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  Raiders of the Second Moon
  By GENE ELLERMAN
  A strange destiny had erased Noork's memory,
     
    and had brought him to this tiny world—to
     
    write an end to his first existence.
   
    [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
     
    Planet Stories Summer 1945.
     
    Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
     
    the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
  Beyond earth swings that airless pocked mass of fused rock and gray
  volcanic dust that we know as Luna. Of this our naked eyes assure us.
  But of the smaller satellite, hidden forever from the mundane view by
  Luna's bulk, we know little.
   
    Small is Sekk, that second moon, less than five hundred miles in
  diameter, but the period of its revolution is thirty two hours, and its
  meaner mass retains a breathable atmosphere. There is life on Sekk,
  life that centers around the sunken star-shaped cavity where an oval
  lake gleams softly in the depths. And the eleven radiating tips of the
  starry abyss are valleys green with jungle growth.
   
    In one of those green valleys the white savage that the Vasads called
  Noork squatted in the ample crotch of a jungle giant and watched the
  trail forty feet below. For down there moved alertly a golden skinned
  girl, her only weapons a puny polished bow of yellow wood and a
  sheathed dagger.
   
    Sight of the girl's flowing brown hair and the graceful feminine
  contours of her smooth-limbed body beneath its skin-halter and the
  insignificant breech-clout, made his brow wrinkle with concentration.
  Not forever had he lived in this jungle world of valleys and ragged
  cliffs. Since he had learned the tongue of the hairy Vasads of forest,
  and the tongue of their gold-skinned leader, Gurn, the renegade, he had
  confirmed that belief.
   
    For a huge gleaming bird had carried him in its talons to the top of
  the cliff above their valley and from the rock fire had risen to devour
  the great bird. Somehow he had been flung clear and escaped the death
  of the mysterious bird-thing. And in his delirium he had babbled the
  words that caused the apish Vasads to name him Noork. Now he repeated
  them aloud.
   
    "New York," he said, "good ol' New York."
   
    The girl heard. She looked upward fearfully, her rounded bare arm going
  back to the bow slung across her shoulder. Swiftly she fitted an arrow
  and stepped back against the friendly bole of a shaggy barked jungle
  giant. Noork grinned.
   
    "Tako, woman," he greeted her.
   
    "Tako," she replied fearfully. "Who speaks to Tholon Sarna? Be you
  hunter or escaped slave?"
   
    "A friend," said Noork simply. "It was I who killed the spotted
  narl
  last night when it attacked you."
   
    Doubtfully the girl put away her bow. Her fingers, however, were never
  far from the hilt of her hunting dagger.
   
    Noork swung outward from his perch, and then downward along the ladder
  of limbs to her side. The girl exclaimed at his brown skin.
   
    "Your hair is the color of the sun!" she said. "Your garb is Vasad, yet
  you speak the language of the true men." Her violet oddly slanting eyes
  opened yet wider. "Who are you?"
   
    "I am Noork," the man told her. "For many days have I dwelt among the
  wild Vasads of the jungle with their golden-skinned chief, Gurn, for
  my friend."
   
    The girl impulsively took a step nearer. "Gurn!" she cried. "Is he tall
  and strong? Has he a bracelet of golden discs linked together with
  human hair? Does he talk with his own shadow when he thinks?"
   
    "That is Gurn," admitted Noork shortly. "He is also an exile from the
  walled city of Grath. The city rulers call him a traitor. He has told
  me the reason. Perhaps you know it as well?"
   
    "Indeed I do," cried Sarna. "My brother said that we should no longer
  make slaves of the captured Zurans from the other valleys."
   
    Noork smiled. "I am glad he is your brother," he said simply.
  The girl's eyes fell before his admiring gaze and warm blood flooded
  into her rounded neck and lovely cheeks.
   
    "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.
  Noork
  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.
   
    "You hunt too near the lake," called a voice. "The demons of the water
  will trap you."
   
    Ud's great nostrils quivered. He tasted the odor of a friend mingled
  with that of a strange Zuran. He squatted.
   
    "It's Noork," he grunted. "Why do I not see you?"
   
    "I have stolen the skin of a demon," answered the invisible man. "Go to
  Gurn. Tell him to fear the demons no longer. Tell him the Misty Ones
  can be trapped and skinned."
   
