But there must be many others outside the light who were not frozen by it.
For some reason, through some complex of interactions, uncoiling from their instincts, which were habits formed and fossilized millions of years ago, they dropped at thirty-second intervals. Something passed through them, releasing them at stated intervals like so many wooden cuckoos.
Ishmael told the crew in a low voice that they were to run. But they should imitate him, and when he leaped to one side, they must do so too. And when he dropped to the floor, they must do the same.
He set out immediately, starting his count at fifteen, which was his rough estimate of the time it had taken him to give his orders. At thirty he threw himself on the floor, reaching out at the same time to seize the fallen torch, which had landed about thirty feet from where he had cast it.
The gray six-legged thing arced over him and into the darkness.
Ishmael got up, counting under his breath, and ran forward. At the count of thirty, he gave two tremendous leaps to the left, and the torches showed a dark body hurtling through the light and on up.
The next time he slashed upward, and his spearhead, though it missed the creature, severed the line from its back. It was just starting the upward swing and so flew out of sight. But a moment later, having dashed ahead, Ishmael saw it. It was staggering around, two of its thin legs bent outward. Even so, it scuttled away and would have been lost if a sailor had not thrown a torch after it. The brand hit the floor, bounced, cartwheeling, and its flaming end struck the thing. An odor of burned flesh was wafted to them; the thing folded its unbroken legs to its body and died, or pretended to die. Ishmael made certain with his spear.
The next room did not reveal to the thrown torch anything like they had just left. It seemed to be nothing except a black emptiness. That did not mean the room was bare: the light had not reached the ceiling or the walls.
Ishmael looked back toward the doorway through which they had escaped, hoping to see the doorway on the other side of the room, the first they had entered, still limned with faint light. It would be a sort of lighthouse, assuring him that they were not in a universe which had gone eternally dark.
He did see the rectangle, or its ghost, far off.
He also saw something else. Rather, he saw the lack of something.
"Where is Pamkamshi?" he said.
The others looked back too. Then they looked at each other.
"He was behind me a moment ago," Goonrajum, a sailor, said.
"I thought he was carrying a torch," Ishmael said. "But you have one now. Did he give you his?"
"He asked me to hold it for a moment," Goonrajum said.
And now Pamkamshi was gone.
Ishmael and the others, keeping close together, retraced their path until they were close to the doorway. This was again covered by a web.
Ishmael led them away from the door but on a winding path calculated to cover territory at random. Nowhere was there any sign of Pamkamshi.
Again Ishmael threw his torch high into the air. He saw nothing, except... But he could not be sure. He picked up the torch and threw it once more, putting every bit of force he had into the throw.
The torch, just before beginning its downward arc, illuminated palely something that might or might not be two bare feet.
"Listen!" Namalee said.
They were quiet. The torches sputtered and flickered. Ishmael could hear his own blood singing. And he could hear another sound, very faintly.
"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.
"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 g
ave 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 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 straightened 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 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.
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.
The Wind Whales of Ishmael Page 10