work under the party shift slightly, as if in a
loom. Honath gave with it easily, automatically, but one of the smaller
vines toward which he had moved one furless hand hissed at him and went
pouring away into the darkness beneath--a chlorophyll-green snake, come
up out of the dripping aerial pathways in which it hunted in ancestral
gloom, to greet the suns and dry its scales in the quiet morning.
Farther below, an astonished monkey, routed out of its bed by the
disgusted serpent, sprang into another tree, reeling off ten mortal
insults, one after the other, while still in mid-leap. The snake, of
course, paid no attention, since it did not speak the language of men;
but the party on the edge of the glade of fan-palms snickered
appreciatively.

"Bad language they favor below," another of the guards said. "A fit
place for you and your blasphemers, pursemaker. Come now."

The tether at Honath's neck twitched, and then his captors were soaring
in zig-zag bounds down into the hollow toward the Judgment Seat. He
followed, since he had no choice, the tether threatening constantly to
foul his arms, legs or tail, and--worse, far worse--making his every
mortifying movement ungraceful. Above, the Parrot's starry plumes
flickered and faded into the general blue.

Toward the center of the saucer above the grove, the stitched
leaf-and-leather houses clustered thickly, bound to the vines
themselves, or hanging from an occasional branch too high or too slender
to bear the vines. Many of these purses Honath knew well, not only as
visitor but as artisan. The finest of them, the inverted flowers which
opened automatically as the morning dew bathed them, yet which could be
closed tightly and safely around their occupants at dusk by a single
draw-string, were his own design as well as his own handiwork. They had
been widely admired and imitated.

The reputation that they had given him, too, had helped to bring him to
the end of the snap-spine tether. They had given weight to his words
among others--weight enough to make him, at last, the arch-doubter, the
man who leads the young into blasphemy, the man who questions the Book
of Laws.

And they had probably helped to win him his passage on the Elevator to
Hell.

The purses were already opening as the party swung among them. Here and
there, sleepy faces blinked out from amid the exfoliating sections,
criss-crossed by relaxing lengths of dew-soaked rawhide. Some of the
awakening househ