    "Why you want their skins?" Ud scratched his hairy gray skull.
   
    "Go to save Gurn's ..." and here Noork was stumped for words. "To save
  his father's woman woman," he managed at last. "Father's woman woman
  called Sarna."
   
    And the misty blob of nothingness was gone again, its goal now the
  marshy lowlands that extended upward perhaps a thousand feet from the
  jungle's ragged fringe to end at last in the muddy shallows of the Lake
  of Uzdon.
   
    To Noork it seemed that all the world must be like these savage jungle
  fastnesses of the twelve valleys and their central lake. He knew that
  the giant bird had carried him from some other place that his battered
  brain could not remember, but to him it seemed incredible that men
  could live elsewhere than in a jungle valley.
   
    But Noork was wrong. The giant bird that he had ridden into the depths
  of Sekk's fertile valleys had come from a far different world. And the
  other bird, for which Noork had been searching when he came upon the
  golden-skinned girl, was from another world also.
   
    The other bird had come from space several days before that of Noork,
  the Vasads had told him, and it had landed somewhere within the land
  of sunken valleys. Perhaps, thought Noork, the bird had come from the
  same valley that had once been his home. He would find the bird and
  perhaps then he could remember better who he had been.
   
    So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich—whose memory was
  gone completely—again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last
  of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired
  young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden
  valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled
  structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the
  second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end.
  The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this
  little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.
   
    The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist
  preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the
  lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but
  Dietrich's spacer had crashed.
   
    Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads
  had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its
  crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.
  Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight
  shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could
  not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly
  blade well.
   
    After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding
  cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the
  roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's
  edge.
   
    Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a
  smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to
  the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal
  branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of
  a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.
   
    He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps
  half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of
  bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!
   
    Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty
  One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a
  comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.
   
    "The new slave," a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, "is the
  daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant."
   
    Noork was fully awake now. They were speaking of Sarna. Her father's
  name was Tholon Dist. It was early morning in the fields of the Misty
  Ones and he could see the two golden-skinned slaves who talked together
  beneath his tree.
   
    "That matters not to the priests of Uzdon," the slighter of the
  two slaves, his hair almost white, said. "If she be chosen for the
  sacrifice to great Uzdon her blood will stain the altar no redder than
  another's."
   
    "But it is always the youngest and most beautiful," complained the
  younger slave, "that the priests chose. I wish to mate with a beautiful
  woman. Tholon Sarna is such a one."
   
    The old man chuckled dryly. "If your wife be plain," he said, "neither
  master nor fellow slave will steal her love. A slave should choose a
  good woman—and ugly, my son."
   
    "Some night," snarled the slave, "I'm going over the wall. Even the
  Misty Ones will not catch me once I have crossed the lake."
   
    "Silence," hissed the white-haired man. "Such talk is madness. We are
  safe here from wild animals. There are no spotted narls on the island
  of Manak. The priests of most holy Uzdon, and their invisible minions,
  are not unkind.
   
    "Get at your weeding of the field, Rold," he finished, "and I will
  complete my checking of the gardens."
   
    Noork waited until the old man was gone before he descended from the
  tree. He walked along the row until he reached the slave's bent back,
  and he knew by the sudden tightening of the man's shoulder muscles
  that his presence was known. He looked down and saw that his feet made
  clear-cut depressions in the soft rich soil of the field.
  "Continue to work," he said to the young man. "Do not be too surprised
  at what I am about to tell you, Rold." He paused and watched the golden
  man's rather stupid face intently.
   
    "I am not a Misty One," Noork said. "I killed the owner of this strange
  garment I wear yesterday on the mainland. I have come to rescue the
  girl, Tholon Sarna, of whom you spoke."
   
    Rold's mouth hung open but his hard blunt fingers continued to work.
  "The Misty Ones, then," he said slowly, "are not immortal demons!" He
  nodded his long-haired head. "They are but men. They too can die."
   
    "If you will help me, Rold," said Noork, "to rescue the girl and escape
  from the island I will take you along."
   
    Rold was slow in answering. He had been born on the island and yet his
  people were from the valley city of Konto. He knew that they would
  welcome the news that the Misty Ones were not demons. And the girl from
  the enemy city of Grath was beautiful. Perhaps she would love him for
  helping to rescue her and come willingly with him to Konto.
   
