Conan Of The Isles

Counting its eight writhing arms, it was as big as a house. First came the tentacles, as long as the Red Lion and as thick at their bases as the trunks of century-old trees. They swept writhing out, seized boulders in their sucker grip, and drew the rest of the monster after them. The mouth with its beak was hidden from view beneath the circle of arms.

After the tentacles came the head with its two platter-sized eyes, mounted side by side above the bases of the forward tenacles. These eyes had slit pupils, like those of a cat, but the slits were horizontal instead of vertical. Their cold, lidless stare was one of the most unnerving that Conan had ever faced.

Behind the head came the bloated, baglike,, limbless body, as big as one of the colossal wine vats in King Ario-stro's cellars. Waves of changing color chased one another over the mottled mass: white, pink, russet., maroon, and black.

Conan stood motionless, debating what to do. He dared not flee down the broken incline at his back, because he would have to go slowly and would have his hands occupied and his back turned to the pursuing, angry monster. Conan guessed that it could not clearly discern him as long as he stood still. But if he moved, the motion would instantly draw the attention of the kraken. On the other hand, he could not remain where he was, for the monster's present course would carry it close to him. As the octopus hunched and edged its way forward, one or another of the lashing tentacles was soon bound to encounter Conan's body.

Choosing the simplest way of escape, Conan sprang upwards to get above the octopus. He hoped to circumvent it entirely and reach the upper slope beyond the cave before it sensed his location.

But Conan forgot that he was now clearly silhouetted as a black, moving object against the rippling, silvery plane of the sunlit surface above. Even as he swam above the brute, two questing tentacles reared up and closed crushingly about him - one about his waist and the other about his left foot. In that viselike grip he was helpless. In a few heartbeats, the tentacles would draw him down to the clashing beak...

Again Conan thrust the point of his blade against the thick, rubbery skin of a tentacle and pierced it. But the monster was not very sensitive to pain. Such was its vitality that he could have hacked through half its tentacles before seriously weakening it, and then it would have merely withdrawn to regrow its mutilated Umbs. Conan felt the surge of titanic muscles in the crushing grip that held him helpless as, with inexorable force, the kraken drew him down toward its beaked mouth ...

Then a bolt of black lightning struck and snapped through one of the tentacles holding him.

The dark shape had flashed out of dimness like a vast projectile. One snap of the triple rows of teeth had chopped a foot-long section out of one of the tentacles. The severed end uncoiled from Conan's midsection and drifted down to the ocean floor, flopping and writhing like a bisected worm.

The new arrival was a colossal shark, with a thick, tapering body over thirty feet in length. Dark slate-gray above, creamy white below, it banked and curved at the end of its lunge. For an instant it hung poised in the green waters. Then, with an arch of its supple spine, it curved about and came eeling back for another attack. Its small, yellow eyes, glassy with mindless hunger, glared into Conan's.

The Cimmerian was now held by a single tentacle, looped about his foot. Urgency lent extraordinary strength to his arms. Swung in both knobby hands, the broadsword sheared through the slender terminal portion of the tentacle., and Conan was free.

Not pausing to sheathe his blade, Conan swam furiously off at a tangent., striving to avoid the meteoric rush of the shark. The sword in his hand encumbered him and weighed him down on the right side, so that he slewed about in a wide half-circle. That was just enough to take him out of the path of the onrushing shark, whose triangular fins cut through the green-lit waters like plowshares.

It shot past him., its tooth-lined maw snapping shut on empty water. It missed him so narrowly that he could see the individual small, pebbly scales that crusted its rough, white underbelly as it raced by in front of his face. The displacement of the water tossed him about like a straw in the wind.

Then the shark turned and poised again at the end of its lunge. This time, Conan knew, he could not dodge. As the shark writhed toward him, three black tentacles flailed up past the Cimmerian and lashed about its bulky barrel, ensnaring the monster, The kraken's arms writhed like a nest of enraged serpents. The shark doubled, snapping furiously. Another tentacle was bitten in two, and the severed end sank writhing to the sand below.