by Brian Lumley
But what guards!
There were two of them, two huge insect-things that crouched "down for all the world like guard dogs - except that they bared no teeth but hissed warningly through jaws like those of great reptiles. De Marigny saw them and was relieved to see also the stretched chains attached to their collars and fastened to iron staples hammered into the ice of the walls. The - hounds? - were at the fullest extent of those chains, uncomfortably close to his feet.
Drawing breath in a huge gasp, he snatched back his feet and hugged the girl to him all in one movement. Shaken from her exhausted half-sleep, Moreen opened her eyes to peer into those of the two monsters that now snapped and slavered only feet away. Galvanized into action by de Marigny's movements, they hissed loudly and hauled dangerously on their chains, scrabbling at the ice floor with legs like hairy, jointed bones.
Then an astounding thing - for before de Marigny could stop her, Moreen had slipped from his arms to hold her hand out to the chained creatures, as if she were about to pet a pair of domesticated animals in a Viking settlement on Numinos!
'Moreen, no!' he cried, stark horror in his voice.
She pulled her hand back from the snapping snake jaws of the things and turned to him in seeming surprise. 'But why? They will not harm me.'
`Not harm you?' he cried, dragging her back bodily from the chained monsters. 'Girl, they'd kill you! That's why they've been put on duty here, to keep us in. They're killers.'
`You don't understand,' she told him patiently. 'No lesser beast would ever harm me. They sense something in me - something which I myself do not understand - and even the wildest of them are calmed when I speak to them. The great eagles of Numinos have perched on my shoulders, and the wild dogs of the hills have accepted meat from my fingers.' She turned back to the hissing cave-things and shrugged. 'These creatures are - different - yes, but for all that they are living creatures. Therefore I am safe with them.'
Her logic baffled de Marigny. 'But look at them!' he cried. 'Do they look harmless?'
`Henri,' she answered, kissing his brow, 'I have trusted you — with my life. Now you must trust me. Indeed there is something very strange about these creatures — for see, they continue to snap and hiss even now that they know. me. Still I say to you that they will not harm me.'
Frowning, she turned from him, approaching the insect-things on all fours. They reared on their chains, jaws slavering and barbed tails lashing as, unhesitatingly, she again stretched out her hand to them.
'For God's sake!' de Marigny whispered, fighting the urge to grab her and drag her back. Ignoring him, she drew closer to the hideous creatures; and as she did so, they arched their necks and drew back their flat reptilian heads — for all the world like angry snakes about to strike.
And strike they did, so swiftly that the eye could scarcely follow their movement. Moreen had no time to snatch her hand back out of harm's way. Razor fangs opened her flesh, injecting yellow poison. Wide-eyed in disbelief, her mouth forming an '0' of surprise to match de Marigny's expression of horror, she fell back into his arms. No living creature would ever have done this to her, she knew that, and so —
`Not real!' she gasped as de Marigny feverishly took her hand and gazed at it in amazement, his jaw dropping. Then they both stared at the clean, unbroken flesh of her hand and wrist. 'They are not real!'
As one they turned their heads to look again at the monstrous hounds — seeing immediately that she was right. The creatures had disappeared, vanished into thin air, and with them the chains that had seemed to tether them to the frozen walls. They had not been real, had existed only in their minds, illusions placed there by the evil genius of the ice-priests.
Suddenly de Marigny recalled what Silberhutte had said about Theem'hdra's ice-priests being greatly skilled in the arts of illusion and mass hypnotism, and at last he understood. Well, it was a lesson learned, knowledgewhich would doubtless prove very useful in the near future.
As for the immediate future: there were things to be done, and at once!
`Come on, Moreen,' he helped the girl to her feet. 'We have to find Silberhutte — and then the time-clock.' And as they hurried together down the unknown ice tunnel toward whatever terrors or triumphs lay ahead, he pictured in his mind's eye an upturned hourglass in which the sands of time flowed swiftly indeed — sands which were rapidly running out .. .
