Pol shook his head.

"Afraid not," he said. "The book and the jumble-box are all I've been keeping there, because I wouldn't want either to fall into anyone else's hands. If I were traveling, I could add my guitar. Much more, though, and it would become too great a burden. Their mass somehow gets added to my own. It's as if I'm carrying around whatever I send through."

"So that's where the box has gotten to. I remember your locating it, that day we went back to Anvil Mountain ..."

"Yes. I almost wish I hadn't."

"You couldn't really hope to recover his body or your scepter from that crater."

"No, that's not what I meant. It was just seeing all that--waste--that bothered me. I--"

He slammed his fist against the arm of his chair.

"Damn those statues! It sometimes seems they were behind it all! If I could just get them to--Hell!"

He drained his glass and went to refill it.

The sensation ebbed. I did not like that experience. The room and its inhabitants were now tiny within the cloud of myself, and more uncertainties were now present: I did not know what it was that had caused me pain, nor how it produced that effect. I felt that I should learn these things, so as to avoid it in the future. I did not know how to proceed.

I also felt that it might be useful for me to learn how to produce this effect in others, so that I could cause them to leave me alone. How might I do this? If there were a means of contact it would seem that it could go either way, once the technique were mastered....

Again, the stirring of memory. But I was distracted. Someone approached the castle. It was a solitary human of male gender. I was aware of the distinction because of my familiarity with the girl Nora who had dwelled within for a time before returning to her own people. This man wore a brown cloak and dark clothing. He came drifting out of the northwest, mounted upon one of the lesser kin of the dragons who dwell below. His hair was yellow, and in places white. He wore a short blade. He circled. He could not miss the sign of the one lighted room. He began to descend, silent as a leaf or an ash across the air. I believed that he would land at the far end of the courtyard, out of sight of the library window.