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!
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 oursâand with no way of attracting attentionâwe'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? Andâ”
“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, yesâbut 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 Wandererâbut 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 itâ
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 magicâor given them powers for the same purposeâand 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 nodded 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 wizardsâthen 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!âbut in that moment when
Nimbus
was hidden, she had suffered a terrible transformation.
The ship had turned gray as the wizards' beams, leprous as the ephemeral smoke-cloud, leaden as thunderheads in a winter skyâ
and heavy as the rock from which she now seemed carved!
“Stone!” Eldin's voice was hoarse with horror. “She falls out of the sky like a stone!”
And it was true. The leaden sails of
Nimbus
no longer billowed but stood stiff as if starched; her stony hull and decks showed all of a ship's detail without its life and movement and texture; the gray ropes of her rigging were rigid as stalactites, and the crew that lurched from her decks into space looked lifeless as lead soldiers.
Nimbus
was a ship of the clouds no longer but a hurled stone plummeting to earth! And she struck like a stone, shattering into a thousand pieces â¦
Almost before the four witnesses of this monstrous magic could catch their breath, Mnomquah's wizards raised their
wands a second time. But before they could thrust them snakelike at the skyâ
“No more of
that
!” cried Hero aloud, springing from the crater and rushing in to engage the wizards at close quarters. “No more wand-play, monsters. Let's see how your spells face up to cold steel!”
Nor was Hero alone in his headlong attack, for hot on his heels came a roaring Eldin and a pair of lithe vixens with eyes full of hell's own fire and fury. And as the blind moonbeasts turned to face this new threat, so they found themselves confronted with four bright and dazzling scythes of death that gave them no time at all to work fresh wonders.
“This for
Nimbus
!” cried Hero, driving curved Kledan steel through pschent, writhing pink face-tentacles and pulpy head alike.
“And this for
Skipcloud
!” roared Eldin, severing the wand-arm of his prey and gutting him with the next quicksilver stroke.
“Let's not forget
Cumulus
!” trilled Ula, her rapier ripping the throat of a third wizard.
“Even
Shantak
deserves her share of vengeance!” sang Una, decapitating a fourth, “âthough her memory shan't find me shedding a great many tears.”
By now the two remaining monsters were shambling back toward the great door in the hillside, their magic forgotten in the face of quester furyâbut Hero was not willing to let them escape so lightly. “After them,” he growled. “Don't let them get away. Who knows how many more of these priest-wizards there are in the hill, or what they'll be up to next? We've more than ourselves to think of now.”
Close behind the moonbeasts, he paused for a moment at the great pivoting slab which was the door to the temple. Then he beckoned the others on and crossed the threshold. Eldin and the girls hurried after him, into the blue-litten dimness of an extensive cavern system which reached back like some unholy warren of evil into the heart of the hill. And indeed at this point they might just have turned backâbut with
a sigh and a rumble the mighty door pivoted shut behind them, bringing down dust from an unseen, centuried ceiling.
“Well, that's that,” whispered the Wanderer in a tone of disgusted finality. He spat into corpse-fire gloom. “We can't go back, so we have to go on.”
“Stay close behind me,” said Hero with an economy of words. “We're not finished yet. We've done our bitâbut perhaps we can still do a bit more.”
“Right!” Ula quietly but emphatically agreed. “In the very guts of Mnomquah's temple, surely we can make a nuisance of ourselves before we're done?”
“We can at least try,” whispered Una with equal fervor. “And if these are his guts, what say we give him a pain in 'em? ⦠Which way did the moonbeasts go?”
“Down there, I think,” answered Hero, pointing into gloom. “Come on, let's go. But carefully ⦔
Left on his own for a moment, Eldin gave himself a little shake, as if to make sure he was awake. “Damn me,” he muttered then. “As if Hero weren't bad enough on his own, it seems I've now got three of 'em to worry about!” But as the shadows began to close in on him, he hastened in pursuit â¦
Moonmoth
As the four moved forward through the temple's labyrinth, their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. Getting used to the utter silence, however, was a far more difficult thing. After the boom of cannons, the splintering of timbers and the shrieks of doomed men and monsters, the unbelievable
quiet
of this subterranean maze was almost deafening in its intensity. It was a silence such as might live in the tombs at the end of time.
“Have no fear, girls,” Eldin whispered, his very whisper echoing in the hollow stillness. “We've been down to the pits of the underworld, Hero and Iâto the Vale of Pnoth itselfâand came back alive and sane. Well, alive anyway ⦔
“
Shh
!” Hero hissed. “Quiet, man! In this place a whisper has the volume of a warcry.” He lowered his own voice to a mere breath. “If you must talk at all, then do it like this. Merely breathe the words. All right?”
