Hiero Desteen (Omnibus)

by Sterling E. Lanier

  The adept was apparently resting, his mind under the influence of some strange drug. Hiero was able to see part of the room, a large one, hung with dark draperies and containing many strange instruments laid out on tables. S’duna lay upon a bed, and beside him, another small brazier emitted a thin trickle of bluish smoke which he was inhaling. One brief look into the thoughts of the enemy was enough for Hiero. The man’s plans for imaginative relaxation involved much that was bizarre and sensuous and more that was hideous, foul beyond belief. Hiero withdrew his mind, sure now that he could find the other again whenever he wanted.

  What next? The time element he was being allowed in which to plan was uncertain, but must be decreasing. The fact that S’duna was under some drug seemed hopeful. A mind of that power would probably be involved in any interrogation. What more could now be done with this new attribute he had acquired?

  He concentrated as hard as he could on distance. That is, he began to use the new band in an increasingly wide arc. Whenever he tapped a mind or even touched one which could be identified as Unclean or as being on the island, he thrust further out and beyond.

  Soon, he knew he was sending his thoughts far beyond the physical scope of Manoon, as ripples from a far-flung stone grow larger and larger. Now he concentrated on Gorm and the girl. He knew their mental identities well and he began to search for them.

  He encountered many minds, but all were animals, the brains of birds, intent on prey, usually fish, and the minds of fish and other aquatic creatures. Once he touched upon a cluster of human minds, all in one area, like a group of blips on an ancient radar screen. This, he guessed, must be a ship, and he knew he was still over water in a physical sense. Wider and wider yet, he cast his net of awareness.

  Just when he was about to despair and abandon the process for some other, more hopeful, line of endeavor, he found them.

  Gorm! The mind of the bear lay open to him, or at least partly so. To his surprise, which he momentarily put aside, there were some areas he could not penetrate. Using the bear’s weak eyes, he could see that he was looking at Luchare. The two were on a lonely stretch of beach, in what seemed to be late afternoon from the way the light appeared. A shift of the bear’s glance now revealed a huge foreleg blocking part of the scene. Klootz, too, was still with them, then!

  Now, could he communicate? Gorm, Gorm, he called, using the new wavelength as hard as he could. He could feel the animal shift uneasily, but he was not getting through. At best, he was making the bear uneasy, acting as an irritant. He tried again, this time not so hard, but using a narrower “needle” of thought. It must be remembered that the soldier-priest was trying something utterly new. The full capabilities of his recently won system were unknown to him.

  Mainly by luck, he made a fleeting contact. Hiero! He felt Gorm literally jump as the message hit him; then he lost the bear again. He tried Luchare next, but got nowhere. He was not surprised. She was a novice at mind speech and the bear was not. In fact, he thought, recalling the sealed elements of the ursine mind he had just noticed, the bear was still an unknown.

  There was no time for such speculation, however. Patiently, he went back up and down his odd channel, trying to relocate the precise point at which Gorm had been jolted. There it was again, a flood of thoughts! Hiero, the bear sent. Hiero/friend, where are you? How do we speak, this (strange) way?

  The priest finally managed to quiet the animal and began slowly to explain what he was doing and how. This time Hiero was not too surprised to observe how quickly Gorm understood. He had thought previously, it came to him now, that the young bear owned a brain not far short of a human’s in power. It was now apparent that the estimate was far too low. The bear was quite as intelligent as Hiero, only in a somewhat different way, that was all.

  I am a prisoner of the Unclean, the priest sent. I am on an island in the sea, where I do not know. I am going to try to escape very soon, since I feel sure they will torture me. Where are you and how are you?

  As Gorm developed practice, the story of the three unfolded. The brief fight, which had left Hiero dead, they thought, on the beach, had left them untouched. They had evaded all missiles and galloped away west. Easily losing the few Howlers who pursued, they had next gone a few miles inland to the very edge of the Palood and headed east again. Now they were camped some half a day’s eastward journey from the place where Hiero had been captured. The enemy was not, apparently, seeking them. It was supposed that they were thought to be mindless brutes and a stupid slave girl, not worth bothering about. They had been trying to frame new plans when the wonderful message had burst upon them. It was now a day and a half since the battle, if it could be called such. What did Hiero want them to do?

