The Goddess in Glass 

PERHAPS THE ONLY pertinent information I can offer about the source of
this document is that I am not its author-for some of my acquaintance have
charged this, on the grounds, I suppose, of my own brief appearance in it.
Who its author was, or even when and how it came among my papers, I do not
know. Nifft himself could have secreted it in my (securely locked) files,
but so could a number of our mutual friends. Certainly none of them lacked
the particular skills requisite for such chicanery, and neither the
manuscript's style, nor its hand-some scribe's of indeterminate
nationality-offers any clues to its authorship. 

As to what it reports, there must by now be few who have not caught wind
of Anvil Pastures' misfortunes, and many will doubtless find here much to
render comprehensible what must have seemed an utterly fantastic and
unaccountable rumor. Perhaps it will seem callous in me to say that I do
not grieve for that city. My feelings about merchants of war are made
plain enough, I think, by my prefatory remarks to The Pearls of the
Vampire Queen. Even granting this prejudice in me, I doubt any informed
person would deny that, among purveyors of arms, Anvil Pastures'
commercial history has been the most shameful of the century. So decayed
are the morals governing the professional activities of merchants of arms,
that the mere simultaneous sale of arms to both belligerents in an ongoing
war is such a matter as only the ignorant or naive would take the trouble
to deplore in print. Witness the offhandedness with which Anvil Pastures
served Hallam and Baskin-Sharpz. But the records of Anvil's activities
afford more than one instance of what even the most cynical cosmopolite
would blush to countenance. I will presume only so far as to remind the
reader of the most publicized of these travesties to occur in recent
decades. The occasion I refer to was Pythna's "crusade" against the city
of Taarg. 

Pythna's posture in the conflict was undeniably laughable. She is an
Astrygal, but one of the chain's cluster of small islands that is often
called the Seven Little Sisters. The wizardry that prevails on Pythna-as
on any of the Little Sisters-is by no means comparable to that of Strega,
Shamna or Hagia, for it is the thaumaturgy of the three mountainous Big
Sisters that gives the Astrygals their deserved name as the world's great
nursery of the lore of Power. Indeed, little Pythna is quite aptly
described by Deenwary the Traveler in his otherwise sensationalized and
distorted (though, admittedly, highly diverting) account of his
experiences in the seas off southern Kolodria. "The inhabitants of
Pythnia," he says, "are a motley, half-wise, half-crackpot lot." 

Pythna's much-trumpeted causus belli was also laughable. An edition of an
obscure Pythnan philosopher's summa (all four volumes of which I have
read, and which piracy of any kind could only flatter) was pirated by an
equally obscure publisher in Taarg, to what end I have not been able to
discover. And perhaps most laughable of all was the ambition which
Pythna's seizure upon this pretext was meant to mask: to snatch some
thaumaturgic renown and status by crushing a power so wormholed and rotten
with invasive demon influences as Taarg. Pythnans, every half-wise
crackpot of them, were tired of being little sister to Strega, Shamna, and
Hagia. 

One might smile, but perhaps only moderately, and then, reflect. Taarg, so
near the Vortex that bears its name (see The Fishing of the Demon-Sea) is,
in the estimation of all informed commentators on the subject, and all
those who have been there (and I am one of the latter, howbeit some might
contest my being one of the former)-is, I say, eaten all but hollow by the
demon influence that flows out with the rotten exhalations of the Vortex's
ragged, spuming mouth. If crusades are to be mounted, whatever fools may
mount them, let their blades be drawn against such a city Taarg was then,
and to some extent continues to be. So I feel, at least, though the reader
must, of course, side as he chooses. 

Anvil Pastures entertained the embassies of both parties, exercising her
traditional discretion, which spared either party the painful knowledge of
its rival's entertainment. The Pythnans purchased from the Aristarchs a
formidable weapon: a flock of spring-steel harpies, clockwork airborne
carnivores guided by such basic spells as their field marshals could
command, and able to scour the largest ramparts bare of defenders in mere
moments. The Taarg embassy, with its demon-augmented coffer-and all the
world knew the subworld source of those coffers' content-purchased from
Anvil Pastures a perfect defense against any aerial assault, for thus much
had they divined of their enemy's tactical plans: a marvelously light,
strong system of steel netting, erectable on a vast framework by
spring-powered spreaders that could operate in mere seconds. 

Taarg's fleet lay prepared for a counterassault, which it launched the
moment the Pythnan assault had been crushed. The Pythnans reeled home with
an armada quite large enough for a full-scale invasion scant miles astern.
And indeed, the failure of its crusade against Taarg threatened to be
followed directly by its homeland's invasion and conquest. Taarg's
pursuing flotilla must, in truth, have offered a spectacle of grim
majesty, for Dami-ergs commanded the flagships, and a century of their
Galgath Assaulters stood in every prow. Before this many-hulled marine
juggernaut Pythna's broken navy fled, lacking even enough lead once they
reached home to blockade their harbor before the Taargian fleet broke
through. And, as is widely known, Pythna was not then saved by any powers
of her own, but by powers that came down from Strega. These latter,
incensed that demon-kind should presume to touch their keels to any shore
in the Astrygals, bent upon those invaders such attentions as shortly sent
them wheeling and bleeding straight back to the Vortex, and back down its
clamorous throat. 

But whatever one's views on these matters, and on the proper apportionment
of blame between those who resolve to make war and those who, by supplying
the needs of the former, effectuate their sanguinary ambitions, I hope
there are few who would dissent from calling one historical consequence of
Anvil Pastures' fate a good one. Shortly after Anvil's catastrophe, the
trade war between Hallam and Baskin-Sharpz ceased, and the belligerents
achieved a composition of their differences that has endured until the day
of this writing, and produced a number of cooperative ventures that
promise to usher in a new era of collaboration between the two cities'
economic spheres. 

If it is anything, the story of Anvil's disaster is a poignant
illustration of the tragic insularity of consciousness that mankind is so
much a prey to. The extant information about Anvil Pastures' remote past,
while not abundant, is such that any man who spent a few weeks researching
the matter in the proper places would be sufficiently informed that he
would have found many of Dame Lybis's oracular directives to her
townsfellows most alarming, and would have deemed their fulfillment of
those directives to be downright astonishing. Moreover, my own compilation
of these data, of which Nifft carried an abstract on his errand for me,
was and is not the only such scholarly treatment of the matter available
in the world, if one but seeks diligently for other scholiasts'
productions. 

The geography of L£lum‰'s Southern spur, where Anvil Pastures is located,
is worthy of notice. The highly metal-rich composition of that great
massif has been noted by many writers. The troubled waters of the sea of
Agon, for all the ceaseless power of their erosive assaults, manage only
to emphasize the obdurate imperviousness to weathering of the Spur's
majestic cliffs. These, as our nameless author tells us, are very little
worn, for all the millennia of their endurance, and oppose an almost
flawlessly vertical wall of more than five hundred miles' breadth to the
ocean's futile siege. Several authors, the Learned Quall most reliable
among them, report an ancient tradition that the Spur is not of earthly
substance; that it is the remnant of a fireball which, in some immemorial
era, fell from the stars upon L£lum‰'s southern rim. There is at least a
poetic felicity in this conception, for when, later, on Anvil's site that
legendary foundry of star-vessels was built, it was said that the starry
visitants seeking the services of the forge rained down upon the place in
meteoric showers, lighting the night-buried ocean bright as day for
hundreds of leagues in every direction. Fitting, that those cosmic
mariners should have been refurbishing their craft with materials native
to those trans-stellar gulfs it was their task-and triumph-to navigate. 

-Shag Margold 

The Goddess in Glass 

I 

WHEN THE THIEF Nifft, of Karkmahn-Ra was near thirty (which side of it is
not known), he had achieved the first plateau of mastery in his art. That
is, his style had been defined but he still lacked certainty about the
proper canvases for his efforts. He knocked around more than he worked. 

And one summer when he was hunting hill-pig with Barnar Ox-back in the
highlands of Chilia, a letter reached him from his friend Shag Margold,
the Karkmahnite cartographer and historian. Margold, knowing that Nifft
meant to strike out westward across the Sea of Agon when he left Chilia,
entreated his friend to stop in Anvil Pastures on the Southern Spur of
L£lum‰ on his way out. Margold had an important treatise in hand, to which
information on that city's primary religious cult would be highly
pertinent, and he had enclosed a packet in inquiries he wished Nifft to
give the oracle of the Flockwarden's shrine. 

The most current news in the scholar's quarter of the world was that the
city had for more than a year been enjoying a period of astonishing
prosperity, resulting from a revelation made to the citizens by the
Goddess through her Oracle. The city was supposed to have benefited
throughout its history from similar benevolent theophanies on the part of
the Flockwarden, and the present boom period in Anvil Pastures seemed an
excellent time to make some respectful investigations of this matter. 

So from Chilia Nifft took ship, some two weeks later, for Anvil Pastures.
He had already been aware of its prosperity. Anvil's weaponry had
dominated the Great Shallows markets for decades, and quite strikingly so
during the last nine months. Blades, body-armor, arbalests,
seige-machinery-everything from byrnies to scabbard-chapes, and all of a
superlative quality of steel both impossibly flexible and all but
unbreakable, had been pouring from its foundries and forges at such modest
prices that all competition on both sides of the Sea of Agon was
overwhelmed. Nifft expected no trouble finding ships bound for that port. 

But it did surprise him that the most convenient option that he found was
a big Gelidorian troop-shuttle bound for the city with no less than seven
hundred mercenaries requisitioned by the Aristarchs of Anvil Pastures.
These troops included a large contingent of pioneers and field-engineers.
None of these troops knew the city's object in retaining them, but they
had other news for him. Anvil Pastures' luck had just recently taken a
very nasty turn. One of the huge, contorted mountains flanking the city
had suffered an uncanny form of collapse. Its peak had been fractured and
the entire mass of it had for some weeks lain poised on the brink of a
collapse that must utterly obliterate the city beneath it. The
Aristarchs-the body of commercial oligarchs which governed the city-had
beseeched the Oracle of the Flockwarden for some remedy to the civic
anguish. The Goddess-in-Glass-for this she was called as often as
Flockwarden by the mercenaries-had, through the oracle, declared that her
aid in this crisis could be procured, but first the Aristarchs must, in
pledge of earnest allegiance on their part, procure for the Goddess this
sizable expeditionary force of first-quality professionals. 

At the evening mess Nifft sought a seat by the First Captain of Pioneers,
a man named Kandros, whom he had found the most concise and enlightening
of his informants about Anvil Pastures' dilemma. By the time the grog
ration went round the two men had exchanged a variety of anecdotes and
philosophical perspectives, and had found that they rather liked each
other. Kandros was a slight, leathery man, not quite forty, but with the
eye-wrinkles of a desert tortoise, the wrinkles of eyes that had studied
two eventful decades' worth of encampments, fortifications, seigeworks and
battles. The hands that hung from his wiry arms were great knobbed and
tendoned pincers. These big, hammer-knuckled paws which he seemed to move
so seldom were uncommonly direct and neat in the movements they did make.
Nifft sipped his aqua vitae and said: 

"Kandros. Am I right in feeling that this company of yours presents an
unusually strong component of engineers and sappers and the like, given
the number of combat forces?" 

"Quite right. We've conjectured no end what place we might be hired to
besiege, but we are too few to attack any city of real consequence.
Besides this, it's hard to see what help for Anvil Pastures there'd be in
the capture of some fortress or town." 

"Though the Aristarkion has engaged you, I gather that august body is as
much in the dark about your precise commission as you are." 

"So I conceive it. The Aristarkion is not always piously prompt to fulfill
a directive of the Flockwarden. For instance, more than a year ago, the
Goddess announced through her oracle that her flock had returned to the
world of the sun, and that-I quote exactly now-she must have them by her,
every one, for it's long and long that they have been gone. The oracle
asked, in the Goddess' behalf, for an expedition to bring her flock back
to her from somewhere on the southeast coast of Kairnheim, where
apparently they had reemerged from some long burial under the earth. And
the Aristarchs, after mature consideration, declined to undertake so great
an expense for so vague a behest." 

"It would seem that the Goddess is forgiving. It must have been shortly
after that refusal that she pointed the city the way to its recent
bonanza." 

A certain watchfulness had entered Nifft's manner, as if Kandros' last
remarks had a connotative undertone that he was not quite catching. The
captain's reply was in a meditative voice. 

"In religious matters, my understanding is that the city-fathers are
somewhat inconsistent. When the Goddess gives them oracles that hint of
profit, they are piously convinced of the deity's potency. There resides
in her corpse a strange attunement to the earth, its deep and secret
structures, and the oracles have preserved the secret of interpreting the
Flockwarden's revelations, though their mysteries remain inviolate. You're
right about the Goddess' generosity. Her revelation to the Aristarkion
followed its rejection of her demand by little more than a week." 

Nifft was smiling absently at his cup. "I get the feeling," he said, "that
there is a certain irony in the city's state of affairs which you have yet
to reveal to me." 

Kandros nodded, conceding. "To someone not intimately affected by the
situation it might be amusing that it was the Aristarkion's intemperate
haste to capitalize on the bonanza the Goddess revealed to them which,
through an unforseeable fluke, created the deadly flaw in the structure of
the mountain which now threatens the city." 

Nifft and Kandros stood by the rail amidships. "You know," Nifft said, "no
matter how I tried to imagine it, it all sounded preposterous." Gazing at
the mountains surrounding the bay into which they sailed, and smiling,
Nifft shook his head. Kandros nodded. 

"Descriptions never convey it." 

"What is that jetty made of?" 

"Steel, or something like it. It's called Pastures' Staff. It is a relic
of the age of the Flockwarden." 

"Pastures' Staff . . . And how remote was that age?" 

Kandros shrugged. "It was when this bay was formed, and these mountains
gnawed from the coastal massif. It was when these mountains were almost
twice as high as you see them now, and far more terrible in their form." 

The Staff, jutting a quarter mile into the bay, was the spine of the
harbor's system of docks. The gentle slope of the bay-floor submerged its
seaward end, so that its full length was not determinable. Though entirely
caged within the skeleton of masonry and timber that crowned and branched
from it, the cyclopean axis immediately engrossed the eye, as though all
that encumbered it-not quite as real as its immemorial metal-lacked the
necessary solidity to obscure it. It drew the viewer's gaze shoreward, to
its inland end, which the city's architects had incorporated in the
foundation of one of the towers of the imposing city-wall. But once there,
the eye again neglected the nobly-proportioned masonry of Anvil Pastures,
and was drawn upward to the mountains that embowered the city. 

Kandros was not given to fanciful turns of speech, and he had called the
mountains no more than what they were-terrible in form. The Southern Spur
as a whole was essentially one vast block of extremely metal-rich stone
two hundred leagues in length, opposing huge, blunt cliffs to the Sea of
Agon's troublous waters. Erosion had flawed and featured those cliffs, but
nowhere really breached the general smoothness of their mighty wall. But
at the site of Anvil Pastures something more powerful than the wind and
tides had torn into it-had gouged the deep embayment that was the harbor,
hewn the rocky niche that was the city's seat, and chewed the continental
buttress into mountains stark as a rack of bones, and stretching sixty
miles inland in all directions. They reared up two miles and more with
fearful steepness from the sea's threshold. They were gaunt, disjointed
peaks. Something in their contorted multitude suggested pain and calamity.

Nifft said, "I remember a certain battlefield I saw some years ago. The
war had moved on from it two weeks before, and many cavalry had died in
that engagement. It was a fiercely hot mid-summer. I remember those acres
of sun-hardened, leathery carcasses, their crooked legs sticking up from
the earth at every angle." 

Kandros made a mouth of wry assent, and nodded at the peaks. "Imagine them
twice this stature, their carving not yet softened by eons of rain and
wind." 

