The Wind Whales of Ishmael

by Philip José Farmer

  By this time, Ishmael was not above telling them that he knew what their gods wanted of them. He acted as if he were receiving divine commands by thought transmission, and the others began to act as if he were. Perhaps they did so because they wanted to believe that their gods had not entirely deserted them.

  There were no lights permitted aboard, of course, so the signal to release all six boats simultaneously was passed by yanking on a system of lines rigged for the occasion through the ship.

  The lines restraining the boats were slashed, and sailors shoved the boats out before they would rise and get stuck in the hull. The side of a boat bumped against the upper part of the wide port as it shot up. A sailor was feeding the amorphous mostly-mouth beasts at the necks of the bladder, and these were manufacturing the gas to increase the buoyancy even as the boat ascended.

  The moon had passed below the western horizon before the Roolanga had entered the final fifty miles of her journey. The immense shelf above placed the small boats in shadow. The front of the mountain, a vertical cliff here, went by at a distance of several hundred yards. The boats, their sails folded and the masts and arms shipped and folded, rose at the mercy of the wind. This was slight at this point, so the boats drifted about half a mile before they were just below the overhang. Karkri, in charge of maneuvering, began to let the gas out. The other boats also slowed their ascent. The men in charge were born to the air. Almost without thinking, they estimated to an inch the amount of buoyancy to lose. The top of the fat oval ring that formed the outer part of the boat bumped against the stone. The people in it were stretched out flat on their faces, but even so outcrops scraped against the backs of some. Then the crews turned over on their backs and propelled the boat slowly outward by reaching up and grabbing the rough stone and pushing.

  It was slow and laborious work, since the shelf projected for a half mile from where they had first struck it. And they could not go swiftly if they had wished to. It was a matter of pulling and hoping the scraping of the hull against the rough stone would not abrade through the skin. The skin was tough but very thin for the sake of lightness.

  Above the hard breathings of the crew Ishmael heard a hissing from the boat behind and to the right of them. Ishmael told the others to stop, and the boat slid to a halt, pressing against the rock bottom. To see what was going on, it was necessary to push against the rock to lower the boat. Ishmael squirmed around while everybody else pushed. The boat to the right was about six feet away and was only a dim shape in the blackness.

  Vargajampa, the third mate, said softly, "Joognaja! There is a shaft in the rocks here!"

  "What size?" Ishmael called back. He hoped that there was no one listening at the upper end of the shaft.

  "Just large enough! There is a grille of wood in the opening, however!" Ishmael gave the order, and his crew began working the boat toward the other, while that one moved away.

  Namalee had told him that, as far as she knew, no one had ever penetrated into an enemy's city in this manner. In fact, though raids had been made at night, they were always either sudden massive onslaughts or a few ships sailing in, destroying, looting and then getting away as swiftly as possible. No one had ever carried out such a plan as Ishmael's or even suggested it.

  Despite this, however, the possibility of such was recognized. That explained why the shafts were screened and sometimes guarded.

  When the boat was centered under the shaft, Ishmael gripped the latticework of wood set into it and pulled. The grille failed to yield. By probing through the spaces between the bars with a slender stick, he determined that a rope was secured with hard wooden pegs to each corner on the inside of the screen. The other end of the ropes must be secured to the inside of a grille set in the top end of the shaft. It was possible that a pull on this grille would drag the other down and set off an alarm mechanism.

  To avoid this, he inserted a slender stick with a flint knife on one end and cut the ropes. Then, after some hard pulling and prying with a sharp stick, he managed to get the grille loose. He stood up slowly and pulled himself up by one of the ropes into the shaft. After that, to avoid pulling the grille loose, and so precipitating himself down the shaft, he braced himself against the walls. It was not easy to climb in that manner. The tunnel was so narrow that he had to hold himself in, and progress upward, by using his knees, and shove upward a few inches. This would have taken the skin off his back and knees and hands if he had not clothed himself in thin leather and put on thin leather gloves. Nevertheless, before he got to the top, the leather was worn through. And he was puffing and panting and sweating and trembling. On reaching the top, he waited until his breathing had become inaudible. He listened for sounds: a foot scraping against the stone, snoring, heavy breathing, but could hear nothing except the blood in his ears.

  The grille above him came out with a skreaking that tore at his nerves as the stone had torn at his leather clothes. He waited a while after it had come loose and then inched up, expecting to have his head split open by a stone ax when it emerged. But there was no one waiting for him. He lit a match and looked around. The room, a cube cut out of rock, was empty except for some boxes in one corner.

  He hoisted himself out and lay for a moment on the floor, which trembled beneath him. When he rose, he went to the open doorway and looked down it but could see nothing because of the darkness. He returned to the shaft and uncoiled the rope bound about his waist. It fell down the shaft and was seized by someone below and given a tug. Ishmael sat down, holding the rope, his feet braced against the opposite lip of the shaft. He held on while Namalee climbed up it. After she was out, she helped him hold the rope while Karkri came up.

