One by one the rest of the ships fell silent as the Lengite hordes closed in, and Limnar knew that this was the end … But still he refused to accept defeat, not while there was an ounce of fight left in him. If the dreamlands were doomed, then this son of the dreamlands would take as many as possible of the enemy with him!
“Weapon yourselves up, lads,” he roared at his ragged crew. “We’re going right through the middle of ’em. Let’s ram the dogs down hell’s throat!”
Gnorri II, as if hearing her Master’s battle cry, rallied herself one last time to answer the helm with something of her old vigor; and the ramlike prows of three brave ships turned alongside Gnorri’s and advanced in line abreast, under all available canvas, straight toward the wall of Lengite vessels where they offered their fat black flanks.
Knowing that this must be the beginning of the end, Gytherik Imniss quit his present task (which was to direct his gaunts in their efforts to cut enemy rigging and sails to ribbons) and called the grim to him in the sky. Unashamed tears washed the youth’s face as he counted just three of the creatures, four with his great gaunt mount, and knew that the rest had been slain. His sorrow would increase tenfold when he learned the loss of Hero and Eldin, but for now he urged the grim back to Gnorri’s deck and reported to the sky-Captain where he commanded a debris-littered bridge.
“Gytherik,” said Limnar as the lad sprang up beside him, “save yourself. Take your gaunts and run for it. See if you can find the aerial Gulf Stream and let your grim glide you back to the dreamlands. Go home to your mother and father in Nir and comfort them as the land of Earth’s dreams totters and dies. We’ve lost, lad. This is the end.”
And as Gytherik stood there aghast—with enemy shot whistling through the rigging and squat black hulls looming larger by the second—Limnar told him of Hero and Eldin, of Ula and Una, and how he feared all four dead and gone forever from the dreams of men. How Gytherik cried then, and how he cursed the moon and its inhabitants, and the horned ones of Leng, and the very fates which had seen fit to end it like this, at this time and in this place … Then—
“I’ll go if you’ll come with me,” he told the sky-Captain. “Only then. Most of me has died here, and you are another part of me. If I can’t salvage something of my life, then I’ll have none of it. Won’t you come with me, Limnar Dass?”
The other shook his head, steered Gnorri on, aimed her wicked ram of a prow amidships of a squat black hull no more than forty yards ahead. “I go with my ship,” he said.
Gytherik grabbed his arms. “And you are the one who would find his own destiny,” he sobbed, “who was never satisfied merely to drift with the dreams of men. Do you forget so easily?”
“This is my destiny!” Limnar cried out in his agony. “But it doesn’t have to be yours. Now go while you still may.”
“Gaunts!” cried Gytherik, turning to gaze with burning eyes upon the grim. “Arm yourselves. Fight like … like men! Kill! Kill!” And as Gnorri II smashed shudderingly into her target he slid sword from belt and hung on grimly to the rail alongside Limnar Dass, youth no more but a warrior full-blown. A warrior doomed!
In the last few seconds before Limnar’s brave ship rammed the Lengite, his engineers had boosted their engines and caused Gnorri II to gain altitude. Thus her keel tore away great chunks of the enemy’s decks, superstructure, and all her canvas before Gnorri herself scraped on into free sky and left a gutted black wreck in her wake. One of the flotilla’s other three ships had used similar tactics, and successfully, but a second, Zura’s Shroud, had not been so fortunate. She had stove in the side of a Lengite and locked there; and now horned ones swarmed everywhere on the decks of the two ships, hewing away in hand-to-hand combat with Zura’s zombies.
Seeing the way the fight was going, that Zura—whose crew had been severely depleted even before the commencement of the aerial battle—must lose in the end, Limnar quickly brought Gnorri alongside and called on the Lady of the Charnel Gardens to come aboard. Being no fool, Zura took a flying leap between decks—at which precise moment the gap chose to widen as the locked ships tilted and began to slip from the sky. Vainly the Mistress of Death reached out her hands toward Gnorri’s rail, and certainly had she fallen—but Gytherik’s gaunts were there to pluck her from thin air and land her safely on the bridge beside their master and the sky-Captain.
