Xaymar's voice came as from afar: "We shall ride together, warrior, you and I! You've saved my life, and you have a will that matches mine. I've longed this thousand years and more for a man like you to share my dreams...." The words went on and on, but Haral could no longer hear. The sickness in him grew. He knew of a sudden that he was going to fall. Words and more words--an incoherent jumble. He was toppling now, yet there was nothing he could do to stop it. In great, languorous spirals, the floor of the dais was roaring up into his eyes. But as it approached, somehow, it grew dimmer ... dimmer ... dimmer.... Then new words came. Or, rather, old words, thundering out of the black sack of his memory. Kyla's words: "_Each night she took a different lover--and then, at the dawn, at her command, each one was slain!_" The blackness closed in.... CHAPTER VI Haral woke in the glow of a wondrous iridescent warmth that pulsed through every nerve and fiber of his body. The pain and weariness were gone. Surging strength, new vigor, flooded through him. Slowly, still not quite believing his own senses, he opened his eyes. He discovered that the iridescence was no mere metaphor, no figment of his imagination. For he lay in what seemed a boundless sphere of light that painted his naked body with an interweaving, continually changing tapestry of glowing color. He would have reached up to touch the wound in his shoulder, then, but when he tried, he found he could not move; that his whole body was somehow gripped in invisible bonds of force that held and molded him at will. They twisted him, turned him, flexed and stretched his muscles. Apparently without support, he moved through space and time--now flat on his back; now curled first on one side and then the other; now upright, upside down, cramped or contorted into an infinity of positions. When his head rotated as under the pressure of unseen fingers, he at last glimpsed his shoulder. With a shock, he saw it had grown well and whole. No wound was visible, no scar apparent. The blue man relaxed, content to bask unresisting in this wondrous healing bath of radiant energy. Then, slowly, the radiance dimmed. Haral felt himself sinking gently. His back brushed what might have been resilient fabric, and he came to rest. The last of the light had faded. He lay in utter darkness. Xaymar's voice reached out of the blackness close at hand: "Is the pain gone from your body, warrior?" "Yes. All gone." "Yet this unit that gives out life and strength is but one of the least of all my secrets!" The voice of the woman-goddess took on a deeper, more vibrant timbre. "There are so many things I know--so many secrets of life and death--But come! You shall see them with me!" * * * * *