Mad Moon of Dreams Read online

  Lathi jerked her head round to stare where he pointed and her hand flew to her mouth. “What?” she cried, her voice thick with sudden rage. “How dare—”

  “I’ll face the death you plan for me when—if—it comes,” Hero yelled, hurling himself naked from beneath her paper gown. “But as you can see, the one they plan is rather more immediate!”

  He leaped at the startled terman, wrested his curved knife from him and shouldered him over the ship’s flimsy rail all in one fluid movement. As he turned toward the mainmast two more termen got in his way. He despatched them with coldly brutal efficiency and smelled the swampy fetor of their sappy blood as he sprang to Eldin’s side.

  Three strokes of the razor-honed knife sufficed to free the Wanderer, who immediately gave a deafening and ferocious bellow—the cry of a berserker plunging into battle!

  He snatched up the knife of one of the termen Hero had felled; and the two adventurers stood back to back, Hero naked and deadly calm, Eldin raging and brassy as hell’s fires. And the Isharrans came, swords dully glinting, eyes gleaming with an almost luminous rapaciousness. They came—and they met red death!

  Death in the shapes of Hero and Eldin, for even with curving knives in place of their usual weapons, still the two were the craftiest fighters ever known. And though Lathi’s termen also fought off the Isharrans, nevertheless the two cut down termen and Isharrans alike, indiscriminately slaughtering all who came within range of their borrowed blades.

  Now the Dukes of Isharra themselves had boarded the paper ship—at which very instant Lathi’s voice rose above the hoarse cries of battle and the hiss of slicing steel:

  “Fools!” she cried. “Do we fight each other? They are our enemies!” And she pointed at Hero and Eldin where they stood, gory with blood and red-eyed from the fever of the fight.

  At Lathi’s cry the termen and Isharrans turned toward the pair, their eyes slitting as they stared at their true foes; and like some terrible tide they began to creep toward the beleaguered questers, hot death in their faces and cold in their hands.

  “Farewell, Old Lad,” said Hero, gritting his teeth in anticipation of the onslaught.

  “We’ll go to hell together,” the other growled—and jerked back his head as a rope’s knotted end struck him in the face. “What in all the dreamlands—?”

  “Ask no questions,” yelled Hero as a second rope dangled into view. “Climb!”

  In the next second, knives clasped in grinning teeth, they were toiling speedily upwards toward the side of a ship whose keel wallowed a little where it showed through lowering clouds and swirling mist. The same thought was in both their minds as they heard the howls of frustrated rage from behind and below; that perhaps this was Gnorri II, with Limnar Dass come to rescue them.

  But as at last they climbed toward the rail their hopes were dashed to pieces. The ship was black. Black as the shrivelled lips of a zombie—

  Black as the putrid heart of Zura of Zura!

  CHAPTER IV

  Aboard the Krakenship

  As their heads came up level with the black planking of the deck, bony, briefly glimpsed feet kicked their knives roughly from their mouths. “A black ship!” Eldin croaked, spitting blood from a slashed lip. He rapidly climbed higher and hooked an elbow over the rail.

  “Aye,” groaned Hero following suit, “and I’ll give you odds she has an octopus figurehead—and a crew whose graves have yawned empty since the day they were dug!” Even as he spoke, stumbling zombie forms came forward out of the ship’s reeking blackness and rotting fingers clutched at the arms of the pair, hauling them over the rail and onto the tarry deck. Many an empty or worm-eaten eye-socket gazed dispassionately upon them; or at best rot-swollen orbs whose lidless glare was wet and fishy. And as always, Zura’s zombies stank to high heaven.

  “Here we go again,” choked Hero as the smell suddenly engulfed him; and with his left hand he caught at the sword-wrist of the nearest zombie, while his right delivered a massive clout to the creature’s crumbling face. The battered body flew apart noisomely … and Hero fought back nausea as the zombie body broke in half on the rail and the entire sword arm came loose in his grasp.

