And then he fell forward into a blackness that was not total and found himself squatting in the shallow muck of a sullen underground river. Or perhaps that lightless roof overhead was but the matted stems and roots of the sunless vines of the fog seas. He saw a faint luminous glow that came from the river. Thousands of tiny light-producing aquatic plant-animals swarmed in the depths.
He saw a raft of tied buoyant agan stems, huge two-foot sections ten and eleven feet long, and poling it along with a tough spear of hide-bound bone, was a woman in a scant, ragged tunic. At the same instant she saw him.
"In Lalal's name," she demanded, "why do you sit in the water so? Are not there few enough warriors in the two caves of the Outcasts without offering yourself thus freely to the water slirans?"
"In Lalal's name," she demanded, "why do you sit in the water so?"
Ho Dyak realized that this was one of the blinded Outcasts, turned out to die in the jungles because they dared question the rule of the One Orst and his priestly underlings.
"I am Ho Dyak," he said, "who is hunted by the black-robed ones, the orsts."