⦠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, yesâin the mundane way of blind, lesser creaturesâbut 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 beâand yet it was!
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 nowâ
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 momentâas if in some sort of inorganic agonyâbefore 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 potencyâelse 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 hereâand certainly I don't want to sound pessimisticâbut damn me, lad, I've never seen you looking so gray andâ”
“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 magicâwhich 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 permanentâ”
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 urgencyâa numbing need to get something finishedâas finally he realized their predicament, “we have to get out of here.”
The moonmoth-to-be shook her mental head. “
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 neckâonly 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 lifeâthe lives of my sisters, tooâprobably 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
.”
The four crossed the floor of the cave and passed behind the stalagmite clump into the fissure, and as they went so the pictures changed in their minds, showing them every inch of the way they must go. Puzzled by somethingâeven in the extremity of the knowledge that this most probably would be his last hourâstill Eldin thought to ask:
“Eeth, how can you know the way so well?”
“
My mother knew the way
,” came Eeth's crystal voice, a little fainter now, “
and her mother before her, and something of their knowledge came down to me. Also, I have been this way once beforeâas a caterpillar on my way to feed in the mushroom forest.
”
“And yet your, er, sisters haven't hatched yet?” Eldin appeared to be trying to understand.
“
I was deposited some little time before them
,” came the answer, with a hint of something like pride.
“D'you take me for a fool?” Hero suddenly asked the Wanderer for no apparent reason.
“Always,” Eldin drily answered.
“Huh!” said Hero. “I know what you're up to. Taking my mind off things with your infernal moth-talk!”
“Taking my own mind off things, really,” the Wanderer replied. “Hero, I'm stiff ⦠and not with boredom.”
“You're looking more than a bit gray, too,” said the other. They paused for a moment where Eeth's mind-pictures said they must turn to the left and climb a steep incline. “Eldin, have you ever had that feeling you've been here before?”
“Deja vu?”
“No riddles, just answer my question.”
“Aye,” Eldin replied with a sigh as they climbed (but oh so
slowly now) the stony ramp. “Oh, we've been here before, all right, you and I. Staring into the teeth of the Old Boy himself. Death's grinned at us more than once.”
“But this time he's in hysterics!” Hero answered without humor.
Now the way led straight up, an easy climb even for a pair of untried girls. Yellow moonlight showed high up at the top of a wide chimney full of ledges and cavelets and resting places. “There you ⦠go,” Eldin told the girls, and he rested his numb legs and aching back against a rocky wall. “Watch how you go ⦠and you'll be ⦠all right.”
Hero came to a halt beside him. They looked layered with moon-dust, gray as pumice, but in fact it was the color of their skin, their flesh. “You've come ⦠this far,” said Hero, “and no harm done. With that ⦠kind of luck ⦠I believe you ⦠should make it.”
“No harm done!” cried Ula, clutching at him and weeping bitterly. She stood on tiptoe to kiss his mouthâand her hand flew to her lips in shock. Una, too, sobbed as she clung to Eldin's stony chest; sobbed all the louder when she no longer detected the beating of his heart. Then the girls stepped slowly away from the questers and stared at them with wide, tearful eyes.
Dust trickled down the wall behind the two when, with a scraping sound, they slowly settled and leaned together. And the last dim gleams of fire went out of their eyes.
Â
For some little time Ham Gidduf's twin daughters hung in each other's arms and sobbed. Then, when it was done, they began to climb. Behind them a pair of statues became one with the shadowed, centuried stone, and from somewhere far below the merest tinkle of a tiny crystal chimed farewell in their minds â¦
The Return of Randolph Carter
Limnar Dass, where he stood on
Gnorri
's bridge, simply could not believe his eyes. For long seconds he stared at the curving horizon of sharp-etched peaks, and at what rose above them, as a man might stare at some monster born of delirium tremens; except that this was no monster but the gladdest, maddest sight imaginable.
“Pinch me, Zura,” Limnar said to the zombie Princess where she stood beside him. “Wake me up or relieve me of my command, one of the two, for I'm either asleep or insane!”
“Then we're both for the madhouse, Cap'n Dass,” she answered. And under her breath she added, “Damn! Damn!
Damn
!”
“Damn?” Limnar faintly repeated her, slack-jawed and pop-eyed. Not really listening to her, his response was almost drugged, automatic. He could not take his eyes from that fantastic horizon.
“Limnar!” came Gytherik's ringing shout as he leapt up onto the bridge in a frenzy of excitement. “Do you see it? Do you see it?”
“We see it,” Zura answered, “and I for one
know
I'm not dreaming. I've seen it before, and from much the same vantage pointâand the last time it cost me my fleet!”
“Serannian!” gasped Gytherik.
“The sky-floating city!” sighed Limnar, almost sure now of his senses.
“Kuranes and Carter,” moaned Zura. “I might as well jump overboard here and now!”
“No,” Limnar caught her by the elbowâthen quickly let go as he thought of all the poisons that she was. “You've played your part, Zura,” he told her. “There'll be no punishment for youânot if I have a say in it.”
“You're assuming, of course, that the dreamlands will win?” she said.
