He did not go to her. She was left alone with her guard, and Carse could glance at her covertly. It was easy to guess what was in her mind. She was thinking how it felt to stand on the deck of her own ship, a prisoner. She was thinking that the brooding coast ahead was the end of all her voyaging. She was thinking that she was going to die.
The cry came down from the masthead—“Khondor!”
Carse saw at first only a great craggy rock that towered high above the surf, a sort of blunt cape between two fiords. Then, from that seemingly barren and uninhabitable place, Sky Folk came flying until the air throbbed with the beating of their wings. Swimmers came also, like a swarm of little comets that left trails of fire in the sea. And from the fiord mouths came longships, smaller than the galley, swift as hornets, with shields along their sides.
The voyage was over. The black galley was escorted with cheers and shouting into Khondor.
Carse understood now what Jaxart had meant. Nature had made a virtually impregnable fortress out of the rock itself, walled in by impassable mountains from land attack, protected by unscalable cliffs from the sea, its only gateway the narrow twisting fiord on the north side. That too was guarded by ballistas which could make the fiord a death trap for any ship that entered it.
The tortuous channel widened at the end into a landlocked harbor that not even the winds could attack. Khond longships, fishing boats and a scattering of foreign craft filled the basin and the black galley glided like a queen among them.
The quays and the dizzy flight of steps that led up to the summit of the rock, connecting on the upper levels with tunneled galleries, were thronged with the people of Khondor and the allied clans that had taken refuge with them. They were a hardy lot with a raffish sturdy look that Carse liked. The cliffs and the mountain peaks flung back their cheering in deafening echoes.
Under cover of the noise Boghaz said urgently to Carse for the hundredth time, “Let me bargain with them for the secret! I can get us each a kingdom—more, if you will!”
And for the hundredth time, Carse answered, “I have not said that I know the secret. If I do it is my own.”
Boghaz swore in an ecstasy of frustration and demanded of the gods what he had done to be thus hardly used.
Ywain’s eyes turned upon the Earthman once and then away.
Swimmers in their gleaming hundreds, Sky Folk with their proud wings folded—for the first time Carse saw their women, creatures so exquisitely lovely that it hurt to look at them—the tall fair Khonds and the foreign stocks, a kaleidoscope of colors and glinting steel. Mooring lines snaked out, were caught and snubbed around the bollards. The galley came to rest.
Carse led his crew ashore and Ywain walked erect beside him, wearing his shackles as though they were golden ornaments she had chosen to become her.
There was a group standing apart on the quay, waiting. A handful of hard-bitten men who looked as though sea water ran in their veins instead of blood, tough veterans of many battles, some fierce and dark-visaged, some with ruddy laughing faces, one with cheek and sword arm hideously burned and scarred.
Among them was a tall Khond with a look of harnessed lighting about him and hair the color of new copper and by his side stood a girl dressed in a blue robe.
Her straight fair hair was bound back by a fillet of plain gold and between her breasts, left bare by the loose outer garment, a single black pearl glowed with lustrous darkness. Her left hand rested on the shoulder of Shallah the Swimmer.
Like all the rest the girl was paying more attention to Ywain than she was to Carse. He realized somehow bitterly that the whole crowd had gathered less to see the unknown barbarian who had done it all than to see the daughter of Garach of Sark walking in chains.
The red-haired Khond remembered his manners enough to make the sign of peace and say, “I am Rold of Khondor. We, the Sea Kings, make you welcome.”
Carse responded but saw that already he was half forgotten in the man’s savage pleasure at the plight of his arch-enemy.
They had much to say to each other, Ywain and the Sea Kings.
Carse looked again at the girl. He had heard Jaxart’s eager greeting to her and knew now that she was Emer, Rold’s sister.
He had never seen anyone like her before. There was a touch of the fey, of the elfin, about her, as though she lived in the human world by courtesy and could leave it any time she chose.
Her eyes were gray and sad, but her mouth was gentle and shaped for laughter. Her body had the same quick grace he had noticed in the Halflings and yet it was a very humanly lovely body.
She had pride, too—pride to match Ywain’s own though they were so different. Ywain was all brilliance and fire and passion, a rose with blood-red petals. Carse understood her. He could play her own game and beat her at it.
But he knew that he would never understand Emer. She was part of all the things he had left behind him long ago. She was the lost music and the forgotten dreams, the pity and the tenderness, the whole shadowy world he had glimpsed in childhood but never since.
All at once she looked up and saw him. Her eyes met his—met and held, and would not go away. He saw their expression change. He saw every drop of color drain from her face until it was like a mask of snow. He heard her say:
“Who are you?”
He bent his head. “Lady Emer, I am Carse the barbarian.”
He saw how her fingers dug into Shallah’s fur and saw how the Swimmer watched him with her soft hostile gaze. Emer’s voice answered, almost below the threshold of hearing.
“You have no name. You are as Shallah said—a stranger.” Something about the way she said the word made it seem full of an eery menace. And it was so uncannily close to the truth.
He sensed suddenly that this girl had the same extrasensory power as the Halflings, developed in her human brain to even greater strength.
But he forced a laugh. “You must have many strangers in Khondor these days.” He glanced at the Swimmer. “Shallah distrusts me, I don’t know why. Did she tell you also that I carry a dark shadow with me wherever I go?”
“She did not need to tell me,” Emer whispered. “Your face is only a mask and behind it is a darkness and a wish—and they are not of our world.”
She came to him with slow steps, as though drawn against her will. He could see the dew of sweat on her forehead and abruptly he began to tremble himself, a shivering deep within him that was not of the flesh.
“I can see… I can almost see…”
He did not want her to say any more. He did not want to hear it.
“No!” he cried out. “No!”
She suddenly fell forward, her body heavy against him. He caught her and eased her down to the gray rock, where she lay in a dead faint.
He knelt helplessly beside her but Shallah said quietly, “I will care for her.” He stood up and then Rold and the Sea Kings were around them like a ring of startled eagles.
“The seeing was upon her,” Shallah told them.
“But it has never taken her like this before,” Rold said worriedly. “What happened? My thought was all on Ywain.”
“What happened is between the Lady Emer and the stranger,” said Shallah. She picked up the girl in her strong arms and bore her away.
Carse felt that strange inner fear still chilling him. The “seeing” they had called it. Seeing indeed, not of any supernatural kind, but of strong extra-sensory powers that had looked deep into his mind.
In sudden reaction of anger Carse said, “A fine welcome! All of us brushed aside for a look at Ywain and then your sister faints at sight of me!”
“By the gods!” Ronald groaned. “Your pardon—we had not meant it so. As for my sister, she is too much with the Halflings and given as they are to dreams of the mind.”