Sarriri hissed too, but the Hewnall had a disciplined crew. The sailor cut some salt meat off the gray slab she carried, tossed it in Gussaw's direction. Gussaw's large round eyes were anything but delighted. "Lizard's meat," she said. Gormanians were omnivores, unlike the camivorous Azusans. But hunger won over distaste. Gussaw needed to do more chewing than, say, Ekrekek would have, but the meat vanished quickly all the same.

  "Now you will talk," Elaekek said the moment Gussaw was finished. To back up the captain's words, several sailors raised weapons.

  "Put those down," the Gormanian said wearily. "You do not need them. I said I would talk, and I will. We beached here, let me see, four days ago. I sent teams into the forest to cut timber for repairs. I knew those could only be rough, but they would have let us sail back to Gorman. Things went well enough the first day, but that night we started seeing lights in the woods."

  "Lights in the woods?" Ekrekek echoed. "Don't be absurd. Your pirates were the only people here. What could make lights in the woods?"

  "They came from the gods' things here," Gussaw answered, "from this one that swallowed my crew and from the others as well. Some shone blue, some orange, some the purest white. Once we even saw for an instant a flash of white light form that magic floating thing there." The Gormanian raised a four-fingered hand, pointed to one

  of the Hidden Folk's airbome structures that had been defying gravity for a thousand millennia now.

  Defying gravity was all it had been doing, though, so far as anyone knew. And for 0 anyone knew, the grounded artifacts here hadn't done anything, either, except to stay perfectly preserved-which, Terry supposed, ought to count for something.

  Before she could speak, Ekrekek said, "Now I know you lie, sixlegs. The gods' things do not glow, they simply are." That was what she had been thinking, though put in more hostile terms.

  "Tell me where my sailors are and I will admit I am a liar," Gussaw said. "Till you can do that, would you not say that listening and leaming seem a wiser course?"

  Ekrekek took a step forward. "Don't do anything you'll be sorry for later," Terry said quickly. She put her hand on the hilt of her stun pistol.

  "How could I be sorry for killing a Cxmnanian?" Ekrekek said. But he

  checked himself. "Still, the sixlegs may possibly know something worth telling. Go on, sixlegs. So, you say the gods' things glowed in the night.

  I am not sure I believe this but, as you say, I do not know where you have hidden your sailors, either. Tell me about them. Tell me what made you so stupid as to take your whole crew off the Agwadulsi and send them traipsing through the jungle. If your kind were all such great fools, we would have exterminated you as soon as we met you. "

  Terry gulped at the Azusan's casual wish for successful genocide. Again,

  though, he'd found an insulting way to ask an important question. Had Terry

  commanded the Gormanian galley, she would have left at least some of the sailors behind there.

  Gussaw said, "Scale-face, there you have me. When moming came, we all felt the urge to go into the woods, and we all went. No one thought anything of it. Looking back, we should have." The Gormanian used both hands to try to comb the matted hair on her flanks. "Looking back, we were crazy to do what we did, but we did it. "

  "You were crazy, aye," Ekrekek agreed, "but why

  were you crazy?" His tail went back and forth, back and forth like a metronome.

  "That I do not know," Gussaw said.

  "Psychic compulsion?" Terry wondered out loud. Some of the Hidden Folk's devices played with the minds of intelligent beings. The ones that did, though, did so all the time. As with the lights Gussaw had talked about, this sudden activation of a new effect in the previously dormant artifacts-if that was what had happened-would be something new.

  "Do you want me to translate that?" Chives asked. "The best I can do is a phrase that really means something more like 'mind magic.' "

  "Never mind, then," Terry said. "Just tell the Gormanian to go on."

  Chives did. Gussaw gave the robot another curious stare before continuing, "As I said, we went into the woods. We did not seek my race's temples here, or even those of the Azusans, though we might well have done either, I suppose. " Her ears flapped, perhaps a gesture of annoyance or perplexity. "In any case, we kept on until we found ourselves inside that circle there. And then"--4hat ear-flap again-"my crew was gone."

