by Donald Tyson
I did my best to conceal my surprise. If the mark of the dark man upon my forehead was so plain to his eyes, what else might he see?
“What do you know about the Well of the Seraph?”
“Ahhhh,” he breathed, nodding with comprehension. “Now I understand. You seek the restoration of your face and manhood.”
My private question was answered. He saw, not only the mark, but the true condition of my face and body.
“Tell me what I ask.”
“If I choose not to answer, what will you do to one who is deathless?”
He mocked me, but whether to test my determination or merely for his own amusement, I could not judge. I might lie open to his understanding, but his true thoughts remained hidden.
I stepped to the edge of the walkway and bent to pick up a splintered thighbone. The beast moved swiftly toward me with a threatening aspect, a hiss escaping from its beak. Remaining still, I waited for it so settle on its haunches once again, then took up a rag of faded silk that must have been some rich garment centuries in the past. This I wrapped around the end of the bone and tied it into place. Belaka watched with polite interest, but I could see that he was inwardly laughing at me. I took the tinderbox from my wallet and struck sparks to ignite the tinder. The Beast shifted restlessly on its legs at the smell of the flame. It was fully alert. The sun must be almost set.
“You cannot die, but you can feel pain,” I told the ancient necromancer, holding the blazing tinder just below the rag.
He laughed aloud as he had before, with the sound of tinkling silver bells.
“I do not believe the Beast would allow you to apply fire to its flesh. Your amulet might not be strong enough to restrain its rage.”
“I am willing to make the experiment,” I told him, lighting the rag.
It blazed impressively, casting a flickering red illumination throughout the chamber that seemed like daylight in comparison to the feeble corpse shine. The Beast cried out like a hawk, and started forward, then hesitated and stood at the edge of the pit, its barbed tail lashing from side to side in annoyance.
“No, stop, you will kill yourself, and your pretty companion along with you. I can’t let that happen, since I have a need for your services.”
I moved the torch behind me so that my body shielded its light. It was already dying down as the flames consumed the rag to ashes.
“If I perform this service you seek, will you tell me what I wish to learn?”
Again, he made his strange, shoulderless shrug.
“Why not? Your purposes are nothing to me. Although it would amuse me to thwart the plans of the dark man, whatever may be their shape.”
“His plans are not my plans.”
He appraised my expression as a jeweler tests gold on a touchstone.
“In that event, the world is more interesting with you alive. Bend close, there is little time. I will tell you what you must do.”
Chapter 40
The Beast stood and shook itself like a dog so that the skin of its wings slapped against its back. With a resolute motion it came forward and stepped from the refuse heap onto the walkway that surrounded the pit. I drew the girl behind me, having care to stay beyond the limit of its restlessly sweeping tail. It bent its heads and fitted its massive shoulders into the opening of the tunnel from which we had emerged. In a moment, it was gone. We waited until the brushing sound of its progress began to diminish, then went after it. I had no difficulty following its trail through the darkness. Its stench led me by the nose.
When we emerged between the fallen pillars by the east gate, I cursed in vexation. The horses had bolted, as I should have known they would upon sight of the monster rising out of the ground. The Beast reared upright on its hind legs, facing the glow of the western horizon with its black wings opened. Already the sun had set, and the brightest stars flashed in the heavens.
I watched the wings of the Beast expand, as Belaka had foretold, until they were like the vast sails of a great ship. It beat them in the air to stiffen them, leaning forward with eagerness.
“When we have gone, try to find the horses,” I murmured to the girl. “Until then, do not move.”
The Beast was most dangerous at dusk, with its mind alert, its hunger sharp in its belly.
Leaving her near the mouth of the hole, I approached the creature from behind. It gave no sign that it sensed my presence. This was due solely to the power of the medallion. I wondered how long the golden disk at my breast would protect Martala, now that she no longer stood close to my side. There was no help for it, we must separate. I hesitated, studying the place where the wings spread from the back of the monster. There seemed little to grasp with the hands.
“Courage, young necromancer,” spoke the faintly amused voice of Belaka. His small dark eyes watched me over the shoulder of the Beast, his head twisted backward on its long neck.
With a silent curse, I ran forward past the swishing barb of the tail and set my boot on the bent thigh of the Beast’s rear leg. Before it moved, I threw myself flat on my belly across its back between its wings. All seven heads swung around to regard me. A shriek of fury came from its beak. I felt rather than saw the whip of its tail poised above my back, ready to strike down like a dagger.
The heads became still. As Belaka had predicted, the power of the amulet turned away its irritation. The tail withdrew from my back. Sliding my body forward so that my elbows were bent and my face pressed just behind the writhing mass of heads, I slid my legs down its sides and tried to squeeze my boots tight against its loins.
The Beast began to sniff the air through its beak. It bent its wings and turned back toward the entrance to the sewers, where Martala stood. Like a crow at a carcass, it hopped across the ground toward her.
