His thoughts blackened into sleep.Sumner woke hours later, a tuneful energy spinning around him. The voor was diminished, a mere tic of feeling far back in his mind. A hollow moon rose above the jagged horizon while he continued to sit, his mind windowed to the mountains.After all sensation of the voor had vanished, Sumner unfolded from his crouch and lumbered out of the cave. With his mind clear as the thin air around him, he hiked along the margin of a glacial scree littered with sharp, bony rocks. He walked to strengthen his selfscan and to forget the pain of his grief. He marched until his knees buckled. Then he sat on his heels beneath a fan of rock and stared down through a pygmy forest of pine. Several ice pools glossed with afternoon light were visible on the southern horizon. Above them, a flock of birds was undulating west, bucking strong winds.Sumner closed his eyes and sensed the voor rising through his fatigue: Sumner, I'm real. You 're not ignorant. Don't ignore me. I can teach you the forgotten language of the world. The secret beast whispers in the rock. The old waters gather the wrath from the bones of extinct animals, and forests are born. I can teach you the fast and still dreams of sunken things—"No!" The word muscled through him with conviction. He was not a voor. He did not want to think these inhuman thoughts.He stood up and continued his hike. The voor was always with him, but only fatigue brought it close. He began to wonder if perhaps his climb had gone too far, but at that moment he caught sight of the ice-glens.They were small misty glades of mossy rocks where hot water channels ran close to the surface. The ice and snow around the glades were heat-carved and wind-shaped into pale blue pavilions. A line of ice-glens moved up the snow-fields toward the summit, and Sumner climbed through them as though he were moving from dream to dream.At the top the sky was violet and the air slim and cold as a frozen song. He sat for a long time staring into the tapestries of ice around him, feeling close to the invisible power that controlled his breathing and his heartbeat.A cold shadow made him look up, and he saw a clot of dark clouds budging over the peaks. The gray scud expanded with frightening speed, and a sinister wind whined down from the icefields. The hailstones came first, sharp marbles, cracking against the stones and snapping the arabesques of ice.Sumner moved swiftly down through the ice-glades, but he was still on the high snowfields when the winds gusted to a howl. He ducked under a narrow overhang and crouched in its far corner, away from the slashing wind. The hail thick-ened to the smoky sheets of a blizzard, and Sumner sat with his limbs pulled close, mesmerized by the mysteries of snow and wind.The snow blew in for hours, transforming the upper slopes into a deceptive world of snow-curves and expanding white. Sumner cursed himself for getting trapped. As the burning cold began to numb him, he settled into contempla-tive reproach: He should have known a storm was coming. He had seen birds flying against the bluff of the wind, and he had seen snows on the sunside of the valleys. But the hot springs on the mountain had lured him beyond his common sense. Now there was nothing to do but wait.The cold narrowed in. By night there was no feeling or sight, only the wind droning—meaningless—constant. . . .He slept, and woke to find his cloak frozen. The world was a fog of wind-blurred snow. The cold throbbed, slow as a burn, and he had to sink deep into his omphalos-power to stay alive.He noted the places that burned: several fingers and one foot. He forced the psynergy into the fringes of his body and held it there for as long as he could. Eventually his effort broke, and he shivered into a profound sleep.When he came to, the skyfires were rippled red and yellow against the void-black of space. Snow sloped on all sides of him and blanketed most of his body. The air was a pool of silence.Sumner tried to move, but it was a long, treacherous moment before his body stirred. No feeling came up from his feet. He pulled his legs under himself and burst thongs of agony to straighten them. Forcing his will into his back, he rose, an aching skeleton, and stagger-stooped into the night.The skyfires illuminated the snowfields and, far off, the dark nerveshapes of trees. Sumner tottered several paces and then dropped chest-deep into starlit snow. He couldn't feel his legs or his hands now, and he knew he was dying.He stilled his mind and closed his eyes. No fear or anger touched him—only lassitude. He was ready todie.When Sumner's eyes opened, it was Corby that stared out. A green fire was dazzling before him, and he recognized it as a deva—one of the orts shaped out of plasma by the CIRCLE mantics and set loose in the electric ocean of the ionosphere. To human eyes it appeared as a filament of green electricity sizzling silently over the snowfield, two meters away. It had responded to Corby's call almost instantly, and he rewarded it. The voor remembered Unchala, and the deva gushed with warm, secret feelings: fire-throbs, mother-makings, bangles of hilarity. . . .He asked the deva to lead him down to the warm slopes. The rope of green light wavered over the snow, and Corby followed slowly. The deva's bounteous psynergy gave him complete physical control over Sumner's body, but he was in no rush to reach the bottom of the mountain. He enjoyed the beauty of the star-lustered snowfields and the delirious aban-donment of having a body that fit his will.Strange seeing the stars again through howlie eyes—the wandering light lens-squeezed to glassy flecks in the black pit cold. Corby preferred the deep-sky perceptions of plants or birds or the first voors—seeing the echoes of gravity-clutched light, feeling the sway of the Iz-wind as it listed on its journey out from the galactic core.The deva understood. Like Corby it was a being of energy, and its perceptions were much wider than anything a human could imagine. The deva's biology was a sheer molec-ular net of magnetite high in the ion sea of the atmosphere. If it were visible, one would have seen a vast hydrozoan—a medusa fish of the high sky, living on sunlight and the plan-et's magnetic flux. This being, which had saved Sumner's life years before in Rigalu Flats, was myth-bound to Corby's struggle against the Delph. Devas too were capable of godmind, and all but this one had been hunted down by the Delph's minions.Corby stared up at the skyfires, the bright squalls where the Iz-wind blustered against the ionosphere. That was the real soul of this world, the plasma sea that the howlies called their sky. Its immense electrical tides and intricate currents shaped the weather that shaped the continents. A vacancy expanded inside Corby. How far he had come on that wind— wandering the starbalance across darkness and worlds of sound-ing light, darkness and a world of iridescent floating, darkness and darkness, and then this world of me-ness. He clenched his fists and felt the immediacy of bloodwarmth. Odd world— everything so close and warm and locked into itself. Odd.An urge of homesickness tightened in him—a deep long-ing to be shapeshifting in the great depth and remoteness of Iz with the harmony of the brood, to be the void and the revelation of everything, instead of one small mind, clinging for identity. But he had to cling. The brood was being annihi-lated here on this small world. Without godminds, the brood psynergy would dissipate and the migration back to Unchala would never be fulfilled. He had to limit his being so that he could strengthen the brood—but he would not forget how it had been in the starbalance—a dreamflash opening, full of music, visions, tumblings, and no-I.