He glanced quickly up at the monsters atop their columns. "Are they all like that?" he asked Adelie. An old man's gruff voice answered him from the other side of the beast-couch. "They won't spring down to devour you--you needn't be afraid of _that_." Two men came into view, one old, one young and very slim. The old one rapped the couch with his knuckles. "This tended you in your sleep. It is made in the shape of the most ferocious race that ever rivaled Man. It is now extinct--as are all those others up there, for the same reason." The thin young man--very pale, very long of limb--stretched his broad, tight mouth into a smile that covered half his face without mirth. "_Not_ the most ferocious, Vigil." "Your kind will learn about that," the old man snapped. "Not from you and yours," the slim man said lightly. Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. "Tell me the situation," Greaves said. Adelie's lips parted. But the old man interrupted. "The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep--" he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers--"have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake." "Oh, on the contrary," the young man said. "Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?" Greaves looked from one to the other--the leather-skinned old man with his mop of ringleted white hair, the young one who was human in appearance but somehow claimed some other status. "Who are you two?" "I am Vigil, your guardian, and this is--" "I am Mayron of The Shadows," the young man said, and he held himself as carelessly as before, but his face looked directly into Greaves's. "See my eyes." There was nothing there. Only darkness speckled by pinpoints of light; thick, sooty darkness like oil smoke, and sharp lights that burned through it without illuminating it. "Mayron that was First of Men," Vigil said bitterly. "Mayron that is First of Shadows," the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before Greaves. "Mayron that will again be First of Men, when all men are shadows. Mayron that is already First of many men. And which of us is a god, David Greaves?" * * * * * Adelie's face glowed with excitement. Her red lips were parted breathlessly. The crowd on the tiers had loosed a great, wailing moan, which hung over the court of conquered monsters as the first stars became visible on the far horizon. Greaves took a deep breath. He could feel his body tensing itself, the muscles rippling, as though his hide needed comfort.