Thongor at the End of Time

by Lin Carter

  Whatever terrific forces had been locked within the weird crystal, held in precarious balance by enormous strictures, they reacted with incredible violence once the glassy prison-wall was breached.

  He opened his eyes. The fallen stone was gone. The crystal had vanished, leaving a monstrous pit of smoking earth. One by one—dislodged, perchance, by the blast or the erupting gem, or falling now that their purpose was lost—the six remained stones of the ring fell, collapsing like a house of cards. The impact of their fall made the plain shiver.

  The sword was gone!

  No, there it was—a vagrant gleam of steely light flashed mirror-bright within the smoking shadow of the pit. He scrambled down into it, earth sliding treacherously underfoot, the strange dry smell of burnt earth thick and hot in his nostrils. He clasped the glittering pommel and dragged the shining sword up out of a light covering of fallen dirt. He lifted the blade up into the air and watched it catch the light and flash with incredible brilliance, feeling deep satisfaction within him. Now, with a sword in his hand, he felt somehow complete.

  Then the sword was gone—utterly! Only the crossshaped hilt of red gold remained in his hand. He blinked and looked again, eyes narrowing with disbelief. But it was so—he had felt the colossal weight of the great sword when he raised it high above his head—then his flesh was tingling with weird awe as he felt the burden of its massive weight inexplicably lighten in his very grasp!

  Brows knotted, he bent a perplexed gaze on the useless swordhilt in his hands.

  What was that? That flicker of light, like a dim ray of brilliance probing up from the flat cross-hilt? For a moment he had thought he saw a thin, insubstantial beam of white light thrusting up from the hilt, a beam seven feet long.

  Now it was gone again. But, in the brief moment that he saw the enigmatic light-ray, he felt a tingle of awesome power run through him, and his flesh shuddered with a surge of strength and vitality. . . .

  He stood for a long, long time, hefting the T-shaped piece of heavy gold thoughtfully.

  All is illusion, nothing is quite what it seems . . .

  Everything in this dark realm of Avangra the Death-Lord is but the analogue of its earthly self . . . even your own body.

  He hefted the hilt with knotted brow, then he grinned and came up out of the pit, still holding the pommel.

  Perhaps this Sword of Light was a test of some kind. The thought touched his mind in a vagrant wisp of thought: is this great blade the Shadowland analogue of mine own great Valkarthan broadsword?

  He did not know the answer to any of these questions. All in this dim nightmare realm was a mockery, a clash of echoes, a vague and haunting mass of intertwining symbols. But he would bear the swordhilt with him, in any case. Perhaps he was a fool to burden himself with so seemingly useless an object, and perhaps not. At any rate, he would see.

  He went forward towards the shadowy horizon across the ghostly plain. And the proof of the sword came upon him far sooner than he had ever dreamed it might, for suddenly—out of nothingness and night, a vast black shape rose up from the plain before him—a huge, hulking, shaggy ogre-like form with blazing eyes and frigid breath that blew across his flesh like a blast of wintry wind.

  And there in the Land of Shadows beyond the Gates of Life and the dark Portals of the Tomb, Thongor of Valkarth found himself locked in uncanny battle with a thing he could neither see nor feel—but that held him in a grip like Death itself!

  Chapter 7: THE ROAD OF MILLIONS OF YEARS

  His great blade cleaves through empty air,

  It flays his flesh with icy breath.

  How fight a Thing that is not there,

  Or kill, when all this land is Death?

  —Thongor’s Saga, Stave XVIII

  Without an instant’s warning, the swordsman of Valkarth found himself fighting for his very life!

  A mammoth claw seized him about his lean waist with crushing force. A tidal wave of blackness rose before him, blotting put the light. He swung balled fists that hissed through thin air—through the black shape that had nearly engulfed him. The blackness clung and crushed him, but his blows met no opposition whatsoever . . . it was like striking out against a formless shadow!

