In the Moons of Borea (11 page)

Without waiting for an answer, she continued: 'The
freedom of the settlement is yours. Only ask no more questions — certainly not of the common folk — for of course you are near-omniscient and therefore need no questions answered.' With that she opened the door and slipped out of the house.

`A pity,' de Marigny at last managed to say as the door closed behind her.

`What is?' the Warlord turned to him, fully recovered now from his brief ordeal.

`I meant to ask her about the bats. Don't you remember? She mentioned them in connection with the Isle of Mountains when first she met us on the beach. "That bathaunted isle," she called it. "Bat wings beating.in the mist — blood and terror and great winds blowing!'

`Yes, I remember,' the Warlord nodded thoughtfully. `Perhaps we'll get a chance to talk with her later. Then we can thank her for these "small magics" she's given-us .Darkhour . .

Darkhour, and chill grey mists had come up off the sea, changing the shapes of the grim-faced men who boarded the longships into those of weirdly homed monsters. Leather and metal helmets glistened with moisture, and furs clung damply to brawny backs and arms. The mist seemed to form a film of slime over everything; the timbers of the ships were slick with it.

The temperature had fallen until it stood not far above freezing; even the ocean, normally slightly warm from the high incidence of submarine volcanic activity, was more chill than its medium. Outlines were soft and blurred, and sounds were muffled.

The Warlord, where he sat beside de Marigny toward the stern of Harold's ship, had been quiet for some time, had uttered no word since boarding. Now he shuddered involuntarily. He felt no natural chill but
an ominous foreboding, engendered perhaps of the quiet, sullenly lapping waters and the leaden mist.

De Marigny was more cheerful. He was filled with warmth and feelings of well-being, the result of putting his tongue gingerly to the merest pinch of Annahilde's warming powder. The blood flowed in his veins like red wine and his features, pale and waxy since first he set foot on Borea, were now ruddy and seemed almost to glow. He turned to his silent companion.

`Hank, Annahilde's warming powder is certainly the Great Equalizer where I'm concerned. I never felt so warm and well. I feel almost reborn, well up to anything Borea and its moons may throw my way. Even in the plateau the cold was a damnable handicap — but no longer.'

As if waking from a daydream, the big Texan had started nervously when de Marigny began to speak. Now he shook himself and nodded his approval. 'Good,' he grunted. 'I only wish I felt as comfortable and as confident.'

De Marigny searched the other's mist-damp face. Is something wrong?'

`Several things. For one, I don't like being on Harold's longship. He hates us and it shows. You saw the way he watched us all through that shindig they threw for us? If he can, he'll do away with us at his first opportunity. No, I don't like him; and I don't care much for this mist, either. It hides too much. Also I've a strong premonition of trouble looming. And finally — '

`Yes?'

Armandra has me worried.'

`She's been in contact with you?'

The Warlord nodded. 'We agreed only to "talk" to each other if there was real danger or something important to say. Well, she too has been bothered by dark premonitions. She thinks Ithaqua is close at hand, standing off in the void and riding the ether wind like a great hawk.

She thinks he's watching us, that we are his quarry, his prey.'

`Are we that vulnerable?'

`We're completely vulnerable. Oh, with luck Armandra might be able to snatch us back to Borea faster than her father could come for us. But on the other hand . .' He shrugged.

'You mean we might be out of luck?'

Again Silberhutte nodded. 'Could be. And you'll note that Annahilde's boys aren't coming on the raid? She made damn sure they were to remain with the rear party, didn't she? What does she know that we don't, eh?'

De Marigny refused to be subdued, 'I'm sure I don't know,' he said. 'But about Ithaqua: personally, I think he's gone off on his wanderings again. I mean, if he were, really interested in taking us and knew of our whereabouts, surely he'd have done it by now. What do you think?'

The Warlord shrugged. 'I wish I dared seek him out with my mind, telepathically,' he said. 'But if he's close, he might recognize me and track us down by my thoughts. As a matter of fact I think Armandra's right and he is somewhere out there, not too far away. I also think he knows much of what's going on. He won't make his move yet, though, for he holds all the trump cards and he's very greedy.'

'Greedy?'

'Sure. Why should he step in now and spoil it all? Why take us now when he might yet get his hands on Moreen — and the two of us in the bargain? And what a coup it would be if he could lure Armandra herself away from the plateau and Borea.'

`You think that's his plan?'

'It makes sense.'

Suddenly deflated, de Marigny said: 'If it wasn't for my stupidity you wouldn't be in this spot.'

