The arsenal boomed with the deep, rolling echoes of it. Somewhere hidden under tons of dust, a forgotten drum boomed back, distant and softly muffled. Some metal cylinder of forgotten purpose took up the echo and replied with a clear, metallic reverberation, and down the hall an æons-dead warrior's helmet rang with its hollow mouth like a clapperless bell, and fell clanging to the floor and the silencing dust.

  Egide laughed again, with a timbre of sudden intoxication, and smote his harp to a last wild, shrilling wail, sent one more phrase of the song booming down the room. And all the room replied. The muffled drum boomed back, and the clear ringing twang of the hidden cylinder, and the little blades shrilled like tongues upon the wall, shivering and twinkling with tiny motion.

  Echoes rolled and rolled again. Egide's voice sang on for a moment or two without him, diminishing against the walls. And this was no longer a thin, hopeless protest of the voiceless past against intrusion as the arsenal replied. Egide's was a warrior's voice, promising battle again, strong and savage with the savagery of a barbarous young race. These weapons had rung before, in the unfathomable past, to the voices of such men. Arsenal and weapons roared an answer to that promise of blood again, and the echoes died slowly among the blades and the drums and the hollow, hanging shields that might never echo any more to the sounds they were made to echo.

  Juille, meeting the unashamed melodrama of his blue eyes and his laughter as he turned away, was appalled by a surge of genuine warmth and feeling. This was naked sentiment again, like the deliberate romance of Cyrille, but to her amazement she found herself responding, and with an unexpected, overwhelming response she did not understand. Egide, laughing, had reslung his harp. He said:

  "Come on—now the danger starts. You have a ship for us, Andarean?"

  "Ready and waiting. You'd better not try to leave, though, until dark."

  "The real danger comes then," Jair rumbled.

  Egide bent a shining smile upon Juille. "That's where you come in, my dear. We couldn't have a better hostage."

  Juille gave him her stoniest glance and looked away. She was profoundly troubled by that moment of sympathy with his unashamed romanticism. It made her think of the warm, resistless mood which had engulfed them both on the dance floor, and that hour on the starry cloud—swift, irresistible, and vanishing to leave nothing but humiliation behind, and a stronger dislike and distrust of the man who could evoke such weakness.

  They went back along winding, upward tunnels, past the carvings of forgotten history upon the walls, past level above level of successive cultures whose dust mingled now under the feet of new rival cultures, one of which must pass so soon. Several times they edged past danger points again, and the leading Andarean twice closed and locked metal grilles after them across their path. The implication was ominous, though no one referred to it aloud.

  Egide's intoxicated assurance began to ebb perceptibly and he grew more thoughtful as they neared the upper levels. Juille, watching his broad back and thinking with a sort of detached passion how pleasant it would be to set the bell-muzzle of her new weapon against it, began to wonder presently at his preoccupation.

  She saw him murmur to Jair, and saw the big red beard turn in the lamplit dimness to stare almost incredulously at his leader. Then Egide went ahead to murmur further with the purple-robed Andarean. Juille began to feel a bit cold. Were they talking about herself? Had the time come already to dispose of her? Surely not yet, before they were safely away—

  When they came out onto a lighted level that showed signs of Andarean traffic, Egide halted. Helia and Juille exchanged an involuntary glance of mutual query. Egide came back through the column to them. There was a strange, stilled look upon his face, as if he had come to some momentous decision in the grip of which he seemed to want human nearness, for he put out both hands and laid them upon Juille's shoulders. Automatic reaction against the lese majesty made her tense to shake him off, but something about the look in his eyes halted her.

  "I'm going—out," he said, in a quiet voice not at all like the melodious roar that had shaken the arsenal below.

  "They'll catch you." She had meant it for a threat, but his look subdued her and the words came out a warning.

  He shook his yellow head. "I think not. They tell me there's a tunnel into the forest from here."

  "But the forest—" Julie broke off and stared up at him, a sinking in the pit of her stomach. For the forest marked the edge of that forbidden ground surrounding the temple of the Ancients. They looked at one another briefly, antagonisms forgotten for a moment. Egide was nodding.

  "I think I need advice. None of us ever had this chance before. Now I'm here—well, I'm going to take it."

  Juille stared up at him with real awe. Even the emperors of the Galaxy, with the stars of heaven for an empire, dared not think too deeply or too often of the living gods of Ericon. Long ago, she knew, there had been emperors who went to consult the Ancients in their temple. So far as she knew, none had done so for a long while now. Upon this one world of all the Galaxy, men lived side by side with the gods, and they had learned not to presume upon their nearness. The very aloofness of the Ancients, striking only to punish, never to reward, did not encourage familiarity. She looked up at Egide with eyes emptied of all thought but reluctant awe.

  His own eyes were very still. He had not quite her feeling of the god's remoteness because, paradoxically, he had not lived so near them. But everyone tended to fall silent at the thought of the Ancients.

