She was weeping and screaming. He fell back on the seafloor, covering his ears. But there was no shutting it out. And the next instant her voice was joined by others, much lower and angrier. A dozen sea-murth men were laying hands on him, biting, strangling, piercing him with their sharp nails and teeth. They must have been watching all along. Behind them Klyst wailed and pleaded.
Their argument was deafening. But Klyst won, and the murth-men let him go. Howling with sobs, she pulled him toward the surface, the raging men just behind. Pazel found himself crying, too. But his tears did not glow, and Klyst would never know he had shed them.
The bathysphere was rising from the waves. Klyst stopped him a yard beneath it and covered his hands with kisses. She looked at him and waited. He bent to do the same to her hands, but she shook her head. She wanted him to speak.
He bit his lips. He would not subject her to that noise.
Klyst saw his look of refusal and let out a final, agonizing scream. Then, with the sound still breaking from her throat, she faded. It happened suddenly. One moment she was there, solid as he was. The next he saw the kelp through her skin. And the next (the scream snuffed out like a candle) there was no murth-girl before him at all.
Spitting hatred, the murth-men turned and fled. Pazel gasped-and choked instantly. He could no longer breathe water.
Flailing, he surfaced. He was surrounded by boats. Clouds of white mist were racing toward them over the water. Twenty feet away, the bathysphere dangled over the deck of the sea barge. All about it the Volpeks stood gaping. And directly beneath the sphere, arms raised, stood Arunis.
The Volpeks in the sphere were lowering the Red Wolf down through the hole. The sorcerer reached for it, ecstatic. When his fingers brushed it at last, he let out a bellowing noise that even through the distortion of his mind-fit Pazel knew for laughter.
What have I done?
Pazel splashed toward the barge. Knock him into the sea, drown him, drown with him.
Saving Klyst's people had been his only thought. But in so doing he had aided a monster.
"I'll kill you!"
Arunis glanced around, trying to locate the source of the meaningless squawk. And then-