The king priest leader of all Hirlaj waited a moment, and was ready to rise and leave when the Eye spoke again.

You must abolish the priesthood.  The knowledge which I have given to you must die when you die.

He waited for a long time in the dim, suddenly cold hall for the god leader to speak again, then slowly rose and walked to the door, the image of the Eye of Kor still bright in his vision.  He stopped outside the doorway, hearing the soft wind of the city flowing slowly past the stone archway above him.  One of his guards reached out and touched his mind tentatively, but he blocked his thoughts and strode heavily down the steps past them.

The sound of the wind above him rose to a screaming, and suddenly it was as though he were tumbling down the entire length of the stairway, fragments of sky and stone and faces flashing past in a kaleidoscope, and the screaming all around him.  He almost reached for his bludgeon, but then he realized that he was not Tebron Marl ... he was Lee Rynason, and the screaming was Horng and he was being driven out of those thoughts, tumbling through a thousand memories so fast he could not grasp any one of them.

He withdrew from Horng’s mind as though from a nightmare; he became aware of his own body, lying in the dust of Hirlaj, and he opened his eyes and motioned weakly to Mara to break the connection.

When she had done so he slowly sat up and shook his head, waiting for it to clear.  For awhile he had been an ancient king of Hirlaj, and it took some time to return to the present, to his own consciousness.  He was dimly aware of Mara kneeling beside him, but he couldn’t make out her words at first.

“Are you all right?  Are you sure?  Look up at me, Lee, please.”

He found himself nodding to reassure her, and then he saw the expression on her face and felt the last wisps of alien fog clearing from his mind.  There were tears in her eyes, and he touched the side of her face with his hand and said, “I’m all right.  But why don’t you kiss me or something?”

She did, but before Rynason could really immerse himself in it she broke away and said, “You must have had a bad time with him!  It was as though you were dead.”

He grinned a trifle sheepishly and said, “Well, it was engrossing.  You’d better unhook the beast; he had a bad time of it too.”

Mara rose and removed the wires from Horng gingerly.  Rynason remained sitting; some of the meaning of what he had just experienced was coming to him now.  It certainly explained why the Hirlaji had suddenly passed from their war era into lasting peace, and why the memories had been blocked.  But could he credit those memories of a voice of an alien god?

And sitting in the dust at the edge of the vast Hirlaj plain the full realization came to him, as it could not when he had been Tebron.  Not only the Temple, but the Altar of Kor itself had been unmistakably the workmanship of the Outsiders.