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their monetary value was
unimportant to him.  Each piece seemed to hold something of the spirit of its
maker, something completely singular, not like Sorrow of the Angels.  Rastini's
famous masterpiece often moved him as he sat gazing at it late at night in his
library, but Rastini had produced at least eighty paintings, and every week one
of his dozen protégés loosed upon the world another work of the school of
Rastini.  No, his collection was a menagerie of uniqueness.  And it manifested
his own uniqueness.  Even among his peers, the most powerful of the local
nobility, it was proof that he was a singular man.
    He thought of Conarra, the inventor from Sevdin.  When they
had first met, Libac knew at once that they were of the same ilk.  Conarra, who
first dreamed of rising above the earth on a winter's morning, suspended
beneath sails of hot air, and then did so. 
    He let his hand flow along the dark seamless wood, the last of
many to touch it, perhaps thousands of hands over dozens of generations
polishing it to smoothness.  It looked somewhat like a little house, did it
not?  Convex on its top side, a pointed dome, it was slightly concave on its
five other sides, all the curves flowing together in perfect smoothness with no
hinges, joints, or openings, as if it had grown that way as a seed-case from a
monstrous tree.  It was certainly hollow, though.  One had only to rap on its
surface to know this.  And he could never have hefted it alone had it been
solid.  Yet the wood of the roof was thick enough to support a deep inlay of
ornate gold scrollery.
    He had asked his furniture maker to explain the apparent
hollowness.  The reply had been that it was indeed hollow, would have been made
in two pieces and was simply the work of a master craftsman.  The seam where it
had been glued with dowel joinings was undetectable, but he must rest assured
it was there.
    Libac had then borrowed his cousin Ranni's most powerful
Syrolian glass, the one he used for dissecting insects, and spent an entire
afternoon scrutinizing the artifact.  With the glass he could make out
imperfections in the wood's grain that were invisible to the naked eye:  tiny
nicks, miniature scratches, signs of weathering of course, yet nothing so
ungainly as a continuous seam, not even one perfectly fitted.
    Finding it, of course, had been an unexpected delight.  The
shrine had lain austere with centuries of disuse, the only surviving statuary
being the guardians, each weighing over half a ton.  In some ways the
expedition had been extravagant.  Connara's fee for building and piloting the
new airship had alone exceeded the cost of manning and outfitting the old sloop
for a three-month voyage. And he remembered how the two men working the
propellers had struggled even in the light pre-dawn airs.  They had been lucky
indeed to successfully land on that mountaintop.  Foolish, rather.  And the
descent in the airship had been even more dangerous.  They all could have been
killed.
    His hand slowed in its caress of the artifact and drifted
away.  Touching it felt good.  More than good, it felt revitalizing, gave him
some of its own radiance.  This was his best thing.  In time, he would loan the
other pieces to the Museum of the Royal Library, or even donate one in return
for a favor.  But not this.  With this he would never part.

CHAPTER 3:  The Song of Returning
     
    When he woke, she was standing near the window, veiled by
smoke rising through the sunbeams.  He lay pinned under thick wool blankets on
a mattress of sheepskin over straw, his head heavy, his ankle stiff and feeling
like it was sewn with iron filings.  She saw him and smiled, coming to his side
to gently push him back down as he propped himself up on one elbow.
    "Thank you," he croaked in what he hoped was
intelligible Pallenor.  "Thank you, very much."
    Her eyes widened slightly, and she spoke to him with a
soprano voice in her musical northern tongue.
    "I'm sorry," he