by Brian Lumley
It was during a session in the exercise cave that Jimmy Franklin brought me word of the trouble, of Northan’s treachery. Since his humiliation the warlord had slowly but surely been losing his authority with the chiefs and headmen, and now only a few of his closest friends and lieutenants remained faithful to him.
I knew of this and had already put it to Armandra that perhaps I should formally replace Northan as head of the plateau’s warrior army; should become warlord in his stead. She would not hear of it. She pointed out that if Northan were deposed, stripped of rank and military power completely, this would only make him hate me more, if that were possible. Also, it would leave him free to create a variety of mischiefs on the plateau’s political side. There were still those among his few cronies who, having been elevated to positions of power by the warlord, would assist him in fresh ambitions rather than risk falling into obscurity along with him. He could also compromise certain of the elders, who feared for their own positions. Even in this alien world, politics were by no means free of corruption; though from what I knew of it, Northan was at the root of everything that was bad. Well, Armandra had stressed the fact that he was ambitious …
I had just landed two spears in the bull from a distance of about twenty-five yards when Jimmy Franklin ran into the vast, high-ceilinged exercise cave. There was blood on the right shoulder of his fur jacket; blood dripped from a deep gash in his left thigh.
“Hank—Tracy’s hurt!” he gasped it out.
“Hurt? How badly?” I grabbed him by his good shoulder, searching his face anxiously. “What do you mean, she’s hurt? Who hurt her? How is she hurt?”
“Northan,” Jimmy panted, “he’s defecting! He sent three of his men after Tracy. They tried to take her while she was sleeping but she woke up in time to avoid whatever they had planned. She got one of them with a star-stone. Hit him in the ear with it. Damn near burned half his head away! One of the others clubbed her unconscious. Then they split up, one heading one way to lead off any pursuit, the other making for the harbor area, where Northan’s ship is tied up. He tried to take Tracy with him but it didn’t work out. Her star-stones are gone, though.”
“You’re not making sense,” I spoke urgently, firing questions at him. “What do you mean, he tried to take Tracy with him? Where is she now?”
“She’s all right, Hank. As luck would have it I was on my way to see her. I saw this Eskimo with her across his shoulder. That was in the perimeter tunnel leading away from our rooms. When I challenged the Eskimo he had to put her down to deal with me. We had a bit of a fight and I got a few cuts,” he indicated his shoulder and leg wounds, “but the noise attracted a couple of Indian friends of ours. One of them was Charlie Tacomah. His room is somewhere above ours. Well, the Eskimo told Charlie that he was only carrying out Armandra’s orders, but I said he must be lying. He made a run for it and Charlie brought him down with a spear. Apparently Charlie and his friend were on their way here to work out with you.”
“Right. I had arranged to meet them here. But where is Tracy now? And what about the third member of the group? And where’s that dog Northan?” My voice trembled with fury.
“Charlie and his friend are taking her to Armandra,. They’re raising the alarm along the way. Your other questions—” he spread his arms and shrugged. “You know as much as I do now.”
Then he swayed and half fell against me. I steadied him and noticed for the first time how much blood he was losing.
I caught him as he fell and carried him to a rest couch, telling the two astonished weapon masters, “Look after him, get him attended to immediately. I’m going to Armandra.”
On my way out I turned to Jimmy. “Thanks for everything, Jimmy,” I said. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I think so.”
“I reckon that Tracy’s just about got to accept you as her champion now, eh?”
He managed a grin. “She was going to anyway,” he said.
Racing through the plateau’s labyrinthine ways, I could see that Charlie Tacomah had been busy alerting the entire place. Indians wearing the insignia of guardsmen were hurrying to positions at the base of the outer wall; powerfully built, squat Eskimo warriors were padding along the corridors leading to the snow-ship harbors; the entire plateau was alive to emergency measures that had been in force for hundreds of years. There was no aimless milling about; these men were moving in military precision, reacting to whatever dangers the plateau now faced, hurrying to their battle stations.
