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a panic inside me akin to that
felt by someone fearing he may miss the last train home. The train—i.e., my
body—was moving on ahead, and I was running frantically to catch up. I think I
would have attempted to escape, then and there, but I would not leave Saryon.
    I found out later that he felt
the same, but that he would not leave because of me. We laughed over that, but
our laughter was hollow.
    “Shh, hush! Look!” Mosiah
cautioned.
    He did not silence us so that we
would not be heard—for that was not possible, not even for the D’karn-darah. He silenced us that we might hear them. What we heard and what we saw
chilled us.
    Though we could move through
physical barriers, we could not see through them. Trapped inside time’s fold,
we could not move to another part of the house or see what was transpiring in
any other part of the house except Saryon’s bedroom. My hearing is acute,
however, and the nervous tension I was under accentuated it. I heard a slight
clicking sound, which was our front-door lock giving
way. The creak of the door’s hinges (which Saryon had been asking me to oil)
meant that the front door was being stealthily opened. At the same time I heard
the snick of the lock of the back door, heard the door itself scrape across the
mud rug which we had placed at the entrance.
    Whoever had been out there had
entered the house by the front and by the back. But try as I might, I could not
hear them moving at all through the front part of the house. One of them was in
the bedroom before I was fully aware of his coming.
    He was clad all in paper-thin
silver robes that clung to his body and crackled faintly as he moved,
occasionally emitting tiny blue sparks, like the fur of a cat in the darkness.
His face was plastered with the same paper-thin silver, so that only the
outline of features—a nose and mouth—were visible. Silver fabric covered his
hands and feet like a second skin.
    He stood in the bedroom and
Mosiah, with a whispered thought, called our attention to a strange phenomenon.
The machines in the bedroom knew the D’karn-darah was there. The
machines responded to his coming.
    The machines’ response was not
overt or dramatic. I would not have noticed it, except for Mosiah’s mention.
The bedroom’s overhead light, which had, of course, been turned off, flickered
on. A faint hum of music came from the compact-disc player. The reading lamp
gave a feeble gleam.
    The D’karn-darah ignored
all this and went immediately to Saryon’s body, which continued to sleep
soundly. He put out a silver-covered hand and shook the catalyst by the
shoulder.
    “Saryon!” he said loudly.
    Beside me, I could feel Saryon’s
spirit shiver. I was thankful, then, for Mosiah’s arrival and his timely
warning. If my master had been wakened in the night and seen such a horrific
sight bending over him, he might never have recovered from the shock.
    At that moment I heard a female
voice say “Reuven!” loudly. I felt a slight brushing sensation across my
shoulder. Then I knew that the second person, the one who had entered by the
back door, had gone to my room. She was standing over my body.
    The D’karn-darah shook
Saryon again, more forcibly, turning the sleeping body over in the bed. “Saryon!”
the man repeated, and his voice was harsh.
    I trembled, for I was afraid he
would do Saryon some harm. Mosiah again reassured both of us.
    “They will not hurt you,” he
repeated. “They do not dare. They know you may be of use to them.”
    The one who had been in my room
now appeared in Saryon’s bedchamber.
    “Same thing?” she asked.
    “Yes,” answered the D’karn-darah who stood beside my master. “Their souls have fled. They were alerted to
our coming.”
    “ Duuk-tsarith.”
    “Of course. Undoubtedly the one named
Mosiah, that Enforcer who was once the catalyst’s friend.”
    “You were right, then. You said
we would find him here.”
    “He has been here. He is probably
still here, hiding in one