Indeed, the whole aimed might of Cimmeria would not have amounted to a good-steed regiment in some armies Conan had seen. Few clans could muster more than a hundred fighting males of adequate years, and the clans of Cimmeria were not numerous. But Conan would not have rated highly the chances of any civilized army, however great its number, against this host. The legendary ferocity of the Cimmerians more than made up for their lack of numbers.
They wore the paints and tattoos, the braids and topknots of all the clans. They were of all ages, from boys little older than Bodhrann to gray-bearded elders with gaunt limbs still ready to wield sword. Their weapons ranged from the fine swords of the chiefs to the crude clubs of the wild Galla.
Uniting them was a fierce pride and independence, the spirit that had kept the Cimmerians a free people for all of their long history.
The chieftains were in the van, and they came forth to meet Conan and Chulainn. "So," began Canach, "you still live. And I see you have found our people."
"Some of them," Conan said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
"There are many more up there."
Canach addressed Bronwith, who stood by Chulainn. "There will be food and blankets for the children. You must take them below to safety as soon as they are fed."
Bodhrann stepped forward. "I stay with the host!"
The chieftains frowned at him for this unseemly interruption, but Conan said: "He killed a Van up there. With a stone."
Wild-bearded old Murrogh looked at Bodhrann with approval. "Go join the warriors of our clan, then."
"Here," Conan said. He took the sheathed dirk from his belt and tossed it to the boy. "There may be no spare weapons for you. This should do until you can find a dead man's sword after the fighting starts."
"He should receive his first man's weapon from the hand of a kinsman,"
objected Murrogh, glaring.
Conan grinned at the old chief. "We're almost kin already. My cousin here is about to wed his sister." The old man clucked over such improprieties.
"Vanir on Ben Morgh," said Canach. "That is something strange."
"It is far from the strangest of what I have to report. But we have work to do. The Vanir have damaged many of our cairns. As soon as you have set up camp we should repair them, before night falls."
"They shall pay," said the war leader of the Galla, who had no hereditary chieftain. "I think our ancestors will find the taste of Vanir blood pleasing."
That afternoon they struggled to restore the toppled stones of their cairns, storing up yet another chapter of hatred for the Vanir. That night, as the peat fires burned low, they heard the strange tales told by Bronwith, Conan, and Chulainn.
In conclusion Conan told them of what he had learned of the demons'
way of fighting and their weaknesses. "Remember, they look terrifying, but they die as dead as men. The scaly ones have tough skins, like Vanir armor, and you must hit hard to pierce them. They have wicked tails and use them in fighting. The things like big insects are easier to kill. Just crack them open. Killing Vanir I need tell you nothing of. There are others we did not fight, but doubtless they are as mortal as the rest. We saw something in the pit, something big as a dragon, but so strange I cannot describe it. I doubt we could do it much damage. Best to leave it to the Khitan sorcerer."
"Saw you any gold down there?" asked Wulfhere, the yellow-bearded leader of the little contingent of Aesir, come at Conan's summons in payment of a debt neither man would discuss with the others.
"I saw none." Conan shrugged. "In truth, I was not looking. I think only
a fool would go down in those caves to look for gold. Let the demons come out and fight us in the open." He looked about and gave his last instructions. "Tomorrow is the equinox, when I must carry out my mission. I think that all these sorcerous doings come to a head then. The demons do not like daylight, so if they want to deal with us, they may attack tonight. You have brought plenty of wood and peat. Keep it close by the fires and be ready to build them up at sound of attack. Let each man get what rest he can now, and sleep with your weapons in your hand."
Fourteen
In the Realm of the Gods
Hathor-Ka felt like an acolyte again. It was not pleasant for one of the world's most powerful mages to occupy again a subordinate position after so many decades. Her youthful appearance was due to her arts, for she was more than a century old. Yet, only now did she realize how ignorant and faltering she had been.
