Starke groaned. "I feel like something passed through a wild-cat's
intestines. She's gone. Rann's gone." He laughed. "That makes me sad.
Somebody cheer me up. Rann's gone." He felt of his big, flat-muscled
body. "She was bluffing. Trying to drive me batty. She knew she
couldn't really tuck me back into that carcass, but she didn't want me
to know. It was like a baby's nightmare before it's born. Or maybe you
haven't got a memory like me." He rolled over, stretching. "She won't
ever get in my head again. I've locked the gate and swallowed the key."
His eyes dilated. "What's _your_ name?"
"Linnl," said the man with the harp. "You didn't tell Rann our
strategy?"
"What do _you_ think?"
Linnl smiled sincerely. "I think I like you, man of Crom Dhu. I think
I like your hatred for Rann. I think I like the way you handled the
entire matter, wanted to kill Rann and save Crom Dhu, and being so
willing to die to accomplish either."
"That's a lot of thinking. Yeah, and what about that promise you made?"
"It will be kept."
Starke gave him a hand. "Linnl, you're okay. If I ever get back to
Earth, so help me, I'll never bait a hook again and drop it in the
sea." It was lost to Linnl. Starke forgot it, and went on, laughing.
There was an edge of hysteria to it. Relief. You got booted around
for days, people milled in and out of your mind like it was a bargain
basement counter, pawing over the treads and convolutions, yelling
and fighting; the woman you loved was starved on a ship masthead, and
as a climax a lady with green eyes tried to make you a filling for an
accident-mangled body. And now you had an ally.
And you couldn't believe it.
He laughed in little starts and stops, his eyes shut.
"Will you let me take care of Rann when the time comes?"
His fingers groped hungrily upward, closed on an imaginary figure of
her, pressed, tightened, choked.
Linnl said, "She's yours. I'd like the pleasure, but you have as much
if not more of a revenge to take. Come along. We start now. You've been
asleep for one entire period."
Starke let himself down gingerly. He didn't want to break a leg off. He
felt if someone touched him he might disintegrate.
He managed to let the tide handle him, do all the work. He swam
carefully after Linnl down three passageways where an occasional silver
inhabitant of the city slid by.
Drifting below them in a vast square hall, each gravitating but
imprisoned by leg-shackles, the warriors of Falga looked up with pale
cold eyes at Starke and Linnl. Occasional discharges of light-fish from
interstices in the walls, passed luminous, fleeting glows over the
warriors. The light-fish flirted briefly in a long shining rope that
tied knots around the dead faces and as quickly untied them. Then the
light-fish pulsed away and the red color of the sea took over.
Bathed in wine, thought Starke, without humor. He leaned forward.
"Men of Falga!"
Linnl plucked a series of harp-threads.
"Aye." A deep suggestion of sound issued from a thousand dead lips.
"We go to sack Rann's citadel!"
"Rann!" came the muffled thunder of voices.
At the sound of another tune, the golden hounds appeared. They touched
the chains. The men of Falga, released, danced through the red sea
substance.
Siphoned into a valve mouth, they were drawn out into a great volcanic
courtyard. Starke went close after. He stared down into a black ravine,
at the bottom of which was a blazing caldera.
This was the Source Life of the Red Sea. Here it had begun a millennium
ago. Here the savage cyclones of sparks and fire energy belched up,
shaking titanic black garden walls, causing currents and whirlpools
that threatened to suck you forward and shoot you violently up to the
surface, in cannulas of force, thrust, in capillaries of ignited mist,
in chutes of color that threatened to cremate but only exhilarated you,
gave you a seething rebirth!
He braced his legs and fought the suction. An unbelievable sinew of
fire sprang up from out the ravine, crackling and roaring.
The men of Falga did not fight the attraction.
They moved forward in their silence and hung over the incandescence.
The vitality of the Source grew upward in them. It seemed to touch
their sandaled toes first, and then by a process of shining osmosis,
climb up the limbs, into the loins, into the vitals, delineating their
strong bone structure as mercury delineates the glass thermometer with
a rise of temperature. The bones flickered like carved polished ivory
through the momentarily film-like flesh. The ribs of a thousand men
expanded like silvered spider legs, clenched, then expanded again.
Their spines straightened, their shoulders flattened back. Their eyes,
the last to take the fire, now were ignited and glowed like candles in
refurbished sepulchers. The chins snapped up, the entire outer skins of
their bodies broke into silver brilliance.
Swimming through the storm of energy like nightmare figments, entering
cold, they reached the far side of the ravine resembling smelted metal
from blast furnaces. When they brushed into one another, purple sparks
sizzled, jumped from head to head, from hand to hand.