No—it was not in the Uigur to surrender! Better to fight for this life—which might not be a bad one, once he escaped these demons. Perhaps this was no more than the initiation test: only the capable visitor managed to remain.

Something strange was happening. It developed slowly, like the barely perceptible rising of the sun at dawn—but like the sun, it spread its influence pervasively. Alp began to understand things about these demons.

They did not consider themselves demons. In their own odd language they were "Galactics"—human beings from far away, representatives of a mighty empire than spanned a much greater region than did the Uigur realm at its height. That empire extended over planets and systems and constellations—though these were concepts of such sorcerous complexity and incongruity as to baffle his mind. He knew them to be pretense and illusion nevertheless—because demons were things of the fundament, not the welkin. Soil-grubbers, not sky-flyers. So that much he could set aside as irrelevant.

Or could he? Again he had to remind himself that the rules of his own realm did not necessarily apply. Conceivably demons did master heaven, here—or thought they did.

The demons spoke a language of their own. Not Uigur, not even Chinese. Their speech had no writing. They had "machines" to do their bidding, these devices being jinn-like entities housed in metal, capable of phenomenal wizardry.

The demons were engaged in a war that was not a war but a game, in which those killed did not really die yet could not exactly return. Reincarnation was the only possibility—but for this they had to pay a fee.

It was too much! Alp closed his mind to this madness—but found there was no escape from it. The helmet was not a suffocation device after all; its torture was more subtle. It crammed unacceptable information into his shuddering brain, destroying his comfortable patterns of belief.