  Karkri and she held the rope while the next sailor came up.

  Ishmael took a small torch Namalee had carried up in a sack. He lit it and then proceeded down the hall corridor. The open entrances on either side gave to more storerooms. At one end, the corridor stopped against stone; at the other, it opened into a stairway cut out of the rock. This curved around and up. Ishmael decided not to go any further until all of the men had come up the shaft. This was a slow process. The empty boats had to be slid away, and the balancing of each boat required a careful moving around. Every time a man went up a shaft, the equilibrium of the boat was affected.

  One boat was to remain with three men aboard. These would wait until three hours had passed. If the others had not returned by then, the three were to take their boat back to the Roolanga and the next phase would begin.

  Ishmael led the band to the next level, which was much like the lower one. The corridor, however, was twice as long as the one beneath it. And the one above that was double the length of the one below it.

  Booragangah seemed to be built much as Zalarapamtra was. This, too, would have had an upside-down pyramid-like appearance if a cross-section had been cut in it. The next level should be twice as long as the one below it, and it was. This, however, was lit here and there with torches or with the less bright but low-oxygen-using fireflies. The torches or cages were set in stone rings carved out of the wall. The few people within were sleeping.

  They passed on. It might have been best to kill the slaves, but there was always the chance that one would wake and cry out. And these were not going to attack the invaders if they should be forced back this way. They would stand to one side and let invaders and invaded fight it out.

  The Zalarapamtrans proceeded more swiftly. The fact that the layout of the tunnels was much like that of their own city assured them that they could find the way to the temple. They went up the next stairway and turned to the left to go in toward the mountain. But Ishmael and two others went ahead without torches and with knives ready while the others waited below. This corridor was dark, and a few random explorations of chambers along the way disclosed more storerooms, one of them an arsenal. These contained no weapons which the band did not have.

  The party went to the other end of the corridor. This did not end in a wall, as the others did, but in a
nother staircase. Namalee said that she expected this, since the corridor of her city on this level also had a staircase.

  "This should lead up to another corridor at the end of which is another stairway to still another corridor. But that one will lead to the temple of the gods. Only..."

  "Only what?" Ishmael said.

  "A long time ago, when even my great-grandparents were not yet born, a Zalarapamtran escaped from Booragangah. He told some strange stories. One says that there are guardians of the temple of the gods of Booragangah. Not human guardians. Beasts that the founder of this city, the hero Booragangah himself, could not kill. So he left them here in places where the unwary would encounter them, and --"

  "We've no time for folk tales," Ishmael said. But when he had climbed the next staircase and looked around the corner, he was not so sure that there was not something strange in this place.

  This hallway, unlike the others, was brightly lit. Torches and cages of fireflies were set within stone rings every six feet, two cages for every torch. The hallway ran deep into the shelf, or into the mountain, for he was not certain how deeply they had penetrated. At the far end the corridor tilted upward. The lower end was still visible, however, and something across it flickered brightly in the torchlight.

  Ishmael finally stepped out from around the corner. The air passed across his face like a cold hand. At the junction of wall and floor were many holes about six inches across. Apparently these were shafts drilled through to the bottom of the shelf. He did not know what caused the air to move. What did come to him was a vision of the ledge drilled through with many holes and the tiny cracks that had to be developed in the ledge with the constant vibration of earthtides and quakes and the cracks spreading and reaching the shafts and then, inevitably, a great piece of the ledge falling off.

  He walked ahead of the others, while those who had been given bows strung them. It was time for them, now that they were approaching a place where they knew the enemy would be up and armed.

  The end of the corridor behind them was a blank wall, and there were no doorways or archways along the walls. They passed by the torches and caged fireflies and started up the slope. At the end was a square-cornered opening about seven feet high and six feet wide. Across it was a spiderwebbish arrangement of gray strands bearing little bits of mica-like material. It was these that flickered in the shifting light of the torches.

  "What is that?" Ishmael whispered.

  "I do not know," Namalee said.

  Ishmael took a torch from a man and stepped up close to the web and peered through it. The torch threw the shadow of the strands onto the floor behind it. Beyond was a vast darkness.

  Ishmael hesitated. The web looked so fragile that he could not imagine why it had been set there. Or would breaking it set off an alarm, as the shaking of a spider's web transmitted vibrations to the waiting predator? If he burned it with his torch, and so avoided touching it, he still might release tension on strands connected to the web and leading back into the darkness. And the release of tension would awaken something in there.

  He passed the torch across the face of the web and the flames licked them out of existence. The mica-stuff fell to the floor like metallic snowflakes.

