Mad Moon of Dreams Page 14

  “Bravo!” whispered Hero admiringly as they were bundled along. “Good stuff, that. Are you sure you weren’t some sort of orator in the waking world?”

  “I doubt it,” muttered the other, “for then I might expect to be making an impression. But these buggers—why, they’re mad as March hares!”

  “Don’t you realize what’s going to happen here?” Hero raised his voice again. “There’ll be fire and destruction and innocent blood spilled in a torrent! Would you set your seal upon that?”

  “We shall not be here to see it,” informed Gathnod-Natz’ ill. “By the time the moon-God arrives here we shall be on our way to collect our tribute from his minions on the moon.”

  “To become slaves of the moonbeasts, you mean!” cried Eldin. “Or worse …”

  “We shall fill our ship to capacity with moon-gems before returning,” replied Byharrid-Imon—but there was a sudden tremor in his powerful voice, which sounded just a little like the strained gonging of a cracked bell.

  “Before returning to what?” cried Hero. “Look about you, man! Look at the sky, the seas, the very land itself. And this is only the beginning. Can’t you see you’ve been duped? When Mnomquah comes the dreamlands will run red with lava and blood. Smoke will hide the sun for centuries and the skies will rain volcanic ash. The seas will be of mud and the green fields barren deserts. And as for towns and cities—they shall be obsolete as this very Sarkomand!”

  “You’ll not make fools of us!” Gathnod-Natz’ill cried, more shrilly than ever. “Not as you’ve done with Lathi and Zura. We are destined for greatness. We always have been!”

  “I’ll bet you sang the same song in the waking world,” returned Eldin. “Even when they were dropping you in the river with your feet set in fresh cement. You’re not only born losers and fools, you’re madmen! Especially you, you damned—crone!”

  At that, and with a shrill, piercing cry of rage, Gathnod-Natz’ ill hurled himself at the bearers who held the questers and girls aloft. For Eldin had been quite right and he had hit upon a very sore spot. In Byharrid-Imon there probably remained something of sanity, but his brother was utterly mad. It might well be an inherited madness—though more likely it resulted from long-term proximity with “Leng-gold” and, more recently, the influence of the mad moon—but certainly the effeminate brother was completely deranged.

  And such was his fury that he might well have killed all four helpless captives there and then, except that this was not to be. For even as he punched and snatched at them to bring them tumbling down from the now tired arms of their bearers, so the procession arrived at its destination, the immemorial Temple of Oorn; and from then on events were taken right out of Gathnod-Natz’ill’s painted and manicured hands.

  For now, as the questers and girls fell upon crumbling flags—even as the crazed Duke laid a hand across the hilt of his sword and snarled his madness at them where they rolled in dust—so a sigh went up from the assembled polyglot masses, and all heads turned toward Oorn’s temple where its low, circular wall showed a jagged, broken rim in the center of the centuried city. Outside that wall a black silken tent had been erected, with yellow tassels and runic, lunar symbols: the sumptuously cushioned and noxiously scented pavilion of Oorn’s High Priest. And there between the arched gate in the wall and the silken wall of the tent—the High Priest himself.

  A large lumpish figure, he stood (or rather slumped) and regarded the small knot of humans, captors and captives alike, at the head of the massed, torch-bearing parade. His robe was of yellow silk figured with red signs and moon-symbols, and a yellow silken hood covered his head; with circular eye-holes almost at the sides rather than in front, where human eyes should be. Behind those holes unseen orbs stared, under whose steadfast gaze the crowd fell back, until none stood between humans and High Priest; yet still he remained silent.

  Beside him, smaller and standing in his shadow, a similarly robed, bare-headed horned one waited attentively until the High Priest placed the mouth-piece of a black flutelike instrument beneath his hood to blow a series of seemingly unconnected notes. When finished, the horned one—patently an acolyte—turned to the vast congregation, especially to the Dukes of Isharra, and spoke these words:

  “I speak for Him:

  “You seem to forget yourself, Gathnod-Natz’ill Isharra. The questers and their females were to be unharmed, and yet it seems to me that you were about to harm them. Indeed, it seems you intended to kill them! Would you defy Oorn?”

