Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"It looks as if it will have to be the hole," said Guest, with great reluctance. "Which of us is the bravest? Let the bravest prove himself, and lead the way!"

Upon which Pelagius Zozimus declared that Guest himself was the bravest. But Guest disputed this.

"No," said Guest, "it is my noble servant Thayer Levant who is the bravest. Lead on, Levant!"

On being poked with Guest's sword, Levant conceded that perhaps he was brave. And he crawled into the hole.

Then screamed.

"What is it?" said Guest, in great alarm, as Levant backed out of the hole.

"A centipede!" said Levant, in panic. "A huge centipede, bigger than you are!"Guest was greatly alarmed, at least until he realized that Levant was grinning.

"Enough of your jokes!" said Guest, who was in no mood for being trifled with. "Get into that hole before I kick you!"

Whereupon Levant led the way into the depths, with Guest Gulkan following him, and Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus crawling along after them.

It would be tedious to recount in detail the long wanderings of the adventurers in the complex and seemingly never-ending underworld which they then entered. Tunnels led to tunnels in unceasing succession, until these four wanderers felt like insects lost in a monstrous maze constructed by a zealous child of over- intellectual disposition.

The tunnels were warm and cold by turns. Some were ice-cold in consequence of the actions of noisy machines busy with the production of huge blocks of ice. By drinking the melt water from such ice, the heroes kept themselves from dying of thirst; but they had nothing to eat, and so grew uncommonly hungry. At the peak of his hunger, Guest proposed that they eat the unfortunate Thayer Levant, and Sken-Pitilkin was not at all sure that he was joking.

"Are you serious?" said Sken-Pitilkin.

"Serious?" said Guest. "About what?"

"About eating Levant. You were talking about it only a moment ago."

"Was I?" said Guest. "I might have been talking about Levant, but I certainly wasn't thinking about him."

"Then of what were you thinking?" said Sken-Pitilkin.

"Of women," said Guest.

As if in direct response to this declaration, there came the sound of women singing. Their clear and beautiful 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!