    "I will help you, stranger," he agreed.
   
    "Then tell me of the Skull, and of the priests, and of the prison where
  Tholon Sarna is held."
   
    The slave's fingers flew. "All the young female slaves are caged
  together in the pit beneath the Skull. When the sun is directly
  overhead the High Priest will choose one of them for sacrifice to
  mighty Uzdon, most potent of all gods. And with the dawning of the
  next day the chosen one will be bound across the altar before great
  Uzdon's image and her heart torn from her living breast." The slave's
  mismatched eyes, one blue and the other brown, lifted from his work.
   
    "Tholon Sarna is in the pit beneath the Temple with the other female
  slaves. And the Misty Ones stand guard over the entrance to the temple
  pits."
   
    "It is enough," said Noork. "I will go to rescue her now. Be prepared
  to join us as we return. I will have a robe for you if all goes well."
   
    "If you are captured," cried Rold nervously, "you will not tell them I
  talked with you?"
   
    Noork laughed. "You never saw me," he told the slave.
  The skull was a gigantic dome of shaped white stone. Where the
  eye-sockets and gaping nose-hole should have been, black squares of
  rock gave the illusion of vacancy. Slitted apertures that served for
  windows circled the grisly whiteness of the temple's curving walls at
  three distinct levels.
   
    Noork drifted slowly up the huge series of long bench-like steps
  that led up to the gaping jaws of the Skull. He saw red and
  purple-robed priests with nodding head-dresses of painted plumes and
  feathers climbing and descending the stairs. Among them moved the
  squatty gnarled shapes of burdened Vasads, their shaggy bowed legs
  fettered together with heavy copper or bronze chains, and cringing
  golden-skinned slaves slipped furtively through the press of the
  brilliant-robed ones. The stale sweaty odor of the slaves and the beast
  men mingled with the musky stench of the incense from the temple.
   
    Other misty blobs, the invisible guards of the ghastly temple, were
  stationed at regular intervals across the great entrance into the
  Skull's interior, but they paid Noork no heed. To them he was another
  of their number.
   
    He moved swiftly to cross the wide stone-slabbed entry within the
  jaws, and a moment later was looking down into a sunken bowl whose
  rocky floor was a score of feet below where he stood. Now he saw the
  central raised altar where the gleam of precious stones and cunningly
  worked metal—gold, silver and brass—vied with the faded garish
  colors of the draperies beneath it. And on the same dais there loomed
  two beast-headed stone images, the lion-headed god a male and the
  wolf-headed shape a female.
   
    These then were the two blood hungry deities that the men of Zura
  worshipped—mighty Uzdon and his mate, Lornu!
   
    Noork joined the descending throng that walked slowly down the central
  ramp toward the altar. As he searched for the entrance to the lower
  pits his eyes took in the stone steps that led upward into the two
  upper levels. Only priests and the vague shapelessness of the Misty
  Ones climbed those steps. The upper levels, then, were forbidden to
  the slaves and common citizens of the island.
   
    As he circled the curving inner wall a foul dank odor reached his
  sensitive nostrils, and his eyes searched for its origin. He found it
  there just before him, the opening that gave way to a descending flight
  of clammy stone steps. He darted toward the door and from nowhere two
  short swords rose to bar his way.
   
    "None are to pass save the priests," spoke a voice from nowhere
  gruffly. "The High Priest knows that we of the temple guards covet the
  most beautiful of the slave women, but we are not to see them until the
  sacrifice is chosen."
   
    Noork moved backward a pace. He grumbled something inaudible and drew
  his sword. Before him the two swords slowly drew aside.
   
    In that instant Noork attacked. His keen sword, whetted to razor
  sharpness on abrasive bits of rock, bit through the hidden neck and
  shoulder of the guard on his right hand, and with the same forward
  impetus of attack he smashed into the body of the startled guard on his
  left.
   
    His sword had wrenched from his hand as it jammed into the bony
  structure of the decapitated Misty One's shoulder, and now both his
  hands sought the throat of the guard. The unseen man's cry of warning
  gurgled and died in his throat as Noork clamped his fingers shut upon
  it, and his shortened sword stabbed at Noork's back.
   
