The A. Merritt Megapack

by Abraham Merritt

He stopped, both speech and motion frozen. Above the hissing of the horde, the louder sighing of the pillar, arose a screaming like that of a maddened horse. The lizard-men scuttled back. Out through them, halting at the edge of emptiness left by the last ring of flame, came—Nimir!

  And dreadful as he had been as the Shadow, dreadful when as Shadow he had poured himself into Cadok, they had been pleasant pictures to what he was now.

  For the Dark Master had gotten himself a body! It had been a Yu-Atlanchan, one, no doubt of Lantlu’s enemies, provided hastily for his Dark Master’s needs. It was swollen. Its outlines wavered, as though the Shadow found it difficult to remain within, was holding its cloak of flesh together by sheer force of will. Its head lolled forward, and suddenly up from behind it shot the face of the Lord of Evil, pale eyes glaring. And Graydon’s heart beat chokingly in a throat as dry as dust as he looked upon that bloated, cloudy body, its corpse-face and the face of living evil over it.

  Another ring of flame came circling. Whatever the Lord of Folly’s immunity from that noose of flame, it was clearly not shared. For Nimir retreated from it, stumbling back on dead feet.

  And as he went, the Lord of Folly pointed his rod toward him and laughed.

  “Fie upon you, Nimir!” he jeered, “to greet me after all these years in such ill-fitting garments! Draw your tattered cloak more tightly round you, Great One—or better still, go naked to the flame like me! But, I forgot, Master of the World, you cannot!”

  Now it seemed to Graydon, mind swimming up through the wave of horror that had covered it, that the Lord of Folly was deliberately baiting Nimir, playing for time or for some other purpose. But the Dark Master took the bait, and rushed at him—and barely saw the hook in time; barely could stagger beyond the reach of the next obliterating ring before it had died, all that had been in its path eaten.

  He stumbled back, into the halted horde. At once there was motion among it. Graydon, dropping down the ladder behind Suarra, saw the lizard-men scurrying beyond the widening circle of emptiness, tugging, pulling, hauling away at this and that while the Shadow, holding tight around him its borrowed body, urged them on.

  Louder and ever louder grew the sussuration of the naming pillar, faster and faster its pulse, and swifter and wider the flaming rings flung from it.

  He ran, Suarra gripping his hand, head turned, unable to take his eyes from that incredible scene. A ring enveloped the ship—and the ship was gone! Another caught a line of the lizard-men laden with coffers, and they were gone! He heard the howling of Nimir—

  Suarra drew him, the Lord of Folly pushed him, into the passage. Its opening dropped. He went with them, unseeing, unhearing, as powerless to tear his mind away from what he had just beheld as he had been to tear his gaze from it.

  They found the Snake Mother in a room so cluttered with her salvaged treasures that there was little room to move. She had been opening the coffers, rummaging through them. Her hair was threaded with sparkling jewels, there was a wide belt of gems around her waist, and others fell between her little breasts. She was admiring herself in her mirror.

  “I am rather beautiful in my way,” she said, airily. “At least I have this satisfaction—that there is no one more beautiful in my way! Suarra, child, I’m so glad you found those jewels. I always meant to get them for you. Tyddo”—she raised her hands in mock astonishment—“where are your clothes! To go thus—and at your age!”

  “By your ancestors, Adana, I had quite forgotten!” the Lord of Folly hastily snatched up a piece of silk, wrapped it round his withered frame.

  “Is it done?” the Serpent-woman’s face lost all laughter, was sorrowful.

  “It is done, Adana,” answered the Lord of Folly. “And none too soon!”

  She listened, with no lightening of sorrow, as he told her what had happened in the cavern.

  “So much lost!” she whispered. “So much that never can be replaced, never—though the world last forever. My people—oh, my people! And the ship—Well,” she brightened, “we got the better of Nimir! But again I say it, he is stronger than I believed. Dearly would I like to know what he saved. I hope he found something that will give him a permanent costume! I wonder whose body he was wearing? Now go away, children—Tyddo and I have work to do.”

