His eyes widened in mingled fear and religious ecstasy, muscles cording in great knots on his neck and back, the leader-priest felt the nearness of a Presence his kind had not known for ten thousand years.

The Dark Ones' time came again.

Far to the southwest, the mountain Omizantrim trembled. Across long years it had built itself in fitful vomits of core-stuff from the planet until it stood thus, a black fang piercing the sky. Now it jetted a cloud of boiling hot ash and smoke, a roiling blackness shot through with flame and vivid lightning. A herdsman watching his flock of one-horned deer grazing the short grass that clung to the lower slopes of the mountain, was caught by surprise. He screamed as the awful heat enveloped him, boiling water from his tissues in an instant, mingling volcanic cloud and human body in the deadly stew.

The cloud rolled on, leaving the herdsman with his charges, now turned to gray ash statues scattered randomly on a lifeless hillside. The folk who dwelt lower on the slopes were luckier. They saw the cloud spew into the night like venom from a serpent's fang and retreated to special shelters dug in the cooled lava flows that jutted from the mountain like diseased roots.

Others, farther away, viewed the eruption with foreboding. Timid and wise alike made signs in the air and muttered fervent prayers to personal deities. But the wise were little comforted by their godly importunings. They knew that Those whose voice spoke through Omizantrim were mightier by far than the gods of Earth.

Farther south, all lights were extinguished at once in a City whose foundations rested on nothing more solid than the air itself. The Sky City's new queen, celebrating her fresh victory over her hated sister and rival to the throne, felt outrage welling within her breast. She sat in her great entertainment hall watching a subtle and sophisticated drama involving a half-dozen stalwart and naked young men, an assortment of implements of curious design and even more curious function, and a lovely young girl of a house which had dared oppose the queen's succession. The girl's screams marking that part of the program which the queen awaited most eagerly had only begun to echo through the hall when darkness fell abruptly.