“Hank!” Armandra’s urgent thought came to me. “Tracy is with me now and she has just regained consciousness. Charlie Tacomah has told me what he knows. Are you coming to us? Do you know what has happened?”
“I’m almost with you now,” I told her, “and I know what happened. That dog Northan; has he really defected?”
“Yes, with two dozen of his officers and men. His snow-ship is no longer at its mooring. They are fleeing now across the white waste, heading for Ithaqua’s altar.”
I let my disgust at the thought of the traitor flare in my mind. “He tried to take my sister with him, as an offering to Ithaqua, no doubt. Can we get after him? I want to be aboard the first snow-ship out of the plateau.”
“You cannot, Hank,” she answered as I raced by her Eskimo guardsmen and their bears. “We are making no pursuit. My father; Ithaqua, is back on Borea; Northan. was waiting for him to return. He chose the hour of his treachery well.”
“Then the dog gets clean away?”
“Not so,” ominous undertones showed in her thought patterns. “I am sending a wind after him even now!”
I ducked through the curtains and entered Armandra’s chambers. Oontawa. was tending to Tracy who lay propped up on a couch. My sister had a bump like a hen’s egg on the side of her head. Armandra, eyes closed and face grim, head tilted back, held out her arms before her while her hands described forward, stirring motions.
“Armandra,” I began, stepping forward. But at that precise moment her entire face started to glow bloodred while the hair of her head rose up to undulate above her as in an updraft of air. A wind blew out from her, thrusting me aside as it raced across the room to set the curtains flapping violently. A moment more this phenomenon continued, then Armandra’s hair settled down again, the flush left her face. the wind ceased. She lowered her hands and opened her eyes.
“Come,” she said. “We will see what games my familiars can play with Northan’s snow-ship.”
“Wait,” I answered, hurrying through into a second room, Armandra’s resting chamber, to fetch my binoculars. Then we went out, back along the corridor to the viewing balcony with its widely spaced bars. Tracy and Oontawa followed us. I put an arm around my sister and asked her if she was all right.
“Yes. A bit dizzy, that’s all. That was quite a bump I took.”
“Not nearly as painful as the bump I’ll deal the ex-warlord when next we meet!” I promised her.
“If you meet him again Hank,” Armandra grimly put in. We had arrived at the balcony and now she pointed out through the bars. “See …”
Through the binoculars I saw the snow-ship fleeing, already two-thirds of the way to the circle of totems with its central altar. Atop that altar I could see the Snow Thing, and he too was watching the snowship’s progress. At that distance the monster’s outline was indistinct, but the flaring of his eyes was clearly discernible. I turned my binoculars back to the snow-ship, seeing that the vessel fairly leaped across the snow.
“See,” Armandra said again, “the winds are answering my father’s call and Northan’s ship flies on their wings. But I, too, have sent a wind, one to vex the warlord’s flight!”
Now, building up behind the snow-ship, growing out of the frozen white surface of the plain, the gray funnel of a tornado raised itself up, twisting and bending furiously as it rushed down upon the fleeing vessel. Closer to the ship the pursuing tornado roared, the howling of its passage coming back to us like the mad wail of some vengeful god.<
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Then Armandra cried out in anger and frustration, “Ah! My father is curious … he joins the play … Ithaqua displays his power!”
And sure enough the figure atop the pyramid altar had held up a massive hand to the onrushing tornado, and with a sweeping contemptuous gesture he brushed it aside!
The tornado, towering high and threateningly over the snow-ship, suddenly swerved aside and teetered crazily, blindly in the wrong direction. The snow-ship sped on. Armandra began to close her eyes, set her jaw stubbornly and raised her arms—then shook her head and let her arms fall.
“What is the use?” she asked. “He is not to be denied his mastery of the winds.”
Out over the white waste the tornado came to an abrupt halt. Ithaqua, from atop his pyramid altar, dismissed it with a wave of his hand. It collapsed in upon itself and spilled to the ground as a fine haze of snow and ice particles.