Eldin tried it and found that it worked. “You know,” he breathed, “I'm not blaming you, lad, but I think we erred coming in here. I mean, we don't seem to be serving a great deal of purpose here, if you see what I'm getting at.”
“Oh, but we are!” Ula protested, her voice the smallest shiver in the pale blue light. “For one thing, we've distracted the attention of the moonbeast wizards away from the flotilla.”
“That's right,” put in Una. “Trapped in here, they can't use their magic on Limnar's ships.”
“Oh, we have
them
trapped, do we?” said Eldin, at the same time avoiding the luminous glow of a great stalactite where it hung from the dim and uneven ceiling. “See, to my mind it's more a case ofâ”
“
Shh
!” Hero hissed again. “I'm sure I sense some movement then. Also, I believe I heard something.”
They had reached a great junction of burrows, emerging into a large, low-ceilinged cave whose walls were literally honeycombed with tunnels which led off to unknown destinations. The floor was very slippery here, worn smooth by the feet of Mnomquah's priests and wizards and worshippers since an age when the moon was in its infancy. Most of the tunnels were artificial, but there were natural fissures, too, and the low ceiling was split right across in a deep, dark gash.
“There!” said Hero as they paused. “Did you hear it that time?”
“Aye,” breathed Eldin after a moment's rapt attention. “The moonbeasts at their adoration. Demon flutes massed in low key, like a distant booming of crazed frogs.”
Hero shook his head. “No, there's more to it than simple worship,” he said.
“A sort of urgency,” added Ula.
“An urging,” Una corrected her.
“A
calling
!” Hero named it. “They're calling Mnomquah up from hell, calling him out of his pit!”
“And that's not all,” said Eldin, “for now I hear something else.”
“A hissing, perhaps?” Hero inquired.
The Wanderer nodded his great head. “Aye, like flotation essence venting from a ruptured bag.”
“And growing louder,” Una confirmed, dread of the unknown trembling in her voice.
“Coming this way!” gasped Ula.
“Quickly,” Hero hissed. “Follow me.” He crouched down,
sprang aloft and hauled himself up into the great crack in the ceiling. The fault was more horizontal than vertical, sloping away from the junction of tunnels at a shallow angle. Hero lay down and reached out his arm to help the others climb, and in a little while they lay close together and peered breathlessly down at the area just vacated.
Nor had they been any too quick off the mark, for scant seconds later the hissing suddenly increased threefold and the darkness in the cave visibly lessened. The questers and their women drew back into shadows then as a strange dim glow entered the cave, a shaft of gray half-light liberally sprinkled with golden motes. Writhing and twisting, that awful beamâlike smoke braided into a plaitâpaused in the space beneath; and indeed the four knew that this was none other than a shaft of monstrous magic, sent from the tips of moonbeast wands to seek them out!
For a moment or two the head of the snakelike beam, a foot thick and flattened like the head of a cobra, swayed and hovered in the center of the cave before sinking down to floor level, almost as if to sniff in the manner of some hideous hound. Then it lifted and recommenced its swaying motion, and finally it wove away down that tunnel by which the four had entered. Unbroken, the swirling, gaseous body of the beam followed its head, interminably writhing through the junction chamber.
Not one of the four made the slightest sound, nor even breathed aloudâfor all had seen what the gray beam did to
Nimbus
, and to her crew.
Then, tugging at the sleeves of his friends, Hero crept backwards away from the mouth of the crevice, turned on all fours and began to feel his way into the near-darkness of the unknown fissure. Soundlessly the others followed, eager to put distance between themselves and the sentient-seeming beam of gray light. Once more their eyes were required to grow accustomed to the gloomâa deeper gloom here, where there was an absence of all but a trace of the blue luminosityâand as they went so the fault expanded until they
were able to stand erect. After that they made good speed until the crevice turned abruptly upward to become a tight and stygian flue or chimney.
“Now we climb,” Hero brushed the silence with a breath of speech. “We questers are used to thisâyou might even say we're expertsâbut what about you girls?”
Dark heads gave shining, negative shakes and green eyes widened in elfin faces. “Sword play, yesâ” said Ula.
“Fool's play, no!” Una finished it. “Ham Gidduf used to say our legs were far too pretty to break taking tumbles.”
“The silly old short-sighted sod was probably right,” commented Eldin without malice. “Ah, wellâwe'll just have to teach you.”
“Aye,” Hero grimly agreed, “but we could have asked for better conditions.”