As for Lathi’s Chrysalis: that tattered rag of a vessel had not attempted anything so utterly insane as ramming tactics; no, for to her that must certainly have proven fatal. Instead, cutting between a pair of enemy ships, the Queen of Thalarion had had her termen enshroud those luckless vessels in their strangling strands and webs; and still Chrysalis remained aloft, though more out of miraculous chance than anything approaching skill on the part of her Captain and crew.
And now only three ships stood in the lunar sky amidst an enemy fleet which outnumbered them eight or nine to one; and the Lengites loaded powder and shot for one final, massed cannonade. Knowing what was coming as the enemy turned his gunwales broadside on to the tiny flotilla, Limnar Dass took Gytherik’s hand in firm grip and shook it, much in the manner of the waking world. Then the two faced Zura and nodded her a curt farewell. Gytherik whistled back his exhausted gaunts—only two of them at the last, Sniffer and Biffer—and went down onto the littered deck to be with them.
Leathery monsters that they were, they tugged at him and thrust their featureless heads aloft, urging him to come with them; but he shook his head in one last denial. “You go,” he told them, “back to your dreamlands, if you can. For me it ends here.”
They would not go, however, but merely covered their heads and shuffled beside him in the manner of gaunts; and so they waited for the end.
—And had they but known it, this was the very moment when the wand-snake erupted into the cave of the moonmoth … and more terrifying by far, it was the instant when Mnomquah chose to thrust up his vast and scaly head from the mouth of the moon-pit!
The events heralding this awesome occurrence—the moon-quakes and the sudden increase in frequency of the mighty orange smoke-rings from the pit—had of course gone unnoticed by the battlers in the sky, but not by Mnomquah’s priests. Even now a horde of robed moonbeasts swarmed from the door in the hill and gathered at the side of the great crater, piping upon their hellish flutes to hasten the moonGod’s emergence—and stumbling back in blind terror when in fact he did emerge!
Up came that massive scaly head into view, pushing ten thousand tons of rubble and rock before it, and such a roar and a blast echoed from the great hinged jaws that whatever else was happening stopped immediately, and all eyes turned to the moon-pit and Mnomquah where he rose from the depths of moon’s heart. Mnomquah!—and how that awesome name suited this awesome monster.
His lizard’s head and flabby wattled neck filled full half of that mile-wide pit, and his clawed, webbed forepaws were each two hundred yards long where he pushed them out to rest them on the rim. One of those paws, falling carelessly half across the base of the domed temple hill, effectively obliterated the pivoting door, caved in the hillside and crushed half of the moonbeast priests flat—but the rest fluted on in an apparent frenzy of adoration. For a moment or two the moon-God appeared to listen to these demon flautists, inclining his vast head while strangely sensitive organs bulged and pulsed beneath the membrane layer which covered otherwise empty eyesockets—but only for a moment or two.
Then his great jaws opened and with an outpouring of orange vapor his forked yellow tongue flickered forth. The moonbeasts—all but two of them—stuck to that tongue like flies in honey, were drawn back in an instant of time into his gaping maw. And now at last it was plain that Mnomquah was not pleased. Indeed, that he was utterly furious!
Very well, he had punished his moonbeast priests—but for what? They had not been to blame for delaying his great leap to the dreamlands. And by now the tides must surely have rolled back from Sarkomand, exposing Oorn’s temple and Oorn herself where she doubtless wa
ited in gastropod glory and expectancy. Why did Lord Mnomquah wait? Why did he not use his great magic right now, this very second, to hurl himself and a billion tons of moon-rock across the vault of space and down upon the cowering dreamlands? His moonbeast priests had called him up from Ubboth’s oily wells, so what more could he expect of them? Perhaps he desired personally to destroy the aerial intruders for all the trouble they had put in the way of his great plan …
Two trembling moonbeast priests played on, and it seemed Mnomquah heeded them for now he turned his blind eyes skyward. Again the mighty hinge of his jaw opened to vent orange vapors, and his flat yellow road of a tongue coiled itself back, back like a spring, poised in his gullet for a nightmare thrust. Then, as a stroke of lightning, that tongue uncoiled—a mile of it that lashed the sky—and where six or seven Lengite ships had sailed, only scraps of smoking wreckage drifted on the moonwind!