In recent days Thoth-Amon had taken her into his house to put the final polish on her sorcerous education, and she was staggered by the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Until now she had considered herself and several other mages to be very nearly Thoth-Amon's equals in the sorcerer's arts. Now she knew how laughable her presumption had been.
The strange beings from other dimensions that she had established halting contact with after long experimentation were Thoth-Amon's communicants. He was more ancient than she had dreamed, and he controlled forces she had been unaware even existed. In the few days since her abortive raid, Hathor-Ka had learned more of the wizard's arts from him than she had known in all her previous years.
Thoth-Amon had guarded well the secret of his full power. Over his centuries he had changed his name and appearance many times in order never to give a hint of the true extent of his power. Thus he had an unparalleled advantage over any potential rival. Many a foe had fallen to Thoth-Amon's wiles by mistakenly assuming himself to be the great sorcerer's equal.
"Are there others as powerful, as knowledgeable, as you?" Hathor-Ka had asked him.
"None," Thoth-Amon assured her. "Jaganath thinks he is, but his skill is no greater than was yours before you came to me. In far Khitai the Order of the Silver Peacock may rival me in knowledge, but they are a brotherhood, and no single one of them rivals me in puissance."
"I know them only by a few writings," she said. "Is there any possibility that they might band together as one to wrest power from us?"
"None. They are as much philosophers as wizards, and while their scholarship is vast, they foolishly will not indulge in certain of the more powerful forms of magic and demon-summoning. They deem these things evil or too dangerous to mankind. They sit and contemplate and dream, but they have no wish to dominate the world through their arts." He waved a hand in one of his rare dismissive gestures. "All other wizards are as nothing now. We shall be masters of them all when this rite is accomplished."
Hathor-Ka remembered this conversation as she went to Thoth-Amon's meditating room for her final instruction before embarking upon the Great Summoning of the equinox. The frame of the door was covered with hieroglyphs of great power. Without the proper counterspell, to cross the threshold would have meant her doom. She muttered the spell Thoth-Amon had given her and the door swung open silently.
Inside, the great sorcerer sat upon the floor. The room was perfectly plain and unfurnished; its walls, ceiling, and floor were unrelieved black.
Before Thoth-Amon was a plain basin of carved obsidian which contained only pure Styx water.
Not for the first time Hathor-Ka wondered at the simplicity of Thoth-Amon's thaumaturgy in contrast to the elaborate props and rituals of her own practice. So refined and perfect had his technique become that he needed little more than his own mind to carry out his spells. The basin of water was merely a focusing device of his powers.
He did not look up. "Come, Hathor-Ka. Sit across from me and look into the water of Father Styx. This night we go on a journey so far that distance is not even a concept. We go past the limits of our very universe.
You have had some success in attracting a few minor denizens of that universe to the site of your temple by tempting them with sacrifices. You have done this by establishing an interface between that universe and ours above your altar. These things have been made possible by the millennial
juxtaposition of the heavenly signs foretold by Skelos. Now we shall go into that universe ourselves and you shall see some
of the real powers of that world, and have some idea of the forces you have unwittingly been playing with. Come, gaze into the waters."
She sat and stared at the nearly invisible water. It was a simple thing; one of the first exercises given to a new acolyte. The meditation upon water was as ancient as Stygian sorcery. But just as a master musician practices every day the simple exercises he first learned as a student, so a sorcerer must return to the basic mind-concentrating rituals. His centuries of practice had taught Thoth-Amon that this was the most profound technique in all the art of sorcery.
As she stared into the bowl, gradually both water and bowl disappeared. Hathor-Ka found herself sitting amid the firmament. All around her was naught but black emptiness aglow with the tiny lights of myriad stars. She had been here before innumerable times, but only by herself. This time Thoth-Amon was with her, although he was no more visible than was she herself.
