He emerged into the upper level. Haniman stood beside the slab, arms folded, regarding him sourly.

“I don’t care if you are the chronicler,” he said. “You touch me like that again and I’ll push you into the sea.”

“I had to get your attention somehow. I was calling and you weren’t answering.”

“You weren’t calling loudly enough, maybe.”

“Enough to knock rocks loose from the cavern roof.”

Haniman shrugged. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

“You were asleep.”

“Was I? How could I have been? You weren’t down there more than two minutes.”

Hresh stared in amazement. “Are you serious?”

“Two minutes! No more than that! You went down below, I laid myself down to rest, and maybe I closed my eyes for a moment, and next thing I knew there you were, grubbing around inside my mind in that filthy way, and—” Haniman halted abruptly. He walked toward Hresh and peered at him closely. “Yissou! What happened to you down there?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look a hundred years old. Your eyes are strange. Your whole face — it’s all different. As if you’ve been hollowed out inside.”

“I had a vision,” Hresh said. He touched his face, wondering if it had been transformed as Haniman said, wondering if he looked as old as old Thaggoran now. But his face felt the same as ever. Whatever transformation he had undergone must have been within.

“What did you see?”

Hresh hesitated. “Things,” he said. “Strange things. Disturbing things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Never mind,” said Hresh. “Let’s get out of this place.”

A great weariness gripped him on the journey back to the settlement. He had to pause often to rest, and once he became sick and knelt behind a broken column, gagging and retching for an almost interminable spell. He felt old and feeble all the rest of the way, lagging behind as Haniman went bounding ahead, and then feeling abashed as Haniman found it necessary to come back and look for him. Only as they reached the settlement itself did his youthful vitality assert itself and his strength begin to return. He moved more quickly, he paused less frequently, though Haniman still turned again and again to beckon impatiently.

Hresh knew he would be a long time pondering what he had learned in the vault of the plaza of thirty-six towers. The jeering hissing laughter of that sapphire-eyes artificial by the south gate swelled in his soul until it seemed to fill the world.

Little monkey, little monkey, little monkey.

It was impossible now for him to clear his spirit of that bitter mockery. And yet he had found the key to lost Vengiboneeza as well. A great triumph, a shattering defeat, each wrapped in the other: it bewildered him. He resolved to keep his own counsel until he came to some deeper comprehension of these matters. But the treasures of Vengiboneeza lay open to him now. He had to tell Koshmar at least that much.

Just outside the chieftain’s house he came upon Torlyri.

“Where’s Koshmar?”

The offering-woman pointed toward the house. “Inside.”

“I’ve got things to tell her! Marvelous things!”

“She’s busy now,” Torlyri said. “You’ll have to wait a little while.”

“Wait? Wait?” It was like a bucket of cold water in the face. “What do you mean, wait? I saw the Great World, Torlyri! I saw it alive, as it had been! And I know now where everything we came to Vengiboneeza to find is hidden!” In his sudden enthusiasm his fatigue and confusion fell away. “Listen, go to her, will you? Tell her to drop whatever she’s doing and let me in. All right? Will you? What’s she so busy doing, anyway?”

“She has a stranger with her,” said Torlyri.

Hresh stared, not comprehending at first.

“A stranger?”

“A scout from a strange tribe, so it seems.”

Hresh’s hand went, as it so often did, to Thaggoran’s amulet at his throat. A stranger!

He gaped. “What? Who?”

“A spy, in fact. Harruel and Konya caught him snooping around on Mount Springtime a little while ago.” Torlyri smiled and put her hands over his. “Oh, Hresh, I know you’re bubbling over with things to tell her. But can you wait? Can you wait just a little while? This is important too. It’s an actual man from another tribe, Hresh. That’s an enormous thing. She can’t deal with more than one enormous thing at a time. Nobody can. Do you understand that, Hresh?”

Koshmar stood straight and tall in front of the dark rat-wolf skin that hung as a trophy on the wall of her room. Her wide shoulders were drawn tightly back, her face was set in determination. Harruel was at her left, Konya at her right, both of them armed and ready to protect her; but she knew that spears were useless in this situation. What was unfolding now was a challenge that intelligence alone could deal with. It was something that she had anticipated since the Time of Coming Forth; but now that it had finally arrived she was far from sure of the best way to proceed.

Now, if ever, she needed old Thaggoran. Another tribe! It was only to be expected; and yet it was almost beyond belief. Throughout all their history her people had thought of themselves as the only people in the world, and in essence that had been so. And now — now—

She stared across the room at the spy.

He was a formidable sight. There was an overwhelming strangeness about him. His face was a lean one, sharp cheekbones cutting away to a long narrow chin. His eyes, set very far apart, were a color that Koshmar had never seen, a startling bright red, like the sun at sunset. His fur was golden, and long and rank, not at all like the fur of anyone of the tribe. Though slender and graceful, he had a remarkable look of strength and resilience, like some fine cable that could never be broken. His legs were almost as long as Harruel’s, although he was far less massive. And there was a curious helmet on his head that made him actually seem taller even than Harruel.

The helmet was a nightmarish thing. It was a high cone of a thick black leathery material, with a visor that went down almost to the stranger’s forehead in front and a ridged plate running the length of his neck to the rear. Mounted in back at the helmet’s summit was a circle of golden metal and five long metal rays jutting upward like five spears. In front, over the stranger’s forehead, the sinister image of a huge golden insect was affixed, its four wings outspread, its gigantic eyes of red stone burning with a ferocious gleam.

At first glance the man looked like some sort of upright monster with a hideously frightful head; only when you looked again did you see that the helmet was a thing of artifice, mere headgear, strapped below his neck with a thick brown cord.

Konya and Harruel had stumbled upon him while hunting together in the foothills of the mountains. He was camped in a cave not far above the last line of ruined villas, and from the looks of things he had been there some time, perhaps as long as a week, for the bones of animals that had been recently butchered and roasted were scattered all around the place. When they found him — sitting quietly, wearing his helmet, staring out over the city — he sprang up immediately and ran past them into the high forest. They followed, but it was no easy chase. “He runs like one of those animals with red horns on their noses,” Harruel said.

“Like a dancerhorn, yes,” Konya put in.

Several times they lost him amid the tangles of the wilderness, but always the glint of the golden rays of his helmet revealed him in the distance. In the end they had trapped him in a pocket canyon that had no exit; and, though he was armed with a beautifully made spear and seemed capable of using it, he offered no resistance, but abruptly surrendered without a struggle and without saying a word.

Nor had he spoken yet. He met Koshmar’s gaze evenly, fearlessly, and kept his silence as she attempted to question him.