  The priest reflected for a moment. It would be silly for the girl, who knew nothing of boats or deep water, the bear, who knew even less, and the morse, too big for most vessels, to try and reach him. He must escape in his own way and seek them out instead. The problem was where to tell them to meet him. But it was not insuperable.

  Go, he sent, to the east. Find a cove where a small boat can come in secretly. Wait there in concealment. The Unclean know nothing of this channel of the mind we use now. He told them to send him a mind picture through Gorm, once they had found such a location, and estimate how far it lay from the site of the battle. He would surely be able to direct himself to it with that help. He added a prayer, a message of comfort for Luchare, and broke communication. A plan had been growing steadily in his mind, and he felt he could no longer avoid trying it. Who knew how much more time he would be allowed?

  Once again he mentally sought the nameless adept, the same who, by the help of the curious apparatus, was maintaining the combined watch and pressure upon him. Once again he had the weird experience of invading the Unclean wizard’s mind and senses and seeing them focused on himself!

  He began to insert a thought in the normal mental pattern of the adept, a thought which would simply appear as a subconscious command! The thought was simple: The prisoner is too quiet. Turn off the machine and go and check on him. Too quiet; go and check. Over and over the thought was built, Hiero increasing its strength by degrees, his concentration never faltering as he tried not to let the pressure mount too rapidly so that the adept, himself a master of mental science, would suspect he was being tampered with. On and on, up and up, went the pressure. All the while Hiero watched the instrument board before him through the eyes of the man he was trying to mislead.

  Suddenly there was a click. The priest felt his enemy’s worry plainly as the light in the peculiar hanging tube dimmed and went out. The board’s lights, too, were now shut off. The pressure on the other part of Hiero’s brain vanished. And at the same time, before the Unclean adept could even rise from his seat, Hiero struck. The mental barrier he had erected to defend himself was swept down, and he lashed out at the dark mind of the adept before the other could even think of guarding himself. Using both channels now open to him, Hiero captured the enemy’s brain before any warning even could be formulated. Now Hiero paused, keeping a tight vise on the other, arid waited to see if anyone else had been aroused. There was nothing, no thrilling of the ether, no alarm, no sign of awareness of what had happened.

  After a moment, Hiero ordered his captive, bound no less strongly than if he had been loaded with chains, to come to his cell and release him. It was a risk, for the adept might have no key, but Hiero was gambling that anyone of that rank must have the ability to set him free.

  He watched through the other’s eyes as the adept left the chamber from which he had kept watch and headed for Hiero’s distant place of imprisonment. Nor were the adept’s eyes the priest’s only aid. With the man’s ears, Hiero heard footsteps coming at a cross corridor and made the other stand in an alcove until they had passed.

  All this time he could feel the enemy’s own mind raging against its restraints. It was a strong mind and it battled desperately to free itself and the body it was attached to from the strangling embra
ce of the priest’s brain. But in vain: so quick had Hiero been that the entire forebrain was completely under his power, all senses, all locomotor ability, everything. The Unclean could only rage futilely in the dark recesses of his mind, helpless to intervene actively.

  Through a maze of dark corridors they went, passing closed doors at intervals and using the occasional dim bulb of a fluor set in the ceiling for light. Once, as they passed a door, Hiero caught the sound of a faint moan. But he dared not tarry to see what foulness of the enemy lay behind it. It would be all he could do to escape alone, and it would serve no one to have him die here in the course of a hopeless attempt at rescue of some other of Manoon’s captives. Presently they were before his own door. He could feel himself inside and themself outside at one and the same time. Under Hiero’s mental orders, the adept was forced to release a tiny, hidden catch in the stone corridor wall just outside the door. The door lock clicked, and the adept opened it and entered. As he entered, Hiero forced him to his knees. The door closed by itself behind the Unclean. At the same time, Hiero clamped down on every neural synapse he could reach in the adept’s body. With a muffled exhalation of breath, the enemy passed out cold, completely unconscious, even as the Metz left his mind completely and reoccupied his own in full.

