by Brian Lumley
He had known the weakest spot in the plateau’s defenses all along; the roof, where only a handful of men, few of them warriors, kept wary watch over the white wastes. Well, I was sure of one thing at least. No matter how many of his kites Ithaqua hurled at the plateau, no matter how heavy the odds, those watchers on the roof would stand and fight to the end.
Only four passageways in all led up to the flat, ruggedly stark roof, four orifices opening into the gray light of Borea. All four were spaced out across the roof’s surface, the only accesses. What if Tracy and the others had been cut off from them? These and similar thoughts ran circles in my mind as I flew up the last few steps. In fact I must have taken well under the three minutes I had allowed myself, but it seemed as though half an hour had elapsed before finally I stood panting out in the open air, where the wind rushed over the slippery stone in furious blasts.
I paused briefly to assess the situation and get my breath back. Apart from the presence of a number of kite-men, there was something very wrong with the sight that now met my eves—something which was soon to become plain to me.
I picked out the figures of Tracy, Jimmy and Whitey almost immediately; they were fighting with those of Ithaqua’s raiders who had already effected landings. With them were about a dozen watchmen, also caught unaware by the aerial attack.
They were not together in a group. Tracy was the most distant from me; about eighty yards separated us. She held up one of her star-stones before her, a threat to any of the Wind-Walker’s men who might attempt to get too close. She had found this stone still on its chain where Northan’s dupe had left it. The other one was lost, gone forever in some dark crevice in the forbidden tunnel. Tracy had not yet seen me. She appeared to be trying to make her way to Jimmy. I called out to her but my shout was lost in a frenzy of winds.
Jimmy was at the forward edge of the plateau, where waist-high battlements faced out across the white waste. As I saw him he was in the act of spearing one of the raiders who was just attempting a landing. Having killed his man with a single thrust, Jimmy toppled him from the roof along with his kite.
Whitey was the closest to me. Flanked by two of the watchmen, who fought equally furiously, he was battling like a madman to hold off a handful of the invaders. There were fifteen of us in all, against about the same number of kite-men, but more of the latter were landing all the time. One thing was heartening at least; for the moment Ithaqua stood away.
Dark and bloated against the gray skies, ten times taller than a tall man, the monster trod the air half a mile from the plateau’s roof almost as a swimmer treads water. With his eyes blazing avidly and his arms half reaching forward, he formed the most fantastic part of the whole scene. I knew that he noted every detail of the situation, but that as eager as he was to destroy the plateau and steal back his daughter—and take Tracy, too, for his monstrous purposes—still the star-stones held him at bay.
The star-stones! Now I knew what had bothered me about the scene on the roof. Ithaqua’s raiders were not trying to break into the plateau, they were there simply to clear the way for their master. He had sent them to destroy the great protective star that my sister had traced with star-stones on the plateau’s roof! With that out of the way. Ithaqua would be able to completely command the roof and land as many of his aerial warriors upon it as he could muster.
And now, out there on the wings of the wind, I could see that there were hundreds of the kites. The brilliance of the Wind-Walker’s stratagem was obvious. Ninety-five percent of the plateau’s soldiery were engaged in the battle down below, and the rest of the able-bodied men were at their posts deep down in the rocky labyrinths. Reinforcements would doubtless come, but would they be in time?
But no, my reasoning was way off—I must be wrong! The Children of the Winds couldn’t possibly have been sent to get rid of the star-stones. They were as helpless against them as Ithaqua himself!
All of these things rushed through my mind as I surveyed the roof. Then I started to run toward Tracy, slowing for a second to snatch up a tomahawk from beside a dead kite man. As I went I called her name again, and this time she heard me. That was a wonder, for above the howling of the wind, at precisely the same time that I called her. there came a shrieking like none I had ever heard before. It was the sound of a soul in torment, a banshee howling that froze my unnaturally chilled blood even further, causing me to seek, wide-eyed for its source.
And when I found that source I knew that I had been right after all, and that the fear Ithaqua inspired in his “children” was absolute.
