He came down as a tree falls, without striving to break the force of the impact. His hands went out clutchingly for Elak’s throat. But Elak was shoving frantically at the white, cold, muscular body, forcing it out the narrow window. It overbalanced, toppled—and fell.
The giant made no outcry. After a moment a heavy thud was audible. Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. “For,” he thought, “a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtar’s hand saved me, one never knows.” Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so.
A loud shriek from below made him go quickly down the stairway, rapier ready. Zend was running toward him, his gray face a mask of fear. The dwarf hesitated at sight of him, spun about as a low rumble of voices came from near by. At the foot of the stairway Elak waited.
From the passage by which Elak had entered the great room a horde of nightmare beings spewed. In their van came Gesti, gray garments flapping, white face immobile as ever. Behind him sheer horror squirmed and leaped and tumbled. With a shock of loathing Elak remembered the whispering voices he had heard in the underground cavern—and knew, now, what manner of creatures had spoken thus.
A race that had not sprung from human or even earthly loins.…
Their faces were hideous staring masks, fishlike in contour, with parrotlike beaks and great staring eyes covered with a filmy glaze. Their bodies were amorphous things, half solid and half gelatinous ooze, like the iridescent slime of jellyfish; writhing tentacles sprouted irregularly from the ghastly bodies of the things. They were the offspring of no sane universe, and they came in a blasphemous hissing rush across the room. The rapier stabbed out vainly and clattered to the stones as Elak went down. He struggled futilely for a moment, hearing the harsh, agonized shrieks of the wizard. Cold tentacles were all about him, blinding him in their constricting coils. Then suddenly the weight that held him helpless was gone. His legs and arms, he discovered, were tightly bound with cords. He fought vainly to escape; then lay quietly.
Beside him, he saw, the wizard lay tightly trussed. The nightmare beings were moving in an orderly rush toward the room in which Elak had sensed the surges of tremendous power, where lay the little brown stone. They vanished beyond the curtain, and beside Elak and the wizard there remained only Getsi. He stood looking down at the two, his white face immobile.
“What treachery is this?” Elak asked with no great hopefulness. “Set me free and give me my gold.”
But Gesti merely said, “You won’t need it. You will die very soon.”
“Eh? Why—”
“Fresh human blood is needed. That’s why we didn’t kill you or Zend. We need your blood. We’ll be ready soon.”
An outburst of sibilant whispers came from beyond the silver drape. Elak said unsteadily, “What manner of demons are those?”
The wizard gasped, “You ask him? Did you not know—”
Gesti lifted gloved hands and removed his face. Elak bit his lips to choke back a scream. Now he knew why Gesti’s face had seemed so immobile. It was a mask.
Behind it were the parrotlike beak and fishlike eyes Elak now knew all too well. The gray robes sloughed off; the gloves dropped from the limber tips of tentacles. From the horrible beak came the sibilant whisper of the monster:
“Now you know whom you served.”
The thing that had called itself Gesti turned and progressed—that was the only way to describe its method of moving—to the curtain behind which its fellows had vanished. It joined them.
Zend was staring at Elak. “You did not know? You served them, and yet did not know?”
“By Ishtar, no!” Elak swore. “D’you think I’d have let those—those—what are they? What are they going to do?”
“Roll over here,” Zend commanded. “Maybe I can loosen your bonds.”
Elak obeyed, and the wizard’s fingers worked deftly.
“I doubt—no human hands tied these knots. But—”
“What are they?” Elak asked again. “Tell me, before I go mad thinking hell has loosed its legions on Atlantis.”
“They are the children of Dagon,” Zend said. “Their dwelling place is in the great deeps of the ocean. Have you never heard of the unearthly ones who worship Dagon?”
“Yes. But I never believed—”
“Oh, there’s truth in the tale. Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came—but from whence I do not know—and civilizations arose. Hold still. These cursed knots—”
“I don’t understand all of that,” Elak said, wincing as the wizard’s nail dug into his wrist. “But go on.”
