Then whips murdered the air all around us-the webbing, through which, despite its toughness, our plunge was as smooth as the arrow's first leap from the bow. We punched through something that made a horrible, wet cough, but did not slow us, and three scorpion legs flopped over the nose of my cart and hung there lifelessly.

Then we were falling clear, and I raised my head again.

It gave me a kick in the pit of the stomach to see how steeply we plunged. The vanes had given us even less lift than the little we had projected. Though we would clear the heaps of landslide-rubble strewn along the base of the crag, I found it easy to form a vivid image of being driven like a tent stake thirty yards deep in the swamp muck. And then a vast hand seized us from behind, and slowed us in midair.

This was how it felt, and as I looked back it was no more than I expected to see, in such a world as this. What I saw, and Barnar too in the same moment, made us shout and cheer like madmen.

We trailed an immense, twisting banner of tangled silk, and a score of hell-shapes struggled in the undulating acres of this train of ours. It flapped and bellied, and let fall a many-legged thing which plummeted, scrambling for purchase on the oily air.

In the lurch and sway of our hobbled fall, we argued over which part of the black-scummed waters we were likeliest to hit, but in reality the particular spot seemed to matter little. Systems of grassy silt-bars made escape afoot possible from most points. Meanwhile the waters looked uniformly threatening. Almost everywhere they bulged and folded with sunken movements of a fearfully large scale.

But now our fall took on a frightening wobble, and a sudden burst of speed. The windstream had compacted the webbing behind us, twisting it in a knotted skein that offered far less drag against the air. Our plunge got fearfully steep, and the unclean waters swelled toward us. Scant hundreds of feet from impact, we saw an immense leech-it resembled nothing else so much-thrust sixty feet of its slime-smeared body-tube out of the swamp brew, open a round mouth-hole with a haggle-fanged rim, and chew-blindly, kissingly-at the sky.

Others of its ilk sprouted almost simultaneously, concentrated in the immediate vicinity of our now imminent crash.

One of them in particular towered at what appeared to be our inevitable point of collision. It seemed to be tracking us, by what sense I don't know. Its mouth's groping centered ever more sharply on our line of approach.

I couldn't determine whether or not its mouth could swallow us whole until the last instant, when I saw that it wouldn't quite manage it. Then we hit our greedy welcomer.

Perhaps these things had a single predatory response for all airborne entities because they were unacquainted with any especially massive ones-I can't say. Whatever the reason, this leech was the victim of a serious miscalculation. We clove his mouth and the first sixteen feet of him asunder before snagging with sufficient firmness in his blubbery plasticity to wrench his eighty-foot bulk clean out of the water, like a plucked root. We hit the swamp, laying the whole floundering length of him out across the bog behind us. He had greatly cushioned our impact. We swarmed out, snatching our bundled weapons, and thrashed thru shallow waters to a cluster of sodden hummocks that offered a broken path out to dry land.

As we fled, we heard behind us a vast threshing of waters, and shrill, agonized voices. The leeches were gathering round the tasty entanglement of web-demons that we had strung across the lagoons, and feeding on them with gusto.

So we fled inland, and at length we found a zone of dry ravines where we could crouch in safety. Here we took our first period of rest in this world-this world so hard merely to enter, let alone survive in. Our venture was begun, at least, and ourselves still both alive and free, no slight feat in itself.

But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough-who denies it?-but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down. Even while the leeches still fed on the web-demons, squads of the winged beings we had distantly glimpsed round the city of platforms swept into view. Their bodies were manlike, though scaly and of thrice human stature, and their temperaments were, as it proved, playful. Flying in vast and flawlessly coordinated formations, they dropped lassoes on several of the leeches and hauled them ashore, where armies of their fellows assembled mountainous heaps of brush. On these the winged things, twittering volubly together, incinerated their huge, vermiform prey alive. Cooking was not the object. The leeches were burnt to ashes while the beings swarmed in the air above their pyres, clearly intoxicated by the greasy smoke to which the worms were transmuted by the flames. And as for the smell of this smoke, I earnestly beg whatever gods may be that my fate may never again set my nose athwart such a stench.

