Then, the voice said, and the ground over which the young man walked was suddenly covered with glittering blades of ice, then I shall tell you what to say to them; they shall hear the words of your mouth as prophecy, and in the time that follows, we shall be among you.

"According to your will, Sargonnas," the young man said.

"Sargonnas!" I exclaimed, tearing my gaze from the stones.

"Sargonnas the Consort," Shardos said quietly. "Prince in the Dark Pantheon."

"I know where you are in the story, Solamnic," Longwalker said, "because I have seen it so many times. What they transacted in that ill hour, Namer and god, only the gods themselves know."

We looked at one another uneasily. At last the big Plainsman smiled faintly.

"Tarry but a while longer, Sir Galen, for the story has a middle and an end."

And in the stones were the rocky foothills, a circle of boulders in a bleak country.

The Plainsmen surrounded the Namer, and a chieftain pronounced the charges and the crimes.

"False prophecy," they said, and "corrupting the young." "Conjury," and "rending the earth."

"'Rending the earth'?" I asked.

"Who is to say that the tremors in the mountains are not his doing still?" Longwalker asked. "His, and that of the evil prince he serves."

I started to return my eyes to the stones, but the Plainsman waved his big hand.

"You have seen enough," he said. "Do not look into what follows, for the ceremony is private when a man is cast from the tribe.

'The stones in the Namer's Crown were divided among the elders, his eye was taken according to the Old Ways, and the wound seared by the white-hot blade of the spear."

I gasped and swallowed hard. It was all a bit fierce and nomadic for my tastes.

"Wh-Why the eye, Longwalker? Why not just… muster the poor lad out? It seems a little harsh, this ceremony of exile and the cutting that goes with it."

"It's actually kind, Galen," the juggler added, stirring from his place by the fire and stretching his spindly old legs. Not for the first time, I wondered how Shardos had learned all of these tales.

"Kind in a rather stark, Plainsman way, that is," the old man continued. "For though it maims the outcast, it also protects him, in an odd fashion. It is an outward sign to the other Plainsmen among whom he wanders that, though he is an exile and cannot be taken in, he is not to be harmed, for perpetually he suffers for his wrongdoings."

"It still sounds harsh to me," I insisted, and Longwalker frowned.

"What," he asked, "would Solamnics do to one who betrayed their Order?"

I was not sure, but I admitted that the Measure would call for something drastic, something with a taste of high drama, no doubt.

"As I thought," Longwalker replied with satisfaction, and he told me the rest of the story: how the outcast left the Que-Nara, but not without stealing the crown and one of the opals. How he wandered for months, guided alone over the desolate landscape by hints and suggestions from the voice that had taken up residence in the cold silver of the crown on his head, which spoke to him somehow through the single, unnaturally glimmering opal.

How after weeks of wandering, the young Namer was not sure whether the voice in his ear was that of a god or a stone or a crown, or perhaps the softer voice of his own prophetic gifts, and how he praised himself for his "insight and foreknowledge." How the wanderings would take him by the way he knew as the Que-Nara Namer-the secret way unto the rest of the tribe, buried deep under the ground.

"Almost at the moment he reached them," Longwalker said, his dark eyes bleak and ominous, "the Rending raced along the spine of the world and the earth burst open, and nothing has ever been the same…"

"You don't believe," I insisted, "that this Namer, this-"

"Firebrand, he calls himself."

"Did this… Firebrand… have anything to do with the Rending?"

Longwalker shook his head. "I cannot say. It also puzzles me how he has lived through the lives of six chieftains."

It puzzled me, too, but there was a whiff of mystery and murk about anything to do with the Plainsmen.

"How… how do you know he is with them? I mean, with the Que-Nara beneath the ground?"

"In the last few weeks, I have seen him, spoken to him," Longwalker said, with a quick motion drawing a warding sign in the dust by the fire. "He laughs at us and says that his wounded eye has stared down our weapons."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"That the people below took him in despite his wounded eye. That his eye must have deceived them, then his words, for now they follow him without question, and that the time will come when his crown is complete-complete beyond the twelve, he says, for it is his plan to set the thirteenth stone and bring forth the power of life and death."

"And I am walking right into his hands, bringing him the very thing he seeks?" I asked apprehensively.

"The very thing he seeks may be his undoing,"

Longwalker mused. "You see, Firebrand is right, for I am powerless against him. His taken eye is my undoing, in a way. For even if I knew the way beneath the mountains into his dark kingdom-which was a way lost to us when Firebrand took the knowledge with him-I could not harm him, tor the blade that marked him has stayed my hand."

I crouched in a puzzled silence. Beside me, Shardos cleared his throat uncomfortably and stirred the fire with a stick.

"Do you mean you cannot lay hands on Firebrand? Not even to save your people?"

"Not even if he harms my people. For he will harm them by stealing their memory, and if I lay hands on him, I am saying that memory is not worth the stealing.

"But," he continued, green mischief deep in his eyes like fire in the opals, "that is not to say I cannot sit back and let someone else-someone not of the People-lay hands on him. Nor that I would not be pleased to do so. For the hands that destroy Firebrand will carry history. They will bind wounds and unite a sundered nation. Perhaps it is my task only to watch them at their business. Sometimes the doing is the waiting."

Moths sailed through the baffled attic between my ears.

"I'm sorry, Longwalker," I said finally, "but I don't really have the stuff of history and all. I'm afraid that all I'm after is my brother Brithelm, and once I have him, my quarrel with this Firebrand is more than likely over. I am no hero."

As if to prove my point, I told the Plainsman the whole unsavory story of my opals: how the stones came to me long ago from the coffers of an evil illusionist, as a bribe to betray Bayard Brightblade, not to mention my family. I dragged the gems through the whole adventure with the Scorpion-from the dusty rooms of my castle to the illusory rooms of his, and despite their time in my possession, I knew little more about them than I did when I first grasped them in my money-hungry clutches.

"I survived, of course, Longwalker," I concluded, squinting into the darkness of the tall shape now standing just outside the firelight's edge. "But it took all my ingenuity and soft words and courage, finally, to pry me out of the Scorpion's clutches. I fear I am just about spent of all those virtues."

"But you survived, of course. And that in itself is something. The night is long," he added abruptly, "and ahead of you a longer journey. By now you must know we have no intent to harm you. Trusting that, you should sleep calmly in your camp tonight."

He smiled his ragged, broken smile and said, "We heard about these stones, that Firebrand awaited their coming. It is our nature to be concerned when such things take place. So we wanted to find them, to see that the hands into which they have fallen are… gentle hands that may guard that stillness well."

"I know of these things, too, Longwalker," I said. "I have seen the fires from a distance, in the mountains and in the gems. A brother of mine is somewhere beneath those mountains, and another…" I choked.