    The struggle overbalanced them. They rolled over and over down the
  shadowy stair, the stone smashing at their softer flesh unmercifully.
  For a moment the battling men brought up with a jolt as the obstruction
  of the first guard's corpse arrested their downward course, and then
  they jolted and jarred onward again from blood-slippery step to
  blood-slippery step.
   
    The sword clattered from the guardian Misty One's clutch and in the
  same instant Noork's steel fingers snapped the neck of the other man
  with a pistol-like report. The limp body beneath him struggled no more.
  He sprang to his feet and became aware of a torch-lighted doorway but a
  half-dozen paces further down along the descending shaft of steps.
   
    In a moment, he thought, the fellows of this guard would come charging
  out, swords in hand. They could not have failed to hear the struggle
  on the stairs of stone, he reasoned, for here the noise and confusion
  of the upper temple was muted to a murmur.
   
    So it was that he ran quickly to the door, in his hand the sword that
  had dropped from the dead man's fingers, and sprang inside, prepared to
  battle there the Misty Ones, lest one escape to give the alarm.
   
    He looked about the narrow stone-walled room with puzzled eyes. Two
  warriors lay on a pallet of straw, one of them emitting hideous
  gurgling sounds that filled the little room with unpleasing echoes.
  Noork grinned.
   
    From the floor beside the fatter of the two men, the guard who did not
  snore, he took a club. Twice he struck and the gurgling sound changed
  to a steady deep breathing. Noork knew that now the two guards would
  not give the alarm for several hours. Thoughtfully he looked about the
  room. There were several of the hooded cloaks hanging from pegs wedged
  into the crevices of the chamber's wall, their outlines much plainer
  here in the artificial light of the flickering torch.
   
    Noork shed his own blood-stained robe quickly and donned one of the
  others. The cloaks were rather bulky and so he could carry but two
  others, rolled up, beneath his own protective covering.
   
    The matter of his disguise thus taken care of he dragged the two bodies
  from the stairway and hid them beneath their own fouled robes in the
  chamber of the sleeping guards. Not until then did he hurry on down the
  stone steps toward the prison pit where Tholon Sarna, the golden girl,
  was held prisoner.
  The steps opened into a dimly lit cavern. Pools of foul black water
  dotted the uneven floor and reflected back faintly the light of the two
  sputtering torches beside the entrance. One corner of the cavern was
  walled off, save for a narrow door of interlocking brass strips, and
  toward this Noork made his way.
   
    He stood beside the door. "Sarna," he called softly, "Tholon Sarna."
   
    There were a score of young women, lately captured from the mainland
  by the Misty Ones, sitting dejectedly upon the foul dampness of the
  rotting grass that was their bed. Most of them were clad in the simple
  skirt and brief jacket, reaching but to the lower ribs, that is the
  mark of the golden people who dwell in the city-states of Zura's
  valleys, but a few wore a simple band of cloth about their hips and
  confined their breasts with a strip of well-cured leopard or antelope
  hide.
   
    One of the women now came to her feet and as she neared the
  metal-barred entrance Noork saw that she was indeed Sarna. He examined
  the outer lock of the door and found it to be barred with a massive
  timber and the timber locked in place with a metal spike slipped into a
  prepared cavity in the prison's rocky wall.
   
    "It is Noork," he said softly as she came closer. He saw her eyes go
  wide with fear and sudden hope, and then reached for the spike.
   
    "The priest," hissed the girl.
   
    Noork had already heard the sound of approaching feet. He dropped the
  spike and whirled. His sword was in his hand as though by magic, as he
  faced the burly priest of the Skull.
   
    Across the forehead and upper half of the priest's face a curved shield
  of transparent tinted material was fastened. Noork's eyes narrowed as
  he saw the sword and shield of the gigantic holy man.
   
    "So," he said, "to the priests of Uzdon we are not invisible. You do
  not trust your guards, then."
   
    The priest laughed. "We also have robes of invisibility," he said, "and
  the sacred window of Uzdon before our eyes." He snarled suddenly at the
  silent figure of the white man. "Down on your knees, guard, and show me
  your face before I kill you!"
   
    Noork raised his sword. "Take my hood off if you dare, priest," he
  offered.
   
    The burly priest's answer was a bellow of rage and a lunge forward of
  his sword arm. Their swords clicked together and slid apart with the
  velvety smoothness of bronze on bronze. Noork's blade bit a chunk from
  the priest's conical shield, and in return received a slashing cut that
  drew blood from left shoulder to elbow.
   
