There was the source of the smoke odor, but what lay at the base of those columns and clouds was invisible just beyond the horizon. Still, whatever might be there was more likely to be a source of help than the empty ocean nearer at hand. Or at least it could provide information about what sort of beings inhabited this particular Dimension. Steadily, taking his time and conserving his energy, he began to swim towards the smoke columns.

It was well over an hour before what lay at the base of the columns lifted over the horizon. Drifting sluggishly on the sea, five ships were burning. Around them like scum on a stagnant pond floated a wide circle of wreckage-spares, rigging, planking, chests and boxes, overturned boats, human bodies. Blade was elated. Here was a better chance of survival than swimming about aimlessly in the sea. He quickened his strokes. In a few more minutes, he reached the fringes of the circle, climbed on to the bottom of an overturned boat and looked more closely at the burning ships.

He now noticed that they were of two distinctly different kinds. Two of them were large, broad-beamed merchantman types, with high castles fore and aft and bluff bows. As far as he could tell from what he could see through the smoke and what the battle had left standing, they had possessed two masts, with two or possibly three square sails on each.

The other three ships were smaller, low-slung, with jutting bows apparently ending in rams. They also had two masts, but lanteen-rigged, and there were definitely oar ports in their low sides amidships.

Merchantmen and war galleys-two distinct types. Two distinct sides perhaps? And with all five ships on fire, and wreckage and bodies littering the sea, that suggested a recent battle. Blade found himself scanning the horizon again. The survivors of such a battle, if any, might not be welcome company for a man naked and unarmed. It was time to see what he could scrounge in the way of survival gear from the flotsam spread out over more than a square mile of ocean.