The Warlord looked at him and grinned wryly. 'Don't flatter yourself, Henri. I'll go out of my way to help
a
friend, yes, but don't forget that you're the one man who can help me . . . you and your time-clock. That machine of yours isn't just a gateway out of Borea and this alien dimension we're trapped in — where at the moment I'm as surely a castaway as you are — it's also a powerful weapon. The ultimate weapon against the Wind-Walker.'

'True enough,' de Marigny answered. 'If any weapon can destroy Ithaqua, the time-clock can. Is that what you want, to kill him? Or is it that you want to escape from Borea and get back to old Earth?'

The other shrugged again.
tell you better when we've
recovered the time-clock — if we ever do recover it. As for now, it looks like we're on our way.'

With a shout that roared out from sixteen throats as if from one — a shout whose echoes vibrated eerily through the mist — the oarsmen lifted up their oars vertically, poising them momentarily like twin rows of masts above the deck. Then the oars were lowered into oarlocks and dipped deep into darkly swirling ocean; and flanked by
its
dragon sisters, as a pacemaker in the mist-wreathed prow
took
up the beat with his hardwood pounding blocks, the longship pulled sluggishly away from the beach.

In the wake of the ships the settlement with its backdrop of cliffs quickly merged with the mist, and soon the three vessels passed out through the mouth of the fjord into the open sea. There, for all that the mist lay thick and menacing, the sails were unfurled and soon filled out as the dank, moisture-laden air swirled into them.

Finally, as they emerged seaward of the grey bank of fog, Harold roared a command from where he stood swaying in the prow. Echoing cries came back from the other ships; the pacemaker stopped his pounding; the sail belied out with the freshening breeze; and as the longships surged

forward into the gloom of Darkhour, so the oars were lifted up once more and stowed away.

The longships were now fully under sail, creaking through slapping wavelets toward unseen horizons. Overhead, a dull-glowing crescent of sun showed golden-red from behind Borea's shadowy bulk.

They sailed out of one Darkhour toward the next, always holding the same course, three ships abreast under strange auroral skies. To the port side sailed the chief's ship with Thonjolf himself in command; to starboard his cousin Hanarl's dragon clove the wave crests. Pride of place, though, went to Harold's ship, for it was the craft that carried Ithaqua's emissaries and rode to sea flanked by the other two.

Only once, when the wind failed, did the Vikings unship their oars, and then briefly. For growing impatient, the Borean Warlord (a genuine high priest of the Wind-Walker in the eyes of most of the Vikings, though Harold and his closer colleagues obviously maintained certain reservations) saw fit to call up Armandra's familiar winds to fill the slack sails and drive the ships on. To witness again at firsthand the strange powers of these men from the skies, and this time to be completely sober, was galling for Harold and his cronies and astonishing to the crewmen; nevertheless, as time passed, proximity bred something of contempt among the crew of the longship.

True, the small-statured strangers seemed to command the very spirits of the air, and it certainly appeared that they carried the word of the Storm-God, but in the end they were only men. And so the bearded giants of the ship soon grew tired of peering wonderingly at the pair where they sat in the stern, and on occasion one or other of the Vikings would even venture so far as to ask of them a gruff question. For their part they always answered carefully and with a paucity of words so as not to demean their assumed standing.

Harold himself, exercising his trunklike legs by walking the wide central way that separated the oar banks, often strode close to the strangers. Whenever this happened, he would pause, legs braced and arms akimbo, scowling down at them. Invariably, though they returned his gaze blandly enough, de Marigny could sense the Warlord's desire to hurl himself at Harold's throat. Silberhutte's experiences on Borea had taught him well enough the best way to deal with treacherous enemies. To challenge Harold here, however, would be to challenge the entire crew — not to mention the crews of the other ships — and it would not bring their quest any closer to its conclusion. Thus Silberhutte bided his time, though now and then his companion could almost swear he heard the grinding of the Warlord's teeth.

For all their intense distrust and dislike of Harold, in one respect the pair followed his example: they, too, in a limited way, managed to spend some little time in exercising. De Marigny's method was to stroll out onto the walkway and limber up in the manner taught him in the plateau's gymnasiums: 'physical jerks' which were initially greeted with loud hoots of derision. The Vikings soon grew bored with such 'caperings,' however, and left him to get on with it.

Silberhutte's exercises were rather more spectacular. Using his fantastic skill, he juggled with his own and de Marigny's murderous picklike weapons; or at other times he would hurl himself furiously from one end of the walkway to the other in whirlwind feats of gymnastic agility. For all that displays such as these were performed solely as a means of loosening up otherwise inactive muscles, still the warrior crew would look on in open awe and admiration, much to their captain's envious chagrin.

