"It is enough for me. Who can say they know of more than themselves? I simply know I am Moljar. I live. I have purpose. The pelt of Alhone. A pledge I must keep. Beyond that—nothing."
She tossed wet hair from her eyes. "Maybe your barbaric code is best after all. The System's returned to barbarism. Decay, ruin. Why not a philosophy to fit it? I rather like you. If you only weren't a half-breed."
He grinned. "If you only were not a mutant." His eyes caught a dark, flat floating object some distance away. A blurred, indistinct outline. He pointed.
"Looks like something large enough to float us," she said. Then she cried out suddenly and pointed over his shoulder.
His knife was in his hands as his legs churned him around in the brackish water. The sea-serpent's flat head arched high above them, dripping an avalanche of weed and water upon their upturned faces. Its sleek, sinuous body shot upward, a monster with fanged jaws and darting forked tongue, with bulging eyes, and bony head and snout.
"Keep diving," yelled Moljar. "It won't open its mouth under water." He watched her surface dive like a fish, then followed himself just as the bullet-like head of the hissing hydrophidian slashed down.
Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about them. The water was a churning white foam. Moljar tried repeatedly to sink his knife into the under-belly of the serpent. But it was like soft but tough plastic, only slightly resilient.
Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about them.