Iced On Aran (9 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: Iced On Aran
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Augeren nodded, but crept closer still. “Now picture my dilemma. I could not go back—the broken limbs, the boneyard of the dholes—and I cannot go forward. So here I stay, halfway, a half-creature, half mad.”
Strands parted behind Hero's back. He worked harder. And to cover his activity: “And have you no plans at all?”
“Only this,” said Augeren, “to live until I die. Until others come, perhaps like you, to put an end to me. Or until the Lords of Luz find me and take me back. For escape from the underworld is not permitted, do you understand? What, escape and bring word of that horror into the outside world? The tunnels of D'haz, winding through slimy rock like the tentacles of some terrible cancer, are mazy and widespread. Perhaps they reach even so far as a certain temple in Inquanok.
“Plans? Not really. Only a desire to destroy. To destroy Luz, also to kill as many ‘human beings' as I may before my life is done. For aye, I hate you all, and you”—he leaned forward until his terrible face was only inches away—“you, who I perceive to have been a waking-worlder—yours is the type I hate most of all!”
“There are things,” Hero gabbled, “certain things, which you have not explained.” He shrank back, molded himself to the wall of the cave. “If you will, please go on …”
“What things?” Augeren's voice was a low slobber.
Hero's mind raced desperately. He remembered his conversation with Eldin—how long ago? Yesterday?
Impossible! “Eyes!” he cried. “And auguries!” He prayed he had Augeren's attention, and:
“You said your eyes—your eye—can hardly ‘see' at all as I understand sight. And yet in D‘haz, you must have seen infinitely more clearly than I ever could. Your ‘sight' must be far superior. So how
did
you see, down there in reeking darkness?” More strands parted behind his back.
“This faceted eye,” Augeren replied, drawing back the merest fraction, “came to me via my leech-like mother, as did my plated, bone-piercing tongue. What I got from my father I cannot say, except for my general shape. Him I never knew, for he gave himself to the dholes before I was spawned. So perhaps he may be held to account for my ‘sensitivity,' eh? As for the eye: it detects and interprets not only light of the present but light of the past, even a little light of the future. It is in itself a sense, additional to the five senses of ordinary men. When my ears hear sounds, the eye gives them shape. When my nose detects odors, the eye frames their source. I touch a living thing in the darkness”—he quickly reached out a huge, taloned hand, touched Hero's thigh—“and my eye describes it in its entirety. See!”
Augeren blinked. Hero saw. The glitter of his eye grew filmy, moist, then quickly cleared. And in its myriad facets, Hero saw himself—a hundred selves—mirrored, ghastly pale, shuddering, trapped here in this very cave, with Augeren crouched over him.
“The eye is also my memory,” the monster spoke again. “Let me show you. Now I draw light from the past …” The eye shuttered again, and when it opened—
Hero saw mirrored in its facets … the underworld! He saw Luz, and frightful half-glimpses of Things that
moved oddly in the deeper shadows. Another blink of the eye, and the pallid grass Downs of D'haz crept away into gloomy distance, with squalid huts and stone pens everywhere, and fungi forests, and loping halflings about their business in the wreathing mists. Blink, and now upon every hand great banks of bones, for this was the prehistoric ossuary of the dholes. And: “Would you see a dhole?” Augeren inquired.
Hero shook his head; said very quietly, “No.”
The faceted eye blinked again. A girl ran through misty woodland, panting. She stumbled in her terror, fell, glanced back. Her myriad faces filled with horror, loathing. And before she could scream, Augeren's shadow fell over her …
Blink! Ilfer Maas, gagged, bound, sat in a cave much like this one. His eyes were wide over a nose where the nostrils flared in a silent scream. The hexagonal pictures came closer, ran into each other, became one. Ilfer's eyes grew larger, more terrified still. Something white, dripping slime, slid into view. The opening at its top widened, and a needle-sharp shaft struck forth, chopped cleanly, instantly into the youth's forehead. The picture faded.