  He rose from the bed and crouched by the body. Hastily he stripped the other, finding a nasty-looking dagger belted on under the robe. This he took and drew on the gray robe and hood over his own supple leather clothes. He listened for a moment and heard nothing. He built again his “ordinary” mind shield, simply as a precaution, lest a snooper try a chance probe at him. A sudden stillness made him glance down. There would be no need to tie the Unclean master up now, for he had ceased to breathe. The ferocious nerve shock must have stopped the evil heart, Hiero realized and promptly forgot the matter. The sooner such creatures as this were exterminated, the better, was his only feeling.

  Before he had “led” the adept to his own cell, the enemy’s memories had been extensively looted. Hiero knew now where his cell lay, where the various entrances were, and the whole maze of Manoon’s underworld down to the last broom closet. He shut the cell door behind him, locked it, and went on his way down the corridor, his hood over his bent head, to all appearances a master of the Dark Brotherhood intent on some problem as he paced along at a steady rate.

  He was not heading for the surface by the way he had entered. It was not the closest way out, for one thing, nor the most private. Also, there was something he wanted to get before he left. He kept his mind always on the warning pulse of the mental wavelength he had found the Unclean to favor. Any human being within range would be detected before he ever saw him and either avoided, the best method, or taken over mentally if necessary.

  He had crossed several hundred yards of dusty corridor, listening intently, his new knife held firmly up a sleeve, when he thought he caught a faint sound. He paused, his ears straining. The noise, if it were a noise and not the blood beating in his temples, was a soft scuffing, and it had seemed to come from behind him somewhere. He heard nothing now. The buried world of Manoon was utterly silent. Far behind him, a dusty blue fluor glowed in the corridor roof, and equally far ahead, another.

  Once more he went upon his way. Soon he slowed his pace even further. He heard footsteps ahead and saw the glow of a stronger light. He was approaching, as he had meant to, a more used part of the dungeon-fortress complex. The footsteps died away again and he moved on. It had only been an underling, whose mind radiated nothing but vicious stupidity.

  Hiero saw that the light came from a strong fluor set at the junction of his corridor with a much broader one. This was also as it should be, and no Unclean minds were in close proximity. Hood drawn down, he stepped into the new hallway and turned left. In a short time he was before another door, and finding it unlocked, he quickly entered. The small storeroom was empty. Having mind-probed first, he would have been greatly surprised had it been otherwise. On a shelf, shoulder belt, scabbard, and all, lay his beloved sword-knife, flung there carelessly by hands disdainful of mere physical weaponry. In a second, he had his robe off and was belting the beloved weapon on. Only moments later, he was out again and moving off up the corridor outside, back the way he had come, storeroom door shut behind him. It had been luck that the dead man back in his own cell had known where his sword was stored, but it had been forethought which had led the Metz to probe for the information. He wasted no time looking for the thrower. It already had been taken apart for examination, he had learned, and besides, he had no shells.

  Hiero met no one and sensed nothing on the way to the little-used corridor from which he had come, but he was nonetheless nervous. A feeling was growing that somehow he had been detected. Once into the corridor, he quickened his pace, moving at a dog trot. All of Manoon seemed unconscious of his escape, but that feeling persisted.

  The passage floor grew rougher, the jagged walls dripping cold water now and then, and the fluors were set even further apart.

  This was a path to a seldom-used exit, one originally designed in the far past to serve as an emergency escape route in the event Manoon should suffer a siege. When Hiero had ransacked the now dead master’s mind, this way had been the one which the Unclean himself had regarded as the most secret and the least likely to be either searched or guarded.

