In the Moons of Borea (21 page)

Thus the last of the ice-priests died.

And as if that sole survivor of the immemorially ancient ice-priests had never existed — as if he had not been born evilly, lived evilly, and grown into the evil priesthood, finally to be snatched from the wrath of honest people and carried here by Ithaqua himself, only now to die so abruptly at the hands of that self-same storm-spawn — so the Wind-Walker ignored his shattered corpse and advanced into the tunnel.

His carmine gaze seemed to penetrate the ice-layered walls of volcanic rock, causing the tunnel to glow a dull pink, like a gateway to hell. And high though the ceiling was, still Ithaqua had to stoop to fit his monstrous manlike form into the icicle-festooned tunnel; and his vast blot of a head rocked from side to side as he advanced, step by step, toward that massive stump of ice that hid his quarry from his gaze.

Except that it seemed no longer to hide them .. .

Perhaps it was that he detected certain telepathic traces that they were unable to conceal — or that he sensed their fear or simply that he knew instinctively where they were. Whichever, he ignored a dozen other great fangs of ice where they stuck up from the floor and made straight for their particular refuge. And as he came, so his head ceased its inquisitive side-to-side movement and he began to stretch out his fearful arms before him.

Run!'
Silberhutte commanded, his voice ringing in the shocked air like a pistol shot.

Taking Armandra's hand, he raced away with her down the frozen burrow toward the lava river, hidden from view by half a mile of winding, curving walls of ice. Ithaqua saw them at once and sent a blast of telepathic derision coursing after them — then came on himself, his vast strides effortlessly closing the distance between them as the two he pursued slipped and slithered in their haste, scurrying like mice before the sure tread of some demonic cat.

Looking back as Ithaqua's shadow began to overtake them, Silberhutte saw the monster pause, reach up, and snatch down from the ceiling an icicle with the girth of a barrel. In the next moment, guessing correctly the Wind-Walker's purpose, he gathered up Armandra on the run and leaped high as a ton of ice came crashing and careening down the corridor after them, bouncing and slithering like a juggernaut over the rippled floor. Another moment and the pair fell, Silberhutte cushioning Armandra's soft body with his own, amidst a chaos of shattering ice.

Half-stunned from the roaring of tortured ice — loud as an avalanche in the sounding walls of the tunnel — still the Warlord protected his woman, as their bodies slowed to a halt, a tangle of arms and legs in a shivering of frozen fragments. Half-stunned he lay there as Ithaqua drew near and finally towered over them, his carmine gaze searing their very souls. Then, acting instinctively and with incredible bravado — despite the hellish ringing of mad, alien laughter in his head and the sure knowledge that this
must
be the last thing he would ever do — Silberhutte shook a mental fist in the face of the monster and charged his mind to fire one final telepathic salvo:

'Hell-Thing!'
he cried.
'Star-born spawn of an unholy mating between — '

But the Wind-Walker would hear no more. His eyes were sputtering pools of fiery rage as he reached down to sweep Armandra aside, sending her spinning half-conscious across the debris-littered floor. Then, deliberately, he lifted up one great webbed foot and poised it
over the head of his mightiest mortal enemy — but before that awesome club could fall .. .

... A beam of purest white light lighted the tunnel, its needle tip searing the Snow-Thing's shoulder and sending him stumbling back, staggering away from his intended prey. Only for a single instant did that beam lick out, but in that solitary moment of time the changes wrought in Ithaqua
were
astounding. From a dumbly snarling, murderous beast-god he became a cringing, vaguely anthropomorphic shape that wavered like smoke, mewling telepathically as he backed away, holding his hands up before a bloated black face in which flinching carmine eyes were slitted now and full of — fear?

Fear, yes — even Ithaqua — for this was that power against which he could not stand, the power of the beneficent Gods of Eld — the cleansing beam of the time-clock's weapon!

