Seg said: “What?”
He stood beside me, a sword in his hand. Delia said: “Do not make a sound, Thelda,” and I heard the squashy sound of a palm over fat red lips.
Again the noise reached us and then the whole back end of the cave fell outward. We had searched the place carefully before taking up our occupation; we had not expected this. Pink light from the moons of Kregen washed in with a reflective uncanny glow.
In that wash of pink radiance I could see the squat ovoid outline of something moving. I saw two squat legs bending to bring the bulk of the body into the cave, and I saw the array of tendril-like arms bunching from arched shoulders. The thing’s head was hunched down and in the darkened silhouette was invisible to me. The thought occurred as such thoughts will that perhaps the thing had no head at all. It kept emitting a wheezing hiss, rather more like a faulty deck pump than a snake but nerve-chilling for all that.
Seg shouted. “Hai!” and charged, his sword high.
He brought the sword down in a brutal butchering blow and a tendril uncurled and caught his forearm and snapped straight. The long sword poised immobile over the thing’s bunched tendrils. Two more grasped Seg about the waist, lifted him, began to draw him forward into the pink-tinged shadows. I did not yell but ran forward fleetly, my head bent to avoid the overhang, and sliced the two gripping tentacles away.
They fell to the floor and writhed away into cracks in the rocks like snakes. The thing shrieked — whether of rage or pain I did not know — and Seg managed to get his sword-arm free.
“The point, Seg!”
As I yelled I ran in again and buried my own weapon up to the hilt into the thing’s body. Everything had happened fast. I know now that these things are inimical to most living beings and the thing had been clearly bent on surprising us by its trick back-end to the cave. Quasi-intelligent, the morfangs, quick and treacherous and incredibly strong. As the beast lay on the ground we could all see in that streaming light from Kregen’s moons the gaped mouth with its serrated rows of fangs, the tiny malicious eyes, the thin black lips, the slit nostrils where a nose should be. It hissed as it expired. We found out about these morfangs later on; what we did not know then was — they habitually hunted in groups. From the dimmer radiance at the mouth of the cave where the overhang cast shade, figures moved with unhurried purpose. I leaped for the opening. A quick glance showed me six of the tendriled beasts. Thelda was heaving and moaning and Delia was holding her down. I had no time for Thelda now. My Delia was in mortal peril.
“Seg! Gather what we need. Grab the girls! Hurry!”
I checked the back exit to the cave where the surprise had come from. Quasi-intelligent, these things, but clever. We were supposed to run screaming from its sudden surprise appearance — run straight into the tendrils of its fellows waiting outside. The back, which opened into a small shaft filled with moons-light, was clear.
“Seg!” I said again, harsh and dominating. “Take the girls out the back way — hurry-”
He tried to argue and I beat him down with a snarl and a look.
Thelda was clutching herself and rocking and moaning. Seg hoisted her up beneath the armpits and half carried her. Delia took our gear and as she went out she cast a look back and stopped, ready to throw down the sleeping bags and the food and the medicines and jump to my assistance, a long jeweled dagger in her hand.
“For my sake, Delia! Go — Hide and then create a little noise — not much, enough to draw them off -
you understand?”
“Yes, Dray — oh, my-”
I didn’t give her time to finish but waved her off with a most ugly look. Then I turned to face the front opening of the cave.
Chapter Ten
Great beasts of the air
The noise from the cave had not been what these tendriled monsters expected. In a body they headed for the entrance to the cave.
Pink moonlight lay thickly on the leaves, on the spilled earth, limned the branches of the trees, weaved and twisted with purple shadows in the coiling and uncoiling tendrils. I stood at the entrance. I could feel my feet thrusting at the earth, the dirt of Kregen four hundred light-years from the planet of my birth. I could feel my heart thumping with a regular anticipatory pulse, kept unpanicked by the disciplines so carefully and painfully learned from the Krozairs of Zy. I could feel the heft of the long sword in my fist, and the balance of it, and the beginning movements that would turn that bar of cold steel into a palely glimmering instrument of pallid destruction until the clean steel glitter fouled and slicked with blood.
