Then he understood why old Thaggoran had feared the Wonderstone, and why he had said it was dangerous. It was not that the stone would do any sort of harm to its user; but so great was its force that it could destroy all judgment, and the user, in the blindness of his borrowed godliness, might well do harm to himself. Overreaching was the danger.

With an effort that was greater than any he had made before in his life, Hresh hauled himself in. He descended to his body; he relinquished his godhead. He shrank down into himself until he lay limp and sweat-soaked on the stone floor of the chamber, quivering, stunned.

After a time he picked himself up and restored the stone to its pouch and hid it away where it belonged, and locked the casket with more than ordinary care. Rain was still falling heavily outside, perhaps even more heavily than before, although it seemed to him that it was less turbulent now, an obstinate hammering downpour but one with little wildness about it. The sky still was dark but he thought he saw a thinning of the darkness in places.

Heedless of the rain, he trotted back across to Koshmar’s house. Torlyri was there now, and the two of them were huddling together like frightened beasts. Hresh had never seen either of them like that, eyes wide, teeth chattering, fur standing on end. When he came in they made an attempt at regaining some self-possession, but their terror still was manifest.

In a hushed voice Koshmar said, “Is this the end of the world?”

Hresh stared. “What do you mean?”

“I thought the sky would split open. I thought the lightning would set the mountain on fire.”

“And the thunder,” said Torlyri. “It was like a great drum. I thought it would deafen me.”

“I heard nothing,” Hresh said. “I saw nothing. I was busy in the temple, seeking the answers you required of me.”

“You didn’t hear anything?” Torlyri asked. “Not a thing?” They were still shivering. It must have been truly cataclysmic. They couldn’t understand how he had failed to notice what was taking place.

“Perhaps the stone shielded me from the sounds of the storm,” he said.

But he knew that that was only a part of the truth, and a small part at that. Whatever tremendous uproar had just happened had been of his own making. It was he who had brought the great thunder and the terrible lightning, while he was using — and perhaps somewhat misusing — the Wonderstone. Of course he had not heard the sounds of the storm at its height. He had been the sounds of the storm at its height.

It would not be good for them to know that, though.

He said simply, “I have the assurance you seek, Koshmar. The Wonderstone has shown me the boundaries of the storm. All is clear to the east and to the west, and the neighboring lands still are fair and mild. This is not the return of the Long Winter, nor has any new death-star fallen. It’s only a storm, Koshmar, a very bad storm but not one that will endure much longer. There’s nothing to fear.”

And, indeed, within hours the winds were dying down, the rain was slackening, patches of blue were showing through the blackness overhead.

After the storm the weather in Vengiboneeza became warmer even than it had been before. Flowers of a dozen kinds burst into explosions of color on the hills above the city, trees grew so quickly you could almost see their boughs waving like arms, and the air was heavy and rich with scent. It was as if those three days of black skies and howling winds had been the final convulsive throes of the Long Winter, and now it was truly the New Springtime and would be forever more.

But Koshmar was troubled, and her distress was deepening from day to day.

There was a private place that she had found for herself in a ruined part of the city, a place that she called her chapel and kept so secret that not even Torlyri knew about it. It was the place where she went when she was uncertain and needed the special counsel of the gods or of her predecessors as chieftain — the equivalent for her of the black stone in the wall of the cocoon’s central chamber.

At first the chapel had been a diversion for her, a kind of amusement, that she visited at widely spaced intervals and forgot for weeks at a time. But now Koshmar found herself drawn to it almost every day, slipping away furtively in the early hours of the morning, or late at night, or even at midday sometimes instead of holding the regular judgment-sessions that were her custom as chieftain.

To reach her chapel Koshmar went eastward a little way toward the mountains, then north past a forbidding black tower that had broken to a jagged stump in some ancient earthquake, and down five flights of stupendous stairs which led to a saucer-shaped plaza of pink marble flagstones. At the far side of the plaza were five intact arches and six crumbled ones, each of which must have been the entryway to one of eleven rooms of some high ceremonial importance in the days of the Great World. Now they were empty, but all but two or three still were rich with gilded wall-carvings, strange and beautiful, of figures with bodies that seemed almost human and the faces of suns, of wraith-like animals with elongated limbs, of interwoven wreaths of unearthly long-stemmed plants. Pivoted stone doors gave admission to these chambers.

Koshmar had found out accidentally how to operate the doors, and she had chosen the midmost of the eleven rooms for her chapel. In it she had constructed a little altar and arranged objects of ritual importance or of sentimental value around it; and here she knelt in secret solitude, here she spoke with the gods — or, more usually, with Thekmur, who had been chieftain before her.

Kneeling now, she made an arrangement of dried flowers and set it afire. The fragrant smoke went up to Thekmur. Koshmar was wearing the ivory-hued mask of the former chieftain Sismoil, flat and glossy, with the merest of slits for her eyes.

“How much longer will it be,” she asked the dead chieftain, “before we discover why we are here? You dwell with the gods now, O Thekmur. Tell me what it is that the gods intend for us. And what they intend for me, O Thekmur.”

She could almost see the soul of Thekmur hovering in the air before her. Each time she came to the chapel Thekmur was a little more visible. A time would come, Koshmar hoped, when Thekmur’s apparition was as real and as solid for her as her own arm.

Thekmur had been a small, compact woman, very strong of body and of mind, with grayish fur and gray eyes that looked outward in a calm, unwavering way. She had loved many men and many women also, and had ruled the tribe with quiet competence until the coming of her death-day; and then she had gone through the cocoon’s hatch without a quiver. Koshmar sometimes thought that she herself was only a pale shadow of Thekmur, a poor substitute for the departed chieftain, though such dark moments came only rarely to her.

“The gods will not speak to me,” she told Thekmur. “I send the boy Hresh out and he finds nothing, and now he has found something and nothing so far has come of it. And there was a terrible storm, and during the storm the sky split and the lightning was frightful. What does all this mean? What is it that we are waiting for here? Answer me, O Thekmur. Answer me just this once.”

The smoke curled upward and the faint image of Thekmur swirled in the darkness. But Thekmur did not speak; or if she did, Koshmar was unable to hear her words.

Only gradually over the past months had Koshmar come to realize that she was sliding into gray despair, or something as close to despair as she was capable of feeling. Life had lost its forward thrust here in Vengiboneeza. Everything seemed to be standing still. And the happiness that she had felt in the first busy time of organizing the new life in the city had all melted away now.