How the two remaining priests piped then, guiding their God more carefully, lining up his great head as it turned at last to point at Limnar’s tight little trio of crippled ships, Gnorri, Starspur and Chrysalis. But did the moon-God really need his priests? And if not, why had he first chosen to punish the horned ones and not these pitiful interlopers? Or perhaps he had merely desired to display to them his awesome might—before letting them feel it for themselves.
Can a lizard smile? It seemed so to all who watched from the rails of the three ships. The moon-God’s scaly lips turned back and his jaws cracked open yet again. Those hidden and nameless organs pulsed and bulged behind the membrane of his sightless eyes, and slowly but surely the great tongue coiled itself into a tight, elastic mass.
… Then, on the very brink of nightmare, the moon-God froze; and in the next moment he had jerked his vast head round to gaze blindly but yet with superhuman instinct at the mountainous, needle-tipped horizon. Sightless, yes—in the mundane way of blind, lesser creatures—but still Mnomquah sensed what was coming, what rose into view even now from behind those looming peaks. Sensed, “saw”, and his jaws instantly opened wider yet in a rictus of hatred and … yes, fear!
All heads had turned with the moon-God’s head, and where alien eyes now widened in terror, human eyes stared in utter disbelief and a kindling of incredible hope.
For this could not possibly be—and yet it was!
CHAPTER VII
Magic of the Moonbeasts
On the instant of the rearing of the wand-snake into Eeth’s cave, Ula and Una had instinctively drawn back, Eldin had drawn a sharp intake of breath, and Hero had drawn his sword. Just what the younger quester hoped to achieve with that blade against this most inimical magic of the moonbeasts is conjectural; but nevertheless he weighed curved Kledan steel in his hand and faced the nodding, fearsome head of the horror in true hero fashion.
Eldin, on the other hand, had noticed something which escaped the other’s attention; namely, a jagged crack in a massy stalactite which hung from the ceiling directly above the shaft’s mouth. Thus when that great ape of a man finally drew his sword, it was with a definite purpose in mind; and for the very first time he recognized a potential which never before had made itself apparent. For in an earlier adventure this very blade he now held had been first destroyed, then reconstituted by the science of the First Ones (a mighty race from extra-dimensional gulfs, whose aeon-slumbering survivors had sent Hero and Eldin questing for the Wands of Power), and thus the sword was imbued with a very special strength of its own.
Never in all the time gone by since then had Eldin suspected the weapon to be in any way different. He had of course noticed that it refused to notch, no matter how much he used it, and that it would not rust, however ill he cared for it, but that was all. Now, however, coming to him from nowhere, he felt suddenly sure that the sword was capable of what he was about to demand of it. Later he would not even remember the dawning of this awareness, but for now—
He gripped the hilt of the blade in both hands, sprang forward, used Hero’s crouched, unsuspecting back as a springboard and hurled himself into the air over the flat, nodding head of the wand-snake. Into the crack of the stalactite he drove the point of that strangely-forged blade, using all the great strength of his mighty arms and powerfully muscled shoulders; and more than a third of the sword’s length grated deep into the heart of the shivery stone. Now, swinging forward as he hung from the hilt, he drew up his legs and aimed a tremendous kick at the stalactite’s thick wedge.
And with a loud crack the mighty tip of that depending stone dagger broke off and fell like a plug into the hole, effectively cutting off the wand-snake’s “head” where it protruded into the cave. Thrown backward by the force of his own kick, the Wanderer landed in a heap beside Hero, who was still trying to draw air where he lay face-down in moondust.
The two girls meanwhile had backed well away from the shaft, and both were in a position to see quite clearly what next happened. They uttered piercing little shrieks of horror as the severed head of the wand-snake threshed for a moment—as if in some sort of inorganic agony—before falling onto the sprawled questers and exploding into a gray-glowing cloud which momentarily hid the two from view. Then, in another second, the cloud had cleared and the pair slowly, dazedly got to their feet, dusting themselves down, apparently unaltered … Or were they?