"We are now at a place far from our world, but nearby as one reckons the vastnesses of space," he said. "The stars you see are familiar. Now we shall go far, toward the very edge of the universe." The stars before her seemed to lengthen, then to shift and glow fiery red. Soon she was aware of them only as streaks of red. This went on for a limitless time, for time here had no meaning. Eventually, the red streaks became thinner and fewer. At last the remaining ones shortened and became once again points of blue-white light. There were very few of them, and all were in a direction she knew was behind them.
"Each point of light you see," Thoth-Amon said, "is not a star, but a cluster containing billions of stars. Gaze now upon infinity."
She looked and saw only blackness of a perfection she had never dreamed.
"Here, at the edge of reality," he went on, "we cross over into another reality."
There was a shifting about them. The blackness remained the same, but she knew that it was different. Thoth-Amon turned them, and now she was looking upon distant lights. They were not the star clusters of the
world she knew, but weird shapes that glowed with unnatural colors. The two began to move toward the lights, and this time there was no color-changing, although Hathor-Ka felt that the distances and speeds were comparable.
Up to and past the glowing things they went. Only her sorcerer's training and experience kept Hathor-Ka's mind from snapping beneath the strain of what she saw. Some of them were living creatures of unthinkable immensity, existing in tortured geometries that an ordinary mind would have rejected at once. On worlds distorted inside out she perceived flocks of creatures doing things that shocked even her hardened senses.
Once, briefly, Thoth-Amon took them down to the surface of what might have been a planet. It was almost normal compared to some others she had seen, save that its shape was a disk of changing thickness and its size was easily a thousand times that of her own world. All on it was perfectly visible despite the absence of any light source. In a city of purple crystal, atop a tower many miles high, Thoth-Amon conferred at some length with a wizard of this universe, a thing made up of crystal shards of many colors and a solid manifestation of musical tones together with a stench that had physical presence. It was performing a ritual intended to destroy its world and all in it, apparently as a combination poem and practical joke.
Onward they went toward the center of this universe. Eventually, the lights and manifestations became fewer and she was aware of a form before them that was so vast that she had not noticed it. It was a concentration of all the blackness in this universe, and yet she could perceive its form in bits and increments.
She was at first reminded of the tentacled, formless horror she had managed to call to her temple through her grisly sacrificial rites. This thing bore some relation to it, but its scale was unthinkably more vast. It was infinitely more evil, more horrible. Slowly, she gained more awareness of the thing's form, its aspect and nature. Then it was as if she had become blind. The horror of this thing was too much even for her, and her mind shut it out.
"You must encompass even a thing like this if you are to become a mage of the first rank, Hathor-Ka." Thoth-Amon's soundless voice was relentless. "This is a god of this universe, and it is one of the least of them.
I confer frequently with the greatest of them. And this is one of the least alien of the universes. There are many far more terrible than this."
When Hathor-Ka emerged from this journey it was as if she awakened from a dream. This dream, though, had none of the soft edges of real dreams, and it remained firm in the memory without fading like a real dream. Had it been a true experience? Was Thoth-Amon as all-powerful as he seemed? Or had this all been a form of mummery, implanted in her mind by the wizard's powerful hypnotic suggestion?
She thought long and hard on this. The experience had been dreamlike in its unreality, in the lack of a true sense of scale, in the ability to see in the absence of light. Yet, that could be explained if the mage was truly able to travel to other universes.
It was important to solve this riddle, because she had no intention of sharing power with Thoth-Amon. But if he were truly so mighty, did she dare betray him? The Skelos fragment said nothing about a joint rule by two mages. If she performed the ritual alone, she would become ultimate ruler, and all other wizards would be subordinate to her. Thus, be he ever so powerful, Thoth-Amon would be her servant. She determined to stake all on this belief. She realized the chance she was taking, but one who would not take great risks had no business seeking high power.