  She dismissed them with a wave of her hand. But as Graydon turned to go, he saw the sorrow creep again over her face, her eyes fill with tears.

  CHAPTER XXII

  The Feast of the Dream Makers

  For the next two days, Graydon saw nothing of the Snake Mother; little of Regor and Huon. He spent most of his time with Suarra, and glad enough were both to be left alone. He wandered with her through the vast place at will, beholding strange and often disquieting things, experiments of the serpent-people and the ancient Yu-Atlanchans in the reshaping of life, experiments of which the spider-folk and the lizard-folk had been results; grotesque and terrifying shapes; androgynous monstrosities; hybrid prodigies—some of them of bizarre beauty. There was a great library, filled with the metallic paged and pictured books; their glyphs understandable now only by Adana and the Lord of Folly.

  He had looked into the Hall of the Weavers with Suarra, and had lingered long, fascinated by the scarlet people clicking at their immense looms along whose sides they ran, weaving patterns which through the ages had become as instinctive to them as the pattern of the spider-webs to their makers. They were not more than a hundred of them left, and in their immense workshop most of the looms swung empty.

  Beneath the Temple, Suarra told him, were other chambers and crypts, and she herself did not know what was in them. There was that mysterious place whose two doors, one of Life and one of Death, were opened for those who desired children and were willing to pay the price—the canceling of their deathlessness.

  Neither Nimir nor Lantlu had as yet made any open move. From Graydon’s eyrie the city seemed quiet, untroubled. But Regor said his spies had reported unrest and uneasiness; the story of Lantlu’s humiliation had been whispered about. It had shaken the confidence of some of his followers.

  Regor’s emissaries had been at work among the Indians; they could count, he thought, upon about half of them. Graydon had asked how many that was, and had been told that those with soldierly training numbered some four thousand. Of the remainder, he thought that many would take to the forest and await the outcome of the conflict; in fact, were already filtering away. He did not believe those who remained with Lantlu would be formidable—for one thing, they were held to him mainly by fear; for another, they hated the lizard-men and would not relish fighting with them. Far more than the hordes of the Urd, Graydon dreaded the dinosaur pack and the charge of the riding monsters; felt that against them the whole four thousand of the Emer could put up feeble defense, would go down before them like stubble before fire. Regor seemed not to think so, hinted of other resources.

  He had other news—some twenty of the Fellowship had survived the raid and probably a hundred of their Emer, all of them soldiers of the first class.

  This night was the Feast of the Dream Makers, the Ladnophaxi. It would drain the city of the nobles. The Emers were rigidly excluded, forbidden even to watch from vantage points outside the shell-like structure which Graydon had learned was dedicated to this yearly fete; they held their own moon festival far away at the verge of the forest. Of all the nights, therefore, it was the best to smuggle in the remnants from the lair, since the city would be deserted, its guard negligible. Huon and Regor were to lead a little force which would meet his men at a certain point on the lake, and guide them to sanctuary.

  Graydon’s curiosity about this Feast of the Dream Makers was avid. He was on fire to witness it. He determined that by hook or crook he would do so. He could say nothing to Suarra about it, fearing that she would either put her little foot inflexibly down, or that she would insist upon going with him—something clearly not to be thought of since Lantlu’s threats and the Snake Mother’s declaration of war. He wondered whether he coul
d cajole Adana into devising a means of getting into the place, came to the speedy conclusion that Adana would even more speedily devise some means of keeping him under lock and key. The Lord of Folly? It was a foolhardy enough idea to appeal to him. But since the affair in the Cavern of the Lost Wisdom, Graydon had realized that whatever the kind of folly of which that able person was Lord, it was not this kind. Nevertheless, he was not going to miss the Ladnophaxi.

  While he was turning the matter over, the Mother sent for him. He found her alone in her tapestried room. The great disks were gone, as were most of the other things they had brought her. Her eyes were bright, her neck undulated, her gleaming coils stirred restlessly.