  Hearing these words, the crowding horned ones—who far outnumbered all other types in the assembly—crept almost unnoticeably closer to the small knot of humans. All madness had fled out of Gathnod-Natz’ill by now, however, and his aspect was a ghastly white in the light of numerous torches. He stood unspeaking, seemingly hypnotized by the High Priest’s staring, unseen eyes, until his brother urgently grabbed his arm. Then he gave a start, swallowed rapidly once or twice, and made a visible effort to pull himself together.

  “Lord High Priest,” he began, his girlish voice quavering. “The questers angered me with their blasphemies against Oorn and their lies concerning the validity of your own promises, made to us on behalf of the moon-God Mnomquah Himself. I would merely have chastised them, nothing more.”

  The High Priest raised his flute again to blow several softer notes; which his horned-one acolyte translated thus: “It is well, for Mnomquah’s word is the law, and the law is inviolable.” Now the crowding horned ones relaxed a little and a soft, concerted sigh was heard. All, it seemed, had been holding their breath, as if in anticipation of some terrific event.

  Yet again the lumpish, silk-clad figure blew upon his carven instrument, more urgently this time, and again his acolyte translated, directing his words at the entire congregation. “The time draws nigh and we must soon away. Mnomquah’s coming will be a wonderful, terrible thing. Even now the Lord of the Moon gazes down upon our works—see!” And triggered by his acolyte’s words, the High Priest’s jellyish—arm?—lifted to point down the wide, cliff-lined rift of Sarkomand’s ancient valley to a horizon already lost in the yellow glare of the rising moon’s leprously scarred and pitted dome.

  Once more the weird fluting, and again the translation—a question this time, and a command. “Is the gold positioned? Then let it be revealed, that Mnomquah may know his true destination when he rushes to Oorn’s fond embrace!”

  More torches were lighted, a vast circle of them on the outermost extremes of what was now seen to be a tremendous cleared area; and at numerous points about this huge outer circle tarpaulins and other coverings were thrown back to reveal veritable mounds of gold—moon-gold, as the captives well knew.

  Of the questers themselves while all this was taking place: they had not been utterly idle. Trussed up as they were, they could still speak to each other … for the moment at least. Eldin, in the curious way he had of detaching himself from current events—even when they promised to become fatal—had asked of his younger companion, “Hero, late as the hour appears to be for us, there’s something that bothers me a bit.” “A bit?” grunted the other, spitting out dust and gravel. “Myself, I’m bothered quite a lot—but say on, if it will give you peace of mind.”

  “It’s just this: how did they know we were coming? I mean, there’s a fair old bit of preparation gone into this lot. And that ambush was a superb job of planning and timing.”

  “Old lad,” Hero had answered after a moment, “brace yourself—and try not to think too badly of me, but—” at which point Eldin had closed his eyes, groaned and cut in:

  “You’re not going to tell me you knew? Please don’t tell me that, lad, for if you do I’ll know for sure that you’re as mad as these bloody Isharrans!”

  “Oh, I didn’t know for a certainty,” Hero answered, “or I surely would not have come, but I have to admit that I suspected. You see, knowing that Oorn had used that mind-call of hers to trap us in the first place, I reasoned—”

  “—That she might also
be able to read our minds, eh?”

  Hero tried to nod but only succeeded in bumping his head on a broken pavement. “Except … well, I hoped that after our trip into the sky they’d all believe us dead—Oorn included. If so, she wouldn’t be on the lookout for us.”

  “And you were wrong!” Eldin groaned again.

  Again the younger quester bumped his head. “It appears so,” he said. “She knew we lived, kept her cosmic ear on us, told her High Priest when to expect us. Why, she’s probably listening to us even now; splitting her sides—I hope!—laughing at us.”

