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voice rasped or the First Lieutenant of a seventy-four.
At the top of the pyramid I lifted the Krozair longsword and I smote against the roof, savage blows,
eight of them, eight intemperate smashes against the prominent knob of polished jet over my head.
The echoes of those vicious blows rang and rattled away along the stone biers.
And the corpses all rose up.
Every corpse rose, and from those ghastly mouths a shrill and ghoulish screaming shattered against our
nerves. Every corpse rose up, screaming, and rushed away, ran blindly from the Hall of Ghouls.
They poured in a blasphemous rout through the two side openings to the Hall. We were all gathered in
the inner end of the arm, that between the two side passages and the center of the mausoleum complex.
The floor moved.
The floor revolved.
The ends of the side passages and the anteroom at our backs slid swiftly sideways going
widdershins! and the floor on which we stood, petrified, turned and carried us around to face into the
mysterious heart of the mausoleum.
A few of the mercenaries at last broke. They were not paktuns. With shrieks of fear they raced madly
for the narrowing slot of yellow light, leaping off the revolving floor, screaming, tearing desperately away,
rushing madly anywhere to escape the horrors of this place.
We who were left revolved with the Hall of Ghouls, swinging in to face whatever it was that had caused
the Undead to rise in panic and flee.
Chapter Seventeen
Out from the Jaws of Death
We never again saw any of those mercenaries who had fled not one, ever.
What we expected to see, Opaz alone knows. I do not.
What we did see was a solid wall of darkness. The floor revolved one hundred and eighty degrees, and
halted with a shuddering lurch, as though we were suspended by chains over a fathomless gulf. The
blackness smote our eyes. The yellow light within the Hall of Ghouls continued; but it remained thin and
pale. The stone slabs lay empty of corpses. The detritus on the floor crackled underfoot as we moved.
Cautiously, we advanced toward that ebon wall, and it resisted, and we could make no impression on its
immaterial substance.
The tall rows of empty biers frowned down. The light smoked somber upon us, and the silence stunned
us.
Quienyin said, The walls. The stone slabs. I think
You are right, Master Quienyin! Tyfar rushed to the nearest wall and put his foot against the bottom
slab. With a slow remorseless pressure his foot was pushed along the floor.
The walls! shrieked Ariane. They are closing in upon us!
Steadily, with small screeching sounds as of trapped animals, the walls closed one upon the other. The
wall of blackness ahead narrowed.
Now we could see that there was a finger-wide gap between wall and floor. And then the full diabolical
nature of these stone jaws was borne in on us.
The stone slabs! shouted Ariane, and she tore her hair wildly, staggering. See they are not
opposite!
It was true. The stone slabs in one wall were set at a higher level than in the opposite wall. When they
met, the stone juttings would pass between one another. Useless to jump up and cower in a stone slot so
recently vacated by a corpse. The opposite stone slab would crush into that slot and...
We looked about frenziedly for a way out. These are the Kaochun, Quienyin informed us, although
few of us were in a condition to appreciate the knowledge. The Jaws of Death.
These Kaochun, these Death Jaws, were going to squash us flatter than an ant under a boot heel if we
did not quickly discover the answer. I saw the rock chippings fallen from the stones.
Without shouting, trusting to the others to see what I was up to and follow my lead, I picked up and
discarded the chunks until I found a solid wedge-shaped piece. This I pushed point first under that
finger-wide slot between wall and floor. I kicked it in savagely. The two hyr-paktun twins were the first
to see and copy. Soon we were all ramming wedges under the walls as hard as we could. Some ground
to powder, others slipped. But some held.
The chittering noise as of trapped animals faltered, and strengthened as wedges crumbled, and then
dwindled again as we went ruthlessly along ramming wedges in as fast and as hard as we could.
The walls shuddered. A thin high whine began.
The walls trembled.
Dust blew suddenly in a cloud from the discarded corpse wrappings. We flailed our arms, heads and
shoulders smothered in the gritty dust. We choked and coughed. But the walls did not move in. The
tremble shuddered to a stillness, the dust fell away, and the walls stopped.
That high shrilling whine passed away above the audible threshold. We shook, suddenly, each one
feeling the pain drilling into his ears.
Slowly, as an iris parts, the wall of blackness opened before us.
When the harsh actinic white light rushed in I saw that we stood in a slot between the stilled walls. There
was space left for us only to walk out in single file, so narrow had been our confinement and so narrow
our separation from death.
Prince Tyfar was the first to march out.
Head up, sword in his fist, he stomped out onto a black marble floor and into the white light. He
stopped. As we crowded out he gasped: By all the Names!
Difficult to describe this Mausoleum of the Moder, so many impressions crowded in like a kaleidoscope.
A place of wonder, of awe, and of horror...
The chamber stretched about us, full four hundred paces in diameter. The roof rippled oddly, hung with
black insubstantiality, ever-shifting so that it was impossible to estimate the height. And that height
appeared to waver and alter and to press up and down.
Positioned some fifty paces in from the walls around the chamber stood fire-crystal tanks, each with a
girth of at least twenty paces. In each tank coiled and writhed a monster from nightmare, tentacled
octopus-like shapes that slimed and hissed and beckoned obscenely. They would have put the shudders
up the toughest of backbones.
Deb-Lu- Quienyin started to talk at once, and I guessed he sought to hold our tattered nerves together.
We are clearly below ground level here, and I imagine this to be the heart of the Moder
You said there were nine zones and this is the eighth
True. But the ninth zone is not for normal men.
We walked slowly forward between two of the tanks. We did not look again at the gruesome denizens.
We all sensed that Quienyin spoke the truth and here was what we had come for all of us, that is,
except the Wizard of Loh... And myself.
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