The two men lounged on the rail absently watching the harbor as they
approached their berth in it. They passed a pair of warships which, while
ignoring in-bound craft, appeared to be stopping and boarding every
outbound vessel, once it had cast off and pulled into the bay. 

"Hallamese," Kandros said in answer to Nifft's look of inquiry. "Rather an
amusing matter. Hallam is at war with Baskin-Sharpz, near the equator
upcoast here on L£lum‰. I suppose you've heard of the conflict?" 

"Yes. Hallam's on Moira, the next isle east of Chilia. A trade war, no?" 

"Correct. You'd think the Sea of Agon big enough to share between them.
Anyway, it turns out they only went to war because both had discreetly
sent diplomats to Anvil Pastures and both sets of diplomats negotiated
what they thought were exclusively advantageous arms contracts with the
Aristarkion. So they find themselves at each others' throats, and each
finds the other twice as well-armed as he had been gambling on. If their
war wasn't going so hot and heavy the discovery would've made a truce
between them and they'd have joined forces to enslave Anvil here, despite
her mighty walls. Even as it is, this harbor is now a zone of truce for
both belligerents. In a few days two Baskinon warships will probably
arrive here to relieve these Hallamese vessels. There are to be no
emigrants from Anvil, you see. They intend that the inhabitants of the
Pastures will stay here to fulfill those arms contracts they so doubly
sold. Naturally both belligerents have staffs of diplomats obligatorily
hosted by the Aristarchs in the comfort of their own homes, and these
diplomats keep a daily roll-count of all the city's rich and powerful men
and of their liquid assets, to ensure that both remain at home. It's the
only reason that splendid metropolis there isn't a ghost town." 

They regarded the ramparts under which they were now docking. Wealth and
power radiantly incarnate-such were the hugeness and the resplendent
masonry of the walls, as well as of the great buildings which, farther
upslope within the city, overtopped them. Nifft, musingly, said,
"Pastures' Staff. Is that the name of that thing in the water, precisely?
I mean, I have the impression I've heard it referred to, but pronounced
differently." 

"No, Pastures' Staff is what I've always heard it called." 

"Well. Shall we share a maxim of wine while we're waiting to go to the
temple?" 

"I'll take you to the Hammerside Inn, but I insist on the privilege of
buying the maxim." 

"That is kindly spoken, and gladly accepted." 

II 

The wiry captain was to join the rest of the mercenary commanders when
they reported to the oracle of the Flockwarden to learn their commssion.
Kandros was of the opinion that Nifft's interview with the oracle stood a
better chance of success if she first met him in company with the military
gentlemen whose services her Goddess had enjoined her to procure, and
Nifft thought this very likely. 

"We probably have time for another of these before we must leave," Kandros
said, hefting the empty maxim. He signaled the ostler of the Hammerside. 

"Only if it comes from my purse this time," Nifft said. 

"Absolutely not. If you are obssessed with repaying me, you can do so on
some other occasion." 

Nifft smiled thoughtfully. "Very well. On some other occasion." 

"Your eye dwells on the fireplace," Kandros said a bit after the fresh
wine had been brought. 

"Its odd to see one whose inner wall is of iron rather than brick."
Indeed, the wall glowed with the heat of the blaze. Kandros nodded with
the satisfied smile of one who has achieved a calculated effect. "It is in
fact a far larger piece of iron than the little fragment of it visible
there. That whole wall of the inn is built against it." 

"The Hammerside Inn. . . ." 

"I will show you when we go out." 

"So be it, oh thou military man of mystery." 

A large, sleek man in a fur-hemmed robe came into the common-room, his
manner one of dignity in haste. He stood in the entryway, simultaneously
clapping to summon the ostler, and scanning the room for him. The ostler
was not overly quick to terminate his conversation with some patrons at a
corner table, and when he came, exhibited only a perfunctory deference.
Kandros nudged his friend and said, "I think this fellow is from the
temple." Indeed, the ostler directed the stranger's eyes to their table.
The smooth-faced could be seen to consider summoning them to him from
their table, but something in their aspect decided the stranger to
approach their table. 

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Which of you is Captain Kandros?" 

"That's me. And you are Sexton Minor, are you not?" 

The man nodded, looking both pleased and vaguely miffed, as if announcing
his identity were one of his habitual pleasures. "The shrine-mistress
would have her interview with you a trifle earlier than she indicated. I
told your fellow officers of this, and they asked me to bring you to the
shrine. My conveyance waits outside." 

"Will you have a glass with us?" Nifft asked. "It seems shameful to waste
so much good wine." 

The Sexton's oily black eyes, resting on the maxim, plainly agreed. "Dame
Lybis bade me hurry. . . ." He hesitated. His own words decided him. "Bah!
I'm her Sexton, not her lackey. Thank you, gentlemen." He took a chair and
signaled the ostler for a cup. With evident relish he decanted and sampled
the wine. Kandros said, "I heard from one of the other captains, friend
Minor, that your shrine-mistress is an irascible sort. I hope she doesn't
make the honor of your office a burdensome one." 

This sally visibly warmed the Sexton. He grimaced confidingly and leaned
nearer his hosts, regaling them more liberally with the scent of his
pomade. 

"The honor, as you so graciously term it, is positively onerous. I thank
the stars that I'm a near connection of Aristarch Hamp-through whom I have
the sextonship-and that I can make some modest claim to civic position and
consequence without it. My first cousin, in point of fact-" 

"Indeed I have heard a great deal about you, Master Minor, and I'm pleased
I have a chance to benefit from your knowledge of the situation here. I've
passed through your city several times, but have to confess I have no deep
understanding of Anvil's affairs." 

The Sexton nodded sympathetically, a great depth of understanding shining
in his large, black eyes. Nifft refilled all three cups. 

"One puzzlement of mine has never been resolved," Kandros went on. "Dame
Lybis, for all her eccentricity, must be a priestess of genuine power, for
is not the Goddess she serves, and speaks for, dead?" 

"How could the Flockwarden not be dead?" asked Minor. "Have you seen her?"

Kandros nodded. "Precisely. And how then does Dame Lybis obtain her
insights from the divine corpse? How do the dead, though they be gods,
communicate anything at all?" 

Minor smiled indulgently at his glass, and drained it with gusto. "You
must forgive my amusement, Captain, but your talk of divinity-though we
call the Flockwarden a goddess-strikes me as naive. What is a god or
goddess? The notion is so vague! Surely you are aware that the consensus
of enlightened opinion holds these beings popularly called gods to be
visitors to our world from the stars? Their alien attributes, their powers
so incommensurate with our own, are the source of the mysteriousness which
the cults make so much of. The Flockwarden while she lived was not unique,
but one of many others of her breed. Her body has by chance survived the
holocaust that killed the rest of her fellow-colonists on our world.
Whatever faculties her kind possessed for reading deep into the structures
of stone and earth are preserved in her body, and through some means the
shrine-mistresses over the generations have kept secret, the dead alien's
eyes-so to speak-can still be looked through, and some of her powers of
geologic insight can, erratically, be tapped. You noticed that the
Goddess' antennae extend forward, and their tips reach to a point quite
near the surface of the glass block?" 

"Indeed, it was as you say." 

"Well, the oracle's mode of communion with the Goddess is not known, since
the operation is veiled, but it is generally believed that it involves
placing her hands against the glass at just the aforementioned place. This
action, by the way, is called the Solicitation of the Goddess. What passes
between Dame Lybis and the Flockwarden is not known outside the guild of
the shrine-keepers. You may be sure that many an Anvilian entrepreneur has
put his hands to the glass in the small hours of the morning, when the
temple is empty, and strained to feel some million-lictor clue of the
Goddess' posthumous knowledge-" Here the Sexton raised his eyebrows in an
expression of ironic self-communion. "-but to no avail. But is this
divinity we are dealing with here? Surely it is technique, historical
knowledge-mysterious to most of us, surely, but mere technique, in
essence, nonetheless." 

Nifft had refilled their glasses, and Minor paused to empty his at a
breath, before concluding: "Well, my friends, shall we go? Dame Lybis will
be quite harsh if we are too late. . . ." 

As they left the inn, Kandros raised a hand to detain the Sexton, who was
opening the door of their landau. "A moment more, if you please," he said.
"I want Nifft to see the Hammer." 

The pair had approached the inn from the direction opposite that in which
Kandros now led Nifft. They rounded the corner of the tall, old building
and Nifft saw that it adjoined a major gate in the city-wall. The wall was
ninety feet high, and the gateposts more than forty feet higher still,
supporting battlemented towers designed for the gate's defense against
siege. But, while the left post's entire bulk was of massive stonework,
the right post as well as much of the tower that topped it, was of a
single piece, an immense block of iron, roughly rectangular in profile,
which stood on one of its narrow ends. It was starkly distinct from the
stonework that embraced it, and made the inn that abutted it-grand and
venerable though that structure was, seem an inconsequential thing,
hastily made, and destined to be dust when that immense ferrolith still
stood unaltered by milllennia of storm and sun. 

And a hammer it plainly was, for from a point somewhat less than halfway
up its height there sprouted a horizontal bar of iron which ran for more
than half the distance to the wall's sea-ward turning-incorporated in the
wall, yet seeming rather to pierce and destroy it than to contribute to
its substance. 

"And that," said Nifft after he had gazed a moment, "is Pastures' Hammer?"

"It is indeed," Kandros replied, his own eyes dwelling on it with fresh
awe and appreciation that contradicted his cicerone's role in this
revelation. Nifft nodded, and looked to Sexton Minor, who had followed
them round the corner, and who was not so nervous at this delay as he was
gratified by Nifft's query: "Forgive my troubling you with what must be a
boring question, good Sexton, but I am not a well-schooled man, though
your city fascinates me. This is called Pastures' Hammer, as who should
say, the hammer of the Pastures?" 

"That is perfectly correct, my friend, in every detail." The Sexton smiled
at the wit of his reply, and blandly awaited further droll questions. But
the one which Nifft murmured a moment later, gazing at the mountains,
appeared at first to baffle, and then to irritate him: "It is hard to
imagine terrain that looks less like pastureland than this, don't you
think?" 

Minor shrugged, frowned. "No doubt, in the usual sense. Naturally, the
city's name refers to the historical facts. The Flockwardens' herds were
lithivores. Their grazings carved the bay and made these mountains where
before there were only great cliffs of metaliferous stone. The flocks'
excreta provided purified metal for the Flockwardens' industry, as well as
a kind of coal to fuel their forges. These are pastures, though not such
as born-bow or jab¢bos graze on. Please, gentlemen-we really should be on
our way." 

III 

Near its inland border, the city rose toward a central eminence, a great
table-topped monolith crowned with its most august edifices. These
surrounded a vast, colonnade-bordered plaza, in which Minor's landau
discharged its three passengers. Minor turned to guide the other two
toward a huge, blunt-terraced building, the acropolis' second-largest
structure. Nifft, however, set out rather dreamily in the opposite
direction, walking a ways out toward the center of the square, and
stopping at the tip of a jagged blade of shadow that lay upon the
flagstones. This was the greatest salience of a vast wedge of shadow which
the noonday sun printed upon the plaza, darkening more than half of its
upland side. Minor lifted his arm and began to call some remonstration,
when he and Kandros saw the gaunt Karkmahnite lift his gaze from the
shadow's tip toward the megalith that cast it. The Sexton's arm fell, and
for a moment the three stood looking silently up at the hammer of ill fate
that overhung the prosperous city. 

The half-destroyed-and potentially all-destroying-mountain was so like its
grotesque fellows that its condition endowed them all with added menace.
They would not have lacked this quality in any case. The noon sunlight
blazoned forth the dynamic of their making, showing well over half their
material to be disparate metallic veins, wildly torqued and twisted
together, as if the varied metals had once been molten in one cauldron
together, and stirred there by some cosmic ladle. This structure was the
source of the mountains' tormented and skeletal shapes, for it had been
gnawed into prominence by millennia of "peeling"-spiral quarrying of
various individual veins, as well as of the rock between the veins. This
latter material was not so variegated as the metals which it interleaved.
Most of it was a dense, fine-textured stone of brownish black-the fecal
coal, in fact, which Minor had mentioned. This had been as heavily
quarried as any of the metals were. 

The damaged peak resembled many others in having been so deeply scored
that the intact veins supporting the mass of its higher parts were clearly
discernible. At a place perhaps four-fifths up the mountain, just about
where its "neck" might be said to be, a large landslide had exposed the
scrawny spinal veins holding up the massive, gnarled summit. The three
twisted shafts of metal ore that did this looked surprisingly slight for
the task, and indeed, had buckled under it-had bent to an angle halfway
between the vertical and the horizontal, bowing titanically in the city's
direction. Raggedly surrounding the point of breakage, a system of
wood-and-steel buttresses had been built-colossal enough on the human
scale, but pathetically inadequate to sustain the mass they encircled. 

Nifft turned and rejoined his companions. As Minor led them toward the
temple, Nifft murmured: "Those supports. They must have been undertaken
more as a psychological palliative than a seriously-believed-in preventive
measure?" 

Minor nodded sourly. Nifft went on: "How big is it, in terms of the city?
I mean, if it hit the city-or say, if it were just set down on the
city-would it cover it?" 

Minor gave Nifft a look of wide-eyed irony. "Heavens no! It's been
carefully computed, you understand. Look out there, down near the harbor.
Do you see that little bit of shanty-town by that farthest corner of the
wall?" 

"That little brownish-grey patch, like huts of weathered wood?" 

"Precisely! Well, if that-" (he pointed at the peak without needing to
look toward it) "were set down here-" (he spread his arms to indicate the
city around them) "then that-" (he again indicated the little harborside
zone) "would be entirely uncovered. As for the rest . . ." Minor shrugged,
as who should say that one couldn't have everything. 

The pair waited by the temple's entry while the Sexton stepped within and
conferred with one of the shrine's attendants. He came back out to report.

"The other officers are already within. Shrine-mistress Lybis is just now
conferring with the Aristarchs. If you'll join the party inside she will
be with you quite soon." 

Kandros nodded, but Nifft laid a hand on his arm and said, "I wonder if
Kandros here might be prevailed upon to indulge a bumpkin's curiosity and
give me a brief tour of this magnificent acropolis of yours while we're
waiting for the oracle's arrival." 

"Very well. Please be conscious of the time. The attendant just within
will direct you to the Warden-shrine when you get back." 

When Minor had gone inside Nifft said, "Is not the Aristarkion one of
these buildings?" 

"It's that one yonder." 

"Most impressive! Could you show me the interior of it? We might even be
so lucky as to hear some of the priestess' remarks to the Aristarchs." 

Smiling slightly, Kandros answered: "That would probably not be difficult.
Though theirs is not strictly a public meeting, there are many galleries
that should allow a discreet vantage on the proceedings." 

The Aristarkion was the only building on the acropolis larger than the
FIockwarden's temple. For a seat of governmental deliberations, it was
rather an open structure-an extensive, roofed system of porticoes and
pillared promenades with a single great chamber, the Aristarkion proper,
at its center. There was a broad and doorless portal in each of the
chamber's walls, and thus from almost anywhere in the galleried periphery
a view of its interior could be had, as well as a clear hearing of what
was said under its echoing vault. Nifft remarked on this before they had
fairly mounted the steps up from the plaza, and Kandros smiled family. 

"The design," he said, "expresses the oligarchy's uprightness. The
Aristarchs, you see, since they never allow considerations of personal
gain to bias their legislative policies, have never had anything to fear
from public audience of their proceedings. Besides, it's long been their
custom to do the real work of governing at informal convocations in the
privacy of their homes, and when they gather here it's usually to
solemnize enactments whose awkward elements they have weighed beforehand,
and worded in the seemliest, least troublesome terms possible." 

They found the corridors and forested columns surrounding the assembly
chamber were populous. Talk was subdued among all these strollers and
loiterers. Most seemed to be listening to a woman's voice that came
spilling out of the Aristarkion-strident, though not yet distinct to the
pair. 