“But won’t Ithaqua kill Northan and his crew?” I asked.
“No, Hank” Armandra turned to me. “Northan was the plateau warlord; he knows all of the secret ways, the many tunnels that lead from the base of the plateau to its halls, barracks, recreation caves and dwellings. He will be a mine of information to Ithaqua’s priests and soldiers. When they are ready, he will lead them against the plateau, have no doubt of it.”
“Will he try to come back for you?”
She shook her head grimly. “No, my father would never allow it. He would destroy everyone on Borea first. Ithaqua is a lonely creature, Hank. He desires a friend to walk the winds between the worlds with him.” For a moment her face glowed with a strange passion. “And sometimes,” her voice was suddenly far away, “sometimes—”
Without knowing why I felt a strange chill grip me. Instinctively I focused upon the horror atop the distant altar. His eyes were burning brightly, staring directly at the plateau. I knew then that he saw us, if not physically, certainly with his mind.
“Stop that!” I cried, taking the Woman of the Winds into my arms and kissing her tenderly. “Stop it. You’re not his, Armandra, you’re mine!”
She clung to me gratefully, drank of my strength, and an anger blew up in me that led almost to disaster. Without thinking I put her behind me, gripped the wide bars of the balcony with both hands and stared straight out at Ithaqua.
I screamed at him with my mind. “You great, loathsome, alien blasphemy! When the day of reckoning comes, may the Elder Gods burn out your black heart and float your soul on a sea of fire, to fry until the end of time! Until then, know this. Your daughter is mine, mine! and neither man nor monster can ever take her from me!”
The defiant gesture of a spoiled child! But not satisfied with that, I also conjured up a mental picture of a star-stone of ancient Mnar and, hurling that at him too, added intended injury to the insult.
Immediately, violently, the thing at the apex of the ice altar reacted. First I sensed his mental derision at the star-stone symbol, as if he already knew that we were no longer in possession of the stones; then came his anger as he lifted his arms up to the gray skies and expanded, bulging upward and outward until he towered fully a hundred feet into the air; and finally he stepped aloft to walk up the wind, reaching into the suddenly boiling sky to draw down weirdly flickering lightnings that played in his hands. For a moment longer he held that inferno of electrical energies in his hands.
“Back!” came Armandra’s warning cry. “Back from the bars!” She tugged at my arm until I followed her at a run, pushing Tracy and Oontawa in front of me. We had covered only a few paces when a weird, hissing blue light filled the balcony and corridor. Then the hissing became a deafening crackling as a large hand picked me up and hurled me headlong. The two girls flew with me—but not Armandra.
From where I dazedly lay I looked back at the Woman of the Winds, and at the balcony beyond her. Her hands were held up against the blue light that flickered angrily about her but did her no harm. Lightning played about the bars of the balcony, heating them a glowing white and running in rivers of sparks all about the floor, ceiling and walls. Tongues of flickering fire reached hungrily after us, but were held back by Armandra’s power. For a moment longer the scene seared itself upon my mind, then the blaze of electrical fire died away.
In my mind’s eyes I pictured a horrific figure striding in icy air over Borea, throwing back his head to roar with glee; then that vision too was gone and I was left knowing that Ithaqua had sent it.
Armandra came to me as I got to my feet. Chidingly she said, “That was no way to talk to the Wind-Walker.” Then she hugged and kissed me, glad that no harm had come to me. Obviously she had heard what I said to her monstrous father, and it seemed she was no longer so vehemently opposed to someone’s laying claim to her, provided I was that someone.
She kissed me again and with her kisses came a great yearning inside me. She sensed it and held me away at arm’s length, turning her head confusedly to where the women had now regained their feet. She disengaged herself, asking them if they were hurt in any way. They were not.
Then watching me out of the corner of her eye, in a very low tone she said, “You must be very careful, Hank, how you taunt or tempt a being with the power to hurl the very lightning of the storm against you. Be it Ithaqua or Ithaqua’s daughter!”