  Eldin, not nearly so sensitive as his younger companion, grabbed a still kicking leg and tore it free from the corpse’s lower half. Then, using the limb as a club, he set about to belabor the encircling horrors. Hero by now had managed to get grips both on himself and on the rusty weapon wrested from rotting fingers, and zombie bits flew as he worked sword-wizardry upon Zura’s stumbling, crumbling minions—

  —But only for a moment.

  For as the zombie crew fell back before the fury of the questers, so Zura’s voice sounded from the bridge, clear and sweet as some golden poison and issuing well-rehearsed instructions. Pulleys creaked as a rope was slashed through, and even as the adventurers turned their gaze upward, so a great heavy net fell out of the rigging and wrapped them in its mesh.

  “Snared!” Hero gasped, slashing at the heavy ropes until his blade was trapped and wrenched from his hands.

  “Snared, aye!” Zura repeated him, coming down from the bridge like some strange Angel of Death. “As I have longed to snare you since that day when you sank my skyfleet in the aerial Bay of Serannian. My ship was The Cadaver then, but I burned her because she reminded me too much of that black day.”

  “Black day?” Eldin grunted. “Funny, but I always thought black was your favorite color?”

  “You—” she rounded on him, prodding him with her knife through the net, “will have little enough to joke about shortly. In the morning my ship will sail under new colors—its flag shall be the flayed hide of one Eldin the Wanderer!”

  On hearing Zura’s threat Eldin puffed himself up in mock rage; but he could not restrain the bobbing of his Adam’s apple, and it is a difficult thing to maintain a berserker rage wrapped up in a great net. While the Wanderer vainly searched for a suitable rejoinder, Zura turned her gaze upon Hero.

  Shrouded and weighed down by the heavy rope mesh, he asked: “And will you skin me also, Zura?”

  “Oh, be sure of it,” she whispered, moving closer. “Your skin shall stretch upon my cabin’s wall, marked with all the lands of Earth’s dreams—a map of my future conquests. And the skin of your head shall cover a small drum, with your nose at one side so that the drumsticks may be sheathed in your nostrils.”

  “Your imagination knows no bounds,” Hero faintly answered, feeling goose-bumps rise up all over his (for the present intact, however naked) body, and knowing that they were not entirely due to the chill Northern air.

  Zura had seen his nakedness, however, and her eyes widened in appreciation as she stared at his crouched and net-weighted nudity. For his part he stared back. She was a lustful monster, this Zura of Zura, and perhaps her appetite might yet work in his and Eldin’s favor.

  “I had forgotten what a man you are,” she said, more softly but no jot less dangerously.

  “And I had forgotten your great beauty,” he lied.

  And yet in fact she was beautiful, or had been, though telltale signs of corruption were now visible despite the artful draping of her invariably adventurous attire. Hero deliberately drank in the sight of her, as were she some sweetheart of his younger, waking-world days; but all the while his mind was working overtime to discover a way out of this new and eminently perilous dilemma.

  While his mind raced he continued to look at her, and knowing he stared, she posed for his eyes. Long and leggy, she wore a scarlet sheath split from her feet to her waist. Above that her body was naked, breasts large, brown-tipped and firm. Wide golden bands held scarlet sleeves to her arms, and her wrists were heavy with gold and silver bangles. Her eyes were huge and black to match the ropes of shining hair which fell about her shoulders.

  With lips whore-red, and a thin film of oil to give her body a milky sheen, Zura was all seductress and knew it. But Hero knew it too—knew also that her gaze was the hypnotic gaze of a serpent, that the scarl
et-covered areas of her body wore the purple bloom of creeping decay. And knowing all of this, still he smiled at her—which was a hard thing for that Princess of Nightmares to understand.

  “Ah, but you had your chance once, David Hero,” she said.

  “I merely lusted for life more strongly than I lusted for you,” he told her. “You would have sucked me dry—tike a vampire—simply to renew your own strength. But if there had been some other way …”

  She considered his words. “Knowing me,” she finally said, “knowing my story, still you—?”

  “You are beautiful,” he cut her short, “but so is life. If I could have you and not lose my strength, my life …”

  For long moments she stared at him, directly into his eyes, until his head began to swim under that burning gaze. “Do you seek to share the Throne of the Dead, David Hero?”

