Ship of Dreams Page 11

  With a blow that knocked that last ounce of wind right out of him, the stalagmite snatched Hero free of the gaunt’s paw and tumbled him head over heels in dust and stony debris. Senses spinning and bones aching, he lay for long moments in darkness and strove to clear his head of wheeling stars. Apart from a sick roaring in his brain and the hoarse sound of his own breathing, all was silent now—too silent.

  “Eldin?” Hero called, the sound of his voice seeming to whimper away like a whipped dog into the dark. “Eldin, are you all right?” And then, more urgently, more desperately: “Eldin—speak up, man!”

  Finally an outraged sputtering came from somewhere fairly close at hand. “Get this … double-damned … stinking heap of rubber … off my legs! Hero, where in hell are you?”

  “That’s right!” Hero gulped his answer.

  “Eh?”

  “I’m in hell, or near as damn!”

  “Get yourself over here,” Eldin snarled. “Follow my voice. My legs are stuck under this filthy great carcass.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Well, if he isn’t he’s picked a funny place to go to sleep!”

  “So what’s the hurry?” Hero asked. “Surely we’ll do well to save our strength, take things nice and slow and easy. I mean, there doesn’t seem much point in rushing about down here.” He made his way gropingly forward over stony, pebble-strewn ground until he found the gaunt’s great body where it sprawled half on top of Eldin.

  “Listen,” said Eldin, grabbing Hero’s arm, “just help me get free—and keep it quiet.” The young man sensed his friend’s fear, and Eldin afraid was an extremely rare thing.

  “What is it?” Hero whispered, his scalp prickling. “What’s troubling you?”

  “I … I thought I heard something,” Eldin answered. “And in this place—if we’re where I think we are—that’s not good.”

  “Where you think we are?” said Hero. “But we know where we are, surely. We’re in the underworld.” He strained to ease the weight of rubbery flesh from his friend’s legs.

  “We’re in a certain region of the underworld, yes,” answered Eldin, dragging himself free. “The Vale of Pnoth, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Pnoth?” Hero quietly shaped the word in his mind as well as with his mouth. He discovered that it left and unpleasant taste in both. “I believe I’ve heard of … Pnoth.”

  Eldin stopped rubbing at his cramped legs and again gripped the other’s elbow, harder this time. “Look!” he hissed. “Did you see that?” And certainly Hero had seen or sensed something. A movement in the darkness—a peculiar, furtive humping of black shadows—a subtle alteration in the texture of the timeless night which surrounded them.

  Or perhaps it was his imagination. For Eldin’s remark about this place being the Vale of Pnoth had stirred both memory and imagination in Hero; and while the first was merely unpleasant, the second was positively frightening. He had remembered a fragment of information picked up somewhere long ago and almost forgotten; namely that the Vale of Pnoth was the home of strange and sinister dholes, though what a dhole was exactly he never had reason to inquire. He had heard, though, that they spent a considerable amount of time heaping bones; also that they neither greatly loved nor were beloved of men. Pnoth—dholes—imagination—

  Nightmare!

  Backing away from the body of the gaunt, their elbows touching and their hair prickling to its very roots, all sorts of monstrous notions rushed screaming through the minds of the adventurers. And as if to confirm Hero’s worst suspicions, Eldin hoarsely whispered in his ear, “Dhole! … If he’s scented us, we’re done for.”

  “Scented us? Damn me, Eldin, even when you whisper you sound like an earthquake! Man, he’ll hear us!”

  “No,” Eldin answered with an unseen shake of his head, “dholes are deaf—I think. Never hear the expression ‘deaf as a dhole’? Blind too—but they do have a wonderful sense of smell.”

  Still backing carefully away from the gaunt, swords in their hands and senses straining, suddenly the two were riveted to the spot by a sound which could only be likened to a noisy sort of snuffling; as if some vast bloodhound were slobbering and sniffing in the darkness. Then, as the sound stopped for a moment, there came in its place a sliding of pebbles—a brushing aside, as it were, of stony litter—and again the inky blackness seemed to stir and rustle and take on dim and frightful shapes.

