Young Thongor (26 page)

Then they had him at last. A thickset body slammed into him, chest and belly, and drove him from his feet. In a flash the burly beast-thing was worrying at his throat. Thongor jammed one forearm under the creature’s jaw and held the snapping fangs away from his jugular. Fetid, stinking hot breath blew in his face. The naked, furry body was rank in his nostrils. Thick-fingered paws closed about his throat, throttling him. He grunted as another heavy body slammed on top of him, and another, until he was buried under a pack of snarling, clawing beast-things.

His mind dimmed as he fought for breath. A haze thickened before his eyes; his lungs were afire; his heart labored within his breast. He fought for air and with ebbing strength to hold those snapping tusks away from his throat.

Then a sharp, imperious voice called out from somewhere beyond the heap of beast-things. Thongor could not make out the words, for they were in a tongue unknown to him. But the crushing weight that pressed him against the broken stone slabs lessened and the iron grip loosened from about his neck. He gulped air into starved lungs as strong hands dragged him to his feet and bound his wrists behind his back with tight leather thongs that bit into numb flesh. Many men would have despaired then, taken captive by the shambling horde that infested the ancient ruins.

It was not the way of Thongor to despair, but he stared into a grim future, knowing that his life could now be counted in hours; perhaps, in minutes.

6

Night Fears

It was the grizzled old Thurdan warrior, Thad Novis, who was the first to become uneasy over Thongor’s prolonged absence. The old warrior had been a stalwart of Jorn’s Raiders when the boy Thongor had first joined the pack of bandits he would later chieftain. From the first, the oldest warrior had felt a paternal stirring in his breast as he saw the grim courage and iron strength and utter fearlessness the barbarian boy displayed. Thad Novis had followed his young leader from banditry into slavery, and from thence to a life of lawlessness and adventure on the high seas. His dogged loyalty had never wavered; now he prowled the perimeter of the camp, baffled and obscurely worried, peering into the moon-washed jungle with searching eyes.

At length he sought out scrawny little Fulvio, who sprawled lazily against a log, nursing a fat wineskin.

“Hell’s blood, man, what ails you?” Fulvio whined. “The chief can take care o’ himself better than any of us. Wait here, said he, and wait here we will. He’ll come back, in his good time. Sit—rest—take some wine!”

The older man shook his head determinedly. “It’s not like the lad to be gone so long,” he growled. “He meant to scout a path around this swamp, not explore the stinking isle himself. Something has taken him, I know…perhaps the same Thing that took poor Kanthar Kan…”

The words hung there in the air. Fulvio licked thin lips with a pointed tongue, and shivered as to a sudden gust of cold. Deep in his heart, the wizened little one-eyed rogue knew the stolid, loyal Thurdan spoke the truth. But the whining little Fulvio was reluctant to stir from this place of safety to plunge into the unknown and silent depths of the waiting jungle.

Fear and loyalty wrestled within Fulvio’s scrawny breast. Self-love and the greed for gold were the only passions the little gutter-rat had ever known. But he, too, worshipped Thongor and went in awe of the mighty barbarian. Thongor was what he perhaps could have been, had he been nourished in the wintry wild among strong, stalwart men and noble-hearted courageous women; but Fate had given him a sniveling beggar for a father and a sluttish shrew for a mother, and the stinking back-alleys of the slums of Pelorm for his home.

Fulvio was cowardly at heart, and vicious as only the cowardly can be. But in his heart, where fear wrestled with loyalty, he idolized the strong young buccaneer captain. And, for once, loyalty won out against a lifetime of twisted selfishness.

Spitting vile curses, little Fulvio scrambled to his feet and snarled at the sprawled men of the landing party. “On your feet, you yellow-gutted whelps! We’re movin’ out, Gods help us. The Cap’n should of been back by now; something may have happened to ‘im.” He fixed the stolid old Thurdan with a venomous eye. “Gorm help you, grizzled old dog, if the Cap’n ain’t in need of us!”

Thad Novis said nothing. Incapable of feeling the cold, sick gnaw of fear himself, he never knew what spark of true heroism he had stirred to fire in Fulvio’s breast.

