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unreal.
    “I’ll be back,” the hero whispers. “Later. Watch for me.”
    And he is gone. Night is gone. Through the slit windows, the pale tentacles of morning are insinuating themselves, sucking their way across the temple floor. Sam goes out where dawn marks the eastern sky with a long, violet line which spreads upward in shades of purple and plum, exploding instantly into pink daylight.
    “I saw him,” Sam erupts with joyous laughter. “I really did see him. Theseus! I saw him!”
    He capers like a goat. He dances. He frolics his way to the brotherhouse, occasioning interest, wonder, perhaps a little fear in those who are up very early and see him leaping along the path like a young milk-vlish. At home, he crawls into bed and falls at once into deep sleep while the day-to-day world wakes and surges around him.
    •     •     •
    • In later years Sam remembered wakening after the episode in the temple with the absolute certainty the hero was real. That same day, Sam had started making a sword belt from a pattern found in the Archives. He made it of worked leather with semiprecious gemstones set into it. One could pick up the stones along the little streams anywhere in Hobbs Land. Sam had made a special trip to borrow a polisher at the craftsmen’s market at Central Management. He hadn’t been accustomed to doing that kind of work, and it had taken him some little time, doing it right, doing it over until it was right.
    When he had finished with it, Sam kept the sword belt hanging in the back of his closet, behind his off-time robes. Later on, again at the hero’s suggestion, he had made a helmet decorated with gold medallions, so he could be properly dressed when he found the thing under the stone. He never doubted he would find it or them, or something else like them. Theseus was clear on that point. Sam would not only find the sword, he would find adventure and challenge and heroism of his own. He would find a destiny fitting who he actually was, which was not a farmer upon dull Hobbs Land, dedicated to grains and legumes and increasing the production of hairy-legged milk-vlishes.
    “Patience,” said the hero, again and again.
    Even though years were going by, Theseus was surprisingly little dismayed. “Patience. The time comes,” he told Sam. “Inevitably, it comes. When it is meant to be, it happens, that’s all.”
    Sam had been patient. He had become thirty lifeyears, and thirty-one and thirty-two, and then he had become Topman. Becoming Topman, in a way, helped solve his problem with patience. Being Topman was kingly and heroic and even godlike enough for him to go on with, for a time.
    And in Voorstod, upon Ahabar, his father lived still, as he had always lived. Among the legends.
    •     •     •
    • In Voorstod, in the town of Cloudport (often called simply, Cloud), on the cobbled street that went from the square on up the hill to the citadel of the prophets, stood a tavern sign called the Hanged King. The tavern sign showed the king hanged by his feet and pierced through with daggers, his crown still jammed tight on his head. It was a measure of Voorstod’s hatred for the royal family of Ahabar that the face on the king was that of the first ruler, King Jimmy. Scarcely a season went by that some drinker did not suggest repainting the sign with the face and figure of the current monarch, Queen Wilhulmia. Since that would mean changing the name of the tavern, however, the owner had held out against the suggestion. “Kings and Queens come and go,” he had chuckled. “The Hanged King goes on forever.”
    At a corner table covered with the circled stains of tankards and charred places where men had knocked out their pipes, Phaed Girat, with his usual bull-necked im-perturability, sat talking with a little man he had only just met, one who had been sent down to meet Phaed, so he said, from Sarby. He had a few amusing words to say about Sarby, up there in the far north, where the