“Yes,” Torlyri said. “Everything is changing.”

Afterward Taniane wondered if she had been too open, too naive. Things said to Torlyri might well go straight back to Koshmar; and Taniane found that thought troubling.

She shrugged and put her hands to her body. She slipped them over her smooth strong flanks and up over the firm little new breasts nestling in her lustrous auburn fur. Her growing body ached. A horde of unanswered questions bubbled in her mind. Time would answer them all, she thought. She needed now to study the art of waiting.

The plaza of the three dozen blue towers in Emakkis Boldirinthe never left Hresh’ mind, waking or dreaming. Often he awakened, shivering and sweaty, with that scene of Vengiboneeza alive once more glowing and throbbing in his soul, the crowded marketplace, those beings of the Six Peoples jostling against one another.

But it was many weeks before he would allow himself to return to it. He knew he was not ready. With all his strength he held himself back.

Eagerness and curiosity ate at him like a ravening worm. But he did not go to the towers. It was hard keeping away, but he did not go. He went everywhere else, anywhere, taking new turns and byways through the city. He found a terrace of radiant pools, glimmering and warm. He found an array of tall slender stone obelisks set in a diamond pattern around an onyx-rimmed pit of utter darkness, and when he dropped a rock into the pit it fell and fell and fell, without ever striking bottom. In the district of Dawinno Weiawala he found a somber brooding greenish-black edifice of enormous size that he called the Citadel, unlike any other building in the city, standing alone on a lofty greenswarded hillside and rising above Vengiboneeza like a guardian. Its length was far greater than its height, its walls were without ornament except for ten huge columns running along each of its two long sides to support its steep-vaulted roof, and it had neither doors nor windows, which made it seem blind and unapproachable, an inward-looking structure. Its function was not only unknown but, apparently, unknowable, though plainly it had been a structure of some high significance. Hresh could find no way of entering it, though he tried several times. Such discoveries as these led him nowhere useful.

“Why haven’t you gone back to that vault yet?” asked Taniane, who had heard of it from Haniman.

“I’m not yet ready,” Hresh said. “First I must master the Barak Dayir.” And gave her a look that closed the discussion.

That was the problem: the Barak Dayir. Without it there was no point in returning, for he was convinced that only through the mastery of the Wonderstone could he solve the riddle of that machine of visions in the vault beneath the tower. But the Wonderstone made him uneasy — he, Hresh-full-of-questions! — as did few other things. He had never actually seen it. Like the rest of the People he knew of it by repute, that there was some fabulous instrument that the chronicler kept, made of star-stuff, which had extraordinary properties but which would snuff the life of anyone who used it wrongly. Thaggoran had called it the key to the deepest realms of understanding; but Thaggoran had taken care not to let Hresh see him using it, careless though he sometimes was in guarding the other secrets of his office, and Thaggoran too had spoken of its perils, saying that he did not dare to resort to it often. Since becoming chronicler himself Hresh had not yet been able to bring himself even to look upon it. Unable to find in his books of chronicles any sort of guide to its function or proper use, he left it alone. When it came to the Barak Dayir his natural curiosity gave way to his fear of dying too soon, of dying before he had learned all that he hoped to learn.

Now at last Hresh took the velvet pouch from the casket of the chronicles for the first time, and held it cupped in both his hands. It was small, small enough to fit in the palm of one hand, and it felt faintly warm.

Star-stuff, they said. What did that mean?

He had not known what a star was until the Time of Coming Forth, when he had seen them for the first time in the sky, those magical bright points of light burning in the darkness. Globes of fire is what they are, Thaggoran had said. If they were closer to us they would blaze with the heat of the sun. Was the Wonderstone a piece of a star?

But the stars that gave light, Hresh knew, were not the only stars in the sky. There were the death-stars, too, those dark terrible things that had come crashing down upon the world to bring the Long Winter. They weren’t made of fire at all; they were spheres of ice and rock, so the chronicles said. Hresh hefted the pouch of the Barak Dayir. A piece of a death-star in here? He tried to imagine the furious trajectory of the plummeting star, the thunderous impact with Earth, the clouds of dust and smoke rising to blot out the light of the sun and bring the deadly cold. This? This little thing in his hand, a fragment of that monstrous calamity?

The chronicles also said that the distant stars of heaven had worlds in attendance on them, just as this world where the People dwelled was in attendance on its sun. Those other worlds had peoples of many kinds. Maybe, Hresh thought, the stone had been made on a world of one of those other stars. He touched it through the pouch and let some other world float into his mind, yellow sky, turbulent purple rivers, a red sun smoldering by day, six crystalline moons singing in the heavens by night.

Guesses. All guesses. He was stumbling about in the dark. There was information of all kinds in the chronicles but nothing that could help him with this.

He made the Five Signs. He called on Yissou, and then on Dawinno, who had always shown special favor to him. Then, slowly, fearfully, he took a deep breath and drew the Barak Dayir from its pouch, thinking that he might be taking his death into his hands. He was surprised at how calm he was.

If it killed him, well, then, it would kill him. A voice tolling like a gong in his head told him that he must do this all the same, that he owed it to his tribe and to himself finally to attempt the mysteries of this thing, whatever the risk.

The Barak Dayir was pleasing to look at, but not extraordinary. It was a piece of polished stone longer than it was broad, brown with purple mottlings, tapering to a point. Though it seemed so soft that it could be marred at a finger’s touch, it was in fact hard, terribly hard. Except that it was so ornamental, it could have been a small spearhead. There was a dizzying network of intricately carved lines along its edges, forming a pattern so fine that it was all but impossible for him to make it out, keen as his vision was.

He held it in his left hand for a while, then in his right. It was warm, but not unpleasantly so. There was something almost benign about it. At least it did not appear to be planning to kill him. His fear of it diminished moment by moment, yet he continued to regard it with respect.

What did you do with it? How did you make it obey you?

He put it to his ear, thinking perhaps to hear a voice within it, but there was no sound. He pressed it between both his hands, to no avail, and held it firmly against his breast. He spoke to it, telling it his name and declaring that he was the successor to Thaggoran as chronicler. None of this produced any response. Then at last Hresh did the most obvious thing, the one thing he had held back from doing, and curled his sensing-organ about it and applied his second sight.

This time he heard distant music, strange, unearthly, not from the stone itself but from all about him. The music entered his soul and filled it to its depths, engulfing him, intoxicating him. He felt a hot prickling at the root of his tongue and his fur grew light, floating outward, spreading about him like mist. The sensations were so intense that they were frightening. Hastily Hresh released the Wonderstone and the music stopped. Putting his sensing-organ to it again brought the music back. But once more a moment was all he could stand. Again he broke the contact. All those tales of the power of the Barak Dayir had not been lies. The thing had great strength and magic to it.