Part 2

"But you'll admit we've no chance now! Soon hordes of sea monsters will scent us out. Surely you'll not deny that this time you will go to meet your barbaric gods!"

"Who knows?"

She cursed him thoroughly. "You're mad!"

"I am Moljar."

She sighed resignedly. "You say that like omnipotence would say, 'I'm God'."

"It is enough for me. Who can say they know of more than themselves? I simply know I am Moljar. I live. I have purpose. The pelt of Alhone. A pledge I must keep. Beyond that--nothing."

She tossed wet hair from her eyes. "Maybe your barbaric code is best after all. The System's returned to barbarism. Decay, ruin. Why not a philosophy to fit it? I rather like you. If you only weren't a half-breed."

He grinned. "If you only were not a mutant." His eyes caught a dark, flat floating object some distance away. A blurred, indistinct outline. He pointed.

"Looks like something large enough to float us," she said. Then she cried out suddenly and pointed over his shoulder.

His knife was in his hands as his legs churned him around in the brackish water. The sea-serpent's flat head arched high above them, dripping an avalanche of weed and water upon their upturned faces. Its sleek, sinuous body shot upward, a monster with fanged jaws and darting forked tongue, with bulging eyes, and bony head and snout.

"Keep diving," yelled Moljar. "It won't open its mouth under water." He watched her surface dive like a fish, then followed himself just as the bullet-like head of the hissing hydrophidian slashed down.

Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about them. The water was a churning white foam. Moljar tried repeatedly to sink his knife into the under-belly of the serpent. But it was like soft but tough plastic, only slightly resilient.

He broke surface, gasped great gulps of the dense air. He saw Mahra and pointed to the right toward the flat raft object they had seen floating there. He yelled. "Keep diving and swimming toward that." Then he went under again as the serpent's head slapped into the water where his own head had been.

It was a world of phosphorescent glimmerings like monstrous fireflies, bubbling and coruscating about his staring eyes as he battled the boiling currents stirred by the serpent. He swam until his lungs were shrieking with agony, then came up again for air. He was only a few feet this time from the floating area. It looked like a collected mass of debris now.

He swam frantically toward it. If he could get up out of the water, he could break out his electro-gun. He looked around for the girl. Her head bobbed up. But still some distance from him. The hydrophidian hissed angrily and struck again. Her silver hair disappeared beneath the serpent's mouth.

He drew himself up onto the raft. He had a quick second of appraisal as he tore the gun from its plastic wrappings. The raft was solid, very buoyant, and membranaceous. Its surface was glossy and veined like the broad leaves of the swamp lilies.

How thick this raft was, how it was made, or how much more of it there was Moljar had no time to think about. But he did know it was alive!

The girl came up a few metres from him this time. Her arms moved weakly. Her face was deathly pale and her eyes pleaded silently beneath the bizarre strands of her silver hair. She again started to sink wearily down as the serpent hissed hungrily and struck.

This time it would have feasted. However Moljar's electro-gun crackled, and its lethal charges burned the monster's glistening length into pieces. They fell writhing in separate anguish all around the girl, crimsoning the water to a thick red.

He lifted her easily up onto the raft-creature. She sank down in a dripping and exhausted heap.

"For a half-breed," she whispered between gasps, "you have courage." Then she closed her eyes. The raft rippled and bucked slightly as something huge stirred against its bottom.

* * * * *

The night hours before morning were illuminated, a strange twilight of phosphorescence. They sat in the middle of the organic raft and waited tensely. The stirring beneath it had grown more violent.

"Man isn't the only highly adaptable animal--not even the most ingenious." The girl's tone was pedantic, amazingly learned. Moljar nodded surlily, not so interested, apparently, in lectures. He edged toward the girl until their shoulders touched. She paused. Continued.

"The animal that build this raft for itself is hiding beneath it now. The serpent frightened it. Soon it will have to come up for air."

"How do you know so much," he growled.

"Earth University of Interplanetary Fauna," she said.

He sneered. "A mutant!"

