“Aye!” Thongor grunted, touching his bruised and swollen throat with tender fingers, grimacing with a wince of pain. “Thank Gorm I blundered on the crystal thing when I did. But, now, Ald Turmis, let us leave this accursed place, and swiftly. We have our swords, and here lie our cloaks and warrior harness. Let us shake the dust of this place off our heels, and repair to the nearest inn. It will take a jug or two of strong red wine to wash the stink of magic from me, and I can taste it already!”
But Ald Turmis, looking past him to the top of the dais, made no answer. Instead he went pale to the lips and clutched Thongor’s arm mutely.
Thongor grunted questioningly, and turned to see what had alarmed his comrade. And he saw—
Even as the ruddy glow of dawn lit the crystal dome above them and bathed the shadow-thronged hall with tremulous, bloody radiance, whirling darkness grew about the empty throne on the top of the tier of stone steps. Was it the hell-spawned guardian, returning to this plane? Or was it has master?
10
The Living Statue
Like a churning cloud of dust motes dancing in a skirl of wind, particles of darkness seethed about the sparkling crystal throne. Gradually the whirling motes drew closer together, forming a shadowy pillar of darkness. Seven feet tall the blurred shadow-shape loomed. The vaporous fabric of its substance grew slowly solid. The tall, massive figure of a man melted out of the dense blackness. He was tall and powerful, with a strong-boned, swarthy face, wrapped from head to heel in a long black cloak whose collar lifted to peaks like horns beside his head.
“Gods of Hell!” Ald Turmis swore—“The sorcerer returns!”
And it was even so. As they watched, the heavy form became solid flesh. Still wrapped from throat to toe in the stiff black cloak, whose strange fabric glittered with tiny star-like points of light, the huge man stood. He seated himself in his chair of power and let long, naked hands go out to clutch the arms of the chair. These arms ended with great knobs carved from the sparkling crystal from which the throne-chair was hewn, and each facet of these knobs bore inset a potent talisman of magic. Enthroned in his high place, touching with his naked hands the sigils which commanded unseen sources of power, the wizard was enshrined, invulnerable—a pole of power—the connecting node between the universe of matter and the unseen half-world of tremendous forces which lay behind the structure of the cosmos.
Robed in power, beyond the reach of mortals, Athmar Phong gazed down at them calmly. He was a veritable giant of a man. Had his towering height been less, he would have seemed a grossly fat man: as it was, his abnormal tallness made him seem less obese. But massive flesh lay on his giant bones. His weight must have been twice that of an ordinary man like Ald Turmis.
His face was a gross caricature of cold, cynical command. Hairless, massive-boned, he gazed down at them like some colossal buddha. His impassive, unlined face was a passionless mask of heavy flesh. Cold, slitted eyes ringed in fat looked down at them with a placid contempt. There was callous cruelty in the set of his thick lips, brutal virility in the arrogant thrust of his hooked nose, remorseless and superhuman intelligence in the huge, bulging brows of his naked pate.
“Thieves in my house,” he said calmly, “and clever ones at that. For, whether you know it or not, mortals, the guardian of my treasures was a demon of the seventh circle. I am amazed that mere men of brawn such as you had the cunning and the wit to destroy so mighty an entity of the transmundane.”
His voice was like his face: heavy, slow, soft and cold. The words glided, oily and thick and sluggish, from almost motionless lips. “Whoever sent you here, must have armed you with a potent name of power. Let me warn you, then, do not think to employ such a name against Athmar Phong. Enthroned, I sit at a nexus of the unseen forces, shielded from such powers as you might bear against me by currents of the ineffable. The name would rebound against yourself, leaving me unshaken. But let me see…”
The heavy, hooded eyelids lifted, baring orbs of utter blackness. No whites were visible about those blazing pupils: nor did they look like the eyes of a fully human creature.
Thongor stiffened, his senses stirring with an eerie chill of superstitious fear. The cold gaze of Athmar Phong thrust at him like needles of steel. His own gaze was locked and held in the grip of a superior will. He felt a weird sensation within his skull, as if cold tendrils of thought were prying through the secret places of his mind. It lasted an instant only, and the tendrils were withdrawn.
Ominous satisfaction curved the lips of Athmar Phong in a slight, subtle smile.