  "Were you inside the circle too?" Lorah asked. Terry's mouth was already open for the same question.

  "Yes, I was," Gussaw said. "Why I was not taken, only the gods know. I felt a biter crawling here"---she pointed to a spot between the second and third

  nipples on her right side---and looked down to catch it. When I looked up

  again, everyone was gone. I stayed near the circle in the hope they would come back again. But you are here instead."

  "Where were you standing?" This time Terry got the words out first.

  "I can show you," Gussaw said after Chives translated. "Are you sure you want to go into the circle with me, though? You--or 1-may vanish as my crewfolk did."

  "I was inside once, and it didn't take me," Terry said with more confidence than she felt. "I'll try it again if you will, Gussaw."

  "I will stay outside," Lorah declared. "If you do vanish, human, someone from a civilized race should witness it and bring word back to the rest of the starfaring peoples. "

  611 am adequate for that purpose, if you feel the need to examine the site of the unexplained phenomenon at first hand," Chives said.

  "Never mind, - Lorah said at once, so quickly that Terry laughed. No one had figured that physical courage would be necessary for this mission.

  As she stepped toward the circle, though, the laughter faded. She found she had to will each foot forward. "I hope the snark's not a boojum," she said. "Indeed." Chives was not built to nod, but he put that tone into his voice. "More human unintelligibilities," Lorah complained.

  Up close, Gussaw did have a distinct odor. Terry did not find it

  unpleasant, but it was different from the dry, musky smell of the Azusans.

  No wonder they had been able to track the crew of the Agwadulsi by scent. Gussaw led her up to the opening in the Hidden Folk's circle. They both flinched as they went through. "We're still here," Terry said when nothing untoward-nothing at all-happened. Chives raised his electronic voice to translate for Gussaw.

  "So we are," the Gormanian said, and Chives turned her words into English. "Perhaps we even have some hope of remaining here-but then, my crew thought they did, too. "

  "Show me where you were when they disappeared," Terry said.

  "Here," Gussaw answered. "I am certain of it. Do you see this red stripe in

  the yellow inner wall of the circle? I was looking at it just before I

  began to itch."

  "I see it," Terry said.

  Chives again did the translating. The robot had walked around the outer perimeter of the circle to a point just outside where Terry and Gussaw stood. Chives observed, "The red band extends completely through the wall." "Does it? That's interesting," Terry said. Neither she nor Lorah had brought any fancy scanners to the island. So far as anyone knew, artifacts of the Hidden Folk were opaque to all the scanners the six starfaring races knew. But then, so far as anyone knew, artifacts of the Hidden Folk did not go around turning themselves on, either. Maybe scanners would have done some good. Since Terry didn't have any, imagining they would have done some good was easy.

  She asked, "Are there any other red bands around this circle?"

  Still perched on Chives's shoulders like an old buzzard of the sea, Lorah said, "Humans are surely the most unobservant species ever evolved. Your device carried me past one back here. Why did you not notice it too?"

  The obvious retort was that the stripe was only on the outside part of the wall. But when Terry looked back, she saw that the obvious, unfortunately for her, was not true. The red line did extend all the way through. "I wonder if there are any more of them," she said.

  Lorah let out a squawk of disgust. "You circled this object with your camera. Did you not bother to take your brain along as well, to observe and remember what you were recording?"

  "I didn't know it was going to be important," Terry said lamely.

  "And so you took no special notice. " Had the Crotonite's eyes been less beady, he would have rolled them. "It never ceases to amaze me that humans are classified as an intelligent race, let alone that they somehow stumbled across the hyperjump."

  "Merely because human intelligence differs from your own, L4mh, do not underestimate it on that account," Chives said. "Having no psychic powers to speak of and only an ordinary sensonum, humans were forced to become perhaps the most skilled artificers in the galaxy. The result was-~' "Abominations like you," Lorah said, effectively ending the conversation. Gussaw had been impatiently shifting from foot to foot to foot to foot while the off-worlders bickered. Now she said, "Why does it matter that this red band is here and not elsewhere? Does the color of a wall make it something different from a wall?"

