Tower Of The Medusa

by Lin Carter

  We've got nothing to worry about now, except a planet-full of kill-crazy Death Dwarves, Kirin thought sourly.

  12. DARK JOURNEY

  The dim ochre globe of Zangrimar shrank beneath their pounding jets and swung away, dwindling and revolving into the black abyss that lies between the stars. The planet of the Witch Queen faded behind them and was lost amidst the darkness.

  The ship tested its circuits and reported quietly that it had suffered no damage from the force trap that had intercepted its course and drawn it deep into the Dragon Stars. The temporary usurpation of the control circuits had caused no permanent impairment to its efficiency.

  It lifted out of the ecliptic and transposed into that mathematical paradox called the Interplenum, an artificial sub-continuum where the laws governing matter and energy were somewhat different from those observed in normal space. In this weird and technically non-existent region of space, light-speed was no longer the limiting velocity, and interstellar travel was made possible by a slight revision in Einsteinian theory. The flight from Zangrimar to Pelizon would take several hours at normal cruising speeds.

  Which was just as well. Kirin had no desire to speed the trip. He was worn out, physically and mentally, and looked forward to some rest before tackling the problem of the Iron Tower and the theft of the Medusa.

  They were all worn out, and some rest and refreshment would do them good. Therefore, leaving the problems of navigation in the capable hands (so to speak) of the ship's brain, they showered leisurely, letting the hissing jets of hot, sudsy water steam out the aches and pains from weary muscles. Then followed a hearty lunch; the ship was a prodigal host and the table was laden with delicacies from the vacuum-preserved stores kept aft. Sizzling buphodon steaks in green Fangalonian mushrooms and wine sauce, plenty of steaming vegetables, a succulent fresh salad, and pots of hot black kaff.

  Then while fat old Temujin snored lustily in his bunk and Caola curled up to enjoy a sound sleep in the other, Kirin stretched out in the capacious pneumo and napped himself.

  In sleep he again dipped below the surface of his mind into what was to become a strange new world.

  Kirin was no fool. He had twice displayed astounding mind powers unknown to his experience. Something was oddly wrong, and he more than halfway guessed it was the result of the brutal probing he had suffered under the hands of the Nexian Mind Wizard.

  As he drifted down through the borders of sleep, he puzzled over the strange experiences. He knew something of the human mind and its mysteries. He had heard that man actually uses only a minute fraction of his brain. The mind is a tenuous web of memory-sequences which are little more than stored electrical impulses. But the brain is a fatty organ made up of nerves and cells. It operates like a chemical battery, generating and storing the electrical impulses of thought. Certain portions of the organ have known uses, they operate as nerve-centers, governing the various life support systems of the body. But vast areas of the brain have no purpose. No known purpose, that is.

  For many thousands of years, scientists studying the mysterious phenomenon called thought have postulated and speculated as to the reasons why the human brain contains so many seemingly superfluous nerve-cells. Some authorities argued that the answer might lie in the distant past, that ancient man might have had other or extra senses than those used by modern man. "Lost" senses and abilities, like psychokinesis, the power of mind to manipulate matter; or telepathy, the power of direct mind-to-mind communication; or teleportation, the ability to transport objects or persons across vast gulfs of space without physical motive power.

  These curious "wild talents" still occasionally crop up in modern man, although they are exceedingly rare. Hence it was argued that perhaps at some remote era in the distant past all men had these powers. In order to possess these mental abilities, men would need nerve-centers in the brain to govern them, just as he possessed nerve-centers which governed his more mundane senses such as sight, hearing, balance, and so on. Although the wild talents may have died out, the extraneous brain-matter might be explained as vestigial nerve-centers, physical remainders of long-dead powers. For the average human body does contain certain vestigial organs no longer used, such as the vermiform appendix. The organ tends to outlive the use thereof, one ancient sage put it succinctly, as is the way with sages.

  So much for the theories of science. But occultism had another explanation. Life memories are recorded in the nerve-cells. Perhaps a man passes on a miniaturized recording of his life memory to his offspring, a cumulative or "racial memory" stored in the so-called unused portions of the brain.