Dismal, eternal, remorseless gluttony. We came to see the hideous vitality of that place as a single obscene shape, its multiform jaws forever rooting in its own bleeding entrails-guzzling and growing strong upon itself.

We knew that by following the nearby river we should eventually find the sea. As the light is never truly full there, so the darkness rarely completely falls. We paused an indefinite time under the changeless sky, and then rose and made our way toward the river by the best-concealed route we could discern.

IX.

We found the Demon-Sea. We reached it. At the time, though it was merely the threshold of our journey, we gaped at it as if it were the unimaginable peak of all Exploit simply to have attained its shores. Once we had come to ourselves somewhat, and recalled that next these waters must be entered, and plumbed, we were yet further awed. It was a moment for taking stock of ourselves.

The personal inventory this led us to was a sobering one. We had set out wearing light body-mail over heavy jerkins and doublets of leather. All three of these layers were now scorched in many places, and as ragged as old curtains in a house full of cats. We had one spear between us, and the head of this was half-melted. Barnar's sword lacked two feet of blade. He kept the remnant because one throws away not even the least asset down there. He still had his target-shield, but mine was now a fused and corroded lump under the carcass of a thing I had killed. Our bones were stark against our skins, our eyes were those of almost-ghosts, and our beards told us we had been at least a month en route. This was our only clue to a sane reckoning of time, in a world where hor- ror, harm, and long, eerie calms flow past the traveler in endlessly unpredictable succession.

We sat down-fell, really, as if our legs had done their limit, and now forever renounced their task. The feeling of futility we had then was the heaviest weight I have ever felt upon my back. For a simple fact which we had known all along was now striking us with its full dreadfulness: having reached the sea, we must now turn e i t h e r right or left, with no way of knowing which was the cor rect direct ion.

If, indeed, there was a correct direction-if even Gildmirth the Privateer could have survived till now on the shore of this subearthly deep. The wrong turn meant a grim eternity of plodding, another of retracing our steps.

Gildmirth's present nonexistence meant the same. And the Demon-Sea spread before us like the very image of - infernal eternity to either side.

We had first sensed its nearness while still deep in the dunes of salt. When we got a tang of brine, we identified a deep susurration we had been hearing for some time as the big-breathing sound an ocean makes. The dunes steepened, and we kept to their crests, trampling their ridgelines into crumbling staircases, winding always higher. And then there was before us a narrow plateau of rock salt ending in white cliffs and, beyond these, crashing against their pallid feet, the subworld waters.

The essential horror of its aspect you could not at first identify. The sounds of it had an awesome musicality, and the prospect a barbarously rich coloration, which conspired to exalt and bewilder your senses. The shingle footing the cliffs was jet-black, seemingly composed of something like broken obsidian, and when the cream-and-jade surf pounced up it varnished their contrast to an ever-renewed brilliance. Moreover, a wealth of gaudy flotsam littered the beaches, so that the breakers made them flash every other color as well. The sea itself was bizarrely dappled, for though a gloomy cloud-cover vaulted it over to the limits of vision, this was abundantly rifted, and wherever it was broken it permitted avalanches of the reddish-gold light of sunset to pour onto the water. The clouds themselves were in many places caved in, and lay in foggy islands and ghostly ziggurats upon the green- black waves, and these misty monoliths had a bluish luminescence of their own lurking within them. Meanwhile the winds on those waters were strangely various, and everywhere wrenched them into a crazy-quilt of local turbulences.

It did truly ravish the senses, and so it was only belatedly you felt the horror of the enclosure of so huge a sea.

For though the light that broke through the clouds might suggest earthly sunset colors, it was quickly recog- nizable as a demonic imitation-more garish less subtly shaded than the dying sun's true radiance. Such subearthly luminosity, in varying hues, had been our sky for weeks now-never a real sky, of course, never a transparent revelation of endless space, but always a kind of bright paint masking the universal ceiling of stone imprisoning this world. Now a true ocean is the sky's open floor-that's the feeling men love in it, the reason they venture upon it, apart from gain or exploration. But this bottled sea, for all its terrible vastness, gave you not the awe of liberation, but its black opposite, the awe of drear imprisonment's infinitude.