Within a very short time the pair emerged from the prison tunnel into that same great ice gallery whose many exits had so recently baffled the Warlord. For them, however, there was to be no indecision; coming to them clearly from close at hand, sounds of battle pointed the way as surely as any signpost. There was the clash of iron and the splintering of ice — but above all else, clear and resounding, came the enraged if somewhat frustrated roar of Silberhutte's bull voice! As they skirted the great hall, it was easy to discover the mouth of the tunnel which issued these furious reverberations.
All caution to the wind — ignoring the fact that his weapon had been taken from him along with the flying cloak — de Marigny rushed down the vast natural tunnel of blue, softly glowing ice toward the lair of the ice-priests; and as he came round the final bend, with Moreen hot on his heels, there opened to his eyes a scene strange and macabre. He took in the circle of frozen ice-priests at a glance, then concentrated his amazed attention on the actors and the action. As Moreen pantingly caught up with him, her gasp told him that she, too, was struck by the weirdness of the scene.
One ice-priest — tall, naked, spindly as a stick-insect —stood with his wax-white back to the pair. His arms
were raised shoulder high, his hands alive with mesmeric motion, outstretched toward the Borean Warlord. But the mushroom-headed ice-priest was not the sole source of de Marigny's and Moreen's astonishment; no, that doubtful honour went to the insane activity of Silber-butte. For the Warlord had obviously gone stark, staring mad!
He crouched between the lone ice-priest and the central pit with its perimeter of frozen figures, his eyes wide and full of darting motion, his great axe held out before him. Every few seconds he would turn, leap toward a wall, and strike at it shatteringly, all the while yelling his rage. But it seemed to the astounded watchers that there was as much terror as rage in the Warlord's savage battle cries .. .
4 `Where is the Time-Clock?'
Now Silberhutte embarked upon a series of dodges, feints, wild turns, and tumbles, his axe flashing in a blur to left and right, as if he fought half a dozen fleet-footed foes which only he could see; and through all of this the solitary ice-priest pivoted to follow his every movement, long-fingered hands tracing mystic passes in the air. This could only possibly be one thing — and de Marigny already had ample evidence of the mastery of the ice-priests over magic and illusion. The Warlord had become the latest victim of that power, as had been his friends so very recently. He had not seen them enter the terminal cave, saw nothing now but the illusions engendered of the lone ice-priest's mesmerism enhanced by the telepathic embellishments of that being's now wakeful, ice-encased brothers. And his plight was indeed a sore one.
Following the attack of the first creature, the other priests had deliberately released their 'hounds' upon him, and since then they had called for the reinforcements with which Silberhutte now battled. And no matter how many of the insect-dogs he cut down or smashed aside, others were there to take their places, supplied from some seemingly inexhaustible source to the rear of the 'three' priests who continued to bar his exit.
One thing was certain: he was losing the battle and knew he must soon fall before the concerted savagery of the pack. Constantly he tripped over their fallen, broken bodies, and only a series of miracles had sufficed so far to protect him from their slavering jaws. On more than a dozen occasions their barbed, venomous tails had come close to splashing him with their acid, and already he was beginning to feel a mental and physical weariness as his great strength was put to this most gruelling test.
Finally that which he most feared occu
rred: stepping back from a frontal attack by one of the hounds, he tripped over a broken carcass and sprawled on his back between two of the frozen priests, his head and shoulders over the lip of the pit that went down to the glowing, sluggishly surging lava. Instantly the hounds were on him, closing from all sides. Then -
'They're not real, Hank!' came de Marigny's warning cry in the Warlord's ears, strangely hollow and echoing. 'Whatever you see, none of it's real . . . not real . . . not real! It's an illusion . . . illusion . . . illusion! It can't harm you . . . can't harm you . . . can't harm you!'
And at once the hissing, slavering snake faces surrounding the Warlord began to fade, to dissolve away into mist, so that he instantly knew and understood de Marigny's message.
Illusions, his friend had called out to him. The mental mischief of the ice-priests. Visions called up to sap his strength and render him helpless - to kill him! Well, the warning had come in the nick of time, for struggling against the hounds, the Warlord had been at the point of falling backward into the lava pit. Now he sprang to his feet, mentally brushed aside the rapidly dispersing mist of nightmarish chitinous bodies and slavering, ethereal jaws, gazed up into the monstrous crimson eyes of the lone ice-priest whose evil skills had conjured the visions.
