"How much.... How much did ... she pay you?" he asked. "One thousand heds." "If you get me ... take me...." Ostby's reasoning was beginning to leave him. Vision and speech blurred. A fiery ball of pain strained at the base of his head, as though striving to break out. The immediacy of his need helped him focus his vision once more on the face above him. He gasped, "Take me to Siggen. He will pay you two thousand if you get me there alive." Ostby felt himself being lifted carefully off the ground. The ball of fire in his head burst and he fell through darkness. He fell until he struck the bottom of a black pit, went through and fell some more. Consciousness left him. * * * * * For six days Death sat on the wooden prop at the foot of Ostby's bed and grinned at the thing that clung so tenaciously to life. The spark within its destitute body flickered feebly those days and the nearest Ostby came to lucidity was when he sat up in bed and cursed the grinning spectre. Each time fat but gentle hands eased him back and murmured to him until he returned to sleep. By the sixth day Death's grin became strained. Why would the creature not die? All the vitality had been drained from the husk, yet the thing within--the thing called Will--would not surrender its life. Each minute it forced the body to breathe once more. And the next minute it breathed again. The minutes stretched into days, and the days to a week; and the seventh day, when Ostby opened his eyes, Death was gone. He had won the hardest battle of his life. Death's frost still lay along his nerves during the next two weeks. Ostby realized how far he had been along the road to dying by the reluctance with which his strength returned. This was the first time in his life he could remember having been weak, so weak that the last frayed ends of his vitality lay naked. And with this weakness came a kind of humbleness. He lay quietly in the placid embrace of the apathy which the humbleness brought. "I wish I knew some way to thank you," he said to Siggen. "Don't try," Siggen urged. "If I'd ever had a son," he added, "I would have liked him to be like you." An hour later Siggen said, "I'll do what you ask, but only on one condition: that you wait until you are stronger before you move." Ostby considered. "I'll give myself two more days," he said. "By that time you should have everything ready." Reluctantly Siggen agreed. The sun had not yet risen, but its light was creeping into the sky as Siggen and Ostby stood huddled in a cold doorway across from the palace. All around them Ostby's discerning eye caught signs of life. But the signs did not disturb him. They were Siggen's men, and they were here at his request.