One of the kite-men was tearing at a star-stone where it was fastened to the battlements. The flesh was visibly blackening on his hands as he scrabbled frenziedly to tear the stone loose. His screams did not stop for a single moment but grew shriller still as his fingers began to fall off. Finally he tore the stone free and clutched it to his chest, then gave the most hideous scream of all as black smoke poured out from him. He tottered for a moment, then, as the stench of his burning reached me on the rushing wind, crumbled like rotting wood and fell from the battlements.
Suddenly the wind increased, blowing especially from that region of the roof now unprotected by the stone sigil of Eld, and at the same time I noted shrieks of mortal terror and horror springing up from four other distinct points all around the rim of the plateau. Heedless of their fatal torment—which must have been the ultimate in physical and psychic agony Ithaqua’s aerial suicide squadron was proceeding with its task of clearing the roof. And as the star-stones were removed one by one, the Wind-Walker himself came closer, suspended in the sky.
I had not quite reached Tracy when two kite-men, freshly free of the harnesses of their aircraft, sprang at her. Their weapons were still in their belts and it was plain that their task was to render her helpless and somehow bear her away. I threw my weapon just as one of them went to strike her with his clenched fist. As she ducked his blow and swung her star-stone on its chain full in his face, my tomahawk bit into his side. It is possible that he didn’t even feel the bite of my weapon for the agony of Tracy’s. His face caved in, black and ruined, and he went down as though a truck had hit him. The second man turned toward me but was thrown down by the force of my rush. As he started to rise I kicked him in the throat as hard as I could. Tracy freed her star-stone from the mess of the first man’s face, and as I backed hastily away she began to be sick.
Looking about me I saw that almost all of the invaders had been dealt with, killed and swept from the roof as they had gone about their task of clearing its surface of star-stones. Nevertheless, they seemed to have successfully completed that task. There came a weird, shrill whistling, emanating from the hundreds of batlike shapes that still hung in the sky between the plateau’s roof and the swollen figure of the Snow-Thing. The kites were soaring forward, the wind whistling its demon song in their frames of poles and stretched hides. Now Ithaqua could take possession of the roof, land the rest of his airborne forces and invade the plateau.
“Tracy!” I yelled in her ear. “Get below. I want everyone off the roof. We’ll be outnumbered in no time at all and Ithaqua himself may even make a landing here.” I pointed her in the direction of the tunnel I had used and gave her a gentle push. She started to slip and stumble away from me, barely keeping her feet as the wind’s strength rapidly increased.
Having seen her on her way to safety, I signalled to Whitey, Jimmy and the remaining handful of watchmen that they, too, should get below where they could better defend the four entrances. Seeing that they understood my signals, I turned to follow Tracy and was greeted by a sight that shocked me rigid. She had fallen and was sliding in the wind across the icy surface of the roof. Ithaqua had seen her and was moving after her!
He came forward and poised himself above the rim of the plateau, his vast feet seeking purchase on the battlements. From side to side his great bloated head went, slitted star-eyes taking in every detail of what was happening. They found Tracy again and stayed upon her where
she finally slid to a halt against a projection of rock. Then the Wind-Walker stepped down onto the roof and reached for her with a massive hand. Immediately she held up her star-stone against his approach …
Slits of burning evil opened huge and round as the horror stepped hastily back and lifted into the air. Rage filled every line of his nightmare form. He trembled with an inner fury that swelled him out more hugely yet, completely distorting his already grotesque proportions, then he abruptly thrust up a hand to the clouds that raced across the sky.
I knew instinctively what he was about. While his alien powers could not work directly against my sister as long as she held that star-stone, he could use them indirectly in a purely physical attack, and now he would simply kill her out of hand and be done with it. I tried to go after her, only to be blown off my feet and sent slithering helplessly across the roof. Fighting to find a hold on the slippery surface, I managed to keep my eyes on Ithaqua and saw him pluck a great ball of ice out of the clouds. I saw his face convulse insanely as he hurled his missile at the roof.
