Jefri said the strangest things; sometimes Amdi was just misunderstanding — but sometimes they were literal truth. Did the humans really have ships that never came to ground? Where did they go then? Amdi could almost feel new scales of reference clicking together in his mind. Mr. Steel's geography globe represented not the world, but something very, very small in the true scheme of things.

"I know you wouldn't leave us. But you can see how Mr. Steel might be afraid. He can't even talk to you except through me. We have to show him that we can be trusted."

"I guess."

"If you and I could get the radios working, that might help. I know my teachers haven't figured them out. Mr. Steel has one, but I don't think he understands it either."

"Yeah. If we could get the other one to work…"

That afternoon the guards got a break: their two charges came in from the cold early. The guards didn't question their good fortune.

Steel's den had originally been the Master's. It was very different from the castle's meeting halls. Except for choirs, only a single pack would fit in any room. It was not exactly that the suite was small. There were five rooms, not counting the bath. But except for the library, none was more than fifteen feet across. The ceilings were low, less than five feet; there was no space for visitor balconies. Servants were always on call in the two hallways that shared a wall with the quarters. The dining room, bedroom, and bath had servant hatches, just big enough to give orders and to receive food and drink, or preening oils.

The main entrance was guarded on the outside by three trooper packs. Of course, the Master would never live in a den with only one exit. Steel had found eight secret hatches (three in the sleeping quarters). These could only be opened from within; they led to the maze that Flenser had built within the solid rock of the castle's walls. No one knew the extent of that maze, not even the Master. Steel had rearranged parts of it — in particular the passages leading from this den — in the years since Flenser's departure.

The quarters were nearly impregnable. Even if the castle fell, the rooms' larder was stocked for half a year; ventilation was provided by a network of channels almost as extensive as the Master's secret passages. All in all, Steel felt tolerably safe here. There was always the possibility that there were more than eight secret entrances, perhaps one that could be opened from the other side.

And of course choirs were out of the question, here or anywhere. The only extrapack sex that Steel indulged was with singletons — and that as part of his experiments; it was just too dangerous to mix one's self with others.

After dinner, Steel drifted into the library. He relaxed around his reading desk. Two of him sipped brandy while another smoked southern herbs. This was pleasure, but also calculation: Steel knew just what vices, applied to just which members, would raise his imagination to its keenest pitch.

… And more and more he was coming to see that imagination was at least as important as raw intelligence in the present game. The desk between him was covered with maps, reports from the south, internal security memos. But lying in all the silkpaper, like an ivory slug in its nest, was the alien radio. They had recovered two from the ship. Steel picked the thing up, ran a nose along the smooth, curved sides. Only the finest stressed wood could match its grace — and that in musical instruments or statuary. Yet the mantis claimed this could be used to talk across dozens of miles, as fast as a ray of sunlight. If true… Steel wondered how many lost battles might have been won with these, and how many new conquests might be safely undertaken. And if they could learn to make far-talkers… the Movement's subordinates, scattered across the continent, would be as near as the guards by Steel's den. No force in the world could stand against them.

Steel picked up the latest report from Woodcarvers. In many ways they were having more success with their mantis than Steel with his. Apparently theirs was almost an adult. More important, it had a miraculous library that could be interrogated almost like a living being. There had been three other datasets. Steel's whitejackets had found what was left of them in the burnt-out wreckage around the ship. Jefri thought that the ship's processors were a little like a dataset, "only stupider" (Amdi's best translation), but so far the processors had been useless.

But with their dataset, several on Woodcarver's staff had already learned mantis talk. Each day they discovered more about the aliens' civilization than Steel's people could in ten. He smiled. They didn't know that all the important stuff was being faithfully reported to Hidden Island… For now he would let them keep their toy, and their mantis; they had noticed several things that would have slipped by him. Still he damned the luck.

Steel paged through the report… Good. The alien at Woodcarvers was still uncooperative. He felt his smile spreading into laughter: it was a small thing, the creature's word for the Packs. The report tried to spell out the word. It didn't matter; the translation was "claws" or "tines". The mantis had a special horror for the tine attachments that soldiers wore on their forepaws. Steel licked pensively at the black enamel of his manicured claws. Interesting. Claws could be threatening things, but they were also part of being a person. Tines were their mechanical extension, and potentially more frightening. It was the sort of name you might imagine for an elite killer force… but never for all the Packs. After all, the race of packs included the weak, the poor, the kindly, the naive… as well as persons like Steel and Flenser. It said something very interesting about mantis psychology that the creature picked tines as the characterizing feature of the Packs.

Steel eased back from his desk and gazed at the landscape painted around the library's walls. It was a view from the castle towers. Behind the paint, the walls were lined with patterns of mica and quartz and fiber; the echoes gave a vague sense of what you might hear looking out across the stone and emptiness. Combination audiovisuals were rare in the castle, and this one was especially well-done; Steel could feel himself relaxing as he stared at it. He drifted for a moment, letting his imagination roam.

Tines. I like it. If that was the alien's image, then it was the right name for his race. His pitiful advisors — and sometimes even the Flenser Fragment — were still intimidated by the ship from the stars. No question, there was power in that ship beyond anything in the world. But after the first panic, Steel understood that the aliens were not supernaturally gifted. They had simply progressed — in the sense that Woodcarver made so much of — beyond the current state of his world's science. Certainly the alien civilization was a deadly unknown right now. Indeed, it might be capable of burning this world to a cinder. Yet the more Steel saw, the more he realized the intrinsic inferiority of the aliens: What a bizarre abortion they were, a race of intelligent singletons. Every one of them must be raised from nothing, like a wholly newborn pack. Memories could only be passed by voice and writing. Each creature grew and aged and even died as a whole. Despite himself, Steel shivered.

He had come a long way from the first misconceptions, the first fears. For more than a thirty days now he'd been scheming to use the star ship to rule the world. The mantis said that ship was signaling others. That had reduced some of his Servants to incontinence. So. Sooner or later, more ships would arrive. Ruling the world was no longer a practical goal… It was time to aim higher, at goals even the Master had never imagined. Take away their technical advantages and the mantis folk were such finite, fragile beings. They should be easy to conquer. Even they seemed to realize this. Tines, the creature calls us. So it will be. Some day Tines would pace between the stars and rule there.