated through the cave.

Sturm entered Rainspot's tiny tempest. To his surprise, the whirling rain was hot. "Rainspot!" he said, grabbing the little fellow by the shoulders. "Let go!"