by Brian Lumley
Outside the light was beginning to fail. Exior called for Loxzor - ex-cockroach, ex-Hrossak, ex-wizard - and commanded: 'Look upon this rune. What think you? Will it work?'
Loxzor scuttled, drew himself up to Exior's table on chitin legs, glared at the freshly pigmented page with many-faceted eyes. `Bah!' he harshly clacked. And maliciously: 'What do I know of magic - I'm a cockroach!'
`You refuse to help me?'
`Help yourself, wizard. Your hour is at hand!'
`Beastly creature!' Exior cried. `Go then, and suffer the slime when it whelms this place! Begone!' And he chased Loxhor from the chamber. Then -
- Then it was time to test out the spell. The last rune of Exior K'mool
Far removed from his own era - if he could any longer be said to have one representative or contemporary time -The Searcher hovered the time-clock high over. Exior's palace and looked down through the scanners and sensors on the scene below. Beside him, Moreen snuggled> close and said: `Henri, I know we've left Earth's dreamlands far behind - or before us - and that this is the waking world in a time when the Motherworld was in her prime, but looking down there, on that .
`I know,' he answered, grimly. 'You'd swear we were still dreaming, eh? Nightmaring, anyway. It seems Exior K'mool's got himself in deep waters. Also, if that dome of force is anything to go by, he's a wizard of some note.'
To merely human eyes Exior's dome would be invisible, but the clock's sensors and scanners showed it as a pale, vibrating hemisphere, with Exior's palace locked inside like a scene viewed through blue smoke or heat-haze. The scanners also showed the slime, and de Marigny's immediate revulsion told him something of its nature. 'It seems we're to be used yet again,' he commented wryly.
`Used?'
He nodded.. 'We were used to rescue Sssss from the Hounds of Tindalos, likewise Hero and Eldin from Gudge, or more properly Nyarlathotep - and now -'
'Exior K'mool from that ... that filthy stuff ? Or is it in fact a filthy thing? I can't tell, but I know it's nothing of nature. Not as I know nature.'
`It's both,' said de Marigny. `It's a slime, but it gets its form, its purpose, its motive for being from a source which is far worm. Do you know what this stuff is? I do, for I've met it before - or will meet it, in the distant future. In ancient Khem it took, will take, the form of a proud young Pharaoh. But by then it will have a thousand other forms, too. Here in the primal land, it too is primal; Cthulhu uses crude means to achieve his ends; no need for sophistication in a mainly unsophisticated. age.'
`Nyarlathotep! the girl shuddered. 'Again?'
'I'm sure of it,' de Marigny nodded, again. 'The Crawling Chaos - but formless in this age. A mass, crawling, chaotic. A primal force in a primal land. It's an age of magic and monsters, remember? And certainly this stuff is monstrous. It's the morbid mind-juice of the Cthulhu Cycle Deities, telepathy bordering on teleportation; it's something the Great Old Ones have sent to exact a revenge, or collect a debt. It seems Exior has had business with Cthulhu, which is the same as making a deal with the devil!'
`It's eating at those walls,' said Moreen, 'and it seems to me that Exior's dome grows thinner, weaker, with each passing moment. 'Can we get inside?'
`I think so. The time-clock ignores most bathers. It was designed to breach the greatest of them all: time and space and all the planes and angles between and beyond. We'll soon see ...'
He located K'mool in his tower workshop, slipped the clock sideways through space-time, emerged in a shimmer of air within that marvellous room where a moment before the wizard had spoken his rune and completed the intricate attendant passes. And:
`By all the Lords of Darkness!' Exior gasped, his jaw falling open. He stumbled back from the time-clock where it hovered inches over the mosaic floor, tripped, flopped backward into his cane chair. 'I called upon a dead ancestor and got him coffin and all!'
But as de Matigny set the clock down, and he and Moreen stepped out of the open door in a wash of purple, pulsing light 'Two ancestors!' Exior croaked. 'And solider far than any ghosts I ever say before!'
None of which made any sense to the time-travellers, for it was spoken in an alien - a primal - tongue. 'We'll have to speak to him through the dock,' said de Marigny, turning as if to re-enter the time-clock. But -
'Wait!' Exior cried, this time in English. 'No need for any interpreter. I, Exior K'mool, am a master of runes - and what are languages if not runes expressed as words? Magic or mundane, all is one to me; I understand tongues indeed, I've fathomed yours from the merest sentence.'
