But indeed some of those sinister black vessels were now rallying, though as yet their wild and spasmodic fire was proving as great a danger to friend as foe, and the large fleet was beginning to move into a battle formation of sorts. This sudden dawning of common sense and comparative calm-headedness among the enemy, however late, had coincided with an outbreak of shrill and urgent piping from on high—audible even over the roar of battle—and with the appearance in the sky of a figure at once alien and commanding. It was Oorn’s High Priest, risen up from one of the Leng ships astride a great horse-headed Shantak-bird to a point of central elevation from which he now plainly directed the horned-one counterattack.
Other Shantaks—mammoth, scaly creatures of notorious and half-fabulous repute—were already winging down from the Leng fleet toward a low domed hill crowned with a monolithic stone or pillar. The hill stood at the rim of the moon-pit, and Eldin, watching the descent of the Shantaks, lowered his eyebrows and wondered at the doubtless baleful portent of what was taking place. He tugged at Hero’s jacket to attract his attention, and in the next moment the eyes of both questers went wide as a great door opened in the side of the hill to discharge a dozen or more beings whose appearance could only have been born of Man’s worst nightmares. They were moonbeasts, and such were their jellyish movements that the questers now knew for a certainty just exactly who—or what—Oorn’s High Priest was. Except that he wore his robe of yellow silk while his cousins, who were pulling themselves up onto the backs of the Shantaks, had never known the need for any sort of subterfuge and were quite naked. Horribly so …
Neither Hero nor Eldin would ever be able to describe the creatures accurately, and this despite the fact that they would soon have much to do with them; for such were the anomalies of the amorphous monstrosities that one no sooner got used to one such when another, usually worse, would take its place. They were gray, toadlike in a certain way, jellyish, blunt-snouted, in some cases blind (but in no way incapacitated) and in all cases utterly nightmarish to behold. They carried strangely carven flutes—for just like Oorn’s High Priest they could not speak in any normal tongue—though about their mouths and in other areas of their beings wriggled bunches of pinkish tentacles like loathsome anemones, with which they appeared able at least to converse with one another.
“More priests of the moon-God,” said Eldin in disgust. “And do you see that tall boulder at the summit of the hill? Is that a statue, an idol, or—”
“An idol, yes,” answered Hero. “Or at least it was, at some dim time in the moon’s youth …” He stared harder, his view obscured by smoke and the settling of debris from shattered ships. The outlines of the idol were hard to make out despite its huge size. Carved from some single block of primeval moonstone, there were vaguely reptilian lines to it. It stood upright like a man, but its forelegs were held in front like the paws of some great and scaly dinosaur from Earth’s prime.
“A lizard-thing,” Hero finally decided. “Old Mnomquah’s a lizard—but a damn big one, you can bet your life on that!”
Until now Ula and Una had obeyed Limnar’s orders and stayed out of harm’s way in his cabin; but now, fully rested and mostly restored to their former loveliness, they could no longer restrain themselves from joining the questers at their position on Gnorri’s bridge. And in all truth that smoke- and soot-grimed pair were glad to see them, for with the din of battle all around and the sky full of milling ships, smoke and green gas, Hero and Eldin were the only ones with nothing much to do. Gytherik had gone off at the double to bring his gaunts up onto the deck, and Limnar Dass commanded his ship with extraordinary skill as she spat fire and death at the enemy; but the questers were at a complete loss.
Eldin, itching to get into the fight, growled, “I could just use a little close-quarter combat!” At which Una at once produced a rapier from her swordbelt and said:
“If it comes to a fight, we stand right alongside you two!”
“Too true!” agreed Ula. “We’re not quite shrinking violets, you know,” and she too produced a slender, gleaming blade. “Ham Gidduf, our father, believed a girl should be able to use a sword as well as any man—if only to protect herself from men!”