For a moment Silberhutte paused . . . Then, with a grunt of exertion - even as the naked ice-priest frantically recommenced his esoteric passes - he narrowed his eyes, lifted his great axe, and drove its keen edge into the willowy giant's fragile chest. With a single, high-pitched, whistling shriek of agony and disbelief the ice-priest died, felled as a grass-blade before the scythe; and a moment later the Warlord stepped over his crumpled body, freeing his axe and almost absently cleaning its edge on the sleeve of his jacket.
Finally the red haze of battle and illusion-engendered weariness cleared from Silberhutte's eyes, and for the first time since releasing himself from the cloak in mid-flight, he saw his friends. They hurried toward him, their faces drawn and anxious, and he caught them to him crushingly. Then he drew a deep draught of the cold cavern air, released them, and said:
'Thank you, Henri, Moreen. When I cut loose from the cloak, my idea was to track you down and come on like the cavalry. But you outflanked me - thank goodness!' He turned back and gazed grimly on the broken circle of ice-priests. 'Now there are one or two things these fellows are going to tell us. We already know they're telepathic, so - '
'We underestimated you, Warlord, that much we grant you,' cane a cold, booming voice in their heads, cutting short Silberhutte's words. 'There were none such as you three in Theem'-hdra. Strength such as yours aye, and powers such as you possess - made men mighty in the Old World. Such men were wizards whose words were law, whose law was - '
'Cruel and corrupt!' Silberhutte spoke out lord. `Now listen, you ice-priests. We've no time to waste, so I'll make it short. We came to Dromos to find a box, a machine stolen from us by Ithaqua. One of you is already dead. I killed him and I'm, glad of it. I don't care how many more I have to kill to get the machine. We three,' he indicated Moreen and de Marigny, 'we're all of a like mind.' Flanked by his friends, he hefted his axe in his huge fist and strode closer to the circle.
The three could not see the awful corpse faces of the four beings whose backs were to them, but the remaining five gazed at them with eyes red as the fires of hell. The veins that stood out in the domes of their mushroom heads were visibly pulsing now, and suddenly there was a tangible electric tension in the air which had not been present a moment earlier.
Moreen gasped and moved behind the Warlord, catching de Marigny's hand. He wrapped an arm about her, said: `Something's coming, Hank — I feel it!'
`No tricks,' Silberhutte warned the ice-priests sharply, carrying his axe as if it were weightless and stepping closer still to the frozen figures.
`Tricks? You dare relegate the magic of the ice-priests of olden Khrissa to mere trickery? Fools — you know nothing of us — nothing!' Now the eyes of the five were boring into theirs with increasing intensity, crimson orbs that seemed to protrude obscenely as their owners concentrated .. . concentrated.
`Mind over . . . matter!' gasped the Warlord, experiencing again that iron constriction he had known earlier. 'Telekinesis — or something much . . . like it.' He tried to lift his axe but froze with the great blade only half-upraised. Though the muscles of his mighty frame bulged and strained, his earlier exertions had all but sapped him, making him easy prey to the mental `magic' of these masters of weird phenomena.
Moreen, too, was held immediately helpless. Though she was young and strong, she had only a woman's physical strength; nor was her mind sufficiently sophisticated to grasp readily the nature of the forces involved. Only de Marigny, as yet untried by any real physical exertion in this frigid subterranean complex, found himself capable of the slightest movement.
Illusion, 'magic,' mind over matter, hypnosis — whatever powers these ice-priests possessed and however they chose to use them — there must surely be rules to the game. All actions have counteractions, produce reactions. De Marigny, unable to defend himself, knew that he must attack; but how? Then, like a glimmer of light in a maelstrom of darkness, he remembered Annahilde's dreaming powders. And that single spark rapidly fanned itself to a flame, for he knew that the dreaming powders — together with the warming powders — were still tucked away in his clothes where the ice-priests had failed to search.
