Spawn of the Winds

by Brian Lumley

  “Go back to the balcony,” I told her. “I’ll meet you these. I want to see how things are going.”

  “Things seem to be going well for us indeed. But war is—terrible. The only thing in it that gives me pleasure is the thought of my father at this very moment. He must be beside himself with rage! I will go now to the balcony. Hank?”

  “yes?”

  “Take care.”

  Two thirds of the way to my destination the sounds of a chase reached me. I slowed to a halt and as I stood there trying to control my breathing and listening in the light of many flickering flambeaux, it soon became apparent that the sounds of flight and pursuit were coming closer. In a few seconds more three wolf-warriors, clinging to the sides of one great wolf, burst from the mouth of a horizontal tunnel.

  They saw me. As they dropped from the wolf’s sides like ticks from an infested dog, one of them spoke to the beast. It sprang at me, its massive muzzle thrusting forward. I had a spear but no time to throw it. I leaned back on the shaft of the weapon until its hilt found a purchase against the uneven floor, bracing it against the wolf’s spring. The great beast impaled itself on the spear, knocking me aside and wrenching the weapon from my hands.

  While the wolf howled out its life in agony on the floor, the three warriors came at me in a rush. Weaponless, I threw myself up a flight of steps, turning to kick the fastest of my pursuers full in the face. He fell from the steps with a scream and crashed to the stone floor head first.

  I made to climb higher and one of the remaining warrior threw himself after me. He grabbed my foot, causing me to loose my balance and fall between him and his companion. On my back, I managed to catch the wrist of one of my attackers as he aimed his tomahawk at my face, and while I briefly wrestled with him on the steps I wondered why the other man made no attempt to help his colleague.

  Then as finally I overcame my attacker and throttled him with the haft of his own weapon, I saw why his friend had not helped him. The last of the three invaders was tottering down the steps, uselessly tugging at a spear that transfixed him. A second flashing spear pierced him as I watched, hurling him from the steps.

  Then two of the plateau’s guardsmen hurried up to me while five more positioned themselves at the mouths of the gallery’s tunnels. “Are you all right, Lord?” one of my rescuers, a strapping young Viking, asked as I climbed to my feet.

  “My thanks for your timely intervention,” I answered. “Yes, I’m unhurt. But how goes it now? How many more of Northan’s warriors lurk in the plateau’s caves and tunnels?”

  “Perhaps a dozen of them,” he answered, “but then, too, will soon be hunted down.”

  “And their wolves?”

  “Few remain, Lord.”

  This man seemed well informed; he had obviously been in a position to follow the course of events closely. “What about the plateau’s losses?”

  “The snow-ships and their crews are lost.”

  “I know,” I answered. “I saw it. They were brave men.”

  “Within the plateau, when the first wolf-warriors found a way in, we lost some men and bears. A man for a man, a bear for two wolves, perhaps. Now that they can no longer get in—”

  “I have no time now for talk,” I cut him off, “but you have made my mind easier. Do not stop, but keep on searching the wolf-warriors out. Tell any others of the plateau’s men you may meet the same thing. Now I go to Armandra.”

  And as I continued on my way, as if invoked by my mentioning her name, Armandra’s mental voice came to me again: “I am at the balcony, Hank. Is anything wrong?”

  “A bit of a scuffle,” I answered. “Don’t worry, nothing came of it.”

  “The wolf-warrior hordes have pulled back from the foot of the plateau,” she informed me, “out of the way of the blazing oil. But it seems to me that Ithaqua’s priests are up to some trickery.”

  “I’ll be with you in a minute or so,” I said, entering the final gallery and crossing it to the tunnel with the lightning-flash symbol. And there I was brought up short in sheerest shock and terror. Terror not for myself, for Armandra. There, sprawled in attitudes of grisly death, lay three of my woman’s guardsmen—a bear, too, its spilled entrails still steaming—and the bodies of four wolf-warriors and a wolf.

  Tired as I was from my race against gravity and time, my heels grew wings as I threw myself down the perimeter corridor and finally turned into the jutting balcony with its widely spaced bars. And there, his back to me, tomahawk raised to deliver a stunning blow, an Indian in the matted apparel of a wolf-warrior furtively crouched.

