All in all, we spent a damp, hungry, uncomfortable night.
But the next day proved even worse.
It was a hoarse squall of terror that aroused me from my rest—if “rest” is quite the word I want for a night spent wedged into a damp hole, curled up on hard, uneven wood.
I scrambled out of the cave, snatching up my blade. Klygon wasn’t there. Either he had arisen before me, and had gone out, deciding to let me sleep, or he had left our hiding place but temporarily, to answer an urgent call of nature.
Crawling out, I straightened swiftly—trying to ignore the stiffness in my aching limbs—and peered around in the darkness for the source of the frightened cry that had awakened me.
It was Klygon, scrambling and slipping and sliding down the root-tangle from somewhere above, with the reckless speed only panic can produce.
A moment later I saw what was chasing him, and tasted the oily, acid tang of fear myself. For, crawling and undulating after Klygon came an immense thing that struck cold dread into my heart.
Its flesh was gelid and sickly white, and it glowed with faint luminescence in the dark, like the wan phosphorescence of something putrid with decay. I could make out no features at first in its writhing hugeness, but then I saw its faceless head and drooling, toothless maw.
It was a wom—a worm the size of an elephant, and half as long as a freight train!
I thought to myself, with wry humor even through my sense of peril, that if Klygon had sought to scare tip some breakfast, he should at least have tried to come up with something that was not going to make a breakfast of him!
And the next second I froze with astonishment.
For the great, slithering worm was dreadful enough, but—this worm had a human rider.
Chapter 11
Delgan of the Isles
Klygon came slipping and falling down to where I stood, clinging to a twisted rootlet like a banister, staring up in awe and wonder at the immense wriggling worm. The little man’s homely face was pallid and sweating with fear, his eyes wild.
“Into the hole, lad, there be more of the horrors,” he panted, and made to dodge past me into the low-roofed entrance of our hiding place. I gripped his arm, holding him back.
“Not there!” I warned. “There’s only one way in or out. We’d be trapped—and the worm-head might be small enough to get in after us!”
He shuddered, eyes glazing. Perhaps he pictured the nightmare image those words conjured up in my own brain—that spasmodic, drooling mouth thrusting in upon us as we crouched helpless in the dark.
I sprang over the edge of the root on which I stood, and went slipping and sliding down to a lower surface, with Klygon panting on my heels. The dim putrid phosphorescence strengthened about us. Looking back I saw with a thrill of horror four or five more monster forms slithering down through the tangled roots after us. Each had a human rider clinging to its back, and each could move far more swiftly than we could.
It was only a matter of time.
And not much time, at that.
They cornered us down by the water’s edge. We had our backs to the wall, for there was nowhere to run and we could not risk immersion in that scum-coated lake in whose midnight depths unknown creatures splashed and hunted.
The wet, working mouths descended toward us, slobbering hungrily, panting a vile, stinking fetor in our faces. But the riders had the monster-worms under control—I glimpsed something like rude reins made of thorny strands—and the riders tugged back upon these, jerking the obscene mouths away from us.
In the next moment the riders slid down from their perches and fell upon us. They were hulking brutes, naked savages, their heavy, anthropoid limbs white as milk, their degraded, snarling features half hidden by tangled locks of filthy white hair. They were true albinos, I saw with a brief, momentary spark of curiosity, their small eyes red-pupiled and doubtless weak, glaring savagely through matted, coarse manes of dead white hair.
But, for all that, they were strong as apes and bore the two of us down before their rush. Armed with wooden clubs and stone axes, they swarmed upon us, and over us, for all our flickering blades. We had poor footing, there on the slimy moss, to make a stand. With the scummed lake at our backs and our feet sliding in the slick moss, we could not put up much of a fight. Even so, I sent my point slicing through the throat of one grunting albino savage and small Klygon, cursing and sweating, stabbed another to the bone.
But with brute strength and sheer weight of numbers they overwhelmed us. The swords were wrested from us. Heavy clubs rose and fell, rose and fell, and we knew no more.
The last thing I heard was Klygon’s voice, shrill and raw with rage, calling on the saints and godlings of the innumerable Laonese pantheon. But he called in vain. And darkness drowned me in smothering layers …
When I woke it was with a roaring headache, to find myself lying in noisome filth, the stench of ordure strangely mingled with the smell of wet loam thick in my nostrils.
I blinked my eyes into focus, and found myself in a subterranean cavern, walled with beaten earth through which hairy, glistening white rootlets crawled. It was difficult at first to ascertain the true dimensions of the hole or tunnel or whatever it was, but as I peered around through the half-gloom I discovered at length that the cavern was of immense proportions. The roof curved above me, lost in gloom; the packed-earth walls receded to every side.
Amid the center of the vast cavernous space, flames writhed, fiercely scarlet, from a fire-pit. The hot light smote my eyes painfully, blinding me after long hours spent in absolute darkness. Bemusedly I wondered how the albino savages could endure the glare of open fire, then saw the beastlike men, grunting and shuffling about the cavern floor upon unguessable errands, each shielding his weak eyes from the blaze of the fire-pit with dirty paws.
Klygon lay some little distance beyond me, propped against the earth wall, looking woebegone. His arms were bound together behind him, as were mine, or so I guessed from the dull pain that bit into my numb wrists. Our legs were free, I noticed, not that we could do much with them.
There must have been thirty or forty of the savages scattered about the immensity of the cavern. Some of them, I saw with faint surprise, were women, but women so degraded and brutish as to be every bit as squat and anthropoidal as the males. There were also children—if you could so dignify with the word naked and filthy little brutes like hairless monkeys, which snarled and spat and squabbled noisily.
I saw no other captives like ourselves.
But there were gnawed bones and broken skulls and pelvis bones scattered about through the trampled muck that coated the cavern floor, and most of them were human.
Lying there quite helplessly, my head throbbing from the pummeling I had suffered under the heavy wooden clubs, I wondered dazedly if these brutish creatures had sunk so low on the scale of humanity as to have developed the habits of… cannibals.
Doubtless, I would soon learn that for myself.
We lay there for what must have been hours, Klygon and I, too far apart to indulge in conversation, beyond an eloquent glance or two of mutual commiseration. We were in no way molested; in fact, none of the shambling albinos paid the slightest attention to us, and the only members of the tribe who seemed to notice us at all were the repulsive little—I cannot call them “children”—cubs. And whenever one or two of them thought to approach us, whether from curiosity or a desire to torment the helpless, one or another of the females would cuff it, and it would scrabble away squealing.
As there was nothing else to do, and as no present danger threatened, I fell to sleep again, for the warmth of the fire, the thick, smoky air, and the dirt in which I lay were, all things considered, more comfortable and conducive to slumber than the dank hole wherein I had passed an uneasy night.