Young Thongor (12 page)

It was a man’s boot. With the foot still in it.

4

Barak Redwolf

When the great golden sun of old Lemuria lifted up over the edges of the world to flood the land with its light and drive away the darkness, the youth and the girl also rose.

They made their ablutions and breakfasted on a light meal, saving most of the meat against a future hour of need. Then they robed themselves in furs against the cold wind and the numbing snow of the heights, and fared forth into the mountain country.

Thongor had decided that there was nothing else for him to do but escort Ylala home to the caves where her tribe dwelt. He could not very well abandon her in the empty castle; neither did he deem it proper that she should accompany him down the great Jomsgard Pass into the southern country. So he must take her home.

They left at midmorning, and struck out for the plateau beside the White River glacier, where her people made their winter encampment. Besides a supply of food and drink, sleeping-furs and weapons, they bore with them a thick earthenware pot stuffed full of live coals, so that if need be on the way they could at least build a fire.

But they carried off from the castle of Barak Redwolf neither gold nor gems from the robber baron’s treasure. Neither of them had any particular use for such loot, as there was nothing to buy in the waste; and Thongor, at least, had an uneasy suspicion that the wealth of Jomsgard Keep might somehow be tainted by the curse of invisible doom that had slain the baron’s warriors to the last man.

Ylala, however, did not scruple to bear away with her a cruse of valuable lamp oil for her mother. Such civilized luxuries were hard to come by in the cave country.

They struck overland, Thongor going ahead to test the snow banks carefully with the long spear he had borne away from Barak’s armory. It was well into Panchand, the second month of spring, and the thaws were eating into the thick-banked snow. Runnels of dirty water trickled down the cliff walls, and the footing underneath was loose and treacherous.

All that day they kept moving, pausing only occasionally to rest and refresh themselves. Toward late afternoon they surprised an
elphodon
drinking from a stream, which Thongor brought down with a single arrow. That night they sought refuge in an empty cave, built a fire, and roasted fresh meat from the carcass of Thongor’s kill. They slept near together that night for warmth, achingly conscious of each other. With dawn they went forward.

They found Barak Redwolf near midday. Or what was left of him.

The baron must have left the castle at the height of the terror, creeping forth into the waste by a secret way. They had no way of telling where he might have been going, but he had not gotten far. Something had come upon him while he had rested, a little after dawn, by the ashes of a fire not long cold.

He had been crushed as if by some titan’s hand. Only his lower parts were mangled; from the waist up he had not been touched.

The expression upon his face was one of sheer, unbelieving terror. Thongor regarded the dead man’s face grimly. The baron had been a knave, a bully, and a tyrant. But he could not for long have held supremacy over his band of ruffians if he had not been a brave man, and a seasoned and veteran warrior. Hard-bitten men of such breeding do not die before the fangs of a beast or the spears of an enemy with such an expression of blood-curdling horror on their faces.

They went on, for there was nothing else to be done.

After a while Thongor cleared his throat and spoke.

“Was this Zoran Zar a powerful wizard?” he asked.

“So the old men of my tribe said,” the girl replied. “They say he had tamed to his will, and pent up, the Demon of the Snows.”

“What manner of creature is that?”

“I really do not know. The old men said it was a thing of utter cold that dwelt beneath the roots of the ice mountain,” Ylala said.

Thongor grunted, and spat, but said nothing. He was not entirely sure that he believed in demons; on the other hand, he was not entirely sure that he didn’t.

He wondered if Barak Redwolf had.

* * * *

They spent the second night under a low, shelf-like rock that afforded them some shelter from the wind and from whatever beasts might be roaming the snowy wilderness.

They slept in each other’s arms.

Thongor had not intended this to happen, but it had. No sooner had he put the furs about them than the girl had come into his arms, pressing herself against him, burrowing her face into his shoulder. He was fumbling and inexpert at first, and they were clumsy in their eagerness. But the instincts lay deep in the blood of both, and soon they moved together, helping each other. When it was done, they lay gasping, and her face was wet with tears.

The second time it was easier, and much better. He was gentle when she needed him to be gentle, and fierce when she wanted his fierceness. This time there were sleepy, satiated smiles, and many warm kisses, but no tears.

They slept deeply and well that night, and woke with dawn, rested and fresh. And never again was there to be any strangeness or restraint between them, for as long as they were to be together.

Later that morning they came to the caves of Ylala’s people. But there were none to greet them and the fires in the caves were dead and cold. Ylala had long born the cruse of precious oil to pleasure her mother. But nothing would ever pleasure her mother again, nor would anything ever again cause her pain. For she was beyond both pain and pleasure, when they found her remains on the outskirts of the caves, crushed as if by some immense hand.

5

That Which Kills in the Night

They found three other bodies besides that of Ylala’s mother, and Thongor scratched holes in the snowy earth and buried them with their weapons and belongings beside them. Then he covered them over and piled high cairns of rocks atop the rude graves to keep the beasts away.

Then they rested beside a roaring fire, and took food, the girl dry-eyed, saying nothing, the boy grim and somber. There was nothing more to be done by them here.

The marks in the snow were clear and easy to follow, although they were unlike the tracks of any beast which Thongor had ever seen or heard of. It was more like the path made by a crawling worm or a serpent than anything else, he thought to himself, that shallow, wriggling, smooth depression in the snow. But if worm indeed it were, then the thing was twice as long as a tree is tall.

They followed it up into the hills, reaching the crest by afternoon. Here they found the tower of the dead wizard, Zoran Zar; it was more of a house than a tower, a four-sided stone building only a little taller than it was long.