“Oh, they will!” cried Gytherik deliriously. “We will!”
“But Serannian!” said Limnar, still astounded and not quite accepting the evidence of his own five senses. “How can it possibly be?”
“I don't know,” replied Zura, “and I care even less. If I surviveâand if I'm not locked awayâthen it's back to the Charnel Gardens for me.” There was no gladness in her tone, and suddenly the sky-Captain felt sorry for her.
“How can you take it so calmly?” Gytherik danced a jig on the bridge. “Look, it's Serannian. It
is
Serannian!”
And indeed it was Serannian, the sky-floating city, jewel of the dreamlands, fully emerged now from behind the mountains and approaching like some incredible stately behemoth of the sky. Beneath the aerial city a haze of warm, vented flotation essence, literally an ocean of that ethereal vapor, shimmered in sunlight from beyond the moon's rim; and on her flanks sailed the massed might of the dreamlands, Kuranes' and Randolph Carter's warship fleets. At the front, leading all into battle, came the Royal Yacht itself, whose colors told Limnar Dass a great deal.
“You see that flag?” he caught hold of Gytherik to keep him still.
“I can't quite make it out,” answer the other, squinting his eyes.
“Here,” said Limnar, “use my glass. Now tell me what you see ⦔
“A lantern, I think,” the gaunt-master reported, “and what
looks like a great jawâall set against a green and ancient hill.”
“Aye,” Limnar grinned, excitement flaring up in him until he trembled to contain it. “That's the King's standard, all right. Randolph Carter is back, Gytherikâand if you think you've seen it all, I've news for you. Do you see those bright-shining mirrors lining the decks of yon ships? They're ray-projectors, last used in the Bad Days. King Carter outlawed them for a time when the troubles were over, but now it seems he's had them installed in the ships of his fleet. You saw their like in Ilek-Vad, on the night of the mad moon's beam, and before that in the war with, erâ”
“With me,” Zura nodded. “And little use they were.”
“Oh, I remember the ray-projectors well enough,” Gytherik hastily replied. “Didn't you have a couple of them aboard
Skymaster
one time? I seem to remember that before we were friends, you shot down one of my gaunts with just such a weapon.”
“Ah!” Limnar coughed. “Yes, that's right. I had forgotten. Actually, the projectors were undergoing trials at the time. They had been improved a little over models used in the Bad Days. And I think you'll find these even newer models are better still. They were originally designed for work against organic targets: to destroy evil beings and creatures,” he glanced at Zura. “Living ones, that is. But I know for a fact that there were plans afoot to have them adapted for inorganic targets too. Then King Carter and Kuranes canceled the project, or perhaps they simply placed it under wraps? We shall see.”
“I seem to remember,” said Gytherik again, “that they were quite deadly enough in their old form!”
“Oh? Well, believe me,” answered Limnar, “that if these really are the latest models, anything that passed for deadly before was merely a prelude. Now comes the concerto!”
High over the suddenly muted moonscape sailed the fleets of dreamland, and while they still could their mirrors gathered the rays from the sun beyond the rim and enhanced them
in their batteries of projectors. Now the ships were descending, venting essence and spreading across the sky like a scarlet stain in the vastness of Serannian's shadow; and too late, the commanders of the Lengite fleet knew that they were doomed.
Pent furyâthe furious power of the sun itselfâwas released then, to lash down from on high in the shape of dazzling-white pencil beams from the fleet's ray-projectors, and where those beams struck they brought death and destruction. They licked over sails and rigging and left them blazing; they lingered on wooden decks until timbers gouted fire and smoke; they penetrated deep to seek out and detonate magazines, filling the sky with falling debris and burning wreckage. And where a Lengite fleet had sailed, soon nothing remained but fire-tinged smoke and rolling thunder!
A dozen heavily armored escort vessels spiralled down, four to each of Limnar's three crippled ships, and put out grapples. Then, powerful engines pulsed; and they were lifted up, up and into the Bay of Serannian itself. This took some little time, during which the fleet had concentrated its ray bombardment upon Mnomquah and the cities of the moonbeasts. Where the former seemed amazingly invulnerable, the latter could not withstand the fleet's fiery fury.
How those windowless towers burned when the devastating power of the sun fell upon them, and how dreamland's gunners took revenge for the ravaged towns and hamlets of the land of Earth's dreams! Ah, but the moonbeasts were not helpless! They had their magic, and wizards who knew well how to use it. Up from the cities under attack sprang the weaving heads of wand-snakes, and wherever they struck ships turned to stone and fell out of the sky. For where the moonbeast wizards of Mnomquah's temple had merely played a cat-and-mouse game with Limnar's flotilla, now their brothers in the cities were in deadly earnest where the greater fleet was concerned. A full dozen of dreamland's ships were caught this way, for no sooner would the ray-projector gunners
find and destroy one group of wizards than another would spring up somewhere else.
And yet the wizard-priests did not strike at Serannian itself, perhaps because they saw little profit in petrifying that which was already stone; so that high over the scene of battle Limnar, Gytherik and Zura, safe now behind Serannian's ramparts, could look down with bated breath and see how the fighting fared. And eventually, as exchanges between ships and cities grew more heated, there came that signal occurrence which put an end to the whole thing.
