Red. Red. Red. The colour of blood. Blood in his eyes. He was
remembering now. The quarry had turned on him, and they had fought on
the bare, blistering rocks.
Nor had N'Chaka killed. The Lord of the Rocks was very big, a giant
among lizards, and N'Chaka was small. The Lord of the Rocks had laid
open N'Chaka's head before the wooden spear had more than scratched his
flank.
It was strange that N'Chaka still lived. The Lord of the Rocks must
have been full fed. Only that had saved him.
N'Chaka groaned, not with pain, but with shame. He had failed. Hoping
for a great triumph, he had disobeyed the tribal law that forbids a
boy to hunt the quarry of a man, and he had failed. Old One would not
reward him with the girdle and the flint spear of manhood. Old One
would give him to the women for the punishment of little whips. Tika
would laugh at him, and it would be many seasons before Old One would
grant him permission to try the Man's Hunt.
Blood in his eyes.
He blinked to clear them. The instinct of survival was prodding him.
He must arouse himself and creep away, before the Lord of the Rocks
returned to eat him.
The redness would not go away. It swam and flowed, strangely sparkling.
He blinked again, and tried to lift his head, and could not, and fear
struck down upon him like the iron frost of night upon the rocks of the
valley.
It was all wrong. He could see himself clearly, a naked boy dizzy with
pain, rising and clambering over the ledges and the shale to the safety
of the cave. He could see that, and yet he could not move.
All wrong. Time, space, the universe, darkened and turned.
A voice spoke to him. A girl's voice. Not Tika's and the speech was
strange.
Tika was dead. Memories rushed through his mind, the bitter things, the
cruel things. Old One was dead, and all the others....
The voice spoke again, calling him by a name that was not his own.
Stark.
Memory shattered into a kaleidoscope of broken pictures, fragments,
rushing, spinning. He was adrift among them. He was lost, and the
terror of it brought a scream into his throat.
Soft hands touching his face, gentle words, swift and soothing. The
redness cleared and steadied, though it did not go away, and quite
suddenly he was himself again, with all his memories where they
belonged.
* * * * *
He was lying on his back, and Zareth, Malthor's daughter, was looking
down at him. He knew now what the redness was. He had seen it too often
before not to know. He was somewhere at the bottom of the Red Sea--that
weird ocean in which a man can breathe.
And he could not move. That had not changed, nor gone away. His body
was dead.
The terror he had felt before was nothing to the agony that filled him
now. He lay entombed in his own flesh, staring up at Zareth, wanting an
answer to a question he dared not ask.
She understood, from the look in his eyes.
"It's all right," she said, and smiled. "It will wear off. You'll be
all right. It's only the weapon of the Lhari. Somehow it puts the body
to sleep, but it will wake again."
Stark remembered the black object that Egil had held in his hands.
A projector of some sort, then, beaming a current of high-frequency
vibration that paralyzed the nerve centers. He was amazed. The Cloud
People were barbarians themselves, though on a higher scale than the
swamp-edge tribes, and certainly had no such scientific proficiency. He
wondered where the Lhari had got hold of such a weapon.
It didn't really matter. Not just now. Relief swept over him, bringing
him dangerously close to tears. The effect would wear off. At the
moment, that was all he cared about.
He looked up at Zareth again. Her pale hair floated with the slow
breathing of the sea, a milky cloud against the spark-shot crimson.
He saw now that her face was drawn and shadowed, and there a terrible
hopelessness in her eyes. She had been alive when he first saw
her--frightened, not too bright, but full of emotion and a certain
dogged courage. Now the spark was gone, crushed out.
She wore a collar around her white neck, a ring of dark metal with the
ends fused together for all time.
"Where are we?" he asked.
And she answered, her voice carrying deep and hollow in the dense
substance of the sea, "We are in the place of the Lost Ones."
Stark looked beyond her, as far as he could see, since he was unable to
turn his head. And wonder came to him.
Black walls, black vault above him, a vast hall filled with the wash of
the sea that slipped in streaks of whispering flame through the high
embrasures. A hall that was twin to the vault of shadows where he had
met the Lhari.
"There is a city," said Zareth dully. "You will see it soon. You will
see nothing else until you die."