CHAPTER XXIII
Dragon Worm and Moss Death
For a small eternity--to me at least--we waited. Then as silent asever the green dwarf returned. "It is well," he said, some of thestrain gone from his voice. "Grip hands again, and follow."
"Wait a bit, Rador," this was Larry. "Does Lugur know this sideentrance? If he does, why not let Olaf and me go back to the openingand pick them off as they come in? We could hold the lot--and in themeantime you and Goodwin could go after Lakla for help."
"Lugur knows the secret of the Portal--if he dare use it," answeredthe captain, with a curious indirection. "And now that they havechallenged the Silent Ones I think he _will_ dare. Also, he will findour tracks--and it may be that he knows this hidden way."
"Well, for God's sake!" O'Keefe's appalled bewilderment was almostludicrous. "If _he_ knows all that, and _you_ knew all that, whydidn't you let me click him when I had the chance?"
"_Larree_," the green dwarf was oddly humble. "It seemed good to me,too--at first. And then I heard a command, heard it clearly, to stopyou--that Lugur die not now, lest a greater vengeance fail!"
"Command? From whom?" The Irishman's voice distilled out of theblackness the very essence of bewilderment.
"I thought," Rador was whispering--"I thought it came from the SilentOnes!"
"Superstition!" groaned O'Keefe in utter exasperation. "Alwayssuperstition! What can you do against it!
"Never mind, Rador." His sense of humour came to his aid. "It's toolate now, anyway. Where do we go from here, old dear?" he laughed.
"We tread the path of one I am not fain to meet," answered Rador."But if meet we must, point the death tubes at the pale shield hebears upon his throat and send the flame into the flower of cold firethat is its centre--nor look into his eyes!"
Again Larry gasped, and I with him.
"It's getting too deep for me, Doc," he muttered dejectedly. "Can youmake head or tail of it?"
"No," I answered, shortly enough, "but Rador fears something andthat's his description of it."
"Sure," he replied, "only it's a code I don't understand." I couldfeel his grin. "All right for the flower of cold fire, Rador, and Iwon't look into his eyes," he went on cheerfully. "But hadn't webetter be moving?"
"Come!" said the soldier; again hand in hand we went blindly on.
O'Keefe was muttering to himself.
"Flower of cold fire! Don't look into his eyes! Some joint!Damned superstition." Then he chuckled and carolled, softly:
"Oh, mama, pin a cold rose on me; Two young frog-men are in love with me; Shut my eyes so I can't see."
"Sh!" Rador was warning; he began whispering. "For half a _va_ we goalong a way of death. From its peril we pass into another againstwhose dangers I can guard you. But in part this is in view of theroadway and it may be that Lugur will see us. If so, we must fight asbest we can. If we pass these two roads safely, then is the way to theCrimson Sea clear, nor need we fear Lugur nor any. And there isanother thing--that Lugur does not know--when he opens the Portal theSilent Ones will hear and Lakla and the _Akka_ will be swift to greetits opener."
"Rador," I asked, "how know _you_ all this?"
"The handmaiden is my own sister's child," he answered quietly.
O'Keefe drew a long breath.
"Uncle," he remarked casually in English, "meet the man who's going tobe your nephew!"
And thereafter he never addressed the green dwarf except by theavuncular title, which Rador, humorously enough, apparently conceivedto be one of respectful endearment.
For me a light broke. Plain now was the reason for his foreknowledgeof Lakla's appearance at the feast where Larry had so narrowly escapedYolara's spells; plain the determining factor that had cast his lotwith ours, and my confidence, despite his discourse of mysteriousperils, experienced a remarkable quickening.
Speculation as to the marked differences in pigmentation andappearance of niece and uncle was dissipated by my consciousness thatwe were now moving in a dim half-light. We were in a fairly widetunnel. Not far ahead the gleam filtered, pale yellow like sunlightsifting through the leaves of autumn poplars. And as we drove closerto its source I saw that it did indeed pass through a leafy screenhanging over the passage end. This Rador drew aside cautiously,beckoned us and we stepped through.
It appeared to be a tunnel cut through soft green mould. Its base wasa flat strip of pathway a yard wide from which the walls curved out inperfect cylindrical form, smoothed and evened with utmost nicety.Thirty feet wide they were at their widest, then drew toward eachother with no break in their symmetry; they did not close. Above was,roughly, a ten-foot rift, ragged edged, through which poured lightlike that in the heart of pale amber, a buttercup light shot throughwith curiously evanescent bronze shadows.
