There was a sudden, violent crack from above. A deep voice moaned in terrifying, sepulchral tones ...
"LET IT BE KNOWN THAT THE DARK ONE POTECTS HIS OWN!" Rapidly, it added it Terranglo, "COVER
YOUR EYES!
Immediately all the trannish eyes in the room shot upward, while the trio of imprisoned humans bent their beads and squeezed theirs shut tight.
Explosion. Bodies flying. Those left standing made a concerted, panicked dash for the exit, tramping some of the wounded in an unbrotherly haste to escape. Above, the weird voice boomed.
"I AM THF POWER AND THE GLORY OF DARKNESS AND ALL, WHO STAND AGAINST ME SHALL BE SLAIN!"
There was another explosion and more of the Brotherhood fell. A lesser crash sounded from above. It was followed by brilliantine tinkling as the skylight was shattered. A cable ladder snaked into the room. Before the bottom had unrolled, Skua September was already halfway down its swaying length. Ethan, Hunnar, and several soldiers followed.
The big man went immediately to the single doorway. He needed Hunnar's help to clear away the bodies.
"Thank Deity for small favors!" he breathed. "It bolts from the inside!" Hunnar threw the latch.
"Tis not strong, Sir Skua. It will not stand against a determined rush."
Ethan and the soldiers all had torches strapped to their waists. They were intended to provide light if the Brothers blew out lamps. Now they were put to a different use. A quick thrust into a hanging lantern and they were lit. Then they began the slow, dangerous job of trying to melt the trapped prisoners free.
Ethan was working on one side of the copper basin that held Colette.
"Hurry, please!" she pleaded. "I ... I can't feel my legs anymore."
"How much time?" September asked Hunnar.
"One cannot say." The knight stared at the bolted door. "'These are not soldiers and do not react as such. Yet it will soon occur to the last of the escapees that we are far from supernatural in shape or form, and some might have recognized us."
It took four of them to lift each metal coffin. Two tilted the heavy container upward. One at a time, the three prisoners slid free, each still encased in a block of ice. Now the melting could proceed at a decent pace.
"Tis a difficult decision for them," Hunnar continued. "If we are truly servitors of the Dark One, as our ability to throw thunder and lightning might suggest, then I would not expect them to attack again at all. But they might consider us to be only mortal servants of the Dark One, deluded mortals, in which case -"
"Shove the Dark One! How much time've we got?"
There was a. thump as someone tried the door, then a rattling of the latch. This was quickly followed by a series of heavy bumps, then silence.
"Well, that answers that," the big man growled. He turned back to the center of the room.
The melting was nearing completion and Williams, Colette, and the motionless senior du Kane were almost free.
"You know," said Ethan conversationally as he melted away the last of the clinging ice from her ankles, "you'd look absolutely awesome in a martini."
"I could use one about that size right now," she replied tightly. "Thank the Devices for these suits!" He started to rub her legs and she didn't protest.
"I'm okay," she said finally. "Help the teacher." Ethan looked over at the senior du Kane, who lay still and quiet on the stone floor.
"Your father ... is he ... ?"
"Watch." She bent over him and Ethan heard her whisper in his car. "Free credit ..."
A hand twitched, then a leg. Stillness, and then the old man sat up, blinking, and looked up at his daughter. She put a big arm under his left and helped him to his feet.
"Well my dear, are we safe or are we dead?"
"It's still a moot point, father, but we incline to the former."
He sighed. "Ah well. Pity." Click. "I was so wondering what kind of flowers they have in the next world."
"Only flower-souls, I've told you that, father. Come on now, move around a little. That's it." At Ethan's slack-jawed stare she replied, "Automatic protective trance. He goes into it. whenever his system is overloaded. This isn't the first time it's saved his life."
There was a loud crash and the door shook violently.
"We've overstayed our welcome," suggested Ethan.
