Young Thongor (15 page)

This time he awoke to the buzzing, become so loud that he could not ignore it. He tried to move. Frustrated in this, he next tried at least to gain his bearings, focusing his eyes. This was difficult. He seemed to see but a pinkish blur, though there was a hint of motion somewhere within the roseate haze. It registered that the hue was nothing natural, but the same as he had seen reflected earlier on the cavern wall. It emanated from no single source, yet it filled the very air around him, and its strength extended no farther than mere inches beyond a great circular tube that held his immobile form.

As his eyes became accustomed to the weird haze, his peripheral vision revealed the arrangement of four other containers, presumably like his own, in a rough semicircle against the irregular cavern wall. At some point in the distant past, some one or some thing had troubled to smooth the rocky surface, yet without bothering to straighten the natural walls. Thongor’s world knew a crude version of glass, though mirrors were usually constructed of polished silver. He had never seen the like of what held him captive now, a perfectly smooth, seemingly thick cylinder of transparent shielding.

And it was the same with the others. The tale of the wandering mage had been no idle one, then, though whatever treasure might lurk here would seem to be far too costly to recover. Thongor thought with grim irony that he would be a rich man to escape this place with the treasure of his life.

He thought he could make out the blurred lines of the remaining companions within the other tubes. Three he had not known well, but the fourth and the easiest to recognize because of his short stature, was one Tam Tavis, a boy too young for the dangers of this ill-fated mission, but headstrong enough that he would not be left behind. Thongor had seen in the strapping youth a reflection of himself in earlier years, a boy budding into manhood quickly, with instincts and reflexes, not to mention precocious strength, that would one day serve him well on the battlefield. There was no school for adventure better than adventure itself, as he had learned amply, so he had put up no real opposition when the lad had pleaded to be taken along. Now Thongor rued his decision. He had long ago lost count of the number of foemen’s lives he had taken. But it was a new and distasteful thing for him to count the squandered lives of friends.

The Valkarthan’s golden eyes turned to the sudden appearance of that alien entity he had fought and failed to defeat. His brow flared into a fever of rage as he traced the heavy, shifting motions of the shapeless silhouette before him, his anger rising even faster with the chagrin of defeat. And for all this, his spine began at once to tingle as he felt the creeping tendrils of a foreign consciousness entering and mingling with his own. The rising panic abruptly ceased, however, as his mind’s eye began to feed on vast scenes crystallizing from a mist of seeming forgetfulness, as if he were awakening from a long sleep and coming to himself, a self he had forgotten he knew.

He was unaware that his square jaw fell slack and drooling as his vacant eyes gazed down the centuries, through the memories of his inhuman host. Together the unlikely pair beheld a great vista of which discredited legends spoke: the infinitely ancient migration through the cosmic aethyr of a legion of sentient comets. From a neighboring sphere they came, the immemorial Children of the Fire Mist, so designated in the forbidden
Testament of Xanthu
, ostensibly salvaged from the collapsing fanes of elder Mu.

They had arrived on the new-made earth, seeking among the myriad forms of burgeoning life some spark of intelligence that they might fan into flame, perhaps out of sheer benevolence, perhaps for recondite reasons of their own. The Lords of the Fire Mist had the uncanny ability to transfer their own intellects, incorporeal as they were, into whatever physical forms they chose, so long as these possessed at least some malleable mindstuff. They sought by this means to heighten the faculties of these crude beings, to hasten their evolution to full awareness.

The first objects of their attentions were the scarcely sentient pseudopodic creatures whose likeness Thongor had lately battled. With these beings they eventually won great success, their mottled blue-green rubbery forms at length evolving into the mighty blue-skinned Rmoahal warriors of the southern plains. But these proved too mighty for the Mind Lords to dominate. They had done their work too well. After long years they ventured another experiment in what Thongor would have deemed blackest sorcery.

