Then, with no warning, the vital force in me became too great. I could not hold it. I felt my brain seared and bulging, and the arteries of my body were alive with molten heat. I was a man who had devoured fire, and was now devoured by fire from within. Everything seethed in light and vanished in it.

And the light folded into blackness like the turning of a page.

There were no dreams in that blackness, and no guide.

I swam up from the pitchy river to discover myself lying on my back, and over my face a broad sultry sky was swirling.

Not recognizing where I could be, only partially recalling the sequence that had gone before, I tried to raise myself. At once I was capsized by strengthlessness and nausea. Dragging myself over onto my side, I brought up everything that might have been in my belly and, so it seemed, half my guts into the bargain.

This done, I fell back wishing for death.

I ached and hurt as if I had tumbled to the bottom of a cliff and yet survived it. While I was unconscious, plainly someone had been paying me court with his feet; I had been pulled over the ground to this open place and left all night, tied only by my legs and a long halter at my neck to a thing of wood I could not properly make out. There were besides a host of amulets, little beads and pierced bits of metal knotted into the cords that bound me. And on my breast the leather was ripped open, and the one-eyed snake was daubed there in charcoal.

Then I remembered, and fathomed, too, what they were at. And I recollected also Demizdor.

I was stirring in earnest now, and abruptly a bunch of warriors came around me, and gathered where I could watch them. There were about fifteen of them. They seemed afraid and working to hide it, joking and poking at me with their spear-butts. One spit on me. I had no powers of any kind to answer him; he saw as much and spit again, into my eyes.

The other thing, which had put me here, was like a fever I had had. I could not get it straight in my mind—Kotta’s tale, the name of Vazkor, the unleashing of energy. Still, I had come to realize I had slain the chief of the krarl and, from the amulets, that they considered me a magician and strove to protect themselves. No doubt imagining these symbols kept me tame, they began shortly to invent new sports. I was suffering this helplessness on the ground, trying sometimes to lurch aside from the tether and the bindings and the wooden pole, and come at them—though it was useless—when, unexpectedly, the warriors left off their play.

I rolled sideways, and looked. I lay on the hillside above the krarl. I could make out the smoke below from the big cook-fire, now that I had leisure, and the length of the shadows told me it was late in the day. Up along the spine of the hill was coming Seel the seer in his robe of beast-tails and teeth. The wind twitched the tails and clinked the bronze lozenges together. I could not see his face against the vinegar light, but I could guess.