  In the viselike grip of the Blackness, in the whirling confusion of the fight, Thongor found it impossible to gain any clear impression of his weird adversary. He had a blurred, swift glimpse of looming darkness, or a vast, heaving, shaggy form, thick-set and stump-legged, with sloping shoulders and bestial paws—one of which closed crushingly around his lean midsection—but little else.

  A flashing glimpse of great blazing eyes like moons of cold fire in a broad, blunt bull-like bead thatched with thick black shag. Then a start of pure horror went through him like a blade of ice as another head lifted into view!

  The shambling thing shuffled thick legs. The massive paw about his waist tightened—lifted. The shaggy twin heads glared at him. Fanged maws gaped wide—and his flesh thrilled to the incredible blast of superarctic cold that breathed from the black jaws of the two-headed ogre.

  The icy blast of its breath was unendurable. The warrior could feel granules of ice form on his panting chest and swinging arms. His senses blurred, his heart labored.

  What use was it to fight? Better to let go, to slide down into the soft blackness, to give up, yield, surrender . . . why fight on against that which you could not defeat?

  The insidious thoughts whispered through his dazed mind. For a moment—for a long, breathless, terrible moment he felt the dragging pull of the temptation and felt himself hover on the brink of yielding to the seductive urge. But then his manhood reasserted itself. From some inward source, fury came boiling up within him.. He had fought men and beasts, demons and Gods ere now—and never had he surrendered!

  He swung another enfeebled blow with the useless gold swordhilt he clasped in one weakening hand—and even as the grim refusal to yield welled up within him, a strange force awoke—

  The Sword of Light blazed up!

  Fourth from the T-shaped hilt a beam of blinding white radiance flamed—a searing ray of utter brightness seven feet long flashed into being! It was as if his very determination not to yield had somehow triggered into existence the enchanted blade.

  In his wild swing, the blade sank deep in the boulder-like chest of the Black One. The misty stuff from which the ogre’s body was wrought—insubstantial to his own fists—yielded terribly to the flashing blade of light. A vast slab of cloudy substance was hewn away. It went floating off to the left, out of the range of Thongor’s vision, and as it drifted away the smoky substance was crumbling into thin vapor.

  The ogre howled soundlessly. The chill blast of its breath swept him from head to foot. But a tingling surge of warmth traveled down his arm from the blazing sword and he felt his cold flesh thaw as the current ran through him. Ice-dust vanished from his chest.

  He swung the Sword of Light, slashing completely through the wrist of the paw that clasped him. It came apart, breaking up in a seething mass of roiling vapors, and he dropped to the desert plain, grinning. Now the tide of battle was on his side!

  He waded in, swinging the magic blade lustily. The shaggy ogre stumbled back from his slashing assault.

  Within moments he had slain, or dispersed, the monster and it was naught but a cloud of slowly expanding mist. He stood watching the vapors evaporate, feeling the lusty pride of victory. The sword had become once again naught but a useless pommel of red gold.

  Now he was beginning to learn something of the strange laws that governed this peculiar astral realm where nothing was what it seemed and each thing was the analogue—the reflection, echo, or shadow—of something else.

  The moment he had conquered his own fear, he had begun to conquer the demon.

  Had the demon been but the symbolic form of his fear?

  Perhaps. He could not be certain. But he recalled the earlier incident when, at first, the task of freeing the sword from the jewel had seeming imposing, if
not impossible. The moment he had determined it could be done, he did it!

  Thongor shrugged away such baffling thoughts. His way was the raw red road of direct and primal action. These musings were suited to philosophers or fools—or both.

  He strode forward, the swordhilt clasped in his hand.

  He walked now upon a broad and level road of dressed stone.

  It had emerged out of the colorless sands of the desert plain by such gradual stages as to be imperceptible. But now the road had fully risen above the drifting sands, so he let it be his guide.

  Straight as an arrow’s flight it ran from this place to the dim and distant horizon. The horizon was clouded and veiled from his sight so he could not make out towards what goal he strove. He went forward, uncaring.

