by Brian Lumley
Kuranes nodded in a satisfied manner and smiled a faint smile, the first his guests had seen upon his face. “Good!” he said, and again it was as if a weight had left his shoulders. “Those are some of the questions I would expect from questers who know their business. Very well, let’s get down to it. What do you know of Zura?”
“Zura?” answered Eldin. “Why, yes, I know of it. It’s a place, a land, a forbidden spot beyond Thalarion. Certain phrases spring to mind, meaningless phrases heard in connection with the place. ‘The Charnel Gardens of Zura,’ for instance, and ‘Zura’s Dead Legions.’ Traders have always avoided Zura and cartographers usually leave it off their maps. In fact, if you talk about Zura in the healthier lands of Earth’s dreams, why, you pretty soon end up talking to yourself! In short, it’s a bad place.”
“Indeed it is,” Kuranes agreed, “and yet—that’s where you’re going!”
There was a long pause before Hero, who had also heard of Zura, said: “Just like that?”
“Basically, yes,” answered Kuranes. “Oh, there are more details—you need to know why you’re going there, for one thing—but essentially the trick is to get you into Zura, discover a certain something, then get out again and return to Serannian.”
Slowly Eldin stood up, his huge knuckles white on the top of the great desk, his face darkening. “Lord Kuranes,” he said, “your offer to work boils down to this: five years in a dungeon or certain death! You must thing we’re as daft as you are!”
“You speak treason!” snapped the butlers in unison, springing forward and coming upon the pair from the flanks.
“He most certainly does,” agreed Hero as he jumped to his feet. He placed his back against Eldin’s so that they faced Kuranes’ angry, whiskered retainers. “Speaks it fluently, and several other tongues—including horse-sense. But now and then he’s a bit hasty, that’s all.” To Kuranes, speaking very quickly now, he said: “If these lads of yours dare lay a hand, Lord, you’ll be making your own bed for a while! And pay no mind to my large friend’s rude and thoughtless blustering. He likes to haggle a bit, you see. But in any case, we accept the task you’ve given us. Without reservation.”
“We what?” howled Eldin, turning his head to stare wide-eyed into Hero’s suddenly placid face.
“We’ll do it,” insisted the younger man, but the look on his face—that look which Eldin knew of old—said much more. It said, “Be still, old friend, and we’ll be all right. Do as you’re told and we’ll come out of it laughing …”
“Well,” said Kuranes, breaking into the unspoken conversation without ever knowing it was going on. “Does your friend go a-questing on his own, Eldin the Wanderer, or do you go with him? Think carefully now, for I’ll not ask you again. What’s it to be: Zura, or Leewas Nith’s dungeons?”
For a while the tableau remained frozen, then Eldin sank back into his chair. “Lord King,” he said, his voice a low growl, “—is it possible these buckoes of yours could bring us another bottle of wine?”
CHAPTER VIII
A Hasty Departure
Later, Captain Limnar Dass found the pair digs in the city and stayed with them well into the night. They went out on the town with the captain, drank and joked with him, enjoyed his company as they rarely enjoyed anyone’s other than their own—but were nevertheless glad when he left them at last and they were able to return to their lodgings. Finally, as they prepared for bed in the attic bedroom of an old tavern on Serannian’s outskirts, Eldin was able to ask the one question which had been burning him up since their audience with Kuranes.
“Right,” he began, “now what’s all this about me not being the only thief in dreamland, eh? Was that your way of saying that—”
Hero, placing his finger on his lips, silenced him. “Even walls can have ears,” he cautioned. He dug into the pocket of his jacket where he had folded it onto a chair beside his bed, produced a ruby which was the twin of the one Eldin had stolen, tossed it across the room. His burly companion caught it in cupped hands.
“How in hell—?” said Eldin.
“Easy,” Hero whispered. “One minute after I took it I had a premonition. A sense of impending nasty. I popped it into Limnar’s pocket in the Museum and took it back from him when we were safely away from the place. If the Curator had stopped me, I was clean. If he had stopped Limnar—well, I didn’t think that likely. As it happened, he stopped you.” He grinned. “If he’s since carried out an inventory … I guess he’ll be going rusty with a rage right now!”