"Quick!" commanded Rador, uneasily, and set off at a sharp pace.
Now, my eyes accustomed to the strange light, I saw that the tunnel'swalls were of moss. In them I could trace fringe leaf and curly leaf,pressings of enormous bladder caps (Physcomitrium), immense splashesof what seemed to be the scarlet-crested Cladonia, traceries of hugemoss veils, crushings of teeth (peristome) gigantic; spore cases brownand white, saffron and ivory, hot vermilions and cerulean blues,pressed into an astounding mosaic by some titanic force.
"Hurry!" It was Rador calling. I had lagged behind.
He quickened the pace to a half-run; we were climbing; panting. Theamber light grew stronger; the rift above us wider. The tunnel curved;on the left a narrow cleft appeared. The green dwarf leaped toward it,thrust us within, pushed us ahead of him up a steep rockyfissure--well-nigh, indeed, a chimney. Up and up this we scrambleduntil my lungs were bursting and I thought I could climb no more. Thecrevice ended; we crawled out and sank, even Rador, upon a littleleaf-carpeted clearing circled by lacy tree ferns.
Gasping, legs aching, we lay prone, relaxed, drawing back strength andbreath. Rador was first to rise. Thrice he bent low as in homage,then--
"Give thanks to the Silent Ones--for their power has been over us!" heexclaimed.
Dimly I wondered what he meant. Something about the fern leaf atwhich I had been staring aroused me. I leaped to my feet and ran toits base. This was no fern, no! It was fern _moss_! The largest of itsspecies I had ever found in tropic jungles had not been more than twoinches high, and this was--twenty feet! The scientific fire I hadexperienced in the tunnel returned uncontrollable. I parted thefronds, gazed out--
My outlook commanded a vista of miles--and that vista! A _FataMorgana_ of plantdom! A land of flowered sorcery!
Forests of tree-high mosses spangled over with blooms of everyconceivable shape and colour; cataracts and clusters, avalanches andnets of blossoms in pastels, in dulled metallics, in gorgeousflamboyant hues; some of them phosphorescent and shining like livingjewels; some sparkling as though with dust of opals, of sapphires, ofrubies and topazes and emeralds; thickets of convolvuli like thetrumpets of the seven archangels of Mara, king of illusion, which areshaped from the bows of splendours arching his highest heaven!
And moss veils like banners of a marching host of Titans; pennons andbannerets of the sunset; gonfalons of the Jinn; webs of faery;oriflammes of elfland!
Springing up through that polychromatic flood myriads ofpedicles--slender and straight as spears, or soaring in spirals, orcurving with undulations gracile as the white serpents of Tanit inancient Carthaginian groves--and all surmounted by a fantasy of sporecases in shapes of minaret and turret, domes and spires and cones,caps of Phrygia and bishops' mitres, shapes grotesque andunnameable--shapes delicate and lovely!
They hung high poised, nodding and swaying--like goblins hovering over_Titania's_ court; cacophony of Cathay accenting the _Flower Maiden_music of "Parsifal"; _bizarrerie_ of the angled, fantastic beings thatpeople the Javan pantheon watching a bacchanal of houris in Mohammed'sparadise!
Down upon it all poured the amber light; dimmed in the distances byhuge, drifting darkenings lurid as the flying mantles
of thehurricane.
And through the light, like showers of jewels, myriads of birds,darting, dipping, soaring, and still other myriads of gigantic,shimmering butterflies.
A sound came to us, reaching out like the first faint susurrus of theincoming tide; sighing, sighing, growing stronger--now its mournfulwhispering quivered all about us, shook us--then passing like aPresence, died away in far distances.
"The Portal!" said Rador. "Lugur has entered!"
He, too, parted the fronds and peered back along our path. Peeringwith him we saw the barrier through which we had come stretchingverdure-covered walls for miles three or more away. Like a mole burrowin a garden stretched the trail of the tunnel; here and there we couldlook down within the rift at its top; far off in it I thought I sawthe glint of spears.
"They come!" whispered Rador. "Quick! We must not meet them here!"
And then--
"Holy St. Brigid!" gasped Larry.
