"Yandro, folk of the Council! He deigns to give you audience."

"Yandro!"

They all spoke the name in chorus, and bowed toward me.

Silence then, a silence which evidently I must break. I broke it: "Friends, I am among you with no more memory or knowledge than an infant. I hear wonderful things, of which I seem to be the center. Are they true?"

"The tenth part of the wonders which concern mighty Yandro have not been told," intoned Sporr, ducking his bearded head in a bow, but fixing me with his wise old eyes.

One of the group, called Council by Doriza, now moved a pace forward. He was the greedy-faced man, short but plump, and very conscious of the dignified folds of his purple robe. One carefully-tended hand brushed back his ginger-brown hair, then toyed with a little moustache.

"I am Gederr, senior of this Council," he purred. "If Yandro permits, I will speak simply. Our hopes have been raised by Yandro's return—the return presaged of old by those who could see the future, and more recently by the death in battle of the Newcomer champion, called Barak."

"Barak!" I repeated. "I—I—" And I paused. When I had to learn my own name, how could it be that I sensed memory of another's name?

"Barak was a brute—mighty, but a brute." Thus Gederr continued. "Weapons in his hands were the instruments of fate. His hands alone caused fear and ruin. But it pleased our fortune-bringing stars to encompass his destruction." He grinned, and licked his full lips. "Now, even as they are without their battle-leader, so we have ours."

"You honor me," I told him. "Yet I still know little. It seems that I am expected to aid and lead and save the people of this world called Dondromogon. But I must know them before I can help."

Gederr turned his eyes upon the woman with the red hair, and gestured to her "Tell him, Elonie." Then he faced me. "Have we Yandro's permission to sit?"

"By all means," I granted, a little impatiently, and sat down myself. The others followed suit—the Council on their range of chairs, Doriza on a bench near me, Sporr somewhere behind. The woman called Elonie remained upon her sandalled feet, great eyes the color of deep green water fixed upon me.

Elonie was taller than any of her fellow Council 

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