Hero of Dreams (8 page)

“He has a lot of money somewhere,” she answered, “but I’ve been here for a year and never found it yet. Perhaps he’s hidden it in the great keep. And of course, there’s his wand of power . ..”

“I’ll take that,” said Eldin, catching up the wand from where it lay at his feet. But no sooner was the wand in his hand than a great blue spark leaped from its knob to strike him in the forehead, standing his hair on end and hurling him backward head over heels in a somersault from Thinistor’s stalagmite throne. He let out a yell of shock and anguish as he fell in a tangle to the furs of the floor.

Then, as Eldin dizzily propped himself up on his elbows and shook his head to clear it, Hero stepped over and gingerly tried his luck with the fallen wand. Before his fingers could even touch it, however, small bright sparks flew up in warning, causing him to snatch back his hand. “Damn thing just doesn’t want to be taken!” he snarled.

‘Then we’ll have to leave it,” Eldin grunted. “And in any case, wands are for wizards. If Borak still wants it, he’ll just have to come after it himself-if he’s still capable when I’ve finished with him!”

“Aye, too true,” Hero readily agreed. He was fully recovered now from his funny turn with the idol, but still he kept a wary eye on the mutilated face of the stone god where it stood half in shadow. “Anyway, we have this monster’s eye, and I say that’s treasure enough. So let’s be on our way.” To Aminza he said: “Can you climb, girl?”

“I can try,” she answered.

“Good. The Great Bleak Mountains are high and it’s a long way down if you fall!”

And so they quickly set off along the main tunnel that led back to the lofty plateau and its sentinel Keep of the First Ones.

This time they moved faster through the tunnel, lighting the way with torches taken from the flambeaux in the temple, and in a very short time they emerged from under the overhanging peak onto the plateau. Dawn was coming up over the edge of dreamland and with it a chill and moaning wind that blew the torches out, leaving the trio shrouded in a cold and deceptive half-light. The dreamers headed straight for the keep, intending to skirt its great base and return down the mountain along the same route they had used to climb it. Aminza, now warmly wrapped, stepped nimbly between them, almost aglow with the gladness of being free at last from her ordeal. Then, as they entered the shade of the looming keep-

-Bat-wings beating, and a cloud of leathery gaunts settling all around them! The things had been waiting in shadows high on the face of the keep, and now they buffeted with their wings, punched, kicked and gouged with their rubbery paws. Swords whispering and slicing, knives stabbing, the dreamers fought back to the best of their ability-ah, but they were not used to looking after a woman! Aminza, having no weapons of her own with which to fight, was snatched aloft by a pair of gaunts and whirled away, back toward the overhang and the cave it shadowed. Her cries came back to the two as they battled desperately, fighting for their very lives.

And abruptly as the fight had begun it was over. The gaunts lifted up and flapped away, leaving three of their number behind, stretched lifeless on the cold, snow-patched ground. Against a brightening sky Hero stood tall and roared his frustration.

“Damn and blast all creation!” he cried, waving his sword. “Now we’ll have to go back for her. Eldin … what-T He quickly kneeled and held out his hand to the older man. “What’s wrong, old friend? Did you get a clout?”

“My bloody pumps!” the other wheezed, spitting redly on a patch of snow. “They’re coming apart, I’m sure. You go back, and all speed. I’ll get my wind and follow. I’ll wait for you at the mouth of the cave. Sorry, David-and good luck!”

But Hero was already gone, racing for the overhang, white teeth gritted and sword at the ready, the weight of Yibb-Tstll’s emerald eye jouncing against his thigh …

Aminza, buffeted almost unconscious by the wings of the two gaunts as they sped with her back along the tunnel toward the temple of Yibb-Tstll, did not see what passed her moving in the opposite direction. This was as well, for while the god’s stone idol was a sight evil enough by any standard, Yibb-Tstll in the flesh was a thousand times worse! She knew, however, as soon as she regained her senses where her captors had tossed her to the floor of the temple, what had happened.

Thinistor Udd, though gravely injured, had not been dead when they had left him in the temple. Recovering, he had used his wand to gain strength from the morbid idol. This was all too plain from the way he now sat with his back propped against the base of his throne, wand to hand, darkly stained stave beside him where he had lain it after dragging it from his body. The idol’s absence spoke for itself, that and the trail of dishevelled furs that led across the floor of the cave and into the exit tunnel.