As I stood there I must have presented a wild and terrible picture, with the defiance that would not be beaten down because the girl I loved was in peril, with my ugly face ricked into an expression I am sure would have prevented me from shaving had I seen it in a mirror, with my muscles limber and lithe and ready instantly to bunch and exert all the monstrous power of which — sometimes to my shame — they were capable.
These morfangs were quasi-intelligent, as I learned later; that they clearly were not fully-intelligent is obvious. Had they sense enough they would have run from me, shrieking. But not unintelligent — as soon as they saw me they halted in their advance and their hissing increased. One bent, picked up a stone, and threw it. I struck it away with my sword as one makes an on-drive to mid-on. The ringing clang acted as a gong-like signal. The half dozen of them, hissing and screeching, leaped toward me and the lashing forest of tendrils writhed above my head seeking to trap me and draw me into the fanged crevices of their jaws.
And now I struck and struck again and the keen edge bit and sliced and any pity or sorrow I might have had for these voracious beasts burned away in the fire of action. Only the sword could have saved me. Their intent was quick and deadly and obvious. Those tendrils clustered in seeking, groping, twining bunches, with immense coiled power striving to drag me into the crag-like sharpnesses of their mouths. Unarmed, I know I would not have lasted five minutes.
As it was I was forced to hack and skip and jump and strike again as though I were some phantom woodsman fated to hack his way through an animate mobile forest. All the time they kept up their jangling-nerved hissing screeching; and, too, I became convinced that shrilling was of anger and fury and not of pain. For the severed tendrils looped up with muscular strength and writhed like the furious contents of an overturned snake basket. And, too — instead of writhing off into the woods as the severed tendrils had wriggled into crevices in the cave, these serpent-like tendrils writhed toward me. They crept over the ground and began to drag themselves up my legs. I could feel their clammy coils lapping about me, constricting my muscles, and as I stepped back and chopped them free so each new severed portion began instantly to coil sinuously toward me over the leaves and the dirt. Only one way waited for me if I wished to escape.
With full force I brought the long sword down onto the head of the nearest creature. That head split and gushed ichor and brain and the sword sliced on past the coat-hanger-like shoulders with their five-a-side ranks of lashing tentacles, drove cleaving on down into the ovoid body. The thing fell backward and I had to exert tremendous strength to jerk the sword free.
In that instant of hesitation tendrils lapped my neck.
Instantly my left hand whipped the main-gauche across and the razor-edged steel — razor-edged because when I shaved I found this weapon a useful implement on my stubble — sliced down the bunched coils. It left a thin scarlet line on my own neck, too.
This could not go on.
Now two of the beasts were down and then a third staggered away on one leg. I breathed in with long deep breaths, timing them to the swing of the sword. The main-gauche went into the eye of an attacker on my left — too deeply, for I was again hung up on the withdrawal and only barely managed to fend the sword blade above my head, shearing tendrils. More tentacles looped me from behind and I felt myself toppling backward off balance.
“Hai!” I yelled — a complete waste of breath and yet a psyc
hological reminder. I twisted as I fell and thrust the sword up so that the beast in falling into me fell instead on the sword with its pommel thrust hard into the ground.
Dragging myself clear I shook my head. Two left, if the others were truly hors de combat, and a host of writhing wriggling tentacle-remnants like a pit of snakes from hell; long odds they were, yet. Then I heard a shout — Seg’s voice: “Hai!”
The remaining beasts hesitated. Quasi-intelligent they were, knowing when to stop fighting as well as when to go on with unintelligent viciousness to death. Had they been armed. . I shouted.
“Hai! Jikai!”
I leaped forward.
The sword blurred. Left, right, left, right. I struck now with the impassioned zeal of a man who knows he must finish it fast.
