He stretched an arm out toward the mountains, but meaning to encompass all that lay beyond. "Is not the human realm worth studying? You and I were born of it, after all, and your grandfather, too." "And other sorcerers have studied it thoroughly, I'm sure. I have chosen to study that which other sorcerers have not. It will serve me as I wish to be served."

"You never chose," said Cray. "Your grandfather chose."

She shrugged. "At the beginning, yes. But the more I study Ice, the more I think it was a good choice. I could give it up, you know. I could alwayschoose to give it up. I control the demon now. I could choose to require it to teach me some other form of sorcery. Something more ordinary. But I do not wish to be ordinary. "She looked out across the white sand and waved a hand at that vista, a short, sharp, contemptu-ous gesture. "This is nothing," she said. "Less than nothing. Look!" She extended both arms, fingers splayed stiffly. Out in the whiteness, sand began to fountain upward as if some buried giant were exhaling his deep and powerful breath. Sparkling motes danced in the sunlight, falling, splashing against the ground and being caught up once again to rise on high. Grad-ually the fountain solidified, its central shaft taking on the form of an obelisk, fewer and fewer grains falling from that column until it stood solid and gleaming, its four sides crisp and smooth and flawless.

"There," said Aliza, dropping her arms. "That is what I can make of the human realm. And I could form a hundred more of them, with walls between, and roofs and turrets-a castle fit for any king, filled with crystalline furniture, and crystal servants to do my bidding. It would be easy, the work of a few afternoons, no more. My grandfather tells me there are sorcerers who have studied all their long lives to do just that, and count themselves skilled and fortu-nate to accomplish it. They have not grown up in Ice, as I have. They are not part of a realm that is crystalline in its very nature, a nature I have absorbed so thoroughly that their long-studied skills are like child's play to me. But Ice itself, Cray Ormoru! Ice is not a simple place like the human realm. Ice resists me, as it resists its own demons. They and I are to Ice as an ordinary mortal is tohis realm. We must labor hard to bend it to our bidding. And yet, we are capable of such labor, the Ice demons and I. Only because I was not born there, because I am notcompletely of Ice, has it come so slowly to me. But by that same token, by my very otherness, I have the potential to manipu-late ice more effectively than the demons who areof it. I have a stronger will than they, more persever-ance, more desire. Regneniel says that if I were a demon, I would be one of the greatest of them. I have spent my life becoming so, and I am not about to give it up for the paltry rewards of the human realm!"

Cray had backed off a step at the vehemence of her speech, and now he gripped the windowsill hard with both hands. Her words and her manner made him afraid, not for himself, but for her. She was still a child, he felt it in his heart, but those were not a child's words, and that was not a child's vehemence.

They were the words and the vehemence of an old and jaded sorcerer, one who had lived long and never acquired enough power to satisfy himself.

He must have told himself it was for her own good,he thought, looking at the implacable expression on her pale and beautiful face.And there was no mother or father for him to answer to. Only an innocent child.

Aliza would have power indeed-power that no other sorcerer had ever had, because no sorcerous parent had ever been willing to give a child up so completely to sorcery. Cool they were, those of the sorcerous breed, but they usually had some affection for their children.

He shivered, though his clothing was dry now and the air that gushed in through the window no longer seemed so cool.

"You call the rewards of the human realm paltry," he said to Aliza. "Yet what do you really know ofthem? Do you remember flowers? Do you remember the sparkle of sunlight on a brook? Do you remember grassy pastures smooth as the finest carpets and a thousand times larger? Do you remember laughing people?" He held his hands out toward her, though he did not try to touch her. "Come with me and travel beyond the mountains to see what you can have at no cost to yourself, no expenditure of gold or power."

She looked at him long and hard. "The cost would be in time," she said, "and I have none to spare for such a journey."

"The time would be well spent, I know, my lady. Think again of your answer."

She turned away from him, away from the window, to gaze back into the depths of her palace. "I do remember these things," she said. "And I do not value them as you seem to. And you cannot make me value them. We are too different, Cray Ormoru, you and I. You may doubt that, but I do not."

