“How is it that your people are so unadventurous? I seem to be the only one travelling from curiosity.”
“What do you mean by ‘your people’?”
“True—you don’t know that I don’t belong to your planet at all. I’ve come from another world, Polecrab.”
“What to find?”
“I came here with Krag and Nightspore—to follow Surtur. I must have fainted the moment I arrived. When I sat up, it was night and the others had vanished. Since then I’ve been travelling at random.”
Polecrab scratched his nose. “You haven’t found Surtur yet?”
“I’ve heard his drum taps frequently. In the forest this morning I came quite close to him. Then two days ago, in the Lusion Plain, I saw a vision—a being in man’s shape, who called himself Surtur.”
“Well, maybe it was Surtur.”
“No, that’s impossible,” replied Maskull reflectively. “It was Crystalman. And it isn’t a question of my suspecting it—I know it.”
“How?”