And it seemed the elements understood both the urgency of the questers and the nature of the threat against the dreamlands, and that they were sympathetic; for the wind had blown strong and steady and the nights had been unseasonably cold and cloudy. The mad moon had sent its beam Earthward once and once only (and then far to the south and gropingly, as if unsure of the target) and for the rest of the time had shown only as an ever-swelling yellow blotch or massive saffron blur behind the mercifully veiling clouds.
Always the way had led over ocean, but at midday on the tenth day they had sailed over a jagged granite rock that loomed up from the gray sea, when certain of Limnar’s older sailors had shuddered and said that this was the shunned sentinel rock which guarded the shores of Inquanok. Inquanok was not their destination, however, and since Sarkomand was rumored to lie to the east of that cold gray land, Limnar now inclined to a course more nearly northward.
All through the tenth afternoon jagged mountains were visible in the north, later to become obscured by dense distant mists and dark low clouds, and as night came on the flotilla crossed a cold shoreline glimpsed through swirling fog and drifting cloudbanks. Here Limnar ordered the ships down to an anchorage above a bleak region of huge and tumbled black boulders like broken slabs of monolithic masonry, as if the entire land were remnant of some aeon-dead metropolis of strange gods. The whole area for miles around was dim, misty and darkening now with the fall of night; very little had been visible from the air.
Because he suspected that Sarkomand must now be close indeed, Limnar decided to wait out the night—and hopefully the mist—right here, moving on in the morning or as soon as the weather permitted. And knowing that if he was correct in his suspicions, then that action was equally imminent, he called for a meeting with his Captains. While the meeting was taking place, Gytherik went off for a long flight with his restless gaunts (ostensibly to spy out the ground, though in fact the gaunts loved nothing better than a good glide through the mist) and Hero and Eldin were left with nothing to do but bemoan their inactivity.
Now they leaned on the ship’s fog-wreathed rail, their hoods up against the dampness of the air, and gloomed together into the chilly night. All around, the dim ghosts of sky-ships lolled gently at anchor, sails furled, their rigging creaking a little but muffled by the mist and seeming strangely distant.
“Somewhere up there,” said Eldin after a while, inclining his leonine head toward lowering clouds, “the mad moon grows larger, closer, just waiting for a break in this weather.”
“So are we,” Hero reminded. “These clouds may be good news for the dreamlands—for by now the message must be well and truly out and about, and even the smallest hamlet must know. of the danger—but they’re damn bad news for Ula and Una. I itch to do something, to get into action, to—”
“—To rescue those poor lasses,” Eldin growled. “I know, me too. And it’s worst knowing that they may be somewhere close by, in the foul paws of those horned horrors from Leng.”
“How close, I wonder?” Hero answered. “Westward lies Inquanok, and way beyond that Isharra. And here, somewhere, perhaps no more than a mile or two away—”
“Shh!” Eldin suddenly hissed, startling his younger friend and making him jump. He thrust his head forward, eyes wide and staring into the mist. “Did you hear that, or was it only my imagination? That cry in the night—that voice calling ‘Eldin, Eldin?’”
“Eh?” said Hero. “I heard not a thing. It must have been the creaking of—” Abruptly, his eyes too went wide. “But I heard it that time!” he gasped. ‘Hero, Hero,’ it cried. A girl’s voice—my Ula’s voice! But how?”
“Again!” Eldin pointed a shaking hand. “Out there!”
“It is Ula!” Hero whispered.
“Both of ’em, then,” said Eldin. “They”ve escaped from the horned ones. Perhaps they saw our ships in the sky, through a break in the clouds—saw us as we sank down into the mist.”
“Aye!” Hero agreed, Eldin’s imagination spurring his own. “And so they broke loose and headed this way. And they’re out there in the dark and the mist, searching for us.”
“Pursued by horned ones.”
“And the lecherous, loathsome Dukes of Isharra!”
“And Zura.”
“And Lathi.”
“Damn me!” roared Eldin, shaking his fist at the night.
