How far from home are you? Heirn thought. How alone in this bewildering, alien place with your terrible knowledge and your deep fears?
An image formed in the wake of the questions. This seemingly ordinary and simple man was like a tiny, distant cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, that might grow to fill the sky and envelop and deluge the whole city, carrying all before it. Heirn felt afraid — very afraid.
Another image came, familiar and reassuring in the trembling confusion — that of iron changing its very nature as it was heated and worked. The idea seemed to possess him. Then he was the iron and the change was stirring deep inside him, deeper than could ever have been reached by any conscious decision. It was almost physical in its intensity. Whatever Atlon was, and oddly frail though
