Another thing Telis noticed also. Though guards abounded _outside_ the city, he had seen but a handful within the walls. He remembered something Gorla had told him long ago: that science could not really thrive against a militaristic background, and that was why so much of the ancient lore was lost when the planet became nothing more than a battleground. Plainly, the city of Dorliss was not ruled by force, and--a break for freedom might not be the impossible achievement that he had begun to imagine it. Now they were within a long hallway, bare but for the crystal panelling. From somewhere came the whispering of plaintive music. It tinted the air with a gentle nostalgia that found a strangely responsive chord in Telis. He was told that the sound came from another chamber where a Priest was engaged in research on sounds and their effect on human emotions. It had been so long since music existed on Laurr that even this knowledge had been forgotten.... The guide led Telis on and on, past the long hall and through many portals that opened at last into a small circular room devoid of any sort of ornamentation. In the center of this room, a man sat at a table that rose in graceful lines out of the floor itself. He was old, old. Telis stared at the man. He wore the sable robes and the insigne of the Seventh Cycle, the topmost rank of priest-scientists. Recognition came, too. This man was not merely a Seventh Cycle Priest ... he was actually the High Superior of the Temple. The old eyes and kindly face, the long white beard and sable robe were the same as he remembered from a hundred solideographs in a hundred provincial Temples. Telis would have thrown himself to his knees before the spiritual head of all Laurr had he not suddenly remembered that he was a prisoner here, abducted like any thieving Commoner. He looked stolidly around the room then, and for the first time he saw the girl. A noble of Laurr had plenty of opportunity to become something of a connoisseur in the matter of woman flesh, but the moment that Telis' eyes found the girl's he knew that here was something special. Her hair was black and her skin fair, a combination seldom found on this side of the planet where bronze skin and brown hair were almost universal, but Telis had heard tales of such women from brother officers who had carried the Laurr's battles of unification to the southern hemisphere. The clothes this woman wore were strange ... a blouse covered her where most Laurrian women went nude, and a short skirt descended from a harness not unlike Telis' own. Her belt was hung with various pouches and holsters. And over all, she affected a transparent jumper of stuff like flexible glass that covered her from neck to ankles like a chrysalis. Her eyes were deeply shadowed, and she seemed either ill or terribly disheartened ... or both. * * * * *