By now a second stranger had joined the party. He introduced himself as Jahn Killik, Arra Coppos’ metallurgist friend. “I’ve seen the statue,” he told them, peering up at its yellow bulk where it rocked in its cradle of ropes beneath the flotation bags. “Leng gold for certain. You can tell by its sickly sheen. Fine and rich by daylight, but damp and strangely oily in the night. Anything else you’d like to know?”
“No,” Limnar shook his heed. “We already guessed as much. Thanks anyway, and no-thanks. For in your confirmation you may just have sealed the doom of Ilek-Vad!”
“Four hundred yards to the dome’s wall!” came a cry from somewhere in the darkness ahead. “And look,” the crewman’s voice continued, “a ship approaches!”
“A patrol ship,” said Limnar, his eyes taking in the silhouette of the vessel where it sailed the night sky beyond the invisible dome of force. “One of the King’s ships. Look, there go its signal rockets!”
Twin streaks of fire raced up the sky like ascending meteorites, bursting in crimson balls high on the dome and showering sparks down its mighty curve. Deep in the city the signal was seen and the night air seemed momentarily to shiver as the dome went down. The ship came sailing in, and in its wake—
“What?” cried Hero, his hand pointing skyward. “Do you see that?”
For a split second, limned against the moon’s ogre face, it had seemed that a flock of great silent birds followed the patrol ship through the de-energised screen. In the next second the air shivered again—and was instantly astir with a throbbing of great wings. But wings fanning the night: a sound that Hero, Eldin and Limnar would recognize anywhere, any time.
“Gytherik!” Hero breathed. “The gaunt-master has arrived in answer to Randolph Carter’s summons.”
“Aye,” Eldin agreed with a similar sigh. “And not a moment too soon!”
CHAPTER VII
The Doom That Came to Ilek-Vad
“Ahoy up there!” shouted Limnar Dass, cupping his hands to his mouth and using his Captain’s hailing voice. “Gytherik—we’re down here!”
The throb of wings, momentarily receding, immediately resounded. “Is that Limnar Dass?” came a youth’s strong but surprised voice above a sudden stir of air and a whirling of dust.
“Aye,” now Eldin gruffly called. “And Eldin the Wanderer.”
“And David Hero, too,” Hero added his voice to the hailing, glaring at his companions for omitting to mention him.
The air became a tumult of small, rushing winds as a grim of gaunts, all horns, barbed tails and leathery wings, landed close by. Leaping down from his saddle on the largest of the faceless beasts, a slim, pale-faced youth—a lad barely out of his teens—stepped forward through the glare and the dust. “Hero?” he queried. “Eldin? Limnar?”
“All present and correct, Gytherik,” Hero answered, taking his arm. “Come into the shadow of this rock. Give your eyes a chance to get used to this hellish yellow dazzle. It will only take a moment.”
“We may only have a moment,” said Limnar. “The mad moon rides high—look!”
A few wisps of cloud hurried across the face of the bloated monster in the sky, as if eager to be gone and out of harm’s way. Looming in the heavens, the great pitted disk looked like some ancient golden coin, bruised and abused by time, and its “face” of mountains and craters wore a look of pure malevolence as it seemed to gaze down upon Ilek-Vad.
Eldin shivered in spite of the sweat which made his clothing hot, heavy and sticky. “By all that’s holy,” he said, “—I swear I’ll never more cuddle a girl by moonlight. Not so long as I remember this night!”
“Which may not be for very long,” Limnar repeated his warning. He turned to Gytherik. “Lad, can you get your gaunts to tow this golden blasphemy out through the force-dome? At once, before it’s too late?”
“A dome of force!” cried Gytherik. “So that’s what it is! Come to think of it, I’ve heard of Ilek-Vad’s force-dome. It was used in the Bad Days. My gaunts sensed it was there, of course, but it completely baffled me. Fool I may be, but not my gaunts. They followed yonder ship of their own accord, under no instructions of mine! And you wish that statue taken outside the dome, eh?”
“Indeed,” Limnar answered, “and urgently!”