  He looked down at her thoughtfully, and for a moment Juille knew, with a sort of angry certainty, that he was about to kiss her. Her pride and her scorn of him made that thought intolerable, but a dissolving warmth was running through her treacherous body as she met his look, and the most humiliating gladness that her arms were tied so that she could not resist. Then the humiliation drowned everything else as he let his hands fall and turned away.

  "Tie her up somewhere until I get back," he said briefly to Helia. "Jair, come with me as far as the tunnel—"

  Juille sat angrily on a floor deeply cushioned with dust, leaning upon a dusty wall. Profound dimness all around her was feebly diluted by the light of a distant lamp. Helia had left it, after a short disagreement with her companions. Juille realized that the Andareans probably distrusted the depths of Helia's loyalty to themselves where Juille was concerned, and oddly, she rather resented their distrust. The cult of the Amazon was still too new not to resent man's misunderstanding of its principles. Juille was conscious of a sort of fierce pride in Helia's betrayal of her lifelong trust, for the bleak ideal of Andarean loyalty. The Andareans' doubt of it was a slap in the face to all Amazons.

  But she was not thinking of that now. She was mentally following Egide through the dripping green forest toward the temple which she had never seen. She knew it would be dark and broad and tall among the trees. She pictured Egide in his black velvet and charred silver mail, striding up to the portal and—But her mind balked at following him farther.

  And that, too, humiliated her. It seemed to her that she had been wallowing in enforced humilities for the past several hours, each of them more irritating than the last. This was particularly so, because it involved the moral courage she prided herself on possessing. She did not like to think of Egide walking boldly up to a doorway so awesome that she herself scarcely dared visit it in thoughts. Even the knowledge that he was a barbarian and an outworlder, with the courage of ignorance, was not too comforting. And presently, in the dimness, she began to wonder whether she could do as he was doing, supposing herself free again. Step in under that great shadowy, unimaginable portal and ask for guidance? Intrude her small human presence upon the living gods, whose millenniums of aloofness showed so clearly that they did not welcome human interference?

  Even if she were free, would she dare?

  Suddenly, hideously, there were tiny cold hands fumbling at hers.

  The darkness reeled about her. Mad thoughts went racing through her mind—denizens of the lower levels, creeping up in the dark to seize her? Unseen things against which the Andareans locked their great grilles in vain? Tiny, clammy-fingered demons from some lost race's hell—clammy-fingered—many-fingered—

  Juille sank back against the wall and laughed hysterically in the dark, weak with relief, feeling a sleek, furry side brushing her wrist as the little hands tugged at her bonds. The llar, of course, but how ... how could it possibly have followed or found her here? No llar had ever done such a thing before. They had none of the canine's fawning faithfulness. No, there must be rescuers close behind it, though how anyone could have followed her here unseen by the Andareans, she could not imagine.

  She called softly into the dimness. No answer, but the llar hissed at her gently, rather like a man whistling in preoccupation as he works. A moment later, she was amazed to feel the cord slackening at her wrists. Knowing how efficiently Helia had tied it, she could not believe the little animal could have loosened the knots. Nor could its teeth have parted the strands no knife could touch. But her hands were free, and already prickling with the pins and needles of returning circulation.

  She rubbed them together, luxuriating in the pleasure of relaxed arm muscles again, and then felt the llar's lithe, boneless weight on her knees. Something was thrust into her hands. Her fingers closed stiffly on a packet—a little leather bag. With fingers clumsy as thumbs, she explored it.

  A tiny cylinder fell out, and something like a mirror on a chain, and what felt like a card. She knew the shape of the cylinder. It was a needle-beam flashlight that was weapon and torch in one. Cautiously, awkwardly, she switched on the flash to its weakest power. In the little blue-white circle of its light she could make out writing on the card.

  It was a message of almost incredible impersonality:

  -

  I am sending you the first completed focusing agent for our weapon. Center your target in the cross-hairs, then press the white stud. Target will register in the machine here; can be destroyed at will by pressing the black stud. Sorry this is a model, good for one shot only. Choose well

  DUNNAR.

  -

  Juille reread the note slowly, puzzled by its laconic detachment. This might be a problem in ethics instead of the desperate reality it was. She saw in her mind's eye the strange, avian face of the envoy as it had so often regarded her with an impersonal, lidless gaze. She could not imagine emotion showing in it. Not even his own danger, she remembered now, had moved him at all when he came in from space with the weapon. Certainly no peril of hers moved him. She sensed some unfathomable purpose of his own working out, calmly and unhurried, behind all that had just been happening. Was he an Andarean? Certainly there was something behind those great, unwinking eyes, something locked secretly in the narrow skull, that evoked awe and distrust together.

  Well, at any rate, now she had a weapon. Two weapons, for the flashlight would serve, too. She turned the thing like a mirror over in her hand. A double lens on a chain, she saw now, each lens threaded with a cross-hair and manipulated by studs set in the tiny frame. A white stud, a black one. Such a simple thing to carry that deadly power. She tossed it up and caught it in her palm, grinning with sudden, fierce confidence. The tables were turning a little. Egide had left her bound and helpless; he would come back to her free and armed with a weapon of such surpassing treachery as no race had owned before, a weapon that struck out of empty air, in solitude, at the striker's will. But since this was a model, it would strike only once. She cursed that restriction in a whisper. Would it be Egide, then? Her feeling for him was too much a jumble of passionate contradictions now, to be sure. Although—

  The llar squeaked impatiently at her knee. She glanced down in the faint blue light. "Well, little friend?"

