Outside stood Doriza. Her blue eyes met mine, and her lips moved to frame a word. Then, suddenly, she was on her knee, catching my hand and kissing it.
"I serve Yandro," she vowed tremulously. "Now and forever—and happy that I was fated to live when he returned for the rescue of all Dondromogon."
"Please get up," I bade her, trying not to sound as embarrassed as I felt. "Come with me. There is still much that I do not understand."
"I am Yandro's orderly and helper," she said. Rising, she ranged herself at my left hand. "Will Yandro come this way? He will be awaited in the audience hall."
It seemed to me then that the corridors were vast and mixed as a labyrinth, but Doriza guided me without the slightest hesitation past one tangled crossway after another. My questions she answered with a mixture of awe and brightness.
"It is necessary that we live like this," she explained. "The hot air of Dondromogon's sunlit face is ever rising, and the cold air from the dark side comes rushing under to fill the vacuum. Naturally, our strip of twilight country is never free of winds too high and fierce to fight. No crops can grow outside, no domestic animals flourish. We must pen ourselves away from the sky and soil, with stout walls and heavy sunken parapets. Our deep mines afford every element for necessities of life."
I looked at my garments, and hers. There were various kinds of fabric, which I now saw plainly to be synthetic. "The other side, where those you call the Newcomers dwell and fight," I reminded. "Is it also windswept? Why can two people not join forces and face toil and nature together? They should fight, not each other, but the elements."
Doriza had no answer that time, but Sporr spoke up behind us: "Great Yandro is wise as well as powerful. But the Newcomers do not want to help, not even to conquer. They want to obliterate us. There is nothing to do—not for lifetimes—but to fight them back at the two poles."
We came to a main corridor. It had a line of armed guards, but no pedestrians or vehicles, though I thought I caught a murmur of far-off traffic. Doriza paused before a great portal, closed by a curtainlike sheet of dull metal. She spoke into a mouthpiece: