Other bleeders began unchaining the chosen forty. They were forced to stand; many at first went crashing back down to the bloody deck, their legs too weak and cramped to hold their weight. Eventually all of them, including number Twenty-Eight, began shuffling stiffly toward the stairway where the bizarre Harlequin stood waiting. Twenty-Nine tried to give his seatmate a look of encouragement as he walked away, but Twenty-Eight wasn't looking at him. As the slaves began climbing the stairs, the Harlequin examined each of them closely.

Another of the chosen men was weeping openly. He was pulled out of the line. The Harlequin drew him closer.

"Do not fear," he said, almost compassionately. "You go to a far better place." With that he released the man to the bleeders, and they forced him up the stairway. "Choose two more." The bleeder did so, and the Harlequin followed the last of them up the stairs.

It was at that moment Twenty-Nine realized things had changed.

He could sense no movement: The ship was no longer rocking back and forth in the sea, as one would normally expect. There was no creaking of the ship's sides. There was, in fact, no sound whatsoever.

And then the temperature began to change.

It started to become cold-impossibly so. The slaves in their meager loincloths began to shiver; their breath turned to clouds of vapor.

Twenty-Nine bent over, trying to conserve body heat. Then he had an idea. Sliding as far into Twenty-Eight's vacant seat as his chains would allow, he peered across the shivering bodies of the other four slaves in his row, trying to get a better look out the small oar slit.

What he saw did not encourage him. The ship seemed to be in the grip of an impenetrable gray fog, the likes of which he had never seen. Growing up in the coastal city of Farpoint, he had seen fog banks roll in, to be sure. But this was decidedly different. As if it had a life of its own, the fog began to slither into the boat, tendrils reaching in through the oar slits and falling down the stairway from which the Harlequin had descended. It quickly filled the deck. As it increased in density the fog replaced the smell of the salt sea with a cleaner odor, such as one might inhale on land after a brisk, cold rain.