A dirt-caked street stretched before him by night, the stones individually cut and smooth with the passage of heavy feet.  “Tomorrow we will set out for the Region of Chalk while there is still time.”  A mind-voice from a Hirlaji hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, dead but alive in the race-memory.  Rynason could feel the whole personality there, in the memories, but he passed on.

“Murba has said that the priests will take him.”

“There is no need for planting this year ... the soil is dry.  There is no purpose.”

“The child’s mind is ready for war.”

He felt Horng himself watching him, beside him or behind him ... nearby, anyway.  The alien heard and saw with him, and stayed with him like a protector.  Rynason felt his presence warmly:  the calm of the alien continued to relax him.  Old leather mother-hen, he thought, and Horng beside him seemed almost amused.

Suddenly he was Tebron.

Tebron Marl, prince in the Region of Mines, young and strong and ambitious.  Rynason caught and held those impressions; he felt the muscles ripple strangely through his body as Tebron stretched, felt the cold wind of the flat cut through his loose garment.  It was night, and he stood on the parapet of a heavy stone structure looking down across the immense stretch of the Flat, spotted here and there by lights.  He controlled all this land, and would control more....

He was Tebron again, marching across the Flat at the head of an army.  Metal weapons hung at the sides of his men, crudely fashioned bludgeons and jagged-edged swords, all quickly forged in the workshops of the Region of Mines.  The babble of mind voices swelled around him, fear and anger and boredom, dull resentment, and other emotions Rynason could not identify.  They were marching on the City of the Temple....

He slipped sideways in Tebron’s mind, and suddenly he was in the middle of the battle.  There was dust all around, kicked up by the scuffling feet of the huge warriors, and his breath came in gasps.  Mind-voices shouted and screamed but he paid no attention; he swung his bludgeon over his head with a ferocity that made it whistle with a low sound in the wind.  One of the defenders broke through the line around him, and he brought the bludgeon smashing down at him before he could thrust with his sword; the warrior fell to one side at the last moment and took the blow along one arm.  He could feel the pain in his own mind, but he ignored it.  Before the warrior could bring up his sword again Tebron crushed his head with the bludgeon, and the scream of pain in his own head disappeared.  He heard the grunting and gasps of his own warriors and the clash of bodies and weapons around him....

The Hirlaji could not really be moving so quickly, Rynason thought; it must be that to Tebron it seemed so.  They were quiet, slow-moving creatures.  Or had they degenerated physically through the centuries?  Still smelling the sweat of battle, he found Tebron’s mind again.