We sat staring at this vista for a long time. We meant to discuss our situation, but simply failed to muster the effort of speech. At last Barnar drew a long breath. In a voice utterly blank of feeling he said: "To hell with - everything. Let's just go right for luck."

And so we did, both secretly grateful that we had managed even this minimal act of decision, for neither of us had believed it impossible that we might just sit forever on that impossible lookout. As it was, we set out sharing the glum, unvoiced conviction that we knew where the manse of Gildmirth was to be found: nowhere. And we would take forever getting there, except, of course, that we would not survive nearly that long.

Though we marched atop the salt bluffs, we found our eyes and minds constantly entangled with the vivid - jetsam cluttering the beach below. And what we saw there had soon roused us from our despairing stupor, for though our spirits were jaded with terrors and atrocities, those sights revealed to us new dimensions of demonic activity. Some of that bright tangle on the black strand was merely the detritus of lower life forms indigenous to the sea: broken coral branches thick with budding rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, or uprooted crinoids whose torn husks were purest gold. Such common objects bespoke nothing beyond the ocean's grotesque fecundity. But equally numerous were products of art, of active-and surely malign-intelligence: wrought chalices of gold with elaborate silver inlay, tiaras of gem-studded everbright shaped and sized to crown no human skull, shattered triptychs whose fragmented images were vivid as hallucination. There was a broken chair, elaborately hinged and barbed, designed to hold unimaginable shapes in unconjecturable postures, and we saw several battle helmets with triads of opalescent eyes inset in the visors tumbl ing empty in the foam. All such evidences of active artifice serving unguessable aims proclaimed the sea's hidden cunning, its vast, unbreathing population aboil with a million malefic purposes.

Yet this was only the inanimate portion of what lay scrambled on the dark gravel. Shorelife abounded. The human form was so much a part of its makeup that we could not always tell whether we were looking at demon hybrids native to the place, or at the deformed thralls of demonkind. If even half of them were captives, then truly, our race has fed multitudes to the subworld's endless appetite for our woe. The lifeless wealth on the beaches-clearly a slight fraction of what the depths contained-showed plainly enough the bait that has drawn so many luckless souls within the subworld's grip, most commonly thru ambitious and uninformed spell- dabbling. And surely it is dangerously easy nowadays-most especially in Kairnheim-to buy the power to call up entities which can only be dominated and put down again by a degree of power not even generally understood, let alone purchasable, by any overweening dilettante.

Some of those we saw, of course, were unmistakably of the latter group: the sea's human "catch," spoils of its malignant enterprise, its fishing among men. Some grottoes, for example, were densely carpeted with victims whose faces alone retained their human form. The rest of their bodies-everted and structurally transformed-now radiated from each face's perimeter in wormy coronas. They resembled giant sea-anemones. The souls within those faces still-all too eloquently-lived, while every vermiculous grotto of them had its demonic gardener: an obese, vermillion starfish shape, all scabbed and barnacled with eyes, and which inched the slathering mucosae of its undersides across the quasi-human meadow. Each threatened face expected its embrace with a piteous look of loathing and foreknowledge.

And there were others of our species who lay in nude clusters resembling the snarls of kelp which a northern sea will disgorge on the sand in storm season. Their legs and hips merged in central, fleshy stalks, while their arms and upper-bodies endlessly and intricately writhed and interlaced. These were the very image of promiscuous lust, but the multiple voice they raised made a hospital groan, a sick-house dirge of bitter weariness.

Crablike giants, hugely genitaled like human hermaphrodites, scuttled over them with proprietary briskness- pausing, probing, nibbling everywhere.