"Your grandfather lives in the human realm," said Cray. "You think he rejects it?"

"I am not my grandfather."

"Perhaps the reason he visits you so seldom is that he doesn't like Ice. He prefers the human realm. Can he be wrong, Aliza?"

"He may be correct for himself. Come now-haven't you had enough of this bright light for now?"

"I am accustomed to it. I walk in it often. I like it." He took a step toward her. "Perhaps if you went out, once, in that naked sunlight, if you commanded Regneniel to fly you to the highest of all those peaks and you looked down to the other side, perhaps youwould change your mind. Does the prospect of possi-bly changing your mind frighten you, Aliza? Are you afraid that all your carefully made decisions might no longer seem so right if you went out beyond the mountains?"

She did not look back at him, but she straightened where she stood. "I am not afraid, Cray Ormoru.

You seem often to see fear where there is none. It's a very strange quirk of your mind. You are the one, I think, that wants to go out beyond those mountains. You are the one who wants to travel in the human realm, and you think, somehow, that everyone must feel the same."

"I have traveled much in the human realm," he said, "and I know how interesting it can be."

Now she gazed at him over one shoulder. "If you wish to see what lies beyond the mountains, I shall command Regneniel to take you there."

"Regneniel could take us both."

"No. You shall go, and you shall satisfy your curiosity."

He heard the wariness in his own voice. "Are you throwing me out, my lady?"

She frowned slightly. "You don't wish to go?"

"I thought ... from what you told my friends, that you were willing to let me stay until tomorrow. It isn't tomorrow yet, surely." She hesitated, and when she spoke there was a hint of a smile about her lips. "You don't wish to see all those wonderful sights you spoke of so glowingly and then come back and tell me how much I've missed?"

He felt himself relax and answer her faint smile with one of his own. "As long as you allow me to come back."

"I told your friends to return tomorrow, and I intend to deliver you to them in Ice at that time. Unless you choose to find your way home now, through the human realm."

He glanced out the window once more. "I would like to explore a bit of it, yes, just for my curiosity's sake. But I would also like to come back here and spend the evening with you. We could look at the stars together from this room."

"The stars," murmured Aliza. "You find them interesting."

"Yes. Not only are they beautiful, but they are among the few things that no sorcerer can control."

"Yes, that must be a source of great frustration to many of them."

Cray laughed. "Of what use would it be for a sor-cerer to control the stars?"

"Of what use is anything?" said Aliza. "Save that some person desires it. I see no use in watching the stars, but apparently you do."

"I look at the stars for the same reason I look at a fine tapestry-for the pleasure it gives my heart. And you know that pleasure, too, or you wouldn't have accepted my gift of a tapestry. Come look at the world with me, Aliza. It will give you even more pleasure."

"No. Go yourself if you like, but you shall not drag me along. Regneniel!"

The demon came swiftly-they could see its ap-proach from several rooms away, see that though its form was wingless, it flew, its long legs held out stiffly behind, beaked head stretched out in front. When it reached them, it lighted on the floor without a sound, as delicately as if it had been made of thistledown.

"Regneniel," said Aliza, "you shall take Cray Ormoru out to those mountains and wherever beyond them he may wish to go. You shall look after him and keep him from harm, and you shall return here with him in time for supper." She looked to Cray. "I trust that will suit you well enough?"

"Very well," said Cray. "I am grateful indeed for the loan of your only demon."

"Think of it as payment for the tapestry."

"I need no such payment. I told you that."

"Then as my gift to you. Does that suit you better?" He made a little bow to her. "It suits me excellently, my lady."

To the demon she said, "Use your bird form for this journey. I wish to see it fly."

In a moment Regneniel was the great white bird, its wings folded close against its body, its head cockedto one side, one large pale eye staring at the two mortals. It squatted, belly to the floor, and two rows of feath-ers just behind its head fanned upward to form the pommel and cantle of a saddle. Cray mounted, and long white feathers closed over his thighs and legs to hold him securely in his seat. Then the bird stood once more and walked toward the window with a curious, bobbing gait.

