In the Moons of Borea (6 page)

De Marigny was asleep and dreaming wonderful dreams of Elysia, of Earth's dreamworld, and of all the strange and marvellous planets out on the very rim of existence, so that he all but cried out in anger when Hank Silberhutte shook him unceremoniously awake.

`Henri, wake up, there's something you should see. This may be our chance to get the clock back!'

Hearing the Warlord's words, the dull edge of sleep was driven instantly from de Marigny's mind. He got up and quickly followed Silberhutte to one of the square windows overlooking the white waste. Even without binoculars he could see a lot of unaccustomed activity about the Snow-Thing's distant altar. lthaqua's peoples were there in their thousands, forming a dark oval blot on the white of the frozen earth.

Taking up his glasses and focusing them on the distant scene, de Marigny asked: 'Why has he mustered them? Is there to be an attack on the plateau?'

The Warlord shook his head. 'No, not that. He lost three-quarters of his army the last time he tried it — yes, and he learned a terrible lesson in the bargain. They've gathered to witness his departure, to be instructed in the arts of their master and to be reminded of the penalties for any sort of treason or action in defiance of his laws. When last the Wind-Walker was away raping and murdering some poor girl of the tribes, three of his wolf-warriors — probably relatives of the girl — tried to defect to the plateau. It's not the first time;
we've
gained several useful citizens that way even in the time I've been here. On this occasion, however, they . .

He paused and shrugged. 'This time they were caught and taken back alive. Before he goes, Ithaqua will deal with them.'

`He'll kill them?' de Marigny asked.

The Warlord nodded. 'It won't be pleasant to watch, and that's not why I awakened you. My reason for doing so is simple: once Ithaqua leaves Borea, we may be able to recover the time-clock. And the sooner we get moving the better. Armandra says she'll help us — in fact she seems to have turned completely about-face on the thing. She wouldn't even talk of it at one time — now she says she'll do all she can to help you get the clock back.'

`But that's marv-' de Marigny began, but the Warlord cut him off with:

`Look there. What's happening now?'

Again training his binoculars on the totem temple, de Marigny answered, 'The ice-priests are bringing forward three captives through the ranks outside the circle of totems. The three are struggling like madmen, but their hands are bound. The rest of the crowd seems cowed, unmoving, heads bowed. Those inside the circle are prostrated. None but the priests move, and they leap and twirl like dervishes. The first of the three captives is pushed forward right to the foot of the ice pyramid.'

`Henri, you don't have to watch,' Silberhutte warned.

`I know quite a lot about lthaqua already, Hank. If I'm to know him fully, then I may as well see him at his worst. Whatever is to happen will happen regardless of my witnessing it.'

Watching the distant scene, de Marigny grew still as Ithaqua reached down to lift up the first of his victims. The man, an Indian by his looks and dress, had stopped struggling and now held himself stiffly erect as Ithaqua's massive fist drew him effortlessly into the air. Without preamble the Wind-Walker held the man up above his monstrous head, turning his glowing eyes upward to stare at him for a moment. Then those eyes blazed wide open and their fires flickered with an almost visible heat. The taloned hand opened suddenly and the Indian fell, a doll spinning briefly in the air before plummeting with a splash of carmine sparks
into
one
of Ithaqua's eyes!

Slowly the grotesque figure atop the ice throne resumed his original position, then reached down again to take up the second wolf-warrior. Not so brave this man. He kicked with his legs and struggled violently. Ithaqua held him on high, made as if to drop him — then caught him — casually used thumb and forefinger of his free hand to pluck off one of the man's kicking, offending legs!

Sickened, de Marigny looked away, then held to his resolve and found the scene once more. Ithaqua was now in the act of tossing a limbless, headless torso into the crowd within the circle of totems. And it was now the turn of the third and final offender.

Grabbed up in massive fist, the man seemed to have fainted; his body hung slack from the Wind-Walker's fingers.. Almost uninterestedly, Ithaqua threw him aloft in a high arc. De Marigny expected to see the body plummet to earth — but no, not yet. lthaqua's fiendish elementals of the air had him, boosting him higher still, spinning him like a top until his limbs formed a cross, then buffeting him at dizzy speeds, north, south, east, and west above the white waste. Finally he zoomed skyward, a marionette jerked up on invisible wires, to be
thrown
down at high velocity into the scattering crowd.