And Hero's petrified gaze crept from Augeren's eye to his mouth. The quester watched that gristle-plated organ poise before his face, tilt slightly upward, saw its tip opening and something white gleaming within.
“Augury!” Hero croaked. “Future light! You said you could read the future!” He sawed at his bonds, his wrists now sticky with blood.
“Only the immediate future,” the monster's voice was a gravelly growl. “Surely you do not wish to see that?”
“I do! I do!” Hero cried. “Also, why do you hate
me
so? A waking-worlder? Aye, I was that—but what is that to you?”
“Don't you know?”
“I no longer know anything!” Hero sobbed, finally unmanned. “I know only what you tell me!”
“Then ask yourself this,” Augeren hissed bubblingly. “Ask why all of this must be: the underworld, the monsters mating here, the nightmare existences I have described, which are as real as I am?”
At last Hero knew the answer. It had come to him with the word “nightmare.” It showed in his bulging eyes, his suddenly slack mouth.
“Of course!” cried Augeren. “Yes, certainly! All of these things are—Luz and D'haz, the Unknown Things, the tick-folk and Urls, halflings and Lords—
because some monstrous man of the waking world dreamed them!
”
“A madman, perhaps,” Hero gabbled desperately. “But I am sane. Or at least I was!”
“Alas,” said Augeren, “but quite definitely, I no longer am. But very well, the immediate future; see it now, then see no more.”
Blink!
Things snuffling, scrabbling in darkness, squeezing their grotesque bodies through impossible crevices in fractured rock, digging with spade snouts or clawing their way with sharp knife hands. And others lurking behind, goading them on, urging with quivering tentacular arms!
Hero saw all of this in the monster's fantastic eye—and Augeren saw it, too. He drew air in a slobbering gasp. “They're coming for me!” And even as he cried his frustration, so the floor of the cave shuddered, began to settle in a sagging of rotten rock and crumbly soil.
Blink!—and another picture forming:
Hero's ropes parting with a twang, and spattering blood from his torn wrists onto the black rocks; and a
hundred Heroes reaching cramped, agonized hands for the daggers tucked away in the cuffs of their right trouser legs
.
“Curse you, quester!” shrilled Augeren. Drill mouth working frantically, he tried to grab Hero's shoulders—but Hero jerked on his bloody wrists and the ropes parted, just as he had seen in the monster's eye! He rolled out of Augeren's reach, grabbed for his knife and found it. Augeren was on him, but Hero's knife was arcing up.
Blink!
Light! Blazing, blinding, merciful light! White light shot with red and yellow, flaring light. The light of a hundred torches, burning on—burning in—Augeren's naked eye!
Blinded by a blazing vision, a scene from his own immediate future, Augeren staggered backward into the hole appearing magically behind him in the floor of the cave. Rocks rained down and dust shook itself free of the walls, and a jagged crack shot across the floor, accompanied by a low rumble of shifting mass. Then … several things, all happening at once:
The light glaring forth from the many facets of Augeren's eye was supplemented by real light, marginally preceding the blundering bulk and hoarse, worriedly-inquiring voice of Eldin the Wanderer. Hero, in some entirely detached part of his psyche, might have seen, might have heard something of this arrival; and certainly on that ethereal plane he would have exulted that Eldin yet lived and breathed; but his
will
was now focused upon one and only one task: to kill, and send to hell, and so be free of, the monster Augeren. All else was peripheral to consciousness; only that one desire, that single instinct remained.
To this end, even as Eldin roared into the cavelet with
a blazing torch held high, Hero severed the cords binding his ankles; turned upon Augeren, who seemed jammed in the hole in the floor as in quicksand. There was blood on the monster's neck and shoulder from Hero's blind thrust of moments earlier, but Augeren seemed not to notice. He was screaming over and over again: “Come for me! They've come for me!”
And as the floor of the cave continued to shudder, while ominous cracks began to zigzag across walls and low ceiling, so the monster reached out his huge hands and grabbed Hero's ankles.
