In the Moons of Borea (17 page)

But which one?

Following the perimeter of the vast ice hall, Silberhutte peered into each of the tunnel entrances in turn, examining their floors for sign of the cloak's passing. He discovered nothing to suggest the way his friends had gone, but he did detect at the last entrance a certain odour. For a single second in the frozen, sterile atmosphere of the place, the strange smell - of incense, perhaps, and yet sulphurous, too - assailed his nostrils, then was gone.

Wasting no time, he moved forward into the tunnel, going as silently as possible between bluely luminous walls of ice, and as he went so the peculiar smell came stronger to him from some as yet unknown source. A minute more, and as the Warlord carefully came around a bend, he froze, baring his teeth in a half-snarl, half-gasp of surprise.

Slowly, great axe upraised, he emerged into view of a fantastic scene. Then he allowed himself to relax, his body coming erect from its half-crouch as he again moved forward, disbelief growing on his face. For this was the tunnel's end, the very lair of the ice-priests. And indeed there were ice-priests here - but they were the last thing Silberhutte had expected.

Armandra had said they were tall, hairless, thin, and cold. Yes, and so they were, but her description simply did not do them justice! They stood all of eight feet tall, were thin to the point of emaciation - mere bones with an outer layer of naked, heavily wrinkled skin - and their
colour .. .

They were white, but not the white of clean snow or of good milk or of any normal thing. They were
corpse-
white, the sickly white of the destroying angel, Amanita

Phalloides, the mushroom of death! And not only in their unwholesome colour did they match that terrible fungus, for their heads, too, were of a loathsome mushroom shape; with foreheads that overhung their faces, and skulls that were much too squat and flat.

Like grotesque, alien mummies they were, and preserved just as surely — though not wound in bindings or lain in carven sarcophagi. No, they were preserved in pillars of ice! And like mummies they too were ancient; but somehow Silberhutte knew that they predated any Earthly mummy, that indeed they were the original ice-priests of Theem'hdra, and that time itself had wrought in them their hideous desiccation.

Nine in number — standing upright, monstrous heads drooping upon bony, shrivelled chests, spindly legs together and stick-arms hanging by their sides . . . and all encased in ice, except for the domes of their projecting heads and their turned-down faces. At first the Warlord thought that they were dead. Stepping closer, however, he saw that they were merely in a state of suspension, a cryogenic limbo; for even as he stared at the awful skull of one of them, he saw the distended blood vessels darkening as the ice-priest's circulatory system worked. They were alive, yes, but their metabolisms had been so slowed as to be almost at a standstill.

They stood (were encased) each to his own icicle in a ring about a central pit, facing outward. The pit was the source of that peculiar odour — much stronger here — that had attracted the Warlord's attention to the lair in the first instance. He now found himself thinking of the place more positively as a 'lair,' as if the ice-priests were more animal than human; nor did studying them briefly at close quarters change his opinion of them in this respect.

Basically human they might well be, but their branch had grown apart from the great tree of humanity in an age predating the coelacanth, and from that day to this they had remained unaltered and irretrievably, yes, alien! They
were
human — as was Neanderthal, as is the pygmy and the aborigine — but their evolution had taken them much farther from the main stem than any of these.

Carefully, still more than a little wary, the Warlord stepped between two of the refrigerated figures to stare down into the central pit. Here the fumes from below were understandably stronger, cloying almost, so that he held his breath as he looked down upon the slow, glutinous bubbling of some thickly viscous lavalike substance fifty feet below. Then, seeing that the walls of the pit at its bottom were glowing a dull red, he decided that it must indeed be an as yet active volcanic source, the valve of some larger vent, and further that the fumes it gave off must somehow be essential to the process of suspended animation.

Finally he straightened up to walk silently around the circle, only halting when he came to a wide gap in the ring of ice-blurred figures. Here, where instinct told the Warlord that there should be more pillars of ice reaching from floor to ceiling, he saw only the stumps of three great icicles which formed uneven mounds upon the floor. And deeply indented in them were the marks of wide, wedgeshaped feet . . . such marks as the feet of the ice-priests would make. Now the Warlord knew that there must be twelve ice-priests in all — an even dozen — of which three were
even
now awake and abroad in the ice-cave complex!

