Thongor in the City of Magicians

by Lin Carter

  It clattered on the tiles, and men looked at it wonderingly. In the endless wars that raged eternally between the Jegga and the Zodaki, and between them and the lesser hordes of the Shung, the Thad and the Karzoona, an arrow, clearly stamped with tribal markings and shot into the enemy city, was the- equivalent of a declaration of war.

  The scarlet shaft bore Jegga markings.

  And then the world went mad!

  Trumpets rang and war zamphs screamed like steam-whistles. The crowd that encircled Zarthon wavered—and broke! In a hurtling rush, the great war-chariots of the Jegga Horde rolled on thundering wheels through the milling throng, across the shrieking bodies of those whose feet were not agile enough to carry them from the path of the spike-wheeled and steel-shod juggernauts, and burst into the plaza.

  From ten thousand throats, the war-cry of the Jegga burst in an earth-shaking shout.

  Scarlet arrows whistled through the air, to fall in a barbed and deadly rain upon the crowd.

  And Zarthon stood stupidly, swaying on drunken feet, as one unable to comprehend the swift change in events.

  The lead chariot rolled up to him, and the grim, stern, majestic figure of the old chief, Jomdath of the Jegga, stared down at him, bow in hand.

  One numb paw went fumbling across his gem-studded girdle, and Zarthon searched dazedly for the scimitar that he had let fall moments before. Instead, his scarred fingers closed on the handle of his mighty bronze ax. He tore it loose and swung back his great corded arm to hurl it in the very face of Jomdath. But the Jegga chieftain raised the bow and loosed a second scarlet arrow. It blossomed from between Zarthon’s scowling brows.

  His great, ugly and misshapen face turned the dull leaden hue of cold ashes. His enflamed eyes went blank and dull. His tusked jaw gaped open in an idiot leer . . . and Zarthon slowly, like a ponderous collapsing tower whose foundations are shorn away by some cataclysmic blow, fell forward on his face, dead as the cold stone he befouled with his gore.

  Now the square exploded into a fury of carnage. Struggling knots of men fought together in the drenching golden moonlight like demoniac monsters from some awful frieze. Time and again, the Zodaki gathered to lead a charge, but were swept with the withering rain of the scarlet arrows, and melted before their stinging, whistling blast like ice before a furnace’s breath.

  Chariots thundered through the streets, herding howling warriors before them into cul-de-sacs, slaughtering the Zodaki where they stood backed against stony walls.

  Mounted on their great war zamphs, the triumphant Jegga warriors rode back and forth through riotous mobs of screaming, fleeing Zodaki, laying about them with glittering swords that soon left trails of scattering scarlet drops on the moonlit air. Many fell to crunch into bloody smears under the ponderous tread of the great zamphs. Others were caught in the brazen beaks of the zamphs, sheared in half by clamping powerful jaws.

  One by one, score by score, in their hundreds and their thousands, they died.

  Never had the endless plains of the East seen so terrible a vengeance, so frightful a battle, as this that Jomdath of the Jegga waged upon the broken hordes of the Zodaki, in the streets and squares of the dead city amidst the measureless plain!

  It did not end soon, but it did end at last. The crimson rays of dawn had struck to flame the upper stories of the palaces of immemorial Yb, when quiet at last reigned over the blood-soaked city.

  In the fullness of their victory, the Jegga were not unmindful of the lessons Thongor of the West had taught them regarding the wisdom of justice, mercy and restraint.

  Only the warriors of the Zodaki were hunted down and slain. And of the warriors, only those who refused to lay down then: weapons and surrender.

  The women and children, the aged and the crippled, the slaves and all the warriors wise enough to yield over their arms, were spared.

  The full glory of dawn saw the division of the spoils, the loading of the heaped treasures of the decimated Zodak Horde upon the great chariots of their conquerors. So vast was the treasure-hoard the warlike Zodaki had amassed over the ages that a hundred baggage-wains of the whelmed horde were pressed into service to help bear it off to the city of Althaar. As well, the remnants of the Zodaki were loaded aboard, for Jomdath swore that in this place of blood and death the name and nation of the Zodaki should be rendered extinct. The children and women and survivors of the conquered horde would be adopted among the Jegga clans.