“He’s not the only one,” Eldin’s chin began to jut. “If I remember right you gave me a pretty hard time after I was caught. And you blacker than the ace of spades!”
“That was to allay Limnar’s suspicions, dolt!” Hero’s grin broadened. “We couldn’t have him mistrusting both of us, now could we?”
But Eldin was no longer listening. Instead he held the gem up to the glow of a lantern. “Oh, look at it, look at it!” he breathed in ecstasy. “It must be the most beautiful stone I’ve ever seen—next to the one I gave back.”
“And as you said,” Hero reminded him, “we’ll live like kings for five long years on this one stone alone.”
“One stone alone,” repeated Eldin. Then his frown reappeared and he was suddenly gloomy. “Huh!” he snorted. “If we survive this damned quest, that is! And believe me, survival is no easy thing in Zura.”
Hero shook his head sadly. “You really are getting old, my friend,” he said. “Be certain we’re not going questing for Kuranes or anyone else. Not to Zura. Not while we’re rich as a couple of lords. Oh, we’ll go along with him for now, by all means—but only for now. Then, as soon as we’re off Serannian, at our very first opportunity—”
“We weigh anchor and shove off, right?” said Eldin, gleefully.
“Right,” Hero emphatically agreed. “Now let’s get some shuteye, yes? Tomorrow is another day.”
Hero dreamed dreams within dreams of all that had passed since his arrival with Eldin in Serannian. Over and over his sleeping mind repeated—with certain of those inexplicable variations which dreams invariably insert into the order of things—Kuranes’ explanation of the threat against Serannian, against the entire dreamlands. It had started three years ago with a visit, when two alleged Priests of Zura had arrived in Serannian as passengers on a galley out of Celephais. Gray-robed the two had been, their cowled faces gray, unsmiling shadows.
Because they said they hailed from Zura (and said it in voices which were flat and gray as their robes and shadowy faces), people tended to give them a wide berth. Also, there had been an odor about them, a certain smell which not even the most powerful perfumes could mask. It was that fetor which old sailors remembered from days when their ships had plied all the seas of dream, when they had inadvertently sailed too close to the shores of Zura.
For in those days Zura had been known as the Land of Pleasures Unattained, because the beauties and wonders its shores displayed had never been able to disguise the reek of plague-stricken towns and the soul-wrenching stench of gaping cemeteries—which was that same charnel odor surrounding the so-called Priests of Zura. Still and all, while the inhabitants of these saner regions of Earth’s dreams felt uncomfortable about Zura, too little was known of that mysterious land to warrant any sort of action against its people; certainly not against its “priests.” Thus that gray-clad pair came and went without hindrance, and when they went took their odors with them. Their odors … and something else.
For their interest while in Serannian had centered chiefly (though covertly) in the mighty engines beneath the city, in them and in the ethereal stuff they manufactured. And so great had that interest been that one of Serannian’s less scrupulous engineers had been persuaded to obtain for them several small bottles of the stuff undiluted by the air around Serannian, in combination with which it formed the Cerenerian Sea.
The Priests of Zura were soon forgotten, however, and the city in the sky went on as of old. Nothing had changed (
or so it appeared at first sight) and no one had suffered from the incursion of the gray-robed men from a forbidden land. Then, almost three years after those evilly odorous priests took their departure …
A man of Serannian, a sailor, was found adrift on the Southern Sea off Oriab, lashed to the shattered planking of some wrecked vessel, more dead than alive and babbling a fantastic tale. As luck would have it a merchantman returning to Celephais fished him from the sea, and one or two aboard knew him for a crewman on Cloud Treader, one of Kuranes’ warships. Indeed the shattered fragment of hull which alone held him up from green deeps bore that very legend in flaking green paint: Cloud Treader, out of Serannian.
Some days later, shortly after the merchantman put into Celephais, Dyrill Sim (for that was the sailor’s name) recovered his senses and was able to tell something of the wrecking of Kuranes’ man-o’-war. What he told of the sinking of Cloud Treader was sufficient to warrant his passage on the next ship out of Celephais bound for Serannian, with a bevy of physicians by his bed to carefully tend his needs and return him to full health. And in Serannian he was taken straight to Kuranes, who listened to his story with growing apprehension.