`Amazing!' said Moreen, round-eyed. She approached the wizard and he made a bow. 'You heard a few words and learned a language! But you must be the 'greatest linguist of all time.'
`So I pride myself,' said Exior. 'It is a measure of my magic - with the help of some skill - all of which is in the blood you passed down to me, 0 mother of all my ancestors.'
Moreen laughed, shook her head. 'But I'm not your ancestor,' she protested. 'I won't even be born for millions of years yet - and when I am born, it won't be on this world! We're_ from the future, Exior, far in the future.'
The wizard was astounded. 'It's true I was less than one hundred per cent sure of the rune,' he gasped. 'But to have got it totally reversed is ... are you saying I've called up future dead? Not my ancestors but my descendants? Hah! So these lamias and succubi had their uses after all!'
'Ah, that's the other let-down, I'm afraid - ' said de
Marigny, - depending on your point of view, of course. We're not dead, Exior, and we're not your descendants. I'm Henri-Laurent de Marigny, called The Searcher, and this is Moreen of Numinos.'
Exior peered at him (very closely, de Marigny thought), then at Moreen. And finally, slowly the wizard shook his head. 'No,' he said, ' - oh, I grant you all else you've said - but not the matter of your lineage. Man, look at you -then look at me. And you tell me I am not your ancestor? In this I am surely not mistaken; apart from our ages, we are like as petals of the same flower, or eyeteeth of the same dog! At least I cannot be mistaken when I name you for a magician. In this, and in the matter, of your calling, I am surely correct; indeed, for you came in answer to my summons, my rune. Alas, I was in haste with the thing; instead of getting someone out of the past, I got you out of the future.'
Moreen was both embarrassed and sorry for him. 'No, Exior,' she said, softly. 'We aren't here to answer your call or spell or rune. We were looking for you anyway.
'And through you,' de Marigny added, 'hopefully, we may yet find Elysia.'
Too much, too much!' Exior cried. He threw up his hands, collapsed again in his cane chair, let his arms and his head flop. 'I have been under great stress,' he mumbled. `The filth closing in ... and no escape, no refuge ... You come from the future, you say? And what good is that to me? I have no future ...' But then he looked up, narrowed his eyes. 'Unless-'
`Why don't we trade?' de Marigny suggested. 'I can take you out of this, wherever you want to go. In return, perhaps you can tell me about Elysia. I have to find Elysia.'
Exior seemed to ignore him. Eyes gleaming, filled with a strange excitement, he leaped up. 'From the future! But how far in the future?'
`Millions of years,' said Moreen, backing away. 'Eons,' said de Marigny.
'Yes, yes - you said that before!' Exior danced feverishly. 'But I scarce heard you - I'm under such pressure, you see? Millions of years, you said, eons. And I scanned mere thousands! I have searched for a future for myself, to no avail. And yet in my dreams, which are oneiromantic, I have seen a future: in distant Lith, where I dwelled with Ardatha Ell in his manse, floating on a take of lava.'
De Marigny's turn to be excited. Goose-flesh crept on his back, set the small hairs erect on the nape of his neck. Curator had mentioned this same Ardatha Ell, these same lava lakes of Lith - and then had gone on to remark how he'd said too much! And the name itself, 'Ardatha Ell', was an echo from something Titus Crow had once told him of Elysia: that he'd met a white wizard there from doom
ed Pu-Tha - Ardatha Ell, of course! One and the same! So if any man might know where Elysia could be found, surely that man must be Ardatha Ell.could take you there,' he told Exior, 'if I knew the way. To Ardatha Ell's house - or manse - in Lith.'
Exior wasn't listening, or barely. Instead he stood before his shewstone, making weird, rapid passes with his hands while the crystal ball as quickly flickered from scene to scene. 'Millions of years,' he muttered to himself. `Many millions of years. Very well, now I cast my net wide as I can, and - '
Moreen and de Marigny moved to flank him where he stood before the crystal on its pedestal.
- There!' said Exior K'mool.
