by Brian Lumley
Down they spiralled, helplessly, like ants trapped on a leaf and whirled in a gale, and even Armandra's little familiar winds could do nothing to help them .. .
Minutes passed and still the power of the vortex increased, so that twice de Marigny felt Moreen's legs slip where they gripped him. On both occasions he released all control over the cloak to grab the girl to him, gritting his teeth in the face of the now howling current of air that rushed them ever faster into nightmare bowels of ice and stone.
In the same interval of time Silberhutte, too, was active, partly freeing himself from his harness and then fighting the suction that threatened to tear him bodily loose from his straps. He would part with the cloak soon enough — but when he chose to do so and not before. When he went to the ice-priests, he would go as his own man, not hooked and wriggling like some fish on a line.
But now, as the bore narrowed until its huge, blue-glowing ice steps were less than fifty feet away on all sides, the cloak and its passengers were caught up in a chaos of crazed air that immediately checked their sickening plunge, whirling them in a circle that took the trio ever closer to the smooth ice walls. Finally, when it seemed they must surely be dashed to pieces against the lowest tiers of steps at the very bottom of the pit, then the mad winds hurled them irresistibly along one of several horizontal shafts that lay at right angles to the main bore.
They were rushed into a region of eerie, blue-lit caves hung with ice stalactites that glowed phosphorescently, and as the frenzied current of seemingly sentient air slackened off a little to thread them safely through this maze of descending daggers, so Silberhutte decided that the time had come to part company with his friends — at least for the time being.
He finished unfastening himself and, ignoring his great speed, cast himself free. His arms, thrown wide, momentarily embraced a pair of icicles almost as thick as his thighs, which might have withstood his body's weight but never its hurtling velocity. They snapped from the ceiling and crashed down with him to the floor of the tunnel in a massive shivering of ice. In the next moment there came a veritable deluge of crystals shaken loose by the reverberating echoes of Silberhutte's collision and fall; following which, as the howling subterranean winds bore the cloak swiftly away into the distance, the tunnel became still once more and coldly silent.
As for the two who still clung together beneath the cloak's straining canopy, they did not even know that the Warlord had left them. They knew only the nausea of their buffeting rush through bowels of earth and ice — a kaleidoscope vista of weirdly carved ice caves, lit now by blue luminosity, now dark as Stygian tombs — the irresistible wind and, in deep mental recesses, the obscene tittering of telepathic voices which could only belong to the ice-priests of olden Khrissa.
When the Warlord's senses returned, (he knew not how long after his fall,) he found himself lying in a pile of ice fragments, large and small; but while his body was a mass of bruises and abrasions, nothing seemed to be broken, though a painful and lumpy forehead explained his splitting headache. He climbed carefully to his feet and examined his body minutely, easing the aches and pains out of stiffened joints and battered limbs.
Then, as he made to follow a trail of ice debris brought down from the ceiling of the tunnel by the demon wind and the cloak's passing, he cast his mind back over the most immediate past. Uppermost in his memory was the wind that had dragged the cloak down the bore of the dead volcano and into this icy underworld, a wind which had doubtless been called up by the ice-priests. Ithaqua had obviously conferred certain of his powers on the ice-priests, much as he had on Borea.
Ah, but these priests of Dromos were different again from those the Wind-Walker occasionally elevated from the ranks of his common worshippers on Borea; they had been real priests in their time and were still, however dark the powers they served. Moreover they were telepathic. For this latter reason Silberhutte kept his thoughts carefully guarded as he traversed the tunnel, which in reality was not so much a tunnel as a series of domed caverns or galleries, natural in appearance and of unknown extent.
So the ice-priests were telepathic; they served Ithaqua and commanded, to one degree or another, a certain control over the elements; and they were basically evil in nature, as Armandra had forewarned. In short, and in the light of what the Warlord had glimpsed in their minds, they were certainly inimical to de Marigny's quest and both he and the girl Moreen could well be in the most dire trouble at this very moment.
With the latter thought strong in his mind, Silberhutte found himself increasing his pace as he passed through successive caverns of blue-glowing ice, always following the trail of crystalline debris. The air was absolutely calm now and completely icy, with a temperature well below zero, so that for all the masses of ice that hung from the ceiling and festooned the wails and floors in fantastic formations, no water moved or dripped anywhere. Silberhutte, however, felt no discomfort; his metabolism had been permanently altered long ago, so that he was perfectly at home in this frigid place, but he worried about de Marigny and Moreen. He knew that they had Annahilde's warming powder but wondered if they had retained their freedom to use it. By now they might well be in the clutches of the ice-priests.
Feeling almost fully recovered and having worked all of his aches and pains out of his system, the Warlord now forged ahead at a rapid pace, surefooted despite the treacherous surface on which he trod. Once or twice as he went, he felt tentative, searching mental fingers groping at the edges of his mind, but he kept his thoughts completely shielded from whichever minds sought his in this alien underworld. The very fact that they sought him, however, told him that his fears for the safety of his companions were realized; that they must have fallen into the hands of the ice-priests and that his own absence had been noted. That simply meant that he must proceed with great caution. And yet how could he do that and maintain his speed? No, speed was of the essence and caution must for the moment take second place in matters of precedence.