From the rift in the tunnel's continuation, nigh a mile beyond thecleft through which we had fled, lifted a crown of horns--oftentacles--erect, alert, of mottled gold and crimson; liftedhigher--and from a monstrous scarlet head beneath them blazed twoenormous, obloid eyes, their depths wells of purplish phosphorescence;higher still--noseless, earless, chinless; a livid, worm mouth fromwhich a slender scarlet tongue leaped like playing flames! Slowly itrose--its mighty neck cuirassed with gold and scarlet scales fromwhose polished surfaces the amber light glinted like flakes of fire;and under this neck shimmered something like a palely luminous silveryshield, guarding it. The head of horror mounted--and in the shield'scentre, full ten feet across, glowing, flickering, shiningout--coldly, was a rose of white flame, a "flower of cold fire" evenas Rador had said.
Now swiftly the Thing upreared, standing like a scaled tower a hundredfeet above the rift, its eyes scanning that movement I had seen alongthe course of its lair. There was a hissing; the crown of horns fell,whipped and writhed like the tentacles of an octopus; the toweringlength dropped back.
"Quick!" gasped Rador and through the fern moss, along the path anddown the other side of the steep we raced.
Behind us for an instant there was a rushing as of a torrent; afar-away, faint, agonized screaming--silence!
"No fear _now_ from those who followed," whispered the green dwarf,pausing.
"Sainted St. Patrick!" O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic."An' he expected me to kill _that_ with this. Well, as Fergus O'Connorsaid when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potatoknife: 'Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye showin me!'
"What was it, Doc?" he asked.
"The dragon worm!" Rador said.
"It was Helvede Orm--the hell worm!" groaned Olaf.
"There you go again--" blazed Larry; but the green dwarf was hurryingdown the path and swiftly we followed, Larry muttering, Olaf mumbling,behind me.
The green dwarf was signalling us for caution. He pointed through abreak in a grove of fifty-foot cedar mosses--we were skirting theglassy road! Scanning it we found no trace of Lugur and wonderedwhether he too had seen the worm and had fled. Quickly we passed on;drew away from the _coria_ path. The mosses began to thin; less andless they grew, giving way to low clumps that barely offered usshelter. Unexpectedly another screen of fern moss stretched before us.Slowly Rador made his way through it and stood hesitating.
The scene in front of us was oddly weird and depressing; in someindefinable way--dreadful. Why, I could not tell, but the impressionwas plain; I shrank from it. Then, self-analyzing, I wondered whetherit could be the uncanny resemblance the heaps of curious mossy fungiscattered about had to beast and bird--yes, and to man--that was thecause of it. Our path ran between a few of them. To the left they werethick. They were viridescent, almost metallic hued--verd-antique.Curiously indeed were they like distorted images of dog and deerlikeforms, of birds--of _dwarfs_ and here and there the simulacra of thegiant frogs! Spore cases, yellowish green, as large as mitres and muchresembling them in shape protruded from the heaps. My repulsion grewinto a distinct nausea.
Rador turned to us a face whiter far than that with which he hadlooked upon the dragon worm.
"Now for your lives," he whispered, "tread softly here as I do--andspeak not at all!"
He stepped forward on tiptoe, slowly with utmost caution. We creptafter him; passed the heaps beside the path--and as I passed my skincrept and I shrank and saw the others shrink too with that unnameableloathing; nor did the green dwarf pause until he had reached the browof a small hillock a hundred yards beyond. And he was trembling.
"Now what are we up against?" grumbled O'Keefe.
The green dwarf stretched a hand; stiffened; gazed over to the left ofus beyond a lower hillock upon whose broad crest lay a file of themoss shapes. They fringed it, their mitres having a grotesqueappearance of watching what lay below. The glistening road laythere--and from it came a shout. A dozen of the _coria_ clustered,filled with Lugur's men and in one of them Lugur himself, laughingwickedly!
There was a rush of soldiers and up the low hillock raced a score ofthem toward us.
"Run!" shouted Rador.
"Not much!" grunted Larry--and took swift aim at Lugur. The automaticspat: Olaf's echoed. Both bullets went wild, for Lugur, stilllaughing, threw himself into the protection of the body of his shell.But following the shots, from the file of moss heaps on the crest,came a series of muffled explosions. Under the pistol's concussionsthe mitred caps had burst and instantly all about the running soldiersgrew a cloud of tiny, glistening white spores--like a little cloud ofpuff-ball dust many times magnified. Through this cloud I glimpsedtheir faces, stricken with agony.
