by Brian Lumley
Some fifty feet ahead of us, passing through the entrance in something of a hurry, went three Indians dressed in what looked to me like full ceremonial regalia. Jimmy stared after them and gasped. “Blackfoot, Chinook and Nootka, chiefs of the most northerly of the Northwest Tribes, just as they were two hundred years ago! Ithaqua doesn’t seem to have strayed off limits very far south of the Canadian border.”
“Come,” Oontawa whispered, leading the way through the door. “We are last to enter, but not too late.”
We followed her into a vast cave or chamber lit by huge, brightly flaring flambeaux. The first thing that caught my eye was a carved throne in the dead center of the chamber. Decked in furs and standing upon a raised section of the floor with stone steps leading up to it, the thing was massively ornate. Seated upon it with her white hands curved over its stone arms, her head upright and her eyes closed, was Armandra,. Her breast moved slowly beneath the beautiful jacket of fox fur that she wore.
She was in a deep trancelike state; before her face, hanging motionless from a golden chain suspended from the top of the high throne’s back where it curved forward over her head, was the medallion she had previously worn about her neck. Motionless? Perhaps not. The medallion was not distinct to my eyes; its disc seemed blurred. Slowly, very slowly, it turned on its golden chain.
The second most noticeable thing in the Hall of the Elders was the silence. Though the descending tiers of stone benches that circled the amphitheater-like chamber were filled almost to capacity, not a single whisper stirred the assembly. Or was I mistaken in this also? Mistaken I was, for now I heard a distinct sound, a humming as of winds blowing far away, and it issued from that slowly turning, vibrating medallion!
The medallion hummed and vibrated, echoing however faintly the hum and roar of weird winds blowing out beyond the rim of the universe. It hung before Armandra’s face and she heard it, and I knew instinctively that its voice formed pictures for her—sounds transmuted into visions—so that what she heard she also saw.
But now Oontawa was standing on tiptoe, whispering something urgently into my ear and tugging at my hand, indicating that my party should take seats. A space had been cleared for us; the occupants of the lowest tiers of seats had moved silently along to make room. I blinked my eyes and shook my head. I had been very nearly hypnotized by the sight of Armandra in her trance.
As I followed Tracy and my friends to our places, every eye in the Hall of the Elders was upon me. At a guess some four thousand eyes frowned at me, the latecomer. While we sat down Oontawa moved quickly to the raised dais, climbing its steps to stand at the left hand of Armandra. For a moment she leaned forward to peer anxiously into Armandra’s white face, at the closed eyes and drawn, regal features. Then she kneeled and bowed her head, this handmaiden to a goddess.
The silence in the Hall of the Elders seemed to deepen, or perhaps it was simply that the humming and roaring of the suspended medallion increased. Whichever, soon it was as though a torrent of whispering ghost-winds rushed through the chamber. And ghost-winds they must have been, for despite the fact that the distant tumult rapidly increased, not a single breath of disturbed air touched us and the fires of the flambeaux burned as steadily as before. And now I sensed that the rushing of air was only an illusion, like the crash of waves heard in a shell, an illusion magnified by the absolute silence of the assembly.
So the shock of Armanda’s voice, clear, golden and belllike, breaking that ghost-ridden whisper of weird winds, was electric! I felt the hair of my neck prickle as she spoke, and instantly all heads turned once more in the direction of my party. The Woman of the Winds was speaking in English, plainly for our benefit, and in the eyes of all present our importance had immediately trebled.
“Ithaqua stands atop his altar,” Armandra intoned in a voice which, except for its singular golden ring, was so void of modulation or emotion that it might have been the voice of Death himself. “He is returned from dark meditations in the moons of Borea and now awaits his tribute—of which there is none, for we have snatched the girl he lusted after and the men whose souls he wanted from the very jaws of his wolf-warriors!
“There he stands.” Her hand, alabaster in motion, trembling slightly, pointed eerily across the hall at nothing. Her eyes remained closed; her hair, living fire, stirred strangely and began to rise up over her head. “There he stands atop his pedestal of ice, my father!” The last word fell like a golden icicle from her lips, seeming to splinter into shards of ice in the air of the great cave.