  “That would be vastly better than to serve as one of the undead,” he answered. “Alive … I am a man in my full strength. Dead—” and he shrugged, “I would be just one more zombie.”

  “I must think on it,” she slowly said, never taking her eyes from him.

  “Then think quickly, Zura, for Lathi would take me from you—aye, and the Dukes of Isharra, too.”

  “The Dukes?” she laughed throatily. “One day they shall crawl before me; for living the way they do, surely they shall die monstrously and so be mine. As for Lathi: she rules over insectmen and females who are ‘maids’ in name only. I fear not that gross grub!” She called forward a pair of freshly dead (alive?) zombies to lift up the hem of the net, then beckoned Hero to come out.

  As he stepped free of the heavy mesh, leaving Eldin still entrapped, a cry went up from far below. Stepping to the rail, Zura called Hero to join her. In the heart of Sarkomand a bonfire now blazed close to the place where the miserable captive horned ones waited for death. Even as his eyes took in the scene, Hero knew that the end was now in sight for that pair of survivors of the desert clash. One by one, the jeering, thronging torturers were cutting the ropes which moored the straining mast and basket to the ground.

  Taking all of this in—and noting that the contraption lay almost directly below Zura’s ship—a mad idea came into the quester’s mind. He glanced at the net which still covered the struggling Wanderer, and at the hawser which had held it aloft in the rigging. At the end of the stout rope an iron grappling-hook lay upon the deck … As Hero’s idea took on flesh, so there came a second concerted cry—this time of hellish glee—from below.

  “’Ware, Zura!” cried Hero. “See, the last rope is slashed through—and that rocketing thing speeds straight for your ship!” He threw her back from the rail, stooped and snatched up the grappling-hook, then leapt up onto the rail where he balanced desperately as the cluster of flotation-bags, shattered mast, basket and shrieking horned ones came rushing up toward him from misted Sarkomand. At the last moment, as Zura screamed a command and her zombies rushed him, he took aim, hurled the hook overboard and threw himself atop Eldin in his net entangle.

  Sprawled there, half-on, half-off the cursing Wanderer, Hero squeezed his eyes shut and hung on for dear life. He felt zombie fingers clutching at him—heard Zura’s harsh command that her minions should “Kill him! Kill him!”—and for a split second believed that his hastily conceived and yet more hastily executed plan had gone horribly awry. Then—

  —A massive fist snatched him, Eldin, net and all crashing through the ship’s splintering rail and up, up. Several zombies where they stood or stumbled amidst the net’s mesh went spinning, some sundered, outwards in a rending of rotting limbs, and silently down in lazy arcs, like skeleton leaves fluttering from a winter tree. For Hero’s shot had been a good one—the grapple had caught in the framework of the basket—and now the cluster of flotation bags hauled two extra passengers, one clinging like a leech, the other too stunned to do, say or even think anything at all … for a heartbeat or two, at any rate.

  “Great heaving bloody hell!” Eldin roared then through mesh and rush of wind, his eyes bulging inches from Hero’s own. “Don’t tell me you’ve done what I think—fear—you’ve done?”

  “As you wish,” Hero shouted back through the mad howl of sundered air. “I won’t tell you.”

  “Are you daft?” Eldin cried. “Have you finally succumbed to moon madness? Man, you’ve done for us! How are we supposed to get out of this one?—and why are you groping at my leg?”

  “Bend your knee, great oaf!” yelled Hero as they soared upward into southward fleeing clouds. “Do you still wear that little knife which you used to carry strapped to your calf?”

  “Aye, but it has no edge. It’s for stabbing, not cutting. You’ll not chop me out of this net with that.”

  “You’re safest where you are—for the moment,” Hero answered, his fingers creeping up Eldin’s trouser leg until he found and slipped the small dagger from its shealth. Then, blade transferred to teeth, naked as a newborn babe and cold as the core of a glacier, he began to climb the rope from net to basket.

  Eldin knew now what his companion was trying to do. If he could climb up to the flotation bags and rupture one or two—they both might still come out of this in one piece. Craning his neck to follow Hero’s progress, the Wanderer saw that he had reached the basket and was now starting up the mast itself. Above him, lashed to that sole remaining timber of Hrill’s destroyed craft, the cloven feet of the survivors of that same brief battle were barely visible through the rushing vapors of the cloudbank.