  The snuffling came again—closer, more decisive—and with it a return of mobility in the momentarily rigid limbs of the adventurers. More quickly now they backed away, careless of what might lie behind them; until, in another second, they stumbled, tripped and fell amidst a loosely piled heap of—

  “Bones!” shuddered Hero, gingerly feeling of the ossuary fragments upon which he and Eldin lay.

  “Pnoth!” Eldin nodded his affirmation in the dark. “I was right. And our unseen friend there—definitely a dhole.”

  Even as they lay there the snuffling and slithering continued, growing louder by the second, until Hero could stand it no longer. “The hell with this!” he cried, jumping to his feet. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait,” said Eldin, grabbing his arm. “Just a second. There’s something I want to know. He should have just about found the gaunt’s body by now …”

  “Oh, come on!” hissed Hero. “What can you possibly want to know about—”

  “Shh!—Listen!—There, what do you make of … of …” Eldin’s whisper trailed off, and listening to this new sound, Hero could well understand why.

  The snuffling had increased to a sort of frenzied slobbering interspersed with sharp tearing sounds; and now, from afar and from all directions, there came a veritable chorus of minor grunts and snuffles of inquiry. Even as the pair listened, their ears straining to pick up every slightest nuance of the drama being enacted in the darkness, the tearing and slobbering abruptly stopped and was replaced by the loathsome sounds of bestial feeding; then this too ceased and there came a weird, mournful cry as of some strange nocturnal bird.

  Answering, excited cries came echoing back, at which Eldin grabbed Hero’s arm and said: “Now let’s get out of here. The gaunt was a big one. Its carcass ought to keep them busy for quite some time.” And Hero felt his friend shudder in the darkness.

  As they slipped quietly away from that dreadful feasting place, they noticed that their eyes had become marginally accustomed to the dark. Not to any great degree, for the darkness of dreamland’s underworld is black as any of the deepest caves of the waking world, but the surfaces of things seemed to carry minute traces of phosphorescence. Thus it was as if they moved across a terrain of black velvet streaked here and there with dim wisps of gray, and at regular intervals they would come across piles of bones whose individual shapes and hugeness set them—mercifully—aside from any possible human connection.

  Direction gave them the greatest problem, for they simply could not be certain of their course, or even if they moved in a straight line at all. In a little while, however, the sounds of feasting died away behind them, and soon after that they came to the foot of a sheer cliff whose crags reached up into dimly luminous mists and vanished from sight.

  For what seemed like hours then they followed the undulating base of the cliff; and as they went so they talked in hushed, rather forlorn tones. Though they would never have admitted it, neither one of them had the slightest idea how this thing would work out, and both were aware of their growing hunger and thirst. It was only when they paused to rest for a few minutes and seated themselves upon black, unseen boulders that the monstrous morbidity of their situation seemed to settle over them like some clammy, ethereal cloak.

  Then it was, too, that they discovered something of the persistence of dholes. For as they sat in silence so there came the first faint fumblings and rustlings from far back along their trail, and they knew that indeed the dholes had finished with the gaunt and now sought sweeter meat!

  It was only with the greatest restraint that the
pair held back from full-scale flight at that point. For even knowing that to panic would be to court disaster, still adrenalin filled their veins and power surged in their limbs; and near-irresistible urges bade them throw caution to the wind and flee … but flee where?

  They did increase their pace, however, and for a while the sounds of pursuit grew fainter; but then—horror of horrors—secondary rustlings and snufflings began to reach them from their flank. Not only were there dholes behind them, but a second party was closing in from the plain of bones. Again they increased their pace and after half an hour or so reached a point where the cliffs turned sharply inward, as if this were some ancient subterranean coastline and they were entering a dried-out, prehistoric bay.

  It was as they paused here at the corner of the cliffs and rested, desperately fighting to control their breathing and their tired, trembling limbs, that snuffling came yet again, and this time closer than ever. Moreover, the adventurers could no longer tell for certain just which direction the sounds came from. Still closer the dreadful night-noises came, and the pair remembered all too vividly the tearing and terrible gluttony which had accompanied the first dhole’s discovery of the dead gaunt.

