Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (41 page)

Vilah-ree conversed briefly with some of her attendant women, and now she came up to them again. Puzzled by her new attitude, Hiero watched her stroke Luchare's arm in passing, noting that Luchare seemed in no way annoyed by the caress. Women! Who knew what they were thinking?

"We are to go now and inspect the enemy," Aldo said. "I have been talking to her majesty here, for your guess was right, Hiero. She's the queen and apparently sole ruler. She wants us to eat first, though."

After a delicious but hasty meal of the fruit, vegetables, and bread which the tree women served, they were on the way through the aisles of the mighty trees. If they were following a trail, it was apparent only to their guides, a dozen of whom ranged in front, while a similar group brought up the rear. Even Hiero, trained hunter and accustomed as he was to forests and silent movement, had never seen anything like Vilah-ree's people. Like lovely, pale ghosts, they slipped through the lofty ferns and over the huge, moss-hung logs, never disturbing a leaf and making less sound than a hovering moth.

Twice they paused for brief rest periods. It was around mid-afternoon when the tree women scouting in front began to fall back, joining the main party. Ahead, the humans could see a much brighter light, and they knew the edge of the forest must be here at last.

Gorm, to whom the whole situation had been carefully explained, halted, sat up, and then sniffed the breeze.
Dirty air,
came from his mind.
Something long dead, but not-dead, up there in the light.

Long dead but not-dead! The Metz drew in a deep breath and exhaled long and hard. On his palate now lay a faint film of corruption, an evil stench of some vileness or other. Drifting through the sweet scents of the forest it came, a wavering miasma of rotten life and seething putrescence, unnatural simply
because
it was alive and not dead, as anything so decayed long should have been. The odor of the House!

We dare go very little closer,
came Vilah-ree's message.
We have lost many of our people, whom the House somehow caught and held unmoving while they watched from the forest edge. Then, those things you saw came
—
and fed!

Now Hiero began to put into effect the plan he previously had worked out with the others. He advanced with caution, his mind probing for any sign of reasoning life, though not neglecting any lesser creatures either. With him the bear went prowling, and the priest could feel his strange mind also reaching out, feeling for alien or inimical contact of any sort.

It had been agreed that this would be the order of their approach, if not of actual battle. Remaining behind them with Vilah-ree, Aldo and Luchare would link minds and prepare to aid if they were needed. But this first move was intended to be a reconnaissance, nothing more.

"Still, we may get drawn in by this thing," Hiero said, when they had discussed the possibilities. "Gorm and I are old veterans now, but we still really know nothing of this House creature, not even what it is, let alone what it actually can do. Remember, it can detect the tree people, by their minds apparently, and we can't! That's enough to make one cautious."

"Then why can't I come, too, and help you? I
won't
be left in back!" Luchare was furious.

"Listen, love, we've been over this a dozen times. You haven't the mental training, although you're learning. You know that Gorm can use his mind better. Brother Aldo has to stay here to help try and anchor our minds if we need him. And you can help only there, by adding your mental energy store to his." His voice was patient, since he knew the sole reason for her anger was fear of his going into danger without her. Eventually, with Aldo helping, she had been argued into acquiescence, however unwilling. The plan made so much sense that she could really argue no longer.

As man and bear slowly advanced over the moss and through the undergrowth which ringed the great tree bases, the sunlight grew steadily. Hiero paused, seeing for the first time at close range the shrouded skeleton of a forest giant, bulging with repulsive growths, through a gap in the yet living trees ahead. There were no large animals in the area, not even small ones detectable by his mind. The exceptions were a few enormous greenish flies, their plump bodies shining in the sun with iridescent hues as they buzzed over the plants about them. Hiero brushed one away, a fluttering, pulpy thing almost three inches long, which hovered near his face for a moment.

Still his mind met nothing. Whatever lurked out there in the foul profusion of rot was quiescent. Cautiously, the two went on, their thoughts neatly overlapping as they spread wider and wider, like ripples in a pool.