Her hand fell back to rest upon the carved arm of her throne while her hair continued its coppery swirling above her head. “They gather, his priests, cowering about the foot of his altar: whipped wolf puppies that snarl at each other, eager to give the blame, grovelling within the circle of totems. Outside the totem ring the Children of the Winds wait. Ithaqua has called them forth from far across the white wastes to see his justice. And he is just, for he commanded and his commands went unanswered, his hunger unappeased. And how shall a god correct such deliberate contempt?
“But see, there are only six of them within the totem ring. The High Priest is not there …
“Ah, now I see him!” She leaned forward slightly, her fingers tightening upon the arms of her throne. “I see the dog, fighting and screaming, dragged from his hiding place and thrown before the altar of his master. He grovels, begs, pleads—this so-called priest who dared to threaten, to curse me—and Ithaqua stands over him, dark atop the pyramid of ice. Now the groveller rages at the lesser priests and they cower, fearing the Wind-Walker’s wrath. But the Wind-Walker is cold and still.
“Now the High Priest bows himself down, kneels and cries out his innocence to Ithaqua, giving the six lesser priests the blame. Ah, but they stand united now, those six, ringing him about and pointing their accusation.
“See! The game is up! He tries to run! … They bring him down! … And now—now Ithaqua takes a hand!”
It became obvious to me then that the entire audience understood at least the rudiments of the English language; almost every head in that great cave, my own included, must have moved forward in unison as Armandra spoke those words. I sensed the concerted movement all about me; the rapt attention of every one of us was full upon Armandra. And we all saw and gasped together at the change that stole swiftly over her face.
A ruddy light seemed to burn upon her cheeks, upon her high brow and closed eyes, subtly complementing the flaming copper of her hair. The medallion upon its chain glittered brightly as its gyrations grew more visibly erratic, its humming and roaring forming a definite presence in the great chamber.
Armandra leaned forward further yet until her face almost touched the spinning disc. Her fingers gripped the arms of her throne like claws. Gone now was the calm, deathlike mask she had worn. In its place a feral skull snarled beneath wildly swaying masses of burning hair.
This was the moment I had waited for. my chance to attempt a penetration of Armandra’s mind. Oh, I entertained no real doubt that her trance was genuine—nor did I doubt that she was indeed the daughter of Ithaqua—but if the latter were true then she was only half human, spawn of a demon or god of the Cthulhu Cycle of Myth, in which event I should at least be able to gauge the power and direction of her mental emissions.
As to why I wanted to do this thing: I found in this woman-creature a vast enigma, a great challenge. Not once did I think of myself as an intruder. If her concentration was as great as it appeared to be, then she would not even notice my presence. When I think now of my audacity …
Tentatively I reached out my mind to her, and instantly I was enveloped!
She was a whirlpool of concentrated mental energy that sucked me in like a spider flushed down a drain. I could neither fight nor withdraw. I became part of her, hearing what she heard, seeing what she saw. And so superior was her power that my own puny energies were not even perceptible in the mental vortex.
Physically I sat there on that stone bench between Tr
acy and Jimmy Franklin, but mentally I was a mote in the cosmos of Armandra’s psyche. I whirled away with her on the wings of strange winds and stared down with her upon a distant scene …
IV
“Bring this Man to Me!”
(Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
“Now Ithaqua takes a hand!”
The words seemed to repeat over and over, receding into vast distances and returning to reverberate in my mind. Then, abruptly, there was only the wind; a wind that blew mournfully across the white wastes, bringing with it the distant howling of frightened wolves. And perhaps those wolves sensed that which would frighten any living creature: Ithaqua, the Thing that Walks on the Wind!
For now I saw him, bloated with anger where he stood at the apex of his pyramid altar, and I saw the six priests scatter like cockroaches as the monster stepped down onto the frozen surface within the totem ring. Ah, but those were no human feet with which the Wind-Walker strode the crushed snow. They were huge and webbed, out of all proportion even to the towering size he had attained, which now lifted him head and shoulders above his own altar.