“Shh!” Hero grabbed the Wanderer’s brawny arm, at the same time casting about through half-shuttered eyes at the crewmen where they went about their tasks on the deck. Wreathed by swirling mist, the sailors seemed unaware of the sudden tension in the waking-worlders, were deaf to the faint cries constantly ringing through the night.
“Listen,” said Hero urgently, “we don’t need this lot clattering about, attracting horned ones and such. There are two girls out there and there are two of us. I vote we do this job ourselves. They were our girls, after all.”
“Agreed,” said Eldin. “And there’s not a one of these lads stealthy as you or I.” He gripped the rail and peered again into the bank of mist where it swirled all about. “There,” he said after a moment. “Did you hear it? From over there.” And again he pointed.
Hero listened, frowned, then grimly nodded. “Right,” he said, swinging himself over the rail. Ignoring a handy rope ladder, he grabbed an anchor rope and went sliding down into the mist. Eldin followed, and a moment later they landed like cats on the broken, slippery stone surface below. There they paused, listening intently for a moment, then set off silently and at speed in a generally northerly direction.
Keeping low, they automatically adopted the crouching lope of expert thieves and nighthawks—which indeed had been their trade before they became questers—and soon they had merged with the mist and the darkness to such an extent that no one would ever have known they were there. And the cries came echoing through the night—plaintive, seeming sometimes distant, sometimes quite close at hand—and yet somehow getting no closer, if anything retreating.
Following those distressed and distressing calls, the pair gradually grew suspicious. With the ships far behind them and swallowed up by distance, darkness and mist, they became aware of their own vulnerability in the night. They were good in the foggy gloom, certainly, but were they better than horned ones from Leng’s perpetually nighted plateau? Better than Zura’s zombies, creatures of darkness? Better than Lathi’s termen, with their insect instincts?
“But I can hear Una calling!” Eldin protested in a low growl.
“I said nothing,” Hero answered, his voice hushed.
“No, but you were thinking it, I could almost feel your lip twitching. It always does when you start to have doubts.”
They found themselves in the depths of a steep-sided ravine whose walls pressed in on both sides. Now their pace slowed, they became cautious and stuck to the blackest shadows.
“That’s just it,” said Hero at last. “You can hear Una but I can’t. In fact, I haven’t heard Una once, only Ula.”
The ravine widened out into a place of reeking vapors, silent except for the distant drip of nameless moisture. “And I haven’t heard Ula,” said Eldin. “Not once!”
The shadows closed in on the pair and the reek grew stronger. Now they knew that smell. It was the odor of decaying flesh, the stench of corruption!
“They’re not calling now,” Eldin breathed, his great hand reaching for his sword.
“I’ve a feeling,” Hero answered, “that they never were!”
“Trap!” they both hissed together, and their swords sang in unison as they sprang from scabbards and sliced through a circle of hideous shadows. Shadows which were not shadows but—death!
Death fell on them in the night, in that terrible opening at the end of the ravine, in the mist and the reeking darkness. Suffocating death, rotting death. And hack and slash as they might—as they did, with all strength and in an utter frenzy of nightmare dread—still they could not turn the veritable tide of death which washed over them and bore
them down.
Death in the shape of Zura’s walking dead …
After leaving the deck of Gnorri II, Gytherik and his grim had headed north. Well wrapped against the night, against the rushing damp air and the natural chill of these northern regions, the gaunt-master had been happy to let his beasts fly where they would, secure in the knowledge that they would find their way unerringly back to the seven ships when they were done with exercising and enjoying themselves.
Actually, it was difficult to say for certain whether or not gaunts ever did truly enjoy themselves. They never showed emotion, or very nearly never (how could they without faces?) and unless directed their flying invariably seemed purposeless and gave them no visible pleasure. But Gytherik suspected that they enjoyed it anyway, and so did he.