Now, as Aminza lifted herself onto one elbow, Thinistor looked at her. Glistening droplets of sweat formed on his bald, yellowed pate and forehead to roll down and wet his sickly, agonized face; but his yellow eyes were bright and evil as ever. From the wand he held in his clawlike hand a greenish light streamed out, following the trail of disturbed furs and disappearing into the mam tunnel. Aminza knew that Thinistor guided the god through this thread of alien energy, knew also that he had sent that hideous Being out to bring back her friends from the waking world. To bring them back-or to kill them!

“Did you think to escape from Thinistor Udd so easily, girl?” he whispered through cracked lips which scarcely moved, so great was his pain. “I can see that you did. Well, old Thinistor’s not dead yet, not by a thousand years or more! And you’ll pay for your treachery, you may count on it. As for your friends: they’ve seen their last morning in dreamland, I fear. They took Yibb-Tstll’s eye, which displeased him greatly. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t save them now-and I don’t want to!”

“No!” he cautioned, as Aminza made to rise. “Don’t move, girl, or they’ll have you quick as a flash!” He cast his eyes up to the ceiling where clung the two gaunts which had recaptured her.

As she sank down again to the floor of the temple, Thinistor laughed. “Aye, best to do as you’re told. Gaunts have no faces but they’re manlike enough in other ways, eh, girl?” And despite his obvious agony he cackled mercilessly before returning his gaze to the weave of green light where it flowed from his wand …

The Dark God Walks/

CHAPTER VI

Reaching the cave entrance under the overhang, Hero paused. The bristling of the short hairs at the base of his neck warned him that apart from all else there was something here completely outside human experience, dreaming or otherwise, something which never should be in any sane or ordered universe. A wind was rushing from the tunnel, carrying with it a rotten smell that had him pinching his nostrils in disgust. He stood, as at the lip of a tomb freshly opened after many centuries, and his eyes widened as he saw, deep in the gloom of the cave, a greenish light swelling and brightening even as he watched. Something was coming down the tunnel from Yibb-Tstll’s temple, and the way die dreamer’s feet suddenly seemed rooted to the earth, he knew that whatever it was it boded ill for any merely human adversary.

Dawn’s light was brightening rapidly now, and the wind from the west had slackened slightly. Incapable of motion and feeling that chill but gentle wind on his back, Hero’s eyes bugged as he watched the green glow pulsing closer still and his inner mind screamed for him to take some defensive action, to run and put distance between himself and the unknown horror. Then, breaking his paralysis-

“David!” came Eldin’s cry, carried on the wind that blew from the looming keep. “Man, come back and give me a hand. I can’t handle all of them myself!” At that the younger dreamer half-turned, saw his companion less than a hundred yards away, hard pressed by the flight of gaunts which had returned and now hovered about him where he slashed and hacked. Alone, he could barely hold them at bay; and slowly but surely they were driving him back toward die cave’s entrance, back to whatever it was mat came in greenish rottenness, looming ever larger from the depths of the tunnel.

Hero cast one more glance into the gloomy bowels of the mountain, enough to make out the outline of the thing that moved there in its nimbus of emerald fire, and then his feet seemed to grow wings as he sped back to Eldin and joined him in fighting off the gaunts.

“What now, lad?” Eldin panted, his face white in the half-light and drawn with awful exertions. “Back to the cave?”

“No,” gasped Hero, skewering a gaunt and withdrawing his blade before the dead creature could crash to earth at his feet. “I’ve seen what’s coming after us. I think it’s Yibb-Tsdl himself. And these damned gaunts are simply here to slow us down!”

Eldin roared his anger as one of the rubbery monsters fell onto his back, almost throwing him from his feet. He leaned forward and Hero lopped off the horror’s blind head. On the next instant, as the carcass of the headless creature slid from the older man’s straining frame, the remaining gaunts lifted skyward in a concerted throbbing of wings. For a second the two dreamers stared at each other wide-eyed, then gazed back toward the cave beneath the overhang.

Yibb-TstH’s bulk was emerging into the still dim light, surrounded by a greenish glow, and one look at that black god of horror was almost too much for the adventurers to bear. Eldin grasped Hero’s arm and croaked: “The cliffs, quick! We must go the way we came!”

