Yet how to reach him, there in the ship, while armed crewmen paced to and fro in the ring of light, on guard against the primitives?
The primitives....
Jarl leaned against the hull, and laughed his drunken laugh again.
The primitives: they held the answer.
Shuffling and stumbling, he worked his way through the piles of debris to the charred ruins of the altar platform. On hands and knees, he searched the trompled sand, probing amid the stinking litter.
Then, at last, his fingers touched the scorched, stiff corpse of a dead primitive, still sprawled in the dirt where the creature had fallen. Fumbling, he stripped off his own garments; replaced them with the corpse's shoulder-plumes and girdle, ankle- and wrist-bands, sandals. Unclamping the hideous metal mask, he clamped it on his own head ... smeared his body thick with sand and ashes.
Then it was done and he was ready, save for a weapon.
A weapon.... He frowned. What weapon was there that he could carry past the guards who paced their posts about rey Gundre's ship?
Wearily, he sagged back on his haunches and let sand trickle through his fingers while he tried to prod his aching brain to action.
The grit piled up in a little heap between his knees, a dusty cone symbolic of this whole thrice-cursed desert world of Womar. It was everywhere, that grit and dust, underfoot and in the air alike. It rasped and smothered, choked and blinded.