Cloud Treader had been one of Kuranes’ fleet of warships, unused since the Bad Days but kept in good repair and sent out upon occasional missions and maneuvers into the skies of the dreamlands. Unlike the rest of dreamland’s ships, Kurane’s sky fleet was not dependent upon the buoyancy of the Cerenerian Sea. No, for in their holds the warships carried such quantities of ethereal aerial essence that each was a self-sufficient unit capable of sailing dreamland’s skies away and beyond the limits of the Cerenerian. Moreover, should there be any leakage of that essentially non-existent stuff, then each ship had its own small engine with which to manufacture more.
How then, Kuranes had asked Dyrill Sim, might a ship such as Cloud Treader fall out of the sky and plummet like a stone into the Southern Sea, there to founder and sink, and all her crew with her with the sole exception of Sim himself? The survivor had answered thus:
One beautiful day—on a cloudless morning when the freshly-risen sun was bright and warm and the gulls wheeled and cried about Cloud Treader where she sailed high over the Southern Sea—with the Isle of Oriab lying far below and to starboard, then the lookout had spied in his glass an unknown vessel under full sail coming toward them out of the sun. Cloud Treader’s captain had thought that perhaps she was another of Kuranes’ vessels—indeed, what else could she possibly be?—and so had come about and lowered most of his sail to allow the stranger to come within hailing distance.
Because she sailed out of the sun, however, the newcomer’s lines were indistinct and her flag unreadable. Then, when she was close and the golden orb of the sun no longer blinded, the men of the man-o’-war saw that this was no vessel out of Serannian but a ship of Death!
Her sails were leprous gray and her hull and Kraken-carved figurehead were dull, lifeless black. Only the eyes in the carven octopus which served as a figurehead had any color at all, and they were of a baleful red. The flag she flew was the skull and crossbones, and lining her decks the crew was formed of silent, gray-robed, hooded figures whose half-hidden faces gazed emotionless and yet with dire intent upon the Cloud Treader where she rode, all unprepared, upon that ocean of the upper air.
Then, feeling a terror within himself and waves of fear rising in his crew, the man-o’-war’s captain had ordered full sail—but too late. Even as Cloud Treader began to draw away from the pirate, so her strange black cannons opened fire. Fist-sized cannon balls struck Cloud Treader’s hull and crashed through, and one shattered as it flew through the gunwales and onto the deck. It was filled with a gushing green vapor which quickly dispersed. No poison this, for those who saw and smelled it were neither offended nor made ill. If not an agency immediately inimical to life, then what?
But now, amazingly, the man-o’-war began to list to starboard, tilting toward the pirate. Now too her gunners had recovered themselves sufficiently to aim their ray-projectors at the decks of the black ship and the leaden figures of her crew where they stood at the rail. Brilliant beams of light raked those decks, passed over the massed, unsmiling crew of the grim vessel—with no visible effect whatever! Those deadly beams, effective against all manner of evil and nightmarish life in the dreamlands, were utterly impotent where the black pirate and her crew were concerned.
And at last the meaning of the green vapor became clear. For as more cannon balls entered Cloud Treader’s hull, so the man-o’-war tilted further yet, and it was seen that the vapor must be a nullifying agent which destroyed the power of the ship to stay afloat on the air. While Cloud Treader wallowed and her crew uselessly blazed away with their ray-projectors, so the pirate circled around and began to pound her port side. And now it was plain that the man-o’-war was doomed.
Down below, something broke in the engine which made Cloud Treader’s flotation essence. The engineer, working frantically to restore life to the precious device, knew that he was fighting a losing battle. Slowly but surely the man-o’-war was sinking, drifting down through deeps of the sky, falling toward the surface of the Southern Sea far below. And the pirate fell with her, circling, firing her cannons; until the last, as the final dregs of Cloud Treader’s life-essence were dispersed, she gave up all pretence of buoyancy and fell like a meteor from the sky.
Dyrill Sim remembered little of that mad rush to the bosom of the deep green Southern Sea, except that he had been aloft and in the rigging and that when a sail ripped loose and fluttered free, he had flown with it. Then he remembered the wash of the sea, and how he had lashed himself to shattered planking, and a mad, half-conscious vision of the black ship sailing down out of the sky to alight upon slowly swelling waters.
