Rather it came as an unseen menace to
the fire, and all that fire signifies to human kind--security,
comradeship, a weapon against the age-old forces of the dangerous night.
Was that threat, too, only in their minds? Or had Lumbrilo some power to
so shape his hatred?
The unseen was cold; it sapped a man's strength, bit at his brain,
weighted his hands and feet, weakened him. It strove to soften him into
clay another could remold. Nothingness, darkness, all that was opposed
to life and warmth and reality, arose in the night, gathered together
against them.
Yet still Tau fronted that invisible wave, his head high. And between
his sturdily planted feet the knife gleamed bright with a radiance of
its own.
"Ahhh--" Tau's voice curled out, to pierce that creeping menace. Then he
was singing again, the cadence of his unknown words rising a little
above the pattern wrought by the drum.
Dane forced his heavy hands to continue the beat, his wrists to rise and
fall in defiance of that which crept to eat their strength and make them
less then men.
"Lumbrilo! I, Tau, of another star, another sky, another world, bid you
come forth and range your power against mine!" Now there was a sharper
note in that demand, the snap of an order.
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