He found that he could swim quite easily. Or perhaps it was more like flying. The dense gas buoyed him up, almost balancing the weight of his body, so that it was easy to swoop along, catching a crystal branch and using it as a lever to throw himself forward to the next one.
He went deeper and deeper into the heart of the forbidden Southern Ocean. Nothing stirred. The fairy forest stretched limitless ahead. And Starke was afraid.
Rann came into his mind abruptly. Her face, clearly outlined, was full of mockery.
"I'm going to watch you die, Hugh-Starke-Called-Conan. But before you die, I'll show you something. Look."
Her face dimmed, and in its place was Crom Dhu rising bleak into the red fog, the longships broken and sunk in the harbor, and Rann's fleet around it in a shining circle.
One ship in particular. The flagship. The vision in Starke's mind rushed toward it, narrowed down to the masthead platform. To the woman who stood there, naked, erect, her body lashed tight with thin cruel cords.
A woman with red hair blowing in the slow wind, and blue eyes that looked straight ahead like a falcon's, at Crom Dhu.
Beudag.
Rann's laughter ran across the picture and blurred it like a ripple of ice-cold water.
"You'd have done better," she said, "to take the clean steel when I offered it to you."