As they approached the actual border of the living forest, the dead trees, each festooned with horrid growth, became more evident. For some time, the reek of the strange fungi had been growing in their nostrils, and now Hiero switched over to breathing through his mouth alone, so foul and purulent had the odors become. No warning of any attacker could penetrate that frightful stench, so why not cut it off at the source? Noses were no good here.

The great flies were still common, indeed seemed to be increasing in number, but nothing else moved. At last, unable to go further, they paused behind the last living tree near them and stared out over the awful panorama spread before them.

Directly in front, a vast puffball, its pocked, white circumference many yards in diameter, reared up in bloated isolation. To the left, a forest of monster toadstools, sterns brown and broad, mottled umbels a sickly orange, stretched out of sight, broken only by the pulp-covered columns of the dead trees rising in their midst. On the right, the dead trees thinned, for here a finger of the outer desert had long ago crept closer to the woods. But now an uneven mound of various smaller fungi, of all shapes and ocherous and bilious colors, extended into the middle distance. There was no normal growth in view, not even grass, nor any bare ground not covered by some slime or smear or leprous muck.

No sound, save for the muted buzzing of the flies, broke the silence. Under the great heat of the afternoon sun, they saw faint steams and moist clouds rise at intervals from the surface of the noxious growths.

Slowly, ever so slowly, they edged closer to the border of crawling horror that was the blight. Still nothing stirred out in the nightmare world into which they looked and also sent their roving brain impulses.

Then—having lured its prey as close as it could by sheer inaction —the House struck! And it was the man who took the brunt of the blow.

Never in all his varied experience had Hiero felt anything quite like it. An actual chill seemed to settle through his body, paralyzing his will and numbing his nerve endings. Though his personally devised mind guard had been kept at full strength, the attack passed through his screens as if they were nonexistent. Yet not quite. The very last one, the one which guarded the control of his own mind, was untouched. But though he could see and hear, no muscle of his body could so much as twitch. Through eyes which happened to be looking half that way when the sweeping assault came, Hiero could see Gorm frozen, one forefoot raised. He knew that the bear was equally helpless, and in so knowing, he despaired.

For with the attack of the House there came knowledge of the attacker. And that knowledge chilled not the body, for that indeed was already numb, but the very soul, the inner being. Steeped in evil and all vileness and cruelty were the adept wizards of the Unclean. But they were nevertheless of human, ancestry, and thus, malign though they were, they yet preserved a tincture of humanity.

But the House was other. Somehow, after The Death, but in the ancient past, a strange and awful mating had taken place, triune perhaps, between a mycelial spore, an amoeboid slime, and, somewhere, somehow, an intelligence. Or perhaps the intelligence grew from the slime and gained the spore, then took a different direction from all other life. Whatever had happened, the result was abnormal, beyond normality in fact. In some ways like the Dweller in the Mist, that seeming embodiment of total evil, yet even further from the upward path to reason and logic was the House.

Fiercely, Hiero strained to free his limbs. At the same time, he tried to link his mind with Brother Aldo and Luchare, back in the forest. Neither effort was successful. He could not move and he seemed enclosed in a curious, icy mental shell, so that any outside contact was severed and cut off. His link with Gorm had vanished as soon as the attack began. His brain was still clear and unhampered except by the screen, yet he could neither move his body nor communicate with others.

Through the screen about him, now another attack, if that was what it was, began. The House was revealing itself. As the image of Vilah-ree had first appeared in his mind, despite any real method of communication, so now the misty outline of the thing itself began to build on the beslimed earth fifty yards in front of him. He knew it was not real, but only what he was being willed to see; that the physical body or structure, he did not know what, actually, of the House was nowhere near, but well hidden, somewhere out in the depths of the foul world it had built for itself. But stay—was that world so foul? Even as the wavering shape of the House began to condense and apparently solidify before his eyes, so too a new thought crept into his mind.
The House was alien, different, yes. But was that enough to make it evil? Had it too not a right to live?
The siren message infiltrated his own thoughts very, very subtly. His inner screen was not so much pierced, for the House seemed incapable of doing that, as persuaded, soothed, and his mind was thus ensnared. Yet not quite.