“Aye,” Hero nodded, “well, you’re brave lasses, both of you—but right now it’s not men you’ve to worry about. Also, it’s not likely to come to hand-to-hand fighting. We’re heavily outnumbered and the horned ones are rallying. Especially now that the moonbeasts are directing their tactics. Look—!” And he pointed to where one of the flotilla’s ships shuddered mightily as shots poured into her flanks. Suddenly the stricken vessel expanded as if taking in a great breath of air—
—Expanded in fire and smoke and noise as her magazine blew her out of the sky in one great roaring detonation. “That was Skipcloud,” Eldin’s voice was sick, “and Cumulus is also in trouble.”
Their eyes followed the Wanderer’s pointing finger to where a second ship of Limnar’s command went limping down toward the pit, her sails in tatters and her hull gaping. Even as they watched, a Lengite vessel vented flotation essence and followed her down, blasting off a mighty fusillade that completely shattered her substructure and sent her plummeting moonward. She missed the pit’s rim with nothing to spare—only to blow up in a bright gout of fire where she struck the ground.
Now the great scaly Shantak-birds were back in the sky above the battling ships, their toadlike riders tootling loathsomely on their talking instruments. “That’s what I was waiting for,” cried Gytherik, as he swung up onto the bridge alongside his friends. “Those Shantaks haven’t seen my grim yet—and there never was a Shantak-bird could stand the sight of a night-gaunt!”
With a single gesture he called the grim aloft—was himself picked up by Sniffer and Biffer and lowered into his saddle below the neck of the great gaunt—and in a moment the entire grim was climbing toward the four corners of the sky on powerfully pulsing membrane wings. The questers watched them grow small with distance, saw them veer toward their chosen targets—then roared their encouragement aloud as panic pierced the Shantaks to their very hearts!
In scant seconds the piping of the moonbeast riders grew frantic with terror as their mounts spied the gaunts, reared back, half-heartedly attempted to rally, and were routed in a panic-flight across the moon’s sick sky. Such was their horror of night-gaunts (the reason for which no legend ever told) that they ignored utterly any commands their riders might have given them and fled; indeed, several of them actually threw moonbeasts from their backs to make for greater speed!
And no sooner were the Shantaks routed than the Lengite fleet once more fell prey to panic and mindless disorder. They had come to rely so heavily upon the instructions of their moonbeast masters that without them—
“They’re useless!” Eldin spat out his distaste. “Damn me, if we had ten more ships we could win this fight outright! Just look at Lathi’s Chrysalis!”
At that very moment the Chrysalis was sailing between a pair of enemy vessels at such close quarters that with a good run a man might leap between decks. The Lengites were pounding away but their shots were simply punching through the paper ship just below deck level and passing out the other side—to crash resoundingly into stout Lengite timbers. They were destroying each other! As Lathi’s leprous ghost of a ship emerged from between them, holed but otherwise unharmed, one blew up in a sheet of fire and the other commenced a slow spiral into the moon-pit.
Now a third Lengite closed with Chrysalis, but before enemy guns could be brought into play, Lathi’s termen produced a “secret” weapon of their own. The watching questers gaped as muscled termen whirled fluffy white balls above their heads and released them at the astonished enemy. Where they landed, these strangely plastic missiles burst and hurled out strands of sticky webbing in all directions, so that in a matter of moments the entire ship—rigging, decks, cannon-ports, even the almost-human crew—were caught up in the stuff like flies in a spider’s web. Then Lathi’s own cannons—lightweight
weapons, to be sure, but deadly for all that—were brought into play to finish the job.
And so the battle raged.
Then—disaster!
Two enemy vessels, converging on Gnorri in an unplanned but nevertheless deadly pincer, saw their chance and began to pound away. Limnar’s gunners fired back; his engineer vented essence and Gnorri began a rapid descent; but the keel of one of the Lengites smashed through the rail amidships, bit deep into the deck—and jammed fast! Locked, both ships immediately began to sink down toward the rim of the moon-pit; and as horned ones came pouring down through the rigging onto Gnorri’s decks, so Hero, Eldin, Ula and Una joined the fray.