They fanned out when they hit the jungle, keeping well in earshot of each other. Blackness closed about little Fulvio like a clammy hand. Sweating and cursing foully under his breath, the little rogue limped along, lashing out at tangling vines and thorny branches with his cutlass as he went. It was one thing to follow such a man as Thongor into the black yawning maw of unknown peril; it was quite another to do it on your own volition.

The jungle thickened about them, entangled boughs shutting out the rich floods of moonlight. Clumping along through wet darkness, Fulvio thought of the slithering, be-fanged things that perhaps lurked all about him in the night. He envisioned the landslide-rush of the
deodath
, the dreaded dragon-cat of the jungle countries. Cold dew dripped down his scrawny neck—or was it the numbing kiss of the
fathla
, the ghastly, blood-sucking tree-leeches of Chush and Kovia? A heavy vine swung overhead—or was it the horrible, man-crushing coils of the
oph
, the horned serpent of the tropic depths?

Night-fears preyed upon him, nibbling away at the edges of his courage, sapping his resolution. But the little one-eyed rogue limped forward without pause, cursing himself for a foolhardy, reckless madman every long step of the way.

They came to the stony monolith Thongor had discovered earlier, and paused, eyeing its enigmatic glyphs with shuddering apprehension. Dread shapes of night and terror were known to haunt old ruined cities—ghouls and morgulacs, as Lemurian legend named vampires, and prowling ghosts of the dead that could not rest.

Thad Novis hefted his heavy scimitar uneasily. “Which way?” he asked.

Fulvio gnawed his under-lip, glancing dubiously about. Here the jungle aisle parted, one lane wandering deep into the jungle’s black heart, the other striking away due east. It was in that direction Thongor had headed an hour before, but Fulvio could not know that.

“Which way, Fulvio?” puffed a fat, moon-faced Kovian named Qualb. The others crowded near.

Fulvio said nothing, chewing his lip in a torment of indecision. Which way? One path led to Thongor, who might even now be face to face with death; the other route led far from his peril, and if they followed it they would become lost in the black jungles of Zosk.

Which way?

7

The Black Moon

The beast-men staked Thongor out to die. They drove four pegs into the earth between the riven slabs of the plaza and bound his wrists and ankles to them with tough thongs. Spread-eagled, his sinews stretched to the limit of endurance, even the Valkarthan’s steely strength could not free him of his bonds.

Jaws set grimly, Thongor waited for death.

The leader of the horde of shambling degenerates paid his captive no attention. With the rapt, blind gaze of a fanatic or a madman he stared without blinking up into the cold fire of the golden Moon. He was unlike the grunting horde of savages he ruled: tall, slim, gaunt to the point of emaciation, his lean frame wrapped in tattered, filthy rags of what had once been the gorgeous ceremonial robes of an ancient priest.

He stood on the top of a block of stone, staring beyond the black pool and the rough-hewn pylon of rock to the soaring Moon. His hair was a tangle of matted witch locks as it fell about the starved skull of his face. His eyes burned through the tangle like sick green fires. He was priest-king of the hulking, naked brutes, the last of a time-forgotten line. But he was only slightly more
man
than they. Beneath the gorgeous, filthy tatters his gaunt body was naked and unwashed. His feet were bare and black with filth. His grime-crusted hands, gaunt like terrible claws, clutched a rod of sleek black
nebium
, atop which a smoky crystal pulsed like a dying coal.

Thongor had seen black rods like his before, and he knew them for Rods of Power. He also knew the black, unholy sorcery men wrought with such relics of ancient wisdom, and his lips pressed together until they paled.

With Thongor securely bound, the shambling beast-men withdrew grunting, squatting in a semi-circle behind the priest and the sacrifice. And the ceremony began…

Scattered rags of cloud fled before the Moon, spreading its light in wandering shafts of cold fire that flickered eerily here and there over this weird scene of stony desolation. The wizard began talking to the half-hid Moon in guttural, clotted sounds that hardly sounded like human speech. The blood ran cold in Thongor’s veins as he heard the strange, coughing sounds. He knew
that
tongue from of old; it was the Chaos Litany. The Dragon Kings of age-lost and legend-drowned Hyperborea had learned it from the black gods of madness who ruled beyond the stars. Human lips were never meant to frame such sounds, and to hear them spoken by a man was blasphemy against human kind.

