But also within him there resounded the music of the water-king Maazmoorn. He had been so close, this time, to the ultimate breakthrough, to the true contact with that inconceivably gigantic creature of the sea.

Now—tonight—

Carabella remained awake for a while to talk. That ancient Ghayrog woman haunted her, too, and she dwelled almost obsessively on the power of Aximaan Threysz's words, the eerie compelling force of her sightless eyes, the mysteries of her prophecy. Then finally she kissed Valentine lightly on the lips and burrowed down into the darkness of the enormous bed they shared.

He waited a few endless minutes. Then he took forth the tooth of the sea dragon.

— Maazmoorn?

He held the tooth so tightly its edges dug deep into the flesh of his hand. Urgently he centered all the power of his mind on the bridging of the gulf of thousands of miles between Prestimion Vale and the waters—where? At the Pole?—where the sea-king lay hidden.

— Maazmoorn?

— I hear you, land brother, Valentine-brother, king-brother.

At last!

— You know who I am?

— I know you. I knew your father. I knew many before you.

— You spoke with them?

— No. You are the first for that. But I knew them. They did not know me, but I knew them. I have lived many circlings of the ocean, Valentine-brother. And I have watched all that has occurred upon the land.

— You know what is occurring now?

— I know.

— We are being destroyed. And you are a party to our destruction.

—No.

— You guide the Piurivar rebels in their war against us. We know that. They worship you as gods, and you teach them how to ruin us.

—No, Valentine-brother.

— I know they worship you.

— Yes, that they do, for we are gods. But we do not support them in their rebellion. We give them only what we would give anyone who comes to us for nourishment, but it is not our purpose to see you driven from the world.

— Surely you must hate us!

— No, Valentine-brother.

— We hunt you. We kill you. We eat your flesh and drink your blood and use your bones for trinkets.

— Yes, that is true. But why should we hate you, Valentine-brother? Why?

Valentine did not for the moment reply. He lay cold and trembling with awe beside the sleeping Carabella, pondering all that he had heard, the calm admission by the water-king that the dragons were gods—what could that mean?—and the denial of complicity in the rebellion, and now this astounding insistence that the dragons bore the Majipoori folk no anger for all that had been committed against them. It was too much all at once, a turbulent inrush of knowledge where before there had been only the sound of bells and a sense of a distant looming presence.

— Are you incapable of anger, then, Maazmoorn?

— We understand anger.

— But do not feel it?