“No,” the other answered, gulping air into lungs which felt starved, galvanizing a body that seemed utterly unmanned. “No, the gaunts would pick us off the cliff like flies off a wall …”

“What, then?”

“The final crest. Perhaps we’ll have room to fight the gaunts off up there, and we might just be able to start an avalanche and-“

“-And send that great horror to hell! Yes, lad, I like your idea. But the way I feel, you might yet end up seeing this thing through on your own!” And Eldin coughed up a great red blotch and spat it onto a patch of snow.

Inadvertently, as they fled for the slope that climbed to the final crest of snow, the two found themselves drawn to look back again at the thing that pursued them: Yibb-Tstll-a loathsomeness from the dead spaces between the stars-whose living visage made his previously stony aspect seem almost warm and friendly by comparison!

Greenly illumined, Yibb-Tstll seemed to flow tower-ingly, purposefully toward them. The god’s feet, or whatever other members propelled him, were hidden beneath his billowing cloak. His eye-that single eye, where recently there had been two-was now alive, redly glistening, quick with a hideous mobility. It slid over the surface of the demon-god’s pulpy face with a swift and apparently aimless motion.

The empty socket which once had housed the other eye-the great emerald that now jounced against Hero’s thigh-moved in similarly pointless circles and dripped a black pus that steamed where it splashed on the stony ground. But if the movements of Yibb-TstU’s hideous orb and its companion socket seemed aimless, the determined way in which he now moved after the dreamers most certainly was not!

What few gaunts remained had gathered themselves to the huge monster and disappeared beneath his weirdly fluttering cloak. Their presence there did not, however, slow him down, and for all his vast bulk he flowed effortlessly up the final slope, obliterating the tracks that the dreamers had left in the thawing snow.

Now, approaching the crest of the snow-ridge, the two struggled through clinging, knee-deep snow that drenched their legs, slowing and tiring them until at last, almost exhausted, they reached the very top. And there they were finally obliged to call a halt; for at their feet, as if some giant had sliced both snow and mountain with a massive sword, a sheer fall of rock went down and down for thousands of feet into mighty, misty deeps.

Before them the seemingly bottomless chasm-where the morning mists now boiled upward, climbing the sheer face of rock toward them-and to the rear the lumbering god of unknown dimensions beyond dreamland, bent upon the recovery of his emerald eye … and certainly upon less mentionable things.

“Thinistor Udd lives!” croaked Eldin. “See, the green light follows the god like a long trail, winding away back to his temple. It was the wizard sent Yibb-Tstll after us.”

“Whoever sent him, I’ll jump before I give myself up to that" Hero pantingly declared. As he spoke a warm glow bathed their backs: the sun, risen at last on what could well be their last morning in Earth’s dreamland.

And still the horror came on, his stench reaching them like the breath of an open tomb as he climbed the slope of snow. Down on all fours went the adventurers, frantically shaping great balls of wet snow which they propelled down the slope toward Yibb-Tstll’s hideous form. Gathering snow and momentum as they rolled, the balls smashed into the monster god with the impact of boulders; but what they had in weight they lacked in consistency, flying apart and tumbling past the lumbering giant in wetly bouncing fragments that avalanched down to the plateau of the keep. And Yibb-Tstll was impeded not at all.

Less than fifty feet separated the pair at bay from that awful Being when the latter’s cloak suddenly burst open to release upon the beleaguered dreamers the few remaining gaunts. Balanced precariously on a narrow and infirm ribbon of snow, Hero and Eldin were hardly in a good position to do battle with the creatures; it was as much as they could do to protect themselves. And still the terrible form of Yibb-Tstll came on, his single eye sliding over his face more rapidly now, perhaps in nameless anticipation …

Aminza knew she dared wait no longer. The look on Thinistor’s face told her that much. Seated with his back against the base of his stalagmite throne, the wizard’s yellow eyes were wide and full of mad delight, and the corners of his mouth curved upward in an awful smile. Aminza had little doubt that in some magical way he “saw” whatever sight presented itself to Yibb-Tstll, carried back to him, perhaps, by the greenly weaving umbilicus of light that still streamed from Thinistor’s wand. If that was the case then her dreamer friends must be in a fearsome plight.