Darkness now had come, and within the darkness lay a weird, glowing core of purplish-green light that seemed almost to have been kindled by the force of air flowing over air. The river had turned altogether black and its surface was rippling and swelling alarmingly as sudden calamitous changes in the air pressure above it tugged or thrust against it. Sand pelted down in wild cyclonic sprays, etching pock-marked craters on the heaving water. Carabella gagged and choked; Valentine fought back an overwhelming dizziness; the floater bucked and reared in a berserk, unruly way, nose rising and slapping down against the water and rising again, and again slapping down, thwack thwack thwack. The cascading sand etched patterns of a curious loveliness in the windows, but rapidly it became all but impossible to see through them, though Valentine had the hazy impression that the floater just to the left of his was standing on its tail, balanced immobile in an impossible position for a frozen moment before starting to slip down into the river.

Then everything outside the floater was invisible, and the only sounds that could be heard were the booming of the wind and the steady, abrasive drumbeat of the sand against the floater's hull.

An odd tranquilizing giddiness began to possess Valentine. It seemed to him that the floater was pivoting rhythmically now along its longitudinal axis, jerking from side to side in ever more abrupt yawing shrugs.

Very likely, he realized, the ground-effect rotors were losing whatever little purchase they had had on the river's wildly unstable surface, and in another few moments the vehicle would surely flip over.

"This river is accursed," said Carabella.

Yes, Valentine thought. So it did seem. The river was under some dark spell, or else the Steiche was itself some malevolent spirit that sought his doom. And now we will all drown, he thought. But he was curiously calm.

The river, which nearly had me once but somehow allowed me to be cast forth to safety, he told himself, has waited all this while for a second chance. And now that chance has come.

It did not matter. In the final analysis nothing really mattered. Life, death, peace, war, joy, sadness: they were all one and the same, words without meaning, mere noises, empty husks. Valentine felt no regret for anything. They had asked him to serve, and he had served. Surely he had done his best. He had shirked no task, betrayed no trust, forsworn no oath. Now would he return to the source, for the winds had driven the river wild, and the river would devour them all, and so be it: it did not matter. It did not matter.

"Valentine!"

A face, inches from his own. Eyes looking into his. A voice, crying a name that he thought he knew, and crying it again.

"Valentine! Valentine!"

A hand gripping his arm. Shaking him, pushing him.

Whose face? Whose eyes? Whose voice? Whose hand?

"He seems in a trance, Elidath."