But how were we to interpret the huge terrapin forms we saw plodding ashore to lay clutches of eggs in the black gravel? Their hatchlings, which erupted instantly, were scaly homunculi with frighteningly individualized human faces. We saw more than once their cannibal assault on the parent beast, as well as their launching of the dead mother's hollowed, meat-tattered shell-a swarming nursery-barque-through the surf, and out into the open sea.

It should be understood that I don't imply that the open waters themselves were bar ren of vi tal signs. Everywhere the waves suffered swift, grotesque distortions, and the shifting architectures of mist and fog that cluttered them everywhere pulsed unpredictably with movement, as of shadowy things in their depths. Once we saw what was surely a combat of invisible entities, which occurred about half a mile offshore. The waves there dented and sagged under massive, dancing pressures. It appeared that a pair of feet or paws were involved on one side-each as big as a large ship-and that a dimpling multitude of claws or tentacles were involved on the other. At length, something huge hammered a hollow in the water. The waves calmed, and an immense volume of saffron fluid gurgled onto the sea from what looked like a seam in the air, and sank coiling roots into the deeps.

Such spectacles as these, always accompanied by the incessant, soft, mind-seducing antiphonies of the ocean's vast noise, beguiled our sense of time just as completely as an interval of ease and merriment might have done. For the most insidious aspect of that place was the subtle, instantaneous comprehensibility of what we saw and heard. It was already halfway to madness just to realize that at the very first note, you understood those choruses of mangled rapture, those arrogant boomings of idiot Murder triumphing over defenseless Life. In short, slowly though we progressed, we were swept along by all we witnessed. Days had surely passed, though how many we could not know, when Barnar first opened my eyes to something he had been aware of for some time.

For out of a seemingly endless silence that had settled on us, he cried: "I can't help it! I've got to ask you." He laid one of his great paws-all cracked and scorched with our trials-on my shoulder. The other he aimed up the coast where we were headed. The shoreline there was an endless white serpent of cliff and surf, diminishing to a wisp of smoky pallor near the horizon. Barnar's eyes, which the squareness of his face has led some to call bovine, but which are in truth alive with acuity, he aimed at mine. He had a haunted look. "Am I seeing a little blackish spur, which might be a headland, about three-fourths of the way to the horizon?"

It was a long time before I answered, my voice a hollow strangeness in my own ears: "Yes. I think you are."

The sinuosities of the shore protracted our approach to the apparition almost unendurably. We were still far from it once it had resolved itself sufficiently in our vision to become a source of hope to us, and thence of new - energy. For what had appeared as a large landspit proved to be a small one, densely crowned with structures, - opposed by a crescent of breakwater and pilings, which also supported numerous buildings, and whose arc - mirrored the headland's, so that the two formed a pair of pincers which enclosed a broad, shallow lagoon shaped like a teardrop. If this landmark proved to be of human construction, it was certainly on a scale attributable only to an entrepreneur of Gildmirth's legendary stature, and in that class, his was the only name we or Charnall had been able to discover. We began to toy with the belief-pretty stupefying to ourselves-that we were going to find our man. Still the twisted coast interminably multiplied the hours of our drawing near, and through them all, the vivid, ersatz light never changed, and it was always sunset that poured from the broken iron-gray of stormwrack and fog.

But, long though we had studied the place on our approach, when we finally crouched above it-as low in a fissure of the salt cliffs as we could get without abandoning the land's protection from the sea's powers-it was long again that we stared at it from near at hand. There was an indescribable poignance in it-in the combination of its splendor and its damage.

For the whole architectural sweep of the place was marred at the base; the headland had been riven, and half its length was subsided several fathoms into the sea. An imposing pyramidal structure that crowned the spit-by its grandeur the Manse itself, if Gildmirth's place this was-was sunk with it, and its lowest terrace was half- inundated by the swell. The sea's weirdly spasmodic surf climbed triumphantly up the sculpted pediments flanking its doorways, and went rummaging inside through its gaping windowframes.