  It occurred to the Valkarthan to wonder who had set this road here, and for what reason.

  To this question no answer seemed possible. He wondered of what earthly journey or state the road was the analogue.

  As he went forward, he began to glimpse curious shapes set up along the road at intervals. They did not so much appear out of nothingness as it was he who gradually became aware of their being. After a time he could see them clearly. And they, more than anything else he had yet encountered in this weird spirit realm, seemed truly symbolic.

  Thrones of odd and antique design rose to either side of the stone-paved way. They were gray with dust, cloaked in cobwebs, riven and gnawed with time.

  Heaps of crowns and coronets, stacks of scepters and rods of kingly power, were bundled together with tattered rags of velvet and satin and ermine, the moldy remnants of royal robes of state.

  Here and there like crumbling monuments rose the shattered gates of cities unknown to him, and the decayed porticos of vast palaces. Busts and statues of forgotten kings stood on cracked pedestals, or lay fallen in the dust.

  And there were ruined flags and standards and all manner of proud regal banners, withering into dust. Some were bravely wrought of gold and silver wire on fine silks and some were woven through and through with glittering gems, and some were of humbler stuff, but all were crumbling and decaying before the breath of time.

  As he strode along the way, he puzzled as to the meaning of these broken and dust-shrouded remains of royal glory. The road passed them by as if it were the mighty and all-encompassing River of Time itself, which passeth and leaveth behind to molder lost and forgotten the thrones and empires of past glory. He brooded somberly on this thought, that be they never so strong-founded, so rich in fame and conquest and majesty, every great realm and nation of man shall fall and founder at last, for none be so secure that Time the Conqueror can not bring them low into the humble dust.

  He never knew how many hours or days the journey took, for here in this dim land of perpetual and unchanging twilight time passed unheralded and unnoticed—if, indeed, time existed at all.

  Perhaps his journey took but instants, perhaps aeons—but he felt nothing of bodily fatigue. His bare feet trampled the stone-build Road of the Millions of Years (as he came in time to think of it) but the astral stuff of which this ghostly simulacrum of his earthly form was composed seemed insensible to all fatigue. Or perhaps his journey was itself an illusion of his dreaming brain. He never knew. . . .

  Now and then beside the road he glimpsed in the eerie half-light the withered corpses or gaunt mummies of ancient, long-dead kings. Some slept in broken tombs of snowy marble. Some were laid to rest in gilded coffins worked all over with hieroglyphic texts. Yet others sat stiff and dry on their thrones with tarnished crowns set upon their brown leathery brows.

  He saw as well that gods can die in the fullness of eternal time. For here and there in the symbolic ruins that lined the sides of the vast avenue down which he journeyed to the unknown horizon he came upon the crude totems and rough-hewn idols of fallen and forgotten gods whose very names, perchance, had faded into the mists of legend, as had their worshippers.

  What hope for men, he thought with grim humor, when even gods may die?

  Then it was that he came upon the first obstacle that he had met since the Phantom of Fear had challenged him hours or ages ago. As he stopped short and stared at the impassable barrier he felt again the hopelessness of his position rise to overwhelm him—the bodiless wraith of a dead man, lost and wandering in the strange half-worlds of this mystic Borderland between the worlds!

  He looked at the River of Fire and knew he could not pass it.

  Chapter 8: RIVER OF FIRE, WALL OF ICE

  Like molten flame the waters glide

  Across his path to block his way;

  He does not shrink nor turn aside,

  But fights the floods as best he may.

  —Thongor’s Saga, Stave XVIII

  A broad river of crimson flame cut across his way, stretching from horizon to horizon. It sprang into being between one step and the next, and now as he halted short upon the very brink of the blazing flood he saw that a single unwary step might have pitched him to a terrible death in the fiery embrace of the liquid flames.

  He stepped back and looked upon the incredible barrier.

