“I have never seen it,” continued Kandive. “Porrina the Ninth lists it as the last of the Olek’hnit cities, situated on an island in the North Melantine.” He opened the box. “This tale I found in an ancient bundle of scrolls — the testament of a poet who fled Ampridatvir after the death of Rogol Domedonfors, their last great leader, a magician of great force, mentioned forty-three times in the Cyclopedia …”

Kandive brought forth a crackling scroll, and, whipping it open, read:

Ampridatvir now is lost. My people have forsaken the doctrine of strength and discipline and concern themselves only with superstition and theology. Unending is the bicker: Is Pansiu the excellent principle and Cazdal depraved, or is Cazdal the virtuous god, and Pansiu the essential evil?

These questions are debated with fire and steel, and the memory sickens me; now I leave Ampridatvir to the decline which must surely come, and remove to the kind valley of Mel-Palusas, where I will end this firefly life of mine.

I have known the Ampridatvir of old; I have seen the towers glowing with marvellous light, thrusting beams through the night to challenge the sun itself. Then Ampridatvir was beautiful — ah! My heart pains when I think of the olden city. Semir vines cascaded from a thousand hanging gardens, water ran blue as vaul-stone in the three canals. Metal cars rolled the streets, metal hulls swarmed the air as thick as bees around a hive — for marvel of marvels, we had devised wefts of spitting fire to spurn the weighty power of Earth … But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.

To the furthest reach of my memory, Rogol Domedonfors ruled the city. He knew lore of all ages, secrets of fire and light, gravity and counter-gravity, the knowledge of superphysic numeration, metathasm, corolopsis. In spite of his profundity, he was impractical in his rule, and blind to the softening of Ampridatvirian spirit. Such weakness and lethargy as he saw he ascribed to a lack of education, and in his last years he evolved a tremendous machine to release men from all labor, and thus permit full leisure for meditation and ascetic discipline.

While Rogol Domedonfors completed his great work, the city dissolved into turbulence — the result of a freak religious hysteria.

The rival sects of Pansiu and Cazdal had long existed, but few other than the priests heeded the dispute. Suddenly the cults became fashionable; the population flocked to worship one or the other of the deities. The priests, long-jealous rivals, were delighted with their new power, and exhorted the converts to a crusading zeal. Friction arose, emotion waxed, there was rioting and violence. And on one evil day a stone struck Rogol Domedonfors, toppled him from a balcony.

Crippled and wasting but refusing to die, Rogol Domedonfors completed his underground mechanism, installed vestibules throughout the city, and then took to his death-bed. He issued one directive to his new machine, and when Ampridatvir awoke the next morning, the people found their city without power or light, the food factories quiet, the canals diverted.

In terror they rushed to Rogol Domedonfors, who said: “I have long been blind to your decadence and eccentricities; now I despise you; you have been the death of me.”

“But the city dies! The race perishes!” they cried.

“You must save yourselves.” Rogol Domedonfors told them. “You have ignored the ancient wisdom, you have been too indolent to learn, you have sought easy complacence from religion, rather than facing manfully to the world. I have resolved to impose a bitter experience upon you, which I hope will be salutary.”

He called the rival priests of Pansiu and Cazdal, and handed to each a tablet of transparent metal.

“These tablets singly are useless; laid together a message may be read. He who reads the message will have the key to the ancient knowledge, and will wield the power I had planned for my own use. Now go, and I will die.”

The priests, glaring at each other, departed, called their followers, and so began a great war.

The body of Rogol Domedonfors was never found, and some say his skeleton still lies in the passages below the city. The tablets are housed in the rival temples. By night there is murder, by day there is starvation in the streets. Many have fled to the mainland, and now I follow, leaving Ampridatvir, the last home of the race. I will build a wooden hut on the slope of Mount Liu and live out my days in the valley of Mel-Palusas.

Kandive twisted the scroll and replaced it in the box. “Your task,” he told Ulan Dhor, “is to journey to Ampridatvir and recover the magic of Rogol Domedonfors.”