"My parents dyed my hair, and with another name I got by for a while. I was going to be a field worker, but they caught up with me. They always do. Anyway, as I was saying, this creature is much like an ianthina, or snail, of earth. It breathes through a siphon, or tubular proboscis. It uses this siphon to suck in air with which it builds these rafts for itself, to keep its heavy body and shell afloat. It's an adventurer like you, Moljar. It spends its life floating or sailing about like a ship."

Moljar grunted. He moved one corded arm behind her. She shifted a little.

"Very interesting thing," she said. "Biology. When this ianthina decides to build its raft, it exudes a sticky mucous over the surface of the sea, layer after layer of it. Then it draws air into its siphon and permits the bubbles to escape beneath the mucous to which they cling. These air sacks imprison the air as the mucous hardens. And we have this very strong raft, a life boat with air tanks. Aren't we lucky?"

The raft jolted violently. "Are we?" said Moljar. "Maybe it does not want to share its raft."

A number of tentacles slithered up and over the edge of the raft. Two antenna with slimy knobs stood up and quivered at Moljar.

The girl tried to ignore the sight. "But this raft is better than any man has ever been able to build." Her voice tightened as more of the ianthina surged into view. "This snail can make more bubbles at will, and it can enlarge its raft whenever it wants to."

There was a sudden upsurging height of gigantic pink-fleshed bulk. It rose up until it towered over its raft. A little above the level of the water they could see its brilliantly colored spiral shell-house gleaming olive-green with streaks and spots of purple, violet and black.

The body of the ianthina continued to exude outward from its shell. From it a thick tendon of flesh spread out to either side to form the frame work of its raft, an integral part of its giant body.

"We've got to get this craft moving someway toward Anghore," said Moljar.

She stared at him, open mouthed, and then said, "Is that all? How will you summon your genii, or is that you?"

He shrugged. "It must be done. We are wasting time. First we must burn this shell away from the raft. It encumbers us."

She was shaking her head as he crouched on his knees, leveling the gun at a point beneath the ianthina's waving antenna. He was about to press the stud, then cursed and fell sidewise beneath the long descending squeal.

* * * * *

Attracted by the glow of the ianthina, a monstrous bat had dived suddenly toward them from somewhere up in that dense grey curtain. Neither of them saw its giant webbed wings until it fanned them like an abrupt deadly wind.

"Burn it!" scream Mahra, as the bat's hideous evilly grinning mouth opened to reveal rows of yellowed teeth, and its gleaming red eyes bored toward them through the mist. "I lost my electro in the water."

Moljar was shaking his head. He tossed her the blaster. "You. Burn the ianthina free from the raft." The bat had sped by, circled, was returning. "This bat can do us some good!"

Moljar stood up and met the sweep of the bat's flexing claws. Just in time he leaped upward between them, and clutched the bat's thick furred belly. He felt the ratty teeth clack shut behind him as he was raised upward into the swirling vapor.

His nose curled, and he choked with the stench of the beast's vermin-infested fur. Then, still gripping the coarse hair with one hand, he raised his knife with the other. A quick long slash brought a fearsome scream hissing in his face. He slashed again and again until the probing blade found the beast's heart.

Gore spilled over him as he clung to the now wet hair. It got too slippery to hold. He grabbed the flailing claws as the gasping, thrashing creature plummeted seaward. The bat's body flopped into the water not far from the raft. It beat futilely with one foot, spinning in weakening frothing circles. Suddenly it was dead.

Moljar worked frantically against time. The blood would attract every kind and condition of sea monster. He hacked and strained at the joint where the huge wing joined the body. The stench almost overpowered him as he floundered about. But finally the great ribbed wing came free. Moljar's breath was coming in deep gusts as he dragged himself up onto the raft and pulled part of the wing up after him. He sat on it to anchor it while he rested.

He looked at the girl. She nodded. "You're pretty brave, for a half-breed."

He grunted breathlessly.

She came closer and handed him his blaster. "I burned it away. I burned its ganglia first, which it used for a brain. Then I severed the tendons which fastened it to its float. Anything else?"

Moljar was up again now, hacking at the thick tough surface of one end of the raft. "Yes. Watch that bat wing. Don't let it slide away. It is what we must have to reach Anghore."

"What are you doing now? And what's the wing for?"