In the shewstone, two men sat at an ornate table before a curving window of some glass-like material. Beyond the window, distorted by its properties, yellow and crimson flames leaped like a scene from hell; but the men at the table showed no discomfort, carried on with their game.
De Marigny saw that it was chess. One of them was clearly Exior K'mool himself, unchanged, the same man as stood here now. The other was tall, incredibly so. Eight feet, de Marigny reckoned him, standing; slender as a reed in his robes of fiery mesh-of-bronze; zombie-like in aspect, this man - if he was a man! For his hands each had six digits, with thumbs inside and out, and his features were sharp as blades. He could be none other than Ardatha Ell; little wonder Titus Crow had recalled him so vividly.
'There!' said Exior again. 'See?' And at that precise moment there sounded a low rumble - like a wall collapsing!
Moreen looked up anxiously, hurried out onto a balcony, came back pale and breathless. 'The slime has forced an entry. It's pouring in through a breach in the wall!'
'Exior,' said de Marigny sharply, 'where is this Lith?'
'Watch!' the wizard answered. He made more passes in the air, his practiced fingers building skeins impossible to follow. The picture in the shewstone blurred; the scene switched to outside; de Marigny seemed to look down on the manse where it floated on 2 turgid, red and black, fire-streaked lake of lava.
The place was like two disproportionate hemispheres, with the small one on top like the dome of some observatory. A central pole or axis looked as if it went right through the structure, forming a single antenna on top and (de Marigny supposed) a sort of keel below, giving the manse its lava-worthiness. There would be a heavy blob of material at the sunken end, keeping the place from capsizing.
'Fine,' he said. 'Now I know what Ardatha Ell's manse looks like, but I still don't know where it is. Can you back off some more? If that's a planet I need to know where in space I can find it.' He stepped to the time-clock, leaned head and shoulders inside, made mental adjustments. 'There,' he said, returning to the display, 'now the clock will record this, trace the co-ordinates. But not until we can see that entire world against a background of stars. After that it should be a simple —'
The palace trembled violently, causing the three to stumble. For a moment the scene in the shewstone convulsed, then steadied, as Exior regained control. More yet the picture retracted: it showed not a lake but a veritable sea of lava now, where the floating manse was the merest speck of white in a crusted cauldron of slowly, oh so slowly congealing rock.
Moreen rushed to the head of the stairs, cried: 'Oh, no! The stuff's in the palace - it's coming up the stairs!'
'Moreen, get in the dock!' de Marigny yelled. And to the wizard: 'More yet, Exior - let's see this Lith from space.'
The scene in the crystal drew away; the lava sea became an angry sore on a mighty black disk that floated free in the velvet void; stars showed beyond its rim. 'There,' said Exior K'mool. 'There - a dying sun!' -
'More yet,' de Marigny repeated, his voice hoarse.
Something gurgled at the head of the stairs and the tower rocked again. Moreen gave a little shriek, ran to the time-clock, entered into the purple glow beyond its door. Exior sweated, struggled, his eyes stood out in his head. His passes were weird and wonderful: his hands described figures at least as complicated as those of the hands of the clock. De Marigny was struck with the similarity. Magic, or a primal science?
Living slime came slopping through cowrie curtains!
And at that precise moment the scene in the shewstone retreated suddenly and violently. Lith jerked away from the viewers, grew tiny against the vast backdrop of space, became a smouldering smudge of light in a great wheel of stars whose brilliance quickly drowned it. And -
'Andromeda!' de Marigny gasped. And without pause: 'Exior, that's all we needed. Quick, into the clock!'
The tower was sinking down into its own foundations, melting like a sandcastle. Its master stumbled, staggered; the scene in the crystal ball blinked out. 'All done, all gone,' moaned Exior. 'The end of all this. My runebooks, instruments, shewstone -'
The slime was on the move. De Marigny grabbed the wizard, half-pushed, half-dragged him toward the dock. The slime rose up in a stinking great flap of filth like a wave, and -
A pencil-slim beam of purest light lanced out from the time-clock, played on the slime - and halted its progress not at all!
De Marigny jammed Exior in through the purple-pulsing door, quickly followed him inside. 'Moreen,' he croaked, `the weapon isn't working! Here, let me try.'