The alien speech droned on, and suddenly a thrill of superstitious awe ran through Thongor. For the shifting, flickering rays were changing hue. He stared up, scalp prickling with chill premonition.
And the Moon turned to blood
.

Shafts of weird crimson light wandered about the scene of primal desolation. It was uncanny—horrible. The Moon glared down at him like the red, burning eye of some maddened god. Behind him somewhere, the beast-things groaned and whimpered, groveling before this awesome display of supernatural power. On the stone block, the wizard stood like a stone-carved image, rapt in unholy ecstasy, as the abominable litany spewed from his writhing lips.

Then Thongor sensed a tension in the air. Nature seemed to hold its breath, awaiting some dark miracle of evil. An aura of force tingled along the nerves of the young buccaneer. And the sky, which had been velvet-black, flushed with cold, dead white radiance.

As the heavens reversed their coloration, the very stars did so as well. Now, through weirdly-colored, ragged clouds the stars burned like black diamonds. The scene was such a mingling of incredible terror and wonder, that it wrung a cry from Thongor’s grim lips. “Gorm!” he groaned, calling upon the god of his savage homeland. And it was as much a prayer as a curse.

And then the Moon turned black, and even the gods could not help him now.

8

It Walks by Moonlight

From a disc of evil crimson, the Moon’s brilliant fires curdled, darkened, became utter blackness like a pool of ink. Weird, weird, to watch a Black Moon blaze in a sky of dead white flame. In his wildest nightmares, the Barbarian had never dreamed of a spectacle so awesome and unreal.

But the ultimate abomination was yet to come.

For still a ragged drift of torn and tattered cloudlets hung before the orb of ebon fire, scattering its rays. The shafts of dark light floated here and there about the plaza, blackening the crumbled stones which otherwise lay bathed in the strange, sourceless luminescence of the glowing sky.

Now, shaft after shaft of black moonlight flashed across the massive pillar of dark, jagged stone that loomed from the center of the pool. And as the uncanny negation of light blackened the rugged monolith, it began to
change
.

It softened, slid and clotted like hot candle wax; it was as if the kiss of the black rays awoke the dormant spirit within the stone pillar, which struggled to regain its lost shape. As Thongor watched in unbelieving amazement, the stone flowed like wax, melting and reshaping itself in the dark radiance. The pillar cleft at the base; two shards split from its flanks; a rough sphere melted into being at its crest. The new shape the monolith assumed under the weird influence of the moon-rays bore a loathsome yet haunting familiarity. It was a botched, obscene caricature of Man—a hideous, twisted, distorted semblance—but a semblance, nonetheless.

The melting stone solidified now. Like a grotesque idol hewn by a gibbering madman, the stone thing stood amidst the dark waters. And lived. And
walked
.

One stone limb thrust forward, lurching. At the knee—or where the knee would have been, had the stone thing possessed one—rough stone rubbed against stone with an incredibly horrible
grating
sound. Then, jerkily, the other leg thrust forth dripping from the dark pool. The misshapen paw that was the thing’s foot or hoof crunched on the stone paving, which squealed under its many tons of ponderous weight.

Behind the spread-eagled buccaneer, the beast-men moaned and babbled in an ecstasy of fear and gloating anticipation. And globules of cold sweat burst forth on Thongor’s brow: he knew now the death decreed for him
. He was to be trampled to red slime beneath the stone paws of the walking god!

But it was not the way of Thongor to lie supinely, waiting for death. Savage rage surged up within him, crushing out his cold fear. Black fury boiled in his veins. His brows contorted in a spasm of berserk, fighting wrath. Suddenly he split the air with a bellow of inarticulate anger. The roar of a cornered
vandar
burst from his snarling lips. And down his wide-stretched arms great thews swelled in a vain attempt to wrench his arms free. Mighty bands of solid muscle stood forth in knife-edge relief on his magnificent chest. His face blackened with effort as he threw every ounce of iron strength his splendid physique possessed into one colossal surge of power—