Yet the rest-the bulk of the establishment-looked remarkably intact. The jetty and rank of pilings that - opposed the headland's curve supported an elegant and various procession of architecture that didn't look in the least derelict or decayed. It was a splendid defiance, this parabola of human workmanship that pierced-stood kneedeep in-the Demon-Sea itself. Such a flamboyant trespass upon so deep a universe of malignant power!

That fragile ring of earthly art was a lunatic declaration of empire, a flagrant challenge to all that swam there.

And yet, withal, there was this half-drowning of the manse. Seeing this, we no longer truly doubted that we had found-if not Gildmirth-at least his fortress, for the spectacle tallied with the report. If, in his bondage, the Pri- vateer indeed lived freely here, his outpost's general soundness reflected it; while, if it were equally true that he suffered bondage, his broken manse proclaimed that just as clearly.

That a man should choose to come to such a place, and to abide in it, astonished us. That he should have done so for so long on his own terms moved us to awe. That he should endure here now on demonic terms made us grieve for him-for whatever kind of man he was, he had dared much, and alone.

"What impudence!" Barnar rumbled, smiling softly.

"And a hundred years of freedom and power before he was taken."

"So you accept that part, then?"

I nodded. "I feel it. If men do age here, it's far more slowly than they do under the sun."

"For everyone, captive or not," Barnar muttered, nodding in his turn. "I confess I feel it too. Somehow it's part of the . . . weariness of being here. So I suppose, if we assume thralls are protected by their possessors, we can also assume he still survives."

"I think so. After all, who else could be maintaining that . . . that zoo down there."

"If it is a zoo. If those aren't invaders of the place, new tenants." The notion startled me. For some time we had been studying the water enclosed by the headland and pier.

This was shallow and quite clear, and its floor was a sunken labyrinth of scarps, reefs and grottoes. And in each pit and den of that maze shapes crouched, or restively stirred. And despite the irregularity of the maze's structure, it gave an impression of design which made me still incline to see it as a menagerie, and not an enclave of demon usurpers.

"They're too various," I pointed out. "Demons don't usually form coalitions. One species might have invaded him, but not a mob, surely. It looks much more like a sampling, a specimen collection."

Truly, a collection of more infernal rarities than those would be hard to imagine. It was like looking in a fair booth through a Glass of Piercing Sight at a drop of pond-scum. Many of those beings are now a merciful blur in my mind's eye, but others I am doomed to remember. There was a globular explosion of spikes and spines, like an immense sea-urchin, and from the tip of each of its spines oozed a yellow human tongue like a drop of poison.

Another of them was a crystalline blob of veined but otherwise transparent material in which hung a constellation of anguished human faces. And there was one demon that resembled nothing so much as a huge lurk. Just as I was studying this one, I made an unnerving discovery.

"Look up there," I said to Barnar, "on the pier about halfway out."

"By the Crack. Is it a lurk?"

"It's a twin of that demon down there in the water, in the grotto just below where it's crouching."

X.

The shape on the pier clarified for us the murkier features of its submerged counterpart. These demons - differed most strikingly from lurks in that their flat forebodies were studded, not with the onyx eye-buttons of lurk-kind, but with a freckling of human eyes. Their feeding-legs too-that shortest and foremost pair that cleanse or hold prey to their bristly fangs-were tipped, not with hook-and-barb feet, but with clawed hands on the human model. Their color was a phosphorescent green marbled with scarlet. Their movement-for both were restive with mutual awareness-was lurkish, both in its steel-spring quickness and its overall liquidity.

Then the monster on the pier-it appeared to be somewhat smaller than that in the water-heaved itself up onto the balustrade, its hairy bulb of a body teetering as its legs bunched to spring. It launched itself into the air.

Its dive seemed sensuous, floating, and its multitude of eyes closed dreamily as it plunged. Its counterpart reared and tore the water with its forelegs, and met the leaper's impact with a frenzied counterassault.

Bubbles thick as smoke masked their struggle, but when at length the water stilled and cleared, we saw the - attacker had mastered the larger demon. Locking the latter's forelegs in a cross-grip with its own, it pushed upward. This hoisted the other's forward half off the sea floor, keeping its fangs out of striking range while its hind legs scrabbled impotently for counter-leverage. From the attacker's underside a brilliant red coil extruded.