  The passage floor now began to slope upward at a light angle, which reassured Hiero, who had been wondering if he had made a mistake. But the floor was even rougher, and bits of rubble and even a few large rocks littered it. Also, it twisted, cutting down the dim light of the occasional fluors even more. His pace slowed to a walk.

  The priest paused. Had he caught another faint sound, the rattle of a stone far to his rear? Once again he “swept” the airwaves for an Unclean human’s presence and detected nothing. If anything, a rat or some other vermin, he decided and went on. No human mind stirred in the fortress.

  At length the passage straightened. It ran up now at a fairly steep angle, and a tiny gleam of light far away heralded its end. Encouraged, the Metz loped on, breathing evenly. He was beginning to feel the strain of all the mental effort, even more than the physical exertion, but he still had reserves to draw on.

  He had passed the last dusty fluor and gone into the darkness beyond when the rattling scrape of claws on stone made him turn, freeing the heavy sword-knife and dagger together from the folds of the robe as he did.

  One fluor’s light beyond the near one, a great dark bulk filled the tunnel from side to side, rolling along at a terrifying speed. At the same time, realizing somehow that he had been detected, the monster gave forth with a ghastly ululating bellow which filled the tunnel with deafening noise.

  Chee-Chowk! Somehow the giant Howler had sensed Hiero’s escape and tracked him down. And the priest’s watch for Unclean human minds had made him forget they too had allies who thought in a different band altogether! But there was no time for self-recrimination.

  As the Leemute passed under the last fluor just in front of him, Hiero caught the glint of the cleaverlike weapon the filthy thing carried in one great paw. Then the priest attacked.

  He had transferred his sword, letting it droop from his dagger, or left hand, while he stooped and then hurled a fist-sized piece of rubble as hard as he could, straight into the fang-lined maw which shrieked at him. Straight and hard went the missile, and the chunk of limestone smashed into the hideous mouth, silencing the cries on the instant and making the brute halt in sudden agony, pawing the air with his free hand.

  Behind the rock raced Hiero himself, sword now in the right hand, dagger in the left, using the downward slope of the tunnel to lend force to his charge.

  Chee-Chowk tried to raise his own weapon, but using the long dagger as a main gauche, the defensive poniard of the forgotten Cinquecento, the priest beat it aside and struck a terrible blow at that awful, bleeding face which reared above him. The short, heavy blade, backed with utter desperation, for Hiero had no doubt as to the ult
imate outcome if he should miss, came cleaving straight between the staring, red eyes. It drove into the skull beyond and split it with a “chunk” sound, as when a man splits a heavy tree knot with an axe.

  That was all. The Howler’s giant body fell slowly forward, eyes glazed in death, and Hiero had to twist himself sideways to avoid being crushed. Even so, his sword was wrenched from his weakening grip, so deeply was it embedded in the head of his monstrous foe.

  There was silence, broken only by the priest’s panting breath. As soon as he could think again, he tried to tear loose his sword and, while doing so, to use his brain to see if any general alarm had been given. But he could detect nothing. No mental clamor, no alert, nothing at all. The minds he was able to spot-check back in the main fortress were unconcerned, set only upon their own routine business. S’duna still lay in drugged slumber, a prey to evil visions.

  Finally, Hiero tugged his weapon loose, and stooping, wiped it more or less clean on the dirty fur of the Leemute. He stood looking down at the huge bulk, whose muscular spasms went on despite death. “A pity, Chee-Chowk,” he mused aloud. “Perhaps if decent men had raised you, you’d have been just another kind of man, not a foul, night-haunting ogre.” Moved by the tragedy of the Leemute’s mere existence, he said a brief prayer and then turned and resumed his march up the tunnel. Already he could smell the fresh breezes over the dank airs of the tunnel and the stench of the dead Howler.

  The light was much further than it looked, however, and it was more time than he cared to lose before he climbed the ramp to the end of the tunnel. His legs now really ached, and he had a strong feeling that a Chee-Chowk one-year-old would have been too much for him.