by Brian Lumley
“Damn, damn, damn!” cried Gathnod-Natz’ill Isharra from Shantak’s deck. His high-pitched, near-feminine voice was full of fury. “Those blasted gaunts have rescued their master!”
“But only him,” answered his brother in typically ringing tone, “and without his friends he’s harmless. As for this so-called Hero of Dreams and his good friend Eldin the Wanderer, this time they are ours. Or rather—they are Oorn’s!”
The brothers gazed into the torch-flickered shadows of Shantak’s bridge. Corpses littered the planking and blood dripped blackly from bridge to lower deck. The ship stank of blood. A groan sounded where bodies sprawled thickest and an arm lifted jerkily—only to fall back as life winked out. Pale for a moment, the Dukes turned back to the rail and their eyes stared with those of their depleted crew down at the scene some forty feet below.
There, caught in nets as they fell and now tight-wrapped in ropes, like human bobbins, the questers cursed and their women sobbed. Byharrid-Imon grinned cruelly and called down: “Curse and cry all you want, you four. Believe me, when you meet Oorn face to face you’ll be glad you practiced!”
Hero stopped struggling and glared his hatred into the mad faces which grinned down on him from Shantak’s rail. “So we’re to have an audience with your monster Goddess, are we? Well, we’ve met such before. She can be no worse than the stinking scum she commands.”
“Can’t she, indeed?” Byharrid-Imon roared with half-crazed laughter. “And who said anything about an audience, eh? No, no, my friends, not an audience exactly. You see, to propitiate Mnomquah’s final plunge from moon to dreamlands—you four are to be sacrificed to his hungry mate!”
“Aye,” added his brother in shrill glee, “and sacrificed this very night—right now!”
CHAPTER VIII
… Of Men and Gaunts
Bruised, bloodied and only half-conscious, Gytherik made no complaint but merely hung limp in the prehensile paws of his charges as, joined by the other pair of nightmarish creatures, they sped him back to the coast, across sea-wall and submerged quays, and up into the night sky toward Limnar Dass where he waited aboard Gnorri II. Had things gone as planned, this would have been a joyous trip, a victory flight. The five gaunts would now be flying in line abreast, with Gytherik riding his great gaunt on the flank and the questers and girls suspended beneath the rest of the line. The gaunts would be overloaded, to be sure, but not for long. Out over the sea they would be met—as even now they were met—by the rest of the grim, all three of them, who would then have taken their share of the burden.
That was how it should have been. Now, with the sole exception of the gaunt-master himself—all dazed and battered and shaken up—there was no burden; and the grim had lost a brave and worthy member.
With Gnorri II in sight Gytherik regained his wits and began to react to the cold night air gusting into his face. Sensing his recovery, the great gaunt which was his chosen mount slid beneath him where he dangled and took his weight. He held tight to the saddle, swaying a little as the grim descended to Gnorri’s welcoming deck.
By this time the rim of the moon was showing like the crack of some false golden dawn all along the night horizon, but mercifully the heavens were still full of vapor, thin banks of cloud which obscured the mad yellow glare. In the sea, however, waterspouts were marching as before, and meteorites blazed across the night sky in fiery profusion. On the western horizon orange fires lit the land and made ruddy haloes on the underside of ashen clouds, and thick columns of smoke and tephra were aglow in the glare of freshly spawned volcanoes. The very air seemed charged with weird energies; and the thin clouds twisted and writhed as if tortured, even though the wind had fallen utterly away.
“Well,” said Limnar Dass when he had heard Gytherik’s brokenly gabbled story, “at least with the wind fallen there’ll be no chase, no unequal fight. But how did they know you were coming?”
Seated in the sky-Captain’s cabin with his bruised head in his hands, Gytherik could only offer a miserable shrug. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I only know that the whole thing was a mess, and that I’m lucky to have come out of it in one piece. If I hadn’t been kicked half senseless—” He shrugged again. “Certainly I would have tried to rescue them—and that would have been the end of me, too.”
“You think … that they’re dead, then?” Limnar had difficulty forcing the words out.
“No, not dead, not yet. As I fell I saw nets set to catch us—saw the others bounce and tumble—and the hordes who waited to leap upon them! No, not dead. They wanted to take us alive.”
