He had the look of a very old man with flowing white hair and beard and a floor-length robe of cream-colored silk embroidered with gold trim. A moment later Mervyn entered, stopped, and looked around. The priestess frowned a moment in puzzlement, then turned and walked back out the door. “Send him in! And don’t hesitate to disturb me. “Sorry I must disturb you, Sister, but the wizard Mervyn is here to see you.” Sister Karla, the administrative priestess for the level, stood there looking apologetic. She was lost in such thought when she suddenly became aware of a throat clearing and snapped out of it for a while. Oh, she’d visited Spirit when she could, under the guise of a priestess who was a cousin of her late mother’s, but that was about it. Although she had kept close track of her daughter’s progress, she’d really had no input into anything not genetic in her only child’s upbringing. Although Spirit had been well brought up in an atmosphere and surroundings not unlike her mother’s, the girl had been raised by others. She was proud of her daughter in every way, for Spirit was also exceptionally bright and at least shared her real mother’s love for animals and nature, but there was much guilt there, too. Sister Kasdi ached every time she thought of Spirit, which was all the time she wasn’t preoccupied with matters of duty. Olive-skinned and curvaceous, well-built as Kasdi herself never was, with a beautiful face and long, black hair and huge, soft brown eyes, she was the heartthrob of every teen-age boy in Anchor Logh. Spirit had grown into a young woman now, and it was a shock to see her these days. Nor did Spirit look anything like either Kasdi or Matson that had been a part of it, too, as any enemy might well look at Kasdi’s native land and her large family there in its search for things to use against her. She knew that she was adopted, of course-the records of Anchor were more likely to trip them up than hide them in their scheme if they had pretended otherwise-but believed that her parents had died in the conflicts raging back at that time. The child had been named Spirit-it was her one conceit, and seemed inevitable. Only four people knew that the child lived and who she was: Kasdi, of course, and her cousin Cloise, who had taken the child and raised it as her own in Anchor Logh, as well as the wizard Mervyn and the Sister General of Logh, Tamara, her oldest and closest friend. In fact, the child had been born perfectly in any event, and those involved had voluntarily submitted to changes in their memory to conform to the official version, those changes made by Mervyn in Flux. Ironically, the lying powers of Flux would not permit an imperfect birth to a wizard only in Anchor could the child “die” as it had to. Had the child been born in Flux, it would have been a painless and effortless birth, though also one that could hardly be a seat of deception.