During those infrequent periods when the Warlord sat nodding with his broad back to the curving side of the ship, then his companion would ensure that he stayed awake and mentally alert, and vice versa. Both men were certain that their position was very tenuous — the look in Harold's pig eyes said as much — which was sufficient in itself to keep them on their toes.

So Lighthour came and went, and gradually the sun crept once more into Borea's shade, and slow but sure the mists rolled up off the sea to deaden the slap of wavelets and shroud the ships in undulating milky billows. Darkhour was coming on again, and according to things the Earthmen had overheard, that was the time estimated for their arrival in the forbidden region, that area of ocean where loomed the rocky star-shaped bastions of the Isle of Mountains. They had heard other whispers, too, concerning devilish creatures that came down out of the sky to murder unfortunate sailors and drive venturesome ships away, but of these they could discover no further details .. .

Almost completely immunized against the cold by Annahilde's powder, de Marigny enjoyed as best he could his newfound comfort; nevertheless, and not wanting to become too dependent upon the drug, he used it sparingly as directed. In that period before and after Lighthour corresponding roughly to one Earth day, he had not taken a single sniff of the stuff, but as Darkhour drew closer, so he resumed his wary consumption of the warming powder, keeping at bay the freezing chill that came with the billowing mists.

Once, before the mist came down in earnest, they had thought to see in the distance a jagged wedge of land against the horizon, and at sight of those distant spires rising, the Vikings had grown silent. Too, there had been a cloud of tiny dots in the lowering sky above the far-off landmass, dots that seemed to circle sentiently but with motions unlike those of birds. Then the damp miasma of
ocean had washed over the ships, covering them with a greyly swirling blanket.

And it was then also, with the Isle of Mountains comparatively close at hand and visibility down to only a few feet, that Harold decided to have done with these so-called emissaries of Ithaqua. It would have to be now, under cover of the mist, so that Thonjolf would never know the truth of it; he was a strange old dog with an odd sense of honour. Harold could always fabricate some tale or other with which to satisfy the old chief, and he knew well enough how to cow his men into complete silence. He had long ago decided that if anyone were to receive Ithaqua's blessings for fetching the girl Moreen out of the Isle of Mountains, that one would be Harold. The reward must certainly not go to a pair of strangers of doubtful origins .. .

De Marigny was on watch while Silberhutte lay wrapped in sleep in the very stern of the ship. For some little time the Warlord's sleep had been restless, and he had tossed and moaned, so that de Marigny had thought to waken him. He had resisted the impulse, reckoning it was best for Silberhutte that he slept his fill in spite of whatever bad dreams disturbed him.

Moments after making this decision, however, he reconsidered. Suddenly there was a tension in the air not at all to his liking, an ominous, almost physical weight that seemed to press down upon him. The figures of the Vikings closest to him, where they sat in their places behind the round shields that lined the sides of the ship, were almost obscured by writhing tendrils of mist; they seemed like grim-horned phantoms sitting there, and their sullen silence only served to accentuate de Marigny's growing premonition of creeping doom.

Then, before he could stretch out a hand to shake Silberhutte's shoulder, there came to his ears a clear and distinct sound. An unmistakable sound which issued neither from the too-calm sea nor the ships that lolled upon it but from above, from the banks of mist that rolled over them. The sound of great wings in the mist, beating steadily, eerily over the longships.

De Marigny started, his heart leaping, as Silberhutte's hand grasped his wrist. 'Henri! I .... I was dreaming. Or was I?'

`More like a nightmare,' the other retorted in a strained whisper. 'But this — whatever it is — seems real enough. Listen!'

The Warlord needed no urging; his face was already tilted upward. 'Bat wings beating, the old girl said,' he recollected. 'But I don't believe she told the half of it, and we forgot to ask!'

Harold, too, heard the wings in the mist. Halfway down the walkway toward the strangers, sword to hand and flanked by two of his flunkies while a third followed up behind, he paused; his darkly suffused face blanched and his pig eyes grew wide.

`They've come,' he whispered, his voice a half-croak. 'Well then, so be it. But before the winged ones tackle us, we take the imposters . . .
Now!'
And with that cry on his lips, crouching as he rushed forward through the shrouding curtain of mist, Harold led his men in a treacherous attack.

Surging out from the swirling grey wall that obscured the deck, startling the crew almost as much as the outsiders they attacked, Harold and his homicidal colleagues were a fearsome sight. He himself wore no helmet and his long damp hair was plastered back on his head. His mouth was open in a twisted, hideous snarl, and his tremendous stature and sheer bulk — plus the fact that the great, dully glinting sword he held on high was all of five feet long — put the finishing touches to the paralysing shock of his appearance.

