Witchlord tripped, and went down. He fell heavily, winding himself. Guest, conscious of the cries of the guards who were in hot pursuit, grabbed his father. The cavern was lit by the unearthly green phosphorescence from overhead, but here and there were patches of darkness. Guest dragged his father toward the nearest such patch, not knowing whether it was a maw or a womb.
It proved to be a pocket of rock-shadowed mud. Cold mud. Wet mud. Slickery mud which absorbed Guest and his father as they plunged into it, going in up to their waists, and going in just in time – for moments later a good two dozen of the Mutilator's guards came pounding into the cavern.
As the guards raced into the cavern, Guest noticed the chip of ever-ice in the ring on his hand was gleaming in the darkness, vibrant with its own inner light. Hastily, he plunged it under the mud.
The guards went pelting past. One slithered, slid, then went sprawling with a belly-flop. One of his fellows kicked him, swearing in fear, rage and panic. Green light slick-sliced from the guards' swords, making Guest uncomfortably aware of the fact that his own weapons were as yet unavailable for his use, since they were firmly attached to his swordbelt. In his hand, he still had the little knife he had won from Aldarch the Third, but he doubted the wisdom of cutting anything free while he was waist- deep in mud, for he might loose his steel to the slime.
Abruptly, the leading guard halted.
Then cried out. Guest thought he had been discovered.
A moment later, with a roar, a thing with a great many tentacles lunged from the mud and seized the guard who had halted and shouted. The guard screamed, then screamed no more, for a tentacle forced its way down his throat. Even as Guest watched, aghast, the tentacle abrupted through the guard's back.
The guard thrashed in spasms. Then the monster of the murk tossed him to one side. He hit the wall with a sick glap-slup of bursting organs, then folded up in a crumpled heap on the mud of the cavern floor.
And while all this was going on, the murkbeast had simultaneously grabbed most of the other guards, and was variously squeezing them, crushing them, waving them about, or munching them down to satisfy its appetite.
As far as Guest could make out by the dim green phosphorescent light from the roof of the cave, the murkbeast had no feet, no legs, no means of perambulation. Rather, it appeared to be rooted in the muck on a thick stalk. It made him think of a toad which had been grafted onto a sea anemone and equipped with the tentacles of an octopus (tentacles dreadfully reminiscent of those of the therapist Schoptomov).
While Guest was still staring in fascinated horror, the murkbeast finished its feast.
Then the cavern was still, but for the noisy vomiting of a cowering survivor, and the groaning of a man a man who had been crushed but uneaten.
When the survivor had finished vomiting, he started crying, then exited from the cavern, exiting from this scene of living nightmare. But no such easy retreat was available to Witchlord and Weaponmaster. For if they retreated, they would run into Aldarch the Third; and, all things being equal, Guest would far rather take his chances with the murkbeast.
The guard who had been crushed was still groaning. As if annoyed by the noise he was making, the murkbeast swatted him with a tentacle. He screamed, and thrashed, and was slapped again.
Several times. Guest heard the crunch of breaking bones, a crunch like that of rock being quarried. Again, a tentacle slapped living flesh, making a sound like a canoe grounding itself on a coral reef.
And, thus slapped, the man screamed no more. Rather, he panted, his breath a matter of heaving gasps, a strenuous fighting. He was fighting for his life, and he was losing. Guest was reminded of a dying man he had once encountered on the stairs in the mainrock Pinnacle. That had been on a night of battle, the night on which Witchlord and Weaponmaster had wrested control of Alozay from Banker Sod. Guest had encountered a dying man, had paused to pity him, then – compelled by the necessities of war – had passed on. Ever since then, he had not once thought of that man. But now he remembered.
Half-thinking to help or comfort the man, Guest started from the muddy pit in which he was mired. But his father pulled him back.
'Wait,' said the Witchlord. 'Guards may come in search of their dead.'
'We'd hear them,' said Guest.
'Not if they were quiet,' said his father. 'Not while our friend out there is making such a racket.'
So Guest, acknowledging the truth of this, subsided into the pit.
He waited.
At length, Lord Onosh grunted, the loudness of his grunt emphasizing the silence in the cavern – for the man who had so recently been dying was now dead.
'Time for us to be moving,' said the Witchlord.
But by this time, Guest was in no mood to be moving. The wait had served to sap his courage, for the obvious and irrevocable truth of the green-glowering depths was that the Weaponmaster was way out of his depth. He was not equipped to wage war on a murkbeast – and that creature was the very first of the dangers encountered in those depths!
In this cold, wet, muddy place, there was nothing which was familiar. Guest had precious little to pad him against the cold, and was afforded no padding of habit or familiarity which could protect him against the full knowledge of the fragility of his own vulnerability. This was an alien place, a place which by no stretch of the imagination could be considered home, and it made him conscious of the pain, the death, the agony which was implicit in the configuration of his flesh and bones. Guest remembered squatting on a beach by night on the Chameleon's Tongue, on the shores of Argan, convinced that the Great Mink was on the loose in the night. He remembered comforting himself with his own familiar, personal, private smell. The gesture had served. But no such comfort would avail him here. For there was no denying that a monster waited in the dark, a murkbeast built for the rending of men.
'It will eat us,' said Guest, trying to keep the fear from his voice.
'It has left one uneaten,' said Lord Onosh, 'therefore it has fed sufficiently. Come. Have you a knife?'
'Take this,' said Guest, passing his father the weapon he had won from the Mutilator. 'But be tender of the point.'
'The edge will serve,' said his father, starting to saw at the fastenings which bound his weapons to his swordbelt.
Then Lord Onosh passed the knife back to his son, who used it to liberate his own weapons. They were well-made and serviceable, though the possession of sword, knives, throwing stars, eye- gouging handscrews, darning needles and packets of pepper gave Guest no confidence in the face of the murkbeast. It did not look to be the kind of creature which would take much notice of weapons. So thinking, Guest discarded one of his knives, and used the buckle-down sheath thus freed as a repository for the blade which he had stolen from the Mutilator.
'You threw away a knife!' said his father, in tones of accusation.
'So I did,' said Guest. 'And it is a crime, yes, but I would do it again, and, what's more, I have done worst in the past and will do worse again in the future.'Guest spoke with some heat, for fear was converting itself to anger. His fear was all of the murkbeast.
Though the murkbeast had been initially hidden in the mud, it had made no move to withdraw to that shelter. Its stalk was severely distended, suggesting that its glutting of itself had made such withdrawal a physical impossibility. Perhaps it would lie there for days, quiescent, digesting, its sprawled tentacles lying heedless in the muck.
Perhaps.
And then again…
'I'll go first,' said Lord Onosh, when his son made no move to venture forward.
Then the Witchlord matched action to his words. Guest watched as his father stepped forward, moving carefully, keeping close to the walls of the cavern. The green light from above shone on the Witchlord's gouged and slanting forehead, lit his high Yarglat-bred cheekbones with a fever sheen, and emphasised the darkness of the shadows which pooled in the bigness of his ears. Moving thus, Lord Onosh looked more like a creature from myth than a man; and Guest felt fragile, incompetent and childish by comparison.
So the Witchlord ventured forward. He drew level with the murkbeast.
And -
And took another step.
And abruptly lurched, and fell.