  In the next instant as if to confirm Hero’s suspicion, the questers heard again that voice in their minds which had first lured them from Gnorri II and into the mists, through the bowels of the mountain buttress to dread, primal Sarkomand. But this time they knew the true source of that mental voice, and it made no further pretense of disguising itself. “Hero …” it eerily mocked, clammy and alien in their heads. “Eldin …” And yet even now there remained echoes of that earlier, sweeter calling, left there deliberately to linger in their minds and remind them what fools they had been.

  By this time the horned ones on the perimeter had done with their uncovering of glowing piles of moon-gold, so that their torches now struck yellow fire from a vast circle of the stuff. Even where they lay, the questers could see its shimmer beyond the thronging forms of their captors; and now Hero whispered: “So that’s how old Mnomquah will find his way here, eh? A golden bullseye, with Oorn’s pit at its center!”

  Before Eldin could answer they were roughly hoisted aloft once more—the sobbing, fearful girls, too—and borne into Oorn’s temple through the worn and pitted archway. At one side of that entrance as they passed stood Zura, with a retinue of zombies; at the other lay Lathi upon a large platform, surrounded by termen and -maids, her lower body silk-draped and fitfully pulsating. Vile females that they were and utterly different, still their faces shared the same expression: fury and dark hatred, for Hero had spurned and made fools of both of them.

  “No hope from that quarter, lad,” said Eldin.

  “No hope from any quarter, questers!” chuckled the horned-one acolyte as he stuffed greasy gags in their mouths. “There! That’s to ensure that you lie there nice and quiet throughout the ceremony—until the rising moon calls Oorn up from her pit to claim you. After that we must leave—but at least the Goddess shall have feasted before her Great Mating!”

  Now they were placed at the four cardinal points of the pit, face down with their heads just over the rim, so that they might gaze into the very throat of Oorn’s lair; and now too there commenced the sounds of an ancient, evil ritual as demon flutes piped and bone-dry crotala clacked and rattled. And the questers and their ladies knew that indeed this must be the beginning of the end, and that there was nothing at all they could do about it.

  Minutes lengthened into an hour, two, as the moon rose higher and the hideous music grew more frenzied and alien yet; and as that sick yellow light flooded the land so the four bound humans found the dark shaft of the pit dimly illumined, and Eldin in particular began to find a special loathsomeness in the shiny smoothness of its perfectly circular wall. It was not unlike the pearly mouth of a conch, this pit, except of course that it was not coiled but fell straight into the bowels of the very earth. Or did it?

  No, for down there, at the limits of vision, a vast nacreous slab plugged the shaft like a cork in the neck of a bottle. And this huge disc of stone persisted in attracting the Wanderer’s attention; persisted too in reminding him of … of what? Staring again at that great plug in the bottom of the pit, suddenly Eldin fancied he saw it moving, inching up the shaft, slowly but surely shortening the distance from bottom to top. And with this creeping, insidious movement there came such a rush of foul gases that, had he not been gagged, the Wanderer was sure he should be violently ill. Hero and the girls also smelled this awful fetor and felt the nausea it brought, but as yet they had not guessed its source.

  Eldin, however, no longer had any doubt. He now knew what he was seeing. Knew that the vast slab which continued to inch its way upward was no slab at all but something far more monstrous. Monstrous beyond words …

  It was a gigantic operculum, the protective plate or lid which secures a snail inside its shell—or, in this case, that most ghastly of all gastropods, Oorn in her lair!

  CHAPTER X

  Moonfleet

  Other things were happening in the night, things perhaps divinely provided by beneficent gods of dreams to keep the Wanderer’s mind from dwelling too deeply upon the imagined nature of the inhabitant of the pit. The sky was ablaze with hissing meteorites and the ground trembled now and then with seismic convulsions. A rumbling growl was plainly discernible, as of far distant mountains on the move; and as the moon rose higher so the rumbling increased, becoming an almost continual tremor in the foul night air.

  Turning their heads—which was about as much freedom as they had—the questers and their women were able to see the moon’s rim where it climbed steadily above the jagged wall of the temple. Bloated beyond belief, the thing seemed no longer a satellite but a sister planet suspended magically in the sky just beyond dreamland’s edge. Its needle-toothed mountains, oily oceans and sinister valleys looked no more distant than, say, the coastline of the Southern Sea as viewed from Serannian on a clear day, and its great evil “face” seemed to leer with an expression at once human and yet unutterably alien. Seen so close, the questers could well understand the madness which the moon had brought immemorially to sensitive minds in the waking world—and which now it was visiting upon the lands of Earth’s dreams.