It was a short fight for the four, but bitter and vicious. The almost-humans had superiority of numbers and were half-crazed with a strange mixture of fear and bloodlust, so that even as they died they drove the four back against Gnorri’s shattered rail. There, at the edge of the sprung deck beneath the squat prow of the Lengite vessel, Hero saw the danger too late. The rim of the pit seemed to spin with the motion of the locked ships; the pockmarked surface loomed close; and as Gnorri’s keel bit shudderingly into moondust so the enemy ship slipped free, broke her back on the jagged rim and slid aft-first into the pit.
Masses of rope and rigging fell from the doomed ship’s side as she went, knocking the questers and their women overboard through Gnorri’s shattered rail and hurling them into chaos!
CHAPTER IV
Marooned on the Moon
For a moment Hero thought they must surely follow the broken, careening Lengite ship to hell, but then he felt himself bouncing on spongy soil before coming to rest at the pit’s rim. Eldin and the girls sprawled beside him, a little winded but apparently unharmed, caught up in bits of broken timber, scraps of canvas and slithering lengths of rope.
“Free yourselves, quickly!” Hero gasped as the doomed ship dragged sails and rigging, ropes and debris and all after her into the abyss. And in another moment the questers and their women were quite alone, strangers on the strange and sinister surface of the moon.
No one had seen their plight; the fighting aboard Gnorri II was still in progress as she rose up again into the sky; and shout as loud as they might the questers would attract little attention in the alien, cratered, utterly unknown and inhospitable environment in which they now found themselves. Disbelievingly, Hero watched Gnorri II sail higher into the sky; and seeing a sudden rain of almost-human bodies from her sides, he cupped hands to mouth and tried one last time to make himself heard over the din of battle.
“Limnar!” he roared. “Ahoy, Gnorri!” But no one heard.
“I don’t believe it!” Eldin growled then in disgust. “Have we come all this way just to get ourselves marooned on the moon?”
“We need to get to a point of higher elevation,” Hero told him. “From which we can see and be seen. Here, amidst all of these small craters, grimy and dressed in these drab-colored clothes of ours—and with no way of attracting attention—we’re goners for sure.” He turned to Ula and Una where they still sprawled on the spongy moon-soil. “Girls, are you all right? Come on, we have to be going.”
“Going where?” Eldin asked, helping the girls to their feet.
“There,” Hero answered, pointing at a tangent across the crater to the low domed hill with its idol-crowned summit.
“What?” the Wanderer cried. “But we’ve seen the great door in that hill and know it for a temple to Mnomquah! Who can say how many more moon-horrors are lurking there right now? And—”
“And it’s the only hill for miles around,” Hero calmly pointed out. “And this is no time to start an argument. Hell’s bells, you were crying out for a bit of action not so very long ago! Well, perhaps you’re about to get some.”
“I think Hero’s right,” Ula agreed. “At least we’ll be visible atop that hill. If we’re going to be picked up at all, that’s the most likely spot.”
“Well?” asked Hero. “Is it unanimous?”
Eldin and Una looked at one another. The Wanderer’s voice was gruff as he answered, “You bloody well know it’s unanimous! You don’t think we’d let you go adventuring on the moon without us, do you?”
Hero sprang to the top of a small crater’s rim and balanced there, putting a hand up to his eyes and scanning out the way between their present location and the hill of the temple. “There’s a sort of small forest or dene,” he informed, “halfway between, which should give us a little cover. After all, we don’t want to be seen until we’re ready.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Eldin. “I want to be picked up, yes—but not by a damned Lengite!”
“Right,” said Hero, rejoining his friends and dusting himself down. “Let’s go. If we stick pretty close to the rim of the pit we’ll have less distance to cover. It should take us no more than fifteen or twenty minutes at most.”
They stepped out, skirting the larger craters and keeping the yawning mouth of Mnomquah’s pit in sight at all times, and soon approached the moon-forest. Entering into gloom beneath the domes of vast and leprous fungi, they wrinkled their noses at a cloying musk of rotten vegetation and overripe puffballs.