  That memory was more than they could bear, and so they turned the corner of the cliff and sought safety in the bight of the rocky bay. With luck, they might even discover a slope they could climb to the top of the cliffs, and thus leave the dholes behind them in the Vale of Pnoth. Or if worse came to worst, perhaps they could find themselves some vantage point to defend to their last.

  Now, because the death-fires were a little brighter here, the adventurers could see that indeed they had entered a great bay where in ages past the cliffs had fallen or been eroded away. The bed of the bay was littered with vast boulders and rocks, all of them dully aglow with that strange foxfire, so that it seemed to the pair that they ran across an alien moonscape. Behind them, echoing weirdly, they had started to hear the excited, nocturnal-bird sound of the hunting dholes, who must sense now that the chase was nearing its end. And when they dared to look back they could see great, undulating shapes across a wide arc of vision, humping and wriggling and forming a constantly changing horizon.

  Then, rounding a massive boulder as large as a house, the two were brought up short at sight of something directly ahead. At the base of the cliffs where they loomed across some four hundred yards of comparatively debris-free plain, the mouth of a tiny cave emitted a beam of dim light which shone like a beacon to the tired and unbelieving eyes of the adventurers. There was a warmth to that dull glow, a reminder of lanthorns and campfires and other healthy lights in the upper world, and its lure drew the pair like moths to a flame.

  Behind them and on both sides as they ran, the loathsome rustling, snuffling and hunting cries of the dholes rang louder by the second, and all of the darkness seemed alive with the unseen, unknown horrors as they closed in. Then the pair were pounding forward beneath the beetling cliffs, and the glowing cave mouth beckoned them on, and the shadows of the cliffs were alive with morbid movement, until with exhausted cries of gladness—yes, and of strange expectation too, for they knew not what they would find—they hurled themselves into the narrow mouth of the glowing cave and turned to face the terror which crowded upon them from outside.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Captive of the Cave

  Beyond that peculiarly illumined hole in the subterranean cliff there might well have been a slow-burning lake of sulphur or some such combustible, and Hero and Eldin would have welcomed its fiery embrace rather than let their nameless pursuers, the snufflers in darkness, come upon them unseen. Even now, crouching in the tiny opening, they were less sensitive of what might be behind them than of what they knew lay outside. On entering they had received vague impressions of an extensive but low-ceilinged, gently glowing, stalactite-pillared cave, whose walls appeared festooned with luminous moss. They had seen nothing, however, to inspire fear in them—that is to say, more fear than already was present—and so their concentration was centered on the encroachment of the still unseen dholes.

  In fact the dholes were to remain unseen, as they had always been and ever would be, though their humping shadows were plainly visible and their rustlings loud as they gathered beyond the cave’s entrance. Gazing out along the dim beam of light from the cave’s mouth, Hero felt prompted to whisper:

  “Where are the damned things! I can see movement—far too much movement—and I can hear them well enough, but I can’t see a one! What’s stopped them, d’you think?”

  “The light,” Eldin answered at once. “Things of darkness don’t much care for light. Not that that helps us a lot. We’ve been given a reprieve, that’s all. Have you had a look at this place?”

  Hero turned from the cave’s mouth and sheathed his sword. Together they stared all about them. And now Hero knew what Eldin had meant by saying that this was merely a reprieve. Because of the cave’s luminosity, it was not hard to see that there was but one entrance. Which meant that they could only go out the way they had come in …

  “Then we’ll just have to sit it out,” said Hero, shivering in a sudden chill. “Perhaps if we keep quiet they’ll lose interest in us and go away. While we’re waiting, I suggest we inspect our new quarters … yeow!”

  Eldin jumped six inches off the ground at Hero’s cry, his straight sword appearing in his hand as if by magic. “What?” he snarled, seeing nothing that might have caused Hero’s howl of alarm. “What? What? Hero, you lunatic, you scared me out of five years’ growth then! What happened?”

