“What I have been given I bear with me. Put on me no shape in which I cannot handle the gift of Volt.”

“I would call you lack-witted,” she flared back, “if I did not know the worth of that biter of yours. But it is not of human make and so may change shape also in illusion. We can only try. Now let us make ready, quickly!”

She pulled a strip of carpet from the floor as Simon and Koris shoved the chair and stool, bore the other things to the other end of the room. Stooping she traced lines with the jewel of power and those lines glowed faintly in the form of a five pointed star. A little defiantly Koris dropped his ax in the center of that.

The witch spoke to Simon. “Shapes are not changed in truth, but an illusion is created to bemuse those who would track us down. Let me draw upon your power to swell my own. Now,” she glanced around and brought the small clay brazier to sit by the ax, puffing its coals into life, “we can do what is to be done. Make yourselves ready.”

Koris caught Simon by the arm. “Strip — to the skin — the power does not work otherwise!” He was shedding his own jerkin. And Simon obeyed orders, both of them aiding Vortgin.

Smoke curled up from the brazier, filling the room with a reddish mist in which Koris’ squat form, the fugitive’s muscular body were half hidden. “Take your stand upon the star points — one to each point,” came the witch’s order out of the murk. “But you, Simon — next to me.”

He followed that voice, losing Koris and the other man in the fog. A white arm came out to him, a hand reached for and enfolded his. He could see under his feet the lines of a star point.

Someone was singing — at a far distance. Simon was lost in a cloud where he floated without being. Yet at the same time he was warm — not outwardly, but inwardly. And that warmth floated from his body, down his right arm. Simon thought that if he could watch it he would be able to see that flow — blood-red, warm — being drained in a steady stream. Yet he saw nothing but the greyish mist, he only knew that his body still existed.

The singing grew louder. Once before he had heard such singing — then it had aroused his lusts, and urged him to satisfy appetites he had beaten under by force of will. Now it worked upon him in another way, and he no longer loathed it fiercely.

He had closed his eyes against the endless swirling of the mist, stood attuned to the singing so that each note throbbed within his body to be a part of him, made into flesh and bone from this time forth — yet also did that warm flood trickle out of him.