September stood facing the door, watching it silently. He held a small, tightly bound package of vol leather in one hand. It had a short, stubby fuse projecting from it and he nonchalantly tossed it from one pair, to the other, back and forth, back and forth.
"Let's step lively there, folks, what?"
There was another crash and the door bulged inward alarmingly. Williams was being. helped through. the shattered skylight. Hellespont du Kane was halfway up the ladder and Ethan waited with Colette at the bottom.
"Let's go," he said finally.
She looked uncertainly at the swaying ladder. "I ... I don't know. I'm not built for this kind of exercise."
"Would. you rather be in that martini? Come on, go. I'll help you." She started up. He put a hand under her enormous rear- it felt like a cake of sherbet- and tried to give her weight a boost upwards. Then he mounted the ladder close behind. If she fell he didn't know what he could do. While she climbed and grunted, he climbed and prayed. Hunnar was right behind him.
September walked to the bottom of the ladder. The crackle of splintering wood filled the room and the door exploded inward. A mob of howling, robed scholars piled into the entrance. They pulled up short at the sight of September standing calmly under the ladder.
A few carried knives this time, probably appropriated from the monastery kitchens. The Brothers were fast losing their intellectual detachment. September reached out and touched the fuse to a nearby lamp. He looked at it for a moment, then gently tossed it.
It landed at the feet of the unmoving Brothers. September coutinued to watch it with interest. The fuse shrank. Then in one motion he turned, leaped, and was halfway up the ladder before someone in the mob unfroze and threw the first club.
Ethan was peering anxiously down through the broken glass. He extended a desperate hand and Hunnar another. Together they yanked hard and Ethan fell backwards. September came out of the opening, tumbled onto the roof, and was followed by a geyser of dust and pulverized stone.
"Quite a banger," he murmured, feeling his side where a thrown staff had grazed him. "Glad I saved that one for last."
For the second time that night Ethan found himself running blindly over rooftops, dodging pillars and buttresses, dropping from level to level toward the stairway. Apparently the Brothers were too disorganized, or demoralized, to offer ready pursuit. Or maybe that last bomb had eliminated the sanctimonious Prior and several of his deputies. "
At any rate, they met no opposition in their hectic scramble downwards. They reached the last roof above the stairway without being challenged.
To their left a long black streak extended back into the monastery, a charred wound. The results of Hunnar's covering blaze set earlier that night. A large band of Brothers stood in front of the burnt entrance, armed with the usual clubs and staves.
They were expecting an attack from the front. Clearly no one had brought them the word about the return of the Dark One's other servants. Not very military. Hunnar's soldiers surprised them completely.
There was no pursuit as they started their second dash down the stairway.
"So much for rule by reason and logic," September grunted. He was breathing heavily. The run down from the monastery had finally tired even him. But now they were safe on board the _Slanderscree_ and there weren't enough Brothers in the world to get them off it again. The big man was staring up at the monastery buildings, faint ghosts against the black crags.
"Well, it performed well enough-within their own tight little precepts," Ethan countered. Behind him, Ta-hoding was sending the crew aloft, yelling dire threats at imagined slackers.
The _Slanderscree_ began to move
out of the harbor. Astern, a quartet of soldiers were ungently dumping the Brothers who'd taken the raft earlier. It was more humane than similar actions that had been performed on Terra ages ago, for there was no water for the captives to drown in.
On the other hand, the ice wasn't especially soft.
The wind blew and the _Slanderscree_ enslaved it, cutting west, then south, to take advantage of the slightest counterbreeze. Ta-hoding didn't miss many.
A week later they saw the first smoke. It blew steadily to the east, black and sooty and well up in the atmosphere. From there Ta-hoding was able to ignore the compass and follow the black line. They made even better time. It was another two days before they had their first glimpse of The Place-Where The-earth's-Blood-Burns, and another two before the base of the giant volcano came into view.
Mottled brown and black, splashed higher up with ice and snow-fourteen kilometers of vertical hell shrouded in polar ice and rock. It was magnificent, awesome, and a little bit frightening.
