The aircraft trembled slightly as the pilot flared out his long glide, and with a breathtaking suddenness, the stars and the moon vanished, leaving only a sable blackness around them. Down again, the sled plunged, and after several moments, the glide flattened again. For a minute it hovered, and then it dropped sharply, and there was a hissing sound as the runners touched the ferric sand. They were down. A company of Temple Guardsmen bearing torches appeared out of the darkness, and Telis was freed from the deck-rings. Respectfully, but firmly, he was taken into custody and marched across the gritty soil of the landing field toward a lighted gate in the distance. The light shield must have been impervious to moonlight, or perhaps it was made transparent during the hours of daylight. Telis never knew. But as they made their way toward the gate, the sun rose with its usual, breathtaking suddenness. The thin air of Laurr precluded any dawn or twilight and, when the sun burst over the horizon, the transition from blackness to day was done with shocking speed. It was a phenomenon that Telis had seen every morning of his six haads, but this time the effect was different. For never before had Telis seen such a city as marvelled Dorliss! * * * * * And, as though created in a trice out of the very stuff of darkness, Dorliss sprang into being before his astounded eyes. The flood of golden light from the sun touched the spires and minarets of an enchanted city, casting shards of amber light into the deep canyons between the slender towers. Unable to help himself, Telis paused to wonder. His gaze found the great golden dome that housed the Mirror of the Sky ... fabled place where legend said that a man might sit and see the glories of the heavens reflected on a monster glass of polished obsidian, figured by the cunning hands of artificers dead over eight thousand haads! Telis had long been a scoffer ... but here was proof! And farther off, basking in the warm morning light, there was the Fist of the Goddess ... a great spire capped by a mammoth sphere. This was the machine that the stories claimed could shatter even the smallest particles of matter and suck out of them the pure force that was the essence of their being, even as had the ancients long ago. It was from a similar machine, the Temple Priests avowed, that the hellish missiles of the first eight Water Wars had been fashioned ... the terrible weapons that had left the once great cities of Laurr in molten, ghastly heaps of slag, later to be covered over and obliterated by the steadily rising tide of rust from the deserts. And here it all was before him! Here was Dorliss, City of the Temple!