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The man they had rescued had turned against one such maddened leader and had been imprisoned just before an attack upon the largest of the colony's cities. After that he remembered nothing. Varta stopped trying to follow the conversation Lur was only explaining now how they had found the space man and brought him out of the wrecked ship.
"It cooks the flesh, we can not walk here," was his verdict. Varta pointed with her chin to the left where, some distance away, the mountain wall paralleled their course. "Then let us keep to the jungle over there and see if it does not bring around to the far side. But what made this ?" She leaned out over the glassy stuff, not daring to touch the slick surface. "War."
But of this side of the mountains both were ignorant, for Memphir's rule had not run here. "Many dead things in times past," Lur's scarlet nostril pits were extended to their widest. "But that was long ago. This land is no longer held by men." Varta laughed cheerfully. "If here there are no men, then there will rise no barbarian hordes to dispute our rule. Asti has led us to safety.
They tumbled down together, Varta's head pillowed on Lur's smooth side, and so slept as the sun and worlds of Asti whirled protectingly above them. A whir of wings in the air above her head awakened Varta. One of the small, jewel bright flying lizard creatures of the deep jungle poised and dipped to investigate more closely the worlds of Asti.
The space man moaned softly and hunched his shoulders as if he struggled vainly to tear loose from bonds. "He thinks that he is still prisoner," observed Lur. "For him life begins at the very point it ended even as it did for the turbi flowers. See now he awakens." The eyelids rose slowly, as if the man hated to see what he must look upon. Then, as he sighted Varta and Lur, his eyes went wide.
"At least we may discover what lies within it," Lur had his own share of curiosity. "How? The two of us can not draw that out of the water!" "No, but we can enter into it!" Varta fingered the folds of the hood on her shoulders.
The Polish language is the only existing representative of that variety of idioms originally spoken by the Slavic tribes, which, under the name of Lekhes, in the sixth or seventh century, settled on the banks of the Vistula and Varta.
Varta threw back her hood and breathed deeply of the air which was not manufactured by the wizardry of the lizard skin and Lur sat panting, his nostril flaps open. It was he who spied the spring on the mountain side above, a spring of water uncontaminated by the strange life of the lake. They both dragged themselves there to drink deeply. Varta returned to the lake shore reluctantly.
When it had done, the girl stooped and altered two of the lines with a swift stroke from one of her talons. The creature of the Chasm nodded its misshapen head. "Asti does not rule here. But long, and long, and long ago there was a pact made with us in His Name. Pass free from us, woman of the Light. There are two paths before you ." The Guardian paused for so long that Varta dared to prompt it.
And there, preserved in the chest in which men born in the youth of Memphir had laid them, Varta found that which would keep her safe on the path she must take. She put aside the fine silks, the jeweled cincture, which had been the badge of Asti's service and drew on over her naked body a suit of scaled skin, gemmed and glistening in the rays of the small sun.
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