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Maharet was looking at him in the strangest way, as if he were a mystery to her. She looked at the others. Finally she spoke:

“You witnessed our separation,” she said quietly. “All of you. You saw it in the dreams. You saw the mob surround me and my sister; you saw them force us apart; in stone coffins they placed us, Mekare unable to cry out to me because they had cut out her tongue, and I unable to see her for the last time because they had taken my eyes.

“But I saw through the minds of those who hurt us. I knew it was to the seashores that we were being taken. Mekare to the west; and I to the east.

“Ten nights I drifted on the raft of pitch and logs, entombed alive in the stone coffin. And finally when the raft sank and the water lifted the stone lid, I was free. Blind, ravenous, I swam ashore and stole from the first poor mortal I encountered the eyes to see and the blood to live.

“But Mekare? Into the great western ocean she had been cast—the waters that ran to the end of the world.

“Yet from that first night on I searched for her; I searched through Europe, through Asia, through the southern jungles and the frozen lands of the north. Century after century I searched, finally crossing the western ocean when mortals did to take my quest to the New World as well.

“I never found my sister. I never found a mortal or immortal who had set eyes upon her or heard her name. Then in this century, in the years after the second great war, in the high mountain jungles of Peru, the indisputable evidence of my sister’s presence was discovered by a lone archaeologist on the walls of a shallow cave—pictures my sister had created—of stick figures and crude pigment which told the tale of our lives together, the sufferings you all know.

“But six thousand years ago these drawings had been carved into the stone. And six thousand years ago my sister had been taken from me. No other evidence of her existence was ever found.

“Yet I have never abandoned the hope of finding my sister. I have always known, as only a twin might, that she walks this earth still, that I am not here alone.

“And now, within these last ten nights, I have, for the first time, proof that my sister is still with me. It has come to me through the dreams.

“These are Mekare’s thoughts; Mekare’s images; Mekare’s rancor and pain.”

Silence. All eyes were fixed on her. Marius was quietly stunned. He feared to be the one to speak again, but this was worse than he had imagined and the implications were now entirely clear.

The origin of these dreams was almost certainly not a conscious survivor of the millennia; rather the visions had—very possibly—come from one who had no more mind now than an animal in whom memory is a spur to action which the animal does not question or understand. It would explain their clarity; it would explain their repetition.

And the flashes he had seen of something moving through the jungles, this was Mekare herself.

“Yes,” Maharet said immediately. “ ‘In the jungles. Walking,’ ” she whispered. “The words of the dying archaeologist, scribbled on a piece of paper and left for me to find when I came. ‘In the jungles. Walking.’ But where?”

It was Louis who broke the silence.

“Then the dreams may not be a deliberate message,” he said, his words marked by a slight French accent. “They may simply be the outpouring of a tortured soul.”

“No. They are a message,” Khayman said. “They are a warning. They are meant for all of us, and for the Mother as well.”

“But how can you say this?” Gabrielle asked him. “We don’t know what her mind is now, or that she even knows that we are here.”

“You don’t know the whole story,” Khayman said. “I know it. Maharet will tell it.” He looked to Maharet.

“I saw her,” Jesse said unobtrusively, her voice tentative as she looked at Maharet. “She’s crossed a great river; she’s coming. I saw her! No, that’s not right. I saw as if I were she.”

“Yes,” Marius answered. “Through her eyes!”

“I saw her red hair when I looked down,” Jesse said. “I saw the