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  'But to go back a bit: there's this matter of the pirates expecting or anticipating a gaunt-attack, and their knowing the gaunt-master's name and reputation. Now Gytherik was a veteran and hero of the wars against Zura and the . Mad Moon, where he'd used his gaunts to great advantage. Aye, for then there'd been little in the way of defence against gaunt tactics. Also, he'd worked for me, right alongside Hero and Eldin; so maybe these pirates had expected me to send him out on patrol. If so, did that give me a clue as to who they might be? Had they perhaps experienced his sort of warfare before? Well, I have my suspicions but I'll keep them to myself for now; but be sure I'd dearly love to know who or what - it is that keeps itself hidden in that voluminous robe and under that cowl, and sinks the fair ships of dreamland and murders their: crews for no sane reason that I can see. For this is the hell of it:

  'In all Gytherik told me he never mentioned seeing those dogs take any booty; but he did see them cutting down the bodies of those they'd hanged, and gathering the lifeless corpses of those they'd gutted!' And here Kuranes paused and shuddered, and pushed away the plate of cold meat that one of his retainers had placed before hint

  `Now,' he eventually continued, 'I thanked Gytheri for his invaluable information and gave him the run my place until his gaunts were well enough to fly; and in the course of a few days off he went again, bent on recruiting more gaunts to strengthen his grim. For there was little he could do with such a sorry bunch as he now commanded But he swore he'd be back as soon as he'd beefed up his band a bit.

  And meanwhile ... meanwhile I'd sent out messengers into all parts of the dreamlands to find and bring back to me Hero and Eldin, my agents extraordinary!

  'They were found prospecting in the Great Bleak Mountains grimy as gargoyles and loaded down with their own weight in "simpleton's sapphires" - that is to say a great pile of blue stones, sapphires that weren't Like "fool's gold", you know? They'd been digging them up for weeks apparently!' Kuranes grinned despite his sombre mood and shook his head. 'How does a man weigh up two such as these?' he asked of no one in particular.

  'Anyway, they were penniless, lean and hungry - and 'completely demoralized that they'd been shovelling pretty pebbles and not fabulous gems - and so ripe for a real quest. So they shipped back to Serannian where I dined them royally for a week, promising them their own sky-yacht and a house by the harbour with a white-walled courtyard, if only -'

  'If only they'd go into the badlands along the eastern coast and seek out the lair of the pirates!' de Marigny finished the tale for him.

  Kuranes nodded. 'Correct. So they fitted themselves up with a fancy wardrobe: eye-patches, a moppish great wig for Hero (Eldin shaved his head shiny bald!), black leather belts and notched cutlasses, calf-boots to tuck their striped pants into and the like, and off they went one night aboard one of Serannian's galleys, all painted black for this one trip. They were dropped this side of Zura the land, where the Southem Sea meets a craggy shore, and that's the last I've heard of them till now.'

  Marigny pursed his lips. 'And now they're captives of Gudge, doomed to die at dawn, and the night already two-thirds flown.'

  'Dead men, aye,' Kuranes gloomily replied. 'Unless you can find them in time and get them out!'

  'Right,' said de Marigny. 'Then here's what I'd like you to do for me - and it must be done swiftly, so that I can be on my way in less than an hour. First - '

  `We,' Moreen cut him off, sweetly but surely.

  `Eh?' said de Marigny and Kuranes together.

  `So that "we" can be on "our" way,' she repeated. 'You don't think I'm going to let you go off adventuring in the dreamlands on your own, do you, Henri? oh 1 know: you're "The Searcher", not I. But if I were to lose you ... should I, too, spend the rest of my life searching And there was that in her voice which told him there'd be little to gain from arguing ...

  Hero, thinking back on precisely those things Kuranes had related to Moreen and de Marigny, had recalled one certain ludicrous aspect of his and Eldin's 'kitting-up': the choosing of their piratical wardrobes and props. 'Madness!' he sighed now, shaking his head weakly, suspended on his . cross over that black pit that went down to dreamland's core.