  Beyond him, ignorant of his presence, Armandra stood at the bars, staring down at the plain where the Children of the Winds milled in confusion and frustration; but as I entered in a rush they both turned. She saw him even as he saw me, and as he leaped to meet me she cried out, “No!”

  His reactions were quick and I was tired. His weapon caught me a glancing blow on the head that sent me dazed to my knees. Up went his tomahawk again and his wild cry was one of certain victory—cut short in strangled amazement!

  He was whirled off his feet, thrust aloft and spreadeagled in midair by centrifugal force as his body spun ever faster in mad currents of air. The suddenly howling wind that filled the balcony snatched at my hair, hurled me aside, slammed the shrieking wolf-warrior time and again against the uneven surface of the ceiling, finally shot him headlong, with a snapping of bones, out through the bars and away into empty abysses of icy air.

  And slowly the sentient hair fell back upon her head and her blazing crimson eyes dulled as Armandra ran to me sobbing, a woman once more, where only seconds earlier an elemental of the air had commanded familiar winds!

  I held her tight and for the moment there was no war in progress, no shadow over Borea. Then I became angry.

  “Where are the rest of your guardsmen? I saw only three of them, all dead, back along the perimeter tunnel—what of the rest?”

  “Three of my men, dead?”

  “They died to stop this man and his brothers reaching you—and they almost died in vain.”

  “I sent the others away,” she admitted, leading me over to the bars of the balcony. “They wanted to join in the fighting and I felt capable of fending for my—”

  “Oh, did you?” I cut her off. “And if I had not come along when I did?”

  “But you did come, Hank. Now come, we have no time for quarreling. Look down there. What do you make of that?”

  I took hold of the bars and looked out. The wolf-warrior army had pulled back to a distance of about one hundred and fifty yards from the foot of the plateau. There against the white of the plain they formed a deep dark band that stretched away and around the curving protective walls of rock to both sides. Between them and the fortified tunnels and keeps an ocean of fire, its warmth reaching up to me even at this height, blazed and roared. At first I could not see what was causing Armandra’s concern, then I saw that the wolf-warriors were opening up to leave clear paths through their ranks from the rear to the front. They were making way for something. But what?

  “My father’s so-called ‘priests,’ see?” Armandra said, pointing. “There, at the rear of the army. And now I know what they are about.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen them cavorting like that before,” I agreed. “Then they were calling up those tornadoes of theirs, working their devilish magic through your father.”

  “That is exactly what they are doing now,” she said. “See? And once they have called up their snow-devils they will throw them into the fire and smother it. And then—”

  “Then?”

  She turned to look at me with wide, unflinching eyes. “Then they will hurl those whirligigs at the tunnel entrances, the keep gates. They will drive them deep into the plateau and the wolf-warriors will follow behind!”

  “Armandra, I—”

  “I have promised not to fight my father, Hank, but those—creatures of his, his ‘priests’—they must be stopped!”

 
“If you interfere, it may draw Ithaqua into the battle.”

  “And if I don’t, the plateau is lost anyway.”

  Down below six spinning tops had appeared, each with its own capering master behind it, urging it on. Six alien whirlwinds that grew up rapidly out of the frozen plain and moved threateningly forward, roaring along the paths cleared by the wolf-warriors, entering and obscuring in clouds of steam and smoke the field of blazing oil fires.

  Armandra was right and I knew it. In another moment Ithaqua’s priests would hurl those spinning pillars directly at the keeps and major tunnel entrances. They would wipe the tunnels clean of men and bears in seconds. The swinging engines that carried the star-stones might be safe enough, Ithaqua’s familiar winds and powers were restricted by his own limitations. But not all of the tunnels were so well protected, and only the actual gates of the keeps carried those symbols of Eld. To simply allow these priests of the Wind-Walker to use their tools of an alien science as they desired would be suicidal.

  “Armandra,” I told her, “do whatever must be done.”

