Tunnel in the Moon
“Can we still use the gaunts,” asked Limnar Dass of Gytherik, “to carry messages to the other ships?” (For some reason the dreamlands had never adopted semaphore.) “I mean, will they be capable of inter-vessel flight way out here between moon and dreamlands?”
“I really don't know,” the gaunt-master answered, frowning. “This is a new situation for meâfor my gaunts too, I'm sure.” Down on the main deck the grim pressed close together in a sullen huddle and shuffled uncomfortably in the streaming, maddening moonlight.
Gnorri's
sails provided a good deal of shade from that glare, but still its awfulness could be felt as an almost tangible thing.
“Of course I could always ask the gaunts,” Gytherik continued, turning toward the grim and leaning across the bridge's rail. Before he could inquire, however, Biffer (it could only be him!) thrust out his neck, fanned his membranous wings and soared aloftâjust as if he had heard the sky-Captain's question and his young master's answer, and thought that this display should settle the matter to everyone's satisfaction. He disappeared overboard to port, passed beneath the ship and came up to hover for a moment before perching on the starboard rail.
“Well,” said Limnar, nodding his acknowledgment at Biffer, “that seems to be the answer to that one!”
Of course, in the normal way of things his question would have been redundant, for gaunts are superb fliers who have no aerial peers in all the dreamlands; but the flotilla was no longer in the dreamlands, and no one seemed able to say for sure which laws might or might not apply out here. Several so-called “natural” laws, or laws which the questers had always considered natural, had already been shattered beyond repair. For one, there was the matter of the temperature.
It was cold, most certainlyâextremely coldâbut not nearly what they had expected. They needed the heavy garments in which one and all were now draped, to be sure, but all were in agreement that it was only slightly colder than a bad northern winter. Hero in fact was astonished by what he leniently termed “an amazingly mild, not at all uncomfortable atmosphere.”
Of course he had experienced the dreadful cold of dreamland's upper atmospheric reaches (and naked at that), which not only made him something of an expert but also accounted for his present astonishment. If it could be so bitterly cold just a few miles above the dreamlands, how come it was not utterly freezing way up here? Eldin suspected that they were moving through a sort of Gulf Stream of warm air which existed permanently in the previously supposed “void” between the atmosphere of dreamland and that of the moon.
These and many other matters had occupied the questers in the relatively short span of time since the commencement of their involuntary journey, but once the halfway point had been passed their talk had turned again to more pressing questions: chiefly Mnomquah's purpose (for it was plainly his doing) in drawing the flotilla up to the moon, and what would be waiting for them when they got there.
And yet even that simple statement “up to the moon” was invalid here; for they no longer spiralled up but downâdown toward the surface of an utterly inhospitable world. Not at all the airless inhospitality of the waking world's moon, noârather that of the vile and inhuman race of moonbeasts,
whose
habits
and
appetites
did not, according to legend, bear mentioning.
As for the trip itself: it had been as strange a voyage as any of the questers had ever undertaken, and they had made several fantastical journeys in their time. Not the least of its strangeness lay in the speed with which it had been accomplished; for while on leaving the dreamlands the spiral flight had seemed slow and strangely languid, since then they had attained a monstrous velocity. Something of this had been seen in the speed with which the dreamlands had dwindled in their wake, and in the rapid bloating of the moon from a sky-filling bulk to an intricately etched world of golden plains, yawning, secretive craters, dark, oily oceans and black shadows. And yet there had been no sense of acceleration, no slightest billowing of slack-hanging sails, no agitation of air as one might expect to be occasioned by their passing. Unless their journey was totally magical in nature (which Limnar Dass frankly believed must be the case), then Eldin's Gulf Stream of air must be travelling apace with them.
Quite apart from discussion and conjecture, the trip had not been without occurrence. On the contrary, Mnomquah's outrage at being deniedâhowever temporarilyâaccess to the dreamlands and oneness with Oorn had made itself very plain in the way he three times aimed (indiscriminately?) his solid-seeming tractor-beam across the now narrowed distance to strike at certain defenseless cities. This had been during the earlier part of the trip when the dreamlands were less obscured with clouds and their contours still visible and more or less identifiable.
And when
Gnorri's
Master got round to studying his maps and charts he had found a very strange thing ⦠three of them, in fact. The moon-God's rage must be violent indeed that he should so drastically and consistently mistake his targets! Or had he mistaken them? The horned-one fleet up ahead, which of course included
Shantak, Chrysalis
and
Shroud,
must also have witnessed the triple striking of the beam, and the questers could not help but wonder what Zura,
Lathi and the Dukes now thought of their splendid alliance with the moonbeasts and their horned-one minions. For Mnomquah's targets had been none other than the Charnel Gardens, twice-builded Thalarion, and the degenerate and decaying township of Isharra! How now for promises and fair play?
“Is it because they fouled up?” Limnar Dass, at the time, wondered aloud. “Or simply because they're of no further use to him?”
“A little of both,” Hero had suspected. “Of course, they were easy targets. What with all the movement of moongold this lot have been engaged in, there were bound to be stockpiles of the stuff in their various headquarters.”
Eldin for his part had gone a little deeper into the subject. “With the moon so close to the dreamlands now,” he reasoned, “you'd hardly think old Mnomquah would need his golden zeroing-in device anymore ⦔ And he had frowned thoughtfully. “How come he doesn't use his beam more often?”
“I believe,” Hero had answered, “that he's been trying to, well,
fuel
himself. Do you know what I mean? You remember what Hrill told us? That the peoples of the dreamlands would be fodder for Mnomquah and the moonbeasts? I really think he meant âfodder' quite literally, and that Mnomquah has been, you knowâ”
“Yes, lad,” Eldin had stopped him short. “We all know what you mean. But if he's so damned hungry, why doesn't he just go right ahead and gorge?”
