Ship of Dreams Read online

  “Come now,” Hero began, at which the captain put his hands to his mouth and made as if to bellow more orders. “All right!” Hero shouted. “Here, take the damned thing!” And he handed Dass the great ruby. Dass looked at it once, turned and threw it straight at the Curator. With a movement so fast that it defied the human eye, the metal man snatched the ruby from midair. He gazed at the stone with his crystal eyes, then switched that gaze to Hero and Eldin where they stood together at the rail. His eyes turned a glowing scarlet and one off this metal arms slowly came up to point out and away, far over the sea.

  “The end of a beautiful friendship,” grunted Eldin. And to the Curator he shouted: “Don’t worry, old clanker, we’re going,”

  “He’s not only telling you to go,” said Dass with grim finality. “He’s warning you never to come back. Not ever!”

  CHAPTER IX

  Sky-Pirates of Zura

  The plot was to have been that Skymaster would sail close to Zura, put off the adventurers at some advantageous point inland, and that they would then proceed as best they could on foot, employing their natural talents to get into Zura’s heartland and there obtain samples of the green vapor. As King Kuranes had had it, the trick would then be to get out again.

  As plans go it was a simple one. Simple things are often easy, and the easiest way is often the best … On this occasion, however …

  On the third day out of Serannian, toward evening, as they passed high over Oriab and headed for the distant coastline of the Southern Sea, gray sails were spied in the southeast. Dass knew well enough that this could only be a pirate; this was not the Cerenerian Sea and therefore no other ship (except one of Kuranes’ own fleet, of which none but Skymaster was in the vicinity) could possibly sail the skies of this region.

  Northwest of Skymaster’s position lay a thick cloudbank. Dass turned the prow of his vessel for cover and raced toward the clouds. Alas, Zura’s pirate fleet was growing! Out of the clouds sailed two more black ships to block the man-o’-war’s escape, their cannons firing even as they came—and one of them had a Kraken figurehead whose crimson eyes burned like malignant fires.

  “Aye, well, we’ve cannon of our own, now!” cried Dass. “Which we didn’t have before Zura sank Cloud Treader.” He shook his fist at the enemy. “More conventional cannon than yours, true, but damned destructive for all that. Get the ports open, lads,” he roared. “Let’s give these dogs a taste of their own medicine!”

  Still cleaving for the dense cloudbank, Skymaster’s cannons roared and rattled, and the stink of powder and hot metal came reeking up to Dass, Hero and Eldin on the bridge. And whether by sheer good fortune or expert gunnery made little difference, but no sooner had Skymaster loosed her first fusillade than two of the masts of the closest pirate crashed down, taking the third mast with them. In another moment the ship turned broadside to Skymaster, whose second barrage literally cleared the decks. The crippled black ship drifted away, silent and ghostly, and disappeared into the clouds.

  Meanwhile the Kraken-prowed pirate had not been idle. Her cannons had poured shots into Skymaster’s flank, balls which issued green vapor within her hull’s flotation chambers. Already the man-o’-war was listing badly to port, and behind her the first-sighted pirate rapidly gained on her. A fool could have seen that she would never make the cloudbank. Dass was no fool; neither were Hero and Eldin fools.

  “We’re done for!” cried Hero in impotent rage. “Skymaster will go the same way as Cloud Treader: down into the drink! Damn their black, piratical hearts!”

  “Never mind the histrionics,” snarled Eldin. “And anyway, it’s not quite the same, is it? Cloud Treader didn’t matter a damn to us, but Skymaster does. Hell’s teeth, we’re on board her!”

  Now, because she was listing to port, Skymaster’s gunners couldn’t get the necessary elevation to hit the Kraken-prowed vessel. Instead she blazed away at the third ship, just coming into range of her starboard cannons. The pirate flagship, seeing Skymaster’s plight, drew closer and pulled alongside.

  “They’re going to board us!” shouted Hero. “Now that’s something we can handle. Eldin, quick, up into the rigging.” He scrambled aloft with Eldin close behind him. Limnar Dass caught on fast and followed them, shouting down to his crew and pikemen to make ready their hand-weapons.

