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From the edges of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the Disk's surface, touching her, caressing her. For a moment she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair streaming cloudily about her regal head.
Another the reports breaking the silence like a profanation. Unseen by either of us, Ventnor had slipped to one side where he could cover the core of ruby flame that must have seemed to him the heart of the Disk's rose of fire. He knelt a few yards away, white lipped, eyes cold gray ice, sighting carefully for a third shot. "Don't! Martin don't fire!" I shouted, leaping toward him. "Stop!
I sensed this amusement in the Disk's regard even as I had sensed its soul of awful tranquillity; as we had sensed the playful malice in the eye stars of the living corridor, the curiosity in the column that had dropped us into the valley. I felt a push a push that was filled with a colossal, GLITTERING playfulness. Under it I went spinning away for yards Drake twirling close behind me.
There was a ringing about us an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline. It came from the cones and strangely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice. Into the vast circle of sky pierced a lance of green fire; swift in its wake uprose others. We slid gently down, stood swaying at the Disk's base. The Keeper bent; angled. Again the planes above the supporting square hovered over the tablet.
By the disk's action, they deduced that their guide had drawn them to this featureless black steel with the precision of a beam-controlled ship. However, the purpose still eluded them. They had hoped for some exit from the territory of the veil, but now they faced a solid slab of dark stone, neither a conventional exit or entrance, as they proved by circling its base.
Unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the Disk's golden zone, still I knew that they were even as those ORGANS, organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could not observe. The floating figures had drawn close to that disk and had paused.
Thrice the height of a tall man as I think I have noted before when it unfolded its radiance was that shape of mingled beauty and power I call the Metal Emperor. Yet this Thing eclipsed it. Black, uncompromising, in some indefinable way BRUTAL, its square bulk blotted out the Disk's effulgence; shrouded it. And a shadow seemed to fall upon the crater.
The sand in which their boots slipped and slid was coarse stuff, hardly finer than gravel, studded with nests of drift bone-white or grayed or pale lavender smoothed and stored by the seasons of low tides and high, seasonal storms and hurricanes. A wild shore and a forbidding one, to arouse Shann's distrust, perhaps a fitting goal for that disk's guiding.
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