`Fight fire,' he told himself, 'with fire!'
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he forced his hand to the pocket that contained the dreaming powders, brought forth the pouch, lifted it toward his face. And all the while his eyes were held by the crimson gaze of the ice-priests, and each slightest movement of his body was slower than the one preceding it. Then, before he could even give thought to the task of disseminating the powders, the pouch was snatched from his hand and thrown down on the ice of the floor, taken from him by no visible power. Telekinesis — 'magic' — the mind power of the ice-priests!
Despair filled de Marigny — despair and the mad, triumphant laughter of the ice-priests, booming and mocking in his mind — until suddenly he became conscious of a frenzied tugging at the hair of his head and the fur fringe of his jacket. Armandra's familiar winds!
In a flash he saw his salvation — his, the Warlord's, and Moreen's. 'The . . . pouch,' he managed to whisper. 'The . . . powder!' And instantly the cave was filled with a tinkling of disturbed ice as frantic winds lifted the pouch from the floor, hovered it before the stricken Earthman's eyes, plucked at it until its contents spilled in air and formed a cloud.
`In their . . . faces,' he commanded. 'Blow it . . . in . . . their faces!' And the whirling cloud of powder was immediately rushed away, driven into the faces of the ice-priests by sentient winds. They breathed air, those chill, soulless beings — and now they breathed Annahilde's dreaming powders . .
The effect was instantaneous.
For a brief moment the three beleaguered adventurers were granted a fleeting glimpse of the terrors that threatened the ice-priests — a single glimpse that leaped to their minds telepathically and involuntarily from the minds of the ice-encased ancients — but that one glance was sufficient in itself to testify to the efficacy of Annahilde's powders. Silberhutte, had he so desired, might easily have remained in telepathic contact with the stricken ice-priests, might have probed their stunned and hag-ridden minds to witness at firsthand the monstrous illusions that now enmeshed them; but that would- have meant sharing their terror of the incredible nightmare hordes which now pressed in on them from all sides. Rather than suffer that, he withdrew, shuddering at what he had so briefly glimpsed.
Masters of illusion the ice-priests were, but theirs were illusions of the mind, born of advanced development of the ESP areas of the brain. Annahilde's powders, on the other hand, produced hallucinations which were external, 'artificial,' as it were; and the difference was that between a disturbing dream and a drug-induced hallucination.
For the powders worked
on those areas of the mind that govern an individual's capacity for fear — his capacity to suffer it as determined by his capacity to inflict it. In the olden times the ice-priests had been masters of terror, and now they paid the price. What kind of horrors would terrify a ghoul, a mass murderer, a torturer, a homicidal maniac, a soulless monster? Whatever the kind, those were the horrors — indescribable in mundane terms — which now threatened the ice-priests of primal Theem'hdra.
The reactions of the three to their sudden release from the mind chains of the ice-priests were varied. De Marigny, to say the least, was relieved and delighted that his ruse had worked so well; Moreen was mystified and frightened, stumbling and clinging to her man's arm as the numbness abruptly left her limbs; and Silberhutte: he knew only that his anger, the rage and frustration he felt at the mere thought of these vilest minions of Ithaqua, had trebled. Given another chance he doubted that they would hesitate to kill himself and his friends out of .hand; or worse by far, they would hold all three and wait on the return of the Wind-Walker. Plainly they must not be given that chance.
Showing that ruthless efficiency of which he was more than capable when circumstances demanded, commencing before the effect of Annahilde's dreaming powders could wear off, the Warlord waved de Marigny and Moreen back from the broken circle of tormented figures and swung his great axe high against the upper part of the nearest column. The massive icicle shattered where the axe bit. Pausing only to gauge his aim, Silberhutte next swung at the base of the pillar, then threw his weight against the collapsing slab of ice and toppled it bodily into the pit. A moment later and, with a belching roar, a great gush of steam came up mephitically, flowing outward along the tunnel's ceiling and settling as fine snow in a matter of seconds. The desiccated prisoner of the pillar, already immersed in hideous hallucinations, had known nothing at all of his final, fatal immersion. That at least had been a mercy.