“So it was my old friend, Kaman Thuu, sent you here, dog of a barbarian. I shall repay him trebly for this deed! Yonder youth also, as I recall, came here at his urgings: him we took captive half-a-moon ago, and I thought him well secured in certain cellar chambers set aside for uninvited guests. I see the lad had cunning enough to force an exit from there—or did you aid him with those great brawny arms, eh?”
Beside Thongor, Ald Turmis snarled an oath and his knuckles whitened on the hilt of his rapier.
The Ptarthan wizard smiled cynically. “I read your thoughts as well…rash, impetuous youth, it is best that I immobilize the two of you before you cause hurt to yourselves—“
Before either Thongor or Ald Turmis could think or move or speak, the wizard’s hand tightened on one of the talismans set within the handgrip of his throne. A shaft of scintillating azure light speared from the crystal throne. The two young swordsmen stood bathed in the shaft of cold blue light, and the wizard smiled as Ald Turmis cried out sharply and Thongor growled an astonished oath.
“I—cannot—move!” the Zangabali cried in a voice of anguish. His face gleamed wetly white, and as Thongor looked he saw an unnatural pallor sweep over the lean, strong body of his comrade, who was naked but for a ragged clout.
“Numb…cold,” Ald Turmis groaned. His voice sounded hoarse, constricted, as if the muscles of his throat were half-paralyzed. The wizard chuckled above them, a gloating sound that roused a warning growl in Thongor’s deep chest. He, too, felt a momentary chill pass over his body as he stood in the path of the shaft of scintillating blue light. But then his fingers tightened over the cold, ovoid shape of the Shield of Cathloda, which he still clutched in his right hand, and the brief sensation of numbness vanished instantly.
The blue ray dimmed and died. The wizard withdrew his fingers from the circular sigil of blue metal.
“The immobilizing ray,” he said softly. “Your flesh will slowly grow harder and more dense until the two of you will turn to stone. Lovely statues to adorn my hall…yet statues that live and think, for your souls will be held captive within your petrified flesh for all eternity to come. Fit punishment indeed, for the tools of that treacherous priestling, Kaman Thuu.”
The giant wizard shifted in his throne. He stretched out one hand towards empty air. “Poor mortals!” he said mockingly. “You searched my halls in vain, for that which you sought but could not find was here beside my place all this while, though shielded from the gaze of uninvited guests. Behold—the mirror of Zaffar!”
One great naked hand clutched out at empty air and whisked aside a blur of bright cloth from a pedestal of glistening silver. At the top of the silver stand an oval disc of thick black glass caught the dim radiance of dawn with sullen, shifting fires. Thongor stared.
The mirror had been covered with a strange cloth whose stiff fabric, bright, blurred, was oddly difficult to see. The eye would not quite focus on it; something about its blurred brilliance was eye-twisting, as if the sight slid off it. So the mirror had been beside the throne all the while!
Beside him, Ald Turmis moaned in anguish. His weird pallor was more visible now. The surface of his bare body, ashen white, looked rough and dry, almost…like stone. And Thongor grimly knew that if he did not act, and soon, the young swordsman of Thurdis who had befriended him in the pits below this house of hell would turn to enduring stone—a living statue, imprisoning the tortured soul of Ald Turmis for all time
to come.
11
The Breaking of Spells
The slow, heavy voice of Athmar Phong was speaking again, like the dull tolling of a leaden bell under thick water. Waves of words beat against them as the wizard droned on.
“Behold, O fortunate mortals, that which few eyes have ever looked upon—the supreme magical treasure of all the ages! Zaffar the Great, the mighty thaumaturge of Patanga wrought this mirror, and seven generations of time—as mortal men measure time—went into its making! Seven thousand potent spells of power are sealed into the substance of this black mirror. Zaffar fashioned it from perdurable adamant, the strongest substance known to sorcery. Now it is fragile as glass…and bound helpless and raging therein, lie forever imprisoned the very self and substance of Aqquoonkagua, one of the nine thousand princes of the infernal pit! Aye, a mighty and eternal prince of hell, older than the very universe of stars itself—a fragment of elder chaos and old night—caught and held within the magic mirror of Zaffar the Great! Behold—”
The black mirror was about the size of the cherm, the small, lightweight buckler the Lemurian warriors wore strapped to their left forearms. It was black as the heart of darkness itself, a disc of shimmering crystal, thick as the breadth of two fingers.