  “You are so different from any one I have seen for so long,” she said, “that you take my mind out of its old ruts, freshen it. I know how unutterably strange Yu-Atlanchi must seem to you—myself, perhaps, strangest of all. Yet this which seems so strange to you is all too familiar to me. And what is everyday matter to you would be to these people quite as fantastic—yes, much of it even to me. I would draw away from my closeness which is both a strength and a weakness; look through your eyes a little, Graydon; think as you, the outlander, think. How do you sum up this situation into which you have been thrust? Speak freely, child, without thought of offending me.”

  As freely as she had bade him, he spoke; of the stagnation of the Old Race, of its decline into cruelty and inhuman indifference, and what he believed the cause; of what he felt to be the monstrous wickedness in the creation of such creatures as the lizard-people, and the cynical perversion of scientific knowledge that had gone into the making of the spider-men; and that although the Urd, at least, should be exterminated, still the fault lay not with them; nor even with Lantlu and his kind, but with those who at the beginning had set working the relentless processes of evolution whose fruits they were. At last, of his fear of the fighting dinosaurs, and of the smashing comber of the Xinli steeds and in their wake the fanged and tearing waves of the Urd.

  “But you have said nothing of Nimir—why?” she asked, when he had ended.

  “Neither have I said anything of you, Mother,” he answered. “I have spoken only of the things I know—and I know nothing of what weapons or powers you two may command. But I think that in the end it will be only you and Nimir—that all other things, the Urd and the Xinli, Lantlu and Regor and Huon, and myself are pawns, negligible. The issue lies between you two.”

  “That is true,” nodded the Serpent-woman. “And I do wish I knew what Nimir managed to take away with him from the cavern! There was one thing there I hope he found,” her eyes glinted maliciously, “and hope still more that, finding, he will use. It would give him that body he desires, Graydon. Yet he might not like the result. As for the others—do not fear too much the Xinli and the Urd. My winged Messengers will cope with them. Nor are the rest of you as negligible as you think. I may rest upon that quick eye and steady hand of yours at the last. But in essence you are right. It does lie between me and Nimir!”

  She dropped into one of her silences, regarding him; then—

  “As for the rest—does not Nature herself constantly experiment with the coverings of life? How many models has she made, more monstrous than anything you have seen here, and, as cynically, as you charge against us, stamped them out. What shapes, loathsome, ravening, has not Nature turned out of her laboratory? Why should not we, who are a part of her, have followed the example she set us? As for the Old Race and what they have become—if you save another man’s life, nurse him through sickness, are you thereafter responsible for what he does? If he slays, tortures—are you the slayer, the torturer? My ancestors released this people from Death, under certain necessary conditions; if we had not, at the rate men breed there would soon have been no place to stand on all the crowded globe. We ridded them not alone of death but of sickness. We placed in their hands great knowledge. Is it our fault that they have proved not worthy of it?”

  “And built a barrier around them so they could not use their knowledge!” said Graydon. “Men develop through overcoming obstacles, not by being hot-housed.”

  “Ah, but was not that an obstacle?” asked the Mother shrewdly. “If they had been worthy would they not have surmounted the barrier?”

  He had no answer for that.

  “But one matter you have clarified,” she said. “If I win from Nimir, I will destroy the Urd. And I will leave only a few of the Old Race. Those errors shall be wiped out—as Nature at times wipes out hers. The swamp shall be cleansed—”

  She picked up her mirror, caressed her hair; put the mirror down.

  “The crisis is close. Perhaps it comes to-night. Lantlu appeared in the city a few hours ago, swaggering, strangely confident, more arrogant than ever, boasting. Is it bravado? I do not think so. He knows something of a broth that Nimir is cooking. Well, let him! Yet I do wish I knew what Nimir took away—I have tried to see, but I cannot—he blocks me…he has found something…I wonder if I dare…”

  She leaned forward, put her hand upon his forehead. He felt the swift vertigo, was swirled across the lake. He was in the red cavern of the Shadow! But what was the matter with it? The rusted light was thick, impenetrable. Go where he would, it closed around him like a mist of iron. He could not see—

  He was back beside the Snake Mother. He shook his head.