Until now Limnar Dass had been calm, cool as a sky-Captain’s training had made him. Training which had it that in a tight spot—when confronted by apparently insurmountable circumstances and difficulties—still there was always something one could do, as long as one refused to panic. Fine and proper advice coming from the lips of some hoary old Admiral who never in all his long career was so confronted … but now? Limnar sprang to his feet and dragged Gytherik upright and out of his chair. Face contorted in a fashion most unsuited to a man born of dreams, Limnar stared into the other’s startled eyes, then shoved him roughly out through the cabin’s doorway onto Gnorri’s bridge.
“Listen, lad,” the sky-Captain ground the words out of his mouth. “It’s not just Hero and Eldin—though without a doubt they’re the finest, bravest pair of rogues a man ever knew—not just their lives we’re talking about. Not even the lives of a pair of poor innocent lasses. No, this time it’s everything! Everything, d’you hear?” And again he grabbed the youth’s shoulders, his hands trembling with the urge to shake him.
At that Gytherik came out of his waking nightmare. The lines which made his young face haggard in the light of the ship’s lamps took on a sterner mold. In ten seconds he seemed to mature by at least ten years—and abruptly he shook himself free from Limnar’s grasp. With haunted eyes he looked at the moon, still rising, potent as some demon drug in the sky.
“You’re right,” he told Limnar Dass then. “These two have become everything to me, but it’s no longer just them. And Limnar … tonight is the night! It must be. So what can we do? Is there anything we can do?”
Suddenly the sky-Captain’s bearded face, whose lines never seemed quite so soft as those of other dreamlanders, broke into a craggy grin. He slapped Gytherik on the shoulder and jostled him back into the cabin, quickly poured two fat glasses of brandy and tossed his back. Gytherik followed suit and pulled a face.
“You know,” said Limnar, “you had me worried there for a moment.”
“You had me worried!” answered Gytherik with feeling. “But I know what you mean. At least I think I do.”
“Do you? Listen, we’re dreamlanders, right? We’re what Eldin calls Homo ephemerans. Which means that however we play it, our actions are governed by the dreams of men in the waking world. Our entire world has been built of their dreams since the first man dreamed his very first dream! And even when they make the transition from waking world to dreamlands, still they seem to run the entire show—just as we’ve seen in Hero and Eldin. Am I right?”
Without waiting for an answer, Limnar thumped the table and jumped to his feet. “Maybe it’s just that something of those two has rubbed off on me,” he continued, “I don’t know for sure, but I’m no longer satisfied merely to drift wherever dreams take me. Damn it all—I reckon it’s about time we started to play our own cards!”
As if caught up in Limnar’s fervor, lit by inspiration, Gytherik’s face brightened for a moment. Then he relaxed and asked: “But what cards do we have to play? What can we do? Everything seems to be against us. If they were here—why, they seem able to make things happen, and—”
“But they’re not here,” Limnar cried, “and we must make things happen!” He thumped the table again. “Now sit,” he said, “and let’s work things out.” They sat and Limnar poured more brandy.
Gytherik sipped, thought, and frowned. He said: “Though the clouds boil, there’s
no wind. Our sails hang slack, so we won’t be fighting any sky battle.”
“No,” Limnar answered, “but the enemy is stuck too. Until the wind rises we’re becalmed—all of us—it’s as simple as that.”
Gytherik nodded. “But we have the gaunts!”
“Too few,” said Limnar. “We can’t launch an attack with a mere handful of gaunts. And that’s not to belittle them, you understand.”
Gytherik began to grow despondent and it showed in his face. “You see? If those two double-damned questers were here—why, they’d turn events in their own favor, make adversity work for and not against them!”
“Good thinking,” Limnar nodded. “So let’s work on that. We don’t have a lot going for us, so how can we use what stands against us? What, exactly, does stand against us?”
“The mad moon, for one thing,” Gytherik shuddered. “She rises even now, and if this really is the night—”
“The last night, for the dreamlands,” Limnar finished it for him. “Unless we can come up with an answer.”