“So be it,” said Gytherik. He turned to where the grim, eight strong, clustered together in the scrub. The creatures were ill at ease in the mad moon’s glare, shuffling uncomfortably and using their membrane wings like vast umbrellas to keep the moonlight off their bodies. Gytherik gestured, no more than that, and at once the gaunts spread their wings and sprang skyward. In a second they had snatched up the ropes from astonished, struggling teams of crewmen, and in the next they were towing the statue straight for the invisible wall.
“But how are they to get out?” Hero asked of no one in particular. “What about the signal?”
“I thought of that back in Ilek-Vad,” Limnar answered, drawing out a pair of rockets from his jacket. “Gnorri carries signal rockets, too, you know.”
He jammed the sticks of the rockets in the crumbly soil, angling them toward the dome. Eldin produced firestones and struck sparks, which soon ignited the touchpapers of the fireworks. And as the rockets sputtered, spewed fire and leaped skyward, so the gaunts reached and were brought up short by the invisible wall; at which very moment—
“Trouble!” Hero saw it first: that heightening of the yellow glare about the crater which formed the mouth of the monstrous moon-face, the throbbing pulse of it, like the vast heart of some alien living thing. And rising (it seemed out of the very night), there came that note struck from some great golden tuning fork, that nerve-scraping single note that went on and on and on.
“Big trouble!” roared Eldin, throwing up his hands before his face as the brilliance of the moonlight increased so as to become painful. “Where the hell are those ray-projectors?”
High overhead the rockets burst in crimson splashes, and on the very instant there came that curious trembling of atmosphere which signified the screen’s subtraction. The gaunts shot forward, dragging their aerial burden after them across the now open threshold.
“Now tell them to let go the statue,” Hero shouted in Gytherik’s ear above the brain-numbing whine (which, it suddenly dawned on him, were it colored, would have to be bright yellow!) “—and if you want to keep them, get them back on this side of the line before the screen goes up again!”
Gytherik asked no questions; the near-frenzied urgency so visible in his friends had finally communicated itself to him. Instead he put fingers to mouth and blew a great blast of a whistle, and moments later the gaunts were landing in their ungainly fashion like faceless pterodactyls and cowering once more beneath their own arcing wings.
“Now we’ll feel the dome go up,” shouted Hero, his voice barely audible over the sudden rush of winds which struck downwards from the sky, “and after that—then we should see these much-mentioned ray-projectors in action, and—” He paused uncertainly. Something was wrong … Desperately wrong.
“No dome!” roared Eldin. “Do you think some fool in the city misinterpreted Limnar’s signal? And how could it be misunderstood anyway? What in hell is going on? And by all that’s … look at the moon!”
But in fact they could no longer bear to look at the moon. Its sick brilliance was such that the entire sky was a saffron dazzle that seemed to flow like some mighty aerial ocean of steaming bile. And at last there came that sound they had all dreaded—that change in the tenor of the dinning single note—that gradually rising whine which they knew was harbinger of the monstrous moonbeam.
“Doomed!” groaned Eldin. “The beam descends!”
Then, through seconds which seemed to last for hours, all was a nightmare of languorous slow-motion, of senses suspended almost to the infinite. A vast sigh went up like a wind rising over a forest; and despite the blinding brilliance of the sky, all eyes turned up to that epicenter of horror, the mad moon. A nameless longing—a hideo
us fascination—filled every heart; arms were raised to the sky as to a promise of splendors and delights beyond endurance.
Hero knew in his inner being that this was wrong, an utterly unholy adoration, but could do nothing about it. The others were the same, even Gytherik’s gaunts, lifting their wings for flight and craning their rubbery necks skyward. In the city, lured by that magnetic beam and unable to still the craving, people erupted from their houses and crowded into the streets; and even the blind gazed into the moon’s sick Cycloptic eye, and cripples stumbled in the glare and raised their arms to a deliverance of doom.
Back on the desert in the scrub and rock, Hero and friends were now filled with a peculiar lightness—not only of heads but of bodies, too—and from somewhere deep within himself, fighting the hypnosis which gripped his mind and body in rigid iron (golden?) bands, Hero found the strength to croak: “Eldin—damn, I’m floating! My feet are off the ground!”
