hed, kind to kind."

Nice to be so certain of that, Ross thought. He did not share Loketh's
confidence on that subject.

"The Shades ... the Shadow ..." Karara persisted. "What are these,
Loketh?"

An odd expression crossed the Hawaikan's face. "Are those not known
to you, Sea Maid? Indeed, then you are of a breed different from the
men of land. The Shades are those of power who may come to the aid
of men should it be their desire to influence the future. And the
Shadow ... the Shadow is That Which Ends All--man, hope, good. To Which
there is no appeal, and Which holds a vast and enduring hatred for that
which has life and full substance."

"So Zahur has this new magic. Is it the gift of Shades or Shadow?" Ross
brought them back to the subject which had sparked in him a small
warning signal.

"Zahur prospers mightily." Loketh's answer was ambiguous.

"And so the Shadow could not provide such magic?" The Terran pushed.

But before the Hawaikan had a chance to answer, Karara added another
question:

"But you believe that it did?"

"I do not know. Only the magic has made Zahur a part of Glicmas, and
Glicmas is now perhaps a part of that which spoke from the mountain. It
is not well to accept gifts which tie one man to another unless there is
from the first a saying of how deep that bond may run."

"I think you are wise in that, Loketh," Karara said.

But the uneasiness had grown in Ross. Alien powers, out of a mountain
heart, passed from one lord to another. And on the other hand the
Rovers' sudden magic in turn, lending their ships wings. The two facts
balanced in an odd way. Back on Terra there had been those sudden and
unaccountable jumps in technical knowledge on the part of the enemy,
jumps which had set in action the whole Time Travel service of which he
had become a part. And these jumps had not been the result of normal
research; they had come from the looting of derelict spaceships wrecked
on his world in the far past.

Could driblets of the same stellar knowledge have been here deliberately
fed to warring communities? He asked Loketh about the possibility of
space-borne explorers. But to the Hawaikan that was a totally foreign
conception. The stars, for Loketh, were the doorways and windows of the
Shades, and he treated the suggestion of space travel as perhaps natural
to those all-powerful specters, but certainly not for beings like
himself. There was no hint that Hawaika had been openly visited b