“The mad moon,” Gytherik repeated, his frown deepening, fingers tapping on Limnar’s table. “The last night. It’s going to happen tonight.” His fingers tapped faster and his jaw began to fall even as his frowns lifted.
“What is it, lad?” Limnar asked, leaning forward to gaze into Gytherik’s face. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. I can almost count your goosebumps!” But it seemed that the youth no longer saw him, only the idea growing in his mind.
“Turn adversity to our favor!” Faster still his fingers tapped. “Waterspouts and whirlwinds, volcanoes and earthquakes and roaring, raging tides!”
“Yes, lad—go on.”
“Tides!” Gytherik whispered almost inaudibly, his eyes wide and staring. “Tides, by all that’s—”
“What is it?” Limnar now pressed. “Come on, out with it.”
“The sea!” the gaunt-master suddenly shouted, springing to his feet. “The blessed sea!” Now it was his turn to lay hands on Limnar Dass. “The highest tides you’ve ever seen, lapping at the rim of the old sea-wall. What a knock in the eye that would be! Hero wanted to do it with earth, and Eldin with fire—but they were both wrong. There’s another element which they overlooked—another way …”
“To do what?” Limnar now roared.
“To trap old Oorn in her damned pit!” cried Gytherik. “That’s what!”
Limnar gaped, shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”
“Of course not, for you weren’t there. You haven’t seen the old sea-wall and the waters raging, ready to break through … Limnar, how much powder does Gnorri carry?”
“Powder?”
“Yes, powder—for the cannon, man!”
Taken aback by the heat of the gaunt-master’s excitement, Limnar could only gasp, “Enough to blow the ship to hell—if all barrels went up at once.”
“Oh, they will, they will,” chanted Gytherik, and he began to dance in his fever. Then he rushed out onto the bridge, where a bemused and breathless Limnar Dass caught up with him.
“Up onto the deck,” cried Gytherik like a madman. “The powder, let’s have it! Let’s have it! Let’s see what we’ve got. And Limnar—where’s the nearest ship of the flotilla?”
“Right there,” the sky-Captain answered, beginning to fear for the youth’s sanity. He pointed off to starboard, where the lights of a ship winked beneath weirdly rotating skies. “Becalmed, of course.”
“No matter!” cried Gytherik. “All to the good. If we’re becalmed, they’re becalmed. You said so yourself. They can’t strike back.” Before Limnar could question this, he added: “A note, quick! A note to the Captain of yon vessel. We want her powder—all of it. My gaunts shall bear the note, return with the powder. Return loaded down with the black, beautiful stuff! A few trips and we’ll have it all.”
Now, as the sum of Gytherik’s babblings began to add up, Limnar became fired with the youth’s enthusiasm. “Are you saying that you intend to blow a hole in Sarkomand’s sea-wall?” he breathlessly asked.
“Right!” Gytherik hugged him. “Damned right, as Hero would say! We’ll drown the damned place, seal old Oorn in her damned pit, smash the encampments of the damned horned ones, termen, zombies and Isharrans flat!” Then, eyes still burning behind dark bruises but softer now of voice, he added: “But we must be quick. The mad moon rises Look—”
Dreamland’s rim seemed to burn beneath a mighty golden dome, to burn with a yellow glare the night mists could no longer hold at bay. Confused clouds cleared a path for mad moonbeams which put down their sick tendrils on the land like a glowing, cancerous horror of cosmic magnitude. Great waterspouts beyond number rushed here and there across heaving deeps—as if the very sea were trying to invert itself—and a dull, continuous rumbling filled the air, subdued now but growing ever louder. Volcanic fires burned in a score of distant places, and meteorites blazed and hissed in the heavens in such numbers that the sky became bright with their fire. Nothing like this had ever been known before in all the history of the lands of Earth’s dreams.
For long moments the two stared at a world gone mad. Then—
“Ahoy the crew!” cried Limnar Dass. “There’s work for you. I want all the powder brought up onto the deck right now … and steady as you go. No accidents, if you please. Bundle the barrels together in scraps of net, gaunt-manageable in size, and get it done as quickly as you can. Come on, lads, bustle about. And listen, keep your chins up. We’re not licked yet!”