  In all their search of the dead city, they found no trace of Thongor of Valkarth. Neither his corpse nor his accouterments could be found amidst the dead city.

  And although Jomdath and his captains searched and asked and questioned their prisoners, they could find no answer to the riddle of Thongor’s disappearance . . . no clue to the mystery of his whereabouts.

  The only hint they could uncover was cryptic and baffling, an enigma seemingly without solution.

  It came from the sneering lips of an old Zodaki shaman, or witch-doctor, who had served in the depraved devil-worshipping and sacrificial cult of the Demon-God Xuthsarkya, the Lord of Worms. This cult of cruel torture and nightmare terror was the nearest thing to a religion the debased and bestial Zodak Horde had known.

  Cackling with blood-chilling, mocking laughter, the old witch-doctor had said: “Ye search for the outlander, Thongor? Ye will not find him here!”

  “Where then, old man?” Jomdath demanded sternly.

  Again a mocking burst of jeering laughter fell from the withered lips of the shaman.

  “Ye will find him in the jaws of the Worm!”

  Further than this, the old witch-doctor refused to say, and no amount of urging or punishment could pry apart his silent lips, nor drive the venomous mockery from his leering eyes.

  Jomdath felt a cold hand close about his heart.

  By “the worm,” did the malignant old witch-doctor mean the god they had worshipped? Did he mean that Thongor had been sacrificed in some unholy ritual of heathen savagery? Or did he mean the term as a synonym for Death? For in the solitary darkness of the grave, the worm alone is king..

  And his brow furrowed with troublous memories. This city of immemorial Yb was sometimes called “the City of the Worm.” Was it because it was the center of the depraved cult that worshipped the Lord of Worms . . . or were the whispered and shadowy myths that Jomdath had heard—true? For rumor claimed that in unknown catacombs beneath the ancient city, a hideous and fantastic Dweller in Darkness slithered through the cavernous ways it ruled . . . a monstrous and gigantic worm.

  Jomdath continued the search for his mighty friend and lordly comrade until midday, when he finally could no longer postpone the return trek to his city of Althaar. He could find no entrance to this mysterious and perhaps legendary underworld that was rumored to exist beneath the stones of immemorial Yb. Perhaps there were no catacombs. Perhaps Thongor had been slain. . . . Although it saddened him beyond words to give over the search, he was forced to do so. For his wounded warriors must be carried back to Althaar where their many hurts could be bathed and salved and bandaged.

  As the great chariot caravan of the triumphant Jegga Horde rolled through the broken gates of fallen Yb and thundered out into the midst of the endless plain, Jcmdath looked back at the silent ruins. He wondered if he would ever clasp the hand of Thongor in this life again.

  And the leering, mocking phrase the vile old shaman had spat at him arose again to haunt his memory, as it would for days to come . . .

  “Ye will find him in the jaws of the Worm!”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE UNDERGROUND WORLD

  War’s iron music shakes the plains

  As Jomdath’s fury breaks the foe,

  But him they seek has burst his chains

  To dare the unknown world below.

  Where madness reigns and nature sleeps

  In nightmare caves beneath the earth,

  He fights the Terror of the Deeps—

  Vast spawn of some unholy birth!

  —Thon
gor’s Saga, XVII, 15-16.

  Thongor fell like a stone into a frigid gulf of whirling blackness. A damp and icy wind whistled up from the black abyss into which he hurled headfirst. The breath of the pit was foul with a slimy, musty fetor . . . a stench of indescribable decay which assaulted the senses like the sickening odor of a nest of squirming serpents, coiled amongst their own reeking wastes.

  As he fell, Thongor thrust his sword into its scabbard so as to have both hands free. He had not thought the black well opened on any such enormity of depth, and thrust out his arms, hoping to seize and cling to some projection or ledge—but his hands touched nothing!

