Carse reminded, “I told you I come from so far that this is all a new world to me.”
Boghaz’ fat face showed mixed incredulity and puzzlement. Finally he said, “I can’t decide whether you’re really what you say or whether you’re pretending childish ignorance for your own reasons.”
He shrugged. “Whichever is the case you could soon get the story from the others. I might as well be truthful.”
He spoke in a rapid undertone, watching Carse shrewdly. “Even a remote barbarian will have heard of the superhuman Quiru, who long ago possessed all power and scientific wisdom. And of how the Cursed One among them, Rhiannon, sinned by teaching too much wisdom to the Dhuvians.
“Because of what that led to the Quiru left our world, going no man knows whither. But before they left they seized the sinner Rhiannon and locked him in a hidden tomb and locked in with him his instruments of awful power.
“Is it wonderful that all Mars has hunted that Tomb for an age? Is it strange that either the Empire of Sark or the Sea-Kings would do anything to possess the Cursed One’s lost powers? And now that you have found the Tomb, do I, Boghaz, blame you for being cautious with your secret?”
Carse ignored the last. He was remembering now—remembering those strange instruments of jewels and prisms and metal in Rhiannon’s Tomb.
Were those really the secrets of an ancient, great science—a science that had long been lost to the half-barbaric Mars of this age?
He asked, “Who are these Sea-Kings? I take it that they’re enemies of the Sarks?”
Boghaz nodded. “Sark rules the lands east, north and south of the White Sea. But in the west are small free kingdoms of hardy sea-rovers like the Khonds and their Sea-Kings defy the power of Sark.”