The two morfangs dropped and I dragged the smeared sword back. Now, with the death of the last two, all the free snake-like tendrils wriggled away into the moon-drenched forest. I guessed then, and was later proved right, that they would grow each into a new morfang beast-monster. Moments later I had rejoined my comrades, guided by their voices, able to reassure them. We began a night march at once to clear the confines of this accursed forest.
There had been only six. They had given me more trouble than twice their number of armed men. One of the reasons lay in those coat-hanger shoulders, each with five whipping tendrils. Even allowing a man two arms, which on Kregen is usual although by no means universal, the count was as though I had fought thirty men. I touched the hilt of the sword. I had lived then, by the sword. The balance of the thought lay leaden and ugly in my mind, and I did not speak as we marched through the pink-shot moonlight of the Kregen night.
After that we redoubled our vigilance and only through extraordinary good fortune were we able to avoid similar encounters. The tendril monsters roamed over a goodly-sized portion of the land here and we found ourselves traveling in constant apprehension. A considerable extent of badlands worked its way in from the south as we trended east, forcing us to carry on in a slanting angle to the east-northeast. Delia shook her head and remarked that she did not recall flying over this kind of country at all when she’d come in from Port Tavetus. Although the feeling was marginal, I had, with that sea officer’s sense of navigational direction, felt we had veered to the north during our passage through The Stratemsk and the attack by the impiters had further driven us off course.
But I did not express my concern, thankful that we were still alive and still fit to travel. Thelda was hardening, and Delia positively glowed with the fresh air and exercise. The climactic shadow of The Stratemsk lay to our rear now, the forests indicated that, and the badlands must be an effect of absence of soil or presence of minerals and poor soil and the millennia-long erosion. The mountains had been traversed and although we did not know their names we were conscious of their puniness in contrast to The Stratemsk; all the same, they were arduous on foot, and we near froze a couple of times. On the eastern side the whole country changed in character. Now we were hard-pressed to avoid cultivated areas, to bypass towns and villages, to keep off the highroads that intersected at towns and posting stations and gave us clear indication that this land was populated.
We would scout with the minutest attention to every detail of the land that lay ahead. From whatever eminence we could climb we would plot our passage. Some of the towns we saw and avoided were nearer cities than towns. Many times we lay in hedgerows while cavalcades of armed men and trundling wagons rolled along paved roads. The roads were, indeed, objects of wonder. I was reminded of the old Inca or Roman roads, and I suspected that they were still in such good condition only through the skill of their builders, for the present inhabitants of this land looked hard and brutal and contemptuous of labor, lusting after silver and gold and the good things of life.
“They remind me of my own people in their hardness,” said Seg. “These cities and towns must be constantly warring one with another.”
“I agree,” said Delia. “The roads link them, but between each city and its surrounding cultivation lies barrenness.”
More than once we saw high-flying birds or winged beasts, and concealed ourselves, for we knew what to expect.
Now we began more fully to understand why all the continent lying between The Stratemsk and the eastern coast of Turismond had been dubbed the Hostile Territories. The true hostility came from men and not from nature or the animals of the wild.
I continued to feel concern over the northerly drift of our course; but in the nature of things with an infuriating obstinacy events conspired to force us more northerly still. I knew that Turismond extended in a bold out-thrust promontory into the Cyphren Sea and if we were traveling eastward we could march as much as five hundred unnecessary miles to the east with the sea away down to our south. But I was not prepared to risk an encounter with the inhabitants of these pinnacled cities, these battlemented fortresses, for I sensed from what we saw of them that they differed in kind from those peoples I had already met on Kregen.