And indeed the crowd was scattering, for who could trust in the Wind-Walker's mood at a time like this? He had been amusing himself but now . . . now the game was over.

Or was it?

He cast about, turning his huge head from side to side, and at last his eyes came to rest on the time-clock where it lay at the foot of the pyramid. De Marigny
gasped as the clock was snatched up — gasped again as Ithaqua threw back his black blot of a head and rocked with the convulsions of crazed laughter. Dumb, no audible sound escaped the monster, but in the next moment he turned his face to look square upon the plateau — square, de Marigny thought, at the window where
he and
Silberhutte stood — and hell itself flared in the carmine fires of his eyes.

Then, _time-clock firmly clenched in hand, he leaped aloft to stride up terraces of air, grew large as, still rising, he raced for the plateau, his shadow an acre of darkness on the white waste. Almost directly overhead he came to an impossible halt, stared down for a moment, and held up the clock like a toy — no, like a
trophy! —
in his great hand, his whole body shaking with massive glee. Then he was gone, out of sight over the roof of the plateau and up into higher reaches of the chill atmosphere ..

. . . Gone from sight, yes, and gone with him the time-clock, de Marigny's one hope of ever escaping from Borea and passing on into Elysia. For the first time the man from the Motherworld was truly stranded, and there seemed to be absolutely nothing he could do about it.

Less than four hours later Hank Silberhutte found de Marigny on the plateau's roof. Approaching him, the Warlord felt satisfaction at his friend's robust if somewhat dejected appearance. Silently he appraised and approved limbs and muscles that had benefited greatly from long hours spent in the gymnasiums and arenas. Nor was de Marigny too heavily wrapped as he leaned across the battlements and stared morosely out over the white waste. He had started to grow accustomed to the bitter temperatures discovered whenever he left his apartment on the plateau's warm perimeter.

'Henri, you look miserable.'

Turning, de Marigny nodded a welcome and his agreement. 'Yes, and I feel it.' His tone was wry. 'Should I be
happy?'

'I think you'll be happy enough shortly.'

There was a look about the Warlord that the other could not quite fathom, as if he harboured some pleasurable
.
secret. Suddenly hope stirred in de Marigny and he asked: 'Hank, what is it? What's happened?'

The other shrugged. `Oh, nothing much — except we still have a chance . .

'A chance — for what? How do you mean, "a chance"?' 'Ithaqua's gone, that much you know — but he didn't take the clock with him after all!'

De Marigny grasped the Warlord's arms. 'You mean it's still here, on Borea?'

Silberhutte shook his head. Not on Borea, no, but on one of Borea's moons. He visited both moons before he went off on his wanderings — and when he left them, the clock stayed behind. Look — '

He pointed to the distant horizon, where two vast moons showed their dimly glowing rims, permanently suspended beyond the hills as if painted there by some cosmic artist. `That's where your time-clock is, Henri, in the moons of Borea. Which one — Numinos or Dromos — I don't know. One or the other, only time will tell.'

De Marigny shook his head, frowning, failing to understand. 'But if the clock is on one of Borea's moons, we're separated from it by at least twenty thousand miles of interplanetary space! A chance, you said, but what sort - of chance is that? And how can you be sure that the clock is there in the first place?'

The Warlord held up a hand and said: 'Calm down, my friend, and I'll explain.

`First off, Armandra kept track of her father telepathically when he left. She knows that when he finished his business on the moons, he no longer had the clock with
him. Indeed she believes that he deliberately let her see that he'd left the clock behind. Possibly he thinks he might trap her into leaving Borea — but I won't let that happen.'

'Do you mean to say that Armandra could walk between the worlds like Ithaqua?'

'If she wanted to, yes. That's always been her father's chief desire: to have her walking with him on the winds that blow between the worlds. If ever he managed to trap her out there' — with a toss of his head he indicated the alien star-spaces above and beyond — 'he'd never let her go again, would kill her first.'

`Then how,' de Marigny patiently pressed, 'are we ever to get the clock back? I don't see what — '

`Henri,' the other cut him off, 'what would you say
,
if I offered you the chance to take part in the greatest adventure of a lifetime? Yes, and a chance to get your clock back in the bargain? Dangers there'll be, certainly, and your life itself may well be at risk throughout. But what an adventure — to fly out to the moons of Bores!'