  From beside me, so close that I felt her breath fanning my cheek as she spoke, and in a tone that called up visions of unknown star-voids, she said, “It is already begun!”

  I glanced at her and felt the hair of my neck prickle at the sight of that strange pink flush that spread outward from the closed eyes to fill her pale face. I stepped quickly back as her hair began to rise up in undulating coils above her head and the white fur smock she wore stirred with weird life.

  Gone again was the woman I loved, gone in a matter of seconds to make way for this child of Ithaqua, whose arms now reached up to beckon to the suddenly agitated sky. High above, gray clouds turned black, then blue, boiling in an instant and flashing with trapped energies. A continuous rumbling filled the pregnant air.

  The fine bones of Armandra’s head and neck showed redly through luminous flesh, a grinning skull of death. Her eyes opened; beams of blinding ruby radiance shot forth to the pulsating sky; she made stabbing motions with her hands, which were curved downward now like the heads of swans.

  And then I was sent staggering back from the bars, away from the vicious rain of red lightnings that lashed down in staccato precision from the sky to the plain below! I did not see those deadly white funnels destroyed—saw nothing of the carnage among the massed ranks of the wolf-warriors when, finished with the sundered tornadoes, Armandra simply rained her devastating energies down upon flesh and blood. I was told of it later, and then I was glad I had not seen it.

  No, I saw nothing; nor, deafened from the first hellish salvo, did I hear anything, for which I am also grateful. And even when it was done, several minutes elapsed before I was able to perceive anything but the scarlet blaze burning on my retinas and the pounding of blood in my nearly ruptured eardrums.

  Armandra lay huddled beside the bars, sobbing and momentarily spent. Again her terrific anger had vented itself uncontrollable, and again the human side of her nature was betrayed. I went dazedly forward to comfort her but then, as my eyes inadvertently looked down upon the plain, I froze in awed disbelief. Where an army had massed in premature triumph, a demoralized rabble now moved in blind, crippled agony.

  Great black smoking craters littered the plain all along the front of the plateau, as if a squadron of bombers had unloaded their bomb bays there. Where the priests had capered to the rear, now a gutted trench lay straight as the furrow of a giant’s plow in the icy ground. And in the wake of Armandra’s inferno of lunatic lightning, at last there sprang up a mournful wind that caught up the billowing smoke and steam to lay it like a veil across the whole scene, as if to hide the horror there.

  Now, cradling the Woman of the Winds in my arms and rocking her, I heard drifting up to me a thousand amazed cries of utter disbelief and nameless horror from the survivors of that destroyed army. And rising above those cries came the lustful, reverberating battle cry of the plateau’s fighting men:

  “Sil-her-hut-te! Sil-ber-hut-te!”

  For a moment I cursed aloud, wildly and blasphemously. God, no! I would not have my name as a seal upon that—upon the carnage Armandra’s blind fury had wrought. But then I was amazed to see that even now the remaining wolf-warriors, who still far outnumbered the men of the plateau, were rallying to the sort of battle they could understand.

  And once more I felt my heart surge within me as out from the base of the plateau, from its tunnels and keeps, rushed the authors of that concerted battle cry, unleashed at last by Charlie Tacomah to earn their honor on a field of bloodied snow and ice!

  III

  War of the Winds

  (Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)

  No sooner was the battle joined than my attention was distracted from it by footfalls sounding in the perimeter tunnel. One of the guardsmen I had left with Jimmy and Tracy hurried into view. He gave a cry of relief when he found us unharmed; he had passed the bodies of his colleagues at the entrance to the tunnel.

  Now he composed himself, bowed first to Armandra and then turned to me. “Lord, your sister, and your friend have gone to the roof of the plateau to view the fighting. They bade me come and tell you.”

  I nodded. “And your partner—did he go with them?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Then you had better follow them. Stay with them until this is all over.”

  He bowed again to me and again to Armandra, then hurried back the way he had come.

  “If they wish to view the fighting,” Armandra said when he had gone, “there are few better places from which to do so than here.”

  “Perhaps they were seeking Whitey. The three of them have grown very close.”

  “Whitey,” she mused, “whose powers have deserted him. Is it a dark omen, I wonder?”

