"It sounds like somebody chewing," Namalee said.
"Chomping," Karkri said.
At Ishmael's request, Karkri took the torch and cast it upward. Though he was shorter and lighter in weight than Ishmael, he still had spent half of his life throwing a harpoon. The torch sailed up higher than when Ismael had thrown it, and it showed a pair of bare feet hanging in the air. They were moving slowly away from the men below.
Namalee gasped, and some of the men uttered prayers or curses.
"Something snatched Pamkamshi into the air when nobody had their eyes on him," Ishmael said. "Something up there."
He felt cold, and his stomach muscles were contracting.
"Shoot up in that direction," he said to Avarjam, who had a bow. "Don't worry about hitting Pamkamshi. I think he is dead. His feet weren't moving by themselves. Something is carrying him off across the room."
Avarjam shot an arrow into the darkness above them. The string thrummed, and then there was a thudding noise. The arrow did not clatter on the floor ahead of them.
"You hit something," Ishmael said, wondering if it was Pamkamshi. Perhaps the arrow had driven into a man who was only unconscious, not dead. But he could not help that. The safety of the greater number and of the mission was paramount.
They walked on ahead until Ishmael ordered a stop. Karkri again threw the torch up, and this time it showed not only the feet but the legs. The upper part of Pamkamshi, however, was as shrouded as if he had been buried.
"He's lower than he was," Ishmael said, and then there was a loud thump ahead of them. They hurried forward and saw in the torchlight the body of Pamkamshi. His bones were broken and his flesh burst open. But it was not the fall that had killed him. Around his neck was a broad purplish mark, and his eyes bulged out and his tongue protruded. Something had eaten his scalp and ears and part of his nose.
"Everybody put one hand up by their necks and keep them there until I say to do otherwise," Ishmael said.
"What did the arrow hit?" Namalee said.
She looked up and yelled, forgetting Ishmael's orders to keep quiet, and jumped back. They looked too, and they jumped away, opening out.
The creature that fell onto the stone floor by Pamkamshi was pancake-shaped and bore a great suction pad on its back and on the other side a coil of purplish hue by a great mouth with many small teeth. The arrow had run half its length through it and probably pinned it to the ceiling after its death had released the huge suction pad.
The beast had dropped its long tentacle nooselike around the neck of Pamkamshi and snatched him into the upper darkness. Whether it had selected the man because he was being unobserved by the others or whether it was by accident, Ishmael did not know. But he suspected that the beast possessed some organs of perceptions not apparent to those unfamiliar with the creature.
He also suspected that the ceiling was crowded with the beasts and that he and his band were in deadly peril. If this was true, however, something was preventing the beasts from making a mass attack. Did there exist among them, as he suspected there did among the creatures of the room they had just quitted, a communal mind? Or, if not a mind, some sort of common nervous system? And this allotted to each in its turn a chance to try for a victim? Or did the hypothesized common agreement insist that any beast could attack when it was safe for one to do so? And what was the safety rule? That one of the prey should be unobserved momentarily by his fellows?
If this was the rule, then the creatures were vulnerable in some respect; otherwise they would not care whether or not the intended victim was isolated from his group.
Ishmael leaned over the thing to study the effects of the arrow. A pale green fluid had spread out from the wound, which was centered on a lump in the body about the size and shape of an ostrich egg. Ishmael thought that this could be one of its vital organs.
There were about fifty of the eggish lumps in the body. The rest was apparently occupied by little but fatty tissue and a circulatory system, though this was only his guess.
Ishmael straightened up and signaled that they should proceed. They all kept one hand by their necks, and they kept glancing upward, as if they expected to see a purplish tentacle drop into the illuminated world of the torches.
After walking sixty paces, Ishmael stopped them again and again Karkri tossed a torch upward. The light flared briefly on a dozen tentacles uncoiling slowly from the darkness above.