'Fly to the moons of — ' de Marigny's jaw dropped. 'Hank, are you feeling well? How in the name of all that's weird could I possibly fly out to the moons of Borea? Through space? An airless void? I don't see — '

`This is Borea, Henri,' Silberhutte reminded; again cutting him off. 'It's not the Motherworld, not Earth. Things are often as different here as they are in Earth's dream-world — or so I gather from what you've told me. We're in an alien dimension, man, and things are possible which would be totally unthinkable on Earth. You want to know how you get to the moons of Borea? As I said, you fly there — in your cloak!'

'My flying cloak? But —'

`No buts, Henri. This is how it will happen:

'Armandra will call up the biggest tornado you could possibly imagine — a fantastic twister, a great funnel of
whirling wind twenty thousand miles long — and we'll fly down its eye like a bullet down the barrel of a rifle!'

'A tornado?' de Marigny's imagination spun as dizzily as
the wonder Silberhutte described. 'Fly down the eye of
a vast tornado? And did you say "we"?'

'We — yes — of course! Did you really think I'd let you
go adventuring in the moons of Borea on your own?' And the Warlord laughed and slapped his thigh. 'Now come on, we've one or two things to attend to.'

Apart from the two heavily wrapped figures standing dead centre of the flat, frozen roof of the plateau, that elevated expanse was empty. No watchmen stood behind the low parapet walls; no sightseers gazed out over the white waste; nothing stirred but flurries of snow and rime blown about by stray gusts of wind. All well-wishers had departed minutes earlier — Tracy Silberhutte and, Jimmy Franklin, Charlie Tacomah the Elder, Oontawa the handmaiden, and her man Kota'na, Keeper of the Bears, these and many others — alt retired now and gone down into the safety of the plateau where the Great Wind would not touch them.

The fires that warmed the perimeter walls had been extinguished hours ago; all openings in the plateau's face were now glazed over with thick sheets of ice formed by pouring water
over
them, necessary in view of the tremendous suction Armandra's tornado would create; all inhabitants and denizens were safely within their caves, quarters, and stables, and the snow-ships were anchored and tied down deep 'in the recesses of their keeps. The two men on the roof, attached each to the other by a new double harness hurriedly manufactured by the plateau's saddlers, waited for Armandra.

She, too, had said her farewells, coming to the roof to hug de Marigny fiercely and kiss her Warlord tenderly, then departing to meditate for a few minutes alone in her apartments. Now they both waited for her and watched the rim of the plateau to the south. She would appear there, floating free on the wind as she drifted up into sight. Then she would stand off from the face of the plateau, rising high into the sky before calling up the mighty whirlwind which would thrust the two adventurers across the vast gulf of space to the moons of Borea.

And now she came — Armandra, the Woman of the Winds — dressed all in white but aglow with a carmine flush that radiated outward from her perfect form as a visible aura. Her hair swayed lazily above her head, floating to and fro in eerie undulations as she rose up in awesome grandeur. Her arms were held loosely at her sides and her loose fur robes floated about her almost as if she were suspended in some slow liquid. Then, still facing them, she receded, moved out over the white waste, lifted up her arms shoulder high, and commenced a series of summoning motions with her long white hands. At this distance her body formed a small cross of carmine fire in the suddenly darkening sky — a cross that commanded incredible powers.

Mastery of all the elementals of the air — of the winds themselves — and in her father's absence, not even the most wayward wind might defy her!

Starting far out beyond Ithaqua's totem temple and hidden from the view of the adventurers on the roof by the horizon of the plateau's rim, the surface snow and rime began to stir in agitated flurries. Rapidly, forming a circle fifteen miles across that encompassed the plateau centrally, small white spirals marched on the plateau, closing their ranks and towering higher as the circle narrowed. The line, high now as Ithaqua's ice pyramid, swept across the area of the totem temple. Several totems were uprooted like matchsticks and tossed aside, and the snow wall marched on unhindered.

Finally the sky itself began to revolve, a sea of darkly churning thunderheads all moving together, turning like a great wheel on spokes of boiling cloud. As the speed of this fantastic aerial phenomenon picked up; the two adventurers gazed dizzily skyward, reeling together while
the plateau's roof seemed physically to turn beneath their furbooted feet. Now, too, they could hear the
rush
of air, the howling of the white wall as it thundered toward them; and at last its crest could be seen towering higher than the rim of the plateau.

