And again he had that sensation of a strong, living presence close beside him in the awful plunge, of something grasping at his brain with a dark and dreadful eagerness.
“No!” Carse whispered in his dream. “ No!”
He husked that refusal again—a refusal of something that the dark presence was asking him to do, something veiled and frightful.
But the pleading became more urgent, more insistent, and whatever it was that pleaded seemed now far stronger than in the Tomb of Rhiannon. Carse uttered a shuddering cry.
“ No, Rhiannon!”
He found himself suddenly awake, looking dazedly along the moonlit oar-bank.
Callus and the overseer were striding along the catwalk, lashing the slaves to wakefulness. Boghaz was looking at Carse with a strange expression.
“You cried out to the Cursed One!” he said.
The other slave at their oar was staring at him too and so were the luminous eyes of the two furry shadows chained to the catwalk.
“A bad dream,” Carse muttered. “That was all.”