voices sounded uncommonly close.
'Good grief!' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'A choir,' said Zozimus. 'Perhaps they would like to hire someone to cook for them.'
'Not you, you lecherous old goat!' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Lecherous?' said Zozimus, feigning amazement. 'Me? Pitilkin,
I haven't had a woman for half five hundred years or more.'
'Then now's no time to be changing your habits!' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Yes,' said Guest, setting out toward the voices.
'Let's each of us keep to our habits.'
Zozimus and Sken-Pitilkin followed Guest Gulkan, but Thayer Levant lingered.
'Levant!' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Hurry up!'
'But,' said Levant, diffidently.
'But what?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'But,' said Levant, 'they might be… they might be mermaids.'
'What?!' said Sken-Pitilkin in astonishment.
Then Levant confessed to his superstition. Thayer Levant was from Chi'ash-lan, and the people of those parts have many dire superstitions concerning mermaids. It is said amongst them that these half-human fishes configure themselves as beautiful women, then use the beauty of their voices to lure strangers to a hideous death.
'Levant,' said Sken-Pitilkin firmly, 'there are no such things as mermaids. They are imaginary creatures, like elves, and orcs, and gnomes, and fairies, and leprechauns, and talking animals. And even supposing that there were mermaids, what then?
Would you really expect to find them down here in these tunnels, deep deep deep beneath the earth?'
'By now,' said Levant, evidencing an unusual intellectual belligerence, 'we may well be deep deep deep beneath the sea, for there is no saying where these tunnels have taken us. So. So maybe they're mermaids, and maybe they'll eat us.'
'Well,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'Guest Gulkan lately suggested eating you, so if you've got to be eaten by someone it might as well be by mermaids. Come on!'
After considerable further hesitation, Thayer Levant at last consented to follow the others. With Guest Gulkan leaded, they braved their way into a huge chamber where there arose a kind of waterless fountain which was adorned with the warm and breathing bodies of a thousand women. Up, up rose this fountain, in tier upon tier, crowded with nubile beauty.
For once, Guest Gulkan was quite lost for words. He just stood there and gaped. As he stood there, a woman danced forth from the company of her peers, positively floating through the air as she tranced toward him. She beckoned to him, and he stepped forward, as if in a dream.
Abruptly -
The women vanished.
The women vanished with a clangor of metal and a burst of shuddering laughter. Immediately, the adventurers realized they were confronted by (and more than partially surrounded by) a huge heaped-up conglomeration of steel, a towering contraption of whispering tubes and slowly grinding tentacles, of rotating disks and spindling toroidal columns, of glowing screens and phosphorescent feelers, of spiked antennae and gleaming chelae.
This thing of coiled and coiling metal sat there in a huge and brooding inertia, sat there with all the mighty weight of an ink-black thundercloud pregnant with hailstones the size of a turtle, sat there in predatory poise. There was no telling what or where its eyes might be, yet the thing saw the travelers, clearly, and these four mortals were the focus of its vulturing regard.
Others had been thus focused upon beforehand, as was proved by the large number of corpses which lay scattered in immethodical disorder in and about the monster's great colony of threats. The bodies of close to fifty people were thus scattered, and, to judge by what was left of them, they had not died pleasantly.
'I told you!' said Levant fearfully, thinking himself doomed to become another such corpse.
'You told us of mermaids,' said Sken-Pitilkin, with a pedantic emphasis which spoke of long years of pedagogical engagement. 'But this is scarcely a mermaid! I think this thing to be an octopus, or a very kraken.'
So spoke Sken-Pitilkin, and he spoke harshly, for he was more than half-inclined to blame Thayer Levant for their present predicament. For, if Levant had not spoken his utter nonsense about mermaids, Sken-Pitilkin might have given more serious consideration to the possible source of those womanly voices, and might have realized that the unlikeliness of finding a female choir so deep underground most surely spoke of deception and danger.
Do not therefore blame the adventurers' predicament upon any presumed defect of the wizard Sken-Pitilkin! recognize Sken-Pitilkin for what he was, an uncommonly sagacious and hypercapable wizard of Skatzabratzumon! And put the blame for the travelers' downfall firmly where it belongs – upon the back of the superstitious Thayer Levant!
'I do not think this is a kraken,' said Guest, at last recovering his voice. 'I think it is a – '
'Whatever it is,' said Zozimus, 'suppose we quietly back out of here.'
Then Zozimus matched action to suggestion. But a lithe tentacle, green in color and slick in its glistening, promptly whipped around his ankles and held him fast. It held him with a strength which bruised his flesh and almost broke his bones.
'It has me!' said Zozimus.
'Then – nobody move,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Guest! Don't move!'
'I'm not moving,' said Guest, who was still staring at the looming monstrosity which confronted them.
The thing was huge. Guest got giddy just looking at it.
Obviously it would be quite impossible to hack it to pieces with his sword. Confronted by such invincible strength, Guest Gulkan was possessed by a sense of angry frustration. He was a Yarglat barbarian! Therefore, hacking things to pieces was a part of his birthright! An essential part of his cultural heritage!
Throughout his childhood, the Weaponmaster had lived with the certainty that if he was brawny enough and quick enough on his feet, then he could hack into bloody pieces anyone and everyone who was intemperate enough to oppose his will. But there would be no such hacking here in Untunchilamon's underworld. Consequently, Guest wished most heartily that he was back in Tameran, back on the flatlands of the Collosnon Empire, sending out his scouts and manoeuvering his cavalry; and, in this time of peril, Guest felt not so much fear as, rather, a sickening sense of homesickness.
Beset by such homesickness, the Yarglat barbarian at last acknowledged that the had been in error when he had wilfully embroiled himself in the affairs of wizards, demons and gods. But it was too late to turn back!
Then, realizing he was trapped, irrevocably entangled in matters far beyond his competence, Guest Gulkan grew angry, so angry that he challenged the looming monster in front of him, challenged it as if it were a paltry slave, and he a victorious conqueror with his boot on its neck.
'Who are you?' said Guest, with a lifetime of practiced self-assertion pouring itself into the challenge.
'I am the therapist Schoptomov,' said the monster, answering Guest Gulkan in his native Eparget. 'Who are you? Who are you, and what are you doing here?' Guest Gulkan cleared his throat, as if in preparation for explanation. Sken-Pitilkin covertly stepped on his foot. The Weaponmaster took the hint, and was silent.
'We're, ah, tourists,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Tourists?' said the therapist doubtfully.
'Yes,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'We've come to see the, ah, the dragons, Untunchilamon is very famous for its dragons, is that not the case?'
'Where are you from?' said the therapist, disregarding the question of dragons.
'From Chi'ash-lan,' said Sken-Pitilkin, hoping at least to puzzle the monstrosity.
'Ah,' said the therapist. 'Chi'ash-lan. I have heard of that place. They feed, I am told, on the eyes of the dog.'
'You are uncommonly well-informed,' said Sken-Pitilkin, astoundingly astonished to find the therapist so well- versed in the ways of such a far and distant land.
By contrast, Guest Gulkan in his ignorance thought the therapist to be in error; for Guest in his confusion
