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That was what it was, a structure of bones thinly wrapped in muscles and bearing bags which must be the stomach, intestines, liver, heart, pancreas, spleen, and whatever other organs were necessary for its life. The wind whistled through the ribs, pelvis, and chest-bones. And the organs, bags attached to the bones, were swinging with the thing's stride.
The head was vaguely human-shaped, and it too was bone thinly sheathed in muscle naked to the air.
There was no hair—at least, they couldn't see any. But then the darkness and their terror made them unable to see clearly. Where the eyes should have been were two black holes; it had to have eyes, but at this distance the holes seemed to be empty.
Phemropit began swiveling, its left track moving faster than its right, the middle track elevated.
Suddenly, the thin beam lanced out, and it drilled a hole in the Brobdingnagian left foot of the monster.
There was a scream that deafened Deyv, and the thing stopped. Phemropit turned to the left, the ray stabbing out, and the two feet were sliced in half horizontally.
Blood spurted out, soaking the ground around it, some gushing out almost to Phemropit's "nose."
And the thing began to topple.
Luckily, it fell backward. Otherwise, its upper body would have struck Phemropit and those sitting around it. The stone-metal creature would have been undamaged, but Sloosh and the others might have been crushed. Or they might have been spared. There was plenty of empty space within that enormous skeleton.
It struck with a crash like a dozen large trees falling at once. Some organs were torn from the bones. The lungs didn't come loose, but they ruptured. And the spinal cord was shattered just above the shoulder bones.
The thing lay on its back, staring upward.
Sloosh got down from Phemropit's back and with a firefly in his hand led it to the thing's head. If he had thought that the coup de grace was needed, he changed his mind. The monster would never again trouble anybody, including itself.
"Most curious," the plant-man said. "I can't believe that it would occur naturally. Surely, it's descended from something that the ancients made in their laboratories. But why would they?"
He tried to cut out a section of the muscles wrapped around the ringer bones. After he'd failed to make any impression with the edge of a stone tomahawk, he used his great metal axe. But he had no more success with the metal than with the flint.
"Hmmm. It's got veins and arteries, of a sort, but it's not really muscular tissue. It looks like bands of thin film of some material I'm not familiar with. It's extremely hard, yet it has to be supple. And its strength must be many times that of genuine muscle. It would have to be to move such a gigantic and heavy body."
Deyv called Sloosh's attention to the two animals. They were sniffing at the blood from the severed feet but refusing to lick it. Deyv got down to smell it, too, and he wrinkled his nose.
"It stinks of fish-oil, but it also has an odor that I can't identify."
"Unfortunately, I can't help you, since I have no sense of smell," Sloosh said.
Vana pointed out that the beetles and ants that should have been swarming over the blood and the carcass were absent.
"It's poisonous," Sloosh said. "Well, I would love to stay here and dissect this thing, but I lack the tools for that."
Nevertheless, they were too shaken to push on immediately. They walked around the carcass, staring at it. After a while they saw the muscle-film begin to melt. The stuff dripped down from the bones and formed pools of red liquid. Then the pools began to evaporate.
It took much longer for the organs to melt, but they did. Eventually, all that was left was a skeleton that looked as if it had been picked clean by scavengers. Deyv hesitated about touching even this, but he finally went into the apish skull. It was big enough to house several human families. Now that the eyes, brain, and other organs had disappeared, the insects had lost their fear. Ants, beetles, and spiders crawled around the interior of the skull. Presently, a huge scout of a bee swarm explored the skull, and then it flew off. Sometime later it came back, leading a horde of its fellows. They set to work at once covering the eyeholes and the bottom with a gelatinlike substance that quickly hardened. In time, the skull would contain enough honey to feed a whole village for many sleep-times.
The travelers decided to push on. They kept to the shoreline highway, and when they came to a junction,
Feersh and Jowanarr listened to the signal-poles. The Dark Beast and the bright skies alternated.
Phemropit's riders came to an area where the skeletal monster had not been, not for some time at least, and they encountered sentients again. These gave the travelers little trouble, which caused Sloosh to congratulate himself on having insisted on getting "food" for Phemropit.
They came to a place where the grass, bushes, and trees were pale and dry with approaching death. Yet there had been no dearth of rain.
Sloosh buzzed satisfaction. "The jungle is bleached, not from disease or drought but from lack of nourishment. The jewels have put out their long roots and are sucking up the minerals. We are very close to the edge of The Wasteland!"
A short time later, they came aropnd the bend of a bay, and they were dazzled by The Jeweled
Wasteland, The Shining House of Countless Chambers, The Bright Abomination. The light from the sky reflected from an unimaginable number of faceted translucent stones. Those on the edge were as tiny as melon seeds. Others were as small as fingertips, as large as a man's head, as huge as the skull of the bony monster dead on the road behind them. They covered the ground completely. They formed great masses, hills, columns, stalagmites, weird beautiful figures that looked beast-like or had vaguely human faces. The piles formed valleys, ravines, canyons, and avenues that would sometimes run straight for a mile. Water had collected in small and large pools from a recent rain. Here and there were piles of stones which had been broken off from the main growths by severe earthquakes.
The swarming life of the jungle and the seashore stopped at the edge of The Wasteland. No birds sang, no monkeys chattered, no insects buzzed there.
Sloosh looked at the road, which ended abruptly, buried under the shining stony growths.
"I can't imagine The Shemibob letting this get out of control," he said. "I wonder why she has?"
No one had an answer. They set up camp by expanding the vessel of the ancients, and they began the work of storing up food. The hunting and fishing and the smoking of meat and fish occupied them for twelve sleep-times. During this time, some of them made short explorations into The Wasteland. They collected loose stones which Feersh said could be useful.
After the thirteenth sleep, they ate breakfast and all except Deyv and the animals got onto Phemropit's back. Deyv walked ahead a quarter of a mile as a scout. His duty was not so much to warn of living dangers, which they probably wouldn't encounter as yet, as it was to look for routes broad enough for
Phemropit to pass through.
The Beast came and went twice, and they traveled toward the stronghold of The Shemibob in a circuitous ma
Four times they came upon oases, areas about a mile square on which the stones could not grow. These held a rich soil on which were fruit-bearing trees and nut-bearing bushes. There were some songbirds and small animals here. The latter kept the birds from getting too numerous, and their own population was kept down by a periodic disease that killed all but a tenth of them.