Incredible, surely, and yet that cryptic Quiru inscription—fascinated by the thing, despite its aura of danger, Carse took two steps toward it.
He heard the swift scrape of sandals on the stone floor behind him as Penkawr moved fast. Carse knew instantly that he had blundered in turning his back on the disgruntled little thief. He started to whirl and raise the sword.
Penkawr’s thrusting hands jabbed his back before he could complete the movement. Carse felt himself pitched into the brooding blackness.
He felt a terrible rending shock through each atom of his body, and then the world seemed to fall away from him.
“ Go share Rhiannon’s doom, Earthman! I told you I could get another partner!”
Penkawr’s snarling shout came to him from a great distance as he tumbled into a black, bottomless infinity.
II. Alien World
Carse seemed to plunge through a nighted abyss, buffeted by all the shrieking winds of space. An endless, endless fall with the timelessness and the choking horror of a nightmare.
He struggled with the fierce revulsion of an animal trapped by the unknown. His struggle was not physical, for in that blind and screaming nothingness his body was useless. It was a mental fight, the man’s inner core of courage reasserting itself, willing itself to stop this nightmare fall through darkness.
And then as he fell, a more terrifying sensation shook him. A feeling that he was not alone in this nightmare plunge through infinity, that a dark strong, pulsating presence was close beside him, grasping for him, groping with eager fingers for his brain.