Now the Hollow Lands were vanished from maps and charts. Now the hunting clans and townsMrem who’d lived there were either fugitives from their homes or, most of them, vanished beneath waters Aedonniss only knew how many bowshots deep.

Rantan Taggah snarled again. Few of the Mrem had much use for water or for travel across it under any circumstances. And that said nothing of the reptilian horrors like the one he’d seen, creatures that preyed on anything they could reach. The Clan of the Claw-and the handful of survivors from the drowned Hollow Lands-would not, could not, rejoin their kind by sailing across the New Water.

The only trouble with that was, the Clan of the Claw couldn’t stay where it was, either. Rantan Taggah turned away from the New Water and toward the south: toward the Warm Lands, the lands where the Liskash flourished best. The pupils in his emerald eyes widened from slits almost to circles, as if he were confronting his folk’s foes in truth, not merely in thought.

His clan was rich, as these things went. Peering south, he saw broad herds of horned bundor and krelprep and shambling hamsticorns. The Clan of the Claw did not lack for meat or milk or leather or hair and wool.

But one clan, alone (or as near as made no difference), could not hope to stand against the Liskash nobles and the weaker but still dangerous reptiles the nobles could gather to fight at their side (or rather, under their feet). Not for nothing did the Mrem picture the demons who opposed Aedonniss as being formed in the image of the Liskash. Maybe it was the other way around: maybe the Liskash looked like demons. Priestesses and savants argued about that, too. Savants, of course, would argue about anything. It was part of what made them savants.

There were times when Rantan Taggah enjoyed arguing as much as anybody else-more than most males. What the Clan of the Claw had to do now, though, was not a matter for argument. He didn’t think so, anyhow. But he was only too certain plenty of other males-and females, too-would be ready, even eager, to argue with him about that.