Until now the wall had been formed of many individual snow devils, tornadoes in the making, but now these small twisters had begun to move to match the motion of the sky, had lost their individuality as they formed a single massive funnel that reached higher by the second, twisting into a whirling, swaying corkscrew shape that began to shut out the light as surely as any wall of bricks and mortar.

There came a roaring as of a tidal wave breaking on a headland . . . and instantly the massive funnel reared taller, reaching up to shut out all but a dim grey light. The tornado had climbed the walls of the plateau, was now narrowing down its diameter on the roof itself with the plateau as a base. To the many watchers who braved the winds that still roared about Ithaqua's totem temple, it seemed almost that the giant twister was an extension of the plateau, the stem of some incredible white-boled tree that swayed and writhed and went up forever; for indeed its top could no longer be seen but transcended the limits of human vision as it snaked out into the void, bending toward Borea's moons.

And within a great circle that had the plateau for its centre, covering an area of almost a thousand square, miles, the winds still fought and tore, shrieking as they rushed in to support the incredible column, to push it higher still, driving its corkscrew tip across the otherwise empty void. Now the adventurers felt the first tug of trembling air in the all but still centre of the uproar — now their persons were explored by gently curious tendrils of air, caressed by scarcely definable fingers — now the flying cloak belled out about de Marigny's shoulders and he felt an upward tugging that bade fair to lift him with or without the cloak's assistance.

`Armandra's personal familiars,' Silberhutte shouted above the howl of frenzied air. 'Fair winds to protect us across the void, Henri. Now we can go. Give us maximum lift, or whatever it is you do, and let's get on our way.'
.

`When I tell Titus Crow about this,' de Marigny began as he urged the cloak gently skyward until the Warlord swung beneath him in the dual harness, 'if ever I get to tell him, that is, he'll never . . .
My God!' De
Marigny's exclamation burst from him when, as if suddenly released like a stone from a catapult — or, as Silberhutte had put it, 'a bullet down the barrel of a rifle' — the cloak and its passengers were shot aloft.

Up they went, ever faster, while the inner surface of the whirling white wall closed on them until it was only fifty feet or so away on all sides. And yet they felt no pressure, no friction or whipping of outraged air, for Armandra's familiar winds held them fast in a protective bubble that travelled with them. They
saw
flashing past them the dizzy wall like the flue of some cosmic chimney, and they
heard
the deafening bellow of banshee winds, but all they felt was the awesome, crushing acceleration as they plummeted ever faster up the eye of the tornado.

`He'll ... never . . . believe me!' de Marigny finally finished with a whisper that went unheard in the mad tumult. Teeth gritted, flesh straining as the acceleration built up, the two clung desperately to their harnesses while the tube of insanely spiralling air became merely a blur, no longer white but a dark shade of grey rapidly turning black.

For Borea was far behind now and even the softly luminous auroral shades of this alien dimension's interplanetary void were shut out, excluded by the nearly solid, twisting, thrusting funnel of frozen air. Then the acceleration was over, and they fell free, weightless, while around them,
silent now but working as furiously as ever, Armandra's tornado — that great-grandfather of all tornadoes — blew them toward unknown, unguessed adventures.

After a little while de Marigny's natural apprehension began to abate. The limited atmosphere was bitterly cold but bearable, by no means the icy, killing, frigid hell he would normally have expected of interplanetary space; and while doubtless the surrounding wall of the twister whirled and writhed as before, it could neither be seen nor heard from within, so that all seemed tranquil with no sensation of speed apparent. Nevertheless the travellers knew that they were speeding across space, protected only by Armandra's familiars whose substance formed about them a soft, hurtling bubble of air.

It never occurred to them that they might converse until de Marigny sneezed, but as the staccato echoes of that involuntary ejaculation died away, they recognized at once that conversation was indeed possible, moreover that it would help in further dissipating their tension and not unnatural nervousness.

'Would you like to know about Numinos, Henri?' Silberhutte's voice echoed and reverberated loudly within their protective bubble of air. 'It suddenly occurs to me that you know nothing at all about where we're going.'

'Any and everything you can tell me,' de Marigny answered. 'Forewarned, as they say back home, is forearmed.'

`Yes,' the Warlord agreed, 'and armour is something we're pretty short of. An axe apiece, a flying cloak, and — ' He paused.

`And?'