I thought then that Tracy was done for, but I had reckoned without Jimmy Franklin. Tracy was my sister, yes, and I loved her, but Jimmy’s love was that of a man for his woman. He fought his way to where she crouched against the outcrop of rock, and dragged her behind it at the very instant that Ithaqua released his ice-bomb. Now that bomb burst like a massive grenade where she had crouched a second earlier, but in the protective lee of the great rock, she and Jimmy were unharmed.
Since she was no longer visible to Ithaqua after the flying shards of ice dispersed, perhaps the monster thought her dead. I think it must have been so, for apparently without another thought for her he turned his attention to me.
And if horror can grin, now this monster grinned; if evil can express delight, Ithaqua was delighted.
Sliding helplessly before the howling wind, flat on my back and scrabbling at the icy stone beneath me, I felt his mind probe mine. Before I could shut him out he said something to me. showed me alien pictures, made me understand. It was no sort of telepathic transmission that I could ever hope to explain, not even to another telepath, and yet I understood its meaning:
“So, You are that man of Earth who dared set himself against me. That same one who hurls insults with his mind and threatens with powers of Eld. You are the one who would take the very seed of my being for your own, to make a mere mortal of her You are nothing, man of Earth, and nothing you shall remain.”
He reached one arm to the sky and pointed his other hand at me. I saw strange energies forming in the clouds, a flickering radiance that ran down his extended arm to his body and turned its barely manlike outline to an ever-changing display of crimson and golden traceries of light. In another instant that electrical nightmare would leap from his outstretched finger to me, and I would cease to be.
“Father!” There came a pure, bell-like resonance in my mind, a call which I heard even though it was not directed at me. “Ithaqua—you will not take what is mine!”
Unable to face the crackling holocaust that I knew was soon to come, I had closed my eyes. Now I opened them and lifted my head from the frozen stone surface. Of a number of things that were happening, the most important to me was that Ithaqua had partly turned away from me to face the forward rim of the plateau where now, floating slowly into view, the form of Armandra rose up. With her appearance the wind seemed abruptly to die away, to crouch down into itself and back off like a scolded dog.
“Armandra,” I said to her, reaching beyond the alien mask she wore to the sane and human side of her nature, “I thank you for my life—but not at the expense of your own!”
“Do not distract me, Hank. All is not lost, not yet, but I need my concentration.” To think that those mental tones of purest gold had come from the female horror that rode the wind above the rim of the plateau! Her hair was floating in fiery, undulating waves over her head; her face was a deathmask. In that skull-like face, carmine pits of hell blazed in supernatural fury to match her father’s own. She was tiny, compared to him, but her hatred and anger were great.
As she rose higher above the battlements, streams of guardsmen and warriors began to rush from the four exits. Pouring out onto the roof, they looked much fiercer than I ever remembered seeing them before, and I believed I knew why. One way or the other this was to be the final scene, and they knew it. They were here to lay down their lives for their princess, their world. At last they had been given an opportunity to fight, these men who had formed the rear parties, and they had arrived barely in time. Now great hordes of Ithaqua’s kite-men were landing all about the roof, freeing themselves from their harnesses, moving into battle positions.
While all this was happening, I was almost unable to believe that somehow I had been spared. I came back to life, and my heart began to beat a little more freely as I saw that those energies Ithaqua had almost hurled at me were dying away, that the traceries of fire no longer permeated his dark form. He had apparently forgotten all about me; now he held out his bloated arms to Armandra in an attitude which, despite his completely alien nature, was almost humanly imploring. In answer she raised one pale arm above her head and rotated her hand, as if to spin the sky upon her fingers. And indeed the clouds immediately above her began to turn with her hand.
Undaunted, Ithaqua stepped closer, his monstrous feet treading air as he narrowed the gap separating him from his daughter, But this was no gap of merely physical dimensions. It was unbridgeable in anything other than the crudest physical sense. She floated back away from him, growing with a scarlet flush, and faster yet her arm twirled above her head. Then, without warning, she lowered her hand to a forward, horizontal position and jabbed it viciously in her hideous father’s direction.