"Nevertheless," Kandros concluded, "certain persons, under certain
conditions, can oblige the Aristarchs to assemble here even when their
sense of delicacy might prompt them to prefer a more discreet kind of
conference. The forgemen's Guildmaster, for instance, can demand one
session yearly to debate forge conditions. And the Goddess' oracle can
convoke them whenever an important communication from the Flockwarden
seems to her to require it." 

They were making for the nearest of the assembly room's portals, and the
voice of the woman within now grew distinct amid the reverberations it
spawned among the marble shafts and pavements without. 

" . . . because once again it's money I'm talking to you about, gentlemen.
And you needn't fidget and squirm, because we've talked about money
before-we talked about it a little over a year ago, for instance, do you
recall the occasion? Anvil, Staff, and Hammer! What possessed you then,
gentlemen? Our heaven-born Flockwarden, whom you all revere, whom you have
thanked for a score of benefits within my term of service alone!-our
Goddess asked something of us, and that led-did it not?-to this previous
occasion I refer to when we also talked about money, just as we're doing
now-you do recall the occasion, gentlemen? What's that you say, Director
Pozzle? Forgive me but I didn't catch your remark-will you repeat that a
bit louder, please?" 

If any voice other than the woman's had sounded within the chamber, no
peep of it had reached Nifft and Kandros. They turned into a promenade
that approached the chamber's portal straight-on, and saw the speaker for
the first time. She stood on a high rostrum, half-ringed by marble tiers
where the Aristarchs sat. She was wild-haired, short. She had her fists
thrust into the pouch of an apron, below which hung her shabby tunic, its
skirts crookedly caught up with pins to mid-shin, perhaps to free the
movement of her restless, sandaled feet. She leaned forward, her posture
elaborately solicitous to hear Pozzle's alleged remark repeated, and even
in this attitude, she paced, her impatient feet shifting her leftward,
rightward, leftward. A florid man in the center of the highest tier shook
his head gloomily. In a voice resigned to harassment he said, "You're
mistaken, Dame Lybis-I said nothing." 

"You said nothing? Oh, you mean just now you said nothing! I see! Because
in last year's discussion about money you said a great deal-perhaps that's
why I mistook you, for I thought you might be going to quote to us now the
very elegantly worded remarks with which you closed last year's
discussion. And dear me, but that was an effective little speech you made,
Pozzle; one point in it I particularly remember. You were helping us to
appreciate just how great the cost of bringing the Goddess' flock to her
would be. You'd computed that, if the beasts of her flock were as big as
she had indicated, then it would cost more to retrieve just one of them
from southern Kairnheim than it would to construct three large public
buildings. Very cogent, that was, a very telling way of putting it,
especially since you gentlemen at that time were so eager to subsidize the
building of a new guildhall for the forge-men-and heaven knows you had
good reason for wanting to appease them, considering the remarkably
creative ways you'd been putting their portion of the municipal revenues
to work for yourselves! Ah me! How perspectives change! Each one of the
Flockwarden's beasts would cost three buildings to bring home to her. And
how many buildings will it cost us if, a second time, we do nothing? How
many buildings are there in Anvil Pastures?" 

She had, in asking this, turned aside from her audience, but now she
whirled, fiercely re-confronting them. "Note well!" she almost bellowed.
"Mark me, and mark what I do not say to you!" She grinned at them a
moment, savoring the opacity of this admonition. Her hair was the color of
dirty honey. She wore a kind of skull-net of wire. Long past containing
her pelt, it was deeply sunk in it, and her hair thrust from its gridwork
in soft spikes reminiscent of the half-erected feathers of an angry hawk.
Her nose was, like most of her person, small, but strongly aquiline, and
due to the neighborhood of her eyes-large, black, bright and restless-had
the look of being a keen nose for trouble. Her compact mouth was
delicately ripe of lip, and would have been sensual in repose, but it was
always either tight with purpose or ironically awry. Both Nifft and
Kandros, leaning against opposite sides of the portal, could be seen idly
discovering within her tunic the womanly emphasis of her pelvic curves and
the plump bouyancy of her little breasts. 

"What I do not say," she all but crowed, "is that the Goddess intends to
send us after her flock as the means to our city's salvation. I am the
Flockwarden's humble servant-I do not presume to foretell her will. But
what seems more likely, eh? And if she does send us to Kairnheim, what
more perfect reparation than that for your criminal stinginess a year ago,
eh? 

"Enough, then. I have but one thing of importance to tell you. You've
commissioned the mercenaries, as she demanded. Thus much, at least, you've
paid up, and without inordinate whining, I must confess. Therefore, beware
lest you falter now. Whatever use she should direct you to make of them,
see you do it and damn the cost. I'm going now to talk with their
commanders. I don't plan to do any dickering or mealy-mouthing about
costs. They are crack professionals from Gelidor Ingens. When they learn
their task, they'll bid the highest figure that a reasonable and
well-informed customer could be expected to pay for the work in question.
And it will be your business, gentlemen, to accept their bid, and muster
the funds for them with all dispatch. Since there's nothing more that lies
in your power to do for your own salvation, then you must do nothing less.

"I will make the Solicitation in one hour. Please be prompt." 

IV 

As the pair re-crossed the plaza toward the temple, they saw the oracle's
litter already some ways ahead of them, and they quickened their pace.
Nifft, watching the palanquin, smiled, saying, "I like her manners." 

"Yes. They were perfectly suited to her audience." 

They walked. Nifft's eyes grew abstracted. "Tell me what you know of the
historical circumstances, Kandros. How was it that the flock came to be
lost in the first place, and that it still survives?" 

"They were lost in the same assault that exterminated the Flockwarden and
all her race." 

"Competitive visitants from . . . abroad?" He waved skyward. Kandros shook
his head. 

"Men. Seemingly, this was one of our race's epochs of greatness. I've even
heard that in those days men tolerated such visitants as the Flockwardens
the more equably because they themselves had crossed to and colonized
worlds not their own." 

"Hmm. But toward the Flockwardens, toleration ran out?" 

"Apparently, greed supplanted it. It is said the colony here prospered
mightily. One tradition has it that this was a kind of smithy servicing
the great steel vessels that conveyed men and gods alike from world to
world among the stars. At any rate the men of some neighboring city-then
great, since vanished without a trace-attacked the Pastures. Such was
their onslaught that the Flockwardens were obliterated. In fact, the
Goddess in the temple yonder, having died in one piece, was unique. Hence
her preservation-a kind of monumental trophy, I suppose. Anyway, the
battle caused a tremendous landslide above the slopes where the flock were
grazing. The beasts were buried en masse, and in consequence, the
conquerors took command of a ghost-smithy starved of metal and fuel alike.
But as for the flock itself, these lithivores needed no air, it seems, and
burial was not death to them." 

"And so they fled underground? And since then have dwelt subterraneously,
until their recent emergence?" 

"Apparently." 

"And there was none with them to . . . shepherd them?" 

Kandros raised his brows at the question, and Nifft laughed by way of
retracting it. "If you mean to suggest," said Kandros, "that a Flockwarden
might have escaped destruction by burrowing down with her flock, you will
have only to behold the Goddess within to know that hers was not a digging
breed." 

At the entry they were met and ushered within by an acolyte, an
exceedingly elderly man who muttered and groaned faintly as he moved. As
Nifft stepped into the Wardenshrine-an immense, softly lit room at the
temple's heart-he faltered just perceptibly. Both the Goddess' form and
her posture had the effect of making her hugeness seem to leap toward the
beholder. 

She resembled a titanic dragonfly. Her long, slender stern segment curved
up and forward above the four angular archways created by her eight
impossibly delicate-seeming, jointed legs. She filled the block of glass
containing her, and this was at least six stories high. She had two pairs
of antennae. Two were short and fanlike, intricate trellises that antlered
her spheroid head just back of her faceted, pyramidal eyes. The other two
were slender, plumate, and tremendously elongated. These bowed forward and
down, their tips plunging to within inches of the glass surface at a point
close enough to the floor to lie within the enclosure of a small cubicle
of drapery. The drapes were at present drawn back. 

From a postern near one corner of the glass monolith Dame Lybis marched,
her hands still completing behind her head the knot of an embroidered
fillet with which she had bound her brow. Coming to stand directly before
the first row of pews, and plunging her hands into her apron pouch, she
bowed gravely, meeting every man's eyes. 

"Gentlemen, you are most welcome here, and that is putting it mildly.
Please forgive a haste that might resemble discourtesy, but this isn't the
time for a genuine conference. It's a chance for me to give you the
outlines of our situation, and answer the most general kind of question,
no more. 

"So first: When I've made the Solicitation and you've learned the task for
which we'll want to engage you, then set yourselves the most generous wage
that fairness allows you. The Aristarchs will only remain cooperative if
they are dealt with firmly and unequivocally from the start. 

"Second: Though we don't strictly know the Flockwarden's will until I have
made the Solicitation, I can't pretend to have the least doubt of what it
is, and so I can acquaint you with the parameters of the task. For surely,
the Goddess' flock is what she herself has wanted since the day their
re-emergence became known to her more than a year ago, while they are also
the only credible antidote to what ails our city." Lybis gestured
ceilingward without withdrawing her eyes from those of the mercenary
commanders. 

"So what is the flock? Its numbers aren't clearly known-hundreds, but
nowhere near a thousand. They are giant lithivores. I gather they stand
about knee-high to the Goddess." (Eyes rose gaugingly. Each of the
Flockwarden's legs had three major joints. The lowest was fifteen feet
from the floor.) "Their bulk is that of a good-sized whale. They are
highly tractable. They've surfaced in the hills of Kairnheim's southern
promontory-a region both so mountainous and so jungled that the Prior
Kairns have never troubled to annex it. This season it's a ten-day
crossing over the Sea of Catastor. And before you start computing the
number of crossings needed, know that the beasts are phenomenally
tough-bodied, all but undamageable, and that they can live entirely
without air. They can, in fact, be lashed together in groups of four or
five, buoyed, and towed behind a transport of moderate size, which the
while can be carrying one or two more of the beasts packed in its hold." 

She paused and raised her brows to invite remark. One of the infantry
commanders, Menodon, murmured: "Twenty ships could carry a hundred and
forty a trip. Will we have twenty ships?" 

"We'll have thirty-five. The Aristarchs can levy twenty from our own
merchant fleets alone, and they'll willingly underwrite the procural of
fifteen more from the Shallows or the Aristoz Islands." 

"Mmm. Forgive me, Dame Lybis, but you must let me rephrase some of your
remarks in what I can't help feeling is a more accurate manner. Ages past,
the remote ancestors of this flock were highly tractable to the commands
of their Flockwardens"-he nodded significantly at the frozen colossus-"but
what we must deal with will be beasts which have never known either a
Warden or her rule. In this rather different light, let me repeat a
question you have already answered by implication. Will the collection and
transport of these huge things involve any dangerous difficulty? Please be
frank. We don't shrink from danger or hardship, we merely seek to assess
it properly and price it fairly. Surely these nomadic, long-ungoverned
behemoths will not be tamely tethered, marched into the sea, bound and
dragged across it, without offering some opposition. With no offense
intended, how can you plausibly promise such a thing?" 

Lybis stood smiling serenely, hands restfully pocketed in her pouch, head
slowly shaking a benign negative. "You don't grasp the entire picture, my
friend. Toil and difficulty there'll certainly be in crossing the terrain
in question. Other claimants to the herd might also be met, and need
fighting. These things excrete in purified form whatever metal they
ingest, along with very high-quality furnace fuel, man, and if they're
noticed they won't go unclaimed! But as for resistance to our will from
the flock itself, we shall encounter none at all. For a Flockwarden will
be commanding their obedience. What you might think of as the Goddess'
voice will prompt their compliance throughout the expedition. For does she
not speak from my mouth, and declare her will through my presence, and
shall I not be with you? Though speech, in this case, will not be the
medium, nevertheless her commands will be channeled through myself and the
flock will feel them. And the latter's ilk, however long at large, are so
made that they can never be impervious to a Flockwarden's behests." 

There was a fractional silence, in which all eyes posed a question which
Lybis, by her smiling silence, benevolently challenged them to articulate,
and then Nifft asked: "With apologies, Dame Lybis, do the dead, then, not
only reveal hidden treasures, and discover the remote emergences of
long-lost beings, but govern expeditions as well, with hourly attention
and providence?" 

The Aristarchs had begun to file into the shrine, a subdued group. The
priestess did not turn her eyes from Nifft's, which she studied for a
moment with an air of speculation. Then she said: "You know that the
Goddess does the first two, sir. Whether or not you believe she can do the
third is for yourself, and the rest of you gentlemen, to decide, before
you accept this commission." 

V 

The assembly was silent. Aristarchs and mercenary commanders alike studied
the slack folds of the drawn Veil of Solicitation, which Sexton Minor had
closed behind Lybis when she had stepped within it, and before which he
now stood, awaiting the priestess' word that the Solicitation had been
completed, whereat it was his office to unveil her again. 

Though identical in their silent concentration upon those pleated drapes,
the Aristarchs watched them with a queasy premonition of painfully large
capital disbursements, while the soldiers' faces betrayed a covert
complacency as they kept the same vigil. But given this difference of
attitude, it could still be said that for both groups, the slightest
stirring of the ceremonial curtain emitted the same ghostly sound-the
subliminal music of five-lictor gold pieces hefted by the palmful, a
melody melancholy to half its auditors, and dulcet to the other half.
Meanwhile the eyes of the men in either group showed an identical
tendency-whenever they forsook that pregnant drapery-to flicker upward at
the coffined giant. Her great antennal bows, plunging to receive her
dwarfish petitioner's query, were given looks of uneasy calculation.
Seemingly, the Goddess' active sentience was being given some thought by
the congregation. A caw of triumph rose from within the Veil: 

"Ha! I knew it! And you shall have it, Mistress, on my very life I swear
it! Ha!" 

The Sexton's feet shifted; embarrassment marred the decorous blank of his
expression. Near silence followed in which a very faint noise, a soft,
erratic pattering and squeaking, was audible from within the Veil. Then
Lybis cried: "Her will is known! Her will be done!" 

The Sexton, as his post seemed to require of him at the pronouncement of
this formula, turned suavely to withdraw the Veil for the oracle's
emergence, but he had no more than turned when the drapes flew apart-one
of them rudely enveloping his head and shoulders-and Lybis strode out,
holding a wax tablet and a stylus. The stylus she pointed vindictively at
herself, while she hammered the tablet against the air at the assembly. 

"Didn't I foretell you this, gentlemen? Eh? Didn't I now?" She stabbed the
stylus into her hair, where it vanished. Then she patted the tablet
against her free palm with a menacing smile. "Harken," she said. She read
from the tablet, her voice dramatic, and clarion-clear: 

From ancient murder buried deep, like seed, 

A harvest has arisen in the sun- 

So men may reap what once they did lay down 

When they entombed the thing that sparked 

the greed 

Their murderous action had been meant to feed. 

In south-most Kairnheim murder is undone; 

If you do but restore to Anviltown 

Her lately un-killed issue, thus you'll speed 

The lifting of that doom that weights you down. 

"Well, gentlemen?" Lybis burst out, as if astonished that they all sat
silent after hearing this exhaustively foretold revelation. "Can you
really be so chill-blooded? So unmoved by heroic sentiments and cosmic
phenomena? Come, you're all playing stoic, as men so love to do. One of
you, at least, must show that he has heard me, in token for the rest of
you, or else I'll think you're all deaf, or dumb, or both. Mint-Master
Hamp! You sir! Let it be you, of estimable, agile-witted Aristarch! Come,
Lord Hamp. What did you discover from the Goddess' utterance?" 

The man in question, by allowing only a grey stubble to occupy the pate of
his otherwise severely shaven head and face, had made the more manifest an
unusual squareness of visage. Hamp regarded Lybis morosely, the glumness
of his mouth complaining in advance that his answer was going to be
mistreated. 