“If I go, quester, then you go with me!” he sobbed. “One thing to learn of the ways of the underworld second-hand, but another entirely to actually
experience
them!” With that he half drew himself up from the hole—
and was dragged back!
Then Hero saw the blood—the monster's blood, from that first blind knife-thrust—on his trousers where they were being half yanked from him as Augeren sank snarling into the ever-widening hole, and finally the taut thread of sanity snapped in him. That nameless, tainted blood—spawned of reeking pits and inhuman lusts—on
him
? In a frenzy of horror, he stabbed at the clawed hands where they held him, stabbed blindly and savagely, as often as not slicing into his own calf-boots and leather bindings in his frantic, repetitious attack.
Augeren's head was below the level of the floor now, leaving his arms and spastically clawing hands protruding, clutching at Hero. But his head came up one final time, glared its hatred from the blackly glittering, faceted eye. His hatred … and his pleading. “Then kill me!” he choked, as “hands”—and many of them, and all more monstrous far than his own—reached up to gain firmer holds on him.
Until now Eldin had seen very little: dark shadows
leaping, dust falling in powdery rills everywhere, Hero's white face, wide-eyed, and something like a great red one-eyed spider, many-armed, that writhed and heaved on the floor where Hero slashed and slashed at it. The Wanderer couldn't know that the “spider” was Augeren's bloodied head, or that of its many apparent arms, only two belonged to the thing itself! The fact that the monster quite obviously threatened Hero was more than enough. Eldin lowered his blazing torch, thrust it straight into the hideously glittering eye. The scream that issued forth then was an entire nightmare in its own right, but Eldin cared little for that. No time for caring or for anything else now, for events were rapidly drawing to a close.
Eldin stepped quickly to where Hero crouched sobbing and stabbing at the sliding rim of the quaking hole in the floor. “Lad?—David?—we have to get out of here, now! Can you walk?”
Hero didn't answer, seemed not to have heard. Up and down went his knife; the blade broke where it struck rock at the edge of the hole, and still Hero's arm pumped like some mad mechanical thing. But what was he stabbing at? The spider-thing was gone now.
As the cave shuddered yet again, Eldin thrust his torch down into the hole and waved it about. It seemed to him that monstrous shapes, distorted faces and figures, drew back down there. Shadows, most likely. But he couldn't be sure.
“Lad?” he said again. And getting no response, he simply kicked the broken knife from Hero's spastic hand. It made no difference: still the younger quester's empty, clenched fist pumped, still he sobbed and raved. Eldin cuffed him hugely on the side of the head, grabbed him in one hand as he crumpled, then half-dragged,
half-carried him out of that hellish place and along the exit tunnel to dreary daylight.
Behind them as they emerged, the tunnel went down in a fall of rock, venting pressured dust thick as smoke as that entire section of the quarry face crashed vertically down in massive blocks, filling in the main area of subsidence …
 
 
Hero came to when he was dumped jarringly on his rump at the top of the ramp. Down below a seething mist lay on the floor of the quarry, with nowhere a sign of what had passed there. Up here, where a pale sun was striving to break through rising vapors, the whole thing might have been a dream within dreams—except that Hero knew it had been real. His chafed wrists and ankles were ample proof of that. Eldin sat close by, panting like a bellows, his wary eyes on the younger man.
At first there was a glazed look to Hero's eyes, but this gradually disappeared as a very little of his color returned. Then he gave a start, sat up straighter, gazed all about. “Inquanok!” he gasped, as if suddenly realizing where he was—and as if the very word tasted bad in his mouth.
Exhausted one minute, he seemed galvanized the next. He shot to his feet, set off at a fast if wobbly pace eastward. They'd hidden their tiny sky-yacht in a copse of evergreens on Inquanok's very border when they first arrived here. Since their invitation to Inquanok had been other than strictly official, that had seemed prudent. Now Hero was obviously in a hurry to get airborne again and out of here. Which would suit Eldin well enough, except:

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