  "I don't Imow," Terry said. "It may mean nothing at all. But seeing as it's the only clue we have, we probably ought to check it out. " She peered over to the far side of the circle. Wide as it was, spotting a thin red line was not easy.

  With his electronically amplified vision, Chives did a better job of searching than Terry could. "There are two more lines over there," it reported. "As nearly as I can determine, the four points at which the bands occur are separated one from another by ninety-degrees around the circle.

  "Which would lead us to conclude that they are probably not just incidental marks on the artifact, but probably relate to something important without it," Terry said. She felt foolish for using "probably" twice in the same sentence, but that was as sure as anyone could be when talking about things the Hidden Folk had left behind. She went on, "Gussaw, do you remember noticing those other three lines the last time you were inside the circle?" "They were not here," the Gormanian said positively. Terry wished she knew how far she could rely on that. A lot of races had total recall; a lot that didn't, humans among them, often pretended to. She couldn't recall into which category Gormanians fit.

  Then Chives said, "Those bands were not here the last time we examined the circle. Review of my data records shows that the only red line present then was the one by which we are standing now."

  Terry felt the small, fine bairs on her arms trying to prickle upright. "Then this site's shown new activity just in the last couple of hours," she breathed.

  "Activity perhaps designed to send us wherever the crew of the Agwadulsi went," Lorah said.

  "No," Terry said. "You've missed something, LorahGussaw says these lines weren't here when the Gormanians vanished. They have to be for something else."

  "Whatever their purpose," Chives said, "I suspect we will not determine it today. And since you organic folk will soon require nourishment and then rest, the coming of night now upon us may be as good a time as any to suspend our operations for the day."

  "The coming of night?" Terry looked up in surprise. How had Tonclif snuck all the way down to the western horizon? She wondered if everyone was as taken aback by sunset as she was. Evidently not: Ekrekek's sailors seemed

  to have been going about the business of setting up camp for some time.

  Lorah, for once, looked to be as bemused as she was. "Let us continue working," he said. "I am not the least bit hungry or tired. " As soon as

  the words were out of his mouth, he gave vent to an enormous yawn. "Well,

  perhaps the least bit," he amended, sounding as sheepish as a Crotonite could, which wasn't very.

  "What have you learned?" Ekrekek demanded when Terry and Gussaw came out of the circle. "I see you have found the gods are no longer hungry, else you would have joined the rest of the Gormanians. " The peculiar rhythmic hiss

  he let out was Azusan laughter.

  Terry thought it in poor taste. She asked Ekrekek, "Have you ever heard of changes in any of the strange things here on the Island of the Gods?"

  The captain laughed again. "No, no more than I have heard of them lighting

  up. That is why I think this sixlegs you insist on making much of is but

  spinning out a fine tale to keep us from doing to her as we usually do with Gormanians. "

  "But--4he ransorn-" Terry said.

  "May the ransom's eggs all break. Roasting and slicing the sixlegs now would be more enjoyable than collecting money later. I know you think my people harsh for this, but ask Gussaw what she and hers would do to me if

  ever I fell alone into their claws."

  Terry glanced toward the Gormanian. She was reluctantly eating another chunk of smoked meat, which Ekrekek's sailors had reluctantly given her.

  She looked sad, bedraggled, very much alone, and not in the least

  dangerous. Terry visualized her along with a few dozen more like herself,

  all of them well-fed and cheerful. Could they match the Azusans atrocity for atrocity? They probably could, Terry decided--reluctantly. Nothing in Tonclif IV's history suggested otherwise, anyhow.

  With tropical abruptness, light vanished from the sky. Stars made strange patterns in the black dome of the heavens, patterns interrupted here and there by the floating artifacts of the Hidden Folk. Even uninterrupted, though, the constellations would have meant nothing to Terry; she was some thousands of light-years from home.