Its twisting length touched a slot in its pinioned opponent's underside and slid into it. For several seconds the linkage was maintained, the coil pulsing with the transmission of unimaginable essences. Then the coil was retracted. The attacker released the other, which had grown oddly quiet, and began to swim toward the manse just below us. During its progress all the monstrosities it overswam, including many far larger than itself, shrank down and cowered in their craggy cells. It accelerated, gathered itself tight, and rode a swell through one of the manse's gaping doors.

Barnar and I exchanged a long look, each waiting for the other to say something that would clarify his own excited thoughts.

"He was renowned as a shifter of shapes even before his expedition here," my friend said at last. That enabled me to take the next step.

"Yes. And maybe, in all this time, he has gone over."

It was some relief to have spoken what we both feared, but not much. Without much hope Barnar countered - after a moment: "Yet Charnall did say that half his passion to come here was for exploration, for knowledge of the ocean's demon forms."

"Knowledge," I snorted. We looked at the lagoon and Barnar shuddered.

"Let's hail him," he said, "from here. We're still technically outside the sea's zone of influence."

I agreed. Barnar cupped his hand to his mouth and cried down upon the manse: "Gildmirth! Privateer!

Gildmirth of Sordon-Head! Two men of upper earth ask your hospitality!" The words rolled down and broke in echoes that reverberated in the empty, tilted terraces of the great ruin. It felt exceedingly strange to shout a summons here. The human voice, human speech-they were tools that were utterly unavailing in this world, and for long weeks we had struggled through it without using them, mute invaders who simply fought or fled whatever they encountered. So it almost made my flesh crawl to hear an unmistakable response to Barnar's words: a small, watery commotion within the manse's sea-level tier. From the door through which the lurkish demon had swum, a naked man swam out.

He had a squat frame, and moved with quick intensity-ferocity almost. He whipped round in the water, seized the luxuriant bas-reliefs framing the doorway, and-monkey-deft-hauled himself up to the next higher tier. Here he stood scanning the sky, as if he thought Barnar's voice had literally penetrated to him through the eternal cloud- ceiling, direct from the world of the sun. I looked at Barnar, hefting my spear. He gave me his target shield and I gave him my sword, thus wordlessly agreeing to what had been our armed strategy of recent days-I would be advance harrier, and my friend, with his one-and-a-half blades, my back-up. We stood up and hailed the small, solitary shape on the terrace.

He turned in our direction then, and dispelled our last doubt that he was Gildmirth, for the eyes with which he met ours were-both pupil and ball-a lush red. The purplish red of summer plums splitting with ripeness.

"Bloody-eyed" was an epithet two textual references had applied to the Privateer in describing his post-capture condition. For the rest, he had a full-lipped, goatish face, was fleece-haired and fleece-bearded. Though his stature was small he had the feet, sex, and hands of a larger man, and his knotted limbs, chest, and stomach bespoke an unusual vigor. He grinned when his eyes had targeted ours, and we caught the flash of a second demon detail that set our own teeth on edge, for his teeth were large and splendid, and made of the brightest steel.

He laughed. "Are you real? Come down! Make me believe it!"

We climbed down the bluffs to a point from which we could leap to the tier of the manse next above the one where Gildmirth stood. Still grinning, he motioned us down. We jumped. By the time we reached the railing, the Privateer was clambering over it.

We both made him a reverence when we greeted him. It was instinctive; the heart will honor excellence where it meets it. Sardonically, he bowed in return.

"Do I merit such a salute? If so, you merit the same, my friends. For it seems you have walked here. If so, you are the fourth and fifth to have done so this hundred years and more. Believe me, if I could feel amazement at all any more, my jaw would be dropping off my face at the sight of you."

In fact, his jaw-a powerful one, fit to drive the dreadnaught teeth that filled it-scarcely stirred with his speech. "Do you know what you are to me?" he concluded, as if in afterthought.