He answered carelessly, "I'm going to make us a sail from the wing. It is almost a perfect sail of its kind. I figure the gyro brought us halfway across the sea. Maybe we have a third of the way to go. I have a compass and I saw what direction we were following before we crashed. With a fair wind, and luck, we should reach shore within a day."

She stared with no attempt, now, to conceal her admiration for the barbarian. "For a half-breed," she said, "you've got a brain."

Moljar said nothing. He had finished digging the hole in the surface of the raft. He next cut long strips of leather from his tunic for rigging. The twenty-foot-high leading edge of the bat's wing, a high curving spar, he stepped deeply in the hole, like a mast. Soon they were moving through the fantastic sea before a slight, lethargic breeze.

Their blaster protected them many times from the countless varieties of sea and air creatures that constantly attacked them. Moljar devised a sea-anchor by cutting off one of the air sacks from beneath the raft, and tying it to one end of a long leather rope. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, he threw out the sea-anchor.

There was little difference between night and day, except that the phosphorescence dimmed and was replaced by a grayer, more sickly light. And the high, gracefully-curved membrane of the bat's ribbed wing arched above them like the bizarre rigging of the junks that ply the Martian canals between the ruins of Phreer and Sumph-Logan. Black, with veins of dried blood, it caught the wind and tautened like the black sails of ancient pirate craft.

But though they could fight the monsters that flew and swam about them they could not fight the sea itself. The sea is cunning. It can bide its time, and spring with more violence than the greatest beast. The wind was its ally.

It was late the following afternoon that Mahra's hypersensitive nerves detected the distant pounding of the surf against high crags. They both visualized the dark mountains of Maghrone where the dull spires and minarets of Anghore towered up from its granite sea wall thousands of feet into the mist.

The thunderous surf grew in volume to a steady roaring as their makeshift craft bore them shoreward.

Then, abruptly, Moljar's nostrils quivered. He leaped to his feet and his black mane matted and curled as his eyes strained upward. "The cloud layers," he said. "Look!"

Each cloud layer was moving rapidly in different directions. "A storm!" cursed Moljar. "The wind and sea will pulp us on the rocks!"

Mahra cowered down, clutching at the floor of the raft. One hand gripped the bone mast of the bat's wing. She reached up the other, and Moljar's broad yellow hand closed over it, and held it in a silent bond.

The sound of the descending storm came from afar. It rose higher and higher, reaching the pitch of a thousand shrieking giants. A colossal comber bore toward them, lifting up, and up. Their eyes followed its curling summit, helpless, bold pygmies. A wall of blue, foaming with white like a mad beast, translucent as they saw it towering up through the swirling vapor. Then it collapsed over them.

Moljar's hand gripped hers. A vise that all the frenzied pounding of the ocean could not break. As the tons of water crushed them down, shattered the raft, hurled it away like chaff, their hands were locked. Their ears rang. Their minds cried out and were smothered. Coughing, blinded, they were absorbed by the sea.

III

The desert tribes of Mars cling to ancient superstitions. When a warrior dies, his body can only go on to Khles. A grotesque land of trial by brute strength by which the victorious can move upward through succeeding plains, and finally into the fairer lands of Perlarh.

So when Moljar's battered consciousness returned somewhat, his cracked lips whispered it gently, with awe. "Khles ... Khles ... Khles...." Then he snapped open his burning eyes.

He was on his side on harsh gravel and grey sand. The sea, calm and glassy again, washed gently at his sandaled feet. He stiffened his aching legs, and a lassitude went through him, like one might imagine upon awakening from death. He raised his right hand and the brilliant, sentient aliveness of the yellow stone caught the filtered Venusian morning, and momentarily blinded him. He shifted his eyes and saw that he still gripped Mahra's hand.

Her long smooth body, bruised and lacerated and encrusted with salt, breathed with a slow, erratic rhythm. Her other arm lay across her high firm breasts and her slim fingers rested on his forearm.

He turned his head up the beach. It might well have been the hell-lands of Khles that towered there. The smooth sloping expanse of gray sand ended sharply in a wall of granite, cracked and hoary with age. It went straight upward, higher than Moljar could see.