“These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas.…They will achieve their desire now, here.”
“Not if I can get free,” Elak said. “How do the knots hold?”
“They hold,” the wizard said discouragedly. “But one strand is loose. My fingers are raw. The—the red globe is broken?”
“No,” Elak said. “Some cords were torn loose as I fought with your slave, and the light went out of it. Why?”
“The gods be thanked!” Zend said fervently. “If I can repair the damage and light the globe again, the children of Dagon will die. That’s the purpose of it. The rays it emits destroy their bodies, which are otherwise invulnerable, or almost so. If I hadn’t had the globe, they’d have invaded my palace and killed me long ago.”
“They have a tunnel under the cellars,” Elak said.
“I see. But they dared not invade the palace while the globe shone, for the light-rays would have killed them. Curse these knots! If they accomplish their purpose—”
“What’s that?” Elak asked—but he had already guessed the answer.
“To sink Atlantis! This island-continent would have gone down beneath the sea long ago if I hadn’t pitted my magic and my science against that of the children of Dagon. They are masters of the earthquake, and Atlantis rests on none too solid a foundation. Their power is sufficient to sink Atlantis forever beneath the sea. But within that room”—Zend nodded toward the curtain that hid the sea-bred horrors—“in that room there is power far stronger than theirs. I have drawn strength from the stars, and the cosmic sources beyond the universe. You know nothing of my power. It is enough—more than enough—to keep Atlantis steady on its foundation, impregnable against the attacks of Dagon’s breed. They have destroyed other lands before Atlantis.”
Hot blood dripped on Elak’s hands as the wizard tore at the cords.
“Aye…other lands. There were races that dwelt on Earth before man came. My powers have shown me a sunlit island that once reared far to the south, an island where dwelt a race of beings tall as trees, whose flesh was hard as stone, and whose shape was so strange you could scarcely comprehend it. The waters rose and covered that island, and its people died. I have seen a gigantic mountain that speared up from a waste of tossing waters, in Earth’s youth, and in the towers and minarets that crowned its summit dwelt beings like sphinxes, with the heads of beasts and gods and whose broad wings could not save them when the cataclysm came. For ruin came to the city of the sphinxes, and it sank beneath the ocean—destroyed by the children of Dagon. And there was—”
�
��Hold!” Elak’s breathless whisper halted the wizard’s voice. “Hold! I see rescue, Zend.”
“Eh?” The wizard screwed his head around until he too saw the short, ape-featured man who was running silently across the room, knife in hand. It was Lycon, whom Elak had left slumbering in the underground den of Gesti.
The knife flashed and Elak and Zend were free. Elak said swiftly, “Up the stairs, wizard. Repair your magic globe, since you say its light will kill these horrors. We’ll hold the stairway.”
Without a word the gray dwarf sped silently up the steps and was gone. Elak turned to Lycon.
“How the devil—”
Lycon blinked wide blue eyes. “I scarcely know, Elak. Only when you were carrying me out of the tavern and the soldier screamed and ran away I saw something that made me so drunk I couldn’t remember what it was. I remembered only a few minutes ago, back downstairs somewhere. A face that looked like a gargoyle’s, with a terrible great beak and eyes like Midgard Serpent’s. And I remembered I’d seen Gesti put a mask over the awful face just before you turned there in the alley. So I knew Gesti was probably a demon.”
“And so you came here,” Elak commented softly. “Well, it’s a good thing for me you did. I—what’s the matter?” Lycon’s blue eyes were bulging.
“Is this your demon?” the little man asked, pointing.
Elak turned, and smiled grimly. Facing him, her face puzzled and frightened, was the girl on whom Zend had been experimenting—the maiden whose soul he had been about to unleash to serve him when Elak had arrived. Her eyes were open now, velvet-soft and dark, and her white body gleamed against the silver-black drape.
Apparently she had awakened, and had arisen from her hard couch.