“Toadstools!” Eldin grunted disgustedly. “Wouldn’t you know it? No sane or healthy forest on the moon.” He gave a shove at a thick and fibrous stem, then stood back as the huge mushroom toppled and crumbled into chunks of sticky decay. Hero and the girls at once held their noses as a vile stink rose up all around.
“Do you mind?” Hero finally, patiently inquired. “I mean, it’s a wonder these old hooters of ours haven”t given up the ghost long ago, the stinks they’ve had to endure; and there you go creating more of them!”
They pressed on without hindrance and shortly left the fungi forest to hurry across an open, fairly level and unpocked area where the ground was made up of a sort of loose, lumpy pumice. Now they were able to scan the sky once more and see how the battle was progressing; and all were delighted and heartened to note that there still remained seven ships of the flotilla in the mad moon’s sky. The seven were scattered far and wide now and sailed at various altitudes, but they were giving the Lengites such a time of it that the enemy still had not fully recovered from his initial surprise. More than a dozen of his shattered ships lay burning and wrecked across the yellow moonscape, and others drifted with neither sails nor sign of life, crippled and helpless.
“They’re doing fine!” cried the Wanderer—but in the next moment his cry turned to a gasp of dismay as a badly battered Shantak, that ship of the once-Dukes of Isharra, fell foul of a Lengite fusillade to blow asunder in gouting fire and ruin.
“Well,” said Hero grimly, “they made a fair fight of it—considering they were such lousy sailors! It surprises me they lasted so long.”
Eldin nodded his silent agreement, gave a little salute, and all four paused for a very brief moment. Then they turned their faces once more toward the domed hill where it now stood less than a quarter-mile away. The way was easier now and they made good speed, but even as they reached the foot of the hill, the door in its side began to open, causing them to dive for cover in the shallow well of a nearby crater. From there they watched the emergence of half-a-dozen moonbeasts, dressed this time as Oorn’s High Priest had been and wearing tall, pschent-like headgear. They carried long wands and there was that in their bearing, however ugly and alien they might be, which seemed to set them aside from others of their kind.
“Wizards!” Eldin hoarsely whispered.
“Eh?” said Hero. “How do you know?”
“All gods have wizards to attend them,” Eldin explained. “See those wands? They’re the wizard’s symbol of office. His weapon, too. Mnomquah will have chosen these lads from his worshippers, taught them how to work a little magic—or given them powers for the same purpose—and set them over his commoner priests and priestlings to keep a tight rein on things. Wasn’t old Thinistor Udd just such a wizard, who tended Yibb-Tstll’s idol in the mountain heights? Oh, yes,” and he nodde
d toward the moonbeast wizards, “they’ll have lots of powerful magic, these lads.”
As he spoke, the weirdly clad moonbeasts had moved forward away from the great door until they stood clear of its shadow on a level part of the hillside. They moved with the peculiar, wobbly, jellyish motions common to all their kind, and yet with a special sort of groping ponderousness that set them apart. Seeing this, Hero whispered:
“Blind! The moon-God has blinded them in his own image.”
“To heighten their other senses,” Eldin informed. “To increase the potency of their moon-magic.”
Now the six sorcerers faced blindly outward over the pit, raising their gray, gold-speckled wands before them and stabbing skyward with them, in the manner of serpents thrusting with their heads. Six sinuous gray beams sprang from the tips of the wands, converged like thick braids of smoke high over the heads of the wizards—then raced as one beam into the sky toward the battling ships.
To the questers in their crater observation post it seemed that the gray beam curved over like the head of a snake, pausing in the sky over the battle-locked fleets as if to choose a prey, before lancing down and striking at one of the remaining six ships of Limnar’s flotilla. And after that … then there could be no further doubt about the efficacy, the terrible potency, of the wizards’ pit-spawned moon magic.
Nimbus was the name of the stricken ship, and her fate was utterly unlike that of any other ship as ever sailed. For on the instant of the gray beam’s striking she was lost from sight in a thick bank of smoke that rolled up from nowhere, then just as quickly revealed as the gray smoke drifted away. Ah!—but in that moment when Nimbus was hidden, she had suffered a terrible transformation.