"Now they will follow you…"

Of course he had thought it was the Que-Nara that Sargonnas meant. But they were a dirty, hide-smelling people for whom a young man's prophecy was raving and ambition. "The future is deadly," the elders warned, "because we expect so much of it."

He scorned them. Their words were the howling of toothless jackals.

So it became the young to whom he prophesied. They came to him with troubles that he thought to be of little consequence, with questions about a flickering romance or the outcome of a first hunt. He told them what they wanted to hear, said, "Yes, the girl loves you" or "Yes, the antelope waits for your spear," and the children liked what they heard and followed him.

Until the gaunt little boy-the youngest son of the Second Chieftain, a lad who had not seen his tenth summer-got it into his head to hunt the wild dogs and came to receive the blessing of the Namer.

He prophesied the best of fortunes and blessed the lad without ever looking up from the opals in the crown. He told himself later that he would not have changed his mind even had he looked up and seen the boy, nine years old and the size of a child of five. When the boy had asked his blessing, he would still have granted it, for the god in the stones was saying, "He is ready, he is ready, let him go…"

They returned the next morning carrying the boy, stretched out on a leather shield, his neck opened by the feeding dogs, his eyes staring blankly into the red moon, and the white, and then into the black moon that only philosophers know. They brought home the boy, and the chieftain, beside himself, had summoned the Namer.

Banishment is simple enough among the Plainsmen. In the center of a circle they placed him. The elders surrounded him and recited his wrongdoings, then the tribe left him. It was the most unceremonious of ceremonies.

Except for the taking of the eye.

Even now, as he sat three miles below and three centuries after, Firebrand remembered the blade, held over the fire till it reached a blue hotness, and how it felt as it passed into his eye, blinding him and searing the wound closed in one motion as the women looked on and chanted the Song of Lost Sight:

"Let the eye surrender, if it offends the People,

Let its last song ride on the blade of the chieftains,

Let it fall like a dark stone into memory,

And in memory let it reside and dwell,

Phantom of light on the wall of the heart

Stored like a dead thing in amber.

Let its last song ride on the blade of the chieftains…"

He remembered the song, and the last sight of the blade, then a dazzlement of stars that preceded the pain and the darkness.

Then the darkness lifted, and he was walking.

It was a rocky country, its farmlands tilled and settled. Just where it lay, he did not know.

Nor did he know how the crown, stripped of all opals but one, had fallen back into his hand.

One gem was all he needed, though. For through it, the dark voice explained everything: how taking the crown was not theft, and the death of the boy not negligence, but both were the tests he had passed to enter the prophecy.

"Enter the prophecy?" he had asked bitterly as he wandered the pastured land like a monster, scrambling painfully over fences, hearing by the distant farmhouses the outcry of wary dogs. "I left a dead boy and a home and a people and even my eye behind me… to enter a prophecy?"

But the stone was silent. There was dark, and daylight, and again dark before it spoke again.

These mountains toward which you are traveling… it whispered as the Namer looked up through the foothills north into the rough, violet rays and above into mist and cloud. The Vingaards. Do you remember the Vingaards?

He remembered the knife. Nothing more. And yet… something the old Namer had taught him…

"The Que-Nara," he said. "Those who dwell under the mountains…"

The stone was quiet. A taut silence played across its surface.

"But the Que-Nara remain the Que-Nara," he protested, kneeling to drink from a creek that tumbled out of the foothills. "They will see that my eye has been taken, and they will turn me away."

They call themselves Que-Tana now, the stone replied. But whether Que-Tana or Que-Nara, they will take you. Of that be sure.

"But how do I find my way to them?" he asked.

Remember, the stone replied. Remember the old Namer's teachings. And under his damaged sight, a light rose from the center of the opal. Within it, he saw a clearing: four vallenwoods, their branches intertwined above an ancient dolmen and a path running between the stones down a hill into a network of vines, which covered…

A hole in the cliff face. Darkness lay at the bottom of it.

"But even if they take me in, those who wounded me will know, will see it in the stones they took from me."

But you have the crown, the voice soothed. Those who wounded you will see no more than you will let them see.

A raptor wheeled overhead, its feathers black on brown on white. It shrieked and swooped, and in a moment rose out of the tall grass, something small and gray in its talons.

The shriek sounded like a call to the Namer, and for a moment, he mistrusted his senses. But the bird circled above him, drifting lazily westward and westward. He followed it dreamily, losing it once as it passed over a strand of poplar but finding it again weaving among bush and evergreen over higher ground, its prey now motionless in its clutches.

Once he looked down into the opal, and within it saw the fiery image of the same bird passing over the same trees in the same country. There would have been a time years ago when he would have dismissed it as coincidence or illusion or even temptation, but now he had followed the call of the stone too long to question. He took the godseye at its word and followed the design of the dark one within it, as both birds-the real one in the air and the cloudy one in the stone-settled at the same time in the branches of a vallenwood…

One of four vallenwoods, their branches intertwined above an ancient dolmen and a path running between the stones down a hill into a network of vines, which covered…

A hole in the cliff face. Darkness lay at the bottom of it.

It was a dry season in which he found the way to the land of the Que-Tana. The twigs he tied together with dried grass and reed popped and sputtered as he passed his hand over them.

For as if to give him solace at the loss of his eye, the dark god had given him fire in his hands-a slow, flameless burning that had guided him by night when touched to a torch, had warmed him at his solitary campsite when he had touched kindling. But now, as he held the dried grass, the fire passed through it, burning it far too quickly to provide a lingering light.

He was not twenty paces down the passage when the light gave out.

Disheartened, he crouched in the canceling darkness, breathing rapidly and angrily. From somewhere ahead of him, he could hear the distant sound of voices and metal on rock. But he knew sound carried deceptively in the dark, that distance and direction tied themselves into knots. Following his ear alone could lead him over precipices or into the lair of the vespertile.

Fearing to go forward and resolving not to go back, he crouched there for what must have been an hour. Only then did the stone begin to glow.

Soon the godseye gave off enough light to see by. Placing the crown on his head, the Namer descended the narrow corridor. Twice the passage forked, and both times the light fluttered and went out when he followed the path he had chosen, only to rekindle when he retraced his steps and followed the other path.