We had no idea in which direction the greater safety might lie, but the first thing to do was to get as far away from the domain of the albino savages as we could possibly manage. The greater the distance we put between us and the tribe of Gor-ya, the safer we would be and the easier we would feel.
It was some time after this that we heard the drums.
Klygon and I, panting with exhaustion from the mad scramble down the medusa-tangle of roots, sprawled at ease, resting for a bit before going on. Delgan, however, paced nervously, as inexhaustible as some jungle cat.
As we became conscious of the throbbing of drums in the distance, the blue man stiffened, paled, and bit his lip.
“What is it?” I asked.
For a moment he said nothing, intent on the faint sound. The drums were a dim pulsing, like the beating of a giant’s heart. The eyes of Delgan glimmered fearfully in the faint, ghostly light.
“They have loosed the God upon us, as I feared they might,” he whispered.
I did not fully understand what he meant by that. Why, then, did the hair at my nape prickle with premonition?
“What god is it?” growled Klygon. “Saints and avatars, is it a living beast?”
“It is the most dreadful of all beasts,” the blue man whispered as if through lips numb with fear. “It is the mighty monarch who rules this world of darkness and terror… a sluth… but the grandfather of all sluth… a worm as mighty as a mountain.”
“Gods and demigods,” Klygon whistled.
The drumbeat quickened in the distance.
“Hark!” hissed Delgan. “They drive it with the drums… it hates the sound, and flees from it… up the inclined tunnel, like a great river of hungry flesh… now it has caught our scent… now it is on our trail. Within mere moments it will be upon us… Call, then, upon your gods and saints, small and ugly fool. Oh, I was mad to think we could escape the vengeance of Gor-ya!”
We began to run.
We were free of the root-system at last, and I stood for the first time upon the actual soil of the World of the Green Star. It was dry and dead and barren, an endless expanse of crumbling loam that stretched for miles between the bases of the immense trees.
No grass grew here, far from the light of day. And few creatures, it seemed, inhabited the barrens of the continental floor. So, staggering in patches of sand soft as talcum, bruising our flesh against harsh stones, we sprinted out upon this night-black plain, going we knew not where, fleeing from the monster-worm that had become a god in the imagination of the superstitious savages.
“It is mighty as a mountain, and ages old,” Delgan moaned as he staggered along beside me. “Gor-ya’s people found it burrowed deep in the ground, slumbering away the centuries. It had half eaten through the king-root of the tree. A hundred men with axes could chop and chop for half a hundred years, and not cut away so huge a hole in the mighty root…”
And he began whimpering like a child, staggering and slipping and sliding in the sand, blundering into half-glimpsed obstacles, crawling over boulders. I thought then of Yggdrasil, the world-bearing ash-tree in the Norse myths, and of the terrible and monstrous worm, Nithhogg, who gnaws forever at its mighty roots …
We ran on.
But now there was Something behind us, a heaving white shape that glimmered and glistened through the gloom… Something that lived and moved and hunted through the night… a monstrous and phosphorescent thing that snuffled and hungered after us… a worm… a worm… but a worm like a moving mountain!
And then we fell over an unseen obstruction and found ourselves sloshing through muddy waters.
Curse the luck, it was a river—the first river I had yet seen on the World of the Green Star, and very likely to be the last, too. For it blocked our path and we could go no farther. I could perhaps have swum across it, although I could not be sure, since it was too dark for me to see across the glistening flood to the far shore; but Klygon and Delgan could not. I doubted if they had ever seen a river either, but, anyway, they could never have found reason to learn to swim, as the art is unknown among the Laonese.
The terrible Nithhogg-worm was almost upon us now. It seemed miles long and as thick as one of the huge tree-branches, although this could not have been the case. Nothing that had ever lived could have been as mighty as that. The monster’s body would have crumpled, collapsing under the weight of its own flesh …
But he was huge, was the Nithhogg-god, and we were puny mites before him, and the ghostly glimmer of his slimy, phosphorescent flesh glowed spectral in the gloom.
We could have fled only to the right or left, parallel along the banks of the river. But we realized, all three of us, that it was useless to flee. Nithhogg came squirming upon us through the gloom, an immense and writhing shape, dimly luminous. Now he was so close that we could see the blunt obscenity of his face, the raw sphincterlike mouth, working, slobbering, drooling, and the one little eye, pink and mindless, and almost blind from untold centuries of living in the darkness …
Almost blind…
It came to me then and there, as we crouched in the slick mud at the river’s edge, with Nithhogg looming above us, a weaving shape of dim luminosity against the midnight gloom, that creatures who live in the darkness fear the light.
I remembered our captivity in the caverns of Gor-ya, and how the hulking albino savages had hidden their weak eyes from the fierce light of the fire-pit.
The light pains their eyes, and they fear it, Delgan had said to me once in explanation.
And I cursed myself for not having thought of it sooner.
For I had the very weapon I needed with me all the time.
I dug into my waistband and drew out the opaque sphere.
It was the Witchlight we had carried away from the hoard of Sarchimus the Wise. I had seen him use it once. He had borne it in his hands and it had shed about him a clear pool of calm white light, a glow that did not flicker or fade, fed by the radiance of imprisoned photons.
It could be made to glow faintly, and would shed illuminance for years on end at that rate. Or it could be made to release all the light pent in it at one time; this Zarqa had explained to me once, in an idle hour. He had shown me how it worked. I blessed him for it now.
I unsheathed the Witchlight from its casing, and triggered the small catch in its side, and flung it from me so that it rolled directly into the path of the writhing worm.
“Cover your eyes!” I shouted.
And the darkness of the bottom of the world was split asunder by the light of a thousand suns …
Chapter 18
Janchan’s Sacrifice
Zarqa guided the sky-sled through the domes and towers of the Flying City of Calidar as through a maze. He came down in the gardens of Ralidux by the simple expedient of smashing through the crystal panes of the fragile dome which shielded the dainty blossoms from the frigid air of this height. The glowing flowers blackened and withered in the cold blast that blew through the shattered greenhouse roof; they would soon perish.
It was a pity to destroy such delicate beauty, but the Kalood had no option in the matter. Human lives were at stake here, and blossoms, however rare and delicate and beautiful, were not worth more than the lives of his friends, reasoned the gentle Zarqa.
Earlier, when Ralidux and Kalistus had examined the mechanism of the sky-sled together in Kalistus’ laboratory, the Winged Man had read the mind of Ralidux and thus obtained knowledge of the position of his apartments in the central citadel complex. It had taken mere moments to fly here from the suite of Kalistus, who lay upon his couch at this moment, still deep in telepathically induced slumbers.