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The Saga of Pliocene Exile, which begins with a flashback to the time of the great fight with Felice at the Rio Genii-and then picks up the main thread of the chronicle immediately after Aiken's victory over Nodonn.

    PROLOGUE ONE
    It had happened, just as Elizabeth had known it would; and there was no metapsychic prolepsis involved in the foretelling, only logic and inevitability, given those protagonists: Aiken Drum, Felice Landry, and Marc Remillard.
    The last reverberations of the great psychocreative blast had dissipated. The four observers still hung high above Spain, out of range, inside the protective bubble spun by the mind of Minanonn the Heretic.
    "Felice is surely dead," he observed.
    "Her thoughts and her image are snuffed out." Creyn was noncommittal.
    "Which proves nothing," muttered Dionket Lord Healer.
    Elizabeth's ranging farsenses, so much more powerful than those of the three Tanu, could provide no positive reassurance at that high altitude. Felice, if she lived, was buried beneath the enormous landslide. "I think it's safe for us to descend," she said. "We must take the risk. There are casualties needing help ... "
    A swift warning passed between Dionket and Minanonn: Maintain your shield at maximum strength Brother!
    The three exotic men and the human woman felt no flow of air as they glided down through smoke-layered twilight. They were isolated from the stench of the burning jungle, the steam rising from the diverted Rio Genii, the dust still rolling up from the rockfall that had pushed the river from its bed and overwhelmed part of Aiken's flotilla.
    "So many dead and wounded at the margin of the landslide," the Heretic mourned. "There lies Artigonn, my late sister's son.
    And Aluteyn Craftsmaster, may Tana grant him peace! He would not abjure the ancient battle-religion, even though his heart rejected it."
    "I see the King." Dionket's farsight showed a vision of Aiken flung up on a gravel bank downstream, his body in its golden suit stiffened, his heart stopped, and mind contracted to a screaming nub.
    "You and Creyn go to him," Elizabeth said. The four touched down upon a great flat rock crusted with burnt vegetation, an island amid foaming dirty water. "You'll be able to keep him alive until I come. There are plenty of uninjured survivors. The majority escaped harm, I think. Organize rescue parties for the wounded. Minanonn and I will join you ... after I find out what happened to Felice." After I search this place where she fell, a meteor self-consummate; and how my mind still shrinks from the memory of her mind's last cry: agony and regret, to be sure-but triumph?
    "The monster is dead, as Minanonn said. And the Goddess be thanked!" Creyn's face was crimson-lit by flames. "Let us go, Lord Healer." Borne by Dionket's psychokinesis, the two redactors vanished into the murk.
    Elizabeth and Minannon stood on the charred ruin of the islet, the protective sphere of psychoenergy now extinguished.
    All around them half-submerged trees thrust from the water, trailing broken lianas in the debris-laden current. A few were still afire. In others, terrified monkeys and other jungle creatures shrieked and hooted piteously.
    Elizabeth's eyes were closed, her mind searching again, exerting itself to the utmost in order to farsense underground. Drifting bits of ash and soot settled onto her hair and jumpsuit.
    Minanonn towered beside her, a bearded blond giant wearing a tunic with a triskelion badge. Under one arm he carried a cubic container that measured perhaps half a metre along the edge. It was made of a dark exotic substance with fragile patterns on its surface, filaments of red and silver that glowed in the deepening night like wisps of interstellar gas. The box held the powerful force-field projector that Brede Shipspouse had called the room without doors.
    Elizabeth searched.
    A body clad in broken glass armour drifted past on the wreck of a pneumatic barge. Somewhere in the rockfall on the right, lost in