Ship of Dreams Page 8

  Now Zura kneeled on the bed beside Hero, slowly peeling off his jacket. As she did so, she continued with her story. “In a little while, however, the sorcerer’s dead love could no longer repeat even the few words he demanded of her. The human tongue is soft and does not last long after death. Still the sorcerer would not relax his hold over his love, and where he went she followed—until she no longer could. Then, blind to her loathsomeness, he stayed with her; and their tent stood in that place where now stand the Charnel Gardens …

  “At last the morning came when, rising up from his blind madness of remorse and anguish, the sorcerer saw his love as she really was. He saw the worms crawling in her and the bones sticking through in places; and when he commanded her to open her eyes, then he saw the pus that seeped from peeling eyeballs. And tearing at his hair, at last he commanded that she be still; and so she sank down and melted into corruption …”

  Zura paused a while to push Hero’s shirt back from his shoulders and slide its sleeves down his arms. She kissed his neck and ran trembling fingers over his powerful shoulders. Hero, every fiber of his body burning, fought to keep his hands still and his heart quiet; but it was a losing battle. The blood was rising in him and Zura’s perfume was in his nostrils. Her nearness and her silken hands worked on him like powerful magnets on iron filings.

  Suddenly stifled, he stirred himself up a little and stared about at a room grown more visible as his eyes became accustomed to its dim light. The small, round windows were of red glass which added a ruby shade to the infernally wicked look of the place, and Zura’s bedsheets were of black silk. Now she was stroking his hair, pushing him back until he lay stretched out.

  “Go on with your story,” he gulped, his nostrils detecting something other than the heavy reek of perfume as Zura’s tongue flickered over her lips and she breathed close to his face. She drew back, paused, pouted, then continued:

  “When the sorcerer saw what was become of his love—and more especially when he discovered that his body, too, was now diseased, infected by her rottenness—his madness returned tenfold. And this was the weird he worked in his great madness:

  “That henceforth Zura would be the final dwelling place of all in the dreamlands who die fearful deaths. That such undead would hasten to Zura, there to serve their evil mistress, also named Zura, who would be the only living being in that entire land of death. Moreover, his weird was greater than this: for the sorcerer knew that a living princess must surely die if she were constantly surrounded only by legions of the undead. And so his curse contained this clause:

  “That while Zura’s princess must love the dead, she might on occasion renew her strength by battening upon the love of the living!”

  “And he used sorcery to ensure that his weird would come to pass?” gasped Hero in Zura’s embrace, his head swimming with the closeness of the place.

  “Aye,” she answered, “great, mad sorcery!”

  “And the name of his love,” cried Hero as he sat up. “Of the one who was drowned in the Southern Sea. What was it?”

  “Have you not guessed?” she answered, her fingers at his belt.

  “Zura!” he shuddered. “And now you, who bear her name, would renew yourself with me!” Head reeling, he jumped from the bed. And so overcome was he by opiate fumes, and so weak from the lusts which had near-destroyed him, Hero almost fell. Instead, stumbling about, he collided with Zura where she had risen to her feet in a rage. His hand caught at her single garment and tore it down—

  And despite the dimness of that room, now Hero recognized the source of the repellent musk whose queasy reek he had detected above that of poppy-essence and the scents of hideous, hybrid orchids; and he knew why Zura’s dress had been designed to cover only certain regions of her body. For these were the sites of contamination—and he had almost become a sacrifice to her revitalization, her “renewal”!

  Zura’s upper arms bore the deep, black indentations of corpse fingers, and the heart of her womanhood was puffy and leprous with decay. Great raised blotches obscured what should have been the perfect outlines of her thighs and belly!

  Staggering away from her, Hero snatched up his jacket and threw it over his shoulders. He tripped on something and sat down with a thump on the richly carpeted floor, and finding his boots he automatically began to pull them on. And one mad question rang over and over in his brain like a peal of crazed bells, until at last he found it bursting from his tongue.

  “Zura—damned bitch of hell—what did your last lover die of?”

  “My last lover?” she answered with a shriek of hideous laughter. “What did he die of? So you are blind after all, David Hero. Fool, he was already dead!”