  Eldin had been quiet for some little time, lost in his own thoughts, but now he dragged his head round to peer at Hero through the gloom. 'Eh? What is?' he rumbled, his voice echoing. 'Are you finally admitting it was madness to accept this damned quest in the first place? If so I wholeheartedly agree - you should never have taken it on!'

  `We took it on,' Hero reminded. 'I clearly recall you drooling over Kuranes' promise of a sky-yacht. "We'll sail off to Oriab," you said, "and look up Ula and Una. we'll drop anchor on some jewel isle and spend a whole month just fishing and fondling." That's what you said.'

  'And you were all for lazing in the sun in your own courtyard,' Eldin countered. ' "I'll sit on the wall with a spyglass," you said, "and watch the ships rising out of Celephais to where the sea meets the sky. And I'll spy down on all the pretty girls in the gardens of the villages along the coast." That's what you said - lecherous little devil!'

  'The specific madness I refer to,' said Hero, 'is the business of the pigeon.'

  Eldin gave a groan. 'Not that again!'

  'See,' Hero growled, 'pirates have parrots, not pigeons. And certainly not pink pigeons! That was a dead giveaway. I mean, fancy tying a damn pigeon to your shoulder, and squawking "pieces of eight" out the corner of your mouth every five minutes! Madness not to mention messy!'

  'But it came in handy in the end, you have to admit,' Eldin justified the thing. 'Before they tied us on these crosses we managed to get a note off to old Atal. By now all Ulthar will know the pickle we're in.'

  'Fat lot of good that will do us,' Hero was quieter now. 'Like screaming after you fall off a mountain. Different if had another two or three days ...

  'Eldin knew what he meant pigeons are pretty speedy creatures, but sky-ships and rescue missions take a lot longer. 'Gytherik and his punts could manage it,' he said, with something of desperation beginning to show in his gruff voice.

  Hero grunted. 'If we had some bacon,' he shrewdly replied, 'we could have bacon and eggs - if we had some eggs'

  'Eh?'

  'It's wishful thinking, old lad,' the younger quester explained. 'Hoping that Gytherik'll be along, I mean. But you're right anyway: remote as the chance is, still it looks like the only one that's left to us ...'

  3 Zura of Zura

  In fact Hero was wrong, but could hardly be expected to know it. In the night skies of dreamland, at this very moment, there was a second chance. Shaped like a coffin - but yet reminiscent of some weird grandfather clock - it moved at incredible velocity toward Zura the land, where the foetor of rotting flesh hung forever like a mouldering cerecloth over that domain of death.

  And in a little while, slowing the, time-clock's speed to a crawl, indeed de Marigny knew that he had crossed the borders of sanity into a region of nightmare. For there below, stretching mile on endless mile, lay that monstrous plain of leaning, mouldy menhirs known as the Charnel Gardens, a colossal graveyard where the diseased earth within each and every plot had been pushed up from below! Oh, yes, this was surely that land where graves and corpses are uniformly unquiet, .but de Marigny's interest was centred rather in Zura the woman than Zura the land itself.

  'And where to find her?' The Searcher wondered out loud.

  'Lying in some grave,' Moreen shuddered and crept into his arms, 'with some poor corpse, if what you've said of her is true.'

  'All hearsay,' answered de Marigny. 'I've told only what I've had from others. But those who've actually met her in the flesh are few and far between who lived to tell of it, anyway. She's the sovereign of dreamland's zombies, Mistress of the Living Dead. All those who die cruel or monstrous deaths must go to Zura in the end, to do her bidding in the Charnel Gardens ...'

  `Dawn is only an hour or two away,' Moreen stated the obvious.

  'And Zura the land is deep and wide,' de M
arigny nodded. 'I know. But Kuranes said she had a sky-ship, Shroud II, this awful princess. So maybe that's where we'll find her, aboard her corpse-crewed vessel. For if Hero and Eldin went missing here, in Zura the land, who better to ask of their present whereabouts than Zura the Princess, eh?'

  Moreen was at the scanners, widening their scope as she scanned afar, toward Zura's heartland. And in another moment she drew breath in a sharp hiss. Then:

  'Oh, yes,' she said. 'That'll be Zura's ship, all right. And very aptly named, too. Why, it's the same shape as the time-clock - except where we stand on end, Shroud II lies horizontal, like a great black floating coffin! There she is, moored centrally over that direful city there.'

