She lolled her beautiful head to face him, and said, quizzically, “And you wouldn’t try to stop me? Perhaps by slashing open my loins with that ... thing.”
She dipped her head to indicate the scythe.
“Why should I?” he said. “You must understand, Madam Shekalane, that these waters are infested with—”
Something flapped out of the gloom suddenly, hovering between them for little more than an eye blink—a ghostly white figure about the size of a full-grown bat. No, two figures, one white, the other black. Dravidian saw that they were holding something, something long and dark—before Sthulhu squawked and launched from his perch, chasing the specter back into the mists.
And yet Dravidian had had an image burned into his retinas from the encounter: a red emblem, or monogram more properly, con