The Sons of the Fire Mist chose a species of small, tailed mammals, bulge-eyed and bulb-fingered, tree-swingers, bug-eaters. Thongor’s vision, which falsely seemed a memory, traced the progress of these creatures up the ladder of apedom to nobler form and feature, and he knew he had witnessed the very origin of his own tribe: Man.

Thongor now knew, and indeed took for granted, that the loathsome form of the thing he had fought and which now shared his very soul was a specimen of that earlier, long-ago age of experiment, before the furry branch-swingers took their first involuntary steps to humanity. Here was one of the first intelligent beings from earth’s dawn age. How long had it bided the ages? He sensed a great anger and a greater…covetousness. This one of the archaic Mind Lords of Lemuria wanted what he, unlike his ancient colleagues, had been denied: a fully human form to inhabit.

Their ancient mission had succeeded. Wisdom had been ignited in the breasts of earthly creatures. Had the rest of the Children of the Fire Mist abandoned the planet again, returned to their adjacent sphere? If so, then why had they left this one behind? Thongor found he could share none of the creature’s memory at this point. Here the lone Mind Lord became guarded; was this, perhaps, from ancient habit, when he needed to shield certain heretical or treasonous thoughts from his more enlightened fellows?

3

Alien Flesh

The Valkarthan lost consciousness again, instantly, as if it had been snuffed out like a temple candle. When he again awakened, no sense of the passage of dreamtime betrayed how long he had been out. He knew at once that the paralysis had left him, and he made to flex his limbs. His initial thought was surprise that there was no ache—until he beheld in horror members which answered to his commands, albeit clumsily, but were not his own!

Worse yet, they were not even remotely human. Of course he knew himself the prisoner of his rugose and monstrous host, more truly and damnably a prisoner than he had been when paralyzed. He was back in the clear tube, and his ungainly tentacles thrashed helplessly against the smooth, concave surface. He found he was able to see what transpired without, but his sight was somehow
different
. Nothing seemed to point in any one particular direction. Relative height and width fluctuated. Colors shimmered into and out of the familiar spectrum range.

His human form was free—and occupied! He saw the image of Thongor of Valkarth admiring himself in a mirror, as if a man should consider a new robe or suit of armor! Gradually, his living image drew forth its scabbarded longsword, again belted to the hip, and made clumsy swipes with it through the stagnant air of the cavern. But the thing that held his body hostage was rapidly accustoming itself to the reflexes and instincts of its new home. Thongor’s body as well as his mind had learned his martial skills, and that made them available to the usurper.

But it also appeared to work in reverse! Thongor at once felt more in control of the repulsive alien form he had inherited. He was for the moment no less a captive, but he knew that things needed to change but slightly before new possibilities could begin to form. Nor was this the only change.

The Mind Lord in Thongor’s body now held the blade in one hand and manipulated some glowing studs on a chest-high metal surface. The mist filling one of his men’s cylinders began to dissipate, drawn back through tiny holes in the base. The man within began to shake himself awake, lacking the paralysis Thongor had experienced. Then the cylinder retreated into a recess in the cavern shadows above, leaving the man free and gasping a lung full of the stale but welcome air.

His eyes visibly brightened as he recognized him whom he took for his brave commander. Inside Thongor’s prison tube, the Valkarthan could hear no sounds, but he saw that the soldier spoke pleasantly to his commander’s image, awaited a reply, looked puzzled—then crumpled with his life’s blood jetting in a geyser from the severed stump of his head.

The helpless mind of the captive Valkarthan raged in impotent fury as he saw the same performance repeated by the incarnated Mind Lord, who seemed to imagine he honed his battle skills by similarly butchering the rest of the Sark’s dazed troops. No doubt one and all perished thinking Thongor had betrayed and murdered them! He vowed his foe should pay dearly for this outrage!

But now the false Thongor made to open the prison-tube of the last of the men, young Tam Tavis! The blue-green sheath that was the Valkarthan’s body shook with unaccustomed—human—fury; Thongor knew he must somehow find a way to prevent this final atrocity.