  Now, with their hulls almost touching, Skymaster and the pirate slid by one another. As they passed so the vast majority of the gray-cowled pirate crew leapt aboard the crippled ship, swords at the ready. This was exactly what Hero had anticipated, and as the pirates left their ship he swung aboard her. Eldin and Dass followed suit, dropping lithe as cats onto the black decks of the enemy.

  In another moment the two ships had separated, stranding the three aboard the pirate. Since the crew of that black vessel was now greatly reduced, however, they found themselves in a far healthier fix than the men left behind on Skymaster. At least they had a deal more room in which to make their play.

  Hero wasted neither time nor opportunity but leapt at the closest pirate and sliced his cowl-hidden head clean from his body. Down went the man without a sound—without even a crimson spurt of blood—and another sprang to take his place. This one Hero stabbed in the heart, his sword passing through him as if he were made of cheese … except that when he dragged the blade free the man failed to fall but kept right on fighting! Out of instinct and desperation Hero struck again, and this time his blade tore aside the pirate’s hood. Beneath it—

  —A fleshless skull leered with empty sockets and rotting teeth!

  And now Hero knew where he had smelled that fetor before—that reek which made vile the very air aboard the black ship—that stink of death and of those who should have lain themselves down long ago! However inarticulately, Eldin’s howl of horror told how he had made the same discovery, while Limnar’s hiss and gasp spoke for him. The three of them were fighting corpses, dead men who felt nothing of their blows and came on secure in the knowledge that they could not die twice!

  Indeed, judging by the utter recklessness of their attack, it seemed that they must long for death, or at least an end to this monstrous undeath. Back to back the three men stood, forming a triangle as their rotting assailants crowded in on them.

  “Go for their heads,” cried Eldin, his voice a hoarse, nightmare croak. “If you cut off their heads, they fall!”

  “Same goes for their legs,” yelled Dass. “They keep on fighting, but they’re not so nimble!” Even as he yelled his sword stuck in the skull of one leaping corpse and was dragged from his hand. Throwing himself forward in a frantic attempt to regain the weapon, he tripped over a headless heap of bones and tattered sinews and fell sprawling. Instantly the stinking crush pressed forward, trampling him down and circling Hero and Eldin with a band of flashing steel. Then—

  “Take them alive!” came a laughing, tinkling female voice from close at hand. “Alive, do you hear? Let’s have some fun aboard The Cadaver. We too seldom have living guests to entertain. To entertain us, that is!”

  And again there came the tinkling laugh.

  Now if words such as these had issued from a burly, bearded, peg-legged brute in a tricorn hat, and if they had been framed in a deep, coarse, bellicose voice, then they should not have been out of place. As it happened, when Hero and Eldin disbelievingly turned their heads in the voice’s direction, the shock of what they saw was so great that they almost dropped their swords.

  “Enter the pirate chief,” whispered Hero in awe. “And what a chief!”

  “If that’s a pirate,” said Eldin with a gulp, “it’s me for the bounding main!”

  The brief lull in the fighting was all Zura’s corpse-pirates had needed. Two of them, coming on Hero and Eldin from behind, pinioned their arms so that others could step forward and wrest their swords from them. Dass was dragged unconscious to his feet and lashed to the mainmast, as were the two adventurers. Only then did the pirate vessel’s mistress come forward, and only then was her astonishing bea
uty fully revealed.

  Tall and leggy, she was clothed in a single fantastic garment which covered her arms, back, belly and thighs but left the rest of her body quite naked. Golden sandals accentuated the scarlet paint of her toenails and tight, wide golden bands on her wrists drew one’s eyes to her slender, tapering, perfectly formed hands … but only for a moment. The rest of this Princess of Zura was likewise perfectly formed, and no man’s eyes—lest they be already sightless—could possibly resist its beauty.

  And yet it was a tainted beauty for all that. An almost visible aura of evil seemed to surround her, and outward from her washed waves of near-tangible terror. Her huge, black, slanting eyes that shone and missed nothing, seemed imbued with the hypnotic gaze of a serpent; and serpentlike, too, were the ropes of shining black hair which fell about her shoulders.

