As the two circled, Thongor’s eye caught something he had not noticed before: a shield. A shining relic, of little use for offence by itself, and perhaps the twin of the sword the blue giant held fast. The giant saw it, too, and both dove for it. Thongor came up with it. He knew the blue-skinned behemoth scarcely needed it to fend off his blows, so there must be some other advantage to his possession of it—or perhaps an advantage to him in Thongor’s not having it.
Stepping away from the creature, Thongor hefted the shining disk so that he might behold the approaching form of his foeman over his shoulder. It seemed insanely foolish, but in that moment, he had found the crucial weapon that had thus far eluded him: knowledge. For now he understood the true nature of his enemy.
In the reflective silver, that metal celebrated for cancelling every spell, Thongor saw but an animated lattice of ancient bones, some of them trailing cobwebs and bits of desiccated gristle. Alien, antehuman, preternatural it was, but it was finally a rotten tree of bones, and, laughing, Thongor swept them aside with the shield. They sprayed across the chamber, many of them collapsing into the omnipresent dust. Struggling against his own fears, he had at last prevailed with the aid of a moment’s thought.
The great sword fell with an almost musical ringing clang. Holding the shield fast, Thongor bent down to retrieve its partner. He made to leave the treasure shaft forever. But on second thought, he stooped and stared about again, looking for the fallen crown of the phantom god-king.
He found it, twirled it around an index finger, and toyed with the momentary temptation to place it on his own brow in a pantomime inauguration. The empty throne was just behind him, as if he had freshly risen from it.
As he stood there, the awful fatigue of the last two days’ exertions fell upon his shoulders. How good it would feel to take a rest upon the dusty throne! Perhaps a healing nap of an hour or so before going on his way. Unconsciously he sat upon the throne.
Without his noticing any passage across the threshold of sleep, dreams nonetheless began to fill his head, and he saw himself reigning from that throne as Sark of all Lemuria! Just as this vanquished being had once reigned in his heyday of the remote past?
And of a sudden Thongor beheld his likeness displayed in the mirror face of the shield: it had become one with the blue-skinned, three-eyed visage of his fallen opponent! Horrified, casting both sword and shield from him like a pair of hungry vipers, Thongor, destined perhaps one day to be king, but not this day, sprang from the throne as from a well-laid trap and made his way down along the shaft to the welcome freshness of the night air.
* * * *
Down on the lower slopes below the caves once more, Thongor was alert for the sound of the dread Hounds of Talondos. There was neither sight nor scent of his recent pursuers. Pausing a moment, he took the risk of retracing his running steps till he came upon the bleeding heap from which he had earlier dared not stop to retrieve his sword. Now he braced one foot on the stoney ribcage and yanked the Valkarthan broadsword free, wiping the blade clean of the creature’s foul blood with a handful of leaves.
Resuming his southward course, Thongor’s steady stride devoured the miles. At length he stood still, and in the light of the golden moon he gazed again at his reflection, this time in the mirror-face of his own familiar sword. Thankfully, it was his natural face.
He knew not what destiny awaited him: surely it had been foolish to entertain the thought of his one day sitting a throne. He laughed aloud now. But he knew his path lay south, and it was time to be on his way.
INTRO TO MIND LORDS OF LEMURIA
Reaching the southern jungle lands at last, Thongor encounters a new world, where quick wits and an even quicker sword keep him precariously alive. He soon establishes himself as a useful fighting man and signs up for military service in the legions of Arzang Pome, the ambitious Sark of Shembis, one of the largest of the city-states.
MIND LORDS OF LEMURIA
1
Jungle Silver
The handful of kroter-mounted soldiers thundered into the glade, the intense sunlight of old Lemuria mottling their harsh features through the overhanging foliage. Only half their original number, these survivors were, on the whole, neither stronger nor cannier than their late companions, just luckier—with perhaps one exception. Command of the unit had fallen to a young barbarian from the frozen peaks of Valkarth, a complete stranger to these climes, but seemingly indifferent to the stings of clinging vine and bird-sized mosquito alike. His name was Thongor, and some months earlier he had entered the service of the fat Sark of Shembis, the tyrant Arzang Pome.
