So they moved together, speaking no more, through the hushed silence of growing dusk, into the shadows of the vast vertical mass of the ancient wall that dipped southward. They searched for a way to scale that soaring obstacle, vainly. The rim of the upper sea, the false sea that was vurth floating lightly above the true sea far below, they reached and Hardan felt the tingling thrill of a stranger returning home as the delicate moist tendrils contacted his exposed flesh. He heard Ylda's sigh of sensuous ecstasy as she sucked in the dank richness of the confined atmosphere, and he heard the Aarthman breathing unsteadily as though half-choked. "How you can stand this pea-soup," came the little man's strangled voice, "is beyond me. It's like walking underwater; yet breathing." Hardan laughed and slipped out of his cumbersome padded garb. Now he could climb the wall or fight more freely. The intangible unseen menace of the walled city and fields now struck him with returned power. He bound the suit into a pack on his shoulders and set about examining the damp and crumbling wall. The moisture had loosened its ancient bonding material and he found many foot and hand holds. Swiftly he angled upward, his two companions following the way he had found. Once he ran into a section of intact wall and was forced to turn back, and Ylda swung upward along a new series of crevices, leading the way. Hardan now brought up the rear instead of Kern Rensom. The vurth ended, and even as they saw that less than twenty feet lay between them and the wall's top, a hideous gagging squelching sound, like a mud-wallowing drunkard venting his addled rage, sounded from below. Hardan turned to look down, his sword in his right hand and his feet jammed in a shallow crack. A vast bulk, indistinct in the failing light of the vanished sun, and rendered yet more vague by the aerophytic sea that washed around its lower body, reared there. Hardan sensed that the greasily smooth hide, wet and slime-covered, was slate-gray, liberally splotched with patches of ghastly pale yellow. He saw an inner gaping maw, its huge inner jaws covered with bony serrated ridges, and in a deadly fringe about this mouth a score or more of specialized tentacles stretched like multi-jointed arms upward. "Climb swiftly!" roared Hardan, "while I hold it back." The tentacles slithered nearer, their gray snaky flesh ending at the tips in sucker-like yellow-tinged discs. Hardan swung his weapon down at the nearest and from the severed tentacle tip a steaming purplish ichor spurted. And with its wound the burbling mouthings from below redoubled. The Wetlander sprang upward, a questing tentacle brushing his heel as he found a new vantage point several feet higher, and then he sliced through this leathery appendage's tip as well.