"Are you ready?" asked the demon's deep, reso-nant voice.

"Yes," said Cray.

With a spring of powerful leg muscles, the bird launched itself through the window, clearing the sill easily and only opening its wings when it was outside, in midair. Two beats of those powerful pinions lifted it high into the sunny sky, and when Cray looked back, Aliza's palace was far below and behind the demon's splayed tailfeathers. He could no longer see Aliza, nor even the window, from this height.

Sunlight flashed from the walls of the palace as from the facets of a jewel. The palace was a jewel, set down upon the white sand and ringed all around by the mountains, as if it were lying on the bottom of a vast, shallow bowl.

Buffeted by the wind of his demon steed's flight, Cray clung fast to his feather saddle, bending low over Regneniel's head. Far beneath him, the sand rushed by, and then, quite suddenly, it was gone, replaced by dark earth and the greenery that grew on the flanks of the mountains. From his new vantage, Cray could see that this greenery consisted almost entirely of trees whose like he had never seen before. They were twisted grotesquely, as if constantly windracked, though he could see from the stillness of their leaves that, for the moment at least, there was no wind among them. Their tops were flattened, the boughs grown up only so far and then turning downward, many reaching the ground, where they branched and spread like ground-hugging vines.

The demon bird began to wheel upward to cross the mountains, and Cray saw that what he had taken for snow capping those peaks was in reality exposed crys-tal upon which no growing things had taken root. The myriad jagged shards flashed and sparkled as he passed.

The far side of the mountains seemed familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Familiar because the land was low and rolling and cloaked by the soft greens of intermittent forest, a soothing contrast to the angular, near-colorless world he had come from. But unfamil-iar because he recognized not a single tree of all the multitude that passed below him. Where were the oaks, the maples, the walnuts? Instead, he saw trees with thick, branchless boles tapering gradually to a tufted summit, trees that seemed to have no trunks at all but rather roots that grew straight up into their crowns like bundles of staves, trees with leaves like waving pennons, trees with leaves as fine as human hair. He felt as though he flew through some other world than his own, a world that resembled the one he knew only if he squinted hard and allowed just the color green to penetrate his lashes. And then, swoop-ing low over a large clearing, the demon flushed a number of animals, and Cray stared down at them in astonishment. The largest ones looked a little like deer, with four legs and antlers, but their bodies were too stocky, their necks too elongated. Some of the others might have been large rabbits but for their red-gold color and lack of visible ears. One creature might have passed for a wild cat, though it was com-pletely tailless and had ears much like those the almost-rabbits lacked. Cray wondered if they would all seem even more peculiar if he were at ground level rather than gliding above them; animals, after all, did not tend to look up at the sky and show their faces to observers there.

Then he saw the town.

It hugged the high bank of a narrow river perhaps half a day's horseback ride from the foot of the moun-tains, and it commanded a magnificent view of them. The water of the river ran a deep reddish hue,derived, Cray presumed, from deposits of red clay that must lie farther upstream. The town itself was red, made of bricks that probably came from that same deposit-the houses all red brick, the streets paved with red cobbles, even the town wall that same mellow shade. The wall was, of course, no barrier to the demon bird, which flew high over it and, at Cray's command, circled the town in a shallow, ever-descending spiral.

There were real birds roosting on the red tile rooftops-birds of every color Cray could imagine, and some he had only seen before in flowers, not plumage. Birds. But no human beings.

The streets of the town were empty. There was not a horse, a dog, a rat to be seen. Not a child playing, not a woman hanging laundry, not a man wheeling a barrow.

As Regneniel spiraled lower, Cray began to see the signs of abandonment-the broken roof tiles, the gap-ing shutters, the doors ajar, the walls cracked and crumbled by years of rain and wind and hot summer sun. Everywhere, plants had taken over where mortals would have cut them back, on those roofs, in those cracks, even on the very doorsteps of the houses. Cray bade the demon land in the town square, where a low platform must once have been a gathering place for bearers of news and for barter.