For as the glamour of the strange spell grew upon him, his inner being realized two things. First, the House was utterly alien, something which should not
he;
and second, the House was not one entity at all, but many minds of things all swarming like so many maggots in and through the gelid and gelatinous structure. The creatures, whatever they were, were both
in
and
part
of the ghastly thing which now reared itself to a height of many feet in front of him, to the eye as much real as his own hand.

And he was being invited to share, to join! He too could take part in the work to come, the great work of cleansing the surface of the earth, so that only the living House remained, surrounded by the monstrous, mutated fungi which were its weapons and its seed.

The House's brownish, oily structure seemed to shake as he watched, horrified yet fascinated. Strange faces began to appear on its shifting surface, to leer invitingly at him, and to vanish again into the mass, only to be replaced by others, equally foul and evanescent. All invited him.
Come,
they seemed to say;
leave your mortal shell and become one with us and live forever.

Then, in his despair, for though he was not tempted, he was utterly helpless, there came a new factor. It was the bear!

His thought came obliquely somehow through the mental sphere of thought with which the monster had surrounded the priest. The strong mind was like a draught of cold air. l
am here. It does not understand me at all, I think, and it uses a sending or a force which might indeed hold me if I were only what I seem, a creature of instinct and emotion, as once my people were. It is afraid of you, that I can feel, but not of me.
The bear's thought was full of mingled anger and also craft. Yet Gorm was giving away no points, nor counseling hasty action, Hiero realized, only waiting to see what he himself wanted.

They
—
or rather, it
—
grows impatient,
came a fresh message.
There are many very strange minds there, all mixed, but making one, like in an anthill or bees' nest. It will not wait much longer,
he added.
It is tired of your refusing whatever it is it wishes. Now
—
it summons something from outside.
The cool bear mind was calm, detached, as if what were happening had no relation to himself.

The Metz had drawn on his own inner resources at the same time, deducing, analyzing, forming conclusions. Simply knowing that he was not cut off had given him immense strength of purpose. There had even been time for a battle prayer of split-second length, but in due and proper form—God preserve his warrior through all trial. Amen.

Can you reach outside? Get Aldo and above all tell him to bring the weapon we have ready. I'm going to keep struggling and focus the attention of this thing on myself. Hurry!

He felt Goon's mind withdraw and then he renewed his own struggle to escape, trying every level, every method he had taught himself or ever been taught, to pierce the web around him and free both his brain and his limbs.

The House now withdrew its sucking blandishments and its horrid appeals for alliance. It still sat before him, or rather, it kept its repulsive, mirage-simulacrum there, but it settled down to watchful waiting. Even as he renewed his apparently fruitless assault, he decided Gorm was right: the House was afraid of him, or at least wary. He must be something very different from anything it—or they—had ever encountered before. He wondered if the bear were having any success in reaching the Elevener. In a few moments they would know.

Now, through the ground itself, he felt a motion, hardly even a vibration, merely a faint stir, an almost imperceptible tremor. Something was on the move, and he knew, or guessed, what that something was. The slime-mold-things, or one of them, were coming to feed. His eyes locked on the House, not able to move at all, he saw and suddenly understood the cloud of bloated flies hovering in front of his face and realized then that they were the eyes of the House and had reported his coming. This, then, was how the thing penetrated the forest fringe and guarded its borders.

Suddenly the House vanished from his sight. In its place there appeared the quaking, soft bulk of the slime-thing it had summoned. He did not believe that its appearance directly before him and the envanishment of its ruler were accidents. Unable to move at all, by a refinement of cruelty he was to be made to see his destroyer coming and know what it was that devoured him alive.