"I entreat you, Lord Hamp," the oracle urged, "can't we dispose of the
obvious with more dispatch? What did the oracle tell you?" 

With the prompting of many supportive gazes, Pozzle's among them, Hamp
cleared his throat, and availed himself of his jaw's massive hinge. "Well,
what she means essentially, as you predicted she was going to in the
Aristarkion, is the interpretation that the way to solve the problem is to
go and bring her flock back, which again as you were saying was exactly
the same situation of a year ago." 

Hamp cleared his throat again, with a faint note of optimism engendered by
Lybis' silent, thoughtful gaze. She shook her head slowly, still looking
at him. She grinned. Her head tilted back and she emitted a big, braying
laugh. At length she brought herself more or less under control. 

"Oh, my dear Lord Hamp," she said. "Anvil, Staff, and Hammer bless us all!
Mind that I don't say this disparagingly, for knowing you and hearing your
views has always given me the liveliest kind of pleasure, but that's
precisely the kind of cretinous irrelevance I've come to count on from you
over the years. Obviously she wants the flock brought back home! What
could be plainer? But does no one see what the significance of this will
be, once it is accomplished? Why has her thought and will endured
throughout the countless centuries of her death? Why has she always helped
us? In short, why has she held this posthumous sentinel's post all along,
if not precisely for this moment? The return of her flock to its home, the
restoration of her world as it was when, anciently, men destroyed it? And
whose luck is this? Who inherits those long-lost mountain-makers and
mountain-destroyers and mountain-miners now? To think that we had to be
forced to accept this staggering enrichment! So greedy you all are in the
short term, so lazy and unimaginative!" 

"Yes, forced!" erupted Director Pozzle. "That's exactly what I'm talking
about!" 

"Eh? Have you been whispering to yourself, Director Pozzle?" 

Pozzle had surged to his feet with an accusing finger thrust up toward the
Goddess, but in the same instant that he struck this posture the huge
countenance of the accused caused his legs to wobble slightly, and the
voice to leak out of his throat momentarily, as if the Flockwarden's mute
giantism confuted anything he could say. 

"Extortion," he managed at last. It came out muted, like a comic attempt
at confidentially addressing the whole chamber without the giant's
hearing. "It's blackmail. We talked in the Aristarkion." His challenging
look elicited some uncomfortable nods and murmurs of support from his
fellow Aristarchs. "The Goddess knew about the deceptive support-vein-that
it wasn't nearly as thick as it looked from outside. The lode she revealed
to us lay deeper, and if she knew about that, she must have known about
the support vein we were counting on to-" 

Lybis had held up her hand, and was nodding calmly. "Lord Pozzle. The
Goddess doesn't condescend to discuss her divine motivations with her
humble servitor, but do you think I'm a fool? Isn't it more or less
staring us in the face? And I will say to you what I told myself when I
had the same realization: So what? Will you gentlemen undertake to punish
her? And if she has seen how to make a mountain bow down above our city,
surely she's the only one who can help us decapitate a mountain. Who else
will you go to for help? But of course, the city's purse is yours to
command. I will leave you to reach whatever agreement you see fit with our
military friends here. Do let me know what you decide. I'll be in the
atrium." 

Nifft followed the shrine-mistress from the chamber. "Dame Lybis, could I
speak with you?" He held out to her a string-tied packet of vellum. "A
very dear friend of mine in Karkmahn-Ra, a scholar of the highest
reputation, sends you this. Perhaps you have heard of Shag Margold?" 

Her brows rose and she took the packet. "Margold? His History of the
Kolodrian Migrations stands on the shelf of my most prized books. Why has
he written me?" 

"He's at work on a history of the world's most prominent religious cults.
He's always followed yours with interest, and has gathered a fair amount
of information on it." Nifft paused, dropped his eyes, and cleared his
throat. "He's asked you a number of questions which he hopes you'll be so
good as to answer for him, to fill out his account of Pa-of Anvil
Pastures. Forgive my impertinence, but that's a charming ring you have on.
Is that an anvil?" 

"Yes." 

"It's a beautiful piece of silverwork-by the same artisan as made your
staff and hammer?" 

Lybis, whose eyes had grown rather remote, absently touched the latter two
miniatures, which hung from a chain around her neck. "I presume so. They
are temple heirlooms, made long before my time." 

"Well. I'll be in the city for some time-frankly, I'm looking for a bit of
employment-and perhaps you'll find it convenient to answer Shag's letter
in time for me to take your reply back with me." Lybis nodded, not
speaking. "So! Thank you again. I think I'll go stroll around a bit and
take the view from this marvelous plaza outside. Good-bye for now." 

Nifft had loitered outside the temple for perhaps ten minutes when the
Aristarchs came out, and after them, the commanders-the former grave, the
latter rather buoyant, in a decorous way. Nifft told Kandros to go on
without him, and that he would meet him back at the quarters where the
mercenaries had been housed. When he had been alone again for perhaps
another ten minutes, Dame Lybis came hurrying from the temple, spied him,
and made straight for him, wearing a rather strained smile. 

"Still here, then? You know, I'm curious-have you read your friend's
letter?" 

Nifft straightened indignantly. "Why-well, certainly not!" His awkward
expression did nothing to repair the lack of conviction in his tone. 

"Naturally not," Lybis said. "Forgive me for asking. You know, I'd like to
express my admiration for Margold in some more substantial way than merely
answering this. You mentioned you were looking for employment? You seem to
be a handy and active sort of man-it would be my pleasure to secure you a
commission on our expeditionary force, at an officer's pay, if that would
suit you." 

"You are extremely kind! I would undertake it most gratefully and
faithfully!" 

VI 

The expedition, being lucky in the winds, had crossed the Sea of Catastor
and found the nearest suitable anchorage to their goal by the afternoon of
their ninth day out of Anvil Pastures, with seven hundred leagues of their
journey accomplished. To cross the remaining fifty miles, and then
re-cross it with the Goddess' flock in tow, took three weeks. 

This sloth was, in part, due to the mountainous jungle they had to
penetrate with every step of their inland journey. Partly, too, it was
their mode of pathfinding. On the open sea, the directive emanations of
the Goddess-her extended filament of sentience-though attenuated by
distance, reached unobstructed over the level seas. But crossing the
fernchoked gorges and vine-webbed groves-following the narrow watercourses
slick with mist, mud, and moss that were often their sole means of
traversing the ridges that opposed them-here, Lybis was often forced to
diverge from this psychic connective to the point of so diminishing her
sense of it that she must find high ground whence she could relocate its
course, and correct their tedious path accordingly. 

And a third circumstance retarded them-the fact that when they reached the
flock, they found an army in possession of it, and a second army besieging
the first. 

The first army was in possession of the lucrative monsters in a technical
sense only. The beasts were in a kind of fortress of their own making-they
had eaten a broad, flat-bottomed gulf out of the flanks of two adjoining
hills. Raggedly vertical walls some ninety feet high encompassed them,
easily enough descended from the hills with ropes, but impossible as an
escape route. Consequently the besiegers bent their main effort against
the impressive wood-and-stone wall the defenders had strung across the
pit's one open side: the narrow valley-floor whence the herd had
approached the hills they found so appetizing. And the defenders possessed
the giants only in the sense that those behemoths were gnawing too
leisurely at the hills' flanks to be very far away by the time the battle
was likely to be decided, and were too torpidly indifferent-if not,
indeed, blind-to events of so small a scale as human warfare to contest
the claims of the army that had strung the wall behind them. 

They had tough, laquered-looking bodies, plated so that they appeared
staved or planked, and they were shaped like the overturned hulls of
ships. They hauled themselves along on clusters of crooked, relatively
dwarfish legs, and swinishly pushed their black, four-lobed
mouthparts-when closed together, they resembled tulips-against the
nourishing bones of the earth. 

Both armies were Prior Kairns, natives of the continent's lush, cattle
rich southern half, competing for the enrichment of two rival provinces.
This was learned from the survivors of the besieging army who, while the
mercenaries encamped to debate their approach to the siege, attacked them.
They had been alert for the arrival of a relief force expected by their
enemies, and in the dense jungle had not recognized that they were
engaging-not the small contingent their spies had described-but a force
larger as well as more seasoned than their own. 

The mercenaries now found their tactical problems simplified. The next
morning they advanced to the rampart. There they compelled the surrender
of the skeleton force the besiegers had left to mask their withdrawal from
the defenders, and prevent a sortie and assault on their rear. Menodon
then called on the defenders to make a peaceful withdrawal, as his force
represented the claims of the flock's lawful owner. This suggestion was
rudely declined by the army upon the ramparts. 

With this eventuality in view, Kandros had already commenced the
construction of a single, slender siege-tower. This was brought within
some hundred yards of the wall, and Lybis mounted it, Menodon and Nifft
accompanying her and covering her with their shields. She identified
herself as the viceroy of the flock's rightful owner, and repeated the
request for her property's surrender. Being scornfully invited to come get
them, she replied with a smile that this would not be necessary. She
stretched her hands, palms out, toward the herd. 

The beasts showed a swift unanimity frightening in things so huge and
slothful. They turned their backs upon their meal and proceeded
thunderously in Lybis' direction. The considerable number of soldiers who
were too stunned to abandon the rampart in time were crushed along with
it. 

Though the expedition did not have to grope for its route back to the
coast, the bulk of the five hundred colossi they now had in train
compelled them to weave one that was often extravagantly serpentine.
Detours were maddening, but failing to find them was worse. Many steeply
pitched and densely overgrown ridges were so lubricated by topsoil and wet
foliage that even the fearsome, rock-splitting traction the beasts' queer
little louse's legs could exert was powerless against the instantaneous
obedience of their huge, mud-buttered masses to gravity's imperatives. And
all too often a squad of lead-beasts had to set to gnawing through muck
into base-rock, and eating a slow-rising trench of rough stone up to the
crest, along which the rest of the flock could be channeled. 

They returned, at last, to find that the detachment of pioneers Kandros
had left with the ships had completed the structures necessary to overcome
the difficulties of the flock's embarkation. The greatest of these was
getting at least one of the beasts into each hold, as the urgency of
hastening their delivery compelled the expedition to make it in only two
crossings. For this, a huge, arched ramp stretched from the beach, out
along a line of offshore rocks, to deep water a hundred yards offshore-a
half-bridge, from whose bowed terminus a giant crane thrust out over the
water. 

For the binding of the herd into flotillas of a half-dozen that could be
towed astern, thirty-five corrals of six-whale capacity (the overall bulk
of the beasts had been accurately expressed in terms of whales) had been
built on the intertidal sands. Made of thirty-foot posts, their seaward
walls were hinged to swing out, gate-wise. When each corral's huddle of
tenants had been lashed together and hung with floats by teams working at
low tide, high tide would be awaited by the fleet-their holds all loaded
previously-at which time they could tow out their stern-cargo
simultaneously, and make full sail to convey to Anvil Pastures her
deliverance. 

The flock marched with clockwork obedience through every phase of the
loading operation, and their perfect inertia once in the holds or tied
astern gave everyone involved a sense of vast power in total, uncanny
vassalage to a governing will that was, after all, thousands of miles
distant. Indeed, the Goddess now enjoyed, with only the open ocean
separating them, unobstructed governance of the flock's will, and could,
Lybis said, perceive the beasts' environment unambiguously, and dictate to
them the behavior necessary for their defense against whatever beset them
from the inlands. So the half of the flock that could not be taken with
the first convoy were left to wait, with a substantial garrison, the
fleet's return, and Lybis went back to Anvil Pastures with the first half.

En route, about two days out of Anvil Pastures, the convoy encountered a
fleet of Baskinon men-of-war. Their pilot-vessel hailed Lybis' flagship,
and a boarding was requested politely enough, given the belligerents'
customary brusqueness with the citizens of their shared arsenal. Lybis'
strident cordiality scarcely required the hailing-trumpet she used to
invite them aboard. The visiting admiral, sufficiently nonplused by what
he saw astern of the Anvilian craft, was even more disconcerted by the
inspection of the hold to which his blithely garrulous hostess exhorted
him. Afterward she invited him to a glass of spirits in her cabin. By this
time the man-a stolid, scar-faced great-uncle, doubtless a merchant in
peacetime, according to the pattern in Baskin-Sharpz-had caught the idiom
of her insolence and begun to warm toward her. Draining his second glass,
and rising to go, he reached forward without the slightest hint of
awkwardness, and patted her arm. 

"You've got seven devils-full of nerve in you, Priestess, and you're so
small! I hope you come out of what you're doing all right. You know, I
half believe that if your city is destroyed, we could end up at armistice
with Hallam. And I must tell you, my dear, that there's many a place in
this world where your city-saving efforts are talked of, and not cheered
on. I'm sorry, but that's the truth." 

Lybis smiled at him with a strange glee: "But my city cheers me on,
Admiral." 

Back in the city, Lybis left Kandros with instructions to build a system
of ramps encircling the peak just below its breakage, and to incorporate
the existing shoring in its foundation-a function for which the latter was
adequate, laughably insufficient though it was for its original purpose.
Both going and returning, Lybis kept Nifft on her ship, and occasionally
would drink with him in her cabin. At such times she would question him
about his life, and she found much to laugh at in his answers. 

VII 

The morning after the expedition's return to Anvil-Pastures, Nifft,
Kandros, and Minor strolled across the plaza of the acropolis toward its
major salience, whence they would have an excellent view of the flock,
assembled on the little plain outside the city's main gate. Meanwhile they
did not lack for spectacle, for up on the mountain, on the rampway
collaring its broken neck, a swarm of tiny figures sent down to them a
minuscule, belated noise of construction. 

"They'll be off it by noon," said Minor, squinting impassively up against
the sky's brightness, "and we'll see if it'll hold the brutes." 

"If the brutes will be on it by then," Nifft said. His friends looked at
him, and he smiled. "I have a feeling there's to be another Solicitation."
He nodded toward the temple, across the square behind him. A procession of
coaches was pulling up in front of it, and already several of the
Aristarchs were stepping down. 

"Damn the woman!" the Sexton cried. "I'm the first functionary on her
staff! She told me nothing! She insists on baiting me and slighting me." 

Nifft clapped him on the shoulder. "I hope it doesn't make it worse that
Kandros and I were told to expect it. The priestess has a feeling, you
see, that the Goddess is going to want something that will require my
friend's engineering skills again. Come on-let's go on and take our view.
We've got almost half an hour." 

As they proceeded, Minor continued to grumble, until Kandros burst out:
"Can her hostility surprise you, Sexton Minor? Does she love the
Aristarchs? Your connection with them, your debt to their influence for
your very position, is a major point of pride with you. You're frankly
skeptical of the Flockwarden's divinity; indeed, that's putting it mildly.
Meanwhile, the Dame herself is nothing but devout toward-" 

"Ah-ha! You see there you're misled!" It was a point on which the Sexton
seemed prepared, fervently ready, with an answer. They had reached the
balustrade facing the north-most tip of the plaza at the terminus of its
slender projection in that direction, and he gave it a slap for emphasis.
"View it objectively. There is an object, the corpse of the so-called
Goddess, which emanates undeniable power. Like a heated poker, its power
beams forth from it, shines out in rays, long after the death of the fire
that endowed it with this radiant power. Heat we all know how to use. But
suppose it's a power that there's a trick to using, to tapping? You are in
a hereditary guild that bequeaths you this trick, in exchange for
lip-service to some divine cant that legitimizes your exclusive possession
of that vital trick. What would you profess then? Yet it remains raw,
residual power in an accidentally preserved alien body, and no more than
that. Would a goddess, who could beam her will across the ocean, be unable
to send it curving through a bit of rough terrain to reach her servant's
minds? Is such laughable limitation a divine potency? Ha! But a simple
beam of power, like a poker's heat and glow, that might well need
reflecting, focusing, as a mirror might reflect and aim the poker's glow
around a corner." 

