Ship of Paper, Ship of Death
“Paper!” Eldin rumbled. “No wonder the ship looks so leprous and lumpy. She's made of the same sort of material they use to build their cities, a variation on this binding muck that's wrapping us.”
“Pretty strong muck,” Hero answered, “as witness our inability to break out of it.”
“Aye, but it burns well enough,” Eldin darkly reminded. “I may have lost my swordâthat good one of mine, shattered and reconstituted by the power of the First Onesâbut I still have my firestones.”
“Fat chance you'll get to use them,” Hero answered. “Not a second time. But right enough, the ship would burn like a torch. Take note: there are no lamps here. See, the light comes from those tiny luminous mushrooms growing out of the woodworkâer, the paperwork. And lookâeven the sails are like mighty shavings of softwood!”
Now they were bundled into Lathi's cabin and brought face to face with the Eidolon herself. Each quester was held upright by a pair of termen, whose wickedly curving knives were held poised to strike at first sign of a false moveâthough how the adventurers might contrive to make even a tiny false move was anybody's guess. And finally, her voice much quieter now but no less deadly, Lathi spoke:
“So, we meet again. You, David Hero, who sang songs to
me to lull me into sleep. And you, Eldin the Wanderer, whose firestones turned my lovely Thalarion to ashes. Ah, but this time we meet in a much colder clime. And there is a coldness between us that may only be dispelled when you two are no more.”
Silently the pair stared at her, attempting to fathom the depths of her mind, to know her thoughts. She was as beautiful as Hero remembered herâthe top half of her, anyway. But where her waist disappeared into silky ruffles of glossy pink and purple paper, there the horror began. For the hidden part of Lathi had more than ten times the mass of the visible; and like an iceberg's submerged portion, the unseen was far more lethal than the seen.
There were curtains to one side of her bench-like seat, which billowed slightly as Hero's eyes found them. Back there, where Lathi's termaids doubtless worked even now, massaging and smoothing with soft oils and supple hands, her monstrous lower body was that of a Queen termiteâwhose appetite was more monstrous yet. Hero could not help but shudder, and Lathi saw his grimace.
“Still you spurn me,” she hissed, “who might have known the final, intimate ecstasy of my embrace. Well, that offer is no longer open to you. You are not worthy.” Her eyes narrowed perceptibly. “How would you die, David Hero?”
“Any other way thanâ” he began, and instantly wished he could bite off his tongue. “With a sword in my hand,” he hastily went on. “The way I have lived.”
“Aye, likewise,” said Eldin.
“Ah, Wanderer!” Lathi's voice was poisonous sweet as she turned her gaze upon Eldin. “But no ⦠no, your fate was decided the day you doomed the hive cityâby fire!”
“It was you played with fire first,” Eldin reminded. “Threatening to burn down that poor defenseless Great Tree.”
“The Tree, defenseless?” Her face twisted in fury. “Not since you two taught him how to fight! My termen dare not even approach him. His roots spring up underfoot to coil and
crush; his tendrils flail like whips; dead branches are wont to fall like the hammers of gods!”
“Good for him!” growled Eldin.
“But not,” she smiled beautifully, and yet hideously, “for you.”
At that moment a terman entered through the cabin door and bowed low. “Lathi,” he said in a curiously neutral voice, “they punish the horned ones.”
She turned her face to peer out of the large, open circular porthole beside her and beckoned to the termen holding the questers that they should bring the two closer. They were bundled forward until they crowded beside her, but still their view outside the ship was restricted. Lathi impatiently shook her head.
“I wish to see,” she snapped at one of the termen holding Hero. “And I wish ourâguestsâto see, so that they may know the severity of our punishments. Drone, get me up onto the deck at once.”
Hero thought to himself: “
A neat trick if she can turn it,
” and was immediately astonished by an abrupt and completely unexpected turn of neat trickery. For as the terman hauled on a large lever in the wall, so the “roof” of the cabin slid back and the entire room became a platform which creakingly elevated to the now open upper deck.
