ried to shrink back further
into the shadows. He was trapped.

But not unarmed. As he dropped to the steps and rolled quickly to one
side Tebron heard the low vibration of a disintegrator beam pass over
his shoulder and the crack of the wall behind him as it struck. And then
the guards were on the warrior in the shadows.

They had brought down several of the temple-guards the night before, and
commandeered their weapons. In a matter of moments this one fell too,
his head and most of his trunk gone. One of the warriors shoved the
half-carcass down the stairs, and bent forward at the knees to pick up
his fallen weapon.

So now they had all fourteen of them; if any more of the temple-guards
remained they could be dealt with easily. Tebron rose from the steps and
wished momentarily that those weapons could be duplicated; if his whole
army could be equipped with them.... But after today that would probably
be unnecessary; the entire planet was his now.

He walked up the last few steps and stepped into the shadows of the
Temple of Kor....

The walls melted around him and Rynason felt his mind wrenched
painfully. There was a screaming all through him, thin and high,
blotting out the contact he had held with Tebron's mind. It was Horng's
scream, beside him, overpowering. Terror washed over him; he tried to
fight it but he couldn't. The shadows of the walls twisted and faded,
Tebron's thoughts disappeared, and all that remained was the screaming
and the fear, like a mouth open wide against his ear and hot breath
shouting into him. He felt his stomach turn and nausea and vertigo threw
him panting out of Tebron's mind.

Yet Horng was still beside him in the darkness, and as the echoes faded
he felt him there ... alien, but calm. There had been fear in this huge
alien mind, but it had disappeared almost immediately with the breaking
of the connection with Tebron. All that remained in Horng's mind now was
a dull quietness.

Rynason felt a rueful grin on his face, and he said, perhaps aloud and
perhaps not, "You haven't forgotten what happened here, old leather. The
memories are there, all right."

From Horng's mind came a slow rebuilding of the fear that he had just
experienced, but it subsided. And as it did Rynason probed again into
his mind, searching quickly for that contact he had just lost. He could
almost feel Tebron's mind, began to see the darkness forming the
wall-shadows, when again there was a blast of the terr