  It was hard sometimes to know just where to place the limitations of that tiny animal brain. The llars were like cats in their fastidious withdrawal from any human attempt to probe their small minds or catalogue them according to human standards. She thought her own pet understood a limited vocabulary very well. She said, "What is it now? Where did you come from? Is there danger?"

  The great benign eyes stared up at her; the furry body twisted away and then back as if in an urgent plea to follow. Juille said, "All right," and stood up, brushing off the thick dry dust. The llar scuttled to the door and peered out. Then it scuttled back and looked up expectantly. "Run along," Juille told it. "I'll follow."

  She slipped the lens chain over her head and dropped the circular instrument down inside her tunic. It would look like some innocent ornament if anyone caught her now. But she felt, without knowing why, a curious faith in the llar's ability to guide her out of this place in safety. She even experienced an illogical flicker of gratification that the impersonal little beast had troubled itself so much in her behalf. The entire performance was one no naturalist would have believed possible, certainly no owner of the proud, fastidious animals.

  She went swiftly along the tunnel, over the cushioning dust, lighting her way with the dimmest blue radiance of her torch. It could be changed to a weapon of needle-beam force by a twist of the handle if anyone came out to intercept her, but her unreasoning faith in the llar was justified more deeply with every passing moment, for it led her along tunnels that seemed to have been uninhabited since the last Andarean emperor died at the hands of the first Lyonese.

  Watching the sleek, lithe body flowing through the dimness, Juille wondered at its unerring certainty of the path. Some homing instinct, or actual knowledge of these passages? No one knew enough about the llar species to answer that.

  The chain of small, flower-shaped footprints in the dust led her on and on. Up level, down level. Over crumbled ruins, through chambers of resounding echoes and caverns muffled in age-old dust.

  They must be nearing the end of the journey now. She could smell fresh air blowing along the tunnels and smiled as she pictured the excitement in the palace when she came out. Her deep uneasiness about the unknown weapons of the Andareans would be appeased soon; those weapons would never now be turned against her. And she thanked her imperial ancestors that Egide had thought he must consult the Ancients, for it gave her the time she needed. The H'vani and their smuggled weapons would never leave Ericon now.

  Her own emotional reactions to the immediate past and the immediate future were too tangled to sort out She didn't want to. That would come later. At any moment she would be coming out into the bustling exhilaration of the palace, and her long inactivity and helplessness would be ended. She smiled into the dark.

  At her feet the llar scurried, rippling, on ahead.

  The end came suddenly. They turned a corner and an unbarred door hung half open before them. The llar gave one small, whispering cry and then drew aside into the shadows of the tunnel. Cautiously, but with a beating pulse of triumph in her throat, Juille pushed the door open. Words were on her lips—urgent commands, reassurances, all the details of the plans she had been working out to put into practice the moment she reached her destination.

  But she stood open-mouthed in the doorway and said nothing. There was no one to say it to. A gust of sweet, rainy air blew past her, the smell of green things and fragrant wet earth. The freshness was delightful after so long underground, but this was no palace scene. It was not even a city garden, but an empty, dripping forest stretched out as far as the eye could see. Nothing stirred anywhere but the patter of rain on leaves.

  Juille glanced wildly around for her little guide. It had vanished. She shot a blue beam around the corridor behind her, finding only a confusing array of fingery footprints that vanished into the dark. She cursed the evasive little beast in a voice that was close to tears. To come so near victory and then find only this!

  For she knew what this forest must be. Indeed, when she cast her blue light down she saw what must be the footprints Egide had left when he came out this very tunnel into the woods where the Ancients lived. Forbidden woods, uncharted, unknown, kept sacrosanct by countless generations of human life on Ericon.

  She glanced about uneasily. Jair and the Andareans could not be far away. But what she could do next she had no idea. Where or how far the city lay was impossible to guess. Certainly she could not return through the pathless honeycomb of the caverns, and if she tried the forbidden woods she might wander for days in the wrong directions. If the llar had been visible now, she might have blasted it with a needle beam for bringing her so far astray. But there was no help for it. She would have to get back to the city, hit or miss, perhaps too late to do anything but warn them of impending blows from nameless weapons.

  The memory of Egide's glowing confidence when he came back to her armed with the Andarean gifts gave her a feeling of sinking dismay. The impending conflict had taken on too many prospects of unguessable proportions. The effect of the new weapons might be overwhelming, unless she could find some way to prevent it.

  Unless—Juille stared out speculatively through the trees. If she could delay Egide—but how could she, short of killing him? And did she want that? Her mind flashed off on a tangent—he had stayed his hand, too, when killing her might have meant a great deal in the outcome of the revolt. Her scorn for that weakness had gone deep. Yet she was hesitating now in the face of the same problem. She set her chin.