More than once we bypassed cities inhabited by beast-men, half-men of races with which none of us was familiar, although given the strangeness of human nature I felt a comical sense of relief when the semi-humans of these cities turned out to be Ochs or Rapas, much though I distrusted the former and detested the latter — emotions which, I hasten to add, were germane to my continued existence at the time, whatever subsequent changes a long life and a great experience have brought. None of us had the slightest hesitation in giving the widest of wide berths to the sprawling city filled with Chuliks upon which we almost stumbled as we came down out of a hill-cleft into a wide valley. We crawled back up into the hills again and when I tried to lay off a course southerly we were halted by a river on the banks of which a string of guard-towers had been built. Perforce we struck northward once more.
The whole land was cut up into city-states. Antiquaries say there were ninety city-states of the ancient Minoan civilization in Crete. They must have been very small. Here the city-states sprawled over vast areas of land, or huddled around a natural fortress-holding on a hill within a valley. The state of savagery of the intervening areas can best be judged if I tell you that Seg and I had often to cope with sudden attacks from leem, those eight-legged demons, furred, feline, and vicious, whose fangs in their wedge-shaped heads can strike through lenk. And, too, we met graints, those wonderfully vital and obstinate animals I had met and battled outside Aphrasoe with the magical swords of the Savanti that did not kill but merely stunned. These, and other wild animals, were not in the usual way to be found anywhere close to settled human or half-human habitations.
‘According to my calculations,” Delia said to me as we rested in a fold of gentle, grass-clad hills, eating the rich flesh of a deer-like animal Seg had brought down and the girls had cooked, “I figure we have something like two hundred dwaburs between The Stratemsk and Port Tavetus.”
“Yes.”
“We must have covered that by now — we’ve been walking for ages-”
“Yes, Delia. But we are north of our course-”
“Oh, yes, I know you have been concerned. .” She pondered. Then, briskly, she said, with that defiant tilt to her chin: “All right, then. The airboat carried us a good way, and we have marched a long way. We do not seem to be able to head south — so we must go on. I think we will find the next Vallian port city up the coast will be Ventrusa Thole. There are port cities of Pandahem, but I think we would be wise to avoid them.”
Pandahem, I knew, was a great rival of Vallia’s in the carrying trade and in business of the outer oceans. But there was a quiet animosity in Delia’s tones that startled me.
“Do you hate them so much, then, my Delia?”
“Hate? No, not really. We both seek to enrich ourselves on the leavings of the empire of Loh. We both maintain settlements on the eastern coast of Turismond. We both try to extend our business contacts to the west-”
“And a fat lot of good that does!” broke in Thelda. She
pushed up on an elbow. Thelda had lost weight on our journey and her figure had trimmed off into statuesque beauty that poor Seg found mightily disturbing. “By Vox!” she said, with some force. “I heartily wish all the devils from Pandahem a watery grave!”
“Quite still!” said Seg. His voice cracked. The green radiance of Genodras lay on his face and turned that lean tanned visage into a ghoul-skull newly-risen from the grave with the grave-mold crumbling upon it.
We all remained absolutely still.
Now I could hear the beat of many wings. From the sky that susurration floated down, ominous, breath-catching.
Shadows flitted across the grassy hills, twinned-shadows from the twin suns, at first in ones and twos, and then in clumpings until the whole sky darkened. We did not look up. Delia still looked at me and I at her, and her face remained calm, her eyes bright and mocking on my face, and I yearned to take her in my arms. But we lay there rigid and unmoving. And now I could hear a strange clinking from the sky, mixed with the massive gusting as enormous wings beat at the air.
The noise dwindled and the fleeting shadows drifted away again into twos and threes. Seg touched me on the arm, for he had been able to watch everything.
“Gone.”
We looked and saw the host of flying beasts like a low cloud vanishing beyond the farther hills. Seg’s face remained grave and serious, despite Thelda’s babblings of relief.
“What is it, Seg?” asked Delia.
“I have heard the tales — all men of Loh have heard the tales of our great empire that Walfarg forged on Turismond. The legends that creak with age and are hung with cobwebs. But-” He wiped a hand over his forehead and I saw the sweat slick there. “But I never thought to see them come to life!”
“What do you mean?”
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