So absorbed was Silberhutte with these observations that for a moment he inadvertently left his mind unguarded, only realizing his danger when alien thoughts rushed in to detect his presence. Before he once more closed the shutters on his mind, he read disbelief, rage, and something akin to panic in the thoughts that crowded in upon his own; panic that he had managed to reach the lair itself. These disordered, frightened thoughts were strangely sluggish and came from close at hand — from
the minds of these very figures ringed about the volcanic blowhole — but the others, whose sources he noted with alarm were also fairly close, though he could not place them exactly, were much more active and immediately purposeful.

Silberhutte again cast his glance across the space where those oddly indented stumps of ice stood up from the cave's floor, and as he did so, he spied a small motion among the ranks of silent,
^,
petrified ice-priests. Again the Warlord froze . . . then watched in morbid fascination as jerkily, one by one, the domed heads of the encased ice-priests came up and their slowly opening eyes, which seemed .to have no pupils and were uniformly crimson, swivelled to stare in his direction!

And immediately it was as if chains had been thrown about the Warlord's massive shoulders, as if his feet were suddenly shackled to the ice-layered floor. He had never before met with hypnotism in any form but knew its principles, knew that what he now felt was not a physical power but the purely mental one of mind over matter — the minds of the ice-priests over the material of his being! It was not even telepathy, which he could understand and handle more than adequately, though certainly there were parallels. For while his mind now worked swiftly and lucidly to free his body from the ice-priests' hypnotic shackles, still those shackles tightened about him, denying him the use of powerful sinew, muscle, and bone. It was as much as he could do to back away from the pit, stumbling and barely managing to remain upright, holding on grimly to his great axe as those crimson eyes bored awfully into his own.

Finally, concentrating all of his mind on the breaking of his invisible bonds, the Warlord could no longer hold in place those shutters that protected his thoughts from external influences. Down crashed his mental barriers — and in rushed the concerted sendings of a dozen evil, powerful minds, the chaotic and monstrous imaginings of this nightmare Brotherhood of Ice.

But the ice-priests, too, had their limits. Now, as they concentrated on the Warlord's mind, they were obliged to relax their hypnotic hold on his body. He found himself free to move, to flee, and turned to do just that -

- Only to find himself face to face with that trio of monsters whose footprints were melted into the three ice mounds at the rim of the pit. There they stood,
,
and while Silberhutte believed that he might handle them easily enough (for what were they but skin and bone?), he was not so sure about the
things
they had with them!

About the feet of the ice-priests, crouching like great hounds at the ends of their leads, were three fantastic creatures unlike anything the Warlord had ever thought to see. Six-legged, like huge insects — protected by black, chitinous plates which sprouted short, coarse red hairs, and with lashing forked tails whose barbs dripped a clear fluid that set the icy floor steaming poisonously — the things were the stuff of a madman's dreams!

The advancing ice-priests smiled (if such a word may rightly describe what they did with their alien faces) in hideous anticipation as they drew closer, drawn on by the straining of their awful servitors. Silberhutte, turning to left and right, could see no escape; the cave was a dead end, containing only the broken circle of ice-priests frozen about the central pit. And now, as the leashed hounds and their masters blocked his single route of egress, so the Warlord found himself backing toward that pit.

Then, quick as thought, one of the terrible creatures slipped its leash and hurled itself straight at the Warlord's throat. He cried out once — no cry of horror, though he felt great horror; not even a cry of rage, though certainly he was enraged to be trapped here like a rat at the mercy of beings whose instincts he knew to be more savage, merciless, and cruel than the instinct of any rat — no, none
of these, but a battle cry. And with the echoes of that cry reverberating and setting the lair of the ice-priests to a tinkling of startled ice, he lifted his great axe, smashed the slavering cockroach thing to one side in midair, and threw himself headlong into battle .. .

De Marigny and Moreen regained consciousness together. They had been literally whirled unconscious at the end of their subterranean flight, driven round and round in a tight circle until they had blacked out. The wonder was that the girl had not been torn from the Earthman's arms by centrifugal force, to be dashed against the blue-glistening walls of their ice prison, but she had not. Now, recovering but still filled with a whirling nausea, they clung together as before; and for some little time that was as much as they could do.

