Her mouth tasted of fear. Sick and shuddering, she sat hunched against the stem, groggily recollecting her thoughts as fire racked her cramped muscles. Light. The sun was high. The rain had ceased; the mist still hung. She was on the river. She was not on the river. In lost confusion, Teres looked about her. The rowboat no longer shot along the current; the riverbank did not rise against the sky. Instead her craft drifted listlessly through a tepid mire, and all about her rose a chaotic wilderness of slime-laden mud and vine-strangled trees. Kane's warning! The darkness, her slumber! When the Neltoben River had risen in flood, its mud-choked South Branch had once more flowed with rushing water. While she slept, the boat had been caught in this deviant current. She had drifted into Kranor-Rill! Bleakly she recalled the dark tales of this unwholesome morass... the deadly creatures who crawled through its labyrinth, the treacherous stretches of unseen quicksand, its ruined city, said to have been built in the Earth's lost dawn, and the fearsome Rillyti, who conducted certain abominable rites with captured humans in the fastness of the swamp.
