"Will you let me take care of Rann when the time comes?"
His fingers groped hungrily upward, closed on an imaginary figure of her, pressed, tightened, choked.
Linnl said, "She's yours. I'd like the pleasure, but you have as much if not more of a revenge to take. Come along. We start now. You've been asleep for one entire period."
Starke let himself down gingerly. He didn't want to break a leg off. He felt if someone touched him he might disintegrate.
He managed to let the tide handle him, do all the work. He swam carefully after Linnl down three passageways where an occasional silver inhabitant of the city slid by.
Drifting below them in a vast square hall, each gravitating but imprisoned by leg-shackles, the warriors of Falga looked up with pale cold eyes at Starke and Linnl. Occasional discharges of light-fish from interstices in the walls, passed luminous, fleeting glows over the warriors. The light-fish flirted briefly in a long shining rope that tied knots around the dead faces and as quickly untied them. Then the light-fish pulsed away and the red color of the sea took over.
Bathed in wine, thought Starke, without humor. He leaned forward.
"Men of Falga!"
Linnl plucked a series of harp-threads.
"Aye." A deep suggestion of sound issued from a thousand dead lips.