Now it was deserted. Cray walked slowly about the perimeter of the square, calling at windows, knocking at doors, even entering a few buildings. Everywhere he found the same-not a stick of furniture, not a pot hanging on a hook by a fireplace, not a rag, just echoing emptiness. And everywhere, the dust of years lay thick on the floors, showing him his own footsteps and nothing more.

"Do you know what happened here?" Cray asked the demon bird.

"Yes."

He waited for the rest of the answer, then realized he would get none without further prompting. Some demons, he thought, were just too literal-minded. "Tell me about it," he said.

"When the hills began to grow into mountains, the people left."

"Ah. Well, I suppose I can understand that. It must have been a rather frightening time. Were there earthquakes?"

"None discernible to mortals."

"How long did the whole process take?"

"Which-the mountains growing or the people leaving?"

Cray shrugged. "Both."

"The mountains completed growth to their present height in approximately eight months. The last mortal left this town some four months before that, though the bulk of the population had gone even earlier; the last few remained behind to harvest the crops that had been planted the previous spring."

"Brave souls," remarked Cray, "to stand fast in the face of all that sorcery." After one last look around the square, he mounted Regneniel and bade it fly on. As they rose into the air, Cray could see the fields in which those crops must have stood, their boundaries obliterated now, encroached upon by thousands of strange plants. Only the small size of the trees that grew in certain broad areas betrayed the fact that not very many years ago they had been cleared and planted with food for human beings. The demon bird flew westward, and below, the in-termittent forest gave way to grassland cut regularly by sluggish, tree-lined rivers. Each river was a differ-ent color, and now Cray could no longer attribute those colors to clay deposits, for he knew of no clays that were aquamarine, citrine yellow, garnet red.

Rather, he could see, when he commanded Regneniel to swoop low, that the beds of these rivers were thick with coarse gemstone sand that sparkled through the clarity of the water. Garnet, aquamarine, citrine, and a dozen other gemstones were here for the choosing, one kind to a river, probably washed downstream from deposits in distant mountains. He knew of one river near Spinweb that bore occasional jewels in its gravels, but never any where the jewelswere the gravels.

There were occasional animals on the grasslands, most of them too small to see clearly from the air, brown-furred and fast-moving, catching Cray's eyeonly in the instant that they streaked for cover.

Farther on, though, he began to see small groups of what, from a distance, appeared to be sheep.

Certainly they were domesticated animals, for each group of fifty or sixty was accompanied by a human being with a heavy wooden staff. The creatures had fat bodies covered with thick gray wool, and they grazed slowly, heads down. But as Cray came closer, he saw that they were not sheep, could never be sheep, for their legs were long and slender, and their heads were at the ends of long, curving, heavily furred necks.

Cray could not help wondering if that was the wool Aliza's carpets were made from, and how it compared to the wool that his mother used for her tapestries. One could not really judge its quality from such a distance, but still ... he liked the look of it, thick and falling in great loose folds from the animals.

The grass looked rich enough to support a high level of quality. And Aliza's carpets were very fine, though of monoto-nous color.

Not far ahead, he could see the walls and rooftops of another town and, about it, the cultivated fields that marked it as inhabited.

"What a shame you haven't a horse's form," he said to Regneniel, "for then I would ride you into yonder town and offer a bit of silver for some of the wool we've just seen. They must have it for sale so near the source." Absently, he patted the demon bird's head, as if it had been a true animal steed. "Have you any suggestions as to how I might enter that town as an ordinary mortal rather than a sorcerer?"

"I can fly you into the center of it, if you wish."

"Nothing of the kind! Idon't wish to frighten the townsfolk. I merely wish to buy a little wool."

"They will give a sorcerer all the wool he might require."

"I'm willing to pay," said Cray. He felt of the pouch at his belt, reassuring himself that there were indeed a few coins inside. "I prefer to pay. And an ordinary mortal can learn considerably more about a town than a sorcerer can. It's hard to talk to people when they are cringing before you. And the point of this journey is for me to learn, after all."

