he bank, also in ruins. He stood up unsteadily, then waded through
the shallow water in which he'd regained consciousness, over to the
wreck of the royal barge. The fingers of his right hand were poised
inches from the hilt of his whip-sword. Slay Bram Forest and the girl
if the wreck hadn't already killed them? He shook his head. Bram
Forest knew more about this strange place, this world of the pink sun
and the green sun, than he did.

* * * * *

He climbed over the wreckage, and finally came upon the two bodies. He
went down on his knees beside them. They were covered with blood. They
were broken--broken being the only word that could describe them. They
had been crushed, perhaps by falling timber, perhaps by the bier of
Jlomec as it hurtled over the side. There probably was not a bone in
either of their bodies, at least a major bone, which had not been
crushed.

They were dead.

With a craftiness which surprised even himself, Hultax remembered the
dead Bram Forest's words. It was the bracelet with the shining disc
which gave Bram Forest the power to appear and disappear at will, as
Retoc had described. Or, as Bram Forest had put it, to journey between
the worlds. Carefully, Hultax took the bracelet--it was miraculously
intact--from the crushed, broken arm of Bram Forest's corpse. He
circled his own arm with it and felt, or imagined he felt, an
instantaneous source of power surge through his body. Without looking
back at the broken bodies of the man and woman who had found love and,
finding it, died in each other's arms, he made his way from the river
bank across a pleasant green meadow. Far in the distance he saw a dark
blur which looked like a forest. It was many miles away, almost at the
limit of vision.

Yet, incredibly, it seemed to rush up at him. It was not merely that
Hultax the Abarian walked with a warrior's long stride toward the
forest. It was as if the forest rushed toward him. A different world.
He remembered Bram Forest's words vaguely. A warped world? Something
like that. Naturally, Hultax was afraid. This was the Place of the
Dead, wasn't it? But still, Bram Forest's cool if little-understood
scientific explanation quieted his fear. Besides, didn't he have the
bracelet-disc-amulet? What could happen to him now?

Bylanus the Golden Ape, only two-thousand seven hundred years old,
quite young as Golden Apes went, saw the wreck of the barge from a
great distance. He