Elak’s hand went up in a warning gesture, commanding silence, but it was too late. The girl said,
“Who are you? Zend kidnapped me—are you come to set me free? Where—”
With a bound Elak reached her, dragged her back, thrust her up the stairway. His rapier flashed in his hand. Over his shoulder he cast a wolfish smile.
“If we live, you’ll escape Zend and his magic,” he told the girl, hearing an outbrust of sibilant cries and the rushing murmur of the attacking horde. Yet he did not turn. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Coryllis.”
“’Ware, Elak!” Lycon shouted.
Elak turned to see the little man’s sword flash out, shearing a questing tentacle in two. The severed end dropped, writhing and coiling in hideous knots. The frightful devil-masks of monsters glared into Elak’s eyes. The children of Dagon came sweeping in a resistless rush, cold eyes glazed and glaring, tentacles questing, iridescent bodies shifting and pulsing like jelly—and Elak and Lycon and the girl, Coryllis, were caught by their fearful wave and forced back, up the staircase.
Snarling inarticulate curses, Lycon swung his sword, but it was caught and dragged from his hand by a muscular tentacle. Elak tried to shield Coryllis with his own body; he felt himself going down, smothering beneath the oppressive weight of cold, hideous bodies that writhed and twisted with dreadful life. He struck out desperately—and felt a hard, cold surface melting like snow beneath his hands.
The weight that held him down was dissipating—the things were retreating, flowing back, racing and flopping and tumbling down the stairs, shrieking an insane shrill cry. They blackened and melted into shapeless puddles of slime that trickled like a little gray stream down the stairway.…
Elak realized what had happened. A rose-red light was glowing in the air all about him. The wizard had repaired his magic globe, and the power of its rays was destroying the nightmare menace that had crept up from the deeps.
In a heartbeat it was over. There was no trace of the horde that had attacked them. Gray puddles of ooze—no more. Elak realized that he was cursing softly, and abruptly changed it to a prayer. With great earnestness, he thanked Ishtar for his deliverance.
Lycon recovered his sword and handed Elak his rapier. “What now?” he asked.
“We’re off! We’re taking Coryllis with us—there’s no need to linger here. True, we helped the wizard—but we fought him first. He may remember that. There’s no need to test his gratefulness, and we’d be fools to do it.”
He picked up Coryllis, who had quietly fainted, and quickly followed Lycon down the steps. They hurried across the great room and into the depths of the corridor beyond.
And five minutes later they were sprawled at full length under a tree in one of San-Mu’s numerous parks. Elak had snatched a silken robe from a balcony as he passed beneath, and Coryllis had draped it about her slim body. The stars glittered frostily overhead, unconcerned with the fate of Atlantis—stars that would be shining thousands of years hence when Atlantis was not even a memory.
No thought of this came to Elak now. He wiped his rapier with a tuft of grass, while Lycon, who had already cleaned his blade, stood up and, shading his eyes with his palm, peered across the park. He muttered something under his breath and set off at a steady lope. Elak stared after him.
“Where’s he going? There’s a—by Ishtar! He’s going in a grog shop. But he has no money. How—”
A shocked thought came to him, and he felt hastily in his wallet. Then he cursed. “The drunken little ape! When he slashed my bonds in the wizard’s palace, he stole the purse! I’ll—”
Elak sprang to his feet and took a stride forward. Soft arms gripped his leg. He looked down. “Eh?”
“Let him go,” Coryllis said, smiling. “He’s earned his mead.”
“Yes—but what about me? I—”
“Let him go,” Coryllis murmured.…
And, ever after that, Lycon was to wonder why Elak never upbraided him about the stolen purse.
DARK DESTROYER, by Adrian Cole
A Voidal Story
In those scattered dimensions that comprise the chaotic omniverse, there are legends that speak of the one who walks in the void, a terrible being who can be summoned to work power, but at a grim cost to the one who calls him.