Now a voluptuous female figure rode astride the evil octopus figurehead, shouting commands as her crew of silent, gray-clad—zombies?—swarmed over the sundered wreckage of Cloud Treader, seeking something out. And finally, before darkness overcame him, Dyrill Sim saw Cloud Treader’s essence-engine ripped loose and held up to the beautiful yet strangely enigmatic woman where she sat astride the Kraken figurehead. She laughed with a voice that tinkled like bells and said:
“Let the sea take it! It failed the so-called ‘man-o’-war,’ didn’t it? Well, then our engines are better. Zura’s engines are better, and with her engines and her cannons she will become queen of all the dreamlands. Princess of Death and Disaster I am already, and soon I shall extend my charnel gardens through all the lands of Earth’s dreams. Did you see Kuranes’ ship fall? Aye, and how much more wonderful his entire sky-floating city!”
And these terrible words that fell so naturally from the strange woman’s lips, and her wicked laughter tinkling over the Southern Sea, were the last sounds Dyrill Sim heard before falling back unconscious upon his raft of shattered timbers …
Hero awoke with a start and grabbed at the massive fist which bunched around his nightshirt and roughly shook him. Eldin, already dressed, grinned down at him and said: “Wake up, lad, for a new day’s a-dawning. Limnar Dass is downstairs waiting for us, and I can smell breakfast hot in a pan.”
“Dass? Here?” Hero mumbled. “What the hell for? Has he fallen in love with you or something? Is that what’s made you so happy?”
“We’re rich, aren’t we?” Eldin replied. “We should be rich and miserable? Is that what you want? Anyway, Dass has been chosen as captain of the vessel Kuranes promised us. He’s really pleased about it. Him and his entire crew, at our disposal. Aye, and the good ship Skymaster too.”
All omens and miseries and memories of bad dreams fell quickly away from Hero as he dressed. Then the two descended from their garret room into the tavern proper and breakfasted with Dass. While they ate the captain told them that Skymaster and her crew were waiting, all provisioned and ready to set sail, and in less than half an hour they were riding the Tilt down to the sea wall and Serannian’s harbor.
As they parked their bicycles and made for
Skymaster’s gangplank, a sudden commotion in the crowding sailors and sightseers who thronged the wharf side some distance away attracted their attention. Something striding, metallic, purposeful, was coming toward them. Eldin took one look at Hero’s suddenly frightened face and yelled:
“All aboard who’s going aboard! C‘mon, Dass, let’s move it. Make way, there! Make way for the cap’n.’ And he dragged both Dass and the strangely dazed Hero through the crowd and up the gangplank. Once aboard, without pause, while Dass looked on in utter astonishment, Hero shook off his peculiar paralysis and he and Eldin directed that the gangplank be raised at once and the ship steered away from the quay.
Finally, in a tone which bordered on the hysterical, the captain demanded: “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’ve got us all aboard, fair enough, but I’m the captain of this ship. We sail when I say we sail!”
“And are we ready to sail?” asked Hero breathlessly, his anxious eyes staring at the wharf where the colorful crowds melted to let through a metal, vaguely anthropomorphic being.
“Yes,” answered Dass, “we’re ready.”
“And do you really want to go a-questing with us for the sake of the King and for Serennian?”
“You know I do.”
Before Hero could say another word, Eldin roared: “Then get this bloody hulk away from the quayside!”
Now Dass spotted the Curator making straight for Skymaster as she pulled slowly clear of the quay, and the look of blank amazement on his face slowly turned to one of boiling anger. “Why, you—” he began.
“Later,” said Hero, his face regaining a little of its color as the gap widened between quayside and ship. “For now—please tell your crew to make haste!”
Dass swallowed hard, then shouted out a few tense commands. The ship’s scarlet sails billowed and she rode out onto the ocean of air. Now the Curator stood on the quayside, his arms extended to their full—which fell short of Skymaster’s dangling ropes by a good yard. Dass looked down at him briefly, then turned to Hero. “Give it to me,” he commanded. “Give it to me now, or damn you—I’ll take her in again!”