  A thrumming sound, faint but deep, came from the darkness.

  Holding the torch ahead of him, Ishmael stepped through the doorway.

  The light opened its own path. The room was even larger than he had thought. The ceiling was so high that the torchlight could not reach to it, and the walls receded at a slant into invisibility. Before him was a smooth stone floor that stretched into the heart of the mountain, or at least looked as if it did.

  The air, however, was motionless, musty and warm. There were no shafts sunk along the walls.

  The others came through the entrance and gathered behind him. Four held torches, and these pushed the darkness back more. But the ceiling was still shrouded, and the walls departed to the right and the left at an ever-increasing angle.

  Namalee spoke very softly behind him. "It is said that when Booragangah led his people to this place, he found that others had lived here before him. There were some large chambers cut into the mountain itself and some perilous beasts living in them. The original inhabitants had died out or been killed by the perilous beasts. Booragangah slew some, but the others were too strong for him. So he shut them up, and his people cut other rooms and halls into the rock of the great ledge."

  "Doubtless the story contains some elements of truth," Ishmael said. "But if there are any beasts here, they do not seem to have been shut up. How could that web hold anything in?"

  "I do not know," she said. "But it might have an odor that we can't detect but that the beast can. Or there may be some other explanation."

  Their whispers seemed to fly out like bats into a never- ending night. The darkness was absorbent; it sucked in everything, light, sound and, given a chance, it might suck in their bodies.

  Ishmael, stepping forward again, holding the torch above him, was reminded that he really knew little of this world. Though he had crossed vast distances on it and seen strange things, he had become accustomed to much of it. But there must be many sinister things in this world, things which he would be ill-prepared to cope with because he would not understand their nature.

  He went on. The torches were burning ships falling in the night. Darkness split ahead of them and fused behind them. And the stillness and silence continued.

  After a while, Ishmael got the impression that the darkness was breathing. It was as if the darkness were itself an entity, a gigantic animal without form which lived on all sides of them.

  Ishmael looked back at the doorway. It was a block of light -- but not the solid block it had been after he had burned off the web.

  The web was back.

  Namalee, who had also looked back, gasped.

  The others turned their heads too.

  "It may be some small animal which spins a web as soon as it is broken," Ishmael said. He tried to say it as if he meant it.

  He turned away and began walking forward again. It would have been easy to panic then and dash toward the doorway and the web. Perhaps, though, that was what the spinner hoped they would do. In any event, they must go on.

  Something whooshed by his head.

  He spun, batting at it with his torch.

  A round body, grayish in the light, with six thin legs and a round head with a big eye and a slit mouth from which a long sharp tooth stuck, sailed away into the darkness. Its body was about the size of his own head, and something very thin and slimy was emerging from its back. Then he realized that the thin slimy thing was a line, and that the other end was attached to the ceiling somewhere up there in the black. The creature had leaped out, probably from high up on a wall, and swung down and made a pass at his head.

  These beasts might be quite harmless except as watch dogs to frighten away intruders or to cause them to make a noise which would alert the human sentinels.

  The next creature came out of the darkness on the end of its line so swiftly that there was no defense. It shot out into the light and fastened its legs around the head of a sailor near Ishmael. The impact knocked the man backward, and his short spear clattered on the stone. The man next to him stabbed his spear into the creature, which spread out its six legs and fell off its victim's head. It lay on the floor, kicking.

  The sailor did not get up.

  Ishmael shook him and placed his head against his heart and then peeled back an eyelid.

  "He's dead."

  There were three little red marks on the man's neck where the claws at the end of the legs had scratched.

  Something dark gray shot out of the darkness, and another sailor impaled it on his spear.

  The spear was torn out of the man's grasp, but the thing was dead.

  About thirty seconds later, another arced over their heads, but it went on into the darkness.

  That the creatures didn't swing back showed that they were endin
g their swing on something hanging down from the ceiling.

  Ishmael counted to twenty slowly and then told everybody to roll a few feet to one side immediately. At approximately thirty seconds after the last thing had swung over, another zoomed over them. It was lower to the floor than the previous one but not low enough because of the change of position of its intended prey.

  There might be thousands of them -- a chilling vision -- but they seemed to be taking turns at thirty-second intervals.

  Ishmael leaped up and threw the torch high into the air.

  It turned over and over, lighting up only darkness, until it came to the top of its arc. It briefly illuminated the ends of three thick strands of grayish stuff hanging down from the darkness. The ceiling was still out of sight. But on each strand, clinging to it, was one of the creatures.

  Ishmael could not see it, but he suspected that a grayish line coming from the back of each creature was attached at the other end to the hanging strand. It seemed likely that the line was coiled inside the thing's body and could be controlled for the distance needed for the deadly swing at its prey on the floor. The creatures did not drop; they seemed paralyzed by the torchlight.