Ulan Dhor said thoughtfully, “It was a long time ago … Thousands of years …”

“Correct,” said Kandive. “However, none of the histories or indices make further mention of Rogol Domedonfors, and therefore I believe that the wisdom of Rogol Domedonfors still remains to be found in ancient Ampridatvir.”

Three weeks Ulan Dhor sailed the nerveless ocean. The sun rose bright as blood from the horizon and belled across the sky, and the water was calm, save for the ruffle of the breeze and the twin widening marks of Ulan Dhor’s wake.

Then came the setting, the last sad glance across the world; then purple twilight and the night. The old stars spanned the sky and the wake behind Ulan Dhor shone ghastly white. Then did he watch for heavings of the surface, for he felt greatly alone on the dark face of the ocean.

Three weeks Ulan Dhor sailed the Melantine Gulf, to the north and west, and one morning he saw to the right the dark shadow of coastland and to the left the loom of an island, almost lost in the haze.

Close off his bow floated an ungainly barge, moving sluggishly under a square sail of plaited reeds.

Ulan Dhor laid a course so as to draw alongside, and saw on the barge two men in coarse green smocks trolling for fish. They had oat-yellow hair and blue eyes, and they wore expressions of stupefaction.

Ulan Dhor dropped his sail and laid hold of the barge. The fishermen neither moved nor spoke.

Ulan Dhor said, “You seem unfamiliar with the sight of man.”

The older man broke into a nervous chant which Ulan Dhor understood to be an invocation against demons and frits.

Ulan Dhor laughed. “Why do you inveigh against me? I am a man like yourself.”

The younger man said in a broad dialect: “We reason you to be a demon. First, there are none of our race with night-black hair and eyes. Second, the Word of Pansiu denies the existence of all other men. Therefore you can be no man, and must be a demon.”

The older man said under his hand, “Hold your tongue; speak no word. He will curse the tones of your voice …”

“You are wrong, I assure you,” replied Ulan Dhor politely. “Have either of you ever seen a demon?”

“None but the Gauns.”

“Do I resemble the Gauns?”

“Not at all,” admitted the older man. His companion indicated Ulan Dhor’s dull scarlet coat and green trousers. “He is evidently a Raider; note the color of his garb.”

Ulan Dhor said, “No, I am neither Raider nor demon. I am merely a man …”

“No men exist except the Greens — so says Pansiu.”

Ulan Dhor threw back his head and laughed. “Earth is but wilderness and ruins, true enough, but many men yet walk abroad … Tell me, is the city Ampridatvir to be found on that island ahead?”

The younger man nodded.

“And you live there?”

Again the young man assented.

Ulan Dhor said uncomfortably, “I understood that Ampridatvir was a deserted ruin — forlorn, desolate.”

The young man asked with a shrewd expression, “And what do you seek at Ampridatvir?”

Ulan Dhor thought, I will mention the tablets and observe their reaction. It is well to learn if these tablets are known, and if so, how they are regarded. He said, “I have sailed three weeks to find Ampridatvir and investigate some legendary tablets …”

“Ah,” said the older man. “The tablets! He is a Raider, then. I see it clearly. Note his green trousers. A Raider for the Greens …”

Ulan Dhor, expecting hostility as a result of this identification, was surprised to find a more pleasant expression on the faces of the men, as if now they had resolved a troublesome paradox. Very well, he thought, if that is how they will have it, let it be.

The younger man wished total clarity. “Is that your claim then, dark man? Do you wear red as a Raider for the Greens?”

Ulan Dhor said cautiously, “My plans are not settled.”

“But you wear red! That is the color the Raiders wear!”

Here is a peculiarly disrupted way of thinking, reflected Ulan Dhor. It is almost as if a rock blocked the stream of their thought and diverted the current in a splash and a spray. He said, “Where I come from, a man wears such colors as he chooses.”