It was as de Marigny became cognizant of their immediate surroundings that the full extent of their plight was brought home to him. To begin with, the Warlord was no longer with them; whether of his own volition or at the will of some other, Silberhutte had parted company with them. Equally disconcerting to de Marigny was the fact that he no longer wore his flying cloak - but there was worse yet to come.

The girl had her face buried in the furs that covered his chest, and so she knew nothing of their whereabouts, was not aware that they lay upon a hard, cold floor of ice in a small cave. De Marigny knew, however; knew moreover that there was only one exit, and that it was guarded .. .

But what guards!

There were two of them, two huge insect-things that crouched "down for all the world like guard dogs - except that they bared no teeth but hissed warningly through jaws like those of great reptiles. De Marigny saw them and was relieved to see also the stretched chains attached to their collars and fastened to iron staples hammered into the ice of the walls. The - hounds? - were at the fullest extent of those chains, uncomfortably close to his feet.

Drawing breath in a huge gasp, he snatched back his feet and hugged the girl to him all in one movement. Shaken from her exhausted half-sleep, Moreen opened her eyes to peer into those of the two monsters that now snapped and slavered only feet away. Galvanized into action by de Marigny's movements, they hissed loudly and hauled dangerously on their chains, scrabbling at the ice floor with legs like hairy, jointed bones.

Then an astounding thing - for before de Marigny could stop her, Moreen had slipped from his arms to hold her hand out to the chained creatures, as if she were about to pet a pair of domesticated animals in a Viking settlement on Numinos!

'Moreen, no!' he cried, stark horror in his voice.

She pulled her hand back from the snapping snake jaws of the things and turned to him in seeming surprise. 'But why? They will not harm me.'

`Not harm you?' he cried, dragging her back bodily from the chained monsters. 'Girl, they'd kill you! That's why they've been put on duty here, to keep us in. They're killers.'

`You don't understand,' she told him patiently. 'No lesser beast would ever harm me. They sense something in me - something which I myself do not understand - and even the wildest of them are calmed when I speak to them. The great eagles of Numinos have perched on my shoulders, and the wild dogs of the hills have accepted meat from my fingers.' She turned back to the hissing cave-things and shrugged. 'These creatures are - different - yes, but for all that they are living creatures. Therefore I am safe with them.'

Her logic baffled de Marigny. 'But
look at
them!' he cried. 'Do they look harmless?'

`Henri,' she answered, kissing his brow, 'I have trusted
you — with my life. Now you must trust me. Indeed there is something very strange about these creatures — for see, they continue to snap and hiss even now that they know. me. Still I say to you that they will not harm me.'

Frowning, she turned from him, approaching the insect-things on all fours. They reared on their chains, jaws slavering and barbed tails lashing as, unhesitatingly,
she
again stretched out her hand to them.

'For God's sake!'
de Marigny whispered, fighting the urge to grab her and drag her back. Ignoring him, she drew closer to the hideous creatures; and as she did so, they arched their necks and drew back their flat reptilian heads — for all the world like angry snakes about to strike.

And strike they did, so swiftly that the eye could scarcely follow their movement. Moreen had no time to snatch her hand back out of harm's way. Razor fangs opened her flesh, injecting yellow poison. Wide-eyed in disbelief, her mouth forming an '0' of surprise to match de Marigny's expression of horror, she fell back into his arms. No living creature would ever have done this to her, she knew that, and so —

`Not real!' she gasped as de Marigny feverishly took her hand and gazed at it in amazement, his jaw dropping. Then they both stared at the clean, unbroken flesh of her hand and wrist. 'They are not real!'

As one they turned their heads to look again at the monstrous hounds — seeing immediately that she was right. The creatures had disappeared, vanished into thin air, and with them the chains that had seemed to tether them to the frozen walls. They had not been real, had existed only in their minds, illusions placed there by the evil genius of the ice-priests.

Suddenly de Marigny recalled what Silberhutte had said about Theem'hdra's ice-priests being greatly skilled in the arts of illusion and mass hypnotism, and at last he understood. Well, it was a lesson learned, knowledgewhich would doubtless prove very useful in the near future.