  But now Kirin was no longer musing over this and other mental mysteries. He was sound asleep. And in his sleep the truth of the occult theory was shown to him.

  For with that sleep, there came a dream.

  It seemed to Kirin that in his dream he descended deep into himself. He penetrated, by curious and shadowy pathways, that inner citadel called the Unconscious Mind. Here lies the deep sediment of thought, memories long since forgotten by the upper, conscious levels of his mentality. Memories of earliest childhood, of babyhood, even vague blurred impulses recorded while he was still in the womb of his mother.

  He passed yet further, through veils of darkness. Now swift visions flickered around him, glimpses of scenes and faces, audible and sensory memories. They passed too swiftly for him to more than glimpse their shape and motion.

  These were the recorded life memories of his father and his mother, on an old earth far away.

  He voyaged on, ever deeper.

  He passed through the memories of many lives, hundreds of lives. The lives of his direct ancestors, life upon life, generation upon generation, century after century, like microfilm recordings.

  Thousands of lives flashed by him. He caught only swift flickering glimpses as the small floating brilliant point of utter light that was the "I" of him intersected memory-sequences...

  A towering mushroom cloud of incandescent orange and scarlet climbed like an angry giant above the island of Manhattan, stamping it flat with feet of thunder. A memory of the fiery holocaust called the Thirty-Six Minute War...

  The dark flashing shapes of MIGs hurtled over Chong-ho-dong Valley... a scrap of memory from a distant ancestor who had fought in the Korean War...

  A sleepy French village slumbered on a spring morning. Chickens clucked and squabbled in the dust of a roadway. Beyond the row of beech trees to the east, the deep-throated thunder of big guns grumbled. The tired, tattered legions of the Kaiser, grimly plodding on towards Paris...

  The roar of cannon and the drumming of hooves. Steel sabres flashed in a hot dusty afternoon sun. Behind the bellowing cannon, stolid Russian peasant faces stared in amazement at the cavalrymen as they flew straight into the blaze of the cannon. Red-faced, choleric, shouting, Lord Cardigan led the Light Brigade into the jaws of death...

  Now the pace quickened. Faster flew the visions...

  The skies above London were crimson. Lines of bent backs crept out of the city over the bridges, bearing hastily-assembled belongings. King Charles and the entire court had left that morning. The Great Fire raged on unchecked...

  Wind whipped the painted wooden sign to and fro, creaking and squealing. Rain sleeted against the diamond-paned windows of the old, low-roofed inn. But within the Mermaid, fire roared on the grate and painted huge black shadows across the walls and the nodding, smiling bearded men in throat-ruffs and rain-daubed cloaks who sat listening to Ben Jonson talk. In a distant comer, pale young Edmund Spenser called for mulled ale and bent to scan the verses he had just scribbled...

  Swifter--and swifter yet! Like great wings beating on the wind, alternately dark and bright...

  A dim rainy morning. Knights in mud-splashed cloaks and rust-smeared mail. Their faces were pale and tense beneath shaggy beards and layers of dirt. Awe and terror was in their eyes and their mouths shaped hoarse oaths as they bent humbly beside the great red-golden lion of a man who lay dead with an arrow
hideously protruding from one eye. Harold Godwinson was dead... the Saxon cause was lost forever... and William the Norman would be king. They wept beside the fallen champion, kneeling in the mud...

  Howling like madmen, their scrawny bare bodies smeared with blue paint, the Picts swept up against the great wall and came scrambling up in the very teeth of the Roman swords. Lucius Albionus cursed thickly and roared an order. Bugles rang cold and clear and reinforcements sprinted along the wet clay roadway. The battle would be long and fierce, but it would end eventually, the tired old Roman thought. But what's the use? Hadrian's Wall will fall in time; even the Empire will fall... why fight and die here in the misty wastes of barbaric Caledonia?...

  The flash of a golden helmet in the morning light! Red-cloaked legions swung clanking in tight formation to meet the charge of the bearded savages. Atop his black mare, the Lord Scipio Africanus smiled coldly. He was well pleased. The host of the Carthaginians was crushed; all they had left was the native savages to hurl against the iron strength of Invincible Rome. Soon the glittering African metropolis would fall, and young Rome would triumph, her greatest foe destroyed. The road to Empire lay clear before her... naught could hold her from dominion over the earth...