"Well, no hallucinations so far," Ethan mused.
"How," Colette snapped back, "could you tell the difference?"
Williams voice sounded behind then?. "I'd very much like to land."
Ethan turned. Eer-Meesach was there, too. "Really, Milliken, in light of the past weeks, don't you think ... "
A huge paw came down easily on his shoulder. "We did leave without properly fixing the bowsprit, friend Ethan," said Hunnar. "Nor did the crew receive their promised, chance for a rest on shore."
"You're not afraid the spirits and goblins will object?"
The knight didn't smile. He gazed over the ice at the sky rubbing cone.
"As a cub I might have been. As a younger man I'd have been uncertain. But the wizards have explained to me what it really is, a thing neither supernatural nor inherently inimical, and I am not afraid."
They followed the jagged shore southward, searching for a place to put in. Hundreds of meters of broken, tortured rock fell in undisciplined cataracts onto the clear ice. But nowhere did it level off.
Just as they rounded the southern; tip of the island-mountain, hitting into the wind again, the plutonic crust abruptly gave way to a smooth, level stone beach. Ropy lines of pahoehoe marched gently into the frozen sea.
They tied up half into the wind, still protected by the sheltering bulk of the volcano. Ice-anchors were used this time, set with care and precision under Ta-hoding's experienced watch. Once again the repair crew set about their tasks-for the last tune, one hoped.
Considering what they'd gone through the past weeks, though, there were none who blamed the craftsmen for an
occasional over-the-shoulder glance. You couldn't be too sure that the ground would not still deliver up yet another fiendish surprise, hey? So the carpenters and sailweavers worked a little slower, a little more observantly.
Rolling blackness. Distant night-stars of plasmoid terror. Vast spaces unmeasureable. False concepts off life and death. The living dark carne, a loathsomeness of long licorice tentacles and soul-draining fangs.
It groped for him in the emptiness, reaching, twisting. He ran faster and faster on a sea of gurgling tar, an oil-sky overhead. The ocean grabbed and tugged at him. Down he looked and ,saw in horror that it wasn't a sea at all. He was running on the back of an amorphous amoeba that humped and shook and laughed.
He tried to jump, but now fat greasy pseudopods held him firm. All about the nightmare, shapes flowed up and around. In the middle of each the faces of things not human chuckled and puckered at him.
Black fronds clutched tighter, enveloping, suffocating. He tried to scream and one of the inky ropes dove down his throat, choking him. They crawled over his eyes, under his ears into his nostrils. Cilia brushed and tickled obscenely.
He couldn't breathe. He coughed, gagged. The thing in his throat was curling into his belly, swelling, filling him with gravid blackness.
The interior of the cabin was dark, too. But it was a comforting, familiar, prosaic dark--root sticky, not malevolent, not full of nightmare shapes. Despite the cold he was sweating profusely and heaving like he'd just finished marathon.
Shaking, he reached for the lamp, then caught himself. His hand paused in mid-air, drew away slowly. No ... no. It was a bad dream. Nothing more. Happens to everyone.
He put both hands on the bed, palms flat against the blankets and furs, and lay down slowly, staring at the bare outline of the ceiling. With a conscious effort he closed his eyes and breathed out, long and low. Then he hunched slowly on his side and fluffed the blanket under his head.
His last thought before falling asleep was that he hadn't had a nightmare since childhood. He wondered about it, for a second.
Morning light bit like a mosquito. The volcano did not shine or sparkle in the false alpenglow. If anything, the black volcanic rock absorbed the light. Only at upper elevations did ice and snow work to do eye-pleasing things with the rich light.
A dark, brooding ziggurat, the mountain gave no hint of the burning core that steamed in its depths. Even the cloud-scudding black smoke was a cold coal.
There was nothing so palpable as an air of menace about the mountain, but neither was it pleasant to be near. It needed companion mountains, a sibling range around its base, before mere humans could relate to it. Alone, it was as impersonal and alien as a lost moon.