  Her lips were full and red—too full, perhaps, too red—and they parted as she breathed to permit the flash of teeth like twin bars of white light. 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 now, as she paraded before her captives, hands on hips and surveying them first over one softly rounded shoulder, then the other, so Eldin whispered: “Man, she’s edible! And I know which bits I’d eat first!”

  “Not likely you’ll get the chance,” Hero growled back. “And anyway, I’d employ a food-taster, first, if I were you. Edible? Carnivorous, more like. Why, just look at that mouth! That lovely maw of hers could suck out a man’s very soul!”

  It seemed that Zura might have heard him, or at least divined his thoughts, for she stepped closer and as her gaze swept Hero up and down it slowly turned from one of proud insolence to open admiration. “Men of the waking world,” she finally said, and she cast a cursory sideways glance at Eldin. “Both of you—but you’ve come a long way from your origins. A pair of rebels who can’t seem to find a place to settle in the dreamlands. Am I right?”

  Hero nodded. “Near as damn,” he said. “And what of you? What do you do with this brotherhood of corpses?”

  “Do with them?” she laughed and threw back her ropes of hair. “I rule over them! For I am Zura, Princess of the Charnel Gardens and soon to be Queen of all Nightmares. As for these,” and she swept her hand to indicate the ranks of undead, “these are my minions, the zombie denizens of Zura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained.”

  Her eyes returned to Hero and narrowed seductively. She licked her lips and reached out a slim hand in which a razor-honed, curved dagger was lightly clasped. Deliberately she sliced upward from his navel, and the buttons of his jacket and shirt went flying to the black boards of the deck.

  Now she put away the dagger and stroked the adventurer’s broad chest, her huge eyes widening again at the strong pounding of his heart and the pulse which showed its steady beat in his throat. Then she stepped back from him. “Cut this one loose,” she said to her cowled, silently crowding crew, “and bring him to the rail. Let him see the fate of them that defy Zura. Then …” and again she licked her lips, “then we shall see what we shall see.”

  CHAPTER X

  Zura’s Tale

  Leading Hero to the rail, Zura said, “There, see what becomes of my enemies!” She laughed and pointed out across the sky to where Kuranes’ crippled vessel foundered and shook and trembled as shot after shot battered it to a hulk. The corpse-pirates—those of them who survived—were off Skymaster’s deck now and aboard the other black ship, and it was that ship which kept up the devastating bombardment.

  Even as Hero watched through narrowed, flinching eyes, the man-o’-war’s decks were raked with a broadside. Her masts and rigging were carried away at a stroke and green vapor writhed over everything. Gaping holes in the vessel’s hull issued clouds of the stuff, and its effect on Skymaster was obvious and terminal beyond any doubt. As the last of her flotation chambers were ruptured, so she rolled over and slid down out of the sky, leaving rapidly dispersing green smudges to mark her trail. Hero could not tell if anyone remained alive on the doomed ship, but certainly none would live through the fall.

  Zura laughed again and leaned far out over the rail to watch skymaster’s dreadful descent. No master of the sky now, that once proud ship, but a tumbling plank, a rag of sailcloth and a whistle of air through tattered, fluttering rigging.

  “Thus perish all my enemies,” said Zura triumphantly.

  “Your enemies?” growled Hero with a half-sneer. “It was you attacked us, remember?” For a single moment he considered tipping her overboard and only the fact that they were under the silent scrutiny of a horde of sword-wielding zombies stayed his hand. “And was Cloud Treader your enemy too?”

  No sooner were the words out than he could have bitten off his tongue, for Zura at once straightened up and turned to him. Her eyes widened as she leaned forward. “Ah! You know of that, do you? And what else do you know, I wonder?”

  “Er,” he answered, thinking quickly, and added quite inanely, “bad news travels fast in the dreamlands.”

  “Were there survivors, then?” Zura frowned. “That was careless of me …” And her eyes narrowed to the merest slits. “But if Kuranes knows it was Zura sank his ship, why has he sent out another to its doom? Or was she on some special mission, perhaps? Where was the man-o’-war bound, my brave young man of the waking world?”