Ishmael had no idea of what was causing this concerted action now. Perhaps the beasts, in, whatever form of communication they used, had conferred and decided that individual action was a failure. Or perhaps the death of one resulted in triggering an instinct which activated them to a communal effort.
Ishmael gave an order, and the band ran forward. They stayed, together, however, and each kept a hand by his neck. They had not gone forty steps before a dozen tentacles shot like frogs' tongues down from the blackness. Each dropped around a neck and its neighboring hand and tightened.
Namalee was one of those caught.
Ishmael spun around at the cries of those seized. He barked an order to the archers to crouch close to the floor, and to fire upward at random as best they could in this position. They were safer from attack now than if they had been standing up. And they sent shaft after shaft into the upper darkness.
Ishmael picked up a torch that had been dropped by a man who was now struggling to keep from being lifted by the tentacle. His hand kept the tentacle from strangling him immediately, but his face was turning bluish-black in the light.
Ishmael rammed the torch against the tentacle, and it released the man and snapped upward and out of sight. The odor of burned flesh trailed from it as smoke from a rocket.
Ishmael leaped upward, grabbing the slimy, ropy limb that was hauling Namalee upward. His weight pulled them both down, and with his other hand he passed the surface of the torch along the tentacle. It uncoiled and dropped them both on the stone floor.
By then the othe torch-bearers were burning the tentacles, and these uncoiled and withdrew.
Something heavy struck the floor ahead of them. After reorganizing, they proceeded ahead and shortly their lights flickered on a dead beast. An arrow had pierced one of the lumpy organs.
Torch men stood on the periphery of the group and waved the brands wildly. A single torchman in the center of the group waved his brand. Ishmael hoped by this positioning of the torches to discourage the beasts. Within forty yards they saw the wall of the chamber and a small square opening. They ran into it, though Ishmael would have liked to have gone slowly and cautiously. The builders of this place may have anticipated that those who ran the gantlet of the tentacles would dive headlong into this entrance as a mouse goes into a hole when the cat is after it.
But there was, by then, no appealing to the better sense of the group.
Their torches showed them a corridor that curved to the right. It was wide enough for two to go abreast and the ceiling was two men high. It continued to curve to the right for about eighty paces and then curved to the left. After about a hundred paces, they came to a stairway cut out of stone. This was so narrow that they would have to go in single file. The ascent was very steep, and the walls curved to the right.
Ishmael led the way, holding a torch in one hand and a spear in the other. As he ascended, he wondered how far these chambers of horrors extended. It was possible that they went on and on and finally ended in a blank wall or in some trap which no one could possibly escape. But he did not see how the Booragangahns could afford to stock these rooms with very many guardians. The beasts could not subsist on trespassers alone. It was doubtful that anybody had penetrated into this area since the chambers had been carved, To keep the guardians alive, the Booragangahns had to feed them. And even if the beasts existed most of the time in a dormant state, they still had to be fed from time to time. From the viewpoint of economy alone, the beasts had to be limited in number.
Presently the narrow stairway s
traightened out. Ishmael kept on climbing and, when he had counted three hundred, he stopped.
Above was the top of the stairs. And on it squatted a huge stone figure.
It was gray and shaped something like a tortoise with a frog's head and a badger's legs. The highest point, the crest of the tortoise shell, was about four feet from the floor. It quivered with the eternal shaking of the rock, and this motion gave it a semblance of life.
The eyes were as gray and stonelike as the rest of the body.
But when Ishmael got close enough to look into one of the eyes, he thought he saw it swivel within the eye socket.
His nerves were slipping their moorings, he thought, and he stepped into the hall which the figure guarded.
The stone head turned with a creaking.
Had it not been for the noise, Ishmael would have been caught unawares and the stone jaws would have closed on his arm.
He jumped away and the jaws clanged shut as if they were made of iron.
At the same time, the body lifted on its badgerish legs and started to turn.
Ishmael rammed his spear into the mouth, when the jaws opened again.