Lathi's amazing paper ship had ascended somewhat and was now a hundred feet or so above Sarkomand's ruins. A Lengite vessel was rising fast behind, her sails unfurling, and the questers could make out the figures of the furious Dukes of Isharra on her deck.
“They intend to take you back,” Lathi needlessly informed, “but they shall not have you.” She turned again to her termen. “Release them from their bindingsâbut do not take your eyes from them. They are treacherous! Strip the young one, for nakedness makes humans weak. As for the other: lash him to the mast ⦠for the moment.”
Using their fingertips, which exuded a thin, melting fluid, the termen quickly cut the questers free of their cocoons.
Numb and cramped, the pair stumbled a little as the termen continued to obey Lathi's commands. Hero was quickly stripped of his clothes and Eldin was trussed up to the mainmast.
Now Lathi grabbed Hero's arm and drew him onto the seat beside her. He shuddered at the contact and she smiled, relishing his horror. “Ah, David Hero, but you shall never know what you missed. And do you tremble? I agree, it is cold in the north. Thereâ” and she held him close and threw the folds of her voluminous gown about him. Crushed to her more than ample and very beautiful bosom, Hero cringed inwardly at the thought of what lay behind and below: the monstrous pulsating grub which was Lathi's lower body.
“Look!” she suddenly said, and turned his head toward a strange and cruel scene. “See, the Lengites punish their failed fellows. Oorn has ordered it. Her God-mate, Mnomquah, will suffer neither fools nor failures.”
Hero looked, but his concentration was elsewhere. Moving as gently and minutely as he could, he flexed his muscles here and there, unwinding his cramped, cold body and willing feeling back into his arms and legs. He had not realized how crushingly restrictive the paper bindings had been, but as blood began to flow again so he felt the sting of pins and needles in all his limbs.
The eyes of the termen were no longer upon him; all eyes were gazing at the tableau laid out in the ruins of central Sarkomand down below, where the Lengites were camped in strength. And as Lathi had directed, finally Hero too looked. The mist had cleared a little and the glow of the luridly racing clouds was sufficient to lend the scene a sort of foxfire luminosity.
Thronging horned ones were jeering and laughing, dancing obscenely around a pole or totem to which they had tied two of their own kind. But now Hero saw that this was neither pole nor totem but a shattered mast, and seeing the basket at its base he recognized the contraption as weird makeshift vessel which alone had escaped the wrecking of Hrill's ship in
the desert. The sail had been stripped away and a mass of flotation bags was now attached to the top of the mast, straining and threatening to bear the whole thing aloft. Several stout ropes anchored it to the ground.
“But what's going on?” Hero asked, intrigued despite himself. “Surely those are the Lengites who forewarned of our coming, so enabling you to trap us? And talking of traps: just how was that done? Or was it really Ula and Una calling to us in the night?”
“Too many questions, David Hero,” she whispered in his ear. “Now be quiet and watch.” But as he opened his mouth to speak again she conceded an answer to at least one of his questions. “Yes, you are correct. They are the survivors of your desert attack upon the Leng shipâthe last vestiges of a miserable failure. They failed to destroy Ilek-Vadâthanks to you.”
“But they
are
survivors,” Hero pointed out, frowning. “Survivors returned from a dangerous, however treacherous, missionâand by ingenious use of their wits, at that! They are my enemies, certainlyâbut they're your allies. How can you punish what my kind would see as heroes?”
“That's where you human beings fascinate me,” Lathi answered in a purr. “Your distorted sense of values, based on meaningless concepts like âHonor,' âHeroism,' and âLoyalty'âespecially âLoyalty.'”
“Oh?” Hero argued. “And what of the loyalty of your termen?”
“The group instinct of the hive,” she shrugged. “Not loyalty at all, really. Survival. You would give your life for the Wanderer there. One terman would not give his for another, only for his Queen. On the contrary, another terman's death would not concern him at all.”