"But there's a sentience in this reflected power," Nifft said. The
amusement in his eyes was lazy, remote, perhaps, from the precise question
at issue. "There's directive consciousness in it." 

"But who knows what energies these beings from the stars glowed with?"
cried the Sexton. "It's still a brute, mechanical thing, and Dame Lybis is
as callous and realistic in her manipulation of it as the most cynical
unbeliever." 

"Well, well," sighed Nifft. "Who's to say your description, in its main
outlines, is wrong?" 

All three fell to gazing where their eyes had dwelt for some time-upon the
Flockwarden's cattle. Seen from this vantage, the flock might have been a
little town built just outside the city wall-a bizarre settlement of
loaf-shaped buildings, perhaps just such an alien-looking town as might be
found on other worlds. Its background of tortured, carcass-gaunt peaks,
wherein strands of a half-dozen bright metallic colors-silver, copper,
bronze, brass-were twisted inextricably with black ribbons of the flock's
age-old fecal coal, did nothing to dispel the illusion. Indeed, it was the
mighty, walled city of pale stone, Anvil-Pastures itself, which struck all
three witnesses as the least "real," most ephemeral fraction of that
panorama. 

" 'By Anvil, Staff and Hammer,' " murmured Nifft. "Where's the Anvil,
Minor?" 

"Eh? What do you mean? What Anvil?" 

"The Anvil that goes with the Staff in yon bay, and the Hammer in yon
wall. 'Anvil, Staff, and Hammer.' Your mistress is always saying it." 

"Oh!" The Sexton chuckled. "There isn't any. There in the harbor is
Anvil's Staff. There, in the wall, is Anvil's Hammer. There before you,
you have Anvil's Staff and Hammer." He seemed quite pleased with the
neatness of this, and Nifft laughed in his turn, catching a look from
Kandros. 

"I see. Silly of me. You know, huge though the Goddess is, one wonders how
she, or even all her race together, wielded such tools." 

Minor snorted, but his answer was not as immediate as before. Finally with
a shrug he said, "A curious thought. I suppose they were a kind of
statuary, memorial landmarks-perhaps together they formed a sort of
signboard identifying the town to its airborne customers as they flew
near!" The Sexton was pleased anew by this explanation. Nifft nodded. "Now
that's ingenious," he muttered, smiling still. 

They returned to the temple. As they mounted the steps to its entry, it
was the elderly acolyte already encountered by Nifft who ushered them
through the door, and on seeing him, the Sexton flew into a rage. 

"Krekkit! You senile weasel-I suspended you for two weeks!" 

"Rig a noose and suspend yourself from a rafter beam," the old man
answered, still leading them onward. Minor seized his shoulder, detaining
him in the sanctum's doorway where, in the same instant, Dame Lybis
appeared. 

"Unhand my acolyte!" she blazed. 

Minor obeyed before he protested: "I disciplined him! I caught him peeking
through the Veil at the Goddess' . . ." 

"At the Goddess' what?" 

"Her private zone, her veiled part which only yourself . . . I mean, does
it not clearly say in the protocol that-" 

"Be still! Is there one shrine-servant out of the whole two score of you
who hasn't peeked there? Including yourself? And put their hands,
experimentally, to her . . . private parts?" Lybis grinned wickedly. "I
tell you, oh Sexton Minor, acolyte Krekkit came here after working forty
years in the forges, and volunteered his services out of piety, and has
served here since then for twelve of the fourteen years I've served. You
understand? It was out of respect for her power-" (the priestess pointed
toward the sanctum) "-and not the Aristarchs'. And if anyone is going to
be peeking at the Flockwarden's privates, I'd rather it were Krekkit than
you, given the nasty, acquisitive frame of mind I'm sure you do it in. Now
you're to attend to the Solicitation and stop making trouble. I have a
feeling that today's oracle is going to leave us all with much new
business." 

In singing tones, the Shrinemistress-raising from time to time enraptured
eyes from her tablet-read out the oracle: 

Oh, bear the brood-nurse to her hatchlings' side! 

Though she within her ancient death be pent, 

Deliver her-herself, her hearse-beside 

Those on whom her former life was spent, 

To the nursery of those tender innocents 

Bear her so that they, of Knowing void 

May with fruit of her Great Knowing be supplied, 

And fully may conceive of her intent. 

What though in death her frame stand vitrified? 

You know her Knowing part doth yet abide- 

More nearly let it work their government! 

With unwonted tenderness the Priestess tucked the tablet into her apron
pouch. Her stylus she did not put away, but turned slowly in her fingers
as she gazed at it, and began to speak. Her voice was a supple, compelling
current of calm ardor: 

"Ye gods, gentlemen! If our interest didn't lie in fulfilling her desire,
how could our hearts resist doing so? I've often been moved by the
Goddess, in touching the living flow of her emotion, her immemorially
ancient knowledge and desire. But this time . . ." Now her eyes flashed
upon the mute congregation. "I tell you, it's almost as if she were alive!
The soulful urgency of her will to be near her children, as she seems to
call them-yes! She seems almost to feel toward them as a mother to her
children. So deep must her care-taker's bond have been with the flock! I
promise you that I haven't managed to translate even a tithe of the
emotional resonance, the motherly passion there was in her wordless
behest! 

"And I can understand this gentlemen, though there be no blood kinship
between her and those beasts! Have I not known the service of an alien
being, known a devotion to the excellence and beauty of an entity foreign
to my kind, and known this devotion to achieve a degree of joy and proud
commitment that's like love itself!? I make bold to detain you with these
personal sentiments, but I tell you I rejoice that the Goddess will at
last enjoy in death that nearness to her beloved charges which was once so
central to her life. 

"For she must have what she wants, of course. It's a tricky bit of surgery
she's going to be doing with those brainless giants of hers and her hand
must be set as firmly upon the scalpel as possible, that's mere common
sense. . . . It's obvious her glass-muffled emanations will benefit from
all the amplification they can get. The sweet maternal propinquity she
craves, honest Aristarchs, is also our greatest security. It's also
obvious she will not command them to our salvation until she has the
conditions she specifies, and so it is scarcely a matter of choice. What
remains to be done is clear. . . ." 

VIII 

The Goddess' multitudinously attended procession out of the city was a
stately one. It took four days and, despite the most cunning devisement of
its route, necessitated the partial or complete dismantling of nine
sizable buildings to make passage for the cyclopean corpse. Before this
laborious pilgrimage could even be undertaken, the Goddess' equally
arduous descent from the acropolis had to be accomplished. The vitreous
megalith was lowered with an immense block-and-tackle from a boom of
unheard-of proportions, whose skeleton the city's forges had finished and
assembled in less than forty-eight hours of cacophonous, febrile toil. It
was just before dawn when her hugeness inched down from the blocky
plateau's beak-like promontory. The catwalks built up against the
plateau's sheer wall swarmed with torches of workmen attending her
descent, and the plaza was also teeming with lights, so that a shower of
sparks seemed to be spilling down from the great mesa as the Goddess
deserted it for the first time in recorded history. 

At length the great crystalline block had ground its way-rollered on the
countless trees which its vast bulk devoured by the hundreds in its
progress-out through the main gate. That giant portal admitted its exit by
scant inches only. The sun had been down for an hour by the time it had
been positioned in the field where the flock was gathered, and cordoned
round with a screen of temple tapestries draped from pole-strung cables to
designate the periphery of sacerdotal privilege, into which lay-folk must
not penetrate. Dame Lybis, already half-veiled by the deepening shadows,
entered this screen under the silent gaze of the townsfolk, whose torches
washed the field with unsteady orange light, and made the immobile herd
seem to stir and shift restlessly. And indeed, before ever she reappeared
from her sequestration with the Flockwarden, a shock went through the
crowd as those nearest the beasts leapt and cried out in startlement. The
flock had begun a shambling progress toward the mountains. 

Darkness masked their ascent of the slopes and occupation of Kandros'
monumental feeding ramp, but both proceeded in flawless order, as the
contingent of mercenaries sent up to observe the beasts reported during
the first lightless hours of their watch. Sunrise revealed them to the
city already well at work. 

For the next ten days, the spectacle was tirelessly observed by Anvil's
citizens. The beasts' huge forms were plainly visible even at that remove;
less so was the small army of men endlessly clearing the rampway of the
giants' waste products and-since these consisted of various pure metals
and tons of furnace-nourishing fecal coal-conveying them down the slopes
to the city. In this period the mass of the great natural hammer that
threatened the city was substantially reduced-by as much as a fifth to a
quarter, according to the best estimates of Kandros and his staff. 

The lofty rampway became the focus of many a festive gathering of friends.
Anvilians began to make a pastime of congregating on the acropolis or out
on the field before the north wall to eat, drink, disport themselves with
music and dancing-all the while rejoicing in that magical, miniaturized
activity upon the peak which was so steadily and painlessly reducing the
lethal menace that had for so many weeks overhung their rooftops. 

Therefore when, on the morning of the eleventh day, things went awry, it
was before the complacent gaze of thousands of such happy spectators. The
first panicked contingents of workmen reached the city with the news half
an hour after the catastrophe had begun to develop, and even by this time
the city at large had not yet grown alarmed. At the most, a certain
hyperactivity on the part of the scarcely perceptible swarms of workmen
had been here and there observed, and some people had thought they noted a
faintly erratic quality enter the movements of the flock. By the time the
disaster bad been reported throughout the city, its effects were just
becoming visible. The rampway was beginning to sag and buckle, and little
avalanches of loose earth had begun to stream down the neck of the
mountain. An ever-growing efflux of panicked citizens began to swell the
near-hysterical multitude thronging the meadow round the Flockwarden. 

The flock had run amok. They had not only abandoned their orderly feeding
pattern round the outermost edges of the peak, but they had begun a
restless, almost rhythmic milling about on the ramp which had already
caused a vibrational break-up of its pilings. Worst of all, several dozen
of the beasts had turned their ruinous appetites upon the naked metal of
the already bent mountain spine itself. This last news almost caused the
assembled Anvilians themselves to run amok. 

Dame Lybis had stepped within the hieratic screen to perform an emergency
Solicitation of aid and enlightenment, and she had not yet emerged when
the entire rampway was seen to collapse, and the monstrous peak itself bow
down a farther heart-freezing three yards. The mutinous giants were
already tumbling down the slopes when the roar of this ruin fell upon the
ears of the multitude. Eternal moments unfolded during which the
peak-universally, breathlessly regarded-settled no farther. Meanwhile, the
indestructible behemoths, having ceased their uncontrolled plunge down the
slope, began to extricate themselves from the jumbled jack-straws of the
fallen timbers and sluggishly-unwillingly, one might have said-to assemble
and descend the rest of the way to the city. It was then Dame Lybis
emerged from her colloquy with the Flockwarden and proclaimed what she had
learned. The Goddess, who for some days had exerted her control of the
flock with ever-growing difficulty, had at last become exhausted with the
effort, and the mammoth brutes had slipped her control. It was only
through the most titanic efforts that she was now reasserting her
government sufficiently to bring them back down to the plain. 

IX 

Sexton Minor, on every feature of whose face was stamped distaste for his
mission, walked into the forge room of one of Anvil's larger foundries,
which stood not far from the main gate in the north wall. He threaded his
way through it, vainly shouting requests for attention from various of the
thousand sweating devils producing the fire and brain-numbing clangor that
made his efforts so futile. Each man moved like a single,
task-concentrated muscle in the toiling body politic of the desperate
city. The feeding-ramp had to be rebuilt around the peak, presuming the
priestess' current efforts to secure some kind of aid from the Flockwarden
produced a remedy for the flock's sudden recalcitrance. To ponder in the
interval whether she would provide a remedy-indeed, to ponder whether the
enfeebled arm of the mountain-hammer would hold long enough to permit
remedy-was far more agonizing than even the most infernal labors, and
every smith and furnaceman was demon-eyed with his absorption in his work
upon the braces, bolts, collars, groinings and crossbeams the new ramp was
going to require. Sexton Minor wove his way, glaring resentfully at every
hiss of steel in tempering tub, every gasp of a down-draft forge-as at
some intentional impertinence. 

In one corner he found a smith snatching a nap atop his anvil while his
forge was a-heating. The man was curled peacefully on his side, his ankles
neatly crossed upon the anvil's horn, his head on his palms. Minor could
see that a forge-hammer leaned against the wall just beyond the man. He
shook the smith awake. The man, balding and tuft-jowled, gaped glassily as
Minor bellowed in his ear: "There has been a new oracle. Dame Lybis sends
me here to get a forge-hammer. Give me your hammer!" 

Having shouted this, Minor stood tight-lipped in the inscrutable majesty
of his office, trusting that the man's sleep-drugged amazement would
procure him the hammer without the pain of further howling. The man rolled
off the anvil and fetched him the hammer. Minor, mistaking the weight of
the tool which the knotted arm tendered him by the handle-tip as one might
a spoon, gave his arm a painful wrench in taking it. 

His eyes only lost the look of pain this put in them when he raised them,
upon exiting the main gate, and viewed the Flockwarden's grotesque,
jerry-built encasement. Scaffolding now enveloped the glass block. Lybis,
still robed for the Solicitation, stood about two-thirds of the way up the
vertical maze. She was attended not only by the detested acolyte Krekkit
but by Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp, and Smalling. The entire population spread
upon the plain, though its flock-ward border stayed well withdrawn from
those unpredictable beasts. The Sexton appeared to derive little
pleasurable sense of consequence from this fact. Nifft received the hammer
from him and passed it up to workers higher on the scaffold. He grasped
Minor's shoulder encouragingly. 

"Be comforted, honest Minor. Can't you see, from the way she treats the
Aristarchs, that there's no way to win if you argue with her eccentric
demands: Confront it, friend-she enjoys rubbing your set's faces in your
covert cynicism toward the Goddess all these years. I mean, it's an
unlovely, vengeful act, but surely understandable in someone who's been
dedicated to a covertly ridiculed mystery for years?" 

"There was simply no need to insist on a used forge-hammer, especially if
one light blow is sufficient for the job," the Sexton sulked. But the
Priestess now had the hammer, and despite his professed scorn, Minor
seemed to catch some of that breath of apprehension which swept faintly
through the entire multitude at that moment. 

In the manner-oddly, under the circumstances-of one who gives comfort,
Nifft said: "Oh, I'm sure it will do the job, Minor. If she can trace the
deepest mountain-bones from where she lies, she can surely find one faint
seam of critical weakness in her own coffin? Come, come. The Goddess is
about to be, in her own term, 'divested.' Ye gods, Minor, wasn't that a
rousing set of lines-I mean for their expressiveness, apart from its
import to all of us." 

Nifft cocked his head back appreciatively, like one about to recite some
admired verses. It was unlikely that the Sexton was going to hear him, for
at this moment he watched fascinated as Lybis, with an address surprising
in one of her diminutive stature, was hoisting the hammer above her
shoulder, hefting for the swing. Nifft, instead of reciting, pointed to
one of the copies of the latest oracle, which had already been posted
throughout the city, scant hours after its delivery. He read aloud from
it: 

Can shackled Mistress bind and rule her slave? 

Unsheathe my limbs, so long the air denied- 

(Lybis now carefully took a wide-legged stance, and calculatingly applied
the hammer nose to the ribbon-circled spot of any impact's maximum
disruptive effect upon the glass.) 

-Divest me, that my power, which never died 

Might flow undammed, as when, before the grave 

Did cover me, I governed in my pride! 

The priestess slowly drew back the hammer for a second time above her
head, and swung the steel slug lustily to the marked spot. A dull,
disappointingly flat whack echoed over the heads of the crowd. The people
roared softly. The entire crystalline vitrolith had grown milky, utterly
opaque. And then it collapsed-smoothly as dry, heaped sand, it rivered off
the giant, alien frame. 