Ethan leaned on the rail and gazed at the ropy beach. He'd almost have preferred to stay on board, but there was always the thin chance that something interesting might turn up. He only stumbled once as they made their way across the ice and onto the rock. Small cause for pride.
On the frozen lava the humans had an advantage over their tran companions. The natives had to pick their way carefully on unclad feet over the nastier sections of aa and scoria.
The two wizards could have gone by themselves. However, someone had to go along to tell the two learned beings when it was time to return to the _Slanderscree._ Left to themselves, they would wander about the island tit dark, get lost, and then there'd be a broken leg or twisted ankle and the hard work of carrying them back to the ship in the dark.
The slopes of the gigantic cone seemed to soar up and up into the opalescent blue until they merged at the artist's vanishing point. You could tell there was a top only because of the black smoke that issued there from somewhere in the clouds.
Well, they could spend the morning picking around at the rocks in the shelter of the east slope, acquire a few specimens, and return to the ship. The rocks ought to keep Williams and Eer-Meesach occupied and out of trouble until they'd reached Arsudun.
Ethan didn't expect any surprises-even Williams had enough sense to forgo suggesting an ascent-but he hadn't counted on the cave.
It was well concealed by rock and low brush as he walked past the entrance. It looked no different from any other section of immolated stone. Only the early morning light shining straight into it gave any hint that it might be larger than the thousands of similar pockets which dotted the lava. He bent and peered inside.
It was large enough for a tran to walk upright in, so he called the others over.
"Fascinating," said the schoolmaster, staring inside. Before anyone could stop him, the teacher had stepped carefully over a chunk of as and was standing on the smooth floor of the cave.
"Get out of there, Milliken," said September. "The business could come down on you any second."
"Pish-tosh! This is a structure built by nature, not mere man, Mr. September. Once a tube like this has been formed, it will remain so until a violent upheaval cracks the set rock. My dear Eer-Meesach, you must see this!"
"What is it?" The tran wizard had knelt slowly and was staring into the hole now.
Williams' voice floated back from some ways in. "The walls of the tube are lined with a luminescent lichen or fungi of some sort. I can see quite clearly even though I'm well away from the entrance." 'there was a pause. "It appears to extend into the mountain for some distance."
Hunnar looked resignedly at September. "I'd as soon wait here, Sir Skua. But those two would surely lose themselves at the first pairing of passageways."
The big man dug into a coat pocket and pulled out one of the small compasses from the survival supplies.
"I expect you're right," he agreed. " Might as well go myself."
Hunnar hopped down into the tunnel, followed closely by Budjir and Suaxus. September went next, turned and looked back at Ethan.
"Coming, young feller-me-lad?"
He hesitated. The tunnel did riot look especially inviting. But they could be watching from the ship. Colette had already confessed a fear of the dark; it was the only thing that seemed to faze her. Naturally he had to go in.
It was a good thing he had no time to work on the logic of his thinking or he wouldn't have been terribly happy with the resultant picture.
They walked at a leisurely pace, moving deeper and deeper into the mountain. The walls, ceiling, and floor had been scoured almost slippery smooth. There were places where the ceiling rose to two and three times the height of a tran. And here and there there were vents of green clay. Green clay in volcanic vents. Now, where had he seen that before? He puzzled over it.
The glowing plant life grew no more luxuriantly as they moved down the tunnel, but it didn't grow dimmer, either. And it supplied enough light to show occasional boulders and rocks that had fallen from the roof (green clay in volcanic vents?). The number was small, Ethan noted gratefully. He moved ahead to listen to the schoolmaster.
"Lava has gone through this passage fairly recently," Williams explained, "which accounts for the smooth sides."
"Now that's a comforting thought," grinned Ethan. He thought of the millions of tons of hot magma beneath their feet, whose outlet had once been the tube in which they now trod.
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