The yearning in me doubled as I saw again the mischief floating to the surface of her ocean eyes. She quickly sobered. “Come,” she said. “We will return to my rooms and wait for news.”
II
How Many Tomorrows?
(Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
News was not long in coming. An Eskimo guard soon arrived and, with much bowing and scraping, was let into Armandra’s chambers. “Good, good,” she said, drawing him upright and cutting short the formalities. “What news?”
She listened intently to his rather slow, guttural speech—words meaningless to me, for where she had spoken in English he answered in Eskimo—until he was done, then dismissed him. In all of his short report I had caught only one phrase, a phrase repeated in something akin to awe and horror: “The Madness!”
As the guardsman bowed himself out Armandra turned to me. “They have caught the third traitor, the one who took Tracy’s star-stones. He was hiding in the forbidden tunnel.”
“In the tunnel?” I repeated. “Hiding there?” I frowned, shaking my head. “But how could any man of the plateau ever manage to steal Tracy’s star-stones in the first place? And I thought no man could ever venture into the forbidden tunnel, that its emanations were impenetrable. Now you tell me this man was hiding there!”
“Perhaps not hiding then,” she looked at me pointedly. “No, he was-—trapped—there. I do not care to think about it. They had him cornered and he had only one way to go. They caught him when he came out. As for the star-stones, that was simple. He caught them up at the end of his spear, lifted them by their chains, kept them away, from him so they could not harm him
“Even so,” I said, “he must be a very brave man. Brave and misguided.”
“A frightened man,” she answered. “Frightened of Northan.”
“I want to see him, question him,” I told her. “I want to discover Northan’s intentions, what he’s up to.”
She shook her head. “You’ll get no sense out of him, Hank. The history of the plateau tells that once, hundreds of years ago, offenders against the common good, thieves and the like, were driven into the forbidden tunnel as punishment for their crimes. The records all show the same end result. It will be the same now; this underling of Northan’s, he will not be coherent.”
The way she said the last word found me looking at her inquiringly, but she avoided my eyes. She did not like to talk about that enigmatic tunnel in the bowels of the plateau, or of its effect upon men.
Tracy spoke up. “And have they got the star-stones backs”
Armandra shook her head; “No, he must have left them behind him, in that place. If so, they will remain there forever.”
At that point there came again the sound of padding feet from the corridor. Oontawa went out and returned after a few seconds. “The man is being held in the council hall,” she told her mistress. “The elders have tried to question him, in vain. Now they ask what you want done with him.
Armandra began to answer, then checked herself. She turned to me. For a long moment she looked at me. Finally she said to Oontawa: “That is not a matter for me. Better you speak to the warlord.”
For a moment Oontawa looked puzzled, but then understanding dawned in her eyes. Of course. Now there was a new warlord! Speaking to me, the girl repeated, “The elders are holding the man; has the warlord any instructions?”
“Ill come to see him,” I told her, “and I’ll talk to the elders, too. Send word that I’ll be there shortly.”
Oontawa left immediately and Tracy went with her. My sister knew that Jimmy Franklin had been hurt and wanted to go to him. Finally I was alone with Armandra. Now she relaxed a little, became a woman again and not a goddess.
“Big trouble is coming, Armandra.” I said. “We don’t need a hunchman to tell us that much.”
“I know,” she answered. “And I think—I think that I am frightened, Hank. Things are all coming to a head too soon. too quickly. Troubles pile up all about us. The plateau’s problems seem about to engulf us all. And now you have accepted a task that might daunt any man. You are the plateau’s new warlord, and at a time such as this!”
“This was the way it had to happen,” I answered. “In a way I’m glad. It’s my chance to prove myself once and for all—to the People of the Plateau and to you. You know what that means to me.” I forced myself to grin, making light of things, kissing her forehead while she clung to me.
Her voice was molten gold when she said, “We may not have much time, Hank. That is what frightens me most.”
“We’ve wasted a lot of time,” I answered, fires melting my iced blood. She pushed me away, her face suddenly flushed.
