The darkness was clear as glass. The sky seemed shaken as if with fire-flies. Not a sound stirred now, not even a hovering wing. Nod heaped high the huge fire, and followed the Oomgar into his hut.
But not to sleep. He crouched on his snug dry bed of moss, and waited patiently till Battle's snores rose slow and mournful beneath the snow-piled roof. Then very quickly he put on his sheep's-coat over his Juzanda jacket and breeches. He crawled out, and lifted down with both hands the heavy bar of the door, and stole out into the moonlight again. He thrust his puckered hand under his jacket, and touched his skinny breast-bone, beneath which, ever since the little Horse of Tishnar had toppled him into the snow, he had felt the slumbering Wonderstone strangely burning. And, as if even Oomgar magic, too, might help him, he hobbled back into the hut and put Battle's little dog's-eared book into his pocket. Then, before his heart could fail him, he ran out as fast as his fours could carry him to where he had heard rise up in the night the Hunting-Song of Immanâla.
On the extreme verge of the steep, opposite Battle's hut, stood a solitary flat-headed rock beside the frozen stream. Here the water burst in a blaze of moonlight into a cascade of icicles and foam. Nod stood there in the rock's shadow awhile, looking down into the forest. And as if a little cloud had come upon the glittering moon, he felt, as it were, a sudden darkness above his head, and a cold terror crept over his skin.
Then he stepped, trembling, out of the shadow of the rock into the moonlight, and gazed up into the shadowy countenance of Immanâla. She lay gaunt and spare, her long neck touching the snow, her eye-balls beneath their wide lids fixed glassily on Nod. He gazed and gazed, until it seemed he was sinking down, down into those wide unstirring eyes.
His heart seemed to rise up into his mouth. He coughed, and something hard and round and tingling slid on to his tongue. He put up his hand to his thick lips, and, like courage that steals into the mind when all else is vain, fell into his hand, milk-pale and magical, the long-hidden Wonder-stone.
HE FELT A SUDDEN DARKNESS ABOVE HIS HEAD, AND A COLD TERROR CREPT OVER HIS SKIN.
"I couch here, Ummanodda," said the Nameless, without stirring, "night after night, hungry and thirsty, waiting for the Oomgar's head. Why does the Mulla-mulgar keep me waiting so long for my supper?"
"Because, O Queen of Shadows," said Nod as calmly as he could—"because the head of the Oomgar refuses to come without his legs—and his gun."