As Athmar Phong touched it with his naked hands, it stirred with strange life. Thongor felt his hackles rise upon the back of his neck. Within the shimmering darkness, a crimson shadow moved!
For a moment Thongor glimpsed a great triangular head. As he watched it, it shouldered into view, peering through the mirror as through a black window. He saw one great, glaring eye—a pit of blazing hellfire—and a wide, fanged maw open, working, screaming with silent fury. Then the red thing that was a captive Prince of the Pit slunk back into the darkness of its shadowy home and was lost to view.
“Gorm!” the barbarian grunted, feeling sweat trickle down his sides and moisten his brows. Strange and terrible were the ways of wizards; dark and dreadful were their uncanny arts. The mighty, crimson demon was somehow reduced to two dimensions only: to him the flat surface of the mirror was an entire world, from which he could never break free unless released by an outside agency. The whole thing was mad and nightmarish. For an instant he almost pitied the shambling, scarlet horror locked in the surface of the ebon glass for dim, unimaginable aeons…
A groan of mute suffering from the young swordsman at his side awoke Thongor from these dark thoughts. Ald Turmis, too, was imprisoned—and his prison was his own living flesh, slowly, inch by inch, petrifying into solid stone. A doom darker and more terrible even than that of the enslaved Demon Prince.
It was time for Thongor to act. He had not moved since the Ptarthan wizard had sent the strange beam of azure radiance sweeping over him and his companion.
Secure in his high place, throned in the midst of his magical forces at the nexus of two universes, Athmar Phong little dreamed that the young barbarian was not rendered helpless from the eerie power of the immobilizing ray. But now Thongor swung into action.
He reached out and laid his hand upon the shoulder of Ald Turmis—the hand that held the all-potent Shield of Cathloda. The flesh of his comrade was harsh, dry, rough and cold to his touch. The surface of the young Zangabali’s skin felt strangely granular. But the nullifying powers of the protective amulet were enormous—strong enough to whelm the spell of the blue ray, aye, and far stronger, as would soon be seen.
Ald Turmis cried out as the amulet touched his hardening flesh. A tingle of weird force swept through his body, like the shuddering electric force of lightning. Through every cell and organ, every gland and muscle and tissue of his body it swept, and the spell of Athmar Phong ebbed and died before it. The young swordsman, suddenly freed from the effects of the spell, staggered and fell to one knee, gasping with relief.
On the sparkling crystal throne, Athmar Phong froze with utter astonishment.
Thongor tossed back his unshorn mane and roared with laughter. “Now, wizard—if swords cannot battle against sorcery, we will see what happens when I pit magic against magic!” And before the wizard could move or think, Thongor whipped back his mighty arm—and hurled the all-potent amulet straight at the black mirror of Zaffar.
It flew, glittering, through the dawn-lit air. Straight as an arrow to its mark it sped, and when it touched the invisible forces that wove a viewless shield about the wizard’s throne of power, great spells were broken. Canceled energies flashed through the spectrum of visible light. A terrific flash of eye-searing radiance lit the hall like some supernal sun.
Tears pouring from his blinded eyes, Athmar Phong screamed terribly, high and shrill like an animal in pain. He lurched unsteadily to his feet, pawing at his eyes.
Hurled with the irresistible strength of Thongor’s mighty arm, the Shield of Cathloda flew through the flashing energy field—and crashed full into the black mirror. The mirror came apart in a dark flash of released forces—it shattered to grains of black dust.
For a single instant, as age-old spells were broken, tremendous energy was released. A seething ball of black flame surged about the crystal throne. The silver pedestal, at the very node and nexus of the canceled binding forces, flashed with intolerable heat. It glowed crimson, then canary, then blinding white. It slumped, crumbling slowly, like the shaft of a waxen candle suddenly thrust into the heart of a roaring furnace. Glowing rivulets of molten metal flowed over the topmost tier of the dais like serpents of liquid flame.