The flat nodding head of a wand-snake found its way into the bay of Serannian and hovered there over a half-dozen ships held in reserve. It was a large snake, this one, and the ships were sailing in close formation. Back went the cobralike head of that magic-spawned smoke-snake, as if to strike, but before it could thrust forward and down upon the shipsâ
“Look!” cried Limnar, pointing out through an embrasure. “The promontory thereâthe Museum!”
Zura and Gytherik followed his pointing finger, saw the great circular building he indicated where it stood upon a jutting, fragile-looking promontory. Built on the very rim, beyond the Museum wasânothing! Beneath it, a thin-seeming fifty feet of rock overhung a mile of thin air. Between sky-island and Museum, a narrow, walled causeway was the only means of access. Now, clanking out from the shadow of the Museum and making his way to the center of the causeway, the Curator had come into view.
“Aye,” said Zura sourly, “and I remember
him
, too! He was responsible for the destruction of many of my ships.”
“Only because they threatened his Museum,” answered Gytherik breathlessly, “as even now it might appear to be threatened.”
Many-armed, built of metal, thin, tall, spiky, shiny and tough-looking, the Curator gazed at the nodding wand-snake through glittering crystal eyes. And as the vast flat head of the thing struck, so did the Curator. Out from his eyes shot pencil-slim beams of blue light which met the wand-snake's
head in mid-thrust. The snake instantly stopped, as if time itself had frozen for the semi-sentient thing, and began to glow with the same blue fire of the Curator's beams. The blue light raced down the body of the snake in a moment into the heart of a gray moonbeast city, to the top of a squat windowless towerâwhich also began to glow with that same blue energy.
Only then, when the source of the great wand-snake was discovered, did the fire behind Curator's eyes blink out. So did the wand-snake's head, its body, the squat building in the moonbeast city, and doubtless a large coven of moonbeast wizards!
Nor was Curator satisfied. If one such magical device could threaten his Museumâthreaten to turn all of its aeon-gathered contents to worthless stoneâthen so could the others. He leaned over the causeway's wall, gazed down at the scene of battle below, and proceeded to destroy wand-snakes wherever he found them until none at all remained! Then, with the danger disposed of, he clanked back across the causeway and into his Museum.
For a long time now the ray-projector gunners had been bombarding Mnomquah where he still reared, half-in, half-out of his pit. As if contemptuous of them, more interested in the battle than annoyed by the puerile attempts of mere dreamlings, the moon-God had seemed to ignore them. By use of that power with which he had drawn the very moon down out of dreamland's sky, Mnomquah had surrounded himself with energies which all the ferocity of the sun itself could not penetrate. Even Curator's weapons would be useless here.
Now it must seem to Mnomquah that he was invincible. Surely these invaders from the dreamlands had tried to destroy himâhad employed their weapons to that end to such an extent that even now their batteries were failing and their beams losing their strengthâand still he prevailed. They had done their worst, and he was unharmed. Very well, his moonbeast wizards and priests had failed him, and so he himself must now take a greater hand in the battle. It would be
a very simple matter, and after that he would make his mighty leap from moon to dreamland's Sarkomand.
As the last few beams from the now useless ray-projectors petered out, so Mnomquah reared up gigantically from his crater and reached a webbed forepaw into the sky. Fifty yards across, that paw, a great club which would cut a swath of destruction through a fleet of ships like a man swatting flies frozen in flightâand yet that swath was never cut!
Limnar Dass where he leaned out of an embrasure in Serannian's ramparts saw it all. His glass trembled in his hands at what he first took to be sheer lunacy as the Royal Yacht of Randolph Carter sailed down out of the moon's sky directly into Mnomquah's range, confronting that horror as a midge might confront some monstrous chameleon. And though Mnomquah could not truly “see” the King's ship, still he sensed its presence and paused before the sheer insolence of it.
Or perhaps that was not why he pausedâperhaps he sensed something else â¦
For in the prow of the Royal Yacht stood Ilek-Vad's King in the red robes of a warrior, and his arms were raised on high as in invocation to Gods or Powers mightier by far than the moon-God. Still watching, hypnotized by the scene below, Limnar's flesh tingled and his hair began to stand on end as utterly alien energies awakened, took flight, and filled the air with their rushing. It was as if huge dark wings beat invisibly in the sky, as if they were shutting out all light, as if this might be the beginning of the End of the Universe.
Darkness descended like a candle snuffed out in a deep cave, until only Mnomquah and the Royal Yachtâaye, and the regal figure of Randolph Carterâwere clearly visible in an otherwise universal gloom. And a SILENCE fell over the entire tableau like no silence before or since. Or perhaps there had once been just such a silence, in that far forgotten age when last this selfsame seal was set over the prisons of the Great Old Ones!
A seal, yes, in the form of awesome words of power which
even now Randolph Carter uttered, and which echoed up out of the silence like the booming of some great and alien gong. What those words meant no man would ever know, not even the King himself. Sufficient that he voiced themâand that Mnomquah recognized and was powerless before them!