“Butâ” Hero would have argued (at the same time resting his eyes casually and fleetingly upon the loosely held, curving knife in the hand of the nearest terman).
“There are no buts,” she cut him short. “Do you think that the horned ones returned of their own free will? They did not.
The wind brought them back here, Fate. They could not control their funny little vessel, that's all, and one of the Lengite patrol ships saw them, intercepted and brought them down. They were hoping to reach Leng, where doubtless they would hide themselves away and disappear. Oh, yes, David Hero, for they knew well enough the price of failure.”
“The price of failureâ” Hero mused, more to himself than to Lathi, as he weighed up his own chances. But perhaps she overheard him, or at least sensed his thoughtsâand she saw his slitted eyes furtively casting about. Saw them pause, however briefly, once more upon the terman's knife.
“You are a devious man, Hero of Dreams,” her purr deepened warningly. “When I might expect the hands of any other man to come a-fondling at my warm breastsâespecially since they will be the last breasts to comfort you before you are folded to the cold and clammy bosom of Death herselfâinstead I discover your eyes upon a loosely-held weapon. You tremble not at my nearness or the desirability of my body, but at the contemplation of mad adventuring! Even now you seek your freedom, with enemies all around and escape utterly unthinkable. I begin to consider you a fool.”
“Am I a male spider then?” asked Hero. “Who loves his mate until she delivers the death-bite?” His mind worked overtime to seek a plausible excuse for his recalcitrance, his ingratitude, before Lathi should decide to make a quick end of her cat and mouse game; and out of the corner of his eye at last he glimpsed his salvationâ
âThe Leng ship under the command of the Dukes of Isharra, where it rose up silent as a ghost on the port side, its deck a mere leap away. “You would eventually kill me,” he gabbled, “whether I managed to grab your creature's knife or notâbut
they
would kill me right now, which makes it a matter of survival.” He freed an arm to point it at the Isharrans who came silently leaping between decks, their twin masters waving them in to the attack.
Lathi jerked her head round to stare where he pointed and
her hand flew to her mouth. “What?” she cried, her voice thick with sudden rage. “How
dare
â”
“I'll face the death you plan for me whenâifâit comes,” Hero yelled, hurling himself naked from beneath her paper gown. “But as you can see, the one they plan is rather more immediate!”
He leaped at the startled terman, wrested his curved knife from him and shouldered him over the ship's flimsy rail all in one fluid movement. As he turned toward the mainmast two more termen got in his way. He despatched them with coldly brutal efficiency and smelled the swampy fetor of their sappy blood as he sprang to Eldin's side.
Three strokes of the razor-honed knife sufficed to free the Wanderer, who immediately gave a deafening and ferocious bellowâthe cry of a berserker plunging into battle!
He snatched up the knife of one of the termen Hero had felled; and the two adventurers stood back to back, Hero naked and deadly calm, Eldin raging and brassy as hell's fires. And the Isharrans came, swords dully glinting, eyes gleaming with an almost luminous rapaciousness. They cameâand they met red death!
Death in the shapes of Hero and Eldin, for even with curving knives in place of their usual weapons, still the two were the craftiest fighters ever known. And though Lathi's termen also fought off the Isharrans, nevertheless the two cut down termen and Isharrans alike, indiscriminately slaughtering all who came within range of their borrowed blades.
Now the Dukes of Isharra themselves had boarded the paper shipâat which very instant Lathi's voice rose above the hoarse cries of battle and the
hiss
of slicing steel:
“Fools!” she cried. “Do we fight each other? They are our enemies!” And she pointed at Hero and Eldin where they stood, gory with blood and red-eyed from the fever of the fight.
At Lathi's cry the termen and Isharrans turned toward the pair, their eyes slitting as they stared at their true foes; and like some terrible tide they began to creep toward the beleaguered
questers, hot death in their faces and cold in their hands.