  “It’s a disadvantage, certainly, but I wouldn’t consider it a dark omen. On the contrary, things are going very well. See, despite the odds your people are fighting an inspired battle. They are making a shambles of Ithaqua’s army.”

  “They are our people, Hank, yours and mine. And they will be victorious because my father’s wolf-warriors are demoralized. I have crippled them.” She stared for a few seconds at the milling scene below, then lifted her eyes to the distant pyramid altar of ice and heterogeneous “trophies.” I followed her gaze as her eyes widened—and then we gasped in unison.

  The Wind-Walker was raging, swelling out; his arms were lifted in a threatening attitude; his carmine eyes were blazing in his bloating face. In another moment he had stepped from his altar to stride aloft, and he was coming straight for the plateau!

  “They have failed him,” Armandra gasped. “The Children of the Winds have failed him yet again. Now he will seek vengeance upon the plateau—and upon his own men!”

  “But how can he strike us?” I protested. “The plateau is safeguarded by the star-stones.”

  “Those star-stones of the Elder Gods!” she passionately cried. “I loathe and abhor the things and the gloom they cast over the plateau and its people.”

  “They are a symbol of benign power in the plateau,” I argued, “and without them all would long ago have been lost.”

  “A benign symbol, yes,” she answered, “like the crucifix in the Motherworld. Don’t you see, Hank, that all great symbols of power are horrific in their way?”

  At the time I didn’t give it a lot of thought, but now that I’ve thought about it I can see what she meant. Certainly the star-stone is benign to anyone not contaminated by Ithaqua or his hideous brothers of the Cthulhu Cycle. Of course the crucifix is a symbol of goodness, despite the fact that it is a model of a most terrible torture machine. The swastika too was an emblem of life, luck and power long before it became the outline of horror. What more innocuous than the hammer and sickle; tools of everyday life and labor?

  “But look,” she said, “perhaps you are right that my father is helpless to harm us. See, he hesitates.”

  High above his totem temple the Wind-Walker
hung motionless in the sky, his evil eyes glaring at the plateau. I knew that he saw—or felt—the power of the star-stones, those same stones which had held him so long impotent, and I knew that they repulsed him as surely as like magnetic poles repel each other.

  “What is he doing?” I asked, as he commenced upward sweeping motions with monstrously bloated arms.

  “He calls a wind,” she answered, frowning. “But to what purpose, for surely no energies of his devising may strike us now?”

  “Look!” I exclaimed. “Those dots on the plain, black dots rising into the air, what are they?”

  Rapidly the things I referred to climbed into the sky and were blown forward ahead of the Wind-Walker as he recommenced his striding toward the plateau, and a moment later I believed I knew what they were.

  “Kites!” Armandra cried, confirming my own opinion. “Kites shaped like bats that fly on my father’s breath. And they carry men.”

  “Man-carrying kites,” I gasped. “But that must mean that he intends to land them—”

  “On the roof,” she finished for me.

  Then her eyes went very wide. “Hank, I think it would have been better if Tracy and Jimmy had come here to us instead of going to the roof!”

  “Oh my God!” I whispered, instinctively turning from her, heading for the perimeter tunnel.

  She called out after me, “Hank, wait!”

  I came to a hesitant halt, half turned. “I have to get them off the roof, out of harm’s way.”

  “If you go up there,” she said breathlessly, “you will have to fight. See, already my father’s man-kites approach. And if you fight … .” She shook her head wildly, as if shaking off the dark shapes of nightmare. “I must not lose you now, man of Earth.”

  “My sister and my friends, Armandra,” I quickly answered. “I have no choice. I could never live with myself.” Then, wasting no more time, I ran from the balcony.

  In my mind, before I could shut her out, she cried after me: “Hank! Hank! Our bargain!”

  I knew that from the gallery at the far end of the perimeter corridor a long flight of steps wound their way up to the roof; it should take me no more than two or three minutes to get up there. I raced along the corridor, started up the winding steps, taking them in threes, and as I went I gave credit to the evil intelligence that was Ithaqua.