A few seconds passed. Then Theotormon’s oily blue-black head appeared and a moment later Vala’s red hair. Her brother’s long toes were entangled in her hair, her head held by the foot.
“Say you’re sorry!” Theotormon shouted. “Apologize! Tell me I’m not a loathsome mass of blubber! Tell me I’m beautiful! Promise to love me as you did Palamabron on the island!”
She tore her hair loose, leaving some dark red strands between his toes. She screamed, “I’ll kill you, you blotch! I’m a long way from dying yet! And if I were, I’d go gladly to my death rather than make up to you!”
His eyes wide, Theotormon paddled away from her with his feet. He turned to Wolff and said, “See! Why should I save her or any of you? You would still hate me, just as I would hate you.”
Palamabron began to yell and to splash violently. “Save me, Theotormon! I can’t stay up any longer! I’m too tired! I’ll die!”
“Remember what I said about your being alone,” Wolff gasped.
Theotormon grinned and dived, and presently he was pushing Palamabron ahead of him. With his head on his brother’s buttocks, he pushed, driving with his flippers and his great webbed feet. Palamabron slid from the water and two body lengths onto the glassy shore. There he lay, breathing like a sick horse, the water running from his nose and saliva from his mouth.
One by one, Theotormon propelled the others onto the bank, where they lay like dead men. Only Vala refused his offer. She swam as hard as she could, summoning strength that Wolff would not have believed possible she had left. She skidded up a body’s length and soon was nudging herself, very slowly, on up the gentle slope. When she had reached a level spot, she carefully got to a sitting position.
She looked down at the others and said with scorn, “So these are my brothers? The all-mighty Lords of the universes! A pack of half-drowned rats. Sycophants of a sea-slug, begging for their lives.”
Theotormon slid upon the bank and past the men. He walked on his bent legs past Vala and did not look at her. And when the others had regained some of their strength and breath, they too crawled to the level land. They were sorry looking, since most of them had slipped off their clothes and their swords in the water. Only Wolff and Vala had retained their clothes. He had lost all his weapons but his beamer. She still had her sword. Except for her hair, she looked as if she had never been in the water. Her garments had the property of repelling liquids.
Luvah had scooted over to Wolff after trying twice to walk to him and ending on his buttocks both times. His color had come back to his face, so that the freckles across his cheeks and nose did not stand out so sharply. He said, “We were caught by our father as easily as children playing hide-and-seek are caught. Now, from children we have become infants. We cannot even walk, but must crawl like babies. Do you suppose that our father is trying to tell us something?”
“I do not know about that,” Wolff said. “But this I do know. Urizen has been planning this for a long long time. I am beginning to believe that he made the planets that revolve around Appirmatzum for one reason only. This world and the others are designed to torment and to test us.”
Luvah laughed without much merriment. “And if we survive the torment and pass the tests, what is our reward?”
“We get a chance to be killed by our father or to kill him.”
“Do you really believe he will play fair? Won’t he make the stronghold absolutely impregnable? I cannot believe that our father will be fair.”
“Fair? What is fair? There is supposed to be an unspoken agreement that every Lord will leave some slight loophole in his defense. Some defect whereby an extremely skillful and clever attacker can get through. Whether this is true in all cases, I do not know. But Lords have been killed or dispossessed, and these Lords thought they were safe from the most powerful and clever. I do not think that the successful ones were successful because of built-in weaknesses by the defender. The chinks in the armor were there for another reason.