  “I know,” she said. “I sent your sight with mine on the chance that sensitivity to the Shadow would let your gaze penetrate where mine cannot. But you saw no more than I. Well—” she smiled at him with one of her abrupt changes of mood, “I’m sorry you can’t go to the Feast of the Dream Makers, child. I could send your sight there, with mine. But not long enough to let you see anything. It would be too great a strain for you. A little—and it does no harm; but for any length of time—no.”

  Not long after that she dismissed him. He went from her with a bad conscience, but with his determination unchanged.

  He was back in his own quarters when an idea came to him.

  Kon!

  There might be the solution. Since his fight with Lantlu, the spider-man had apparently tucked him under his heart as tightly as he had under his arm during the scramble across the precipice; never passed him without clicking affectionately and giving him a pat or two with his little paws. Could he persuade Kon to scale the walls of the great shell with him, find a place where he could see but not be seen? How the devil could he cajole Kon when he didn’t know how to talk to him? He turned the matter over and over, then laughed. Well, his idea might work. He could only try it.

  The full moon arose over the barrier of peaks three hours after the sunset. That meant sunset in Yu-Atlanchi, which by reason of those same peaks was dark when it was still twilight outside. The Feast of the Dream Makers would not begin until the moon shone full upon the amphitheater. That much he had gathered from Suarra. And even now dusk was thickening in the bowl of the Hidden Land. He would have to work quickly.

  He dined with Suarra, and the others. She told him that the Mother wanted her attendance that night, gathered that the Serpent-woman intended to miss nothing of what went on at the Feast, and that Suarra had certain duties of her own in that surveillance. To his relief, he found that he was not asked to accompany her. He told her he was tired, would take some of the pictured books to his room, read awhile and sleep. Her solicitude made him feel guiltier, but did not shake his determination. Casually, he asked her where Kon kept himself. She said he had taken a fancy to the chamber of the thrones, was usually there when not scuttling around after Huon.

  After she had gone, he stole away to the throne chamber. There, sure enough, was Kon, and sitting, of all places, in the throne of the Lord of Folly. Graydon, taking it as a happy augury, grinned widely. He seated himself beside him, drew out a stick of red pigment and a piece of white silken stuff. Kon clicked, interestedly. Graydon drew on the silk the outline of the amphitheater. Kon nodded. Graydon pointed to the entrance and to himself. The spider-man shook his head, vi
gorously. Graydon drew a picture of the back of the shell as he thought it might be, and an outline of himself climbing up it. Kon looked at the picture scornfully, took the stick from him, and drew an excellent picture of what, clearly, was the actuality. He made it curved outward, instead of flat as in Graydon’s drawing, covered its face with scrolls which apparently were carvings upon it, and then with that extraordinary facial contortion meant for a grin, sketched on it an outline of himself with Graydon under his arm. He patted Graydon on the back, and broke into a weird burst of sounds plainly intended for a laugh.

  Kon had told him as clearly as by words—“The only way you can get up there is to have me carry you, and I know damned well you won’t want that.”

  Didn’t he? It was exactly what he did want!

  He patted the spider-man on the shoulder approvingly, pointed to the sketch and nodded. The grin faded from Kon’s face. He seemed surprised; disconcerted. He clicked warningly, even angrily. Kon, reflected Graydon, was undoubtedly giving him hell—but he kept his finger on the drawing, nodding stubbornly. Kon seemed to have an idea; he caught up the stick and drew a recognizable picture of Lantlu, mainly so because it showed a face with a fist planted on its nose. Then he drew Graydon again with his rifle pointing at the face. Graydon shook his head. The spider-man looked puzzled.

  His next picture showed him crawling down the Temple wall with Graydon apparently held by a foot, headfirst, in Kon’s hand. Graydon nodded cheerfully. If clicks could swear, Kon was swearing. He drew another picture of himself swinging through the branches of the trees with Graydon hanging on behind—still by his foot. Graydon clapped him on the shoulder, nodding complete acquiescence. Kon swore again, stood for a moment in thought, then rapidly sketched himself bringing down four bars on Lantlu’s head. Graydon shrugged, indifferently. Kon emitted one despairing click, and surrendered.