Hand, and arm. For he used his good hand now to pull his sleeve back, well above his elbow. Flesh had retreated and aura had advanced well above the place where the sword of Elshield had cut into him.

Querc sighed. “It is old magic, not understood or practiced much since the First Age. Pick knew it. We of this age are confined for the most part to fixed forms, bounded by our own skins. In the Before Times, forms were more fluid and many had auras that reached beyond their forms.”

“I saw it among the high Autochthons of Secondel,” said Prim.

“And Pick could do it,” said Lyne. “We saw his aura reach out from his head beneath the Overstrike.”

“I, unfortunately, cannot,” said Querc. “Which is where Mard might come into the picture. But first, there is another thing. In Pick’s sample case were bits of chaos and so on that he had collected from various locations such as the Chasm we just crossed.”

“I have no other purpose here,” Lyne offered.

“Nor I,” said Fern. “We can go to the brink of the Chasm if Mab leads the way.”

“I’ll lead the way,” said Corvus. He was swinging his beak side to side, watching with his beady black eyes as Mab flew back and forth through the Cube. “Mab is more useful here.”

With a short, slow movement of his blinding sword, Burr sliced a corner from the top of the Cube, since Mab had flown through it and reported nothing there. He used the tip of the sword to hollow out the surface, making a nut-sized depression. He repeated the procedure with another corner. The two pieces, clapped together, now made a container that crudely approximated one of the carven adamant drawers from Pick’s old sample case. Lyne and Fern borrowed as many warm clothes as the others could spare and set out with Corvus, carrying this makeshift sample holder with them. On one side of the Cube, Burr began to carve off more bits where Mab told him it was safe to do so.

On the opposite side, where the light of the angel sword would not be such an annoyance, Querc talked at length to Mard, recounting what she had learned during her years with Pick. Mard began to experiment with reaching into the Cube with the hand that was no longer material. That inability to come to grips with solid objects had seemed an important deficiency when he was trying to button his cloak or break his fall. But here and now it was enabling him to perform what for lack of a better term one would have to call magic. “Can you feel anything?” Querc was asking him. “Are there sensations in that hand?” Mard insisted it was altogether numb, as if it weren’t there at all. “But you can open and close it, can you not?” Querc asked.