He added, “Aye and there are many even in my own subject land of Valkis and elsewhere who secretly hate Sark because of the Dhuvians.”
“The Dhuvians?” Carse repeated. “You mentioned them before. Who are they?”
Boghaz snorted. “Look, friend, it’s all very well to pretend ignorance but that’s carrying it too far! There’s no tribesman from so far away that he doesn’t know and fear the accursed Serpent!”
So the Serpent was a generic name from the mysterious Dhuvians? Why were they called so, Carse wondered?
Carse became suddenly aware that the woman Swimmer was looking at him fixedly. For a startled moment he had the eery sensation that she was looking into his thoughts.
“Shaikh is watching us—best be quiet now,” Boghaz whispered hastily. “Everyone knows that the Halflings can read the mind a little.”
If that was so, Carse thought grimly, Shallah the Swimmer must have found profoundly astonishing matter in his own thoughts.
He had been pitchforked into a wholly unfamiliar Mars, most of which was still a mystery to him.
But if Boghaz spoke truth, if those strange objects in the Tomb of Rhiannon were instruments of a great lost scientific power, then even though he was a slave he held the key to a secret coveted by all this world.
That secret could be his death. He must guard it jealously till he won free of this brutal bondage. For a resolve to regain his freedom and a grim growing hatred of the swaggering Sarks were all that he was sure of now.