Raiders of the Second Moon

"Brown-skinned one!" she cried with a stamp of her shapely little sandalled foot. "I am displeased with the noises of your tongue. I will listen to it no more."

But her eyes gave the provocative lie to her words. This brown-skinned giant with the sunlit hair was very attractive....

The girl was still talking much later, as they walked together along the game-trail. "When my captors were but one day's march from their foul city of Bis the warriors of the city of Konto, through whose fertile valley we had journeyed by night, fell upon the slavers.

"And in the confusion of the attack five of us escaped. We returned toward the valley of Grath, but to avoid the intervening valley where our enemies, the men of Konto, lived, we swung close to the Lake of Uzdon. And the Misty Ones from the Temple of the Skull trailed us. I alone escaped."

Noork lifted the short, broad-bladed sword that swung in its sheath at his belt and let it drop back into place with a satisfying whisper of flexible leather on steel. He looked toward the east where lay the mysterious long lake of the Misty Ones.

"Some day," he said reflectively, "I am going to visit the island of the unseen evil beings who stole away your friends. Perhaps after I have taken you to your brother's hidden village, and from there to your city of Grath...." He smiled.

The girl did not answer. His keen ears, now that he was no longer speaking, caught the scuffing of feet into the jungle behind him. He turned quickly to find the girl had vanished, and with an instinctive reflex of motion he flung himself to one side into the dense wall of the jungle. As it was the unseen club thudded down along his right arm, numbing it so he felt nothing for some time.

One armed as he was temporarily, and with an unseen foe to reckon with, Noork awkwardly swung up into the comparative safety of the trees. Once there, perched in the crotch of a mighty jungle monarch, he peered down at the apparently empty stretch of sunken trail beneath.

At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Apparently there was no stir of life along that leaf-shadowed way. And then he caught a glimpse of blurring shadowy shapes, blotches of cottony mist that blended all too well with the foliage. One of the things from the island in the Lake of Uzdon moved, and he saw briefly the bottom of a foot dirtied with the mud of the trail.

Noork squinted. So the Misty Ones were not entirely invisible. Pain was growing in his numbed arm now, but as it came so came strength. He climbed further out on the great branch to where sticky and overripe fruit hung heavy. With a grin he locked his legs upon the forking of the great limb and filled his arms with fruit.

A barrage of the juicy fruit blanketed the misty shapes. Stains spread and grew. Patchy outlines took on a new color and sharpness. Noork found that he was pelting a half-dozen hooded and robed creatures whose arms and legs numbered the same as his own, and the last remnant of superstitious fear instilled in his bruised brain by the shaggy Vasads vanished.

These Misty Ones were living breathing creatures like himself! They were not gods, or demons, or even the ghostly servants of demons. He strung his bow quickly, the short powerful bow that Gurn had given him, and rained arrows down upon the cowering robed creatures.

And the monsters fled. They fled down the trail or faded away into the jungle. All but one of them. The arrow had pierced a vital portion of this Misty One's body. He fell and moved no more.

A moment later Noork was ripping the stained cloak and hood from the fallen creature, curious to learn what ghastly brute-thing hid beneath them. His lip curled at what he saw.

The Misty One was almost like himself. His skin was not so golden as that of the other men of Zuran, and his forehead was low and retreating in a bestial fashion. Upon his body there was more hair, and his face was made hideous with swollen colored scars that formed an irregular design. He wore a sleeveless tunic of light green and his only weapons were two long knives and a club.

"So," said Noork, "the men of the island prey upon their own kind. And the Temple of Uzdon in the lake is guarded by cowardly warriors like this."

Noork shrugged his shoulders and set off at a mile-devouring pace down the game trail toward the lake where the Temple of the Skull and its unseen guardians lay. Once he stopped at a leaf-choked pool to wash the stains from the dead man's foggy robe.

The jungle was thinning out. Noork's teeth flashed as he lifted the drying fabric of the mantle and donned it.

Ud tasted the scent of a man and sluggishly rolled his bullet head from shoulder to shoulder as he tried to catch sight of his ages-old enemy. For between the hairy quarter-ton beast men of the jungles of Sekk and the golden men of the valley cities who enslaved them there was eternal war.

A growl rumbled deep in the hairy half-man's chest. He could see no enemy and yet the scent grew stronger with every breath.