One blazing rivulet crawled between the staggering legs of the blinded, howling wizard. His glistening, black cloak went up in a puff of fire. Suddenly sheathed from throat to heel in a sheet of crackling flame, the wizard screeched and fell flopping and writhing to the steps. He rolled down them and crashed against the stone paving of the hall, crushing out the flames beneath his heavy weight. Panting, his flesh blistered and blackened, he staggered to his knees, sobbing with agony and naked fury.
But neither Thongor nor Ald Turmis could spare a glance for the dethroned sorcerer. Their gaze was riveted with horrible fascination at that which stood above the dais. For the Shield of Cathloda had severed the seven thousand spells which had bound the Demon Prince within the depths of the enchanted glass.
Now Aqquoonkagua was free.
12
Flames of Hell
Up out of the whirling cloud of black flame towered and grew a titanic shape of terror. It was crimson, and covered with crawling fire; bestial of shape, hulking and monstrous. It had great sloping shoulders like some mighty ape, from which long arms swung, arms that ended in great three-clawed paws, that also smoldered and smoked as if molded out of red-hot iron.
Up and up it went until it loomed forty feet above the stone pavement. Flames slithered across its shaggy skin; the fiery red light that beat up from it was dazzling. The room swirled with smoke. Blistering heat like the breath of an open furnace went baking across the hall in waves. Soot blackened the walls and hung thick in the air.
Roaring, raging, the crimson thing stood free after long, weary centuries of time. It had no neck. A heavy-jawed, apelike head swung between the burly shoulders. One huge eye blazed with fires of madness under beetling brows. The fanged maw gaped and slavered. One great paw closed into a fist and came smashing down on the soot-blackened, overturned throne. It burst to fragments and was ground to dust under the weight of the blow. The other paw reached down for Athmar Phong.
Naked, the wizard’s heavy body sprawled panting at the foot of the dais. Blind and horribly burnt, the Ptarthan sorcerer somehow knew or guessed what was about to happen. Like a huge, fat slug writhing under the gardener’s hoe, he squalled and wriggled on the hot paving as the titanic, flaming hand came down upon him. Waves of heat beat from the grasping paw, crisping flesh and withering cloth to ash. The demon’s hand was huge as the wizard’s body, and the three mighty claws were big as smouldering logs. The searing heat of the demon’s flesh smote him first, and he kicked and screamed. Then the hand came down upon him and snat
ched him up.
Thongor had seen much of battle and death and suffering, but never before had he heard such a cry wrung from mortal lips as that which now went ringing through the hall. A hoarse, terrible bellow of ultimate agony and unutterable despair—the sort of cry that rips the lining of the human throat.
The naked wizard flopped and wriggled on the flaming palm of the demon’s hand. Then the burning claws closed over him slowly—tightened—and the screams were cut off. The sickening stench of broiling human flesh filled the great hall. Ald Turmis gagged and spat; Thongor’s own gorge rose at the nauseating smell.
Bearing the smoking corpse of Athmar Phong in one great paw, the roaring, raging demon burst up through the dome of dawn-lit crystal and was gone—back to whatever ultracosmic hell the blasphemous rituals of the thaumaturge Zaffar had conjured it from, ages ago.
The broken dome collapsed, strewing the soot-smeared pavement with shattered wreckage. Mighty stone pillars, shoved askew by the demon’s skyward passage, toppled slowly, shaking the wizard’s house to its foundations as they came crashing down. Black cracks zigzagged through the fabric of the walls. The house was coming down upon their heads.
Thongor grabbed Ald Turmis by the shoulder, shouting through the roar of wreckage. They ran across the buckling stone flags for the yawning blackness of the secret panel, which still stood open. Thongor snatched up their cloaks and harnesses as they sprinted for freedom.
The terrific heat of the demon’s crimson body had touched to flame the tapestries and hangings in the hall. Overturned benches and fallen beams blazed like oil-soaked torches. The ruined hall was transformed into a thundering inferno within mere instants.
The two warriors plunged into the black door and vanished from view. Down the secret passageways they went. Room after room, as they passed, was bursting into flame. It was weird to see solid marble burn, and metal, and crystal, too. The fires that blazed within the demon’s body were the fires of some ultracosmic inferno—hotter than any flames of man’s knowledge. The terrible hellfire burned through stone walls and floors, consuming everything in its path like a ravenous dragon.
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