She fumbled to make the Elder Sign with her right hand. For a moment, her fingers became tangled, but she sorted them out with her left hand and held the Sign up before her. The Beast hesitated, its breath coming in rapid pants. It snapped its beak several times, and the teeth of its heads imitated the motion. Over its shoulder, I saw Martala’s terrified expression. She waved the Sign in the air, but it continued to hop forward.
“Back up into the hole,” I told her.
She needed little instruction. She was already slipping backward on the treacherous loose dust. The shadow of the dark tunnel hid her from view in the failing light from the sky. The Beast stopped at the slope and considered the situation. When I thought it was about to enter the hole, and made up my mind to slide off its back to protect the girl, it turned with a hop and faced the wind, wings expanding to their full stretch. It ran forward on swift leaps of its long hind legs and with a shriek, launched itself into the air, its wings beating with powerful strokes that thrummed on my ears.
The tightly overlapping scales of its back were even more difficult to keep from sliding across than I had anticipated. Like the scales of a serpent, they felt cool and dry, but were as slick as polished leather. Once it attained its height, its wings ceased to beat so strongly, and held themselves level. Their satin surface was not so smooth as the dark red scales, and gave some purchase for my outstretched chest and abdomen at their base. It was sorely needed when the Beast turned in its flight, and its entire body leaned to one side.
With caution to avoid unbalancing the creature, I peered over the leading edge of its right wing. The rushing wind made my eyes water. Shadows covered the plain and merged its details into a gray obscurity. The moon was not yet risen. I caught the reflected gleam of starlight and guessed we were flying above the river, although I could not see it clearly.
“It always hunts first.”
I looked up. The hairless head of the ancient necromancer watched me, neck arched backward so that the sharp ridge of his nose almost touched mine. His breath smelled foul, even in the forceful wind.
“Does it always kill?” I shouted, blinking the tears from my eyes.
“Not always. Sometimes it goes hungry, and other times it kills just before it returns to its lair, and drags the body with it so that it can feast without being interrupted by the rising sun.”
“That explains the many bones.”
His laughter tinkled on the wind.
“Some are the bones of foolish seekers after knowledge. They did not enjoy the protection of the dark man.”
“The skulls were cracked.”
“It pops the head in its beak, like the shell of a nut, and eats the brain.”
“How many have you watched it kill?”
“Too many to number.”
How long we flew, I could not judge. My attention was occupied by the necessity to constantly shift my body to prevent it from sliding off. It was like trying to ride a galloping horse without a saddle. I became aware that the river was closer, and that we flew more slowly, gliding along with only an occasional beat of the mighty wings. We passed over a cargo boat tied up at a landing place for the night. The Beast wheeled and returned. I saw a dim solitary shape near the river, collecting dried wood thrown up on the bank by past floods. Upon a nearby hill, a campfire burned with several shadowed figures seated around it. As we slid over the wood gatherer, we drew near enough so that I could see it was a young boy of ten or twelve years.
“Run, you fool,” I cried.
Startled, he dropped his armload of sticks and looked up. I heard voices from the campfire. As the Beast drew away I turned and saw him running toward the fire. The Beast cried out in frustration. Tremors ran through its muscles, as though it yearned to throw me from its back and tear me to pieces with its talons before I reached the ground. It circled, and I saw several men with swords drawn, standing beside the campfire, the boy huddled among them. I thought the Beast would attack the group, but it must prefer to take its prey by stealth. It passed over and flew onward.
“So you do have human feelings,” Belaka said. His voice held a faint disappointment.
“If this monster stooped like a hawk to seize that child, how could I maintain my place upon its back?” I shouted at him against the wind.
He said nothing, but merely raised his thin eyebrows as his face dissolved into its neck, and the neck withdrew.
The Beast left the river and flew across the plain. I saw the pale ribbon of a caravan road, but it was empty of travelers. After following it for what seemed an hour, the Beast began to circle, gaining height. The stars grew brighter, the air more chill. It set off in a new direction with a determined purpose. I could not see the earth below, but something felt different. At last I chanced to glance up, and noticed that the rising moon was larger than it should have been, and tinted with a redness as though eclipsed. Stranger still, it showed the wrong face. It should have been in its third quarter, but instead approached fullness. I had read in the scroll of the Old Ones that a few among the children of Shub-Niggurath have the power to move between the worlds. This moon did not resemble the moon with which I was familiar.
We flew for hours. Time extended endlessly into the darkness that wrapped on all sides, broken only by the blood moon and glittering stars above. My mind drifted in a waking trance. The wind striking my face grew so cold, it almost turned the tears on my cheeks to ice, and the thin air made me gasp. The thought came to me that should it fly where there was no air at all, I would strangle and fall from its back, a frozen corpse. Perhaps this was what Belaka intended. Perhaps all that he had told me was a lie.
A distant shadow loomed, darkness against deeper darkness. The Beast flew directly toward it. For a time it appeared to draw no nearer, then all at once it towered in front of us, a vast wall of black rock as sheer as the side of a pillar. The Beast circled it, gaining height with each beat of its wings, and I saw that it was a mountain. We ascended over the rim of its windswept top. With a cry, the Beast extended its hind legs and fluttered its wings, landing the way a hawk lands on the crown of a tree.