A yellowish fluid sprayed out of the mouth into Namalee's face and she fell backward against the man on the step below her. Ishmael leaped up and jumped up onto the thing's back. He pulled out his stone knife and began chipping away at its right eye. His knife shattered, and then the neck of the thing creaked as it slid far out from the shell. Ishmael could no longer reach the head to stab at it, and it dipped to get at Namalee.
The people behind Namalee had retreated but one man, Karkri, sent an arrow into the thing's open mouth.
The head continued to approach Namalee, the neck seeming to be of interminable length. Ishmael could see that the neck was of stone, or covered with stone. But the silicon consisted of hundreds of tiny plates, and these slid one over the other as the thing moved its neck from side to side and bent it downward.
Ishmael stood up on the tortoise-shaped shell and leaped outward. He came down astraddle the extended neck just behind the massive head. His weight carried the neck and head down until the head slammed into the steps. More yellowish fluid spurted out from the thing's open mouth, and then abruptly the jet became a trickle.
There was no more movement from the creature.
Ishmael got off the neck and slid down alongside the head. The gray hard eyes were as stony and lifeless as before, but this time the thing seemed to be actually dead. The mouth was still open, and a torch showed that Ishmael's spear and Karkri's arrow had pierced a huge eyeball-like organ in the cavity past the throat. This no longer pulsed, though some of the yellowish fluid was still oozing out from around the shafts of the two weapons. Ishmael asked Namalee if she had been hurt, and she replied that only her emotions were pained. Then he rapped on the thing's hide. If the skin of the beast was not indeed granite, it was something very like it. What manner of beast was this that excreted a skin which hardened into stone?
Namalee and the others said that they had never heard of such a creature, not even in the many tales of horrible beasts they had heard from their grandmothers.
"But it is dead now," Ishmael said. "I do not know where the Booragangahns got this creature. I suppose they may have found it buried in the heart of the mountain when they carved these steps. I hope this was the only one they found. At least we will not have to worry about it on the way back."
"Do not be so sure," Karkri said.
He held his torch in the thing's mouth, and Ishmael saw that the arrow and the spear were being sucked -- or absorbed -- into the red organ. And the thing was beginning to pulse again. Or was that an illusion fostered by the eternal shaking of this world?
Then the jaws slowly closed, and the neck began to retract. The gray eyes continued to stare as blankly, and the head offered no hostility. But the men scrambled by it, watching it closely to make sure that the head did not turn toward them. When they were all in the hallway, behind the back of the thing, they paused for a moment. They looked at Ishmael as if to ask, What next?
He said, "All we can do is go ahead. But I am sure of one thing: the priests of the temple of Boorangah will not be expecting anybody to come alive through here. So we will take them unawares."
"If this does lead to the temple," Vashgunammi, a sailor, said.
"Somebody has to feed the guardian beasts once in a while, and I doubt that they enter from the other end to do so," Ishmael said. "In any event, we must go on until we win or lose."
And that, he said to himself as he turned away, summed up the mechanics of life. A living being had to keep on going, no matter what happened, until the enemy was conquered or had conquered. Even here, in this quivering world of the red sun and the falling moon, that held true.
So far they had been fortunate. If the guardians had been more vigorous, or of a slightly more belligerent nature, they might have wiped out the band of invaders. And perhaps in earlier days they might have done so. But ages had passed with no call for their talents, and they had grown older and more feeble. Their keepers, the priests, had started to neglect them, perhaps not feeding them enough to keep them fully strong. And the beasts dwelt in the long, long darkness and dreamed of their prey; when their prey was among them, they took a long time awakening. The sluggishness of millennia was not easily overcome.
However, now that they were alert, they might be three times as dangerous if the invaders attempted to return this way.
Might be. . .
They were faced with another extremely steep stairway cut into the stone. This led up and up and then became even steeper with very high rises so that Ishmael's shins brushed against the edges of the steps. Presently he was clinging to the steps with his free hand while he held a torch in the other.