  Were he to land on solid stone from such a drop, he would need the luck of the gods to survive with anything less fatal than a pair of shattered legs. . . .

  Then an icy shock bathed his hurtling form, as he struck the surface of a subterranean lake and crashed below the surface to flail and flounder in lightless depths. The water was incredibly cold; at first the impact stunned him, but the biting chill of the underground waters revived him and he struck out with powerful arms, rising again to the surface choking and spluttering and numb to the bone.

  He found himself in the grip of a powerful current! No lake this, but a subterranean river which swept him along head over heels with irresistible force. All about him was utter blackness so that he could see naught, but from the way the roar of the surging river rebounded and echoed, he judged that the torrent rushed through a narrow, low-roofed tunnel. To fight the seething waters would be useless, so he concentrated on merely keeping his head above water, a task sufficiently difficult to occupy his full attention for some time.

  The underground river hurtled at frightful velocity through a tunnel that curved and twisted, as Thongor soon discovered when the violence of the river’s force scraped him painfully against walls of rough and jagged rock at the first turn. He devised a method of kicking out with his legs whenever he sensed the current was about to swing him bruisingly against the wall again. And as he fought the river with all his strength, he grimly felt the piercing chill of the black waters deadening his mighty limbs like a creeping paralysis. Unless he managed to escape the torrent soon—very soon—the cold would numb his arms and legs beyond the power of even his iron will to force them to further exertions, and he would sink helplessly and go down to a terrible death amidst the darkness and the cold, drowned in the seething depths of this unknown river somewhere below the earth. . . .

  And then, without warning of any kind, the underground torrent burst into a huge and echoing chamber as vast as the domed and vaulted nave of some stupendous cathedral.

  His senses caught a distant gleam of faint light—and then the current swept him with stunning impact against a rough obstruction of cold wet stone. With the last ounce of strength in his numb arms and shoulders, he seized an upper protuberance and heaved his bruised and aching body up out of the river onto a narrow ledge or flat surface of gelid stone.

  He flung a length of dripping hair out of his eyes and peered around him in the thick gloom. Gradually, as he rested, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a faint source of light, a dim, gray-greenish glow unlike any radiance he had known before. And slowly, by its feeble half-light, he began to make out the contours of his new surroundings.

  About the rock he clung to, the river poured into a black lake flecked with white foam. Somewhere beyond vision to his left, this lake drained off in a waterfall of unguessable size, for the thunder of falling water filled the cavern with booming echoes and floating mist of droplets. Here and there, immense fang-like spears of slick and glassy stone knifed up from the foaming waters. Some lifted to three times the height of a standing man, and were as huge about as the girth of the giant lotifer trees of the forest country. The furious, rushing flow of the river-current had eroded and eaten away, over unthinkable centuries, the thick bases of these monstrous stalagmites, forming diskshaped ledges of stone that overhung the gulf. It was to one of these that Thongor had hauled himself upon.

  He craned his neck and peered up into the gloom above. He could not see the arched and vaulted roof that overhung the cave, but if it were low enough he might be able to grasp one of the dangling stalactites and climb up, perhaps to find his way back to the upper world again!

  Off to his right, beyond a number of conical, tapering stalagmites, he saw a ledge of stone that formed the edge of the lake. It was from that direction that the faint green-gray light seemed to seep.

  The nearest stalagmite was not far. Rising to his full height, clinging with one hand to the slick stone spear that had saved him from the lake’s cold embrace, he managed to step across the foaming waters to the safety of the next—and thence to a further—and thus he gained the stony margin of the lake, and clambered up a steep, sharply-eroded incline, to stand on dry land again.

  The ground underfoot was mostly solid stone, but heavy-littered with dust and powdered rock and chips of moldering rubble that crunched and squeaked beneath his boot-heels as he slid down the further side of the incline to the cavern proper. Here, he inched his way through a dense forest of stony stalagmites set close together. The weird glow strengthened as he worked his way towards it.