  Hero was backing away from the wall, stumbling and almost falling with every backward pace he took. His sword, too, was back in his hand; with his free hand he pointed in a palsied fashion at the moss on the wall. Mouth agape, he seemed to find difficulty in articulating. “Moss—” he finally gulped. “It moved—the whole damn mass of it! It’s alive! When I touched it—it moved.”

  Eldin, who had not suffered Hero’s terrific shock, or at worst only part of it, stepped forward and lifted his sword to point it at the tangle of moss which Hero’s outstretched hand indicated. He made as if to thrust, and—

  “Kill me then, if you will!” cried the moss in a reedy voice, detaching itself from the wall and forming a glowing, manlike shape. “Kill me, you agents of Thinistor, and an end to your torturing ways. Ah! You don’t fool me, for who else but wizard-spawn could come here, unharmed, across the Vale of Pnoth?”

  Now, seeing that the gesticulating apparition was a human being draped in lightmoss—and a badly frightened human being at that—the adventurers held their swords a trifle less aggressively. Eldin addressed the trembling thing thus:

  “Whoever you are, shake off that moss at once. I’ve a mind to run you through just for the shock you’ve given us. What’s the idea of hiding there like that!”

  “Who are you anyway?” asked Hero. “And what’s all this about us being agents of Thinistor? Thinistor Udd, d’you mean?”

  “Udd, yes, of course,” answered the apparition, hastily shedding its glowing camouflage. “Since you know of him, he obviously sent you. Why keep up the pretense? As to who I am—you already know that.”

  Tall for one of dreamland’s own and well into his middle years, the man was made to look older by reason of his flowing white hair, pallid complexion and almost skeleton thinness. His clothes, or rather their remnants, consisted of tattered ribbons of cloth that barely held together, and the index finger of his left hand—which he seemed to hold awkwardly—was shriveled, crooked, and white as if baked in a fire.

  “Thinistor Udd didn’t send us here,” growled Eldin.

  “In a way he did,” Hero contradicted.

  “Aha!” cried the stranger, cowering back.

  “Oh, he sent us here, all right,” Hero continued, speaking more to Eldin than to the other. “Or as good as. We certainly wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t killed the bastard, and if that young fool of a gaunt-master didn’t need to kill us in order to find his—” And
he paused. Eldin saw the understanding dawning on Hero’s face and turned back to the ragged oldster.

  “You?” he growled. “Is it possible that you—are—”

  “I’m Mathur Imniss, which I’m sure you know well enow,” answered the other. “And you’ll never convince me that you weren’t sent by that devilish half-brother of mine, Thinistor Udd.”

  “Listen,” snarled Eldin, his patience on the point of evaporating. “For the last time, we haven’t come down here to do Thinistor’s work. Nobody ever will. He’s dead, and we were partly responsible. We’re here because of your son Gytherik—because he won’t be able to find you and set you free until he’s killed us …” Eldin paused, frowned, sheathed his sword. “It’s complicated.”

  “My son?” Mathur came forward and clutched at Eldin’s powerful forearms. “My boy? Gytherik sent you?”

  “Er, not exactly,” Hero said. “Look, let’s all sit down and I’ll explain right from square one. Before I do, though, I would like to be sure we’re safe here.” And he jabbed a thumb in the direction of the cave’s entrance. “What about them?”

  “Them?” Mathur Imniss repeated him. “The dholes?” He spat on the pebbly floor. “Cowards! Afraid of clean light. In fact, clean light would be fatal to them, I’m sure. They even fear this filthy stuff,” and he held out a fistful of glowing moss. “Watch—”

  Mathur moved quickly to the entrance and threw out the lightmoss, ensuring at the same time that his arm did not pass beyond the arch of the cave’s mouth. There was an instant rustling and scraping as shadows which had seemed perfectly natural took on a furtive, fearsome (and now fearful) life. The darkness seemed to withdraw, and not only through the action of the dimly glowing heaplet of lightmoss where it lay beyond the entrance.