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 terror and he felt his mind reeling back from those memories.  The screaming filled his mind and body and this time he felt Horng himself blocking him, pushing him back.

But there was no need for that; the fear was not Horng’s alone.  Rynason felt it too, and he retreated before its onslaught with an overpowering need to preserve his own sanity.

When the darkness subsided Rynason became aware of himself still sitting on the stone bench, sweat drenching his body.  Horng sat before him in the same position he had been in when they had started; it was as if nothing had happened at all.  Rynason wearily raised one hand and motioned to Mara to break the linkage.

She switched off the telepather and gingerly removed the wires from his head, frowning worriedly at him.  But she waited for him to speak.

He grinned at her after a moment and said, “It was a bit rough in there.  We couldn’t break through.”

She was removing the wires from Horng, who sat unmoving, staring dully over Rynason’s shoulder at the wall behind him.  “You should have seen yourself when you were under,” she said.  “I wanted to break the connection before, but I wasn’t sure....”