Doomed, Zchakow the Russian fled, feet flying, arms reaching, eyes bulging and fear foaming from between his champing jaws. He fled before the tread of his monstrous master.
With a thrill of pure horror I suddenly found myself lusting for the Russian’s blood, eager to see him struck down and destroyed! It dawned on me that this was not Hank Silberhutte but Armandra. I was now part of Armandra, influenced by her emotions, her desires, which were stronger than mine. And yet, paradoxically, human compassion was not absent in her; indeed it was strong. I could feel it like the pulse of a powerful heart. Ah, but that compassion was fighting a losing battle with her inhuman side, the incalculably alien and abhorrent cruelty inherited from her father. And Zchakow was her enemy.
Now I moved closer to the terrible drama being enacted down on the frozen plain. Out between the carved totems raced Boris Zchakow, his face twisted with hideous fear. He was, or had been, Ithaqua’s High Priest, with power of life and death over the Children of the Winds. He knew his master: he recognized his fate. And perhaps it was this knowledge of that ultimate fate of all of Ithaqua’s followers that robbed the Russian of his senses. When I saw what that fate was, I thought that I too might easily go mad confronted with it.
But even transfixed with horror, feeling empathy with the madman with every psychic nerve I possessed, nevertheless I also thrilled to the chase. For Armandra was Hank Silberhutte, and he was only a tiny part of Armandra, and both were lost now to a raging vortex of bloodlust!
I remembered her face as I had last seen it: a skull-like mask surmounted by living, flaming hair; lips drawn back from gleaming white teeth; the whole burning with hell’s own fires. And now I saw that face again, only her eyes were no longer closed.
Carmine pits blazed where only depths of submarine green had opened before, eyes that burned with the energies of alien suns, and somewhere, like subdued background music to a conversation, heard again a concerted gasping from two thousand throats.
The Hall of the Elders! Struggling still to free myself from Ar mandra’s magnet mind, I had almost made it back to that great cave deep in the bowels of the plateau, only to be snatched back again to my mental vantage point above the Temple of Ithaqua.
In that same instant, as if my mind were not already more than sufficiently whirling, I sensed that something was different, wrong—terribly wrong! I was no longer merely a part of the Woman of the Winds but of something far greater, something utterly alien.
Ithaqua-Armandra-I brushed aside massive totems, smashing them like matchsticks, reached to snatch the gibbering lunatic from the frozen ground and hold him high aloft. He-we tossed him into the sky, limbs thrashing like a crippled bird, catching him before he could crash to earth.
Then we laughed, Ithaqua-Armandra and I—laughed in a maelstrom of mirth that I knew could only be subdued, could only end in an act of the cruelest horror.
I fought against the unholy glee that filled me, fought to be free of its hold as it moved toward livid, lunatic rage. But I might as well have tried to beat down the winds with my bare fists. And Armandra fought too, bravely, but uselessly, as the human side of her nature strove harder than ever to turn her back from her monstrous sire’s dread attraction.
Physically I was Hank Silberhutte, a man sitting between his sister and a friend in the Hall of the Elders; mentally I was a telepathic observer, an unseen intruder, a part of Armandra’s psyche. But since she in turn had been drawn into the Ithaqua id, then I was also part of Him. Part of the ultimate horror He had planned for Boris Zchakow.
The Wind-Walker. Armandra and I stared through avid carmine orbs, shrinking ocean depths of green, flinching blue slits, as he-she-we lifted Zchakow up to his-her-my face, where he screamed and frothed as Ithaqua-Armandra-I scrutinized him minutely.
Then, in another instant, it was over. We threw back our hideous head and lifted the shrieking figure of the mad, wildly kicking Russian up, up into the air. A sudden moan of horror, rising to rival the mournfully moaning wind, came up from the assembled thousands of Ithaqua’s people, held captive audience. But no, they could not watch, they had seen this before. To a man they turned and fled, even those six lesser priests whose accusations had brought Zchakow to this—to the very gates of hell! Yes, the gates of hell, in the shape of Ithaqua’s eyes—into one of which he-she-I now dropped the wriggling form of the mad Russian!