  “Go to it, lad!” Eldin roared as loudly as he could. “Good luck, you skinny son of a monkey!” But he doubted if Hero heard.

  Bitterly cold now but determined to do or (literally) die, Hero was clambering up the ropes which bound the horned ones to the mast. Incredibly, one of them snarled something inaudible into his ear and bit that same inoffensive organ. With the knife clasped in his teeth, Hero could not tell the horned ones that he was attempting to save their lives, not to mention his own and Eldin’s; better simply to ensure that the rest of his climb went unimpended. Thus he kneed his attacked in the groin and butted him in his wide-mouthed face, so that he at once lapsed limp and passive.

  But even as the naked quester continued his climb, he guessed that he was fighting a losing battle. The mast was slick with moisture from the clouds; gravity pulled tirelessly and with much more than its usual force; his fingers were blue and every inch gained drained so much energy that there would soon be none left. Worse, the heaven—(or hell-) bent contraption finally burst out of the clouds and shot up into mad moonlight: a sick, blinding yellow glare emanating from that looming, bloated, cratered monstrosity which now seemed to fill the entire sky.

  Hero felt his numb fingers slipping and knew this was the end. It had been a good game while it lasted (both in the dreamlands and, he supposed, though he could not really remember, in the waking world), but now it was over. For a moment he considered simply relaxing his hold and letting himself be swept away. But then he thought of Eldin. No saying what bother the old fool would get himself into on his own. No, better simply to cling here, like a limpet to a rock, and see what the future—if there was to be a future—held for them both. And if there was no future … well, eternity would welcome him frozen to a sky-ship’s mast somewhere in the bitter reaches high above the dreamlands. At least this way he could never go as a zombie to the Charnel Gardens of Zura!

  But damn it all, he had almost made it. The flotation bags were just up ahead, a couple of feet away. It might as well be a mile. He turned a frosted, rime-covered head slowly upwards, squinting his eyes against the painful glare of the mad moon—

  —And saw a fantastic, impossible sight!

  Black shapes, a pair of them, were outlined against a bloated background of yellow craters and looming, golden mountains. Black shapes, horned, bat-winged, with forked tails—and carrying weapons?—circling the flotation bag cluster where it dragged its burden skyward, less speedily now but quite irresistibly.

  “Gytheri
k’s gaunts!” Hero whispered to himself as hope surged up in him once more. “But they must almost be at their limits in this altitude. Whatever they intend doing, they’d best do it quickly!”

  And almost as if they heard him (which indeed they did, in their way) the weapon-wielding gaunts “did something.” They angled their bodies into streamlined arrows, turned their swords—one curved sword, which Hero now recognized as his own, and one straight, which was Eldin’s—toward the straining bladders of flotation essence, and came zeroing in on the bags in a crazy kamikaze dive like … like—

  Like bats out of hell!

  CHAPTER V

  Hero’s Plan

  Morning light was still an hour or so away when Gytherik, unable to sleep, went up onto Gnorri’s deck to find Limnar Dass already up and about and pacing the planks in the chill, eerie half-glow of pre-dawn. Gytherik could tell from the sky-Captain’s expression that nothing had changed: Hero and Eldin were not yet returned from their inexplicable and unguessed night-quest.

  But it was not until he called his grim up onto the deck from their storage-hold quarters that the gaunt-master realized the real size of the problem. Not only had the ex-waking-worlders gone off into the night, but apparently Sniffer and Biffer had also heard and answered some unknown call. And in that last Gytherik was closer to the answer than he might ever had guessed.

  “Those two gaunts,” he told Limnar Dass, “are definitely a most unusual pair. They have developed characters—I mean real characters—at a frightening rate. Maybe I made an error when I gave them names. Perhaps it only served to accelerate the problem.”

  “You think they went off with Hero and Eldin?” asked Limnar.

  “I believe they may have gone out on their own to search for Hero and Eldin,” Gytherik answered. “Without my go-ahead.”