  CHAPTER XI

  Zura’s Delight

  With Zura’s mad laughter ringing in his ears, Hero stumbled to his feet and found the cabin door. As he lifted the latch and threw the door wide, Zura opened a large, hitherto unnoticed cupboard set flush with the wall at the head of her bed.

  “My lover?” the demon princess screamed again. “Would you really like to know him, David Hero? Then know him!” And out from the dark recess of her cupboard stepped forward a tall, nightmare apparition whose jerky, creaking movements and moldering aspect froze the adventurer solid where he stood framed in Zura’s doorway. The thing had a short, wide-bladed sword in its claw of a hand, and as Zura pointed at Hero and screamed a command, so it lurched forward.

  Galvanized into action, Hero ducked under the zombie’s arc of steel and caught at the stringy wrist which controlled the sword. A moment more and he had wrested the weapon free—the entire hand, too!—and with a single sweep decapitated the cadaver which had been Zura’s “lover.” Collapsing, the body of the poor thing fell against him and threw spindly arms about his neck. With a cry of horror and loathing Hero tried to disengage himself, only to be surrounded in a moment by the rest of ship’s graveyard crew. No longer having room to move, still he surged and bounded in their midst as they took away his sword and heaped themselves upon him. He found himself forced to his knees, saw the bright gleam of a blade where bony hand lifted it above his head, and—

  “Hold!” came Zura’s command, her voice ringing loud and clear over the creak of leathery joints and the clacking of bones. “No, no, lads, don’t kill him. Not that way, at least. I want him to come to me as a corpse, but he can’t come without his head, now can he? So let’s play a little game with our guests instead, should we? That most delightful of all games.” Her voice became a dangerous purr: “Poor David, did my perfumes make your head spin? Well, what better way to clear a dizzy head than a short walk in the sweet, clear air, eh?”

  She laughed and made to chuck Hero under his chin where he was held in tight restraint, but he jerked back his head with a growl of disgust. Zura’s eyes hardened and her lips curled into a sneer. She turned swiftly and pointed to the ship’s rail. “Get out the plank!” she snapped her orders to the zombie crew. “There’s no shorter, sweeter walk in all the dreamlands than that!”

  While Hero was roped back into position alongside his colleagues at the base of the mainmast, a narrow plank was dragged into view and made fast to the deck so that one end projected far out over the abyss of air. Limnar Dass had regained consciousness by now and his eyes were taking in all of the activity at the ship’s rail. To Hero he said:

  “This game she plans for us. Do you know it, my friend?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Hero gloomily answered. “A so-called ‘sport’ of olden-day pirates in the waking world. This must be Zura’s version. But better by far than some of the games she likes to play.”

  Eldin snorted his disgust. “When I saw her drag you away into her cabin there, I said to myself, ‘well, that’s us in the clear. She’ll be so taken with him that we’ll all three be set free.’ Huh! I might have known you’d let me down again. It would be a different story if she’d chosen me.”

  “Would it?” said Hero. “Let me tell you, old lad, you’d be far better off with a
leper in the final stages of disintegration. Our little Zura there is a mobile cesspit!”

  “Hero,” answered Eldin. “let’s not fool each other now, not in what promises to be our final hour. Truth to tell, I’d rather live in a damn cesspit than walk that plank!”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Hero shook his head.

  “Damn me, I know my own mind!” snarled the other. “Don’t tell me what I would or—”

  “Why don’t you two shut up!” hissed Dass. “If you must fight, save it until they cut us free of this mast. Personally, if I’m to die I’ll take as many of these zombies with me as I can.”

  “The crew doesn’t mean a thing without Zura,” Hero informed. “She’s the threat. If you’ve got to die a martyr—certainly if you want to save Serannian—Zura’s the one to kill.

  “What did you find out?” Dass urgently questioned. “Quickly, for one of us might yet escape to carry a message back to Kuranes. Have you discovered why Zura wishes to destroy Serannian?”

  Both Hero and Eldin looked at Dass in amazement. “Escape?” said Eldin. “Limnar, you never fail to astound me. Sometimes I think you’re daft as Hero! How in hell can we possibly escape?”