`Not working?' said Exior. 'A weapon? Of course it's not. Hurtful mechanical magics are forbidden in my palace. So I spelled it when Black Yoppaloth of the Yhemnis sent a squad of onyx automatons against me. They had quicksilver blood and glass scythes for arms, and -'
De Marigny frantically commanded the clock forward in time - and it stood stock still! 'But this is only hurtful to us!' he yelled. 'Now the time-dock is stuck!'
'My protective runes at work!' cried Exior. 'A rune against abduction, which-'
'Man, your runes are going to kill us!' de Marigny grated through clenched teeth.
The slime slopped across the mosaic floor, reared before the clock.
'We entered,' shrilled Moreen, clutching at both men, `and so should be able to leave.'
Exior shook himself free of her hand. 'You entered because. I called you,' he insisted. 'Such a fuss! - there and he made .a simple downward-sweeping pass.
The slime hurled tentacles to encircle the clock but too late by a single instant of time. Side-stepping through space-time, the clock disappeared, re-appeared a mile high over the crumbling, slime-reduced pile which was once Exior's palace. Tapering tentacles of filth lashed skyward after the clock failed, fell seething back to earth .
2 Ardatha Ell's Vigil
De Marigny sighed, allowed himself to slump for a moment. `That's the closest I ever want to come,' he said. 'That Cthulhu mind-stuff - Nyarlathotep, sentient slime, call it what you will - could have entered the dock as easily as the Hounds of Tindalos themselves. But now,' he straightened up, ' - now let's get out of here'
`Wait!' something clacked harshly where it scuttled about their feet. `And what of me?'
De Marigny saw the thing, gave a violent start. 'What in the name of all the hells - ?'
'This is Loxzor,' said Moreen. 'He got in while you and Exior were busy.' She looked reproachfully at the wizard. `And Loxzor's not quite what he seems to be, either. Like Exior, he's something of a linguist yes, and he's been telling me a few things.'
Exior hastily offered his version, and added: 'But since he's here anyway ... I suppose we could always take him back to his steppes?. If you feel inclined.'
De Marigny flew the time-dock south-west at Exior's direction, brought it to rest on a hill crested with a bleak stone shell. 'My castle,' clacked Loxzor, 'fallen into ruins through these fifteen years of hybridism.' He scuttled out of the door as soon as de Marigny opened it for him, crying: 'Ruined, aye, all ruined - thanks to Exior K'mool!'
`No,' Exior shook his head, 'thanks to your own dark inclinations, Loxzor. However, since I'll no more be here to suffer you as a neighbour, I'll now unspell you.' He pointed a bony finger, uttered a word. It had a strange sound, that word, impossible to remember or repeat, except for Exior.
Green lightning lashed from his finger, set the hideous roach-man leaping and shrieking where it covered him in a mesh of emerald fire. There came a puff of smoke, and when it cleared -
Loxzor of the Hrossaks stood there, a whole man again. A pallid, yellowy bronze in his dark cloak and cowl, he stood hunched, scowling. At his feet a cockroach scurried. He spied it, said 'Hah!' - crushed it with his naked foot.
`And there stands Loxzor,' said Exior in disgust. 'He shared that poor creature's body many a year, and now pulps the life out of it without a moment's thought. Well, farewell, Hrossak wage but one last piece of advice. 'Ware wizards whose powers are greater than your own, eh, Loxzor?'
Loxzor stared stonily, eyes yellow and unforgiving. The three turned away from him, entered the dock. As the door closed on them, Moreen queried: 'But what's he doing now?'
Exior, during their brief flight to Hrossa had explored something of the dock's workings; his wizard's mind had quickly discovered the use of most of its 'accessories'. On entering the clock this second time, he had followed Moreen's lead in tuning himself to the scanners. De Marigny, taking the actual controls (as it were), was startled yet again when Exior answered Moreen's query with a cry of warning:
`Hurry, Searcher!' hissed the wizard. 'That's a "follow-him" spell he's weaving! See, he makes his wicked passes, points in the direction of my late palace in Humquass - and now he points directly at us!'
De Marigny saw saw, too, the thin trail of noxious yellow vapour, like the trail of a meteorite, on the horizon, . speeding toward them and gave the clock its instructions. Wisps of slime, made aerial and lightning-swift by Loxzor's spell, arced down toward the clock ... but the clock was no longer there.