  Then, abruptly, the monstrous music of the horned ones rose to a screeching crescendo and faded out in a final clash of brazen cymbals. Mnomquah’s propitiation was complete; His way was made plain; His mate prepared to partake of her bridal feast!

  Eldin’s bound body jerked violently as a cloven foot kicked him in the side. “Goodbye, questers,” came the guttural, nasal tones of the silk-clad horned one. “Oorn’s High Priest bids you a fond farewell, and so do I.”

  Now the High Priest himself came to the pit’s rim, slumping forward and wriggling beneath his robes as he peered through his wide-spaced eyeholes and down into the throat of that nameless shaft. He saw how close the pearly door had climbed toward pit’s rim; and if he could smell at all he doubtless smelled the hideous effluvium of the Thing beyond that door. His robe shivered fitfully and Eldin was aware of a pink writhing beneath its momentarily parted folds as carven flute was set to unseen lips. The notes this time were high, urgent, filled with a certain glee—yes, and a certain fear, too.

  “The time is nigh,” the acolyte translated. “We go!” And he gave Eldin a final kick with sharp, cloven hoof. Then they were gone, leaving the four bound humans to wait out their final nightmare.

  Eldin, knowing (or at least having very strong suspicions) just what the nightmare would be, now worked feverishly to release the bandage which held his gag in place; and seeing their friend so urgently at work, Hero and the girls did likewise. Finally, hooking the rag over a sharp knob of rock where it projected at the pit’s rim, and tearing his face a little in the process, the Wanderer was first to free his mouth.

  For a few seconds he paused to draw air deep into his lungs—but only until he began to taste upon his tongue the musk of the horror which crept ever closer—and then he choked back his nausea to call out across the pit, “Hero, have you guessed yet what this she-monster is?”

  Spitting out his own gag, Hero called back, “Man, I don’t dare guess! But if she looks half as bad as she smells …”

  “Oh, she’ll look worse than that,” Eldin promised. “You see the great slab which creeps ever closer up the shaft toward us? That’s part of her, attached to her like the lid on an oyster’s cup. She’s beneath it—immediately beneath it—and once that lid begins to open—”

  “Are you deaf, man?” Hero snarled. “I said I don’t want to know—and I�
�m damned sure the girls don’t! What Oorn is isn’t important. How to get the hell away from her is. If only these ropes weren’t so damned, uh!—tight …”

  “Can you roll?” Eldin asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Can you rock your body until it rolls?” Eldin repeated. “At least that might get us away from the rim.”

  “Damn me,” answered the other after a moment’s thought, “I’m not sure I want to try it. We’re so close to the edge that if we roll the wrong way—”

  “Well, we’re going to have to try it sooner or later,” said Eldin. “Another few minutes and she’ll be here.” So saying he began to rock his trussed body to and fro until he rolled once, twice, three times away from the pit. Seeing his success, Hero and the girls did likewise.

  Both Ula and Una had their mouths free by now, and as the latter rolled once in the wrong direction she gave a shrill little cry. The others held their collective breath until she corrected the motion and began to roll away from Oorn’s monstrous shaft, after which they breathed out a single, concerted sigh. Then, for long minutes, all that was heard was a great grunting and panting—and the occasional curse—as all four strained to put distance between themselves and the reeking horror which crept upon them.

  And it was as Hero rolled onto his back for the fourth or fifth time that he noticed the strange thing taking place in the sky. Where before the clouds had seemed to churn and tumble mindlessly, now they moved with a peculiar, an almost sinister purpose. They were forming a coil, like some impossible languid tornado, whose tenuous funnel spiralled visibly toward the ever-rising moon. And down from the looming face of that mad golden monster, as if to greet the funnel of clouds, sick moonbeams crept to form a yellow path or river in the sky.