Some turned to fly, but before they could take a second step stoodrigid.
The spore cloud drifted and eddied about them; rained down on theirheads and half bare breasts, covered their garments--and swiftly theybegan to change! Their features grew indistinct--merged! Theglistening white spores that covered them turned to a pale yellow,grew greenish, spread and swelled, darkened. The eyes of one of thesoldiers glinted for a moment--and then were covered by the swiftgrowth!
Where but a few moments before had been men were only grotesque heaps,swiftly melting, swiftly rounding into the semblance of the moundsthat lay behind us--and already beginning to take on their gleam ofancient viridescence!
The Irishman was gripping my arm fiercely; the pain brought me back tomy senses.
"Olaf's right," he gasped. "This _is_ hell! I'm sick." And he was,frankly and without restraint. Lugur and his others awakened fromtheir nightmare; piled into the _coria_, wheeled, raced away.
"On!" said Rador thickly. "Two perils have we passed--the Silent Oneswatch over us!"
Soon we were again among the familiar and so unfamiliar moss giants.I knew what I had seen and this time Larry could not callme--superstitious. In the jungles of Borneo I had examined that otherswiftly developing fungus which wreaks the vengeance of some of thehill tribes upon those who steal their women; gripping with itsmicroscopic hooks into the flesh; sending quick, tiny rootlets throughthe skin down into the capillaries, sucking life and thriving andnever to be torn away until the living thing it clings to has beensapped dry. Here was but another of the species in which thedevelopment's rate was incredibly accelerated. Some of this I tried toexplain to O'Keefe as we sped along, reassuring him.
"But they turned to moss before our eyes!" he said.
Again I explained, patiently. But he seemed to derive no comfort atall from my assurances that the phenomena were entirely natural and,aside from their more terrifying aspect, of peculiar interest to thebotanist.
"I know," was all he would say. "But suppose one of those things hadburst while we were going through--God!"
I was wondering how I could with comparative safety study the funguswhen Rador stopped; in front of us was again the road ribbon.
"Now is all danger passed," he said. "The way lies open and Lugur hasfled--"
There was a flash from
the road. It passed me like a little lariat oflight. It struck Larry squarely between the eyes, spread over his faceand drew itself within!
"Down!" cried Rador, and hurled me to the ground. My head strucksharply; I felt myself grow faint; Olaf fell beside me; I saw thegreen dwarf draw down the O'Keefe; he collapsed limply, face still,eyes staring. A shout--and from the roadway poured a host of Lugur'smen; I could hear Lugur bellowing.
There came a rush of little feet; soft, fragrant draperies brushed myface; dimly I watched Lakla bend over the Irishman.
She straightened--her arms swept out and the writhing vine, with itstendrilled heads of ruby bloom, five flames of misty incandescence,leaped into the faces of the soldiers now close upon us. It darted attheir throats, striking, coiling, and striking again; coiling anduncoiling with incredible rapidity and flying from leverage points ofthroats, of faces, of breasts like a spring endowed withconsciousness, volition and hatred--and those it struck stood rigid asstone with faces masks of inhuman fear and anguish; and those stillunstricken fled.
Another rush of feet--and down upon Lugur's forces poured thefrog-men, their booming giant leading, thrusting with their lances,tearing and rending with talons and fangs and spurs.
Against that onslaught the dwarfs could not stand. They raced for theshells; I heard Lugur shouting, menacingly--and then Lakla's voice,pealing like a golden bugle of wrath.
"Go, Lugur!" she cried. "Go--that you and Yolara and your Shining Onemay die together! Death for you, Lugur--death for you all! RememberLugur--death!"
There was a great noise within my head--no matter, Lakla washere--Lakla here--but too late--Lugur had outplayed us; moss death nordragon worm had frightened him away--he had crept back to trapus--Lakla had come too late--Larry was dead--Larry! But I had heard nobanshee wailing--and Larry had said he could not die without thatwarning--no, Larry was not dead. So ran the turbulent current of mymind.
A horny arm lifted me; two enormous, oddly gentle saucer eyes werestaring into mine; my head rolled; I caught a glimpse of the GoldenGirl kneeling beside the O'Keefe.
The noise in my head grew thunderous--was carrying me away on itsthunder--swept me into soft, blind darkness.
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