  He found himself in a fantastic forest of monstrous growths. Toadstools . . . vast, bloated domes of stinking fungi that nodded at chest-height atop long warty stems as thick about as his mighty arm. About the obscene and moldy growths hovered a dim nimbus of unhealthy phosphorescence—the eerie, sourceless light he had glimpsed when first he had drawn himself up out of the chill bosom of the underground lake.

  The green-gray radiance was a chemical illumination, the witch-fires of decay.

  Here, some distance from the roaring waters, with a wall of stony spears rising between him and the foaming lake, he could gain some notion of the height of the cavern’s groined roof. Whatever stalactites might hang downward, it seemed obvious from the height of the booming echoes that gobbled and cackled far above that the domed roof was enormously high.

  He would have to seek another exit.

  With the grim patience of a true barbarian, the Valkarthan began to search along the sloping walls of the vast cave.

  After a weary interval of indeterminate length, he found a side-tunnel that branched off from the domed central hall. The dim phosphorescence of decaying fungi did not penetrate the portal’s gloom. Peer as he might, his keen gold eyes could not see beyond the curtain of darkness that stretched across the black mouth of the cavern. So, drawing his sword, he plunged into blind darkness, senses alert. The slightest sound could trigger him to a slashing attack.

  But seemingly naught lived within these unlit deeps, save for the monstrous and unnaturally huge fungi of the lake-cave. He traversed the full length of the side-tunnel without encountering a living creature, and stepped forth into an even vaster cathedral-dome-—a gigantic echoing space that must have been a thousand yards across. So incredibly huge was it that he could not see the further wall!

  But see he could, and it was with relief that his eyes blinked and drank in the fierce light of volcanic fires. Good to see by honest firelight again, after the greenish murk of sodden fungoid things!

  The uneven floor of this most gigantical of caverns was filled with crater-like pits, and from many of these jets of red-gold flame roared up to towering heights. Perhaps they were geysers of natural gas, or the escape vents for some unknown region of volcanic fury far below in the earthquake-torn bowels of the planet: at any rate, whatever their origin or nature, they provided a fiery light by which Thongor could see his surroundings clearly.

  And a source of warmth, as well. He approached the nearest fire-fountain and warmed his half-frozen limbs in its furnace-breath for a time, wringing dry his cloak and long unshorn mane of coarse black hair. In the baking heat of the flaming geyser, he felt the exhaustion and numb cold seep from his body and soon felt more like himself, ready to face and overcome whatever obstacle might yet arise in his path to stand between him a
nd his escape to the upper world.

  He was, however, aware of an aching void of hunger. It seemed endless hours since the last meal, and that had been only a hasty field-lunch amid the Hills of the Thunder-Crystals. He yearned for a luscious steak and wished he might come upon some succulent species of cavern-life so that he could slay it and cook its meat in the fire-jets. But, alas, this cavern also appeared sterile and devoid of living things. He could not see even the fungoid growths of the lake-cave.

  When he was warm and completely dry, he began to think about moving on. He crossed the cavern of the fire-fountains and entered another tunnel which branched off in a new direction.

  He soon lost all sense of time. After he had stumbled forward through cavern and open space and cavern again for some indeterminate time, he felt himself becoming so weary that he slept, ignoring the pangs of hunger, curling up on the dry warm floor of a huge long cave, rolled in his cloak, the great sword lying near his hand in case of need.

  When he awoke, stiff but rested, he had no notion of how long his slumber had lasted. An hour, or a day—who could say? But the hunger that coiled within him now was a cold knot of devouring pain.

  He passed through another chain of caverns, and came to a stone bridge that curved in a natural arch over a rushing river of cold black water. Whether this was the same river into which he had fallen when first entering this underground world, or a branch of it, or an entirely different stream, he had no way of telling. But this river bore life.

  When he had come to the mid-point of the stone bridge, a snaky neck rose dripping from the black water—a neck as thick about as his waist, and scaly with plates of gray horn. The fearful head that dipped and swerved towards him, opening slavering jaws set with fangs like ivory knives, had blind white eyes.