  “Damn it, I don’t know,” Dass answered, “but if—just if—one of us does live through this …”

  “All right,” said Hero, “listen and I’ll tell you what I think. Zura the woman told me that anyone in the dreamlands who dies a horrible death ends up in Zura the land, as a zombie in her Charnel Gardens. In other words, all her subjects are dead. Well now, during the Bad Days there must have been a fairly regular flow of unhappily defunct folk into Zura, but since then things have been pretty quiet …”

  “So?” Eldin pressed, interested despite himself.

  “Corpses,” Hero informed, “rot! Zura the woman needs a regular source of supply. The fall of Serannian out of the sky would mean a massive injection of life—excuse me, death—into her Charnel Gardens. I think that that was the initial idea, but since then it’s expanded. Gone to her head. Now she wants to be Queen of Nightmares, mistress of all she surveys. And where the dreamlands are concerned, she wants to survey all!”

  “She wants to murder everyone in the land of Earth’s dreams?” Dass gasped.

  “That’s the way I read it, yet,” Hero nodded. “And it looks like we’re to be among her first victims. Here she comes now!”

  “Him,” said Zura, striding up close and pointing at Eldin. “The ungainly one. See how the ropes chafe him? Poor creature. Him we shall set free from his misery at once … From all misery!”

  “Ah, Zura, you’ve come to your senses at last!” cried Eldin. “Hero would be no good to a woman like you. He’s only a pup in my employ. Come now, set me free and we’ll—”

  “Silence!” she snapped, and to her crew: “Fetch the dog!”

  Kicking and struggling and roaring like a wounded bull, Eldin was cut loose and dragged across the deck, then prodded with sword-points until he swayed out onto the narrow plank. A wind had come up and The Cadaver was rolling a little, so that Eldin shuffled and danced to keep his balance as he was prodded to the plank’s outer extreme. To get him into position, Zura’s zombie crew used long, sharply pointed poles.

  Hero had gone chalk white against the black mast. Straining his neck to watch Eldin’s performance, his muscles never ceased from bunching and cording as he put every effort into bursting free; but all in vain. Dass, too, was distressed almost to tears. “One at a time,” he kept saying over and over. “One at a time, and we don’t stand a chance. And poor Eldin, he’s first to go. One at a time, Hero, one at a time …”

  “Oh, for my sword,” roared Eldin as he wavered and teetered at the end of the plank. “Is this any way for a man to go? With empty hand? A man who’s been a fighter all his dream-life?”

  Hearing him, Zura nodded to one of her crew and Eldin’s straight sword was produced. She took it, weighed it for a second, gave it into the crumbling hand of a great black Pargan who threw it, without delay, toward Eldin. At that exact moment the ship gave a great heave to starboard as a sidewind caught at her sails. Eldin, thrown off balance, nevertheless reached for the sword and snatched it from the air. That was the end of it. He cast one last despairing glance in the direction of Hero and Dass. For a second only his eyes met Hero’s—then he was gone.

  “Damn and blast your foul black heart, Zura!” Hero howled, anguish choking off his words on her name. He gasped a while longer, gulping at the air. Then brokenly, more quietly, he continued. “Throw me down next, Zura. Me …”

  “As you wish,” she nodded, ropes of black hair blowing in the wind. She came closer and stood on tiptoe to stare into Hero’s eyes. “But first … a parting kiss?” She licked her lips and held her face up to him.

  The agony slowly went out of Hero’s eyes. He smiled a strange smile and bent his face down to her—and spat at her point blank. She fell back, wiped the thick spittle from her wrathful brow and pointed a trembling hand toward the plank. “Go, then, fool!” she hissed. “But we shall meet again, you and I, never fear. In the Charnel Gardens …”

  Hero was cut free from the mast and without delay was bundled onto the plank. He too was given his sword, and at the last he turned to face his tormentors like a great wolf at bay. Crouching there, inches from eternity, his eyes found Zura’s and bored into them. For a second she met his ferocious gaze, then could meet it no longer. And when next she looked Hero too was gone.

