he Handmaiden, out to what we believed soul-destroying death in a place
almost as strange as this *; another was now. Deliberately, detachedly, I
studied the angrily flaming Shape.

* See "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool."

Compared to it we were as a pair of Hop-o'-my-Thumbs to the Giant; had
it been man-shaped we would have come less than a third way up to its
knees. I focussed my attention upon the twenty-foot-wide square that was
the Keeper's foot. Its surface was jewel smooth, hyaline--yet beneath
it was a suggestion of granulation, of close-packed, innumerable,
microscopic crystals.

Within these grains whose existence was more sensed than seen glowed
dull red light, smoky and sullen. At each end of the square, close to
the bottom, was a diamond-shaped lozenge, cabochon, perhaps a yard in
width. These were dim yellow, translucent, with no suggestion of the
underlying crystallization. Sense organs I set them down to be--similar
to the great ovals within the Emperor's golden zone.

My gaze traveled up to the transverse arms. They stretched sixty feet
from tip to tip. At each tip were two more of the diamond figures, not
dull but burning angrily with orange-and-scarlet luster. In the center
of the beam was something that might have been a smoldering rubrous
reflection of the Emperor's pulsing multicolored rose had each of the
petals of the latter been clipped and squared.

It deepened toward its heart into a singular pattern of vermilion
latticings. Into the entire figure ran numerous tiny rivulets of angry
crimson and orange light, angling in interwoven patterns with never a
curve nor arching.

Set at intervals between them were what looked like octagonal rosettes
filled with slender silvery flutings, wan striations--like--it came to
me--immense chrysanthemum buds, half opened, and carved in gray jade.

Above towered the gigantic vertical beam. Toward its top I glimpsed a
huge square of flaring crimsons and bright topaz; two other diamonds
stared down upon us from just beneath it--like eyes. And over all its
height the striated octagons clustered.

I felt myself lifted, floated upward. Drake's hand shot out, clung to me
as together we drifted up the living wall. Opposite the latticed heart
of the square-petaled rose our flight was checked. There for an instant
we hung. Then the octagonal symbols stirred, unfolded like buds--

They were the nests of the Keeper's tentacles, and out fr