They had briefly penetrated the cloud ceiling to fly in moonlight, but so yellow, hideous and dazzling had been that light—and so monstrously vast and close its throbbing source—that the gaunt-master had ordered the grim down again and back into the clean (by comparison) clouds and mists. Once, too, he had thought he spied a flight of shantaks, several of which had seemed to carry riders, but this latter effect might have been merely phenomena of the mist. Whichever, the hippocephalic creatures had been visible for no more than a second or so, nor had they caused Gytherik more than a moment’s concern. Shantaks, despite their great size and strength, are utterly afraid of gaunts; even a flock of them would rather flee than face one lone gaunt in the night skies of Earth’s dreamland.
On the other hand, it was known that Leng’s horned ones had mastered and occasionally rode shantaks; which on second thought did give Gytherik a little more room for conjecture. And so for over an hour he had searched the misty skies and the needle peaks of clouded mountains—to no avail. He saw nothing more of either shantaks or horned ones, and so decided to return to the ships. In doing so he urged the grim to greater speed, for a nagging voice in the back of his mind was now becoming more and more insistent that all was not well; so that he hardly surprised himself by sighing out loud when at last the grim circled down to a landing on the mist-slick deck of Gnorri II.
Limnar Dass was there to meet him, and the look on the sky-Captain’s face confirmed beyond a doubt Gytherik’s own feelings of impending disaster. As the gaunt-master dismounted, so Limnar apprised him of the latest development. “Hero and Eldin,” he said. “They’re gone.”
“Gone?” Gytherik ushered his grim below decks. “Where have they gone?”
“They went while I was in conference,” Limnar answered. “Don’t ask me where or why.”
“But someone must have seen them go?”
“Indeed, several of my crewmen. I’m told that they appeared excited, then furtive—and that they slid down a rope into the night—since when they have not returned. They’ve been gone for some two hours, since shortly after you yourself went off with your gaunts. I was hoping that perhaps you had seen something of them?”
Gytherik shook his head. “Do you think they’re in trouble?”
“Not necessarily. They’re like cats in the night, those two, and fierce fighters to boot. But you know all that. It’s just that I have this feeling …”
“Me too,” Gytherik shivered. “Very well, let’s wait until dawn. If they’re not back by then I’ll send out the gaunts to search for them.”
Below decks, Sniffer shuffled uncomfortably and facelessly in the gloom of a cargo hold. Most of the other gaunts were already asleep (at least, they were in that huddled, wing-hooded state which serves for sleep in night-gaunts) but Sniffer was wide awake. He gave Biffer a nudge and they both inclined their monstrous heads upward, as if engaged in some sort of earless listening. In fact they were “listening” to Gytherik and Limnar’s conversation: or more exactly, to the concern which radiated from that pair in very tangible waves, at least waves which were tangible to night-gaunts.
Having listened, they stared eyelessly at each other for a moment or two, and finally they each gave a single, simultaneous nod, as if in agreement to some mutual, unspoken suggestion. And half an hour later, when the ships were very much quieter and only the watch patrolled the decks, then they crept silently topside and launched themselves into the swirling mist …
CHAPTER II
The Dukes of Isharra
Trussed up in termen threads like flies in a spider’s cocoons, with only their faces showing through glossy silken surfaces, Hero and Eldin were borne away like centuried mummies into the base of steep-rising cliffs, through reeking labyrinthine tunnels, interminably downward to vast caverns of elder horror. Among their captors were a few horned ones, a large number of zombies (which, being expendable, had performed the actual dirty work) and a handful of Lathi’s termen.
Now they were bundled along horizontally through great caves, their way illumined by torches held in the paws of horned ones, amidst the massed and monstrous polyglot horde, toward some doom as yet unknown and probably best unguessed. And all around them the rush and patter of feet and paws in damply reeking bowels of earth.
“Mmf, mff!” mumbled Eldin, who couldn’t get his jaws open wide enough to speak.
“Damn right!” Hero emphatically agreed. “Mmf!” And less restricted in respect of facial movements, he went on to berate his burly friend: “Of all the stupid, brainless, wild-goosiest wild-goose chases you ever got me into, this—”
“Mmf?” Eldin was astonished. “Mmf mff mff!” he in turn accused.