Starkad was worrying, something he seldom did. Encamped before the mouth of the cave, which none of his men would consent to enter, he sat regretting that he had ever undertaken this escort. He loved gold, but these foreigners did not have gold sufficient to balance the risk they were running. He had foreseen a brief incursion into Cimmerian territory, perhaps a few brisk encounters with the blackhairs, with the Vanir holding great numerical superiority, of course. A little blooding was good for the younger men, and gold was always welcome.
Now the whole foray was turning into a disaster. Already they had lost several men, and with nothing to show for it. The fine batch of prisoners they had bagged was gone, and they had not slain a single blackhair to salve their pride. Now, behind them, was a cave full of unholy wizardry and frightful demons the Vanir had only glimpsed. Far below them he could see the fires of the Cimmerian encampment, surely the largest Cimmerian army assembled since the sack of Vanarium. It would be strange indeed if even a handful of his band survived to return to the halls of Vanaheim again. He intended to be one of those, but many a chieftain
had been deposed in the aftermath of undertakings less ill-starred than this one. A leader of the Vanir held position by the might of his own arm, but also by the example of his skill and luck. Men would not follow a man who had proven himself unlucky.
All around him his men were thinking the same thoughts. Some glared at him as they idly gnawed the rims of their shields. Starkad was roused from his gloomy thoughts at the approach of two men he had sent on a scout. One was Alfgar, one of his oldest and most trusted companions. The other was Hilditon, a youth noted for his skill in climbing, learned in his native cliff village, where all men scaled the rocky faces in search of eiderdown. The two squatted by him and spoke in whispers.
It is no good, Starkad," Alfgar said, shaking his grizzled head. "We have been all over this mountaintop, and it is all sheer cliffs to both sides of us.
The only way down is through that valley before us, the way we came."
Starkad turned on Hilditon. "There is no chance?"
"I might be able to make it," the young man said, "in daylight, with good ropes. But not the rest. It takes much skill and experience."
Starkad gestured behind him. "And if we climbed up over the crest?
Might we find a better slope on the other side?"
"It is too rugged and too icy," Hilditon said. "And we would not know what we faced until we reached the other side of the mountain. The risk would be great, we would lose many men on the slopes, an
d it might all be for naught."
"Starkad," Alfgar said, "the time has come to speak of what we must do before the sun rises. The whole blackhair nation is down there in arms, and upon the morrow they will move against this mountaintop. It were best we were not here when that happens. The fat foreigner has some business tomorrow, upon the equinox. I know little of sorcerous things, but I would wager all my gold, all my land and cattle and wives and slaves that he means us no good. Let's be away from here, and quickly."
"You speak wisely, old friend. If it were any enemy but the blackhairs down there, I would say let us go down and bargain with them. Even the Aesir will behave as reasonable men when there is nothing to be gained by battle. But the hatred of Cimmerians is as black as their hair and their
hearts. They care nothing for gold and little for their lives. Besides, we have desecrated their holy place, and they will be more than a little annoyed. I warned the men about that."
Alfgar shrugged. "We did not know there was a whole blackhair army after us then. Besides, what warrior can resist defiling the ancestors of his enemies?"
"It is done," Starkad said. "Not that the Cimmerians need much encouragement to thirst for Vanir blood."
"Those two blackhairs cut their way through us," Hilditon said. "Might we not do the same? If we can carve a way through them, the bulk of us may escape. The blackhairs did not come all this way just to deal with us.
We slew the messenger with the Bloody Spear almost as soon as we crossed into Cimmeria. They were gathering for this hosting even then. If we run for home, they may not pursue, being intent upon their business here on the mountain."
Starkad nodded. "You speak wisely for a young man. This has been much my own thought as well. If we can get through, we might pick up many slaves on our way back, since the fighting men will not be guarding the steadings and villages. Thus we need not return empty-handed."
"Whatever we do," Alfgar said, "we must do it before first light."
"Very well," Starkad said, relieved to have his mind made up. "Get the men ready, and be sure they're quiet about it. We fight, and we run."
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