The girl groaned, raised on an elbow. He turned. They looked silently at each other a moment, before turning their eyes back to the colossal sea wall. Simultaneously their eyes caught the broad towering gate of dull black metal.

"Anghore," she whispered.

His hand dug into the sand. His lips were thin lines of dark wire. "It is magic," he said. "Even the gods are prejudiced against half-breeds, or I'd say they lent their strength to ours."

"Only evil gods would guide us to this place," she said.

"We have our gods who are not known exactly for benevolence. Lumphoor. Ghyx."

Moljar climbed stiffly to his feet and lifted Mahra. They stretched sore, wrenched muscles. They ate the ample meat from the many types of shells strewing the beach, and all the time they had been eyeing the giant, formidable barrier. Then, with silent accord, they walked up to it and stood dwarfed before it.

"You can leave me here," said Moljar. "I have pledged. I must return to kill Alhone. But you are free."

"In this jungle? Free for death! I'll stick a while longer, half-breed."

Her hand crept into his as he raised the yellow ring-key. A faint humming, a hollow metallic clang, and the gates slid to either side into their granite walls.

They stepped through into a massive cavern. A cold maw of twilight, green haze and smooth arching walls veined with ruby red and gold. Mahra cried out softly, and Moljar cursed as the two giant furred male Anghorians ran toward them.

Each wore a long straight sword and a slender dagger at his side. Their pink cat-faces masked cold, sadistic evil. Alien. One reached out a paw-like hand at Mahra. His almost lipless mouth slid open, and the incongruous whining speech mewed its travesty of human tones.

"This woman has not been called. She does not belong here." He turned to his fellow. "Take her to the Matrix. Ghils is experimenting with the seventh plain. She will be useful there."

"You are to come with me," he said, turning to Moljar.

The half-breed's hand rested on his dagger. He had fallen instinctively into a half-crouch. "How did you know I was coming here?"

"You will learn many things about Anghore. You have much to learn."

"I'm stubborn about my subjects, and my instructors," growled Moljar. And, as the other Anghorian stepped toward Mahra, Moljar leaped at his throat.

As his left hand clutched the corded body, his right hand whipped the cat man's dagger free. It rested harshly now against the furred man's broad silken chest.

"Do not touch the girl," he warned in the small pointed ear.

The other catman said evenly, "A dangerous act. But excusable. You have not yet learned the formalities of Anghore." He moved in a blinding blur of speed. Mahra gasped, as his body streaked across her vision like a flash of light.

* * * * *

Moljar went back. The catman thudded against him. His head cracked against the stone wall, and the red tint of the glowing stones deepened to a more personal crimson. He cursed harshly. These catmen could move! Shaking the dimness from his head, he tried to grip the Anghorian's writhing body. His dagger raised and fell, but only found hard stone. He blinked, trying to clear his eyes of fog, and his own blood.

He heard Mahra's savage, despairing yells, and caught a glance of her struggling in the other catman's corded arms. He heaved upward. The catman flew off him like a filthy conscience. Moljar flattened against the wall, his dagger crossed before him.

And when the catman leaped again, the half-breed was prepared. His clearing vision focused this time on its feral darting movements, and he met that pink snarling face with a long right slash. The pink face crunched, smeared. The big body sheared around, buckled, plunged down. It twitched, and its paws swept about searching for Moljar. Moljar kicked the face until the body stopped moving.

The other Anghorian released the girl. He drew his sword and eased toward Moljar.

* * * * *

A voice said with cruel, morbid interest, "Bring the half-breed to me alive, Akare. Or you will accompany the girl to the seventh plain."

Involuntarily, Moljar yelled, "Princess Alhone!"

Whining, squealing laughter echoed through the vaulted cavern. Baffled, the barbarian whirled around searching for the voice. It seemed without source.

"Alhone," he said again desperately. "You here! How?"

The gloating laughter again. "I have never left Anghore, mighty Moljar, since it was built for me. You and all the other fools outside Anghore have seen only my projections. You are foolish to fight now. Allow Akare to bring you to me. Leave the freak girl. I wait."

"Wait," said Moljar. "The girl stays with me."