“Me too, lad,” came an answering groan, “—and all the others. We’re in the beam, moon-bound!”
And slowly they floated free of the desert, inches at first, then feet as the stony ground receded—at which point the night seemed to give itself a mighty shake, brilliant beams of white fire sprang upward like dazzling searchlights from the city, and gravity returned in a tumbling of bodies and a thumping of earth as by a shower of mammoth hailstones! The force-dome was up, the ray-projectors in action, the doom averted.
No one had fallen more than six or seven feet, some much less, and casualties would be light. There would be broken bones in the city, especially among the aged; here on the desert it was all bumps and bruises and the occasional groan or moan, but mainly thankful sighs.
Hero, dusting himself down, strode purposefully for the city, his face contorted with rage. Eldin, limping a little from a sprained ankle, hurried to keep up. He understood his young friend’s muttered curses and complemented every one of them with a few choice remarks of his own. Limnar Dass, too, where he came running up behind.
“I’ve a bruised behind, a fat ankle and a lumpy elbow,” Eldin growled. “Someone will pay for it!”
“What the hell was the delay?” Hero demanded of no one. “Another second or two and we wouldn’t have survived the fall. Ten seconds and we’d have been sucked right up to the moon! I’ve a few questions for Eeril Tu, you may be sure …”
Gytherik’s slightly shaken voice floated down to them from where he once more rode his great gaunt. “Want a lift, you three?” He spoke a word to the strange creatures he controlled. Gaunts paired off, two apiece to Hero and Eldin, and picked them up. A fifth, second largest of the grim, grabbed up Limnar. Not a man of them was able to suppress the not unnatural shudders they felt at contact with the silent, faceless night-gaunts; despite the fact that they were accustomed to this mode of travel, still there was that about the creatures which repelled and disgusted. Old myths and legends die hard, and Gytherik’s gaunts were a living denial of dreamland lore from ages immemorial.
Now the ray-projectors were in repose—their brilliant beams no longer illumined the mighty dome’s ceiling—and the night had returned to normal … or as normal as might be expected with that bloated moon sailing the sky, its sickly, all-enveloping light coloring the desert, the city and the ocean beyond the promontory a sweaty yellow. Up above, retreating like the snatched-back tentacle of some frustrated, golden god-octopus, the mesmeric moonbeam shrank down into its source in the mouth-like crater and dulled into quiescence. The terror had passed—
—For the moment.
And beneath that moon of madness, the human-burdened grim sped cityward, and jut-jawed men clung tenaciously to prehensile paws which alone kept them from gravity’s jealous grasp …
A surging, cheering, lanthorn-bearing crowd—a mob of delirious people—greeted the aerial party as it passed overhead and across the rooftops of the suburbs into the city. Plainly the people had connected the golden statue’s removal from Ilek-Vad with the barely averted doom; and they knew that they had Hero, Eldin and Limnar to thank for a timely intervention. As for Gytherik Imniss: since Zura’s defeat at Serannian, most everyone in the dreamlands had heard of the young man with power over gaunts. And since Gytherik was with the trio he must be that man, for they had all fought for Kuranes in that same war against Zura.
A second, smaller crowd waited in the palace gardens. These were mainly palace staff, but among them Eeril Tu was supported by a pair of hefty guardsmen. As the grim landed Hero saw the Master of the Dome—saw too the blood-stained bandages which swathed his head and the sling which supported his right arm. Close followed by Eldin, Limnar and Gytherik, Hero ran to Eeril’s side where he was greeted by the counsellor Arra Coppos.
“A near thing,” said Arra. “And indeed I stand amidst heroes this night!”
“What happened?” Hero growled. And to Eeril: “Who bloodied you?”
“They did,” the Dome-Master answered, and he pointed painfully to where a pair of shrouded bodies lay upon stretchers in the grass. “I was with one other engineer in the tower which houses the dome’s machinery. I saw your signal and switched off the force-field. Then, when I would have switched it on again—”
“These two jumped you, eh?” Eldin bent down and tore aside the sheets which covered the strangely squat bodies of the traitors. The two were quite dead—their slant eyes closed, their faces waxen—but still their too-wide mouths seemed to grin as at some evil secret, and the shapes formed by their peaked turbans were terribly suggestive. Eldin ripped away the turbans and his lips drew back in a snarl of loathing. “Horned ones of Leng!” He spat out the words.