And there have always been those whose jealousy of this Voidal’s power has led them to seek his downfall, his eternal imprisonment, where madness will chain him.
One such envious god was Ubeggi,1 the Weaver of Wars.
I
In Ulthar, the city of cats, two swarthy men sat at a table in an inn, talking softly and looking out through the window at the buildings of the city that dropped away below them. In the distance, moonlight fractured the winding river Skai and beyond that the shifting enigma of the dreamscape pushed forward silently, tonight oppressive and alive with evil portents. Things flapped across the sky darkly and silently: the dreams of the inhabitants of Ulthar were not pleasant ones.
The first of the men wore a strange hat (as a priest might) and upon his cloak were sewn unusual figures with human bodies and the heads of varying animals—cats, hawks, rams and lions, marking the man and his colleague as travellers from the far South, whose mysteries were famous in Ulthar, where cats are sacred. In this high inn where the men sat, no one had spoken to them, and indeed the few patrons had already left, while all the cats that lived here—and there were many scores—gathered around them, purring and fussing like servants anxious to please. From time to time one of the men would reach down and dig with gentle fingers into the fur of an animal, or stroke its sleek coat. The silent innkeeper, Drath, was a little uneasy, but pleased, knowing that it was through these Southern wanderers that Ulthar had become a shrine to cats.
“There are signs here, too,” said Umatal, taller of the men. He sipped at the strong Ulthar wine. “Everywhere.”
“Just so,” nodded Ibidin, his stockier companion, turning from the table to study the lower town. “Ybaggog’s dreams are a far-reaching curse. Such dreams as flit about these skies are poisoned by this awesome god. I heard in the market today that seven men across the river were found dead in their beds, killed by the grim nightmares that beset them. It was unquestionably the doing of Ybaggo
g. These dreams are not confined to this realm, Umatal. They spread. It is murmured in hidden places that even the priests of the Old Ones are afraid for their gods.”
“Say nothing of the Old Ones,” replied Umatal. “Even in Ulthar, their ears catch every breath.”
“How are we to be rid of the Dark Destroyer? What possible means are we to employ to thwart its purpose?”
“Its purpose! Pah! How can we comprehend its purpose?”
“Enough to know that Ybaggog is called, Devourer of Universes.”
“We may have to sacrifice universes to kill him.”
They said no more for a while, knowing that their own gods (and indeed, all gods that they knew of) went in fear of Ybaggog. Ibidin nervously chinked the silver coins in his pocket; he had not earned many this season, for few people in Ulthar wanted the benefit of his fortune telling. As the men subsided into their grim thoughts, more shadows crossed the moon. The men jerked up, a symptom of how afraid they were, for such nocturnal things were common in Ulthar and not usually worthy of concern.
“Something approaches,” said Umatal, drawing back. Around him, fifty cats arched their backs and hissed in unison. Ibidin pulled a short, curved knife from his belt, lurching up from the table. Presently a small, squamous figure alighted on the windowsill and peered in with huge eyes. It was not unlike the frightful night gaunts, but was too squat and small, and a few moments were all that were needed to outline its evident trepidation.
“Begone!” growled Umatal, as if chasing off a wayward crow.
“Your pardon, masters,” came the reply. “But is this the inn of Drath, sixth cat master of the northern heights?”
A figure had come out of the shadows behind the table, holding and stroking a cat, and with a smaller one perched on its shoulder. All the cats in the inn had subsided, purring softly again and gazing dreamily at the odd visitor. “Aye,” said Drath. “What do you seek here?”
“I am Elfloq,” said the figure, hopping in a frog-like way on to a table, narrowly missing a jug of wine. “Are these two lords your only guests?” He appeared to be searching out more guests with those bulbous, saucer-like eyes, though there were only the cats, creatures of which he did not approve. One of them extended an exploratory claw and came close to hooking it into the scaled hide of the familiar. Elfloq opened his wings in readiness to flit upwards to the rafters.
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