For a moment their eyes clashed. But the questions held their own bleak answers. Muttering, half-sullen, the big Jovian moved aside.
Jarl said: "I'll be back, Ungo." Silently, he dropped out the hatch to the ground and strode towards the dim lights that marked the ancient, scabrous buildings which fringed the port.
But every step was a coal for the dull fire of tension that burned within him. Would he really be back? Would he ever see the carrier again, or Ungo?
Or Ylana....
He wondered.
The native quarter closed in about him, heavy with the stench of age and rotting garbage. Vocorn pipes wailed, thin and minor, and strange eyes stared at him, luminous in the descending night. Once he stepped shuddering into the protoplasmic slime of some primitive life-form as it writhed its way across the mud-choked cobbles; once, through a doorway, he glimpsed a snake-woman's sinuous dancing in the light of flaring thes-wood torches.
But he hurried on, still wrapped and trapped in his own dark thoughts.
Again and again, in spite of him, his mind flashed back to Wassreck ... Ktar Wassreck, tortured genius, who'd come for him at Horla.
Could betrayal find a haven in such a man?