The Blue World by Jack Vance Page A

shredding the net, smashing huts of all the pads of the
lagoon. Then he turned his attention to the main float, breasting up
to the edge. For a moment he eyed the population, which started to
set up a terrified keening sound, then thrust himself forward,
wallowed up on the float, and the keening became a series of hoarse
cries and screams. The folk ran back and forth with jerky, scurrying
steps.
    King Kragen bulked
on the float like a toad on a lily pad. He struck with his vanes; the
float split. The hoodwink tower, the great structure so cunningly
woven, so carefully contrived, tottered. King Kragen lunged again,
the tower toppled, falling into the huts along the north edge of the
float.
    King Kragen
floundered across the float. He destroyed the granary, and bushels of
yellow meal laboriously scraped from sea-plant pistils streamed into
the water. He crushed the racks where stalk, withe, and fiber were
stretched and flexed; he dealt likewise with the rope-walk. Then, as
if suddenly in a hurry, he swung about, heaved himself to the
southern edge of the float. A number of huts and thirty-two of the
folk, mostly aged or very young, were crushed or thrust into the
water and drowned.
    King Kragen
regained the open sea. He floated quietly a moment or two, palps
twitching in the expression of some unknowable emotion. Then he moved
his vanes and slid off across the calm ocean.
    Tranque Float was a
devastation, a tangle, a scene of wrath and grief. The lagoon had
returned to the ocean, with the arbors reduced to rubbish and the
shoals of food-fish scattered. Many huts had been crushed. The
hoodwink tower lay toppled. Of a population of four-hundred and
eighty, forty-three were dead, with as many more injured The
survivors stood blank-eyed and limp, unable to comprehend the full
extent of the disaster that had come upon them.
    Presently they
roused themselves and gathered at the far western edge, where the
damage had been the least; Ixon Myrex sought through the faces,
eventually spied Sklar Hast sitting on a fragment of the fallen
hoodwink tower. He raised his hand slowly, pointed. “Sklar Hast!
I denounce you! The evil you have done to Tranque Float cannot be
uttered in words. Your arrogance, your callous indifference to our
pleas, your cruel and audacious villainy—how can you hope to
expiate them?”
    Sklar Hast paid no
heed. His attention was fixed upon Meril Rohan, where she knelt
beside the body of Zander Rohan, his tine brisk mop of white hair
dark with blood. Ixon Myrex called in a harsh voice: “In my
capacity as Arbiter of Tranque Float, I declare you a criminal of the
basest sort, together with all those who served you as accomplices,
and most noteworthy Elmar Pronave! Elmar Pronave, show your shameful
face! Where do you hide?”
    But Elmar Pronave
had been drowned and did not answer.
    Ixon Myrex returned
to Sklar Hast. “The Master Hoodwink is dead and cannot denounce
you in his own terms. I will speak for him: you are Assistant Master
Hoodwink no longer. You are ejected from your caste and your
calling!”
    Sklar Hast wearily
gave his attention to Ixon Myrex. “Do not bellow nonsense. You
can eject me from nothing. I am Master Hoodwink now. I was Master
Hoodwink as soon as I bested Zander Rohan; even had I not done so, I
became Master Hoodwink upon his death. You outrank me not an iota;
you can denounce—but do no more.”
    Semm Voiderveg the
Intercessor spoke forth. “Denunciations are not enough! Argument
in regard to rank is footling! King Kragen, in wreaking his terrible
but just, vengeance, intended that the primes of the deed should die.
I now declare the will of King Kragen to be death, by either
strangulation or bludgeoning, for Sklar Hast and all his
accomplices.”
    “Not so fast,”
said Sklar Hast. “It appears to me that a certain confusion is
upon us. Two kragen, a large one and a small one, have injured us. I,
Sklar Hast, and my friends, are those who hoped to protect the float
from depredation. We