  De Marigny applied his senses to the time-clock's scanners, saw what Moreen had seen: a horizon of megalithic mausoleums whose gaunt grey facades reared high and formed the ramparts of the city Zura itself. 'Zura,' he nodded then. 'And you're right: that coffin-ship with its squid figurehead can only be Shroud II.'

  Now The Searcher scanned the eastern horizon, where he fancied a faint nimbus of grey light made a wash on dreamland's rim. And:

  'No more time to waste,' he said then, his voice grim and urgent. 'So... let's see if Zura's aboard, shall we?'

  Zura was indeed aboard, and in an especially black humour.

  She stood frowning in the prow of her vessel, behind the blood-eyed figurehead, wide-legged and arms folded across her bosom. A princess of all she surveyed, of bones and mummies and dust, and crumbling sarcophagi.

  Tall and long of leg, Zura wore a single black garment which sufficed to cover her arms, back, belly and thighs but left the rest of her quite naked. Golden sandals accentuated the scarlet of her toenails, while wide golden bands on her wrists gave something of a balance to her slender hands and pink nails. Her lips were full and red as her painted toes - too full, perhaps, too red - and they pouted a little as her sensitive nostrils flared in the reek drifting up from the city of the dead beneath the keel of her coffin-ship. A thin film of heavily perfumed oil covered her body, giving her breasts a milky sheen where they stood proud and high and tipped with dark-brown buds.

  And seen like that, at a glance - like some strange lewd statue under the moon with its yellow glimmer upon her - Zura was very beautiful, incredibly so. Yet hers was a tainted beauty, like that of the man-eating flowers of jungled Kled, whose tendrils are suckered and pollens lethal. An almost visible aura of evil seemed to,surround her, issuing waves of near-tangible terror. Her huge, black, slanting eyes that shone and missed nothing, seem imbued with the hypnotic gaze of serpents; snaky-sinuos, too, the ropes of shining black hair which fell about her alabaster shoulders.

  This then was Zura of Zura, smouldering and silent, and her crew knowing enough of her moods to keep well of her way this night; so that it might seem she was alone aboard her gaunt, leprous grey vessel. She was not alone, however, not for all the stillness and the quiet; her zombies would stand still just as long as she'd let them, and corpses are mostly silent creatures anyway, especially when their tongues have rotted to slime in their mouths .. .

  And: 'Damn!' said Zura of Zura. 'Damn! Damn! Damn!' She breathed the words into the night like four grey ghosts fleeing from between her clenched teeth. 'Damn Gudge and his so-called "pirates", and damn the pact I made with them! They've robbed me of what was rightly minen and nothing to be done about it.'

  She thought back on the hand that fate had dealt her since the war of the Mad Moon:

  First her return to Zura the land, under threat of ,banishment to the alien and utterly horrible - even to her - dreamlands of other worlds if ever again she should set foot outside her own boundaries. That had been disappointment enough: to see her dream within dreams of turning all the dreamlands into one gigantic nightmare of death themselves turned to dust. But then ... to discover Zura the land empty, even deathless! For Mnomquah, the lunatic god of a Mad Moon had drawn all her zombie minions up to the moon on a beam of powerful attraction, and not a single dead creature remained in all Zura the land. Even the foetor of that unthinkable place had been much reduced.

  But the worm will have his way, and death conquers all in the end. A quarrier was crushed by a rock-fall in Nir, and his corpse came to Zura one night, shattered ribs and trunk and all. A pair of prospectors in the uplands, stung by a pack of six-legged spider-hounds, arrived all puffed upand bloated with poison. A great ceremonial canoe out of Parg, carrying a bride-to-be and her entourage from Parg to the isle where she'd wed her lover, struck a reef and sank. All were chewed by sharks, and swam to the shores of Zura. And close behind came the bereaved lover, who jumped from a cliff to the sea and the rocks. And so Zura was back in business again.