  Whatever the waters of the river were fashioned of, they burned with a seething fury. In the long annals of his earthly wanderings and adventures, Thongor of Valkarth had seen streams of blazing lava no more fiery than this strange flood of burning fluid that now blocked his path. But the lava had been molten rock, a thick and viscous substance like mud, heated to a cheery cherry-red glow, its wrinkled and sluggish surface crawling with flickering yellow flames. This was different—the magic river was a broad and ponderous flood of what appeared to be water—but water that blazed with great shaking banners of gold and orange and crimson flames that shot ten paces into the air. And the light shed by the burning water was so fierce and intolerable that he must shield his eyes with a lifted hand or be blinded.

  As best he might, half-blinded by the glare, he measured the width of the tide. Perhaps, he hoped, it would prove narrow enough so that he might cross it with a mighty leap. No. The burning river was thirty yards across.

  He looked about him in the grip of growing helplessness. It seemed impossible that he could go around the river of fire, for it stretched straight as a boundary-line from horizon to horizon. Or so, he reminded himself, it seemed—for he had learned by now that in this Empire of Death one could not trust eyesight alone.

  His next thought was to consider dislodging one of the huge paving-stones whereof the road was composed, so as to make a mighty raft. Thongor knew that a flat stone will float for a time upon the surface of molten lava. He wondered if such were also the case with this river of flaming water.

  He pried loose a small slab of stone from the borders of the road and heaved it into the fiery gulf—only to see it sink on the instant without a trace in the flaming waves.

  That slim chance seemed to exhaust the store of possibilities—at least for the moment. How, then, was he to cross the blazing barrier? Or was his strange quest to end here on the blistering brink of the magic stream? What else was there for him to do, but to turn back at this point?

  He stood staring thoughtfully at the surface of the road, where it broke off abruptly before the blazing torrent. The ancient stones were shaken and dislodged and dry weeds grew here and there between them, even upon the very edge of the flood of crimson flame—

  He froze with astonishment.

  Was his strange quest to end here on the blistering edge of the enchanted barrier?

  A grim smile broke the masklike impassivity of his features. He burst into laughter. Would he never learn to distrust the evidence of his senses in this ghostly realm? He had become so accustomed by now to the fact that this astral counterpart of his earthly body was largely insensitive to fatigue and the ills of mortality, that he had not until this very moment noticed that the river of fire cast fierce red light—but shed no heat!

  For there, on the very verge and margin of the flaming stream, dry dead weeds grew up between the
paving stones—weeds that should by all the laws of nature have shriveled and burst into flame from such near proximity to the burning waters—if those burning waters were real.

  He flung himself prone beside the river and, greatly daring, thrust his hand into the seething flames.

  To vision alone, it was a terrible sight. His bare flesh vanished in the crimson smoky light as leaping tongues of flame coiled about his hand, but he felt nothing.

  The river of fire was mere illusion, and naught more!

  He stepped into the roaring flood and stood there. The racing tide came to his chest. The shaking banners of crimson flame towered far over his head. The light was so fierce that he was forced to close his eyes against the glare.

  But he felt nothing at all. No heat, no tugging current Nothing.

  Laughing with grim humor, he strode across the river and as soon as it lay behind him it vanished completely in an instant, ceasing to exist as swiftly as it had flashed into being. Behind him stretched an unbroken surface of the Road and nothing more. Smiling, he strode forward.

  It was not long before yet another barrier opposed his way.

  He strode into a thickening fog whose gray vapor rose boiling up from the surface of the land and condensed before him—suddenly clearing away.

  A vast wall of glittering ice marched like a range of glass mountains across the world before him from horizon to horizon. It rose in a sheer cliff, breaking into a sparkling mass of crystal pinnacles at its cloven crest. Dim light flickered and twinkled from the glistening facets of the wall.

  Thongor faced it, wondering if this was naught but another illusion. He felt no dank breath of cold from the icy mass—and from his boyhood in the frozen Northlands of the Lemurian continent, he recalled the chilling fog that blew numbingly from the massive glaciers of that boreal realm.