I was aware of another light beating past us--beating down the Keeper's.

The hosts of tendrils drew back from me.
I felt myself picked from the unseen grasp, whirled in the air and drawn away.
Drake beside me, I hung now before the Shining Disk--the Metal Emperor! He it was who had plucked us from the Keeper--and even as I swung I saw the Keeper's multitudinous, serpentine arms surge out toward us angrily and then sullenly, slowly, draw back into their nests.
And out of the Disk, clothing me, permeating me, came an immense tranquillity, a muting of all human thought, all human endeavor, an unthinkable, cosmic calm into which all that was human of me seemed to be sinking, drowning as in a fathomless abyss.

I struggled against it, desperately, striving in study of the Disk to erect a barrier of preoccupation against the power pouring from it.
A dozen feet away from us the sapphire ovals centered upon us their regard.

They were limpid, pellucid as gems whose giant replicas they seemed to be.

The surface of the Disk ringed about by the aureate zodiac in which the nine ovals shone was a maze of geometric symbols traced in the lines of living gem fires; infinitely complex those patterns and infinitely beautiful; an infinite number of symmetric forms in which I seemed to trace all the ordered crystalline wonders of the snowflakes, the groupings of all crystalline patternings, the soul of ordered beauty that are the marvels of the Radiolaria, Nature's own miraculous book of the soul of mathematical beauty.
The flashing, petaled heart was woven of living rainbows of cold flame.
Silently we floated there while the Disk--LOOKED--at us.
And as though I had been not an actor but an observer, the weird picture of it all came to me--two men swinging like motes in mid air, on one side the flickering scarlet and orange Cruciform shape, on the other side the radiant Disk, behind the two manikins the pallid mount of the bristling cones; and high above the wan circle of the shields.
There was a ringing about us--an elfin chiming, sweet and crystalline.
It came from the cones--and strangely was it their vocal synthesis, their voice.