The scaffolding had been built rigid and close to the block, in order that
it might catch and at least partially sustain the Flockwarden's pithless
remains once their support should have fallen away. The precaution was
needless. The Flockwarden did not fall. She stood springily upon her
jointed legs, and her iridescent wings delicately essayed the air. 

The noise this raised from the crowd was such that it brought Nifft's head
around in sudden, surprised appraisal. For the outcry was a curiously
relief-tinged groan, as might greet a thing that has been all but
foreknown. The Flockwarden's wind-spawning wings sped up. They were now
scarcely visible, yet for all their power of vibration they did not even
graze the narrowness of her enclosure. Smoothly vertical she rose, and
cleared the box of scaffolding. Smoothly across the plain she moved,
bearing the message of her mastery directly to her refractory herd. 

And as her assault commenced, her mastery proved never for a moment to be
contested by the swinish giants. It seemed a strangely ritualistic
scourging she gave them, too-not to all of them, but to perhaps a hundred
individuals, one after the other. Over each of these she hovered, and
bowed downward-dead contrary to her tapered abdomen's normal bent-her
caudal prong. This she thrust into the beast beneath her, and thus linked,
she did no more than hang in the air a moment, her body shuddering
rhythmically. Then she unanchored herself and flew to another, seemingly
randomly chosen member of her flock. 

When at length she returned from the scourging, the Goddess seemed
dreadfully enfeebled. She wobbled in her flight, and in settling on the
grass not far from her shattered coffin, her legs buckled under her on her
left side, and her head drooped. 

It was soon learned from Lybis that the city's benefactress lay in grave
weakness, and her life-that long-kept secret-was waning within mere hours
after its last, long-prepared for vital service. It was not known how long
she might survive, and the only assurance she could give the city was that
the flock was, at least for now, subdued, and would return to work when
the ramp was ready. Her beasts would in any case be showing a marked
slowing down, as they were nearing their natural calving-season, but while
they approached that period, they should at least obediently-if not
energetically-pursue their task. 

At least, they should do so while the FIockwarden lived. Their possible
behavior if she should die became a matter of terrified conjecture. A
great pavilion was erected over the Goddess. Her moribund vastness was
constantly visited by the piously solicitous townsfolk, and an outdoors
shrine blazed with votive candles as the indoor one had never done. A
further oracle was besought, and given. 

In her pronouncements, there were some dim foreshadowings of what aid the
city might seek in the melancholy event of the Goddess' demise. These
could be read on any street in town, as the posting of the oracles had
become at this point an invariable procedure: 

My life doth gutter, darken toward its close. 

If death my governance of the flock o'erthrows, 

One there is, not far from here, whose name 

His ancient nearness to our city shows- 

Pastur. His tomb I'll teach you, should the flame 

Of my remaining life grow yet more dim. 

Before that time I nothing will disclose 

Lest some too greedy man uncover him 

And use the buried giant for selfish aim- 

Vain consequence and power-for among those 

I shared my world with, Pastur could dispose 

Their giant bulks to suit his lightest whim; 

He drove them as he listed, unopposed 

By me or mine, who cowered when he came. 

X 

The herd resumed its lofty pasturage, but in a manner that nourished among
Anvilians gloomy speculations on the Goddess' diminishing strength. The
flock's obedience was sluggish, balky, and its appetite was dull. Apart
from the approach of its breeding season, some of this torpor seemed a
plain token of its warden's wavering life-flame. No one could bring
himself to seek the abatement of the beasts' remedial labors, nor could
they allow themselves to contemplate the result of a second anarchic
frenzy, should such again possess them. So throughout a two-week agony of
ambivalence, the citizens stared themselves dizzy at the thronging
rampway, and in that time saw the lapsed peak's bulk dwindle by inches to
a mass that was still more than two-thirds what it had originally had-and
this supported by a spine rather less than the same fraction of its
original thickness. 

And then the flock abandoned its work en masse. The city woke one morning
to find the peak deserted, and the plain outside the north wall again
encamped with the motionless colossi. 

The populace had soon thronged the walls and the ground outside them to
view the prodigious biological event that was occurring out on the plain.
It had soon become evident that far more than half the flock were females.
Perhaps four hundred of the mammoth livestock on the sward were seen, by
noon, to be engaged in the generative process. 

The promised breeding was unquestionably in progress. Each female, after
establishing a caudal link with the soil for at least an hour, inched her
tail-tip up from the earth, hoisting its rubbery apical mouth from around
what she had so laboriously, and with so many a shudder, been implanting:
a shining, white, ribbed ellipsoid with a barbed peak-and, presumably,
barbed tail, the which was snugly planted in the earth, and must have been
what permitted the wobbling anchorage that each newly deposited egg
exhibited as it rolled lazily with the assaults of the onshore winds that
arose at dusk. Each of the giant cows produced a minimum of a dozen eggs,
and several huge old cows produced more than fifty apiece. 

The egg-laying marked the beginning of an alarming decline in the
Flockwarden's already diminished vitality. She had been lying with her
legs half folded under her, her abdomen more tightly curved above her than
it had been during her endless immurement in the glass. Her antennae were
almost her only active part. They could he seen to move in feeble
conference with the veiled priestess during the several non-oracular
communions Lybis held with her, during which she acquainted the priestess
with the state of her diminishing vigor. Now, however, the Flockwarden's
great head hung forward, and her major antennae trailed almost touching
the ground. They could be seen to stir now and again. The priestess,
prevented by the Goddess' posture from a full and formal Solicitation,
could do no more to ease the tormented hearts of her townsfellows than
assure them that the Flockwarden, should death truly come for her, would
rouse herself a last time on behalf of her human flock (as, said Lybis,
the Goddess had come to regard the Anvilian's) and speak again, imparting
to them the cue to their salvation-the means of raising the giant from the
past to work their deliverance. 

During this suspension of the herd's activity-for though they milled
restively from time to time, they were generally almost comatose, each cow
standing stupidly, flanking her egg-cluster-the city agonized ceaselessly
over the oracular implication that the beasts were indeed capable of a
second anarchic outburst if the Goddess should die. An assault upon the
city itself was not thought impossible. Within four days of the egg-laying
the Aristarchs had dwelt so vociferously upon this topic that a plan was
developed, in concert with Kandros and his staff, for the city's defense
in the event this hair-raising possibility should eventuate. 

As the powerlessness of stone to oppose the advance of the flock was the
original cause of worry, ramparts or other vertical barriers were
discounted at the outset-they would go down too quickly, by mere pressure
alone, unless the town should be given an unlikely amount of time for
construction on a major scale. A great, straight-walled trench was deemed
the best thing to slow them, and the digging was commenced by truly
massive gangs of conscripted citizens, working side by side with the
mercenaries and swelling their numbers to an extent that made it possible
to finish the trench in less than a week. It ran almost a mile and a half,
dividing the north wall from the little plain. It was more than a hundred
feet broad, and as many deep, and from its inner, wallward lip a thick
palisade of spike-tipped timbers projected at an angle above the pit,
wherefrom the defenders could harrass the ascent of the besiegers. A short
time after this impressive feat of engineering was accomplished, while
gangs of grimed Anvilians still lolled in the parks and squares of the
city, numbly awaiting the next dreadful exigency that should come to rouse
them to maniacal efforts, the priestess sent out a city-wide summons to a
Solicitation-for the Flockwarden had lifted her antennae, and feebly
besought the oracle's attendance. It appeared this might be the Goddess'
last revelation for her human flock. There was the more reason for hasty
attendance, the message added, in that the eggs of the flock were
beginning to hatch, and the congregated giants showed signs of waking from
their torpor-indeed, showed signs of advancing upon Anvil itself. 

When Lybis emerged from the Veil, her pallor, and the cold, impassioned
determination on her face were such as to distract the populace for some
moments from the dreadful organic unfoldings out on the plain, a short
quarter mile beyond the just-completed trench. 

"The Goddess, The Flockwarden, is dead. Long live the Goddess! Long live
the Flockwarden!" 

With a vast, low grumble, the multitude repeated her words-a hopeless
outcry of shocked piety, for all now saw what, in their absorption
flockward, they had missed: the Flockwarden's slack neck, her antennae
like dead pythons on the grass. 

"We have done well to defend ourselves," Lybis said, gesturing toward the
spike-rimmed ditch. "They will advance-they begin already, do you see?
Those which are hatching now-soon they too will advance. Watch them. Give
me your ears only while you watch them. View what threatens us-behold in
all its meaning the calamity that descends on us, while I speak its remedy
in your ears. And then upon your own heads let it be if, after hearing,
you do not spur hell-bent directly and speedily to accomplish the great
labor which must purchase that remedy." 

And so she brought her tablet from her pouch, and read the Goddess' last
oracle to the city. As she read, they watched the plain, whereupon there
was much to be seen. For though all the flock's eggs were identical-each
the size of a four-passenger coach, tapered top and bottom, identically
ribbed and colored-two radically different kinds of creature were erupting
from their rupturing husks. 

The most numerous of these were clearly infants of the flock. Though their
leg-clusters were rudimentary, scarcely more than blackish nubs, their
overall conformation was that of their parents, in bud. 

But there were some egg-clutches, perhaps a hundred of them, whence very
different hatchlings dragged themselves out amidst these bona fide calves.
These had spiny black barrels for bodies, leg-clusters that were much more
developed and elaborately jointed and barbed, and jaws of an equally
elaborate structure, entirely distinct from the rock-guzzling snoutlets of
the more numerous calves. 

Both breeds of hatchling began to feed instantaneously once their heads
were free, even though the rest of their bodies had still to be dragged
free of the shell. The calves fed upon the first bare rock they found
beneath them. The black hatchlings began with equal speed to feed upon the
calves. 

It was a stunning, gaudy carnage, for the babes in question were on the
general scale of a large battle-chariot with its team. The calves seemed
to lack all awareness of, or powers of resistance to, the assaults of
their carnivorous nestmates. They squirmed ineffectually, some even
continued to devour the stone as they were flensed to blubbery fragments
by their scissors-jawed siblings, and guzzled down. Meanwhile the parent
beasts displayed no more reaction than did their victim offspring, but
continued an inchoate, milling advance in the general direction of the
watching city. Long after Lybis had finished reading the oracle, the
multitude watched, and saw the pattern emerging in the flock's movement.
The hatchling carnivores remained more or less stationary, usually
surrounded by a blood-spattered mess of half-a-dozen calf carcasses, where
they continued feeding methodically on their swiftly captured feasts. At
the same time, the calves that had escaped their predation-never ceasing
to graze-gradually completed their eclosions, and began following the
movement of the adult beasts. These latter now made steadily, in an
ominous unison of apparent intent, toward the recently completed trench. 

Strangely, few of the townsfolk afterward found that they needed to read
the posted copies of the Flockwarden's last oracle. Sunk in astonishment
as they had been while gazing on that vast unearthly and disaster-pregnant
spectacle, Lybis' voice seemed to have imprinted itself upon their minds,
and most recalled both the burden, and the sweet, ambiguous music, of her
message: 

In Ossuaridon, where priest and seer 

Seek insight, and in visionary gloom 

Within the giant's bones themselves inhume, 

And dwell in dark that they might see more clear, 

There seek great Pastur's catastrophic bier. 

Exhume him and return his remnants here. 

For his bones-if from their accidental tomb 

You take, and with them work his frame's repair- 

Have might to master those that threaten doom, 

Seek the magic of my murdered more-than-peer! 

Haste to find him and convey him where 

Great Anvil-town doth offer greatest room- 

Oh, haste! Lest that should fall which now but looms! 

And the flock my death leaves lawless, do not fear. 

All things their hungry jaws have power to tear, 

Save gold alone-this can they not consume. 

Weigh then your wealth, and judge if it's more dear 

To you than life. If not, your course is clear. 

XI 

Dame Lybis, in the company of Kandros and Nifft (generally recognized now
as being her chosen strategic counselors for the many emergency labors her
position was imposing on her), went on the expedition sent to retrieve
Pastur's bones. She stayed there long enough to see the work commenced,
and then sped back to the city to oversee the last phases of its wall's
"thickening." 

If she had made a special effort to rouse an energetic responsiveness in
her fellow citizens, her success was striking. A sort of de facto
communalism had developed. The city's material stores were disbursed
city-wide on a strict basis of need according with amount and importance
of work done, and people of every class joined in a wholehearted
furtherance of whichever aspect of the city's need they were assigned to
assist. At work on the wall, or on the arduous convoy of hugely laden
wagons bearing back Pastur's bones from Ossuaridon, or on the work-gangs
frenziedly constructing the wagon train's roadway (and working a scant
league ahead of the vanguard's rumbling advance) the townsfolk struggled
shoulder-to-shoulder with the mercenary squads, distinguishable from them
only by a peculiar, taut-faced singlemindedness, a rapt concentration that
was almost glassy-eyed, like the look of a desperately driven slave. 

By far the most herculean labor fell to those sent to exhume the bones.
Ossuaridon-until now no more than the name of an obscure hamlet of
religious fanatics to most Anvilians-was a mere five days' journey inland
through the mountains fencing Anvil-Pastures against the sea. But this was
the time that a mobile expedition of foot with lightly laden wagons took
to traverse that distance. Their return necessitated the highway already
referred to, and even this it took the burdened wains more than eight days
to traverse. The hamlet, built against the flank of a sheer, glacially
carved escarpment, was founded upon the giant's bones themselves, in both
an architectural and cultural sense. Its inhabitants all had in common,
despite the diversity of their origins, a shamanistic turn of mind. The
age of ice which had seemingly intervened between the era of Pastur's
death, and the historical past, had sheared away most of the rock that
encased his bones. These had been even more fully exposed by subsequent
erosion, and many of them thrust gigantically from the escarpment. In
particular the skull had been frontally exposed to an extent that made it
possible for the mystic devotees to enter either of the orbits of the eyes
and, within these bony caves, enjoy the dream-producing vigils which had
for centuries drawn others like themselves to the place and, effectually,
created Ossuaridon. And yet, though all the meagre structures of this
religious outpost clung variously for support to the ribs and femurs of
the broken titan, their inhabitants never offered the slightest opposition
to what amounted to the complete (and swift) dismantling of their
habitations, nor to the extraction and removal of the object of their
cult. 

Once the mining-out of the skeleton was well begun, and the first of the
great wains were laden and on their way back to the city on the still
embryonic highway, Lybis led Nifft and Kandros, along with a small group
of mercenary officers, back toward Anvil on horseback. Just as she was
setting out she abruptly turned her mount aside, and rode to the shamans'
encampment. They had quietly removed their belongings out on the plain to
some tents provided them at the oracle's orders. A man was standing in
front of the nearest of these, and she reined up on reaching him. His
eyes, which were flat and flinty black, were old, though he did not seem
particularly aged in the rest of his lean, raggedly garbed person. 

Lybis leaned forward in the saddle. "You are content that this-" she swept
her arm toward the sprawling, scaffold-decorated exhumation "-should be?" 

"I am content, Mistress." 

"May I ask you why?" 

The man's mouth smiled, an operation that did not involve the rest of his
sun-blackened face (Ossuarionites' days-long vigils were not restricted to
the cult-object's skull). "Are you not restoring him? Would this, in us,
be thanks for his infinite, history-spanning insights, to obstruct his
resurrection?" Lybis smiled, and nodded as if to herself. Then,
delicately, she cleared her throat, and said, "I am glad and grateful. I
am especially glad you do not mingle with our workmen, trouble their
labors. . . ." 

"Nor speak to them either, about anything at all, Mistress," the man
nodded calmly, not even his mouth smiling now. "And that is as we shall
keep matters. We do not wish to obstruct your labors in any way." 

"Bless you, shaman." 

"Equally to you, oracle." 

When she had rejoined her companions and they had been some moments on
their road, Nifft murmured wonderingly: "Marvelous, those caves of his
eyes. Did you go inside, Kandros?" 

"No. Somehow I didn't get the chance." 

