Iced On Aran Read Online Free PDF Page B

gods. If men cannot climb them and so proceed into awful, mist-shrouded Leng, likewise no thing of Leng is likely to attempt the feat in reverse. But between the foot of the gray range and Inquanok, there in the misty twilight valleys and foothills where they slope at first greenly, then stonily oceanward—with the onyx quarries of Inquanok on every hand and farms scattered sparsely here and there about—this was the region of the terror. This was where it had started, as if seeping slowly out of Leng and across the gray peaks, until recently it had reached Urg and crossed into Inquanok itself.
    As for what “it” was: there was no lack of clues, but paradoxically no jot of evidence to point to any known predator. It was, indeed, the Unknown.

    The thing took its victims in darkness. Here the young, favored daughter of a farmer, carried off soundlessly from her bed and never more seen alive; there the young son of a quarrier, snatched from some makeshift shack at the rim of one of the deep quarries and bundled away in the night. A Shantak, perhaps? But how could so vast a creature possibly sneak down against the stars and the moon unseen and enter into a farmhouse or quarrier’s shack? Low stone houses and wooden shacks do not have doors or windows sizeable enough to accommodate Shantaks, not without considerable structural damage!
    What about Lengites, the horned, wide-mouthed, slant-eyed almost-humans known to inhabit or infest Leng? Or even a Lengite-Shantak collaboration? The Lengites were said to tame and even occasionally ride the hippocephalic Shantak; so couldn’t one of those squat, cloven-hooved horrors be the raider? Well possible, but unlikely. The men of Inquanok are wont to make slaves of (or do much worse things to) serious wrongdoers of whatever race; in the present circumstances, only let them sniff an almost-human in the vicinity … he’d be strung up at once, and almost certainly without trial.
    Night-gaunts might seem the best bet, but were they really? There was now a body of evidence to show that they were not the monsters previously supposed; quite apart from which they had no faces, hence no mouths, ergo no “appetites” as such. And on that last note they were definitely out, as were Shantaks and almost-humans. Not that these last-mentioned had no feeding habits; indeed they did, and pretty awful ones at that. But the unknown thing’s appetite was such as to leave other messy eaters agog, possibly even turned to jelly.
For Augeren, who or whatever he was, ate only bone marrow!
    â€œBone marrow!” said Hero, as if reading Eldin’s thought. “Brrrr! To have the juices sucked out of your very bones!”
    Eldin felt a shudder go up his spine. “Enough of the brrrs ,” he pleaded. “You’ve got me at it now! And anyway that last one of yours was over the top—it had four ‘r’s.” He jumped down from his branch, faced his younger companion across the sputtering fire.
    The difference in their ages would be maybe fifteen years, perhaps a little more. Eldin could be anything between forty-five and fifty years of age—hardly an old lad—and Hero at thirty was a deal more than a mere teenager. Both of them were prone to gross exaggeration, however, especially with regard to each other. Hero needled at Eldin’s maturity as if he were well into advanced senility, and the Wanderer carped at Hero’s comparative youth for all the world as if he were still in diapers! To any outsider their constant jibing and mutually acid sense of humor would appear most disconcerting. But it was their way; it meant nothing; they loved each other better than brothers.
    In appearance:
    Eldin had a scarred, bearded, quite unhandsome and yet not unattractive face which housed surprisingly clear blue eyes. Stocky and heavy, but somehow gangly to boot, there was something almost apish about him; yet his every move and gesture (when