'These winds of Armandra's. Her personal familiars that have looked after her since the day she was born a daughter of that alien, black-hearted monster and a human mother. It worries me now that she's without them. Yet if they were to leave us . . . we'd be dead sooner than it takes to tell! They're ours to command now, until we find the clock, or — '

De Marigny sensed the Warlord's shrug of resignation in the dark, picturing the other floating weightlessly close by in his harness. Then the strangeness of his situation hit him, and he wondered to himself:

'What on Earth — or off it — am I doing here? Sustained by a bubble of sentient air; speeding along on a mad voyage between alien worlds; questing after a stolen space-time machine so that I can go off adventuring again in search of Elysia? Is there any such place as Elysia, I wonder, or am I simply another patient in a madhouse somewhere? A hopeless case that the doctors despair of, keeping him quietly sedated in his own lunatic world of opium dreams . .

'Numinos,' Silberhutte finally continued, 'though the closest of the moons of Borea, is also a world in its own right — a world like many others, with an atmosphere, oceans, and people. On one of the largest islands dwells the principal race, sailors with a warrior instinct, worshippers of Ithaqua. From what Armandra has told me of them, it's perfectly natural that they should worship the Wind-Walker; their ancestors most certainly deified Odin and Thor in the Motherworld. Yes, they are Norsemen or as nearly Vikings as makes no difference. They control and inhabit all of the Numinosian islands except one: the Isle of Mountains.

'In the Isle of Mountains dwells a peace-loving race, not Ithaqua's people, protected in some way from the periodic attacks of the seafaring barbarians. There aren't many of these peaceful folk — a few families, a handful — but Ithaqua's interest in them has always been intense, and never more than right now. I don't know why . .

As the Warlord paused, de Marigny inquired: 'But how does Armandra know all of these things? Has she herself visited the moons of Borea?'

In the absolute darkness Silberhutte answered, 'No, but when she was a child — through all the years when the Elders were grooming her for her role as the plateau's first citizen — often Ithaqua would try to tempt her away from her tutors. He'd send her telepathic pictures of the secret places he knew, the distant, strange worlds where he is worshipped, feared, hated. Then, as now, he desired a companion to walk with him on the winds that blow between the worlds. Remember, Henri, that his is a loneliness lasting for aeons.

'At any rate sometimes these mental invasions of Ithaqua's upon his daughter's privacy were vivid and detailed. Particularly on those occasions when he told her of the relatively close dominions of Numinos and Dromos, worlds he was wont to visit whenever he returned to Borea from his immemorial wanderings.

`But however persuasive the monster's promises, however seductive his telepathic enticements, the Elders had brought the child up to loathe him, showing her his cruelties at every opportunity. And gradually, as she grew through her teens into womanhood, her father's tempting slackened off. After all, it must have been a great strain on him even on the Wind-Walker to carry on this prolonged attempt at Armandra's mental seduction, the ultimate goal of which was to be
her
defection from the plateau and its peoples. For you see, the plateau with its subterranean store of star-stones has always been anathema to him, and to force his mind in upon hers through barriers such as those laid down by the Elder Gods must have been psychic agony. And all to no avail, for she spurned him totally.

'His final disappointment must have been when she and I joined forces, when we took each other as man and wife; for it was then that she fought him with his own powers, inherited from him, and would have destroyed him with them if she could. Oh, yes, he must have realized then that she was a lost cause, that he could never hope to win her to him. I think that if ever he is given the chance, he will kill her. Certainly he would kill me — and, judging from what you've told me, he'd kill you, too, without hesitation.'

As Silberhutte talked, his companion noticed what appeared to be a gradual lightening effect; the utter blackness became shot with dark grey streaks, and the whole began to take on an opaquely milky appearance:

`Hank,' de Marigny called out. 'I think something is happening — or do I only imagine it?'

After a slight pause the Warlord answered: 'No, it's real enough, Henri. It could mean that we've reached the end of our ' Abruptly, breathlessly, he again paused, then cried,
'Look!

At Silberhutte's excited exclamation the surrounding milkiness rapidly took on rushing motion. One second all seemed calm and silent, the next brought a resumption of the tornado's chaotic whirling; and as a dim light illuminated the two voyagers, they saw that the wall of the twister had finally extended itself to its limit, that it now whirled about them within arms' reach!

In another moment gravity returned, and with it the knowledge that they were now falling headlong
down
the narrow tube that was the whirlwind's centre. Sound, too, rushed in upon them from outside: a furious high-pitched whining that had them clapping hands to ears and gritting their teeth as the pitch rose higher with each passing second.