At least he could not complain of misplacement; on the contrary, for he was used to a subterranean or semisubterranean existence. These were different caves from those he had known in the plateau on Borea, certainly, and different again from the volcanic system of caverns and vents in the Isle of Mountains on Numinos, but they were caves nonetheless. Thus he was not at all dismayed when he was obliged to traverse several darker caves where the illumination was little more than a dull blue glow around the perimeter of the walls (he had known darker places in the plateau), though of necessity he had to slow his pace in passing through such areas.
Before long, however, he came to a large gallery where he was brought up short in unaccustomed indecision. Here the ceiling receded into frosty heights from which massive ice pillars, many of a thickness three or four times as great as his waist, joined with columns that grew up from an oddly corrugated floor; but the size and configurations of the place were not that which stopped him. What caused his consternation was something entirely different.
For some time the ice-crystal spoor of the cloak's passing had been diminishing, but here in this huge cave it petered out altogether. That might well mean that Silberhutte's search was almost at an end, but at the same time it confused matters greatly. For the place was like some sort of underground junction from which several shafts led off in different directions. One of these tunnels had been the cloak's exit route from the gallery, and its discovery would certainly lead the Warlord to his vanished friends.
But which one?
3 Lair of the Ice-Priests
Following the perimeter of the vast ice hall, Silberhutte peered into each of the tunnel entrances in turn, examining their floors for sign of the cloak's passing. He discovered nothing to suggest the way his friends had gone, but he did detect at the last entrance a certain odour. For a single second in the frozen, sterile atmosphere of the place, the strange smell - of incense, perhaps, and yet sulphurous, too - assailed his nostrils, then was gone.
Wasting no time, he moved forward in
to the tunnel, going as silently as possible between bluely luminous walls of ice, and as he went so the peculiar smell came stronger to him from some as yet unknown source. A minute more, and as the Warlord carefully came around a bend, he froze, baring his teeth in a half-snarl, half-gasp of surprise.
Slowly, great axe upraised, he emerged into view of a fantastic scene. Then he allowed himself to relax, his body coming erect from its half-crouch as he again moved forward, disbelief growing on his face. For this was the tunnel's end, the very lair of the ice-priests. And indeed there were ice-priests here - but they were the last thing Silberhutte had expected.
Armandra had said they were tall, hairless, thin, and cold. Yes, and so they were, but her description simply did not do them justice! They stood all of eight feet tall, were thin to the point of emaciation - mere bones with an outer layer of naked, heavily wrinkled skin - and their colour .. .
They were white, but not the white of clean snow or of good milk or of any normal thing. They were corpse-white, the sickly white of the destroying angel, Amanita
Phalloides, the mushroom of death! And not only in their unwholesome colour did they match that terrible fungus, for their heads, too, were of a loathsome mushroom shape; with foreheads that overhung their faces, and skulls that were much too squat and flat.
Like grotesque, alien mummies they were, and preserved just as surely — though not wound in bindings or lain in carven sarcophagi. No, they were preserved in pillars of ice! And like mummies they too were ancient; but somehow Silberhutte knew that they predated any Earthly mummy, that indeed they were the original ice-priests of Theem'hdra, and that time itself had wrought in them their hideous desiccation.
Nine in number — standing upright, monstrous heads drooping upon bony, shrivelled chests, spindly legs together and stick-arms hanging by their sides . . . and all encased in ice, except for the domes of their projecting heads and their turned-down faces. At first the Warlord thought that they were dead. Stepping closer, however, he saw that they were merely in a state of suspension, a cryogenic limbo; for even as he stared at the awful skull of one of them, he saw the distended blood vessels darkening as the ice-priest's circulatory system worked. They were alive, yes, but their metabolisms had been so slowed as to be almost at a standstill.
They stood (were encased) each to his own icicle in a ring about a central pit, facing outward. The pit was the source of that peculiar odour — much stronger here — that had attracted the Warlord's attention to the lair in the first instance. He now found himself thinking of the place more positively as a 'lair,' as if the ice-priests were more animal than human; nor did studying them briefly at close quarters change his opinion of them in this respect.
Basically human they might well be, but their branch had grown apart from the great tree of humanity in an age predating the coelacanth, and from that day to this they had remained unaltered and irretrievably, yes, alien! They were human — as was Neanderthal, as is the pygmy and the aborigine — but their evolution had taken them much farther from the main stem than any of these.
Carefully, still more than a little wary, the Warlord stepped between two of the refrigerated figures to stare down into the central pit. Here the fumes from below were understandably stronger, cloying almost, so that he held his breath as he looked down upon the slow, glutinous bubbling of some thickly viscous lavalike substance fifty feet below. Then, seeing that the walls of the pit at its bottom were glowing a dull red, he decided that it must indeed be an as yet active volcanic source, the valve of some larger vent, and further that the fumes it gave off must somehow be essential to the process of suspended animation.
