Mnomquah!
At that precise moment when the smoke-formed wandsnake of the moonbeast sorcerers thrust its hissing head up through the chimney and into the moonmoth's cavern, an equally terrifying emergence was taking place on the lunar surface. Namely, that of Mnomquah's head from the mouth of his vast burrow. More of that in a moment â¦
In the meantime, all had not gone well for Limnar Dass and his now greatly reduced flotilla. He had recently lost another ship; powder was so low as to be almost exhausted aboard his remaining vessels; and
Gnorri II
herself, having suffered structural damage in the collision with the Leng ship and her subsequent plunge to moon's surface, was not answering the helm with half her usual willingness. The enemy fleet, on the other hand, had rallied from its initial pounding and was now well deployed to apply maximum firepower in the task of reducing the flotilla to aerial rubble.
This, despite the continuing loss of their own vessels to the flotilla's superior gunnery, was exactly what the Lengites were doing; even now an enemy cannonade removed the bridge from one of Limnar's surviving nucleus of ships. And still the flotilla fought back, though for a certainty the end was nigh.
Zura's
Shroud
continued to do remarkably wellâso well indeed that Limnar was given to wonder how the zombie
gunners fared in the massive recoil of their cannons. The living dead, by their very nature, are highly vulnerable to hard knocks and shakes; so that by now
Shroud'
s deck must be a veritable nightmare of detached, kicking limbs and various other more or less mobile bits and pieces.
As for Lathi's
Chrysalis:
just how that paper ship held together at all was a mystery Limnar Dass would never fathom. She was a very light vessel, of course, and perhaps that had much to do with it; but long after better ships had plunged to their doom,
Chrysalis
continued to give back blow for blow, even though she was little more than a torn rag in the sky. Yes, and if Hero and Eldin were here now, Limnar was sure that they would applaud the tenacity of these inhuman once-enemies no less than he himself.
Hero and Eldin ⦠Their loss over all else was the one blow which had troubled the sky-Captain beyond endurance. For he felt certain that they had gone down into the throat of the moon-pit along with the Leng ship. The questers and their brave ladies, fighting to the last, gone down to the bowels of the moon to spit in Mnomquah's blind eyes.
Well, they had left a rare legacy behind them; for it was as if something of the questers had found its way into the hearts of each and every surviving human, as if they fought even now right alongside their old enemies, Zura and Lathi, urging them to greater excesses of effort. And right there and then in the midst of the battle, even as the sky-Captain was given momentarily to admire the gritâthe sheer fighting spiritâof dreamland's handful of battered ships, so there came that one cry he had most dreaded to hear: the despairing voices of his gunners, reporting that the powder was finished, that
Gnorri II
had fired her last shot.
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 aghastâwith enemy shot whistling through the rigging and squat black hulls looming larger by the secondâLimnar 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 ⦠Thenâ
“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 Zuraâwhose crew had been severely depleted even before the commencement of the aerial battleâmust 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 decksâat 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 fallenâbut 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 gauntsâonly two of them at the last, Sniffer and Bifferâand 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.
âAnd 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 occurrenceâthe moon-quakes and the sudden increase in frequency of the mighty
orange smoke-rings from the pitâhad 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 emergenceâand 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!âand 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 flatâbut 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 eyesocketsâbut 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 moonbeastsâall but two of themâstuck 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 priestsâbut 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 waited 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 â¦
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 uncoiledâa mile of it that lashed the skyâand 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 mightâbefore 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.