The ways of civilized men seemed no less than madness to the strapping Valkarthan, accustomed as he was to the barest code of survival in a hostile world. But the decadent Pome’s madness was real, even by civilization’s standards. His madness was a greed for silver. Hushed rumor had it that the Sark required the precious metal for some unspeakable alchemical rites aimed at securing eternal youth. And, while believable, these whispers might be a simple cloak for insatiable greed where the metal was concerned. Perhaps the be-jowled monarch just had a liking for it.
But for whatever reason, it was his silver lust that had sent this mixed band of palace guards and mercenaries on what thus far had been a futile chase into unmapped jungle. Some wandering mage had sold the Sark a wives’ tale of a lost city buried in the depths of the lotifer forest, a rich and proud city whelmed in ancient days for its overweening pride by the Nineteen Gods. Surely a city so proud must have shared the oblivious ruler’s imprudent lust for precious metal, and so he sought to emulate their crime, risking their doom. If there had ever been such a place, a half-fabulous city with no name that even the itinerant storyteller could remember.
But greed let no chance go unopened, and here they were, most of the men sick and disgusted. Their original commander, a high-ranking member of the elite guard, had already perished from snakebite, several others from deadly fruit. Wild beasts had thus far remained at a distance, but as the men’s numbers shrank, this would almost certainly change.
Thongor had assumed command, and no one with an objection had any longer the strength to challenge him. He would do his best to watch out for the men. He liked not the bargain the Sark had struck: how many men might be spent in search of superfluous loot that probably didn’t even exist? He decided he would press on but a little further into the rank growth, far enough to justify the report that a search had turned up nothing. Then he would turn back and take his chances as the bearer of bad tidings. He explained his scheme to the men, and none gainsaid him, all eager to be back in the Shembis wine shops and brothels if they should live so long.
Such thoughts occupied him as Thongor guided the foremost of the mounts carefully through the strange terrain. It suddenly grew thicker again, slowing them down to a maddening crawl. He congratulated himself on having avoided a path grown dense at the far end with spiky vines, but as he turned left, the company raggedly following along…
Disaster closed like a vise! At once there was nothing underfoot. A hunter’s trap, he thought momentarily as his stomach lurched with the unexpected descent. But the fall continued too long, and it was only before he crashed to solid floor beneath that he realized he had found what he sought. The vines and bushes of a thousand years had silently covered the tunnel mouth leading to a great underground complex.
2
Caverns of Madness
It was not long before consciousness returned, and thanks to his wilderness-bred instincts, it returned like a pouncing snow-vandar. His head ached, but Thongor’s full black mane, square-cut across his forehead, had cushioned the blow. His silver-plated helmet was nowhere to be seen. He rose up on one elbow, turning in every direction, trying to pierce the shadows with his curious golden eyes, to see how his men fared, men who had made a mistake in following him.
Thongor cursed himself as he paced across what seemed an extensive chamber, stooping over body after body, finding a broken neck here, a fa
tal concussion there. All he could find were dead, but not all were yet accounted for. Of a sudden he saw a trace of lambency, a strangely colored light shining round a corner of the cavern wall. Had the other survivors, and there could be no more than four, he estimated, had they awakened before him and gone on without him, deeper into the shaft? It seemed unlikely.
Tightening his sword belt and choosing a dagger from one of the sprawled forms, Thongor made for the light. But before he could round the corner, crouched in a stance anticipating attack, he was surprised by an advancing form that seemed to throw itself upon him like a vast blanket. Dry like a snake, yet viscously unstable like some jellyfish, the thing sought to smother him, but he whipped his broadsword from its sheath like lightning and hacked desperately at that which held him. It neither bled nor made any sound.
But a faint buzzing, of which the barbarian had been but subliminally aware up to now, began to heighten in pitch and urgency. Thongor ripped and sliced, tearing with one hand as he cut with the other, but the living wave of alien flesh began to get the better of him, attaching itself to his face, cutting off his breath. For the second time in under an hour, he lost consciousness.