  Night lay, black wings folded, over the frowning ziggurats of ancient Babylon. All slept, the conquered Persians and their bold Macedonian conquerors, sated with the victory feast. But a light burned in the palace window, where a young man scarce more than a boy bent over ancient documents murmuring archivists set before him. He took a swallow of red wine and bent forward again, holding the parchment map closer to the oil lamp whose wavering glow blazed on his golden hair. Aye, this was the route to the Indus . . . and when the proud Gangarids had knelt before him... on to fabulous Cathay and the very ends of the earth itself... then, surely, Zeus his father would give him a place among the undying Gods, for he had outdone every man who had ever lived... the fires flickered low, but he saw it not. For flesh is weak and the young grow weary swiftly. And young Alexander slept, exhausted, dreaming of bright glory, unaware, as all men are unaware, that he was doomed... Swift now, almost beyond thought, thousands of lives passing in the flicker of an instant...

  They bore him in secrecy out of the mud-brick palace and down the reed-bordered river to the secret tomb where all was ready. The rows of little dark men with shaven heads and linen kilts bowed before him as he passed, as a field of grain bows before the wind. Their voices were lifted as one voice as they intoned the quiet, blessed words:

  "May he repose in the Western Mountain, and come forth on the earth to see the disc of the Sun, and may the roads be open to the perfect Spirit which is in the Netherworld! May it be granted to him to walk out, to enter and go forth as a living soul, to give offerings to He-who-is-in-the-Other-World, and to present all good things to Re-Horus, to Nekhebt, Lady of Heaven, to Hathor, princess of the Desert, to Osiris, the Great God, to Anubis, Lord of the Sacred Land, that they may grant to him the breathing of the sweet breezes of the North Wind."

  And thus the mummy of Narmer the Lion, he who had first united the Upper and the Lower Lands with the strength of his sword, passed into the hidden tomb. The first Pharaoh of Egypt passed through the shadows into the sunlight of the Gods...

  And he came at length into a shining Presence amidst the gloom of the most ancient of memories. Like a shadow of burning gold It hovered against the darkness.

  When the voice spoke, it was low and soft as a whisper, But there was strength in it, and unconquerable youth, and a bright vigor that ages of shadow had not dimmed.

  "I am Valkyr," It spake to him softly. "The Lords of Life and Death banished me from Eternity into Time, for that crime of which you will have heard ere now. Thus have I lived through ten thousand million lives, passing from world to world; thus shall I go on forever through innumerable incarnations until I have accomplished the task set for me. Through you, O Kirin, shall I expiate mine ancient sin..."

  Here, in the dim shadows of the inmost mind, amongst the shards and tatters of forgotten lives, drowned in the depths of this strange and timeless dream, there could be no amazement. Kirin felt, instead, a boundless wonder. For all his days, he had been host to a God! How strange the thought, and yet, in a way, how very fitting. For was not he, too, a thief?

  "I have long since grown weary of the stale monotonies of mortal life," the Voice went on softly. "Life after life offered, but repetition of the same narrow range of emotions, the same few small senses, the same limitations. A human body is but a sordid prison to one of the Immortals, O Kirin. Hence I submerged myself deep within the mind of my hosts, dreaming of past glory... and of glory to come."

  Did the dim flames beat higher for a moment? Did traces of bygone splendors blaze up within the ghost of the banished divinity? Kirin could not be sure.

  "Soon we shall enter the Tower, you and I. I can help you but little, for my strength has ebbed over the aeons of my imprisonment, and I am weary from loss of the strength I have already given unto you, although I grudged it not. Be wary then, O Kirin, and step with care, for I can help you but once more before the end..."

  A strange conflict rose within his dreamself. How to explain to that gentle, sorrowful, weary being that he did not want to give up the Medusa to another! How display before that crippled angel who slept within him, the shame of his own greed? Even as he struggled to find the right words, he felt the dream ending, and fought against it...

