The door swung shut behind them.
The room in which they stood was cramped and box-like, with walls and floor and ceiling of dully gleaming metal. As the portal closed, a feeling of motion pulled at Haral's vitals. It dawned on him that they had entered some sort of carrier that even now was hurtling them upward with the speed of lightning.
Then the feeling left him. The door opened once more, and they stepped out into the hot yellow light of an Ulnese day.
Shielding his eyes against the sudden glare, Haral looked about.
Above them rose a gigantic crystal bubble, a dozen times as large as the one beneath which Xaymar had lain sleeping. Set high amid craggy grey and green and purple peaks, it thrust up like a beacon, a watch-tower, into the yellow sky. Concentric circular tracks on which were mounted banks of strange, snub-nosed projectors, each set at a different angle, ran round the globe above his head. Control boards, a mass of indicator dials and switches, were set at intervals along the metal-walled, chest-high base.
Xaymar touched his arm. "Your trappings, blue man...."
He turned to her gesture. There, stacked in a niche beside the shaft up which they'd come, lay his light-lance, his armor, the clothes he'd worn.
"Your steed, too...." The woman pointed through the crystal, down the slope.
Haral stared. His great blue Mercurian hwalon dragon moved restlessly to and fro in a narrow natural yard bounded on three sides by steep rock walls less than half an Earth mile from them. Two coleoptera stood guard along the open side.
Narrow-eyed, Haral turned back to the woman. "But why? What made you bring my gear here, and my hwalon?"