Stompers crowding the moorland all night with their dancing, their vast singing coming to the cave from all round the compass. Rose banks distant in the night sky and Hoggy Darn crossing the House of the Maidens. Red Hoggy Darn, still lagging, still not catching it perfectly upright. The strangeness of Pia. The waiting, clutching a polished thigh bone. * * * * * At last the night when the mighty war song of the stompers went up unbearably, as the man had heard it that once before, and fire mist boiled along the distant mountains. Flyers shuttled across the sky, dropped, rose again. Blasters ripped the night with ion-pencils. Hoggy Darn gleamed redly on the threshold of the House of the Maidens that stood almost upright and perfect with silvery Morwenna at the vertex. Flyers blasted clearings in the throng of stompers, and grounded. Men boiled out of them, setting up Corbin powercasters here, there, another place, fighting as soon as their feet hit ground. The man stood up and brandished the thigh bone. "I must go down and fight. Wait here." "I must go too," the girl said calmly. "Yes, you must," he agreed. "Come along." Stompers rushed by them and bounded over their heads and did not harm them. Blaster-torn stompers fell heavily beside them, threshing and snapping, and they were not touched. Men lowered weapons to point at the man and girl, shouting to one another out of mazed faces silently in the whelming music of the stomper chorus. Man and girl walked on. Unharmed through the forest of singing, leaping shapes, hand in hand through a screen of fighting men that parted to admit them, they walked into the light of a glowing Corbin where a tall, gaunt old man stood watching their approach. The feeling of exalted unreality began to lift from Cole. "Grandfather, give us blasters," he shouted. "We want to fight." "The power is on you, lad, and you only half know it," the old man shouted back. "Stand here by the Corbin. Your fight is not yet." Tears stood in the fierce old eyes. Across the moorland the fighting raged. Islands of men and women grouped round their Corbins held back the booming, chaotic sea of stompers that surged against them from all sides. Dikes of dead and dying grew up, men and stompers mingled. The flyers shuttled down and up again and more islands of men took shape. Hoggy Darn crossed the threshold and the savage war song of the stompers shook the night sky. In a lull Morgan came in to the Corbin to change the wave track on his blaster. His face was a mask of iron joy and his eyes blazed. "Morgan, if we are both alive after, I will kill you!" Cole shouted. "No," Morgan rumbled. "You have been into the forest and come out again. It took you three weeks. It took me three hundred years. Clasp hands, my brother in hatred." "Yes, brother in hatred." The exalted unreality began coming back strongly. "I want a blaster!" he howled at Morgan.