There was a long painful pause before the Princess Alhone spoke again. "You have passed the many tests that only a few survive."

"Tests?" said Moljar.

"The Red Moon Games are but testing grounds. The survivors become my warriors here. You are welcome, Moljar. You will be the greatest among them. But this--this girl has signed herself away to the seventh plain by entering here. You had better accept this compromise, Moljar. You have much to gain. Otherwise, both of you will go to the seventh plain together. I would hate to lose you, Moljar. I would make you a Jehlak of my Guards. Forget the girl. Accept. You will be far greater than those who have scorned you. They will be your slaves."

He hesitated, then said, "I am Moljar. I only compromise when it pleases me. The girl stays with me. I care nothing for your plains, whatever they are. Send us to the seventh, the thousandth. It means nothing to Moljar."

The voice mewed merciless laughter. "Your rugged independence has ended, half-breed. You can be overpowered instantly by any one of many of our energy weapons. There is much duelling here, so, by decree, only swords are worn. Otherwise my warriors would soon decimate themselves. But for stubborn aliens we have other methods."

"Is talk and crazy laughter one of them?" said Moljar. "I am not impressed."

He turned. His eyes sought Mahra's. She stood proud and tall, her breasts moving with controlled breathing. Only her eyes held deep, crawling fear. Here was dirty mystery. Alhone and her minions who had watched the Red Moon slaughters--a three-dim projection from her eyrie here at Anghore. He remembered again that all her public appearances had been surrounded by the blue glow. His brains spun. He shook his blood-encrusted hair.

His decision was a natural projection of his own character. He could not have acted otherwise. He moved in a sudden leap sidewise. One arm encircled the startled catman's neck. The Anghorian could have eluded him, and offered battle. But he had not. Apparently he awaited direction from Alhone. He held his dagger to the quivering side. The fur was silky, soft beneath his fingers, inviting violence.

He raised his head and shouted, "Moljar waits. Does the girl stay with me? We will die before we part."

The voice was a petulant whine now. "Fool. You will not die. You are here to serve me. I am not served by corpses."

Akare made a quick, lightning-like jerk from Moljar's grasp. The half-breed sank his dagger in to the hilt, ripped sidewise. Then he leaped away, covering the girl against the wall. A stream of bright thin blood spurted from Akare's pulsing side as he crawled toward the far side of the cavern, mewing with pain.

Mahra's hands clutched Moljar's shoulders as they crouched against the coruscating colors of the veined granite. Her breath came in short, jerking gusts. "For a half-breed," she breathed, "you have honor."

Her hands stiffened, dug into his skin. Moljar's hair bristled on his neck. Intuitively, he raised his dagger, though it was a useless, silly gesture now.

From the far side of the cavern, moving ghost-like from a massive opening, a dense vaporous sphere floated toward him. It eddied and pulsed, and in its center was the dim outline of a human shape encased in plastic, its head helmeted by a faint glowing light.

"A Mistman!" Mahra gasped. "Moljar...."

The half-breed had no time to think. Capture or death would find him moving, though there seemed no hope in it.

A yellow beam of light slashed outward from the man in the sphere. Moljar dropped beneath it. But it caught the girl full. His eyes saw her stiffen into a hard stone mannikin and tumble forward. From his hands and knees he sprang upward like a maddened beast, straight toward the pulsing heart of the Mistman's vaporous shell.

There was one rending burst of pain. Then an explosion that seemed to shatter his brain. Its million floating fragments drifted through blackness.

IV

He was aware of low chanting rhythms, the blood heating throb of unknown instruments. He stirred and found himself wallowing in a bed of incredible depth and softness. Heady scents that twisted his soul with sweet pain floated across his face, and his wild barbarian heart was instinctively repelled by the suggestion of sensual, soft decadence.

When he opened his eyes, oscillating lights bathed him in sense-drunkening sweetness that sickened even as it lured. He turned his head. A boudoir out of the abyss of a drug dream. Black drapes littered with flashing jewels. A black floor that seemed to undulate with sentient life, mosaicked in red veins. Weirdly-plumaged birds with serpent's heads hissed in a golden cage.