She crackled enthusiastically. Lightning was a simple natural force, and it wasn’t too hard to entertain her.

She set Veltan down on the stormy face of Mother Sea, and he walked the rest of the way to shore. He was just a little surprised when Mother Sea calmed her surface to make the going easier for him. Either she’d recovered from her bout of bad temper, or she realized just how serious the present situation really was. He stepped right along and reached rocky shore in short order. “Thank you, Mother,” he said politely to the source of all life.

“Don’t mention it,” she replied silently within his mind. “Zelana and Eleria are farther south,” she added helpfully.

“Ah. Could you give me some sort of landmark?”

“The coast along here’s fairly level, Veltan, so there isn’t anything that really stands out. Just go on south until you come to a place where there are quite a few floating trees gathered near the shore. The man-things call them ‘ships,’ and they ride on them when they visit me.”

“I’ve seen a few of those, yes.” Veltan squinted at the alien land he’d just reached. “I think I’ll nose around a bit, Mother. The people here won’t know that Zelana’s my sister, so they might tell me things they wouldn’t mention to her. If we can come here, it’s possible that the creatures of the Wasteland can as well, and if they do happen to be here, I think we should know about it.” He hesitated. “There’s something you should probably be aware of, Mother,” he added. “Before very long, I’m going to have to open a channel through Aracia’s ice zone that lies off the south coast of Dhrall. I’m sure that Aracia received your approval before she put it there, but now I’ll need to push it aside so I’ll be able to move the army I just hired to our homeland. Is that going to offend you?”

“Not particularly, no. Aracia didn’t bother to ask me before she put it in place, so it only seems fair for you to brush it aside without her permission as well. Actually I could do it for you, you know. All you had to do was ask.”

“I didn’t want to bother you, Mother. I learned quite some time ago that it’s not a good idea to offend you.”

“I’d forgotten all that silly ‘stripes’ business a long time ago, Veltan. I thought you’d realized that by now.” She paused. “Why did you remain on the moon for so long?” she asked.

“The moon told me that you were still angry with me.”

“And you actually believed her? Oh, Veltan, you should know me better than that by now. You could have come home after a month or so. You didn’t really have to remain on the moon for ten thousand years.”

A dark suspicion intruded on Veltan’s awareness. “Evidently the moon was feeling just a bit lonely,” he muttered. “She kept telling me that you hated me.”

“She lied. Everybody knows that you can’t trust the moon.”

“I didn’t. She seemed so sincere.”

“Oh, Veltan, what am I going to have to do with you to make you grow up? You’re so gullible sometimes. The moon enjoyed your company, so she lied to you to keep you there. Your responsibilities are here, not out there.”

“When all this business with the Vlagh and the creatures of the Wasteland is over, I think I’ll go have a nice long chat with the moon,” he said darkly.

“Whatever entertains you, Veltan. She won’t listen, of course, but if scolding her will make you feel better, I suppose it’s all right. Don’t hurt her, though, and don’t offend her too much. My tides depend on her, so step around her rather carefully. If you think that silly business about stripes made me angry, you’ll come face to face with real anger if something disrupts my tides.”

“I’ll be careful, Mother,” Veltan promised.

Veltan modified his clothing and quickly pushed out his scanty facial hair to make himself look much like an ordinary Maag, and then he went on into a coastal town the Maags called Weros. He drifted unobtrusively around the narrow, muddy streets near the waterfront, listening but saying very little. Since he was listening to thought rather than speech, he could hear whispered conversations from a long way away.

He soon discovered that the Maags were a noisy, rowdy kind of people who spent much of their time in taverns, soaking up beer and grog by the gallons. Fights seemed to break out very often in the area near the waterfront, and it was not uncommon to see a Maag peacefully sleeping in the gutter in that part of Weros.

Veltan strolled along, occasionally looking into taverns as if he might just be looking for some friend or acquaintance. Such conversations as he happened to overhear were usually garbled, since most of the Maags in this part of town were far gone in drink.

He wasn’t really accomplishing very much, but then he heard someone off to his left speaking in a voice that seemed uncontaminated by strong drink.

“It was a good enough plan, I guess,” the speaker was saying to someone else, “but it went all to pieces when Kajak and his men tried to set fire to the ships Hook-Beak had anchored around the Seagull.”

“Exactly what went wrong?” The voice that asked the question chilled Veltan all the way to his core. It was a rasping sort of voice that could not have come from a human mouth.

“I wasn’t there to see it personally,” the first speaker replied. “My hive-mate had been controlling Kajak from the very beginning, but I guess just the thought of all that killing excited it more than it should have, so it was down on the beach—far too close, as it turned out. One of the man-creatures killed it from a great distance away. By the time I got there, most of the survivors had scattered to the winds. I nosed around in Kweta and managed to pick up the gist of the story from various Maags who’d spoken with the survivors before they fled back into the surrounding countryside. It’s fairly obvious that Sorgan—or someone in his crew—knew about Kajak’s entire scheme. As soon as the men in those little rowboats threw torches onto the decks of the ships that were guarding the Seagull, a rainstorm came out of nowhere and doused the fires before they could spread. Then long arrows began to come out of the dark with unbelievable accuracy. I managed to get my hands on the arrow that killed my hive-mate, and the arrowhead was made of stone—like the ones we’ve encountered back in the Land of Dhrall—and it’d been dipped in venom in the same way. That sort of says that the Dhrall who’s been killing my hive-mates for all these years is here, and he’s still killing us. The arrows he used to kill the Maags had iron arrowheads, though. As we’ve come to expect, he’s extremely clever. He disabled Kajak’s ships by killing the steersmen, and he terrorized everybody on the ships by driving his arrows through the head of anyone who went near the tiller. Kajak’s men panicked and went over the sides of their ships. Kajak was screaming at them to come back when he took an arrow right between the eyes, and the whole thing ended right then and there.”