Then Ithaqua turned and fled, bounding away down the ice tunnel, rapidly shrinking as he made of himself a smaller target, careening heedlessly from wall to wall as he sought to avoid that purifying needle of light which licked out after him again and again until he disappeared around the curve of the wall and was gone. And as de Marigny set the time-clock down on the ice-littered floor the Warlord was already helping Armandra to her feet, hugging her to him and offering her comfort as any man might comfort his woman.

Leaving the time-clock, it took
de
Marigny only a few seconds to convince Silberhutte and Armandra that they would suffer no harm from his fantastic machine. For all that it was a creation of the Elder Gods, it was not an extension of their power (except in the form of its single weapon) and could not cause them physical pain such as would be caused by one of the star-stones of ancient Mnar. Then it was simply a matter of bundling them in through the opening of the clock's panel, into that place where Moreen waited for them, an utterly fantastic place whose dimensions were greater — infinitely — than external appearances might ever account for.

Quickly de Marigny demonstrated the use of mental
rapport
in binding his passengers to the clock's sensory systems, and once they had the hang of it and were over their initial astonishment, then he flew that incredible vehicle of the Elder Gods out of the frozen underworld, up the massive throat of the volcano, and into the outer world of Dromos. There, stationary in the air above that mighty vent, he briefly explained his purpose in directing the clock's beam back down into it:

First, that if Ithaqua yet hid in the underworld, he might permanently be sealed in down there; and secondly, that the underworld itself was and had been a place of evil for so long that its door should not be left open on any sane or ordered universe. Then he said no more but triggered the clock's weapon to pour its ray with an ever-brightening glare into the volcano's vent.

For minutes he played the beam into the root of the volcano, continuously increasing its power until his passengers were obliged to quit the time-clock's scanners; for even though they viewed the scene outside with their minds, the sight threatened the mind's eye itself! And although he had used that awesome weapon before, even the clock's master did not know the full extent of its power, so that the great gout of flame that suddenly licked forth from the volcano's rim came as a complete surprise to him.

He lifted the clock high into the skies of Dromos then and watched that ancient cone fill with fiery life, spewing its molten heart miles into the air. A river of lava coursed down the side of the volcanic mountain, hissing and obscuring the view in clouds of steam from melting drifts of snow. In another moment a fantastic pyrotechnic display commenced — with lava bombs and flaring streamers of fire
hurled in all directions — out of which, rising like a dread phoenix from the flames, came the black and once more gigantically bloated figure of the Wind-Walker, fleeing the fire and racing madly for those high-blowing currents of etherwind which only his feet knew, whose ways only he had ever wandered.

And as he cleared the rim of Dromos, so he saw the time-clock where it seemed to wait for him on the reaches of the void; and he threw up his great hands before his flinching eyes, knowing full well his vulnerability and that at any moment he must surely feel the fatal sting of de Marigny's ray. But no, the beam did not come, and slowly the Wind-Walker lowered his hands to stare in alien amazement at the time-clock where it faced him squarely across a distance of less than two hundred yards.

Now, in his expanded size, he dwarfed the clock completely, made of it the merest toy, which in his hands it had once been. But in de Marigny's hands, for all that it seemed so tiny, the clock was the most awful weapon. And still the beam did not come.

For long moments they stood thus high in the sky over Dromos - darkly looming Wind-God and coffin-shaped vehicle of unbelievable journeys and near-infinite power. Then, as at a mutual signal though none was given, they broke apart and went their separate ways; Ithaqua striding off, bemused beyond a doubt, into unknown star-spaces, and the time-clock winging ever faster inward, away from Dromos, past Numinos, down toward Borea itself . .

Much later Silberhutte was to ask de Marigny: 'When you could have finished the monster for good, you didn't. Why?'

De Marigny was to shake his head in answer, replying: `No, something told me that that wasn't the way into Elysia. I remember that Titus Crow once told me much the same thing. And of course we don't know for sure that I could have killed him. Better to retain the threat of his extinction, I think, than to try to destroy him and fail.'

