For almost a mile it extended upward, its delicate tendrils touching the restless sea and the fertile moistness of the land alike to draw life from them. It offered no resistance to the passage of men or ships; yet it shielded them from the harshness of the vast ringed sun of Osar. And here four million Wetlanders lived and built their dank massive-walled cities. Half of them were Tarns, ruled by the Council of Consars, and across the vastness of the Tarn Sea four other smaller kingdoms fought and squabbled over their narrow strips of vurth-shielded Wetland. The land was overcrowded and so it came about that a few hardy adventurers pushed out into the Drylands. At first they followed the rivers, their bodies slowly toughening to the actinic rays of the direct sunlight, and later they struck out into the unknown dryness of grassy plains and deserts. They fought the huge apish Drylanders and ate the hairless horned ulfo of the plains and the woolly bladts of the barren hills.... And they found Lake Gron, where a large central island offered new homes for thousands of impoverished Consars and their sarifs. So it was that endless series of wagon trains, drawn by domesticated Dryland beasts, maars and ulfos, pushed up the Aba River, and the Gron River beyond the dam at Aba, to the upland lake. And the hardy men of the frontier guided them--even as Earthmen ten centuries before, and a thousand light-years distant, had guided their effete Eastern countrymen into the Rockies and beyond.... Hardan stirred at last and climbed, refreshed, from his pool. Darkness had come and a dozen fires blazed merrily within the ringed double walls of the roofed wagons. He gathered up his weapons and clothing, wearing only the thin inner jerkin and trunks against the dryness of the night air, and went to the wagons. Before dawn the wheels were rumbling and grinding up over the rock-strewn ridge above the river headed out into the eastern grasslands. The sleeping tanks, where the Wetlanders slept on moist elevated pads of vurth, were full and the spare water tanks were loaded as well. A dry trek of three, possibly four, days lay ahead of them before they could reach the eastward branching of the Aba River. Hardan and three of the young sarifs stayed behind as the train moved away, readying the ten oldest wagons and the discarded equipment for the fire that was to help cover their tracks. Later parties of Wetlanders would find the ashes of wagons and the fire-blasted skeletons of men beside the trail and presume this had been a massacre by the apish barbarians of the plains. "I wish the council of sarifs had ordered the death of Nitka Porn last night," said a blocky young sarif uneasily. "If they escape during the night there will be trouble." Hardan touched his torch to the wagon they approached. The others were already ablaze. Together they swung into the saddles of their snorting maars. Only then did he speak.