    The fighting grew more furious as the priest pressed the attack. He
  was a skilled swordsman and only the superior agility of the white
  man's legs kept Noork away from that darting priestly blade. Even so
  his robe was slashed in a dozen places and blood reddened his bronzed
  body. Once he slipped in a puddle of foul cavern water and only by the
  slightest of margins did he escape death by the priest's weapon.
   
    The priest was tiring rapidly, however. The soft living of the temple,
  and the rich wines and over-cooked meats that served to pad his paunch
  so well with fat, now served to rob him of breath. He opened his
  mouth to bawl for assistance from the guard, although it is doubtful
  whether any sound could have penetrated up into the madhouse of the
  main temple's floor, and in that instant Noork flipped his sword at his
  enemy.
   
    Between the shield and the transparent bit of curving material the
  sword drove, and buried itself deep in the priest's thick neck. Noork
  leaped forward; he snatched the tinted face shield and his sword, and a
  moment later he had torn the great wooden timber from its sockets.
   
    Tholon Sarna stumbled through the door and he caught her in his arms.
  Hurriedly he loosed one of the two robes fastened about his waist and
  slipped it around her slim shivering shoulders.
   
    "Are there other priests hidden here in the pits?" Noork asked tensely.
   
    "No," came the girl's low voice, "I do not think so. I did not know
  that this priest was here until he appeared behind you." A slow smile
  crossed Noork's hidden features. "His robe must be close by," he told
  the girl. "He must have been stationed here because the priests feared
  the guards might spirit away some of the prisoners."
   
    Slowly he angled back and forth across the floor until his foot touched
  the soft material of the priest's discarded robe near the stairway
  entrance. He slipped the thongs of the transparent mask, called by the
  priest "Uzdon's window" over his hood, and then proceeded to don the
  new robe.
   
    "My own robe is slit in a dozen places," he explained to the girl's
  curious violet eyes—-all that was visible through the narrow vision
  slot of her hood. He finished adjusting the outer robe and took the
  girl's hand.
   
    "Come," he said, "let us escape over the wall before the alarm is
  given."
  Without incident they reached the field where Rold toiled among the
  rows of vegetables. Another slave was working in a nearby field,
  his crude wooden plow pulled by two sweating Vasads, but he was not
  watching when Rold abruptly faded from view.
   
    Noork was sweating with the weight of two cloaks and the airlessness of
  the vision shield as they crossed the field toward his rope, but he had
  no wish to discard them yet. The tinted shield had revealed that dozens
  of the Misty Ones were stationed about the wall to guard against the
  escape of the slaves.
   
    They came to the wall and to Noork's great joy found the rope hanging
  as he had left it. He climbed the wall first and then with Rold helping
  from below, drew Sarna to his side. A moment later saw the three of
  them climbing along the limb to the bole of the tree and so to the
  jungle matted ground outside the wall.
   
    "Will we hide here in the trees until night?" asked the girl's full
  voice.
   
    Noork held aside a mossy creeper until the girl had passed. "I think
  not," he said. "The Misty Ones are continually passing from the island
  to the shore. We are Misty Ones to any that watch from the wall. So we
  will paddle boldly across the water."
   
    "That is good," agreed the slave, "unless they see us put out from the
  shore. Their two landing stages are further along the beach, opposite
  the Temple of Uzdon."
   
    "Then we must hug to the shore until we pass the tip of the island,"
  said Noork thoughtfully. "In that way even if they detect us we will
  have put a safe distance between us."
   
    Shortly after midday Noork felt the oozy slime of the marshy lowlands
  of the mainland beneath his paddle and the dugout ran ashore in the
  grassy inlet for which they had been heading. His palms were blistered
  and the heavy robes he yet wore were soaked with sweat.
   
    "Once we reach the jungle," he told the girl, "off come these robes. I
  am broiled alive."
   
    Suddenly Noork froze in his tracks. He thrust the girl behind him.
  "Misty Ones!" he hissed to Rold. "They crouch among the reeds. They
  carry nets and clubs to trap us."
   
    Rold turned back toward the boat with Noork and Sarna close at his
  heels. But the Misty Ones were upon them and by sheer numbers they bore
  them to the ground. Noork's mightier muscles smashed more than one
  hooded face but in the end he too lay smothered beneath the nets and
  bodies of the enemy.
   
