"And the priests," said Revel fiercely, "and the gods!" He almost believed that somehow they could climb into the air and destroy the gods in their red and blue buttons. He lay down, one hand vised on the woman's wrist, and though he felt he should never sleep that night, being far too excited, in three minutes he was snoring mightily. * * * * * He woke some time later with the prickling feeling of danger on his skin. He opened his eyes and saw red, literally a red mist that obscured the world. Then his head began to open and shut, open and shut, and he knew he had been hit a hell of a blow on the forehead, and there was blood in his eyes. Groping for his pick, that had lain next his left hand, he missed it; then he recalled the girl, reached out for her, found she was gone too. He drew the back of his arm over his eyes and cleared the gore a trifle. "Jerran?" he said quietly. No answer. Blinking, he saw the vast meeting place empty, lit by the blue lanterns. He rolled his head and there, its point buried deep in the sward an inch from his right ear, was his pick. He sat up. Jerran lay a dozen feet off, looking very dead indeed, with his thin hair matted with blackening blood. Instinctively he tore the pick out of the ground. It was buried so deep that only a very strong hand could have sent it in; not the girl, he thought, somehow relieved that she hadn't done it. No, a miner's blow alone might have done it, for the earth was packed solid as oak's wood by untold multitudes of rebels' feet. Wait a minute, he said to himself: this is all wrong. That blow should have opened my skull like a walnut. It missed me by a fraction--either the aim was poor, or else damned good. I could have struck such a blow, sure to miss where I wished to, but not even many miners could duplicate it. Had the enemy missed, then walloped him with another weapon and left him for dead? Gingerly he felt the wound on his head. It was healing already, a tap that might have laid him out for a few hours, but would never have slain him. He glared at the pick in his hand. Then he brought it up and in the combined light of the blue lanterns and the dawn filtering in from the woods, he squinted at the handle. Where his own pick bore the crude carving of a mink (he had taken the beast as his symbol a long time ago, another sign of his identity), this one had a jumble of grooves meant to represent a woods lion. This wasn't Revel's pick--it was his brother Rack's!