Nona, from her dolphin beside mine, had reached out and gripped my arm. I followed her gaze, caught a glimpse of a figure hovering amid the air-pods overhead and just in advance of us. A man, coming down now toward us, swimming cautiously.
My heart leaped; my grip on my sword tightened. Then I saw it was a Marinoid—one of my own couriers stationed here to watch the enemy pass.
He joined us. “Og,” he said, “and his black fishes were last to pass. I would have given my own life to the fishes could I have killed him. But it did not seem possible.”
I sent the courier back to Rax and we went on as before. Out of the forest now, across an open stretch, with the lights of the Maagogs still before us.
Then—Gahna. There it stood, leaning sidewise in the press of current. Traveling so slowly, we could feel the sweep of the moving water. A gentle current here; but just beyond Gahna, I knew there was an opening in the side wall of rock which bordered in the Marinoid domain. It was a large opening leading diagonally downward—an opening larger than the city itself—and into it the water rushed swiftly.
“Wait!” whispered Nona.
We halted our mounts, and waited while the last of the occupying Maagogs dispersed themselves about the city. From this distance we could see their lights but hear no sounds. Evidences of the recent half-breed massacre of the Marinoid population, were about us. Broken, inert bodies lying here and there on the sea-bottom; and the smell of blood in the water.
I shuddered to remember it. Gahna, bloody from end to end—a city of death now; and these triumphant Maagogs occupying it, making it a base from which to attack Rax.
At last they were all in. Cautiously, we advanced further. Moving lights on the city’s outer surface—a murmur of sounds. Nothing more.
A few moments and we were under the city! In its cellar, let me say. No one lived down here; sand under our feet; woven vegetation twenty feet overhead—a cellar ceiling which formed the lowest tier of the city.