  He became conscious that a hand was shaking his shoulder and he opened his eyes to see old Temujin peering down with a smile and to hear him say:

  "Wake up, lad. We're here! Pelizon is in the scopes."

  13. ZARLAK STRIKES

  In a dark cavernous room far underground, lit by the cold flare of permabulbs, a gaunt man sat alone at a huge table of dark wood.

  He was robed in dark glittering stuff. Black silks rustled crisply to every motion as he turned the leaves of the ancient book that lay before him on the table. Sequins of jewelled light winked and flashed as he turned the pages; they were sewn along the folds of the voluminous robes that cloaked him from men's eyes.

  His face was an oval of darkness beneath the enshadowing cowl of his robe. Only his eyes could be seen. They were grey and cold as ice, but fierce as flame. As he hovered immobile over a rune-scrawled page of the old manuscript book, only his eyes seemed to live. They burned and seethed with restless energy. A cold, subhuman cruelty was in their icy glare, and the hot banked fires of unholy and unscrupulous ambition.

  The book over which the robed and masked figure bent so intently was old. A thousand centuries has passed since alien hands had inscribed those sheets of wrinkled yellowing leather with uncouth hieroglyphics. The book that lay before him on the mighty table was older than recorded human history. The river clay whereof men were someday to fashion bricks wherewith to raise the walls of Ur of the Chaldees was still fresh and wet when these crumbling pages were inscribed. The stones of Cheop's pyramid still slept amid unbroken hills along the Valley of the Nile. The titanic glittering wall of ice that came grinding down across the world out of the ultimate and boreal north had but recently withdrawn into its fastnesses. Man was young, scarce more than a beast that had learned to stand erect and toy with tools. An aura of almost palpable age hung about the old book; it was impregnated with the dust of a hundred thousand years of slow time.

  Whatever the veiled man had hoped to find in the ancient codex eluded him. With a bitter curse he closed the book and shoved it from him, and sat back in his great throne-like chair, brooding, eyes of cold fury inscrutable as they stared hungrily into the cavernous gloom of the subterranean chamber.

  A sound behind him. The clink of steel on steel. A dark curtain was drawn to one side by a gnarled and claw-like hand. The black mouth of a tunnel was thus exposed, behind the hangings. From the entrance came forth into view a small, dwarfed figure clad in weird armor of steel. Fantastical in design, the armor was scrawled over with writhing dragons and snarling d
evil-heads. The dwarf was clad entirely in steel, save for his gnarled and twisted hands and his sallow, frog-like face.

  He was incredibly ugly. His mouth was a broad lipless gash and his three eyes were glowing slits filled with evil malignant glitter. His skull-like head was devoid of hirsute adornment.

  "Master!" he croaked. The robed figure turned to regard him.

  "Speak!" the robed one commanded harshly.

  "We have lost contact with Pangoy," the Death Dwarf said. "His receptors went dead in the third quarter of the Hour of the Toad."

  "Death, or unconsciousness?" the Veiled One demanded.

  "Death."

  The word echoed in the silence, fading away into dim whispers. The robed man with the black-masked face regarded the dwarf steadily, with eyes of cold grey flame. Zarlak, the Master of the Death Dwarves and Lord of Pelizon was filled with the bitterness of failure. The age-old book he had searched through fruitlessly and had just shaved aside had been his last hope. Ever since coming to this wilderness world, the Veiled One had striven for one purpose: to find the secret of the Iron Tower. He had searched the crumbling archives of the death cult, but in vain. Old rumors and whispers he had tracked down, but for naught. Now he sought in the ancient Books of Power for the key that would unlock the charmed and demon-guarded gates of the Iron Tower, and the Books had failed him.

  The failure of his connection with Pangoy on Zangrimar was yet another disappointment. His mask hid the expression of rage and frustrate fury that writhed and snarled across his face. But his eyes blazed with unholy wrath and cruelty. The Dwarf was forced to turn his eyes away with a little shudder; the flaming fury in Zarlak's gaze was beyond his endurance.

  "Give me the tapes!" Zarlak said. Silently, the Dwarf handed his master a tangle of grey plastic ribbon, whereon black wavering lines were drawn. Zarlak slid them through his black-gloved fingers, studying them.