  That left only Limnar Dass, and without a murmur, head held high, he followed his friends of so few days along the plank and out into the sea of air. Zura watched his tumbling, rapidly shrinking figure until it entered clouds where they had gathered below like foam of ether. Only then did she turn from the rail.

  A picture of Hero’s face, furious, full of hatred and loathing, burned in her mind’s eye. She felt a chill wind on her like some strange omen.

  “Set sail for Zura,” she ordered. Then, lifting her voice: “For Zura, I said, and quickly! That’s enough sport for one day …”

  CHAPTER XII

  Enter Gytherik

  Eldin and Hero knew only one way to fall: noisily! But you can only yell for so long. They had yelled, both of them lustily, but more out of defiance of the unacceptable than in fear. You may fear death’s approach when he is stealthy and his shadow falls over you slowly until it shuts out life’s light, but when he leaps on you suddenly with his scythe already swinging … Now they merely fell, tumbling, breathlessly, between whirling heaven and earth, expelled by the one and attracted—fatally—by the other.

  Limnar Dass, on the other hand, knew a different way to fall. If the pair who preceded him rapidly down leagues of sky and had his experience of the air-baths, they too might have made the same desperate attempt. An attempt not to fall but rather—to fly. For in the air-baths Limnar had learned the best way to hold his body in order to maintain a position without sinking to the end of his chain, and if it worked in the air-baths perhaps it would work here. Not so efficiently, no, for while in the air-baths perhaps it was simply a matter of maintaining one’s balance, here the fight was against gravity, a most powerful adversary.

  In the waking world Limnar would have made a remarkable free-fall parachutist, but he had never lived in the waking world. Here in the dreamlands he could only do his best, and that without any parachute at all. Nevertheless, during those first few moments after casting himself from the plank, he had formed his body into the air-enclosing posture of the free-faller, and from this position he could observe through eyes half-closed against the whipping rush of his fall all that went on below.

  In this position, too, he shot through the cloud-layer far beneath The Cadaver; and only then did his speed become apparent, so that he knew for sure that try as he might he could in no way slow his fall. The only difference, if he could maintain his present spread-eagled position, would be that he would be conscious when he hit the surface of the Southern Sea. Or at least, until immediately before he
hit it …

  And down below he spotted the hurtling figures of his two friends—Eldin plummeting like a stone while Hero seemed to pin-wheel down the sky—and a sick feeling of defeat came over Limnar as he realized that he would see the two hurtle into the sea, and that a few moments later he would follow them. From this height it would be like falling onto solid rock.

  Then—

  An impossible sight! Limnar slitted his eyes more yet against the rush of air and stared at the speck which was Eldin. He must be close to the surface of the sea by now, mere seconds away. And yet another speck—a winged speck—no, two winged specks, seemed to be converging upon him. And even as Limnar watched through streaming, disbelieving eyes, so the three merged together …

  To Eldin the nightmare seemed unending, and yet as he saw the dark ocean looming larger with each revolution of his ungainly body, so he knew that indeed it was drawing to a close. And he was even more astonished than the watching Limnar Dass when suddenly he spied, falling with him into the deepening dusk and closing with him by the second, a great pair of gaunts whose faceless heads seemed angled to monitor every slightest change of position in his tumbling body.

  Their bat-wings were folded back so that they fell like arrows, and it flashed through Eldin’s mind that they might be scavengers racing to drag his shattered, exploded remains from the reddened wave crests. But gaunts, having no faces, are equally void of appetites—at least they have none that are mentionable. Certainly not for that sort of fare, anyway.

  Eldin still held his sword clenched tightly in his hand, and for a moment he considered whether or not to make his final act in the dreamlands one of destruction. Yet he could not bring himself to strike. Astoundingly, he somehow felt that the gaunts meant him no harm—not right now, at any rate—and that his sword was holding them at bay from … what? If they meant him no harm, then perhaps they were trying to help him. Was that possible? But they wouldn’t help him a damn as long as he flashed his sword at them! And quickly, fighting the rush of air, he sheathed his blade.