Having “seen” all of this through the eyes of the four, Eeth now spoke again in their minds, and her relief was a near-physical thing as she said: “You have saved me, both myself and my unhatched sisters, for surely would the magic of the moonbeasts have turned us all to stone! And you are lucky, for in severing the head of the wand-snake you destroyed much of the magic’s potency—else you were now frozen gray figures, lifeless as moon-rock.”
“Much of its potency?” queried Hero worriedly, bracing his shoulders and stretching his back. He turned to the pulsing chrysalis. “All of it, I should hope …” Then, feeling an unaccustomed stiffness in all his limbs, he looked at Eldin. “Tell me, old lad,” he said, his voice tight and nervy. “These aches I feel: surely they simply result from that great kick in the back you gave me?”
Eldin nodded. “And mine from my fall,” he said … and suddenly appalled they stared into each other’s eyes. Then the Wanderer gave a small groan as he deliberately set about to bend arms and legs, testing them against the possibility of an unimaginable horror. Not satisfied with the results of this self-examination, he turned again to Hero and studied his face minutely. “Of course,” he said, “it could be the foul light in here—and certainly I don’t want to sound pessimistic—but damn me, lad, I’ve never seen you looking so gray and—”
“And old?” asked Hero, as the Wanderer paused in midsentence. “You too, Eldin. You’re starting to look stony old!”
Eldin groaned again. “Oh, no!” he said. “I mean, you can stand a few years, but me? Who’ll employ a quester who’s stiff as a board and looks old as Methuselah?”
“Methuselah?” Hero looked puzzled.
“A long-lived waking-worlder, I think …”
Ula and Una now approached the pair. “Are you all right?” they wanted to know.
Eeth, slowly pulsing in her cocooned half-sleep, answered for all. “It is as I feared, and I have read my inherited memories and instincts aright. It seems that the partial wandsnake retained a partial magic—which it expended upon you,” she said.
“You mean we’ve been partially petrified?” said Eldin.
“I mean,” Eeth answered, “that you are now feeling the first effects of what must soon become a permanent—” And she too paused as she realized the awfulness of what she was saying. But the questers had received their tinkling message with crystal clarity.
“Permanent paralysis?” Hero was aghast.
“Petrification?” Eldin too.
“Eeth,” Hero was filled with a sort of leaden urgency—a numbing need to get something finished—as finally he realized their predicament, “we have to get out of here.”
The moonmoth-to-be shook her mental he
ad. “You’ll never make it.” Her mind-voice was full of sorrow.
“And the girls?” Eldin wanted to know, fascinated by the numbness he could now feel coursing through his veins. “What of them?”
“They were not enveloped by the cloud,” said Eeth. “They are not the victims of moonbeast magic.”
“They can make it?” asked Hero.
“Yes, if they knew the way.”
“Then you must guide us,” said Eldin. “We’ll take them as far … as far as we can.”
“We’re not going anywhere without you,” Una sobbed unashamedly as she threw herself on his neck—only to draw back when she felt how cold he had grown.
Ula flew into Hero’s less than usually responsive arms, kissed him on lips from which the color was gradually draining. Tears washed her face as she whispered, “Oh, Hero! Hero!”
But the questers thought only of the girls. “Which way, Eeth?” asked Hero.
“You are brave creatures,” she answered, her thoughts awash with a strange mixture of pity and prescience of their terrible fate. “You saved my life—the lives of my sisters, too—probably the entire moonmoth race. And now you have no thought for yourselves, only for your females. The least I can do is guide you out of here … With my mind, for of course I must remain until my change is complete.”
“Then let’s be on our way,” Eldin urged, “while we’re still able.”
Now there flashed into the minds of the questers and their women a picture of the cave in which they stood. So perfect, that picture, that they hardly realized it was there at all until the scene shifted to show the mouth of an upward sloping natural shaft hidden behind a cluster of tall, bulky stalagmites. “Go then,” said Eeth. “Follow the shaft, and I shall guide you.”