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Avarjam shot an arrow into the darkness above them. The string thrummed, and then there was a thudding noise. The arrow did not clatter on the floor ahead of them.
"You hit something," Ishmael said, wondering if it was Pamkamshi. Perhaps the arrow had driven into a man who was only unconscious, not dead. But he could not help that. The safety of the greater number and of the mission was paramount.
"He's lower than he was," Ishmael said, and then there was a loud thump ahead of them. They hurried forward and saw in the torchlight the body of Pamkamshi. His bones were broken and his flesh burst open. But it was not the fall that had killed him. Around his neck was a broad purplish mark, and his eyes bulged out and his tongue protruded. Something had eaten his scalp and ears and part of his nose.
"Everybody put one hand up by their necks and keep them there until I say to do otherwise," Ishmael said.
"What did the arrow hit?" Namalee said.
She looked up and yelled, forgetting Ishmael's orders to keep quiet, and jumped back. They looked too, and they jumped away, opening out.
The creature that fell onto the stone floor by Pamkamshi was pancake-shaped and bore a great suction pad on its back and on the other side a coil of purplish hue by a great mouth with many small teeth. The arrow had run half its length through it and probably pi
The beast had dropped its long tentacle nooselike around the neck of Pamkamshi and snatched him into the upper darkness. Whether it had selected the man because he was being unobserved by the others or whether it was by accident, Ishmael did not know. But he suspected that the beast possessed some organs of perceptions not apparent to those unfamiliar with the creature.
He also suspected that the ceiling was crowded with the beasts and that he and his band were in deadly peril. If this was true, however, something was preventing the beasts from making a mass attack. Did there exist among them, as he suspected there did among the creatures of the room they had just quitted, a communal mind? Or, if not a mind, some sort of common nervous system? And this allotted to each in its turn a chance to try for a victim? Or did the hypothesized common agreement insist that any beast could attack when it was safe for one to do so? And what was the safety rule? That one of the prey should be unobserved momentarily by his fellows?
If this was the rule, then the creatures were vulnerable in some respect; otherwise they would not care whether or not the intended victim was isolated from his group.
Ishmael leaned over the thing to study the effects of the arrow. A pale green fluid had spread out from the wound, which was centered on a lump in the body about the size and shape of an ostrich egg. Ishmael thought that this could be one of its vital organs.
There were about fifty of the eggish lumps in the body. The rest was apparently occupied by little but fatty tissue and a circulatory system, though this was only his guess.
Ishmael straightened up and signaled that they should proceed. They all kept one hand by their necks, and they kept glancing upward, as if they expected to see a purplish tentacle drop into the illuminated world of the torches.
After walking sixty paces, Ishmael stopped them again and again Karkri tossed a torch upward. The light flared briefly on a dozen tentacles uncoiling slowly from the darkness above.
Ishmael had no idea of what was causing this concerted action now. Perhaps the beasts, in, whatever form of communication they used, had conferred and decided that individual action was a failure. Or perhaps the death of one resulted in triggering an instinct which activated them to a communal effort.
Ishmael gave an order, and the band ran forward. They stayed, together, however, and each kept a hand by his neck. They had not gone forty steps before a dozen tentacles shot like frogs' tongues down from the blackness. Each dropped around a neck and its neighboring hand and tightened.
Namalee was one of those caught.
Ishmael spun around at the cries of those seized. He barked an order to the archers to crouch close to the floor, and to fire upward at random as best they could in this position. They were safer from attack now than if they had been standing up. And they sent shaft after shaft into the upper darkness.
Ishmael rammed the torch against the tentacle, and it released the man and snapped upward and out of sight. The odor of burned flesh trailed from it as smoke from a rocket.
Ishmael leaped upward, grabbing the slimy, ropy limb that was hauling Namalee upward. His weight pulled them both down, and with his other hand he passed the surface of the torch along the tentacle. It uncoiled and dropped them both on the stone floor.
By then the othe torch-bearers were burning the tentacles, and these uncoiled and withdrew.
Something heavy struck the floor ahead of them. After reorganizing, they proceeded ahead and shortly their lights flickered on a dead beast. An arrow had pierced one of the lumpy organs.
Torch men stood on the periphery of the group and waved the brands wildly. A single torchman in the center of the group waved his brand. Ishmael hoped by this positioning of the torches to discourage the beasts. Within forty yards they saw the wall of the chamber and a small square opening. They ran into it, though Ishmael would have liked to have gone slowly and cautiously. The builders of this place may have anticipated that those who ran the gantlet of the tentacles would dive headlong into this entrance as a mouse goes into a hole when the cat is after it.
But there was, by then, no appealing to the better sense of the group.
Their torches showed them a corridor that curved to the right. It was wide enough for two to go abreast and the ceiling was two men high. It continued to curve to the right for about eighty paces and then curved to the left. After about a hundred paces, they came to a stairway cut out of stone. This was so narrow that they would have to go in single file. The ascent was very steep, and the walls curved to the right.
Ishmael led the way, holding a torch in one hand and a spear in the other. As he ascended, he wondered how far these chambers of horrors extended. It was possible that they went on and on and finally ended in a blank wall or in some trap which no one could possibly escape. But he did not see how the Booragangahns could afford to stock these rooms with very many guardians. The beasts could not subsist on trespassers alone. It was doubtful that anybody had penetrated into this area since the chambers had been carved, To keep the guardians alive, the Booragangahns had to feed them. And even if the beasts existed most of the time in a dormant state, they still had to be fed from time to time. From the viewpoint of economy alone, the beasts had to be limited in number.
Presently the narrow stairway straightened out. Ishmael kept on climbing and, when he had counted three hundred, he stopped.
Above was the top of the stairs. And on it squatted a huge stone figure.
It was gray and shaped something like a tortoise with a frog's head and a badger's legs. The highest point, the crest of the tortoise shell, was about four feet from the floor. It quivered with the eternal shaking of the rock, and this motion gave it a semblance of life.
The eyes were as gray and stonelike as the rest of the body.
But when Ishmael got close enough to look into one of the eyes, he thought he saw it swivel within the eye socket.
His nerves were slipping their moorings, he thought, and he stepped into the hall which the figure guarded.
The stone head turned with a creaking.