This time he awoke to the buzzing, become so loud that he could not ignore it. He tried to move. Frustrated in this, he next tried at least to gain his bearings, focusing his eyes. This was difficult. He seemed to see but a pinkish blur, though there was a hint of motion somewhere within the roseate haze. It registered that the hue was nothing natural, but the same as he had seen reflected earlier on the cavern wall. It emanated from no single source, yet it filled the very air around him, and its strength extended no farther than mere inches beyond a great circular tube that held his immobile form.
As his eyes became accustomed to the weird haze, his peripheral vision revealed the arrangement of four other containers, presumably like his own, in a rough semicircle against the irregular cavern wall. At some point in the distant past, some one or some thing had troubled to smooth the rocky surface, yet without bothering to straighten the natural walls. Thongor’s world knew a crude version of glass, though mirrors were usually constructed of polished silver. He had never seen the like of what held him captive now, a perfectly smooth, seemingly thick cylinder of transparent shielding.
And it was the same with the others. The tale of the wandering mage had been no idle one, then, though whatever treasure might lurk here would seem to be far too costly to recover. Thongor thought with grim irony that he would be a rich man to escape this place with the treasure of his life.
He thought he could make out the blurred lines of the remaining companions within the other tubes. Three he had not known well, but the fourth and the easiest to recognize because of his short stature, was one Tam Tavis, a boy too young for the dangers of this ill-fated mission, but headstrong enough that he would not be left behind. Thongor had seen in the strapping youth a reflection of himself in earlier years, a boy budding into manhood quickly, with instincts and reflexes, not to mention precocious strength, that would one day serve him well on the battlefield. There was no school for adventure better than adventure itself, as he had learned amply, so he had put up no real opposition when the lad had pleaded to be taken along. Now Thongor rued his decision. He had long ago lost count of the number of foemen’s lives he had taken. But it was a new and distasteful thing for him to count the squandered lives of friends.
The Valkarthan’s golden eyes turned to the sudden appearance of that alien entity he had fought and failed to defeat. His brow flared into a fever of rage as he traced the heavy, shifting motions of the shapeless silhouette before him, his anger rising even faster with the chagrin of defeat. And for all this, his spine began at once to tingle as he felt the creeping tendrils of a foreign consciousness entering and mingling with his own. The rising panic abruptly ceased, however, as his mind’s eye began to feed on vast scenes crystallizing from a mist of seeming forgetfulness, as if he were awakening from a long sleep and coming to himself, a self he had forgotten he knew.
He was unaware that his square jaw fell slack and drooling as his vacant eyes gazed down the centuries, through the memories of his inhuman host. Together the unlikely pair beheld a great vista of which discredited legends spoke: the infinitely ancient migration through the cosmic aethyr of a legion of sentient comets. From a neighboring sphere they came, the immemorial Children of the Fire Mist, so designated in the forbidden Testament of Xanthu, ostensibly salvaged from the collapsing fanes of elder Mu.
They had arrived on the new-made earth, seeking among the myriad forms of burgeoning life some spark of intelligence that they might fan into flame, perhaps out of sheer benevolence, perhaps for recondite reasons of their own. The Lords of the Fire Mist had the uncanny ability to transfer their own intellects, incorporeal as they were, into whatever physical forms they chose, so long as these possessed at least some malleable mindstuff. They sought by this means to heighten the faculties of these crude beings, to hasten their evolution to full awareness.
The first objects of their attentions were the scarcely sentient pseudopodic creatures whose likeness Thongor had lately battled. With these beings they eventually won great success, their mottled blue-green rubbery forms at length evolving into the mighty blue-skinned Rmoahal warriors of the southern plains. But these proved too mighty for the Mind Lords to dominate. They had done their work too well. After long years they ventured another experiment in what Thongor would have deemed blackest sorcery.