Finally he straightened up to walk silently around the circle, only halting when he came to a wide gap in the ring of ice-blurred figures. Here, where instinct told the Warlord that there should be more pillars of ice reaching from floor to ceiling, he saw only the stumps of three great icicles which formed uneven mounds upon the floor. And deeply indented in them were the marks of wide, wedgeshaped feet . . . such marks as the feet of the ice-priests would make. Now the Warlord knew that there must be twelve ice-priests in all — an even dozen — of which three were even now awake and abroad in the ice-cave complex!
So absorbed was Silberhutte with these observations that for a moment he inadvertently left his mind unguarded, only realizing his danger when alien thoughts rushed in to detect his presence. Before he once more closed the shutters on his mind, he read disbelief, rage, and something akin to panic in the thoughts that crowded in upon his own; panic that he had managed to reach the lair itself. These disordered, frightened thoughts were strangely sluggish and came from close at hand — from the minds of these very figures ringed about the volcanic blowhole — but the others, whose sources he noted with alarm were also fairly close, though he could not place them exactly, were much more active and immediately purposeful.
Silberhutte again cast his glance across the space where those oddly indented stumps of ice stood up from the cave's floor, and as he did so, he spied a small motion among the ranks of silent,, petrified ice-priests. Again the Warlord froze . . . then watched in morbid fascination as jerkily, one by one, the domed heads of the encased ice-priests came up and their slowly opening eyes, which seemed .to have no pupils and were uniformly crimson, swivelled to stare in his direction!
And immediately it was as if chains had been thrown about the Warlord's massive shoulders, as if his feet were suddenly shackled to the ice-layered floor. He had never before met with hypnotism in any form but knew its principles, knew that what he now felt was not a physical power but the purely mental one of mind over matter — the minds of the ice-priests over the material of his being! It was not even telepathy, which he could understand and handle more than adequately, though certainly there were parallels. For while his mind now worked swiftly and lucidly to free his body from the ice-priests' hypnotic shackles, still those shackles tightened about him, denying him the use of powerful sinew, muscle, and bone. It was as much as he could do to back away from the pit, stumbling and barely managing to remain upright, holding on grimly to his great axe as those crimson eyes bored awfully into his own.
Finally, concentrating all of his mind on the breaking of his invisible bonds, the Warlord could no longer hold in place those shutters that protected his thoughts from external influences. Down crashed his mental barriers — and in rushed the concerted sendings of a dozen evil, powerful minds, the chaotic and monstrous imaginings of this nightmare Brotherhood of Ice.
But the ice-priests, too, had their limits. Now, as they concentrated on the Warlord's mind, they were obliged to relax their hypnotic hold on his body. He found himself free to move, to flee, and turned to do just that -
- Only to find himself face to face with that trio of monsters whose footprints were melted into the three ice mounds at the rim of the pit. There they stood,, and while Silberhutte believed that he might handle them easily enough (for what were they but skin and bone?), he was not so sure about the things they had with them!
About the feet of the ice-priests, crouching like great hounds at the ends of their leads, were three fantastic creatures unlike anything the Warlord had ever thought to see. Six-legged, like huge insects — protected by black, chitinous plates which sprouted short, coarse red hairs, and with lashing forked tails whose barbs dripped a clear fluid that set the icy floor steaming poisonously — the things were the stuff of a madman's dreams!
The advancing ice-priests smiled (if such a word may rightly describe what they did with their alien faces) in hideous anticipation as they drew closer, drawn on by the straining of their awful servitors. Silberhutte, turning to left and right, could see no escape; the cave was a dead end, containing only the broken circle of ice-priests frozen about the central pit. And now, as the leashed hounds and their masters blocked his single route of egress, so the Warlord found himself backing toward that pit.
Then, quick as thought, one of the terrible creatures slipped its le
ash and hurled itself straight at the Warlord's throat. He cried out once — no cry of horror, though he felt great horror; not even a cry of rage, though certainly he was enraged to be trapped here like a rat at the mercy of beings whose instincts he knew to be more savage, merciless, and cruel than the instinct of any rat — no, none of these, but a battle cry. And with the echoes of that cry reverberating and setting the lair of the ice-priests to a tinkling of startled ice, he lifted his great axe, smashed the slavering cockroach thing to one side in midair, and threw himself headlong into battle .. .
De Marigny and Moreen regained consciousness together. They had been literally whirled unconscious at the end of their subterranean flight, driven round and round in a tight circle until they had blacked out. The wonder was that the girl had not been torn from the Earthman's arms by centrifugal force, to be dashed against the blue-glistening walls of their ice prison, but she had not. Now, recovering but still filled with a whirling nausea, they clung together as before; and for some little time that was as much as they could do.
It was as de Marigny became cognizant of their immediate surroundings that the full extent of their plight was brought home to him. To begin with, the Warlord was no longer with them; whether of his own volition or at the will of some other, Silberhutte had parted company with them. Equally disconcerting to de Marigny was the fact that he no longer wore his flying cloak - but there was worse yet to come.
The girl had her face buried in the furs that covered his chest, and so she knew nothing of their whereabouts, was not aware that they lay upon a hard, cold floor of ice in a small cave. De Marigny knew, however; knew moreover that there was only one exit, and that it was guarded .. .