"Take. Drink. Join."

Why, it was the wine dream-speakers used, when they made their communion with your mind and spoke the dream that was troubling you! That was it, surely, dream-wine. Though Millilain had been to a dream-speaker only five or six times, and not for years, she recognized the unmistakable flavor of the stuff.

But how could that be? Only dream-speakers were allowed to use it, or even to possess it. It was a powerful drug. It was to be used only under a speaker's supervision. But somehow in this backroom chapel they had vats and vats of it, and the congregation was guzzling it as though it were beer—

"Take. Drink. Join."

She realized she was holding up the passing of the bowl. She turned to the man on her right with a silly grin and an apology, but he was staring rigidly forward and paid no heed to her; so with a shrug she put the bowl to her lips and took a deep reckless gulp, and then another, and handed the bowl onward.

Almost at once she felt the effect. She swayed, blinked, had to struggle to keep her head from falling forward against her knees. It's because I drank it on an empty stomach, she told herself. She crouched down, leaned forward, began to chant along with the congregation, a low wordless meaningless repetitious murmur, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah, just as absurd as what those others had been shouting in the street, but somehow gentler, a tender crooning yearning cry, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah. And as she chanted it seemed to her that she heard a distant music, weird, otherworldly, the sound of many bells far away, ringing in patterns of overlapping changes that were impossible to follow for long, since one strand of melody quickly became lost inside its successor, and that one in the next. Oo wah vah mah, she sang, and back to her came the song of the bells, and then she had a sense of something immense very close by, perhaps even in this very room, something colossal and winged and ancient and enormously intelligent, something whose intellect was as far beyond her comprehension as hers would be beyond a bird's. It was turning and turning and turning in vast unhurried orbits, and each time it turned it unfolded its giant wings and spread them to the ends of the world, and when it folded them again they brushed against the gates of Millilain's mind—just a tickle, just the lightest of touches, a feather-whisk, and yet she felt herself transformed by it, lifted out of herself, made part of some organism of many minds, unimaginable, godlike. Take. Drink. Join. With each touch of those wings she joined more profoundly. Oh wah vah mah. Oo wah vah mah. She was lost. There was no more Millilain. There was only the water-king whose sound was the sound of bells, and the many-minded mind of which the former Millilain had become a part.