Valentine got unsteadily to his feet. His clothing was soaked, he had lost one boot somewhere, his lips burned with the taste of salt, his lungs seemed full of water, and he felt shaky and dazed; furthermore it was hard to keep upright on this unendingly trembling surface. Looking about, he saw by the dim pale luminosity a kind of vegetation, pliant whip-shaped growths, thick and fleshy and leafless, sprouting from the ground. They too writhed with inner animation. Making his way between two lofty pillars and through an area where ceiling and floor almost met, he caught sight of what seemed to be a pond of some greenish fluid. Beyond that he was unable to see in the dimness.

He walked toward the pond and perceived something exceedingly odd in it: hundreds of brightly colored fish, of the kind that he had seen flitting about in the water before the day’s hunt had begun. They were not swimming now. They were dead and decaying, flesh stripping away from bones, and below them in the pool was a carpet of similar bones, many feet thick.

Suddenly there was a sound as of the roaring of the wind behind him. Valentine turned. The walls of the chamber were in motion, pulling back, the drooping places in the ceiling retracting to create a vast open space; and a torrent of water came rushing toward him, as high as his hips. He barely had time to reach one of the ceiling-pillars and fling his arms tight about it; then the inrushing of water sluiced about him with tremendous force. He held on. It seemed that half the Inner Sea was pouring past him, and for a moment he thought he would lose his grip, but then the flow subsided and the water drained away through slits that materialized abruptly in the floor — leaving in its wake scores of stranded fish. The floor convulsed; the fleshy whips swept the desperate flopping fish across the floor to the greenish pool; and once they entered it they quickly ceased to move.

Suddenly Valentine understood.

I am not dead, he knew, nor is this any place of afterlife. I am within the belly of the dragon. He began to laugh.

Valentine threw back his head and let giant guffaws pour from him. What other response was fitting? To cry? To curse? The vast beast had gobbled him whole at a gulp, had sucked in the Coronal of Majipoor as heedlessly as it might a minnow. But he was too big to be propelled into that digestive pond down there, so here he was, camped on the floor of the dragon’s maw, in this cathedral of an alimentary canal. What now? Hold court for the fishes? Dispense justice among them as they came sweeping in? Settle down here and spend the rest of his days dining on raw fish stolen from the monster’s catch?

It was high comedy, Valentine thought.

But dark tragedy as well, for Sleet and Carabella and young Shanamir and all the others, drawn down to death in the wreck of the Brangalyn, victims of their own sympathies and of his awesomely bad luck. For them he felt only anguish. Carabella’s lilting voice silenced forever, and Sleet’s miraculous skills of hand and eye forever lost, and the rough-souled Skandars no longer to fill the air with whirling multitudes of knives and sickles and torches, and Shanamir cut off before he had fairly begun his life—

Valentine could not bear thinking about them.

For himself, though, there was only cosmic amusement at this absurd plight. To take his mind from grief and pain and loss he laughed again, and stretched his arms wide to the distant walls of the strange room. "Lord Valentine’s Castle, this is!" he cried. "The throne-room! I invite you all to dine with me in the grand feasting-hall!"

Out of the murky distance a booming voice called, "By my gut, I accept that invitation!"

Valentine was astounded beyond all measure.

"Lisamon?"

"No, it’s the Pontifex Tyeveras and his cross-eyed uncle! Is that you, Valentine?"

"Yes! Where are you?"

"In the gizzard of this stinking dragon! Where are you?"

"Not far from you! But I can’t see you!"

"Sing," she called. "Stay where you are and sing, and keep singing! I’ll try to reach you!"

Valentine began, in the loudest voice he could muster:

Again the roaring sound came; again the great creature’s gullet opened to admit a cascade of sea-water and a horde of fish; again Valentine clung to a pillar as the influx hit him.

"Oh — by the Divine’s toes," Lisamon cried. "Hang on, Valentine, hang on!"

He hung on until the force was spent, and slumped against the pillar, soaked, panting. Somewhere in the distance the giantess called to him, and he called back. Her voice grew nearer. She urged him to keep singing, and he did:

He heard her occasionally bawling a snatch of the ballad herself, with amiably bawdy embellishments, as she approached through the intricacies of the dragon’s interior, and then he looked up and saw by the faint luminous light her enormous form looming above him. He smiled at her. She smiled, and laughed, and he laughed with her, and they clasped one another in a wet, slippery embrace.

But the sight of one who had survived put him in mind again of those who surely had not, and plunged him once more into grief and shame. He turned away, biting at his lip.

"My lord?" she said puzzledly.

"Only we two remain, Lisamon."

"Yes, and praises be for that!"

"But the others — they’d live now, if they hadn’t been so stupid as to go chasing across the world with me—"

She caught him by the arm. "My lord, will mourning them bring them back to life, if dead they be?"

"I know all that. But—"

"We are safe. If we have lost our friends, my lord, that’s cause for sorrow indeed, but not for guilt. They followed you of their own free choice, eh, my lord? And if their time has come, well, it is because their time has come, and how could that have been otherwise? Will you give up this grief, my lord, and rejoice that we are safe?"

He shrugged. "Safe, yes. And yes, grief brings no one back to life. But how safe are we? How long can we survive in here, Lisamon?"

"Long enough for me to cut us free." She pulled her vibration-sword out of its sheath.

Amazed, he said, "You think you can hack a path to the outside?"

"Why not? I’ve cut through worse."

"At the first touch of that thing to the dragon’s flesh it’ll dive to the bottom of the sea. We’re safer in here than trying to swim up from five miles underneath."

"It was said of you that you are an optimist at the darkest time," the warrior-woman declared. "Where’s that optimism now? The dragon lives at the surface. It might thrash a bit, but it won’t dive. And if we do emerge five miles down? At least it’s a quick death. Can you breathe this foul muck forever? Can you wander for long inside a single giant fish?"

Gingerly Lisamon Hultin touched the tip of the vibration sword to the side wall The thick moist flesh quivered a bit but did not recoil. "You see? It’s got no nerves in here," she said, driving the weapon a little deeper and turning it to excavate a cavity. There were tremors and twitches. She kept digging. "Do you think anyone else was swallowed with us?" she asked.

"Yours was the only voice I’ve heard."

"And I only yours. Phaugh, what a monster! I tried to hold you as we went overboard, but when we were struck the last time I lost my grip on you. We came to the same place, anyway." She had by now opened a hole a foot deep and two feet wide in the side of the dragon’s stomach. It seemed hardly to feel the surgery at all. We are like maggots gnawing within it, Valentine thought. Lisamon Hultin said, "While I cut, you see if you can find anyone else. But don’t stray too far, hear?"