The base from which the male statue'd fallen was plain. Ilna rose to her feet, frowning. "There's nothing here," she said. "We'll check the living quarters before we decide what to do next. There's huts on the other slope." Someone groaned at Ilna's feet. She jumped back. "Sister take me, mistress!" Karpos said, pointing his drawn bow at the figure on the floor. "That's not a statue! It's a man!" *** Garric, once ruler of the Isles, faced the largest city of the Coerli. The catmen called it simply the Place, because its ten thousand residents made it unique among a race which generally grouped itself into hunting bands of a dozen or two. When the Change merged eras, it'd wrenched the Place to within twenty miles of Valles, the capital of the Isles. "Coerli, send out your champion!" Garric shouted. He was the only human who was fluent in the catmen's language, though he'd set scores of clerks and army officers to learning the patterns of clicks and hisses. "Send him to fight me, or send your Council of Elders to surrender!" "Or we could simply deal with the cat-beasts the way I would've in my time, lad," said the ghost sharing Garric's mind: King Carus, his ancestor and advisor.

"Burn the city down and slaughter any of the animals who live through the fire. And go on to the next city and do the same." Tenoctris says we need them, Garric thought. And if she'd said we needed to ally with apes in the trees on Shengy, I'd be down there in the jungle waving bananas and chittering. The image of the tall, tanned king in Garric's mind threw back his head and laughed. "Aye, lad," Carus said.

"And you'd be right to, of course. But sooner monkeys than cats who'd eat men if we let them." If, Garric repeated with emphasis. His smile and the king's both widened grimly. Ornifal and the other isles of the kingdom were now a chain of highlands surrounding a great continent.

The land hadn't risen in the sense that earthquakes and volcanoes sometimes lifted an island out of the sea-or sank one to the depths with the cities upon it, leaving their doomed, screaming residents to thrash in the boiling waves. The Change had welded the Isles of Garric's day in a ring which clamped together periods in which the Inner Sea was dry land. A better term would be fragments of periods.