"You hunt too near the lake," called a voice. "The demons of the water will trap you."
Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.
"It's Noork," he grunted. "Why do I not see you?"
"I have stolen the skin of a demon," answered the invisible man. "Go to Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones can be trapped and skinned."
"Why you want their skins?" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.
"Go to save Gurn's ..." and here Noork was stumped for words. "To save his father's woman woman," he managed at last. "Father's woman woman called Sarna."
And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake of Uzdon.
To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.
But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.
The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork, the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.