The Sons of the Fire Mist chose a species of small, tailed mammals, bulge-eyed and bulb-fingered, tree-swingers, bug-eaters. Thongor’s vision, which falsely seemed a memory, traced the progress of these creatures up the ladder of apedom to nobler form and feature, and he knew he had witnessed the very origin of his own tribe: Man.
Thongor now knew, and indeed took for granted, that the loathsome form of the thing he had fought and which now shared his very soul was a specimen of that earlier, long-ago age of experiment, before the furry branch-swingers took their first involuntary steps to humanity. Here was one of the first intelligent beings from earth’s dawn age. How long had it bided the ages? He sensed a great anger and a greater…covetousness. This one of the archaic Mind Lords of Lemuria wanted what he, unlike his ancient colleagues, had been denied: a fully human form to inhabit.
Their ancient mission had succeeded. Wisdom had been ignited in the breasts of earthly creatures. Had the rest of the Children of the Fire Mist abandoned the planet again, returned to their adjacent sphere? If so, then why had they left this one behind? Thongor found he could share none of the creature’s memory at this point. Here the lone Mind Lord became guarded; was this, perhaps, from ancient habit, when he needed to shield certain heretical or treasonous thoughts from his more enlightened fellows?
3
Alien Flesh
The Valkarthan lost consciousness again, instantly, as if it had been snuffed out like a temple candle. When he again awakened, no sense of the passage of dreamtime betrayed how long he had been out. He knew at once that the paralysis had left him, and he made to flex his limbs. His initial thought was surprise that there was no ache—until he beheld in horror members which answered to his commands, albeit clumsily, but were not his own!
Worse yet, they were not even remotely human. Of course he knew himself the prisoner of his rugose and monstrous host, more truly and damnably a prisoner than he had been when paralyzed. He was back in the clear tube, and his ungainly tentacles thrashed helplessly against the smooth, concave surface. He found he was able to see what transpired without, but his sight was somehow different. Nothing seemed to point in any one particular direction. Relative height and width fluctuated. Colors shimmered into and out of the familiar spectrum range.
His human form was free—and occupied! He saw the image of Thongor of Valkarth admiring himself in a mirror, as if a man should consider a new robe or suit of armor! Gradually, his living image drew forth its scabbarded longsword, again belted to the hip, and
made clumsy swipes with it through the stagnant air of the cavern. But the thing that held his body hostage was rapidly accustoming itself to the reflexes and instincts of its new home. Thongor’s body as well as his mind had learned his martial skills, and that made them available to the usurper.
But it also appeared to work in reverse! Thongor at once felt more in control of the repulsive alien form he had inherited. He was for the moment no less a captive, but he knew that things needed to change but slightly before new possibilities could begin to form. Nor was this the only change.
The Mind Lord in Thongor’s body now held the blade in one hand and manipulated some glowing studs on a chest-high metal surface. The mist filling one of his men’s cylinders began to dissipate, drawn back through tiny holes in the base. The man within began to shake himself awake, lacking the paralysis Thongor had experienced. Then the cylinder retreated into a recess in the cavern shadows above, leaving the man free and gasping a lung full of the stale but welcome air.
His eyes visibly brightened as he recognized him whom he took for his brave commander. Inside Thongor’s prison tube, the Valkarthan could hear no sounds, but he saw that the soldier spoke pleasantly to his commander’s image, awaited a reply, looked puzzled—then crumpled with his life’s blood jetting in a geyser from the severed stump of his head.
The helpless mind of the captive Valkarthan raged in impotent fury as he saw the same performance repeated by the incarnated Mind Lord, who seemed to imagine he honed his battle skills by similarly butchering the rest of the Sark’s dazed troops. No doubt one and all perished thinking Thongor had betrayed and murdered them! He vowed his foe should pay dearly for this outrage!
But now the false Thongor made to open the prison-tube of the last of the men, young Tam Tavis! The blue-green sheath that was the Valkarthan’s body shook with unaccustomed—human—fury; Thongor knew he must somehow find a way to prevent this final atrocity.
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