  In a little while a boat-builder came to her, crushed between ship and wharf, and Zura commanded the building of Shroud II. But he was an ex-waking worlder, and his previous occupations had included mortician and coffinmaker - which perhaps accounted for the shape and style of Zura's ship. All to the good where she was concerned the sails were of cerecloth, with ligament rigging and bones for the rungs of ladders).

  And soon, once again as before, a ripe miasma of rot

  hung over Zura the land, and once again the Princess Zura commanded her legions of the morbidly dead. But corpses disintegrate all too quickly, and suitable lovers are rare in the ranks of the direfully dead and last only a little while. So Zura dreamed dreams within dreams of a great disaster, which would send dreamland's peoples to her in their thousands, and a war where they would slaughter each other mindlessly but no disaster came, and the peoples of dream war hardly at all. And so her frustration grew .

  Then -

  - Then came Gudge and his 'pirates'? Oh, that peculiar band of supposed buccaneers fooled her not at all she knew who and what they were, if not what they were about They'd be up to no good, be sure, but fell motives were not Zura's concern.

  What they offered was this: that if Zura step aside ark give them free run of the skies over Zura and land adjacent, and if she make no report of them or their presence here - in other words, ignore them entirely ant let them get on with their dubious business - then they'd send her the poor doomed remains of crews and passenger of all the vessels they intended to sack over and mum Zura the land, Thalarion, and the Southern Sea Fo ostensibly they were to be pirates, and where pirates sai death is a frequent occurrence and corpses very COMMIX place. Lathi of Thalarion had been likewise approached though in her case (because she had no interest in cadavers the pressure applied had been that of sheer threat us disguised: if she failed to accept the presence of the pirate or created any sort of difficulty for them, then they'd simply fire-bomb Thalarion the hive; which the eidolon Lathi knew all too well would prove a very harrowing an possibly fatal experience!

  Zura had considered, and it had seemed to her that at was getting the better of the bargain; Gudge, as he callled, himself, had not even requested harbour or mooring for ship, in Zura (oh, yes, for there had been only one black Pirate vessel in the beginning) but had settled for an extinct volcano in the mountains between Zura and Leng for his -headquarters. And there, in that dead cone and in the tunnels formed of ancient lava ruins, he had made his home and garrisoned his crew.

  Things had gone well at the start; Zura reaped the rewards of her passive assistance; her zombie legion grew apace. But then things started to change, however marginally at first. Numbers of zombie recruits, initially highm began to drop off; Zura complained and the pirates offered her booty rather than bodies, for which she had little use. Then, periodically, the 'extinct' volcano would throw up smoke rings in the hinterland, which might or might not be responsible for certain strange and unforeseeneclipses of the, moon; also, there were at times dull rumblings underfoot like the evenly-paced pounding of mighty hammers or subterranean engines - whose epicenter would seem to be the root of that self-same ex-volcanic mountain. And then one day Zura's zombie spies reported that instead of one pirate ship there were now three, and that plunderings (or at le
ast sinkings) of dream-land's innocent vessels had increased dramatically at which Zura had flown into a raging fury!

  She'd summoned Gudge to attend her in Zura themausoleum city, but only the Captain of one of his two surplus vessels came; and when she'd put to that squat, offensive, eye-patched and tricorn-hatted - person? - certain quesfions, then he'd only laughed unpleasantly. Where were all the freshly dead going? (Zura had wanted to know), for they certainly weren't entering Zura the land. Indeed she was lucky if she saw more than two or three corpses from each ship sacked! Did her pact with Gudge count for nothing at all, and should she now treat it with a similar lack of respect? And anyway, what was that silent, cowled, voluminously-robed creature up to in the mountains, that a dead volcano should suddenly belch itself back into life, however sporadic? Was it the pirate leader's intention to submerge the Charnel Gardens under a lava lake? These were the questions she had put to the wide-mouthed Captain-messenger.

  'Cause trouble,' she'd been informed then, gutturally and with many a sneer, 'and Gudge will blow your worm-eaten shell of a ship right out of the sky, reduce your bony bully-boys to glue, put mausoleum Zura to the cannon and the torch, and spray perfumes of Kled over all Zura the land until it may never stink so badly again!' And laughing even more unpleasantly than before, Gudge's man had gone off and left her in a shocked condition bordering on trauma!