“It was you heard the cries first,” said Hero.
“Mmf mff mff mff!” Eldin answered, his astonishment turning to outrage.
“Now just you hold on there, old lad,” Hero snarled. “And don’t go taking that tone of mmf with-” Abruptly he broke off as they were bundled out from torch-flickered gloom into an open space which stretched away for miles to the murmuring ocean. It was dark and misty and the pair could not see that distant shoreline, but they could hear the dull hush of waves and taste the salt in the dank night air.
Above—high, high above black cliffs that went up in massive and vertiginous steps—the phosphorescent clouds of the north hurried southwards in great belts; and such was their glow that the eyes of the pair soon grew accustomed to the weird light which they lent the place. And a strange and terrible place it appeared to be.
There were crumbling walls and shattered columns everywhere, and grayish shrubs that forced their way through weirdly-patterned pavements, breaking them upward and forming small piles of debris. The gaping ruins of great houses stood or lay fallen at every angle, and following the contours of their mounds the pair of trussed-up questers could see that this had once been a mighty and thronging city—but how many thousands of years ago? There were legends in the dreamlands which had it that a certain primordial city had perished a million years before ever the first true humans discovered and inhabited Earth’s dreamland …
The thought must have found its way simultaneously into both Hero’s and Eldin’s minds; for as the truth of their whereabouts dawned on them Eldin gave an exclamatory mmf! and Hero whispered, “Sarkomand!”
“Sarkomand, aye,” agreed an evilly grinning horned one, coming close and shoving his face near to those of the captive pair. “Sarkomand, which is where the glorious careers of dreamland’s most famed questers must surely end—but not before you have seen the so-called Lords. And the so-called Ladies …”
“Ladies?” said Hero. “Ula and Una? They really are here then?”
“Eh? Oh, those two,” the horned one answered. “Aye, they’re here—but they are not the ladies I meant.” And he urged the throng of monsters to more speed as they hurried through the dark and primal ruins.
Hero’s eyes met Eldin’s as the pair were rushed headlong through the centuried streets. “He means Zura,” Hero grunted sourly.
“And—mmf!—Lathi,” Eldin answered. He had finally succeeded in working his jaw loose and could now speak—with difficulty. “And speaking of—mmf!—Lathi, did you ever see a ship like that b
efore?”
Hero, unable to turn his head, had to wait until he was jostled into the required position. There, looming in the mists some fifty or so yards away, a totally unique vessel was moored. The ship was a leprous white and its outline was indistinct, but even at that distance and in the misty gloom Hero was able to recognize the mushroomy color as one and the same with the city of Thalarion, the Eidolon Lathi’s fire-doomed seat, which Eldin had razed to the ground by use of his firestones.
“So,” Hero said. “The grub-Queen has ships now, does she?”
“One, at least,” Eldin answered in disgust. “A vessel such as that could not belong to any other.”
“And look!” Hero exclaimed. “That black ship there, with the octopus figurehead. We’ve seen her before, I fear.”
“Zura!” Eldin spat out the word. “A pretty writhing of maggots here, Hero.”
Now they were passing ship after ship, all gently rocking at anchor some twenty or thirty feet above the crumbling ruins of the ancient city. “Leng ships, these,” said Hero. “Black as Zura’s vessel but bigger, squatter. Looks like the fiendish females have only one ship each, and that the rest of the fleet belongs to the horned ones.”
“That fits,” Eldin muttered. “We smashed Zura’s fleet at Serannian, all except her flagship. As for Lathi: she didn’t have any ships. That one we passed back there, it must be her prototype.”
“And the Isharrans?” Hero wondered.
“Too small a community, ingrown, degenerate. A goldmine grown all out of proportion. Shantytown at one end, palatial residences at the other. A veritable slave community governed by the Dukes. Sky-ships would be too modern in concept for them. Yak-carts with wooden wheels, more like. I would guess that they’ve borrowed a Leng ship, and a Leng crew to boot. Knowing what’s in store for them at the end—at least according to old Hrill—that would seem most logical, don’t you agree?”