Since he had entered the chambers, Ishmael had looked for signs of the keepers: dust or lack of it, footprints or lack of them where they should be, anything that would show that these rooms were used. But there was no dust and therefore no footprints. And there was not a sign of garbage or of anything left after the animals had been fed. Apparently the priests ventured into here often enough to clean up. Or the priests only cleaned up at long intervals and they had just recently done so. Whatever the situation, the chambers must have been cleaned a short time ago.
Ishmael was heartened by this, because the chances were that the keepers would not be coming for some time. Also, the fact that the beasts had been fed recently might account for their lack of all-out fury. The edge of their hunger had been taken off.
Ishmael whispered, "Perhaps you are bringing us good luck, Namalee!"
"What did you say?" she whispered back.
"Nothing," he said, lifting his free hand to signal silence. He thought he had heard a noise from above.
The others stopped climbing too, and they stood on the steps, listening.
Again the faint noise drifted down the flight of stairs.
It sounded something like chanting.
"I think we might be close to the temple," Namalee said.
"I hope we are close to the exit from this place," Karkri said. "Something is following us."
Ishmael looked back down the steps, past the torches, and strained to see into the darkness at the foot of the steps. The extreme influence of the torchlights barely reached there. Still, it was light enough for him to see the hulk that moved slowly, creakingly, from the corridor into the space at the bottom. Though he could not make out the details, he knew that it was the stone beast.
"It didn't die," Namalee said.
"And it's waiting for us," Ishmael said. "Well, it surely can't come up the steps after us."
The thing made no effort to ascend the flight. It was as motionless as the statue it seemed to be. It was waiting, and it probably was better at waiting than any creature in this world or the one that Ishmael had left.
"It's blocking the corridor," Karkri said. "And the next time it will be aroused. We have hurt
it, and it won't forget that."
"You don't know that," Ishmael said.
He climbed on until he reached another narrow corridor. This led straight for about sixty feet and ended in a wall of stone. But the voices, which had become louder, had to be close by. He put his ear to the wall and could hear the chanting quite clearly. It was not in the tongue of the Zalarapamtrans.
Softly, he rapped on the wall. He was surprised to find that the wall was not as thin as he had thought. It was very thick and solid. He determined after going over the wall that the voices were filtering through openings near the bottom, the center, and the top of the wall. These were holes a quarter-inch wide drilled through the stone and spaced about a foot apart.
"They must move this wall somehow," Ishmael said to Namalee.
He pushed at various places and passed the torch over every inch of the wall and the adjacent areas of the corridor. But he could find nothing that might serve as a button or an activator to swing the wall on a pivot. He was convinced that this had to be the manner in which the wall was operated.
"Perhaps," Namalee said, "the mechanisms are all on the other side?"
"I hope not," he said, "though that would be one way of making sure that intruders did not get into the temple even if they escaped the guardians. To return after feeding the beasts, though, the priests would have to notify those on the other side of the wall to operate the mechanism. I suppose they could do so through the little holes."
"The stone beast is coming up after us," Karkri said.
Ishmael returned to the head of the stairs and looked down in the light of the torch Karkri held. It was true. The great shell of the beast was tilted upward, and the massive legs with the claws of stone were gripping the edges of a step. Slowly, and with a grinding noise, the bottom of the shell scraping against the steps, the monster pulled itself up. Its head was extended out of the shell and its jaws were opened wide. Ishmael went carefully down the steep steps until he was close enough to see into the wide yawn of the mouth. The eyeball thing inside pulsed much more rapidly than the first time he had seen it. And the arrow and spear seemed to have been absorbed into the organ. Possibly their wood had provided it with fuel. The beast's life must be comparable to a low and slow-burning fire under a tea kettle. The energy was low, but even a small fire will eventually make a kettle boil.
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