“He is hungry, I'm sure of it,” answered Hero. “See, his beams consume energy, magical or otherwise makes no difference, and he needs to make it up as fast as he uses it. Which shouldn't be a problem, really. Exceptâ” and he paused to snap his fingers.
“Well?” they had all wanted to know.
“You remember what Randolph Carter told us in his letter? About Theem'hdra in the primal waking world, the land at the dawn of time? They had two moon-gods in those days,
Mnomquah and Gleeth. Now Gleeth, if you recall, was an elemental god, not really there at allâand he was blind! What I'm saying is: perhaps the old legends got it all mixed up. Perhaps Gleeth, who never was, got credited with certain characteristicsâone at leastâof Mnomquah, who was and still is! Do I make myself plain?”
“As mud!” Eldin had grumbled.
“You're saying that Mnomquah isâ” began Limnar Dass.
“Blind?” Gytherik Imniss finished it.
Hero nodded. “I'm beginning to think so. That's why he daren't expend energy on tractor-beams which stand only one chance in, say, ten thousand of hitting anything worth eating. He took the cities of his allies because they had been made easy targets. Also because Zura, Lathi and the Isharrans are of no further use to him.
Also,
I suspect, because we'd put him in a bit of a tantrumâbut mainly because he was hungry.”
“And now that he's fed he'll be fully fueled for his plunge to Oorn's pit, eh?” questioned Limnar. The others looked startled, suddenly reminded of a nightmare they had all hoped was over and done with. “After all,” Limnar continued, half apologetically, “the moon does govern the tides, you know. What comes must goâincluding the waters which at present cover Sarkomand.”
“Personally,” said Hero after a moment's silence, “I don't think Mnomquah will have derived much benefit from Thalarion and Isharra. And as for Zura's Charnel Gardensâwhy, he's probably throwing that lot up right now! No, I rather fancy that we ourselves are intended to provide the energy for his big jump. If we let him get away with it, that is.”
“Well, we're certainly not going down without a fight!” Eldin had rumbled then.
“âIn which we'll be outnumbered three or four to one,” Gytherik had pointed out. “Also, the enemy fleet will be battle-ready, just waiting for us to come spiralling down out of the sky. Why, we'll be sitting ducks!”
Which had taken them to the point where Limnar Dass inquired
about the airworthiness of the gaunts in these interplanetary regions. And as soon as Biffer confirmed that indeed gaunts were capable of flight in the Gulf Stream ether, then the sky-Captain explained the reason for his anxious interest.
“Gytherik is right,” he said, “we'll be sitting ducks. And,” he reminded, “we have no powder. Nor has
Starspur.
We used it to crack Sarkomand's old sea-wall. Without powder we can't fight, soâ” he turned to Gytherik, “your gaunts are going to have their paws full for the next couple of hours. They'll have to resupply
Gnorri
and
Starspur
from the other ships. Fortunately this crazy whorl has kept us all fairly close together, so the gaunts shouldn't really need to exhaust themselves.”
By the time the grim fully understood their task and had been given letters marked for the flotilla's Captains, a gradual deceleration was already making itself felt. This showed itself not as any return of weight (which had never departed and so could not return) or change of motion (which had also
seemed
to remain constant, despite the enormous speed they must have attained), but in the gradual recognition of a sense of
spiritual
weight and direction; as if the souls of all concerned had passed through an area of freefall, and that now, as they approached journey's end, some mechanism of the psyche was alerting them to that fact.
Strangely enough, the gaunts seemed similarly alerted and showed an urgency all their own. Sniffer and Biffer, however, before commencing their powder-ferrying tasks with the rest of the grim, shuffled down into
Gnorri's
hold and returned with Hero's curved Kledan sword and Eldin's straighter blade, handing (pawing?) them to the questers in a sort of solemn but almost tangibly sarcastic silence. Just how they managed to express their disdain without the facility of facial expression or scathing words would be difficult to say, and yet both Hero and Eldin did feel a peculiar embarrassment.
“I had forgotten about your swords,” Gytherik now explained. “The gaunts picked them up from the spot where we
were tossed overboard from the deck of
Shantak.
They went off on their own to recover them while Limnar and I were placing the powder charges below the old sea-wall.”
“Like a dog when you throw a stick for him, eh?” Eldin hopefully grinned.
“No,” replied Gytherik in a very dry tone, “I think not. More like a patient valet whose senile master keeps forgetting his trousers!”
By this time
Gnorri's
crew had done what they could to ready her for battle, likewise the crews of the other ships, and all that remained was to watch and wait for the gaunts to finish with their transporting of powder barrels. This, too, was rapidly accomplished; and now the seven-strong flotilla slowly spiralled down out of a black, gold-streaked sky toward the surface of the moon.
Ruins which from afar had merged with the mountains now became visible, dead temples to defunct and forgotten deities; and on the shores of oily oceans stood cities of thickly-clustered, leaning gray towers, windowless and inherent with a nameless menace other than that of their obvious and ugly alienage. The spiralling moonbeam path straightened out and was soon seen to be drawing the ships down toward a mighty crater of at least a mile in diameter and completely conjectural depth, whose throat occasionally belched rings of orange smoke or vapor and about which the Lengite armada sailed in a huge circle, keeping a healthy distance from the menacing rim.
“That great hole,” observed Eldin, “seems more a gigantic tunnel in the moon than a crater in the proper sense.”
“Mnomquah's lair,” opined Hero with a grimace. “A vast burrow indeed. And somewhere in the middle, the blind beast himselfâall horrid, hateful and hungry!”