Blindly, still gripping the jewelled sword, he leaped up and turned to re-enter the buried Tomb of Rhiannon.
“I can go back the way I came, back through that hole in the continuum.”
He stopped a convulsive shudder running through his frame. He could not make himself face again that bubble of glittering gloom, that dreadful plunge through inter-dimensional infinity.
He dared not. He had not the Quiru’s wisdom. In that perilous plunge across time mere chance had flung him into his past age. He could not count on chance to return him to his own far-future age.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m here in the distant past of Mars and I’m here to stay.”
He turned back around and gazed out again upon that incredible vista. He stayed there a long time, unmoving. The sea birds came and looked at him and flashed away on their sharp white wings. The shadows lengthened.
His eyes swung again to the white towers of Jekkara down in the distance, queenly in the sunlight above the harbor. It was not the Jekkara he knew, the thieves’ city of the Low Canals, rotting away into dust, but it was a link to the familiar and Carse desperately needed such a link.
He would go to Jekkara. And he would try not to think. He must not think at all or surely his mind would crack.
Carse gripped the haft of the jeweled sword and started down the grassy slope of the hill.