But the Warlord's patience had left him. 'I don't understand,' he grated. 'After all we've been through, couldn't you - '

'I am glad,' Armandra had broken into the conversation, `that you let him go, Henri. My father always was, he is now, and he must always be. He is one of those elementary evils which
must
exist, so that we lesser sinners may be reminded where our ways may ultimately lead us.'

'And I, too, am glad he lives,' Moreen had added in her turn. 'Once he flew with me all around Dromos, and he was gentle. Perhaps if we knew how to make him so, he would be gentle again . .

Perhaps,' the Warlord had then grunted, subdued but unable to keep the cynicism out of his voice. 'And perhaps not.'

It was all of three weeks later (Earthtime, for de Marigny still used the chronology of the Motherworld) when at last the time came around for him to take his departure from Borea. Three weeks, but it might easily have been a much shorter period had he felt able to tear himself away from the plateau and its polyglot tribes and peoples.

Now the adventurers stood together on the roof of the plateau surrounded by the many thousands of its inhabitants come to see the departure of the time-clock and its crew. The talking was all done, the farewells all said; and only the wind any longer had voice, blowing a thin rime of fine snow crystals across the flat roof and between the massed ranks of spectators, piping an eerie, far-distant tune.

Much had happened in the days since the return of the four to Borea. There had been a second visit, however brief, to Numinos to see Annahilde and carry her and her sons into the safety of the Isle of Mountains; several trips to the sunward side of Borea, where Silberhutte had
discovered those tropic islands and lands so often dreamed of; one short mission of vengeance in the time-clock, undertaken solely on the insistence of the Warlord, to destroy utterly Ithaqua's totem temple out on the white waste and recruit the Children of the Winds in their thousands into the brotherhood of the plateau; yes, and banquets and tournaments and pleasurable things galore —

— Until finally de Marigny had said: it's time,' and had gone off with Moreen to their rooms high on the plateau's rim.

And later Silberhutte had followed and the two men had talked, when for once Armandra kept out of her man's mind to let him make his own decisions. For this was the way she had known it must be sooner or later.

`Hank,' de Marigny had said, when finally the conversation had led them to it, 'I think your decision is the right one. If I were you, I would do the same thing.'

`You don't know what I've decided,' the other pointed out.

`Oh, I do,' de Marigny answered. 'And if ever I return to the Motherworld, I'll tell them that you're a king in Borea — that you rule all the tribes of the south, where an auroral sun always shines, however strangely and that your queen is strange and beautiful beyond belief. I'll tell them that you walk on the wings of the wind there together, and that no man was ever so loved .. . or so lucky.'

`That we walk the winds together, Henri?' the Warlord had raised his eyebrows in question. Armandra is Ithaqua's daughter, yes — and she walks the wind when the fancy takes her, granted — but I remain earthbound, my friend.'

`No more, Warlord!' the other had laughed, handing over a silken bundle which Silberhutte at once recognized as being the flying cloak.

`Henri, I couldn't accept your — '

`Why not? I've no further use for it now that the time-clock is mine again.' And before the other could further protest, de Marigny had asked: 'Will you tell them that Moreen and I are leaving, and that we'd like everyone to see us off from the roof?'

And now they
,
stood together on the roof: Armandra and the Warlord, Tracy Silberhutte and Jimmy Franklin, Oontawa and Kota'na, with all of the plateau's Elders ringing them about and the tribes thronging behind. Only the, sad winds spoke, until Armandra, unable to bear
the silence any longer, her golden voice full of anguish, begged:

`Must you go?'

As if in answer, of its own accord, the panel in the front of the time-clock swung open, and the four hands on its weirdly hieroglyphed dial commenced moving in a different pattern, a new and unfathomable sequence.

Then, without another word, de Marigny and Moreen passed into the clock and became part of the purple light that softly pulsed within.

Behind them, the panel clicked shut . . .