A bubbling scream, shrill and rising, cut off in a shower of carmine sparks that burst upwards from the flickering rim of that seething crater eye like lava bombs from a volcano—and Zchakow was gone.
And I had felt something. Something which I cannot, must not attempt to describe in detail, except to say that perhaps it was an overflow of Ithaqua’s hideous satisfaction …
Now for a moment the Wind-Walker grimly surveyed the fleeing hordes of his people, then turned to stride up a staircase of air back to his position at the summit of the pyramid altar. There he stood, arms akimbo, great feet gripping the sides of the ice mountain, and as his rage subsided I found myself freed of the tremendous attraction of his id. I began to withdraw, to retreat along with Armandra from the mental maw of the Wind-Walker.
—And at that very moment he saw us!
No, he saw her, only Armandra, for my own feeble essence was insignificant. I call it essence because I realize now that it was no simple mind-web that had enmeshed me, and therefore that I had not been trapped telepathically. After all, I had looked into Ithaqua’s mind before without any of this. But the power Armandra had which enabled her to visit and observe scenes afar was more than merely telepathic; it was more truly psychic, the essential power of the id itself. Her Ka had been part of her awesome father for a few brief moments of time, hers and mine too; and now, when we had almost managed to break free—
Quickly the scene of the monster atop his pyramid of ice shrank as I fled with Armandra back toward the plateau, and quickly Ithaqua turned his head to stare after us, realization growing in the flickering of his flaring eyes. He reached out bestial psychic arms after Armandra, again casting that net whose meshes she had managed to escape before he even knew she was there. Ah, but now he did know she was there, and again she was caught.
Armandra was caught and so was I, and it seemed as good a time as any to make my presence known, this time telepathically, as I had intended in the first place.
“Armandra!” I cried with my mind. “Fight him. You have to fight him. I’m here to help you. Together we can beat him!”
“What?” Armandra’s mind reached out unbelievingly to mine. “Who is it that offers aid, and how did—” but that was all.
At last Ithaqua had seen me too, but too late. Something that seethed like acid touched my mind, touched Armandra too, then burned through to the Being of Ithaqua himself. He staggered atop his pyramid. He snatched back those greedily reaching mental and physical arms of his and slamme
d down the shutters of his alien id, his psyche, his mind, cutting us free of him. No, cutting himself free of us! We fled hack to our bodies in the Hall of the Elders.
I was stretched out full length on the stone floor. Tracy and Jimmy were trying to get me to my feet. I shook my head and stood up, noting that the chamber was now empty of all but a group of magnificently robed old men, my own party, Oontawa, and—
I started forward when I saw Armandra being helped down the dais steps by Oontawa. The Indian girl’s eyes flashed a warning, saying that this was not the time to approach the Woman of the Winds. But perhaps she was wrong.
Armandra’s beautiful face was drawn, strained. As she passed close to me she held up a trembling hand and turned my way. “What is your name, man of the Motherworld?”
“Hank,” I told her. “Hank Silberhutte.”
“And it was you that—?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
She leaned toward me, searching my face. “At the end there—what was it that came to sting my mind, burning Ithaqua and making him release me?”
“Was it this?” Tracy asked, holding up one of the five-pointed star-stones from her neck, where the fur of her jacket had kept it and its twin hidden. “When you cried out, Hank, when you shouted to Armandra that she must fight her father, I sort of instinctively held the stone up before your eyes. Then you leaped up and fell to the floor, and Armandra almost toppled from her throne.”
Tracy stopped talking, gazed nervously about as the elders all around her stepped quickly back, away from the star-stone sigil, and I stepped back with them. Armandra’s eyes grew huge and round. She pointed a trembling hand at the powerful symbol of old gods spinning at the end of the chain Tracy held. Then she fell back weakly, leaning on Oontawa.