Limnar nodded. “King Carter was right about the Lengites. Well, we can make a safe guess as to how these two got into the city: they must have waited for a patrol ship to enter and slipped through while the screen was down. We know where they came from, too: that party we saw out in the desert as we flew in aboard Gnorri.”
“Right,” Hero growled again. “And by the same token we know where to go to get some answers! But tell me, Eeril—if this pair jumped you, who jumped them?”
“As you can see,” Eeril answered, “they didn’t quite finish me off. I took a clout on the head and a knife thrust in the back, and they must have thought me done for. The lad I was with got the worst of it, but I’m told he’ll recover … Anyway, when I came to—it could only have been seconds—the horned ones were peering out of the tower windows and grinning evilly, and I could see that the dome was still down.”
“And even injured you managed to take them?” Eldin’s voice was full of admiration.
Eeril nodded. “More by good luck than anything else,” he modestly stated. “I snatched a knife from the belt of one of them, and before they knew what was happening I had managed to stab them both. Then, when I would have switched on the dome, I suddenly found myself weightless and floating toward an open window. Outside the glare was awful and a hideous sound filled the night. I felt half-hypnotised—weak from loss of blood and yet filled with an awful fascination—but as I floated over the machinery I stretched down my hand and at last switched on the dome’s power. Then I fell, and—”
“And knew no more until you were found sprawled in your own blood,” Arra Coppos finished it for him. The old counsellor turned to Hero and company. “The ray-gunners had been similarly affected by the mad moonbeam, but when the dome came on they were released from the trance and immediately began to fire their weapons. The rest you know …”
“Man,” said Eldin to Eeril Tu, “you should be abed.” He laid a massive hand gently on Eeril’s good shoulder. “Aye, and a hero’s bed at that. Ilek-Vad must care well for you. Well indeed, for without you the city was surely dead this night!”
CHAPTER VIII
Black Ship of Leng
Through the rest of that night—what little remained of it when the adventurers finally got to bed—they slept a sleep of utter exhaustion in which there was no room at all for dreams within dreams. Up at dawn’s fi
rst light, they were aboard Gnorri II and gone from Ilek-Vad before the city’s less exotic citizens were even out of their beds. Westward they headed, out through the invisible force-screen and across the desert and scrublands.
They left behind the three ships sent by Kuranes of Serannian, which had arrived during the night and were now provisioning, and three others of King Carter’s fleet which were ready to sail but not required immediately. Limnar had spoken to the commanders of the latter trio, asking that they remain in Ilek-Vad until the newcomers were fully provisioned and rested; then that they lead them out over the desert to an aerial rendezvous in the west. By then Gnorri II should have had time to locate and deal with the Lengite party, and from then on the course and actions of the sky-flotilla would be governed by whatever the leaders of the expedition had learned from those treacherous horned ones.
Back in a palace tower, Arra Coppos and several others of Ilek-Vad’s dignitaries watched the ship until it was gone from sight, then turned to those tasks which must now commence to ensure the safety of the rest of dreamland’s peoples. For word must be sent to all of dreamland’s cities, towns and hamlets warning of the peril in so-called “Leng gold,” of the dangers inherent in any sort of trading with the horned ones, and of Zura’s, Thalarion’s and Isharra’s complicity in the moon-doom now threatening these lands of Earth’s dreams.
The first step would be to get a message to Ulthar, for then the messenger-pigeons of the Temple of the Elder Ones would make light work of the rest of the task. And once word of the terror began to spread, then the work would gain momentum, accelerate, until all regions near and far would know and take steps to combat the danger.
As for Hero, Eldin, Limnar and Gytherik; their task was equally immediate, and they pursued it with an urgency apparent in the way Gnorri II forged westward under full sail. And as they sailed, so the adventurers exchanged stories of all that had passed since last they were all together. When it was the gaunt-master’s turn he shrugged, pulled a wry face, then set about to explain why the months between had been for him less than happy ones.