"Who are you, daughter?" she begged. "Whence come you?"
"I am Vivyun," labored the refugee, "of the Durm Clan. Short days ago came strange lightings in the heavens; mad thunders burst in the forests about our village—"
Jain interrupted, startled, "Mother! The omens we heard night before last in the forest to our west!" and Meg looked swiftly at Daiv. She cried,
"The forest through which we fled, Daiv! The wood of heavy twigs!"
Daiv silenced her with a thoughtful nod. Vivyun's halting speech continued.
"—then came the onslaught. Armored demons, the color of mustard seed, burst upon us. Our Warriors went to meet them but the dwarfs loosed lights from sticks and where the soldiers had stood, now were but inch-long, stony parodies of Women. One of the lights played for an instant upon my leg—"
Meg looked and shuddered. The dying Warrior's leg was firm and round from hip to thigh; ten inches above the knee it ended abruptly in a scoriated stump from which depended an ugly, wartlike excrescence which—Meg saw with sickening horror—was the perfectly formed simulacrum of a human limb.
Daiv was muttering savagely, "Speak on, Warrior!"
"They come," persisted Vivyun, "to capture Women. Like the Wild Ones, they die out for lack of Mates. Out of the far southland they come, from a land called Mayco. They bear other strange weapons. A stick that shoots lights of insanity ... a wall they build of invisible bricks...."
"More!" pleaded Daiv and the Mother in one breath as Vivyun faltered. "More!"