"As you wish," said the demon. "There is a large grove of trees not far from the town. I could set you in it, and you could walk from there as an ordinary mortal traveler."

"Is this a deserted grove?"

"At this moment it is." "Very well, take me there."

The town stood on the near bank of a river with the deep purple color of finest amethyst. Close by were only a few isolated trees, but farther downstream, where the river widened, they grew more thickly, es-pecially on the far bank, until at last they formed a sizable grove. As the demon bird wheeled toward this grove, Cray gauged its distance from the town. De-mons' notions of distance in the human realm could be misleading, for they flew so much more easily than a human being could walk, but in this case the grove really was not far from the town. They dipped among the trees, and leafy branches raked Regneniel's wings and Cray's arms as they glided to a feather-soft landing Cray dismounted and, surveying the nearest trees, selected one whose pennon-shaped leaves seemed tough enough for his purpose. With a word and a gesture he directed the largest of these leaves to pluck themselves from their branches and fall at his feet, there to shred themselves into narrow strips and weave into a coarse fabric. When the fabric was finished, it shaped itself into a knapsack, complete with cords for tying around a waist and across a chest. Cray packed the knapsack with other leaves to make it seem like a traveler's burden, and then he strapped it on.

"You will wait here until I return," he told the demon.

"My lady Aliza told me to look after you," said the demon. "How can I do that if I cannot follow you?"

Cray shook his head. "You can't come along. You're too obviously something sorcerous."

The bird cocked its head to one side and regarded him with a pale eye. "A mouse is small enough to fit inside that pack."

"Very well," said Cray. "But you must remain si-lent and still unless I call for you."

The bird hesitated. "I must use my own judgment on that, Cray Ormoru. My lady's commands must supersede yours."

"I understand that. Still,you must understand that I have traveled much among ordinary mortals, without any demon help, and I know how to deal with them. I will know better than you if I need your assistance.

You will not be doing me any favor if you reveal yourself without my permission."

"You might not be in any position to give permis-sion," said the demon. "You might be bound and gagged. You might be wounded, or even killed, before you realized what was happening."

Cray crossed his arms over his chest, gripping the cords of the knapsack. "You have a very low opinion of mortals, it seems." At his nod, a sapling a few paces away shed its branches and bark with a violent shake and, snapping its trunk off cleanly a few hand spans above the ground, became a stout staff that fell into Cray's outstretched hand. "But I have my dagger and now this weapon, as you can see, and I assure you that I know how to use them. I doubt, though, that as a peaceful traveler I'll be in any real danger. I saw no signs of war about the town, no sentries on the walls, no men-at-arms along the road that leads to it. Is there perhaps something else, some other danger here that you know about and I don't?"

"It is an ordinary town, like many another," said the demon. "I know of no danger in it save the mortals themselves. Mortals are very unpredictable creatures."

Cray could not help smiling. "That I know already. Very well, be a mouse, Regneniel, but try hard to stay inside my pack unless I call for you or you know that I am not able to do so." When the demon had shrunk sufficiently, Cray stooped to let it scamper up his arm and dive into his knapsack. Then he headed for the river.

The flow was shallow here, broken by many rocks, and Cray could cross by hopping from one to next, scarcely wetting his feet. Through the clear, slow-moving water, he could see the thick layer of amethyst sand on the bottom, most of it as fine as any sand he had ever seen, but with a scattering of coarser gravel, and some stones even bigger. And one of the rocks he stepped on was an amethyst boulder, or at least half amethyst wedded to a grayer granite, the boulder worn velvet-smooth and cloudy by water.

Before he finished his crossing, Cray stooped to pick an egg-sized purple stone from the riverbed; it was rounded but with a recently broken end, the sharp edges and one plane not yet gentled by wear. Pulling a leaf from his pack, he wrapped the stone well and slipped it into the pouch at his belt.

On the other side of the river, fields of half-grown grain pressed close to the water, leaving only a narrow path of hard-packed yellow earth on the bank. Farther on, the land began to rise and the riverbed to narrow and deepen till, at the town wall the water was more than two man heights below the bank, and fast-flowing.