Nifft glanced a smile at his friend, then resumed his musing. "So warm it
was in there! And once they'd broken out some of the overhanging rock that
shadowed the interiors, you know what we saw? The back of the left socket
is cracked-there's a hole in its rear wall-and you could see just a bit of
a huge metal sphere, imbedded in the bone where the brain would be. I'll
tell you, my friend, that's going to be the heaviest piece of all." 

Back in the city they found the civil defense project well in progress. It
had not been initiated without the most anguished and repetitive
deliberations up in the Aristarkion. The agonized Aristarchs, from whose
pockets must come the bulk of the protective gold, pointed out that it was
a futile defense, as the flocks, however effectively a layer of gold might
repel their destructive appetites from the wall itself, could always
simply tunnel under any gilded bulwark that opposed them, and bring it
down by collapse, as sappers do. 

As the days of debate lengthened, the flock advanced. They and their
greedy, ever-growing calves, appearing to dread a precipitous fall into
the trench (though many of the adults had survived a far more dizzy plunge
when the ramp had collapsed under them) had eaten their way down into it
at an oblique angle. And then, once down in it, they had begun to eat
their way out again, creating a second oblique rampway, and proving
impervious to all the missiles hurled down on them by the troops on the
log palisade. As this rampart began caving in and had to be abandoned, and
as the time before the beasts should regain ground-level outside the wall
shortened, the urgency of the citizenry for concerted action grew so
ardent and demonstrative that the dilatory Aristarchs yielded. Huge
bellows-powered pumps were constructed. These fed off of melting-vats into
which, with pathetically evident reluctance, the Aristarchs fed their
hoarded bullion, along with all the specie they had cached in the several
banks of the city. When Lybis returned, the first quarter of the wall had
already been gilded with the finest lamination of gold the Aristarchs had
been able to procure from their closely overseen staff of engineers. Lybis
quickly put the rest of the task in the hands of Kandros and his staff,
with Nifft assisting their efforts. It was a labor to which the workers
engaged in it welcomed any additional support, as the flock had already
eaten more than half their way up from the pit, and those constrained to
work the bellows and the melting-vats did so in the most urgent anxiety.
Nifft and Kandros ordained some alterations in procedure, and the gilding
of the walls moved ahead apace. Pastur's bones began to reach the city. 

The relative lightness of these bones was the one fortunate circumstance
the gangs of laborers on the caravan had encountered. Those citizens at
all conversant with such matters vowed that the cyclopean remains had to
be less than a third the weight which normal animal bones of similar size
would have possessed. The acropolis was still crowned with the derricks
that had facilitated the Flockwarden's abandonment of it, and as that
great square was the only place in the city that appeared adequate to
accommodate a skeleton of the size they were dealing with, these machines
were once more enlisted in the city's salvation, hoisting up Pastur's
fossil as fast as its pieces could make their progress through the city
from its eastern gate. Further demolitions, which largely or completely
destroyed some thirty-seven buildings, were required to create the
necessary passageway for the broken skeleton's approach to the base of the
great eminence, and before the work of reassembly up in the plaza had
progressed very far, it was evident that supplementary support must be
created for the huge memento mori. A gigantic platform was extended from
the broad end of the elevation. When, about two weeks after Lybis' return,
the skull arrived, it was, with vast effort and exquisite care, laid upon
that north-projecting horn of the acropolis from which Nifft and his
friends had formerly viewed the flock out on the plain. With the spine
largely completed, and the legs and feet assembled on the platform at the
eminence's opposite end, it became evident that Pastur, when he lived, had
stood about eighty stories high. 

At this point the Aristarchs brought in to Dame Lybis a very shrilly
voiced complaint against her generalship of the city's defenses, most
particularly as regarded the wall-gilding project. Their mathematicians
had scrupulously worked out a volumetric equivalence of unit gold per area
of wall coverage, based on the desired thickness of application per square
foot, and the wall, now all but covered, had consumed more than one and a
half times the gold computed as adequate for its surfacing. Nifft's and
Kandros' crews pursued their labors even as their rectitude was being
subjected to these lofty (and heated) examinations up in the Aristarkion.
It was well this was so, for long before the Aristarchs, under the
moderation of Dame Lybis, had brought their deliberations to any
conclusion, the wall had been completely gilded and, in the same hour, the
ravening columns of the besiegers had swarmed out of the trench and
attacked it. The citizens fled within the gates, and crowded anxiously
atop the walls, manning the defenses there and breathlessly watching for
the first decisive contact of the flock with their now priceless defenses.
The giants crowded to the wall like pigs to a trough, applied to it their
all-destroying snouts, and recoiled. 

Their will to assault the citadel never flagged in the tense days that
followed this first rebuff. The flock, recoiling sullenly and undamaged
from the projectiles and boiling oil the defenders poured down upon them,
tirelessly returned to their attack, but this never involved the use of
their dreaded jaws, which indeed the golds appeared to inhibit their use
of. Instead, they reared as high as their short legs permitted, and butted
thunderously against the barrier. This was far from a futile ploy. As the
days passed, there were several points in the wall where cracks began to
develop, and even inward bucklings of an ominous appearance. The herd
could fairly be numbered at around two thousand now-the calves had
speedily swelled in size, and at present had half their parents' bulk and
most of their adult bodily features. An army of these proportions, which
never ceased its ramming, was bound, eventually, to break down an even
more considerable bulwark than that of Anvil Pastures. The citizens toiled
unremittingly, manning the battlements or shoring the wall from within
wherever it showed signs of weakening. 

Two small mercies were discerned in the situation by some of the more
optimistic Anvilians. First, the herd never seemed moved to resort to the
under-tunneling tactic which the Aristarchs had dreaded, and which would
surely have brought the walls down in swift and utter ruin in half the
time that had thus far elapsed since the flock's onset. And second, the
menacingly carnivorous cohatchlings of the calves had, far from showing
any disposition to join in the siege, shown a reassuringly passive
temperament. All of them, shortly before the battle was joined round the
wall, had burrowed themselves halfway into the ground and lain perfectly
dormant. In the course of the first few days following this occurrence,
observers from the wall noted that the beasts' exposed upper bodies had
developed an opaque ensheathment of tough, dark material. A kind of second
eggshell, it seemed, was enveloping them. Now, after more than ten days
had passed, they showed no sign of further life, and their new
encapsulations had grown quite rigid-looking. 

Meanwhile, the bones of the city's savior-to-be passed one by one through
its eastern gate and, amid the shouts of men, the grunts of dray-beasts,
and the rattle and groan of massive tackle, inched their way up the
vertiginous side of the acropolis to join the steadily growing framework
of the recumbent titan that crowned it. The work never faltered, even at
night, when the great plateau was draped with torch-swarms, and seemed,
once again, to shed cascades of sparks. 

XII 

Late in the afternoon, Aristarchs Pozzle, Hamp and Smalling stood outside
the temple, talking gravely with Sexton Minor. To stand where they did, or
indeed, anywhere on the acropolis, was to stand under a monstruous, stark
forest of megalithic shafts and arches, one where swarms of men on ramps
and crane arms were-not timbering-but supplementing, multiplying its
growth. If this overlooming industry caused the Aristarchs to cringe
somewhat, to crouch resentfully, it seemed to add something to Minor's
stature. Perhaps this was due to a certain unconscious pride he was
beginning to take in this stupendous productiveness of his hitherto
disregarded temple. Power, in his understanding, was clearly taking on a
broader definition than he had formerly accorded the term. His posture
lacked the deferential tilt it normally exhibited when he was in the
company of the power-elite, and he looked particularly fresh and spruce.
This trio of the elite, on the other hand, looked gravely worn, almost
shabby, as though mired by the exhausting defrayal of endless costs. 

"I am very sorry, gentlemen," Minor was saying smoothly. "Dame Lybis is at
this very moment searching the repository of sacred texts for some clue.
We can do no more than wait. Believe me, I regret the anguish this
subjects you to. But try to be comforted. Hasn't the temple proved to be
the source of an astonishing variety of powers and insights, just in these
past few months alone? I must confess to you, gentlemen, that I feel an
irrepressible optimism myself, however grim things are in a general way.
After all, every danger the Goddess and her cult have gotten us into,
they've gotten us out of again-try to be encouraged by that." 

Pozzle regarded the Sexton with a just-barely repressed bale. Members of
the power-elite tend to keep a close accounting of all the little taxes of
deference and flattery they levy from their subordinates, and the
Aristarch looked particularly incensed at being short-changed in this
regard by the Sexton-and short-changed with an impunity bestowed by the
very cult which had so deeply involved his finances in the general ruin.
In a thick voice, but managing an even tone, he said: "To have done so
much, Sexton Minor-" he gestured overhead "-and then to find the skeleton
imperfect in so relatively small a way, and its power entirely unavailable
as a result, and when it's so incomprehensible in the first place how
simply reassembling a skeleton is going to help us in any way against
those monsters outside-it is all exasperating in the highest degree. It is
infuriating in fact-" 

Aristarch Smalling, a slight, dapper man, laid a soothing-and
preventive-hand upon Pozzle's arm. "It is not difficult to observe,
Sexton," he said, smoothly in his turn, "from the north promontory-" he
pointed toward the giant's skull, its orbits aimed skyward "-that the wall
under attack is now deeply buckled in several places, and that even the
most extreme counter-bracing measures will not hold some of those ruptures
for more than a few days longer. Is it certain the hand does not lie
somewhere in the same stone as contained the rest of the remains? If need
be, we'll tear the entire escarpment to rubble to find the thing, and damn
the expense." 

Pozzle emitted a low moan of impotent anger here, and the square-faced
Hamp looked distinctly greenish at the corners. Minor shook his head, his
brows rising in a regretful shrug. "That's the heart of the trouble,
gentlemen, but, like so much else in this affair, it's also going to be
our salvation. You see, Dame Lybis was assured of the hand's separation
from the rest of the giant's body when she remembered a part of her
instruction as a tyro that mentioned Pastur's loss of it-indeed, it was so
obscurely referred to that it took our failure to find the hand to recall
it to her at all. But do you not see? Once she has found the textual
foundation of that tradition in the archives, she will also find
therewith, in all likelihood, a description of the place where the hand
may be found." 

"If it has survived to be found at all." Pozzle murmured this almost to
himself, looking a trifle feverishly up at the great work above him. 

And, toward the end of that day, as the sun neared its setting, that work
was essentially one of final adjustments. By that time, all of Pastur's
bones thus far exhumed had been put in place-and this comprised the entire
skeleton except for the right hand. Throughout the day Aristarchs in
various combinations had come, stood outside the temple, stepped into it
and out of it again, and departed. Now, as the skeleton's shadow reached
its maximum elongation across the rooftops of the eastern half of town,
and lay upon them like a cage of vast and alien design, a large number of
these dignitaries had collected before those-hopefully-pregnant doors. 

The doors burst open. Out of them, and halfway down the steps, the
Shrine-mistress stormed, brandishing a scrap of parchment. Her tiny figure
too cast a long shadow, and the swarm of notables condensed close to her.
Her voice, a small but strident sound audible from afar though indistinct,
wandered through the forested acres of stone, weaving itself into the
cathedralled ossuary. The rapt flock of other miniatures stood paralyzed,
and close to her. Then her voice changed key, her arms moved expressively
and, shortly, the swarm of Aristarchs dispersed, as if exploded by some
verbal bomb. Nifft turned to Kandros, with whom he shared a seat upon a
length of scaffold draped across the crest of the giant's high-arching
ribs. Nifft's eyes, which had lazily abandoned the scene directly below
them, had risen toward the wall on the northern side of the city. "Do you
notice, Kandros, beyond the parts of the wall not directly assaulted by
the flock, there still seems to be a kind of assault-like activity, but
one carried on by small, shadowy forms?" He handed to the captain the
wineflask they were sharing. Kandros applied himself comfortably to this
before he answered: 

"Yes. Men, I make them out to be. One wonders what they're after. Perhaps
some of that gold smeared all over the wall. They're certainly drawing a
lot of fire from the archers." 

Nifft nodded with the solemn, enlightened expression of one who hears a
very ingenious theorem propounded. "Thieves. Of course. They've probably
been swarming here from every city on the coast since the word went out
about the gilding." He was returned the flask, and paused to utilize it.
"You know, Kandros, in the spirit of the great friendship I bear you, I
must declare something to you. I am myself not unacquainted with the
workings of thieves." 

Kandros nodded in his turn, receiving the flask. "No man who is acquainted
with the world at large, is unacquainted with the workings of thieves," he
said. He utilized the flask. 

By the time full dark was settling on the city, a large party of
belanterned wagons was speeding from the base of the acropolis, down to
the harbor. There, with that day's end, was the beginning of new labor. 

By dawn, a big raft was launched from the dockside. It supported a massive
crane, whose boom overreached its side. Heavy pontoons of welded metal
casks gave it counter-support for its work. This work, which began with
the first rays of the sun, was the retrieval, assisted by divers, of a
series of large, weed-bearded, shell-crusted blocks, the longest of them
some eighteen feet in length. A considerable heap of them soon accumulated
on the dock. All were found in one narrow zone quite near the Staff, about
midway out along it. Indeed, half of these objects were winched out from
under the Staff, whose underlying sand and muck had to be laboriously
sucked away with bellows-driven pumps supported by several auxiliary
rafts, and serviced by dozens of additional divers and mechanics. Once
deposited on the dock each piece was scraped by crews of men with saws and
scaling-axes used by fishermen on the larger marine reptiles. The cleansed
products that ended up loaded on wagons to make their way through the
harbor gate were rather remarkably identifiable as bones; so undamaged
were they, beneath the ocean's encrustation, that once cleansed, they were
to be seen even by a man innocent of anatomy as the building blocks of a
gigantic hand. 

As night drew on again, most of the city was massed on the walls,
expectantly attending the results of the completion of Pastur's skeleton,
for this would be accomplished, all were informed, within the hour. Pozzle
and Smalling stood in the privileged spot near the pylons of the north
gate, an area reserved for the Aristarchs as one of the best posts for
observation, and one of the rampart's strongest parts. 

"Where is the little weasel?" Pozzle rasped, squinting toward the
fossil-encumbered plateau. Smalling, who did likewise, answered: "I
believe that temple landau just coming down from the acropolis bears
toward us the unctuous little eel. Seems to be making remarkably fast time
too. I wonder what it was he was so mysterious about 'investigating.' " 

A murmur of concern swept along the wall. Someone down the line reported
seeing one of the hummocks containing the dormant carnivorous hatchlings
stir, and tremble where it lay. For an indeterminate, unbreathing time,
everyone watched the plain. The hillocks marking the self-inhumed monsters
seemed universally unmoving. The thunderous impacts of the flock against
the wall, never having ceased, returned to the general awareness. Missiles
and hot oil resumed their rain-all but ineffectual except in a temporary
way-upon the assailants. Pozzle and Smalling returned their gaze to the
route the landau must be following to reach them, and when it came into
view they found it to be remarkably far advanced toward them. 

"Why such haste?" muttered Pozzle. "Some new catastrophe?" 

"Here he is." 

Breathless, Sexton Minor pitched from the landau and floundered up the
causeway to the gate-side battlements. His manner, once he appeared, was
of extravagantly elaborate discretion, and this drew all eyes upon him as
he ushered the waiting pair over to a corner. 

"A dreadful catastrophe has befallen us," he moaned. "Dame Lybis, in her
excitement, didn't find the whole passage. I had a feeling about it. I
went into the Archives . . . and I found the rest of it, right near where
she had stopped looking when she discovered the first page. Look. Read." 

Smalling seized the document. He held it so that he and Pozzle could read
it together. When they had done so, both went to the posted copy of what
Lybis had discovered in the archives the night before. They reread this,
and then reread what Minor had just handed them. Taken from the beginning,
the entire passage ran: 

By foes disarmed, in death unhanded, 

Though all disjoint, still Pastur clutches 

The staff that he, in life, commanded, 

And still with moveless fingers touches 

That which shall make all harm be ended. 