It shook its wings and folded them, hopping forward across the tufts of browning grasses that grew up between the stones. As the wings began to shrink, I slid from its back and stepped quickly away from its restless tail. The heads all shouted and laughed and wept, as though possessed by a common madness. Belaka’s face was not evident among them. I turned to examine this strange plateau. It sloped gently, with a stone-filled gully across its middle where water must flow during periods of rain. Most of it was flat grassland, but at the higher elevation a ridge of rock rose like an irregular wall. Here and there, a black boulder projected half its bulk above the thin soil.
In the middle of the plateau, in a slight depression, stood a pillar of stone. It was not of the same kind as the rock of the mountain. That was a dull black, but the pillar caught the moonlight on its irregular surface and reflected it like glass. Approaching to examine it more closely, I saw that it was striated with veins of dark red that seemed to glow or pulse. I touched it but snatched my hand away. It felt warm, almost like flesh. It had not been shaped by any chisel, but was of natural formation, slightly wider at the top than at its base, and angled at its crown, so that it resembled a great nail of black glass stained with streaks of blood, driven into the mountain to half its length. As tall as the pillars of blue stone I had seen in the temple at Albion, it bore no symbol or mark to reveal the intention of whatever intelligence had placed it there.
The wind keened through the stiff tufts of grass around its base, making them nod their heads. I saw among them the tiny white flowers Belaka had described, each no larger than the nail of my smallest finger, shaped like a star with five points. They grew in clusters on a low plant with thick dry leaves that appeared gray under the feeble moonlight. The taller grasses protected the gray plants from the worst of the wind, yet still they trembled in its harshness. I walked across the plateau to the gully, but found the plant only near the base of the pillar. The flowers grew in a broad depression three paces wide that surrounded stone, and nowhere else.
Quickly, I bent and pulled several dozen of the flowers up by their roots. Their leaves and stems had a furred texture that was unpleasant against the hand, but their roots yielded easily and came up intact. In shape they were like a carrot, but smaller, no more than the length of my middle finger, and white like the flowers. I broke off the leaves and stems and sorted the roots into a pile on the ground, then took a rag of blue silk from the front pocket of my wallet and tied the roots into it. If what Belaka claimed was true, these little roots were worth more than their weight in precious jewels. They would need to be dried with care to preserve them.
The Beast snorted out its breath like a horse. Looking across at the edge of the plateau where it stood, I saw that its wings were folded tight against its back. The heads had fallen silent. In my interest in the roots, I had failed to notice. Their eyelids drooped as though in sleep. The head of the necromancer had not emerged. It seemed that Belaka’s will was overwhelmed by the purpose of the Beast, preventing him from forcing his head to form. On its four legs, the Beast approached the pillar.
It stood facing the great dagger of black glass with its heads lowered almost to the ground, as though in silent prayer. There was something solemn and majestic about its serene pose. At last it roused itself and began to walk around the pillar with slow steps in a circle that bent to its left. I found a convenient boulder and sat upon it, watching the circumambulation of the monster. It seemed tireless in its single-minded purpose. It came into my thoughts that its feet had worn the depression in the hard ground over centuries, or even eons of walking. Every so often, a piece of dung dropped from its hindquarters, and its claws treaded it into the grass and worked it around the circle.
The unnatural moon set, and the sky began to pale at the horizon, revealing a distant line of jagged mountains that thrust up like black swords. At last, the Beast stopped and
turned its heads toward the light. It shook itself and walked back to the place on the edge of the plateau where it had landed. Facing the chill wind, it opened its wings and stood fanning them up and down to inflate their size.
“Alhazred, come here quickly.”
Belaka’s bald head had returned, along with his dry voice. I pushed myself stiffly to my feet and rubbed my buttocks, which had gone numb against the icy stone. Without haste, I approached. His head extended over the shoulder of the beast and regarded me impatiently.
“There isn’t much time. Did you get the u’mal root?”
“Is that what it’s called?”
“Yes, yes, did you get it?”
I withdrew the blue rag and untied a corner. Taking out a root, I held it up for him to see in the pallid light from the east.
“Excellent. Place it into my mouth.”
I twisted the white root between my thumb and forefinger, admiring it. Such a small thing to be the object of so great a desire.
“The Well of the Seraph? Where shall I find it?”
“I do not know its location,” he said peering at the root as though afraid I might drop it and lose it amid the grass.
With a curse, I closed my fist around the root.
“You promised me the well. Are you nothing but an idle boaster, like the rest of these heads?”
Several of the other heads laughed and snapped their teeth at me. Belaka ignored them.
“I do not know where the well is, but I know how it can be found. Give me the root, and I will tell you.”
“Tell me, and I will give you the root.”
He scowled at me, his expression murderous. His anger lent the Greek he spoke a strange accent. He cursed me, and I realized with surprise that I did not know the language of his curses. It must have been a tongue unknown to Nectanebus, for all his fabled wisdom. When he saw that I did not mean to give him the root until he spoke, he mastered his fury and forced a smile upon his thin lips.