The questers climbed into the volcanic rock chimney, finding it easy going and passing the girls between them from stretch to stretch. By this time full twenty minutes had ticked away since they entered the door in the hillside, and they could not help but wonder how Limnar's tiny fleet was doing now. They wondered, too, about the very faintest of tremors which were beginning to make themselves felt in the rock all around themâas if a giant stirred in the depths belowâand they shuddered as they remembered the cryptic bass pipings of Mnomquah's moonbeast priests. Then, to speed them on their way, there came again that hissing of escaping gas, and they knew that the gray beam was hot on their trail once more.
As that fearful sound grew louder below and behind them, suddenly the chimney became a blow-hole that opened abruptly into a huge but patently unfrequented cave. Here the blue light was stronger, where great stalactites festooned the ceiling and pumice dust lay in a thick carpet all around. It was a natural cave and must be totally unknown to the moonbeasts.
Eldin was first to emerge and he quickly hauled the others
up to stand beside him, ankle-deep in the drifted dust of ages. “Where now?” he queried Hero in a breathless whisper.
The other shrugged helplessly, staring this way and that. “Damned if I knowâbut we have to make up our minds quickly, beforeâ”
“
Who comes?
” a crystal voice full of fear sang out in their minds, causing all four to start violently and hug each other tightly at the shock of the thing. “
Who disturbs me in the Sleep of the Change? Is it moonbeasts, come to cut out my great heart while I helplessly hang here? Oh, who shall protest my unhatched sisters now?”
And as they gradually relaxed, the tinkling telepathic voice filled the four with its fear and sadness.
Meanwhile, the loathsome, near-distant hissing sound had subsided a little, telling them that the gray beam had picked up a false trail; but the tremors in the earth were grown much stronger, more frequent and threatening; and all taken into account, it seemed to the questers and their women that they were being driven toward some unknown precipice from which there would be no escape. This new thingâthis telepathic voice in their headsâwas just something else to set nerves a-jangle, to increase the hysteria building inside them.
“Who?âwhat?âdammit!
âwhere
are you?” Hero asked at last, barely remembering to keep his own voice to the merest whisper. “And listen, whoever you are: if the moonbeasts are your enemies, then you have nothing to fear from us.”
For an answer he felt a crystal tinkling in his mindâa searching, a seeking-out of truthâand knew that his three friends were similarly affected. Whatever the presence was which dwelled in this cave, it quickly satisfied itself that there was nothing of harm in the questers ⦠certainly none directed toward its at present unknown self. And again it spoke to them:
“I am Eeth, a moonmoth maidenâor I will be when my metamorphosis is complete.”
“Hero!” Eldin hoarsely whispered and clutched the other's elbow. “One of these stalactites is alive!” He pointed a shaking
finger at a stony, stubby column of rock where it depended from the ceiling. “The thing's moving,” declared the Wanderer. “Will you look!”
Hero looked, the girls too, and they all commenced to back away as the great stalactite's surface
pulsed
⦠and rested â¦
pulsed
⦠and rested â¦
pulsed
, andâ
“Like a heart!” Hero whispered.
“
Oh, yes, it is my heart you see beating
,” the crystal voice told them. “
The casing is not a stalactite, however, but a cocoon. Nature has designed it this way to deceive the moonbeasts, who find moonmoth flesh irresistible.”
Still backing away, Ula gave a little cry as the backs of her legs struck something and she tripped and sat. When the dust settled she got to her feet in a circle of five great white ovals, each one large as a decent-sized boulder. The things looked for all the world like hugeâ
“
My sisters!
” cried the telepathic voice.
“Oh, be careful! They are not yet hatchedâand there are so very few of us!”
Hero helped Ula step out from the circle of great eggs and turned back to the living stalactite. “You mean you're a chrysalis?” he said, astonishment coloring every whispered word.
“That is correct,
” answered the voice,
“but in a little while I shall be Eeth, a moonmoth maidâif the moonbeasts don't find me first!”
“Eeth,” Eldin now stepped boldly forward, a hopeful rumble in his echoing voice. “If you got in here there must be a way out. Now do be a good chrysalis andâ”
“
Shh!
” Hero fairly danced in his torment, leaping on Eldin and clamping a hand over his mouth. “Great oaf! Be quiâ”
But too late â¦
From somewhere deep in the heart of the hill a droning of triumphant flutes reached out to them, and at the same time the moonrock beneath their feet gave a sharp and very distinct lurch. Important and ominous as these signs were, Eldin's ill-timed outburst had not been responsible for them. It was, however, responsible for the other thing:
Namely, a more deliberate and knowing renewal of the horrid hissing! For even as the ground bucked again and dust shivered from above, so a grim gray light gleamed from below; and up from the hole in the cave's floor rose a vast nodding head of writhing, gold-speckled smoke.
“The magic of the moonbeasts!”
cried the crystal voice in the minds of the questers.
“Farewell, my new-found friendsâfor we are all doomed now!”