All in all the element of surprise itself ought to have been
sufficient to see Harold's murderous intentions carried through, would have been sufficient but for unforeseen circumstances. One: the bully had made a mistake in allowing his cronies to flank him so closely. The walkway was not wide enough to accommodate three men abreast, certainly not men as huge as the Vikings. Even as they rushed into view of their intended prey, the man on Harold's right slipped on the damp planking, lost his balance, and fell, bringing down the one to the rear. By then de Marigny and Silberhutte were on their feet, reaching for their hand axes, automatically taking up defensive stances.

Then came the second unforeseen circumstance — the sudden intervention of an outside agency. For down out of the mist came Nightmare borne on leathery wings, Nightmare with the pointed ears and dripping fangs of the devil himself. The creature was a bat — fur bellied, yellow-eyed, with a wrinkled black-leather face — but it was almost as big as a man!

Flying between attackers and attacked, the giant bat used the talons of one of its hind limbs to rake. Harold's face, opening his cheek in a red slash. He cursed and hacked at the thing with his great sword, but the creature was agile as its smaller cousins of the Motherworld and avoided the Viking's blade without difficulty.

Again and again Harold struck upward at the huge bat until suddenly, following fast upon his last thrust, its talons reached down and caught at the blade near his wrist, snatching it from him. He cursed as, with a shrill whistle of triumph, the creature tossed the weapon aside so that it fell into the sea.

By then the man on Harold's left, who had momentarily stepped back to give the chief's son elbow room, was once more coming in to the attack. He leaped high in the air, striking at the bat and missing, then followed up his action by turning his attention once more to the strangers. Landing in
^-
a crouch, he straightened up and whirled his sword at de Marigny. Instinctively, with skill born of his many lessons in the plateau's
arenas, the Earthman
ducked under the deadly arc to swing the needlepoint of his weapon into the giant's neck. In the next moment blood gushed in a crimson fountain, and the stricken man gave a single, gurgling scream before toppling overboard.

But now more bats had descended from the mist and were flitting hugely over the heads of the Vikings, striking at them with wickedly sharp talons as they rose up from their seats to fight back with savage blows. All was confusion; the mist swirled everywhere; the air was filled with shrill whistlings, screams, and bull roars of rage and pain as the bats took advantage of the momentary havoc to tear and rip.

Harold, defenceless now, still faced the first of these horrors from the sky, and as the great bat struck at him yet again, de Marigny stepped forward and made to intervene. The Earthman was in no way interested in saving Harold's skin, but it fully appeared to him that unless the bats were driven off, all aboard the dragonship
were surely doomed.

Before he could strike, however, the Warlord --- until now curiously inactive caught at his arm and
stayed the blow. 'No, Henri,' he shouted, 'leave it. If we don't bother them, they won't bother us. It's the Vikings they're after!'

But freely given or not at all, Harold needed no assistance. He was far from crippled by the loss of his sword, and as the bat tore at his chest with its talons, he struck it a massive double-fisted b
low
in the face. Half-stunned, the creature thudded to the deck, and taking advantage of this brief respite, the chief's son roared: 'Do you see what these so called "emissaries of Ithaqua" are up to, lads? Why, it's
them
called these monsters down on us! See here, they've sided with the bats! Now fight, you dogs, and when we've driven off the fliers, then we'll deal with the traitors . .

As he finished yelling, the dazed bat on the deck seemed to recover its senses. Wings outstretched, it flopped toward him and attempted to knock him from his feet. With a blustering battle roar, seeing that the thing was half done for, Harold stepped inside the span of its wings and caught at its soft throat. Forcing its dripping fangs to one side and well away from his face, he locked his mighty arms about its neck.

His remaining pair of cronies, having been amply engaged in their own right prior to this moment, now rushed to assist him. They stabbed at the bat together, their swords passing through its membranous wings and into its soft body. Blood gushed front its wounds and from
its
gaping mouth, drenching Harold from head to foot; but a moment later he heaved its corpse over the side of the ship to stand there red with gore and furious in the berserk rage that now gripped him.

The mist was lifting a little, and the bats were retreating with it, but in their wake they left a dozen dead or dying Vikings. Nor had the crew of the longship failed to take its toll. The deck was littered with the broken bodies of great bats, and those that yet lived were even now being put to the sword.

'Time we abandoned ship, Henri,' Silberhutte said as Harold's pig eyes lighted upon them where they stood in the stern. 'The big fellow's tasted meat, and we're next on the menu. Can you fly us out of this? The bats are waiting for us.'

`Waiting for us?' the other repeated. 'Then maybe we'd do as well to take our chances here.'

'No, you don't understand. They're waiting to lead us to the Isle of Mountains — to the great cave where the people of the island live — to Moreen . .