    A misty shape came to stand beside these three new captives as they
  were stripped of their robes. His foot nudged at Noork's head curiously
  and a guttural voice commanded the shield be removed. Then his voice
  changed—thickened—as he saw the features of Noork.
   
    "So," he barked in a tongue that should have been strange to Noork but
  was not, "it is the trapper's turn to be trapped, eh Captain Dietrich?"
  A fat, square-jawed face, harsh lines paralleling the ugly blob of a
  nose, showed through the opened robe of the leader. The face was that
  of Doctor Von Mark the treacherous Nazi scientist that Stephen Dietrich
  had trailed across space to Sekk! But Noork knew nothing of that chase.
  The man's face seemed familiar, and hateful, but that was all he
  remembered.
   
    "I see you have come from the island," said the Doctor. "Perhaps you
  can tell me the secret of this invisible material I wear. With the
  secret of invisibility I, Karl Von Mark, can again conquer Earth and
  make the Fatherland invincible."
   
    "I do not understand too well," said Noork hesitantly. "Are we enemies?
  There is so much I have forgotten." He regarded the brutal face
  thoughtfully.
   
    "Perhaps you know from what valley the great bird brought me," he said.
  "Or perhaps the other bird brought you here."
   
    Von Mark's blue eyes widened and then he roared with a great noise
  that was intended to be mirth. His foot slammed harder into Noork's
  defenseless ribs.
   
    "Perhaps you have forgotten, swine of an American," he roared suddenly,
  and in his hand was an ugly looking automatic. He flung back his robe
  and Noork saw the dress uniform of a general. "Perhaps," the scientist
  repeated, "but I will take no chances. The amnesia is often but a
  pretense."
   
    His lip curled. "This is something for you to remember, Captain
  Dietrich," he said as the ugly black muzzle of the gun centered on
  Noork's bronzed chest.
   
    And then Doctor Von Mark cursed as the gun dropped from his nerveless
  fingers and his hands clawed weakly at the arrow buried in his wide
  belly. He stumbled backward.
   
    Arrows rained from the mistiness that had closed in about Von Mark and
  his men. The men from Wari, their faces unshielded, fell like flies.
  In a moment those yet alive had taken to their heels, and Noork felt
  invisible fingers tearing at the nets that bound him.
   
    As he rose to his feet the robed figure let its misty covering drop
  aside. A handsome golden-skinned warrior stood revealed.
   
    "Gurn!" cried Noork.
   
    A glad cry came from the throat of Tholon Sarna as she saw her brother.
  And then she crept closer to Noork's side as the invisible mantles
  of Gurn's loyal Vasads opened to reveal the hairy beast men they
  concealed. Rold whimpered fearfully.
   
    "The message that Ud carried to me was good," laughed Gurn. "The Misty
  Ones skin easily. We were trapping the Misty Ones as they came across
  the lake," he looked at the dying Von Mark, "as were these others. Soon
  we would have come to your rescue, Noork, my friend."
   
    "Lucky I escaped first," Noork told him. "The priests of Uzdon would
  have trapped you. To them the Misty Ones are visible."
   
    He picked up the fallen vision shield that lay beside their feet. His
  chest expanded proudly.
   
    "No longer," he told Gurn, "am I a man without a name. I am Captain
  Dietrich from a distant valley called America. I was hunting this evil
  man when my bird died."
   
    He smiled and his brown arm tightened around Sarna's golden body. "The
  evil man is dead. My native valley is safe. Now I can live in peace
  with you, Gurn, and with your sister, here in the jungle."
   
    "It is good, Noork," smiled Tholon Sarna.
  End of Project Gutenberg's Raiders of the Second Moon, by Gene Ellerman
  
  
question_text: What is the significance of the Misty Ones in the story?
response: The Misty Ones are significant for several reasons. They are creatures that come from the island in the lake of Uzdon, and they look like mist and are therefore nearly invisible to most (other than the priests). They are thought to be demons and perhaps invincible, but Noork discovers otherwise when he gets close enough to see that they look like him. He passes a message along to Gurn that they can be trapped and skinned. Noork’s discovery of this allows him to rescue Sarna and allows Gurn and the other warriors to rescue them from Doctor Von Mark. 
  