Inside, they found nothing. Barak Redwolf’s men had been thorough, if not neat. Old books written in languages Thongor could not understand lay cast about, scattering the stone-paved floor with paper. Crockery was smashed in the fireplace, which stank of queer chemicals for which Thongor had no name. Curious small idols of lead and clay and brown stone lay toppled over or smashed. The furniture, what there had been of it, was broken or overturned.

Here and there, Barak’s men had pried up stone slabs from the flooring, hoping to find gold buried beneath them, somewhere. There was no sign that they had found any.

Outside the stone house, holes had been dug in the earth. Neither was there here any sign that treasure had been found, such as empty sacks or broken chests.

Here on the heights the wind had blown away most of the snow and the earth was raw and muddy. It was easier to track the devil-thing.

The tracks led to a hole in the earth, like a covered well. The cover, a rounded slab of mountain granite, had been manhandled away and there were signs in the mud that men had knelt here as if to probe the depths of the pit with long poles or spears.

Thongor examined the stone lid curiously. It had carefully and painstakingly been carved with cryptic symbols in a language he could neither speak nor read, but which he had seen before, once or twice, in his travels. They were the characters used in the secret language of magicians. The weird runes were potent and powerful, he knew; it stung the eyes until they watered just to look upon them.

Bidding the girl stand back, he unwrapped their store of fresh meat, tied a thong about it, and dangled it over the lip of the well. The odor of meat was rich and tantalizing on the fresh air.

They heard, both of them, a slithering in the depths of the earth, as of some ponderous and mighty thing—
stirring
.

Then a blast of frigid air smote them. So unearthly was the cold that breathed up suddenly from the pit that ice crystals formed in their hair and upon exposed portions of their bodies.

At the sight of that which came pouring forth out of the pit the girl screamed—horribly. Even Thongor felt his skin crawl and his nape-hairs stir.

It was like a worm grown unthinkably immense—mountainous in its hugeness—soft and pulpy and obscenely naked.

White it was, with the unhealthy pallid whiteness of a thing that has never, or seldom, been exposed to the glare of the golden sun.

It had no eyes, no nostrils, no features of any kind. Except for a wet, squirming, repulsive, toothless orifice that should have been a mouth. This obscenely working hole closed over the dangling meat. Oozing a fetid slime, the orifice gaped open again, hungry for more flesh.

Thongor flung his spear into the white thing, but it did no harm, merely slicing a path through stinking, colorless pulp. Then he put an arrow or two into it, which it did not seem even to feel.

The gaping maw of the thing, dripping slime, veered suddenly toward Ylala, where she stood frozen with horror as if rooted to the spot. The blast of arctic cold that breathed from the wriggling length of the worm-thing chilled her flesh, made her blood flow sluggishly. In a sudden spasm of revulsion, the girl flung that which she held, for some reason, in her hand.

It was the cruse of oil.

The stopper came loose when the container thudded against the monstrous worm. In seconds, pale yellowish oil ran all over the head and upper portion of the thing, dripping into the gaping, wetly-working maw.

Thongor whirled, caught up the pot of coals and flung it.

Hot coals spilled out and splattered the worm from its blind head to the upper portion, which extended out of the mouth of the well. Mindlessly, the worm chomped down on the live coals.

Then it recoiled suddenly, uttering a shrill, ear-splitting hiss of pain. Steam swirled up, obscuring the thing as it whipped its pulpy head to and fro.

Flame shot up as the coals caught fire in the spilled lamp oil. Writhing tendrils of flame meshed the white worm, bit in cruelly. For perhaps the first time in the measureless eons of its monstrous life, the Demon of the Snows felt the unendurable searing touch of pure flame upon its soft, cold flesh.

Wriggling in spasms of agony, the worm-thing oozed back into its pit.

It vanished from view, but they could hear its shrill, squealing cry; and the earth shook to the fury of its torment.

Oily black smoke, mingled with live steam, seeped from the yawning mouth of the pit.

Thongor rolled the stone lid back into place until it once again covered the well. Sunlight gleamed on the deep runes cut in the smooth stone. They blazed with wrathful warning, strong with power.

“Is it—dead?” Ylala panted, shivering in his arms.

“Gorm knows,” he grunted. “But, dead or alive, it cannot pry the lidstone away of its own strength. Those signs were cut there to keep it imprisoned safely far below. Let us hope that never again men come this way, hungry enough for gold to lift the stone and set loose that which was never meant to be seen by the light of day.”

* * * *

All day the travelers had trudged down the great Jomsgard Pass that chopped the mighty wall of mountains in two, and now, as the day died in crimson over the western horizon, they had come within sight of their goal.

The Mountains of Mommur bestrode the horizon like a great wall of stone, shutting away behind them the icy kingdoms of the bleak Northlands—Eobar and Valkarth, and the many tribes and clans that wrung a meager sustenance from the wintry wild.

Below them the pass sloped down into the warm and summery lands of the Dakshina. There a curtain of morning mist lay over the grassy meadows and the dense jungles. Far to the south, and farther still, morning smote to gold the towers of Kathool and Patanga, and the seacoast cities. Sunlight glittered in the waters of the great gulf, and gleamed on the curving ribbons that were the jungle rivers feeding into that gulf.

For Thongor of Valkarth it had been a long and wearisome road, down from the cold vales of the ultimate north, down across the snowy valleys, across the great plateau, and the mighty glaciers, and the sky-tall mountains. But he had reached the edge of the golden Southlands at last; surely there, among the wharves and shipping, in the barracks of the soldiers or the palaces of the kings, among the green farmlands or in the noisy marketplaces, he could find employment with his keen eye and steady hand, strong arm and brave heart. For a man who was not afraid to face death at sword’s point, the Southland with its wars and golden cities was the place to seek his fortune.