From the whirling clouds directly above her, lightning at once struck, branching into a blinding fork that speared at Ithaqua’s eyes. He never moved, stood unblinking and still as a hawk on the wind. Only those hellish orbs of his changed; they momentarily flared brighter as twin tongues of lightning were quenched in them. He had not even bothered to ward off Armandra’s initial attack; what is the blow of a child to a man full grown? Ah, but that first blow of hers had opened up floodgates of accumulated loathing.
Now she stabbed at her father again and again, her hand like the tongue of some venomous reptile, invoking powers I had once believed to belong to nature alone. Lightning flashed in an almost continuous stream from the clouds to Ithaqua’s form, filling him with blue and white fire. Through all of this he stood unharmed, but if she did not hurt him, certainly she angered him.
The imploring attitude he had seemed to adopt fell away and his massive body began to tremble in rage. One of the hands he held out to Armandra clenched and rose up threateningly, swept across to strike his own shoulder in a strangely human gesture of pride. The game was over, the “offer” was withdrawn—now the Wind-Walker demanded obedience! He might as well have asked it of the wide seas of Earth or the desert’s sands. She simply moved farther away and continued to rain down her lightnings, whose bolts became increasingly violent.
So much I saw before being drawn into the tide of renewed battle that washed across the roof. For with Armandra holding Ithaqua’s attention so completely, his aerial invaders were on their own against the men of the plateau, and where the latter were concerned, no quarter would be asked and none given. Hearing my name on the lips of every man who fought for the plateau, I joined them, hurling myself headlong into the fighting.
It was then that Whitey found his way to me through the mass of struggling bodies. “Hank,” he gasped, dragging me behind a natural wall of rock that protected one of the openings into the plateau. “Hank, I have an idea.”
“A hunch?”
“No, just an idea. My hunch days are over.”
“All right, what is it?”
“Tracy has a star-stone with her, right? Well, if she can somehow manage to fasten it to a spearhead—tie it firmly with a thong or something—do yo
u suppose you could land it on Ithaqua’s warty hide?”
“He makes a big enough target,” I answered. “I suppose I should be able to do it. Come on, let’s see if we can get to Tracy and Jimmy.”
Making our way across the roof was not easy. Through gaps in the tumult we got occasional glimpses of the two of them, Jimmy fighting like a madman side by side with a massive Eskimo guardsman, and Tracy behind them, her back to the same rocky projection that had kept her safe from Ithaqua’s ice-bomb, protecting their flanks with her star-stone. But halfway to them we got split up. The last I saw of Whitey for a while, he was tackling a lean Viking, while I myself was faced with a pair of hatchet-faced braves.
I was lucky, managing to kill both my men without being hurt. At the same time I discovered a strange thing; though there was more than one occasion when nearby guardsmen might have stepped in and made things easier, not one of them lifted a hand to help me. I had obviously reached new heights of legend; Sil-ber-hut-te could look after himself and wouldn’t thank anyone for interfering!
But if I could look after myself, the same could no longer be said of Armandra. As I cleared a path for myself through the crush of fighting men, I saw that Armandra was almost spent. The energies she drew from the whirling clouds were less powerful, her stance less steady above the plateau’s rim. And her father was beginning to enjoy his invulnerability. As the lightning rained about him, so he would use his great hands to deflect the bolts into the groups of furiously fighting men on the roof. It seemed of absolutely no concern to Ithaqua where these bolts fell or what mayhem they caused; the deaths of his own followers were of no consequence to him.
In any case, within the space of a few seconds more it could be seen that with or without Ithaqua’s concern, his human allies were well and truly beaten. Though they fought a desperate, ragged retreat to the battlements, where at last the monstrous shadow of their lord and master fell upon them, still the men of the plateau followed them up, determined that not one of them would escape. The end came quickly even as I watched. Taking full advantage of their opportunity the plateau’s soldiers made one last effort, forming an unbreakable wall and moving inexorably forward until the remaining kite-men were simply pushed off the roof into empty space. They fell in a screaming human rain from the rim.