(Here the published fragment ended, and the Sexton's supplement began.) 

For once each bone to each attaches 

Thereby is his death rescinded- 

Thus both his mind and might are mended, 

And 'ware ye then, lest down he reaches- 

What he pursues, great Pastur catches. 

When they had finished their perusal, the two Aristarchs looked dazedly at
Minor. The crowd of their fellows was now curiously following their
actions. 

"Where's Lybis?" Pozzle asked in a small and distant voice, his shock as
yet embryonic, not fully born in his mind. "She must be shown-" 

"Listen!" Smalling said. So closely did the pair have their fellows
attending to them that his command was obeyed by the entire company of
Aristarchs. Their heads rose, ears tilting inquisitively. From all along
the wall a blurred roar of consternation welled. And nothing crosscut the
sound. It was distinct from the most distant points of the wall-because
the flock's crashing assault had ceased utterly. The Aristarchs surged to
the battlements, whence the rest of the city already gaped upon the
universally quiescent behemoths below. Even the dogged parties of thieves
engaged in stripping the gold from the wall paused, astonished, in their
shelters where they melted down their peelings. Somewhere a cry arose, and
here and there it was taken up in accents of hoarse terror: 

"Out on the field! Look out on the field!" 

The hillocks holding the self-encoffined carnivores were trembling and
heaving. Loose soil drizzled from shining sarcophagi of black plates which
were beginning to split open even as they wrenched themselves from their
shallow socketings in the earth. The one most advanced in its struggles
lay also among the nearest to the trench. The sun was just down-there were
no more shadows on the earth, and the light was red-gold. Clearly the
populace saw the encasement split lengthwise, and clearly too saw what
dragged itself forth and gigantically unfolded itself, beginning to winnow
dry its wide, membranous wings as it stood fully revealed before them. It
was a Flockwarden, and relatively small though the secondary egg had been,
it stood a third as large as the Goddess herself, whose pavillioned
corpse, lying not far off, had carried for so long the undying seed from
which it had sprung. 

XIII 

By the time the light had faded, a legion of her kind had risen from the
plain-and by that time, they had stood long enough, and their restive
wings had so gained in dry resilience and eye-eluding speed of
oscillation, that nothing appeared to hinder them from taking flight. But
grounded they stood, vibrating with readiness, while their flock,
separated from them by the chewn-down trench, shared their paralysis. 

Once it was grasped that a heaven-sent hiatus (some obscure feature of
these breeds' biological cycles, no doubt) was to be granted the
beleaguered city, the multitude turned and bent its gaze on the acropolis,
where the repair of Pastur's ancient amputation was being prosecuted
energetically. 

It was a dramatic vision that greeted the throng, and wrung a hopeful cry
from it, a shout of excited discussion-for the crane erected for the
hand's assembly, working from a platform built on the edge of the giant's
pelvic bone, was at that moment but one step from finishing its
task-raising what appeared to be the last joint of the last finger, and
dangling it some few yards from its point of juncture with the condyle of
the next-to-last phalanx. Though the light was fast dimming, the sketch of
lanterns and torches in which the scaffolding ensheathed the skeleton
starkly displayed its form. It was more anthropoid than not, but with
certain striking exaggerations or diminutions of the human scale in some
of its features. 

Its arms and hands were almost simianly massive and elongate, but withal
the fingers were extremely prehensile-looking, the fingers being
four-knuckled, and the thumb connected by an exceptionally mobile-seeming
joint to the metacarpal. The rib cage bespoke a stupendous chest of
topheavy outline, with most of its mass displaced in an upward bulge. This
was an arrangement that doubtless gave the arms a basis for the exertion
of truly enormous leverage. Waistwards, the giant slimmed and his legs,
though strong and shapely, were comparatively small. As to the skull,
while in sum it was more bulky than human make, it had its excess of bulk
exclusively in the cranial bulge, whose ampleness seemed divisible into
four distinct lobes of bone. Toward the tiny, delicate jaw the lower skull
shrank radically. The giant's face must have been eerily, gnomishly small
under the swelling of its brainpan. As for the delicate tapering design
that marked every aspect of Pastur's hugeness, it was evidenced even in
this final phalanx now being lowered to its assembly-crowning lodgment.
For the bone was scarce four feet long, spare and graceful, completing a
digit identical to its fellows in its limber strength of design. 

But just then, perversely, the movement of the crane suffered a hitch,
then paused abruptly. The bone, light though it was, had been faultily
wrapped with the cable, and its sudden slippage in its noose brought the
crane up short. The phalanx was swung back again to the platform and
lowered to be reslung. On the wall the people groaned, and shuffled like a
herd growing nervous to the verge of stampede. 

Alone among the crowd a group of three men standing near the gate showed a
doubtful, retrograde cant of body in their gazing up at the skeleton. The
million leaned toward it, as if from a distance to impart their own
strength to the effort of the crane-crew upon that culminatory bone. But
Smalling, Pozzle, and Minor, through each moment that they regarded it,
cringed anew from what they saw, or from something they were thinking of
as they watched. 

The crane rose again, and swung the now perfectly balanced fraction of the
giant across the cerulean, torch-lit sky. The crowd yearned, in a movement
as multiple and unanimous as phototropism in a variegated garden, toward
that elevated spectacle. The phalanx drifted across and down. Two workmen
were poised on catwalks to either side of the near-finished finger. They
received it in the air and guided it downward, applying its condyle with
delicacy-almost tenderness-in its proper orientation to that of the
penultimate bone. The piece rocked into place, making a gentle, solid
crack of impact, belatedly but crisply audible across the deserted city. A
much vaster noise succeeded this one. 

First there was visible a slight, sharp tugging-together of the skeleton,
a magnetically simultaneous tightening that rippled through the whole
immense fossil. This was followed, an instant later, by the noise: like
that made by a vast, well-drilled army performing a turning movement, it
resembled the oiled rattle of a hundred thousand shields, spears, and
swordbelts. This washed down to the stunned multitude. And then the orbits
of the recumbent skull filled with saffron pools of light, and sent two
towering, powerful beams of illumination into the sky. The right hand
gently closed upon the workmen perched on it. 

A new cry was arising, overtopping even the uproar this had kindled. For
the legion of new Flockwardens was taking wing. In the next instant the
herd had renewed its assault on the walls, and the staggering force of
their impacts was such as made their prior efforts seem a curiously
restrained performance. In the anarchy of mind that engulfed everyone for
the next few moments, the approach to the north gate by a large aerial
form went unnoticed. And then this apparition swept down and hovered just
above the Aristarchs, to add to their already multifaceted astonishment.
Astride the back of the creature-it was a new-hatched Flockwarden-sat Dame
Lybis and, behind her, Nifft the Karkhmanite. The Shrine-mistress cried
out: "Aristarchs! Townsfellows! Hark you, all my venal devotees, my greedy
congregation-harken all ye dear, doubting, ducat-minded delvers into
Pastur's rightful wealth and realm! I bring you the last sacral
Pronouncement of my priesthood, indeed, of my cult itself. First, behold,
if you will, Great Pastur!" 

The injunction was ironic. All saw the giant sit up, saw it, with a
curiously delicate gesture both deft and dismissive, reach down from the
plateau to liberate the workmen he had captured amid the empty buildings
below. They saw him, with quick, finicking movements of his fingers, brush
from himself like cobwebs the scaffolding encumbering him. The weighty
shards rang as they rained on the rooftops of the buildings below the
acropolis, and the queer, delayed musicality of this was, in the crowd's
stupor, as enrapturing as any of the more prodigious things they
witnessed. For then, the giant stepped down from the plateau, spread his
hands upon the plaza where he had just lain, and leaned there, his eye
beams playing, as if musingly, upon his recent bed. 

"And then, if you will-" Lybis let her voice echo and create a listening
silence, then repeated herself, voice resonant: "And then, if you will,
behold Pastur's Anvil, whereon he will work again as he once worked, and
this time he will fashion, not the star-vessels of others, but his own,
for he has wearied of our world, my erstwhile parishioners! Exceedingly
and abundantly is he weary of it. The Wardens will now marshall his flock,
to whom gold is no real obstacle, to the swift and-if you choose
it-peaceable dismantling of the city's walls. A squad of the goddesses now
guards the harbor, and others patrol the other walls. You will work for
Pastur, and you will work surpassing hard, and long though your toil will
be, you'll suffer no harm from him if you obey him, and serve his forges.
And now I bid you a farewell that is not untinctured by a sour
satisfaction with your fate. Since I was sixteen, I have served an
unthanked shrine where you regularly came scavenging whenever the Goddess
chose to throw you the lucrative offal you craved. I have known the
proverbial aloneness of the dedicated artist. I will grant that my
solitary tenure was not unleavened by laughter, and I have had the further
incomparable compensation that the flock, and the Goddess' unfettered
will, were resurgent during my humble term of service. Of these
circumstances I have taken unflinching advantage, and am grateful that the
honor of doing so has fallen to me, out of so many thousands who have
served here. And now, Sexton Minor, you are to accompany me. Step forth!" 

The Aristarchs recoiled from the Warden's smooth approach, which
accompanied these words. Minor began to retire in equal confusion. 

"What?" boomed the priestess. "Do you think you would survive residence in
this vast slave camp, now that your complicity with me is thus widely
published? Climb aboard or die here, it's as simple as that. Pastur has
greater work in hand than the guarding of one miserable life." 

The Sexton's passionate denials died in his throat. Gaping, he climbed up
via one of the Warden's spiny legs. The Goddess bore them upward, and
Lybis shouted: "Now, farewell. Your new master will be setting to work
now, and he will need his tools. You near the gate would do well to clear
the wall when he comes for his hammer!" 

Pastur swept his hands across his anviltop. This one brief gesture cleared
it of all that crowned it. The Aristarkion mingled with the temple in the
general wreckage he sent cascading down. Then, setting his feet with
titanic delicacy upon the broadest open places amid the buildings, very
few of which he crushed in his progress, he walked down to the harbor. He
reached over the sea for his staff. His hand slipped into the same waters
from which it had so recently been raised, and with a great tearing and
sucking noise the rod came uprooted from the harbor-floor and towered in
the starlight, shedding in fragments the dockworks that encrusted it. Its
upper end, immemorially masked by the waters, was arched like a shepherd's
crosier. A dozen of the Flock-wardens swarmed upward and perched atop the
crook of the staff. The giant turned the beacons of his eyes upon the
north wall of the city, and gestured toward it. The Wardens sped thither,
and commenced clearing it of the astonished Anvilians, while Pastur
advanced to take up his hammer, so long laid down. 

"And so none of them had ever read that ancient variant of their city's
name? Nor of Pastur himself? How very curious." 

"Hm! I'll tell you, Shag, it's always been an exceedingly curious thing to
me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little
island of time and place in the world." 

"Yes. If the cult was guilty of systematically obscuring its own origins
and traditions, it was at least not hiding anything that anyone was
inquiring into very energetically. Indeed, the scholarly community at
large has been none too vigorous in recording that temple's history. . . .
Well! You've come well out of it at least. You understand of course that
there's absolutely no question of my accepting a gift of that size." The
scholar sternly indicated a little stack of gold bullion on the floor in
one corner of the study. "The way you spend money, you're going to need
that yourself before long." 

"Well, if you're going to be stonefaced about it, you're just going to
have to get rid of it yourself. Those bricks are heavy. I recommend that
you only carry them out of here one at a time, and at long intervals. And
anyway, what about this new treatise-has the Academy gotten richer, or
aren't you going to have to help subsidize the printing of this excellent
work, wherein my own humble name appears repeatedly, in ample footnotes?" 

Margold glowered mulishly at his square, rather battered-looking hands.
After a while, glancing up at Nifft's eyes and finding them both sarcastic
and resolute, the historian sighed. 

"And so. Where is Dame Lybis now?" 

"Somewhere in the Aristoz Chain." 

The scholar nodded, impressed. "I see. She sounds like one who will go far
with that caliber of thaumaturgic training." 

Nifft's assent to this was accompanied by marked restiveness. He got up
and went to the window as he answered. "Absolutely my own opinion. It's
caused me some worries, too, I'll confess to you. I love Dame Lybis
dearly-I have the highest admiration for her person, her pluck and her
artistry. But then too, she doesn't lack cynicism. Power she'll surely
gain. She has the love of achievement, and the will to drive herself. If
she will remain benign as she grows in power, that's the question I can't
confidently answer." 

Margold guffawed. His thick grey hair was wispy in a flame-like way, and
for a moment his sea-weathered face seemed to corruscate with his
enjoyment of Nifft's remark. "Remain benign, you say? By the Crack and all
that crawls out of it-by Anvil Staff and Hammer! I like that! I truly do.
Remain benign. When I tell that to my colleagues, I'll have to get it just
right, the earnest way you said that!" The cartographer sat chuckling.
Nifft arched a brow at his nails. Presently he chuckled a bit himself. 

"I don't deny it was a grim game. Though they didn't suffer the death they
marketed abroad so blithely, some of them at least might have learned what
it was like to wish they would." The pair enjoyed this sally equally, and
at some length. 

"You know," Margold said at last, "your description of the giant, his
bones' lightness . . . it is an odd thought, but perhaps those bones of
his never did have flesh on them. Perhaps he was himself . . . the product
of a forge, some distant foundry far vaster even than his own?" 

"You mean, that he was some kind of vast . . . automaton?" 

The historian nodded. "Remember, if we may trust the tradition, how he was
destroyed. It is said that the landslide created by his ambushers did not
. . . kill him-that he'd worked both hand and staff clear of the rubble,
and would have used that formidable weapon to free himself in a short time
more, had not their amputation of his hand broken his bodily integrity,
and therewith his life. Care was taken to remove the hand far from the
body, and cast it in the sea. A man who loses a hand does not necessarily
die of it. But a clock with even one spring removed ceases to work, and
will start up again should the spring be restored to the rest of the
mechanism." 

Nifft looked dreamily from the window. "So that all his work was for yet
greater masters on a greater world? Why not? A slave himself? But a
terrible and beautiful creation all the same, Shag. I recall the last look
I had of him-like some of those engravings you showed me of scenes from
Parple's Pan-Demonion-whose were they again?" 

"You mean Rotto Starv's woodcuts." 

"Starv's. The same. Anyway, a day before we set sail, Kandros and I took
Minor and Krekkit up on a Flockwarden just after sunset, to take a sort of
good-bye look at the city, I suppose-as much for ourselves as for the old
man and Minor, both of whom we'd come to like. At any rate, we flew up
over the peaks to the south of town, and hung there looking at it as the
light faded. It was something to fill you with awe, Shag, the armies of
them, their desperate unison. 

"The townspeople, I mean. They thronged the streets, and moved in that
steady, always-changing-yet-the-same way a stream has. They served the
same forges and foundries the town has always served-but they all served
them. The flocks were off working a distant mountain, quite near
Ossuaridon, in fact. Half the Flockwardens were with the flock, and the
other half were patrolling the streets and the perimeter where the rubble
of the walls was heaped. They were scarcely needed. Pastur's sole presence
commanded every man and woman of them. He was resting from his labors. His
anvil still hummed with the recent blows of his hammer, and glowing crumbs
of metal were strewn atop it. He sat back on the hillside, his huge arms
draped over his knees, the hammer held casually in his right hand. He was
watching the city as a sightseer might watch a view. The chimneys smoked
and the firestacks flamed as I, nor anyone else, had never seen them do
before. His eyebeams played across the rooftops and the crowded streets,
and from time to time, he raised them toward the stars." 

After a silence, Margold murmured: "He had the flock working where he was
buried with their ancestors? Perhaps even then he was beginning his
preparations to return home." 

"Yes. One wonders what he will find there, after so long an absence. He
seemed to be wondering too."