To Gytherik he said, “I’ll have that note for you in a dozen flaps of a night-gaunt’s wing. And talking of gaunts, while I’m writing the note you’d best have an earnest little chat with the entire grim. Gytherik,” he squeezed the youth’s shoulders, “I think your answer is the right one, possibly the only one. I think it will work.”
“Think it will work?” the gaunt-master answered, his eyes aflame with reflected meteorites. “My friend, you’d better pray it will work. It has to!”
CHAPTER IX
Oorn!
A thousand torches blazed all through the streets of centuried Sarkomand from its oceanmost limits to Oorn’s temple, lining the route for the triumphant procession which now wound its way through the alien ruins, bearing aloft the bound, bruised and battered forms of Hero, Eldin, Ula and Una. And there could be no mistaking the fact that now—setting aside all matters of earlier, personal squabbles—the entire enemy alliance was truly allied and in one accord in its current task: namely the physical destruction and spiritual damnation of the four prisoners in a mad and monstrous sacrifice to Oorn.
Zombies marched (or shuffled) with the throng; horned ones leaped, cavorted and played grating, inhuman tunes on nameless instruments; termen, however woodenly, paraded with the rest; and the Isharrans, led by their twin masters, slouched along in their generally degenerate fashion. And never an argument nor indeed any single sign of discord along the way. Noting this absence of enmity, Hero and Eldin began to wonder if they might not breed a little in the minds of their captors. The Dukes of Isharra were sticking close to them (their bearers were burly members of Shantak’s depleted crew) and so the questers decided to work first upon the minds of the sinister brothers. The decision was unspoken, mutual; even in adversity—perhaps especially in adversity—Hero and Eldin worked as a team.
“Hey, Byharrid-Imon,” called Hero, sucking sore lips and teeth where a fist had bruised his gums. “You realize of course that you and your fellow Isharrans are the only true humans in this entire bunch—except for us, I mean? See, I’m puzzled. I can’t figure out why you’ve teamed up with these damned monsters.”
“You should listen to him, Isharran,” Eldin gruffly put in. “We don’t know what you’ve been promised, but we certainly know what’s in store for you! We had it from old Hrill, the horned-one Captain of a ship we sank out in the desert west of Ilek-Vad.”
Byharrid-Imon turned to smile grimly up at the two where brawny arms held them aloft. Without breaking h
is stride he said, “Talk all you like, questers. That’s your right. But don’t you think you’ve left it a bit late to try wriggling your way out of this one, eh?”
“It’s late for all of us, Byharrid-Imon,” Hero eagerly answered. “Can’t you see that with the dreamlands destroyed there’ll be no room for you in the moon-God’s plans? What possible service could you perform for Mnomquah?”
Now it was Gathnod-Natz’ill’s turn to speak. In his shrill, half-female voice he said: “We have been promised a complete monopoly in the trading and control of all precious metals and stones throughout the length and breadth of the dreamlands. Moreover, we are to be Satraps of Oriab and the Southern Isles, Kings of all the lands and cities bordering on the Southern Sea—with the exception of Zura and Thalarion, of course, for which we’ve no special desire—and High Lords of sky-floating Serannian.”
“Oh?” Eldin lifted painfully puffy eyebrows. “But surely Lathi will have something to say about that? I mean, she’s been promised a nest of hive-cities stretching right across the dreamlands!”
“And what of Zura, Princess of Zombies?” asked Hero. “She has plans to go a-conquering wherever her fancy takes her. And remember: all who die monstrous deaths become Zura’s to command.” He gave a wholly genuine and involuntary shudder. “By all that’s rotten, her armies will be swelled this night—and that’s for sure!”
“We know nothing of all that,” Byharrid-Imon returned, but his voice rang a little less stridently now and his tone appeared less certain. “We do know, however, that we’ve always had fair play in our dealings with the horned ones and their masters.”
“Of course you have,” Eldin readily agreed. “They were setting you up, using you. They needed you to distribute their damned moon-gold, so that Mnomquah would know where to fire his double-damned beam on cities full of innocents. Beware, Isharrans, for you’ve been out in the mad moon’s glare too long! You say you’ll be Kings? Kings of what? Who will your subjects be when the slaughter is over? Who will you trade with then? With Zura and her million undead?”