After a time she turned to Hresh and said brusquely, “Very well. You’re the expert on language here. Use your second sight on him, and find out who he is and what he seeks here.”

Hresh stepped forward and confronted the stranger in the helmet.

He had never felt so tired in his life. What a day this was! And not finished yet. They were all watching him. He was far from sure he could muster second sight again, so tired was he.

The Helmet Man looked down at him from his great height in a cool, distant way, as though Hresh were nothing more than some bothersome little beast of the jungle. His eerie red eyes were disturbingly intense. Hresh imagined that he could see anger in them, and contempt, and an abiding sense of self-worth. But no fear. Not a trace of fear anywhere. There was something heroic about this helmeted stranger.

Hresh gathered his strength and sent forth his second sight.

He expected to meet some sort of opposition: an attempt to block his thrust, or to turn it aside, if that was possible. But with the same cool indifference as ever the stranger awaited Hresh’s approach; and Hresh’s consciousness sank easily and deeply into that of the Helmet Man.

The contact lasted no more than a fraction of a second.

In that instant Hresh had a sense of the great power of this man’s soul, of his strength of character and depth of purpose. He saw also, for the briefest flicker of a moment, a vision of a horde of others much like this one, a band of warriors gathered on some heavily wooded hill, all of them clad in bizarre and fanciful helmets like his, but each of an individual design. Then the contact broke and everything went dark. Hresh felt his limbs turning to water. He staggered, tumbled backward, pivoted somehow at the last moment, and landed on his belly in a sprawling heap at Harruel’s feet. That was the last he knew for some time.

When he awakened he was in Torlyri’s arms on the far side of the room. She held him close, crooning to him, reassuring him. Gradually he brought his eyes into focus and saw Koshmar holding the stranger’s helmet in both her hands, regarding it quizzically. The stranger was limp on the floor and Harruel and Konya, gripping him by the ankles, were dragging him out of the room as unceremoniously as if he were a sack of grain.

“Don’t try to stand up yet,” Torlyri murmured. “Get your balance first, catch your breath.”

“What happened? Where are they taking him?”

“He’s dead,” Torlyri said.

“Fell right down the moment you touched his mind,” said Koshmar from across the room. “So did you. We thought you were both gone. But you were just knocked out. He was dead before be hit the floor. It was to avoid being questioned, do you see? He had some way of killing himself with his mind alone.” She slammed the helmet down angrily on the ledge of her trophy shelf. “We will never know anything about him now,” she said. “We will never know a thing!”

Hresh nodded somberly.

The thought came to him that this was somehow his fault, that he should have anticipated some defensive maneuver of this sort from the stranger, that he should never have allowed himself to talk Koshmar into using second sight in this interrogation.

Perhaps it would have been a better idea to use the Wonderstone instead, he told himself.

But how was he to have known? Thaggoran might have known; but he, as he continued to discover, was not Thaggoran. I am still so young, Hresh thought ruefully. Well, time would cure that. A great sadness spread through him. He might have learned new and remarkable things from this man of another tribe. Instead he had merely helped to send him from the world.

Best not to think of it.

He went to Koshmar’s side, where she stood glowering above the helmet, running her hand repeatedly along its golden rays in a stunned, angry way. After a moment she glanced at him. Her eyes were dull and sullen.

“I need to tell you something,” Hresh said. “I’ve just come back from the heart of the city. Haniman and I. We went down into a vault beneath a building, where there is a machine of the sapphire-eyes, Koshmar. A machine that still works.”

Koshmar looked at him more closely. The light of her spirit returned to her eyes.

“It’s a machine that was meant to show pictures of the Great World,” Hresh told her. “More than pictures. It was meant to show the Great World itself. I put my hands on it, Koshmar, and I used the Barak Dayir on it.”

“And could you see anything?” she asked.

“Yes! Wonderful things!”

That was the beginning of Hresh’s true penetration into the mysteries of Vengiboneeza. The machine in the vault of the plaza of the thirty-six towers had opened the way; that and the Barak Dayir.

Everyone knew that he had made some great discovery. Haniman had spread the story far and wide. It stirred even the most sluggish imagination. Hresh was the center of all attention. People stared at him as if he were newly returned from a dinner at the table of the gods. “Did you really see the Great World?” he was asked, twenty times a day. “What was it like? Tell me! Tell me!”

But it was Taniane who saw the real truth. “You came upon something terrible when you were down in that hole. It upset you so much that you don’t want to say anything about it. But it’s changed you, hasn’t it, Hresh? Whatever it was. I can see it. There’s a darkness about your spirit now that wasn’t there before.”

He looked at her, amazed. “Nothing about me has changed,” he said tightly.

“It has. I can see it.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“You can tell me,” she said, cajoling. “We’ve always been friends, Hresh. It’ll soothe your soul to tell someone.”

“There’s nothing to tell. Nothing!”

And he turned quickly away from her, as he always did when he was fearful that someone would see the lie on his face.

Not only was he unable to bring himself to share with any of the others the agonizing truth he had discovered in the vault of the thirty-six towers, he could scarcely bear even to think about it. Now and again he felt it like a dull pain close to his heart; and now and again he heard a harsh mocking voice whispering, Little monkey, little monkey, little monkey. But the revelation of the vault was too painful for Hresh to face just yet. He put it aside; he thrust it down beyond the reach of his conscious mind.

He eased his spirit by plunging deep into the exploration of the ruins of Vengiboneeza. The pattern created in his mind by the machine and the Barak Dayir was his guide. When he wielded the Wonderstone, the points of red light that glowed on the interlocking circles that he saw gave him the clues he needed; and he began now systematically to uncover the city’s ancient caches of undamaged mechanisms, which he now knew lay all about at close hand, some in deeply hidden galleries, some virtually out in the open.

It amazed him that so many treasures of the Great World had survived the Long Winter. Even metal, he thought, should crumble to dust in so great a span of time. Yet wherever he looked — now that he knew the right places — he came up with wonders great and small. Most of the devices were far too big to remove; but many could be carried away and brought back to the settlement, where a special storeroom in the temple was set aside for them. Rapidly it filled with strange, glittering devices of mysterious function. Hresh examined them cautiously. Discovering these objects was one thing, determining how to make use of them was another. It was slow, difficult, frustrating work.

A group who became known among the People as the Seekers collected about Hresh to aid him in the task of exploration and discovery.

At first the Seekers were simply the handful of bodyguards — Konya, Haniman, Orbin — who usually went out to protect him as he roamed the city. Hresh had regarded them in the beginning as necessary nuisances and nothing more, mere spear-wielders. But before long they knew the city almost as well as he did. Though he tried to keep his map to himself, it was impossible to prevent others from learning their way around. Sometimes now they would go on expeditions of their own. It became a kind of competition for celebrity, now that they saw the fame that accrued to Hresh for having been out so often into the city. And occasionally they would actually return with some glittering little marvel out of antiquity, which they had pried out from under a fallen column, or excavated in some debris-choked undercellar.