  Again Hero wracked his brains for an answer. “She was bound … for Ilek-Vad!” he finally answered, and held his breath.

  “Possibly,” Zura said at last, “since Kuranes counts Randolph Carter as one of his greatest friends. Would they cement a pact against me then? It would avail them naught.”

  “I know nothing of any pact,” said Hero. “My colleagues and I were visiting friends in Serannian. The captain of Skymaster—now gone down with his ship, poor man—was an acquaintance. Since he was under orders from Kuranes to sail for Ilek-Vad, and since that city was our destination also—”

  “He let you sail with him, eh? Well—what’s your name?”

  “Hero,” he answered. “David Hero.” And he hoped it was a name she had never heard of.

  Apparently she never had. “Well, David Hero, you may never see Ilek-Vad. You may never see beyond the deck of this ship! Do you know that?”

  He nodded. “I’m neither blind nor daft.”

  “Just so,” and she gave a sharp nod of her head. “Nor am I—and I do as I will with my prisoners!”

  “Then do with me as you will,” he said, and somehow managed to keep the beat of his heart steady.

  Her serpent’s gaze seemed to probe his soul and for long moments she was silent. Then she said: “You are either very brave or very foolish. Perhaps both. Certainly you are different, as are all men from the waking world. It was clever of you to come aboard The Cadaver that way. If you’d stayed aboard Skymaster you’d now be dead.”

  “Perhaps I’d be better dead,” said Hero under his breath.

  “Eh?” said Zura suspiciously. “Do you mock me?”

  “I said, certainly I’d be dead,” Hero lied.

  Again her eyes became the merest slits. “Indeed you would … But know this, David Hero: alive or dead, either way you would still be mine. The only difference is that dead you’d obey my commands more readily; though fortunately for you, much more woodenly. You’ll understand my meaning—soon.”

  She turned from the rail and waved her moldering “men” aside. Without another word she made for her cabin and Hero, who had no desire to stay where he was, surrounded by stinking corpses, quickly followed her. On her heels he breathlessly asked: “What of my friends? Eldin the Wanderer and Limnar Dass?”

  “They are safe for now,” she answered, opening the black, gold-inlaid door of her cabin and beckoning him inside. As he moved to pass her she arched her body against him and said, “Be sure you do nothing to change that.”

  Briefly, as light flooded in through the open door, Hero saw a richly furnished, low-beamed room whose
fittings were of gold and whose drapes were of a black, funereal velvet. Then Zura closed the door and it was as if they stood in gold-flecked blackness.

  “Come, David Hero, sit with me and talk. Since you are coming from Serannian, you must know a great deal of that sky-floating city. Perhaps you know things which I do not.”

  “I think,” he answered, sitting on the edge of the bed where she now indolently sprawled, “that I should rather know about you. After all, I’m a mere commoner—a man late of the waking world, yes, but a commoner for all that—while you … why, you’re a princess!”

  “A princess, yes,” she answered moodily in the gloom of the place. “Princess Zura of Zura—Mistress of Death!”

  “But from what I’ve seen of you,” he pressed, “that’s the way you like it.”

  “I have lived with it, grown with it, reveled in it!” she answered. “I would have it no other way. Listen and I will explain …” As she spoke she got down from the bed and sat at Hero’s feet where she began to loosen his boots. Her movements were languid but sure and Hero made no move to stop her. Indeed he felt half drunk with her sensuality but his ears were wide open and receptive to her every word.

  “When the dreamlands were young a certain wandering sorcerer fell in love with a girl who died before he could make his love known. Her death, though accidental, was horrible: she drowned in the Southern Sea off the shores of Zura—at least where the land of Zura now lies—and her body washed ashore there. Using his sorcerous powers, the bitter magician returned her to life; that is to say, he made her one of the undead, a zombie. Then for a little while he could talk to her, and she to him; but while his love burned like a fire hers was born of slavery and could never be real. There is no love in death, you see, and she could only say to him those words he bade her say.”