  She turned to Lorah. "Are you close enough to your native world for the local stars to seem familiar to you?"

  "No, though I must say many more of them seem to be visible here than on most worlds I've visited. I suppose that's mostly because the atmosphere here is so beastly thin. On most Crotonite worlds, stars are hardly visible from the ground. "

  "I never thought of that," Terry said. "Here we are, trying to unravel the riddles of the Hidden Folk, and we don't know nearly enough about one another. Intelligence is like that, I suppos"ways pushing out into the distance without worrying so much about what's close at hand. If your people couldn't see the stars, I'm surprised you ever developed space travel." Lorah spread his wings. "Don't forget that we always had flight. Going up and up was natural with us, and when we developed technology we used it to do more than we could unaided. We--"

  The Crotonite's voice faded as Ekrekek and his sailors cried out. Close by them, the circle that had swept away the crew of the Agwadulsi began to glow a soft but piercing gold. Farther away and overhead, other relics of the Hidden Folk also began to shine. Gussaw shouted something, again and again. Chives translated for Terry: "I told you so!"

  Terry had to admire Ekrekek for what he did then: He walked over to Gussaw and saluted her as if she were one of his own species. "I found lies when you spoke truth," he said. "It was so strange a truth, I could not believe it, especially since it came from an enemy. But I see it was truth nonetheless."

  "You* do not seek to trick me," Gussaw said slowly, half to herself, as if probing for hidden meanings in the Azusan's words. "You have no need to trick me, for I am

  in your power. So I see you are also speaking the truth. But that an Azusan should apologize to a Gormanian is as strange a truth as these lights we see now on the Island of the Gods."

  "You are the enemy I know," Ekrekek said. "Of the gods and their toys here I know nothing. The danger they present may well be greater than yours.

  Until I know how great it is, I will act on that belief. As you say"-he

  opened his mouth wide to display those carnivore teeth-"I can do with you as I wish, when I wish. If slaying you seems to my advantage, I will slay you. But there is no hurry. ' ~

  "For an Azusan, that's a miracle of moderation," Terry said when Chives was done translating. "Or, to be fair, for a Gormanian. " She thought again

  about how Ekrekek would have fared alone with the whole crew of the

  Agwadulsi.

  "Yes, it is remarkable," Chives agreed. "It would be as well if the allegedly more sophisticated and civilized starfaring races could also unite in the face of the unknown challenge the Hidden Folk represent, rather than having members of each species scheme for their own aggrandizement, often at the expense of others."

  Chives was a diplomatic piece of machinery; it named no names. That was probably just as well, Terry thought. Crotonites despised all wingless races, which meant they despised all the other races in the galaxy that had discovered the hyperjunip-Lorah was less xenophobic than most of his people. Humans were no mean connivers either, come to that.

  Lorah said, "I observe no bands of anomalous color on any of the other

  Hidden Folk relics within my range of vision, and my vision can be

  amplified to the point where I would see them if they were of a width

  similar to the four red bands on the circle here."

  Chives did not look around. Instead, it said, "Let me review my data store.

  " After a moment, it went on, "You are correct. What significance do you ascribe to the fact?"

  "I don't know. " Lorah sounded anything but happy with the admission.

  "I must confess it is not obvious to me, either," Chives said. The robot's voice was not programmed to show much emotion, but Terry did not think it was happy. It had been designed to be curious--or with a drive to collect and assess new data, which amounted to the same thing.

  Terry said, "If the two barbarian races can work together here in the face of the unknown, Lorah, do you think we can imitate them, at least as long as we're here on the island?"

  "Very well." Lorah stiff sounded less than enthusiastic, but went on, "The potential for learning here overcomes my distaste for cooperation, at least for the present."

  Terry knew that meant he would do whatever he thought necessary as soon as they were off the Island of the Gods, but she'd known that all along. She slid her backpack off her shoulders, got out her sleeping bag. With a yawn, she said, "I'm not going to worry about anything till morning. "