"What are we to you?" Barnar asked obligingly.

"You are two brief escapes from here. You are two lives in whose light I can live for a while, before returning to this." He gestured at large. "I refer to the payment I will ask for any service you may be seeking from me.

Unless, of course, you've just come down to clasp my hand. That service is free."

I took the hand he mockingly extended. This wasn't a simple act, for I had not yet decided that he was still on the human side of the line he had drawn here in the days of his freedom and expeditionary pride. His hand was as cold as a month on a Jarkeladd glacier, but i n n o c e n t o f a n y malevolent aura. I said: "I am honored. I am Nifft of Karkham-Ra, a master thief. It is likewise with my friend Barnar Hammer-hand, who is a Chilite."

He took Barnar's hand. "Your honor honors me. I smell no great sorcery about you. In reaching me, you have done much with little."

"We are here," Barnar said, "to buy our lives out of mort- gage by retrieving a certain lad from your puddle out there.

It took all we had just to get h e r e , a n d w e h a v e neither hook, nor line, nor rod."

The Privateer smiled pleasantly. "You seem to have little of anything at all besides determination. Yet still you carry with you the price of my services. I don't promise success, mind you, but once I have made my best effort, if I survive that effort, pay me you must-which is to say, you must admit me to the treasury of your personal memories. It is done in a moment, but afterward I will possess every jot of your lives as intimately as I do my own, including many things you might yourselves not even recall, in the riot and variety of your freedom.

For an absolute lover of privacy, it is much to pay, but a trifle otherwise, while for me it is a blessed mental oasis in the desert of my bondage. Can you accept the terms?" We nodded. "Then what was it that took the youth you're looking for?"

"A bonshad," I told him. He nodded slowly. "Heavy work, both the finding and the killing. But feasible. We'll cross over to my armory. Kindly bear in back, gentlemen, that henceforth your safety lies solely in your nearness to my protection. You already stand within the surf-line, and are now fair game to all the wet half of hell."

He gestured slightly with one hand. From the swamped doorway two tiers below a coracle-made of hide stretched on a bone frame-drifted out. We climbed down after Gildmirth, waded to this craft, and boarded it. It seemed to propel itself, and as we crossed the enclosed waters we watched the pier we approached, not to be looking at the monstrosities crouched so near below us.

"Gildmirth," Barnar said abruptly. "That was you, just now, swimming here?"

The Privateer smiled a thin, cold smile, and answered without turning to face us. "Swimming. Indeed I was, and more than that, though I don't think you'd really care to hear about it. I'll tell you what you do want to hear, though it's for you to decide if you trust my word or not. But no. I have not altered. I am still a man in my - essence and allegiance."

Barnar nodded. There was much more we wished to know about him, but we held our tongues. We felt ashamed to have doubted him in his adversity, thereby discovering that we did trust him. But presently, in - concession to our unvoiced perplexity, Gildmirth added: "You must understand that I am not bound here by an - external compulsion. It is my own will that has been captured . . . infected. I may not leave because certain of my own appetites will not permit it. They have been exaggerated, distorted, rendered insatiable. And only here can I even begin to feed them. One of my appetites earned me a title in Sordon-Head. Curator, they called me. A subject of jest. It was my larceny I grew famous for among them, especially my great swindle of the city itself- not a subject of jest. They never knew that I robbed them for the Curator. Lesser, periodic thefts would have sated my mere cupidity-I was never impatient. It was only the Curator's secret ambition, long-cherished, that needed so huge a grub-stake. That quaint old Curator. Is it really three hundred years and more since he came here? He had the zoographer's passion for living form, its precarious and infinite complexity, its stupendous - diversity. And these seas teem as none above ground with unmined marvels. This is an empire of discovery such as no savant ever hoarded to buy posterity's undying thanks. . . ."

He fell silent, and brought the coracle to a ladder up one of the pier's pilings. He climbed this, his movement forgetful, that of a man who thinks himself alone. We followed in silence.