4

Thongor against Thongor!

He saw a single, dim chance and acted more by instinct than by design. Thongor’s mind had begun to feel, as if by the acquisition of a new sense, that it could mimic some of the mental feats of the thing whose alien form he now wore. He focused his oddly distorted vision upon his own stolen form, but it remained obtuse to his probing. The entity must have taken precautions against the trick Thongor now tried. But the barbarian would not be daunted, not with his young friend’s life at stake. He focused next upon the awakening form of Tam Tavis. Thongor had a dreamlike apprehension of running, exerting himself in a race to reach some far point as soon as he might, straining every nerve. And then he was beyond the physical form he had occupied—and into that of Tam Tavis!

Thongor knew he was taking several risks at once, not the least of which was that the boy, awakening inside the terrible, utterly non-human form of the Mind Lord, would instantly go quite mad. Already in his brief career of adventuring, Thongor had beheld a number of sights to shake the soul, though mind-transference with this awful being might have unhinged him without the shared memory-vision of the Mind Lord to make sense of the events for him. And he knew Tam Tavis had no such advantage. Gorm grant the boy would awaken with the creature’s brain-instincts as a safety net.

For his own part, Thongor could not help rejoicing in wearing a more accustomed form, blood pumping through muscled arms and legs from a central heart (for the adepts of ancient Lemuria knew already this much of the body’s systems). He was shorter now, but his perspective was much more familiar than the strangely filtered perceptions of the thing from the planet Venus had been. There was but little sluggishness in the lad’s limbs as the adrenaline drove out the last vestiges of the alien sleep gas.

The black-maned, golden-eyed giant facing him appeared to freeze for a moment, surprised, but quickly making sense of what had happened. It was plain he had not deemed the barbarian or his race so capable. In that moment of his foe’s hesitation, Thongor darted forward to grasp the hilt of the dagger he had earlier picked up from the fallen body of a soldier. His mighty opponent had not expected the move, just looked at the blade in Tam Tavis’ hand and smiled, raising his own great-bladed sword.

The two men paced and circled, the younger crouching like a hunting
vandar
, the jungle lion of Lemuria. Both had blades ex tended, but the disparity between the two weapons daunted Thongor not. Indeed, he feared his own prowess with the blade, not daring to contrive to kill his opponent—himself! Which would prevail: his strength, or his skill?

The first blow was that of the Mind Lord, a clumsy but powerful thrust, which Tam Tavis’ body, agile as a cricket, easily side-stepped. “Go ahead! Flee me, human! I have waited all these
kalpas
, and I can spare a few minutes more!” The intonation was not quite right, as if the thing inside were only beginning to get used to the human vocal apparatus.

“Fool!” the Lemurian youth gasped with the exertion, “You have waited so long only for death!” He knew how laughable that sentiment must seem. Even if he were able to overcome the massive form whose death-dealing capacities he knew better than anyone else, it were mere foolishness to seek to kill his own body! Better to find some way to get it back—if he could evade its increasingly skilful blows!

As he considered his next move, Thongor noticed that the amorphous body of the Mind Lord was now flailing with agitation. Plainly, the mind of Tam Tavis had awakened in its new abode and liked it not! But was the young mind also going mad? Was it as Thongor had feared? If so, here would be another innocent death charged to his account. But he dared not entertain such thoughts at the moment if he hoped at least to save the body of his young friend, to say naught of his own soul.

He saw now that the boy’s agility exceeded his own, just as his weight was much less than Thongor’s. New stratagems suggested themselves like recruits on a parade ground. Thongor took advantage of his borrowed skills to leap upward and grasp hold of a fang-like stalactite. He hoped to gain a moment’s breathing space this way, but he had not counted on the slippery nitre and began at once to slip. So be it; he would come down on his opponent’s head. His own form stood uncertainly below, trying to spot his vanished quarry amid the dense shadows, seeing his sudden descent too late. If only the younger man might knock the older unconscious without further damage!