His senses left him, and in his brain, like a lost sun returned from yesteryear, he beheld the face of Dalili; and with Dalili, in a bright phantasmagoria, there came the happy days that had been ere his bereavement. The visions passed, and he awoke struggling, with the bitterness of the sea in his mouth, and its loudness in his ears, and its rushing darkness all about him. And, as his senses quickened, he became aware of a form that swam close behind him, and arms that supported him amid the waters.
He lifted his head in the twilight, and saw dimly the pale neck and half-averted face of his rescuer, and the long black hair that floated from wave to wave. Touching the body at his side, he knew it for that of a woman. Mazed and wildered though he was by the sea’s buffeting, a sense of something familiar stirred within him; and he thought that he had known, somewhere, at some former time, a girl with like hair and similar curving of cheek; but he could not remember clearly. And, trying to remember, he touched the woman again, and felt in his fingers a strange coldness from her naked body. At this, he wondered a little, but forgot his wonder in the wildness of that sea through which he was borne by the swimmer.
Miraculous was the woman’s strength and skill, for she rode easily the dreadful mounting and falling of the surges. Yadar, floating as in a cradle upon her arm, beheld the nearing shore from the billows’ summits; and hardly it seemed that any swimmer, however able, could win alive through the ponderous cataracting of that surf on the stony strand. Dizzily, at the last, they were hurled upward, as if the surf would fling them against the highmost crag; but, as if checked by some enchantment, the wave fell with a slow, lazy undulation; and Yadar and his rescuer, released by its ebbing, lay unhurt on a shelfy beach.
Uttering no word, nor turning to look at Yadar, the woman rose swiftly to her feet; and, beckoning the nomad prince to follow, she moved away in the deathly blue dusk that had fallen upon Naat. Yadar, arising and following the woman, heard a strange and eerie chanting of voices above the sea’s tumult, and saw a fire that burned weirdly, with the colors of driftwood, at some distance before him in the dusk. Straightly, toward the fire and the voices, the woman walked in the fashion of a somnambulist, and Yadar, with eyes grown used to that doubtful twilight, saw that the fire blazed in the mouth of a low-sunken cleft between crags that overloomed the beach; and behind the fire, like tall, evilly posturing shadows, there stood the dark-clad figures of those who chanted.
Now memory returned to him of that which the galley’s captain had said regarding the people of Naat and their necromantic practices; and with the memory came misgiving. For the very sound of that chanting, albeit in an unknown language, seemed to suspend the heartward flowing of his veins, and to set the tomb’s chillness in his marrow. And though he was little learned in such matters, the thought came to him that the words uttered were of sorcerous import and power.
Going forward, the woman bowed low before the chanters, in such fashion as a slave, and stood waiting submissively. The men, who were three in number, continued their incantation without pausing, and they seemed not to perceive the presence of Yadar as he entered the firelight. Gaunt as starved herons they were, and great of stature, with a common likeness, as of brothers; and sharply ridged were their faces, where shadows inhabited their hollow cheeks, and their sunk eyes were visible only by red sparks reflected within them from the blaze. And their eyes, as they chanted, seemed to glare afar on the darkling sea and on things hidden by dusk and distance. And Yadar, coming before them, was aware of swift horror and repugnance that made his gorge rise as if he had encountered, in a place given wholly to death, the powerful evil ripeness of corruption.
High leaped the fire as he neared it, with a writhing of tongues that were like blue and green serpents coiling amid serpents of yellow. And the light flickered brightly on the face and breasts of that woman who had saved him from the Black River; and Yadar, beholding her clearly, knew why she had stirred within him a dim remembrance: for she was none other than his lost love, Dalili!
Forgetting the presence of the dark chanters, and the ill renown of that isle to which the seas had brought him, he sprang forward to clasp his beloved, crying out her name in an agony of rapture. But she answered not his cry, and responded to his embrace only with a faint trembling. And Yadar, sorely perplexed and dismayed, was aware of the deathly coldness that crept into his fingers and smote through his very raiment from her flesh. Mortally pale and languid were the lips that he kissed, and it seemed that no breath emerged between them, nor was there any rising and falling of the wan bosom against his. In the wide, beautiful eyes that she turned to him, he found only a drowsy voidness, and such recognition as a sleeper gives when but half awakened, relapsing quickly into slumber thereafter.
“Art thou indeed Dalili?” he said. And she answered somnolently, in a toneless, indistinct voice, “I am Dalili.”
To Yadar, baffled by mystery, chilled, forlorn and aching, it was as if she had spoken from a land farther away than all the weary leagues of his search throughout Zothique. Fearing to understand the change that had come upon her, he said tenderly:
“Surely thou knowest me, for I am thy lover, the Prince Yadar, who has sought thee through half the kingdoms of Earth, and has sailed afar for thy sake on the unshored sea.” And she replied like one bemused by some heavy drug, in a soulless voice, as if echoing his words without true comprehension: “Surely I know thee.” And to Yadar there was no comfort in her reply; and his concernment was not allayed by the parrotings with which she answered all his other loving speeches and queries.
He knew not that the three chanters had all ceased their incantation; and verily, he had forgotten their presence in his finding of Dalili. But as he stood holding the girl closely, the men came toward him, and one of them clutched his arm. And the man hailed him by name and addressed him, albeit uncouthly, in a language commonly spoken throughout many parts of Zothique, saying: “We bid thee welcome to the Isle of Naat, from which no living traveller may return.”
Yadar, feeling a dread suspicion, interrogated the man fiercely: “What manner of beings are ye? And why is Dalili in this place? And what have ye done to her?”
“I am Vacharn, a necromancer,” the man replied readily, “and these others with me are my sons, Vokal and Uldulla, who are also necromancers. We dwell in a house behind the crags, and are attended by the drowned people that our sorcery has called up from the sea to a semblance of life and animation. Among our servants is this girl, Dalili, together with the whole crew of that ship in which she sailed from Oroth. For, like the vessel in which thou camest later, the ship was blown far asea and was taken by the ineluctable Black River, and was wrecked finally on the reefs of Naat. And my sons and I, chanting that powerful formula which requires no use of circle or pentacle, summoned ashore the drowned company: even as we have now summoned the crew of that other vessel, from which thou alone wert saved alive by the necromantic swimmer at our command, for a certain purpose.”
Vacharn ended, and stood peering into the dusk intently; and Yadar at that moment heard behind him a noise of slow footsteps coming upward across the shingle from the surf. Turning, he saw emerge from the livid twilight the old captain of that merchant galley in which he had voyaged so unwillingly to Naat; and behind the captain were the sailors and oarsmen. With the paces of sleep-walkers they approached the firelight, the sea-water dripping heavily from their raiment and hair, and drooling from their mouths. Some were sorely bruised, and others came stumbling or dragging with limbs broken by the rocks on which that torrential sea had flung them; and on all their faces was the ghastly look of men who have suffered the doom of drowning.