by Brian Lumley
'You owe me nothing,' said Curator. `But you owe your race, the race of Man, everything. You deserted that race once for a dream, and now you return to a dream. And in you, germinating, lie the seeds of that race's continuation. The stars are very nearly right, Searcher, and you still have far to go. You seek a source and the clock now has the route, knows the destination. Waste no more time, but use it!'
The dream-clock's hands had steadied to a less erratic rhythm; it whirled for a brief moment, stopped abruptly and slid home into Curator's chest. The panels closed it in.
'Then it's time to say farewell,' said de Marigny.
`Indeed,' said Curator. 'As for the dream-clock: for the moment he stays here with me, perhaps forever, or for as long as we have. Only if you are successful will he ever return to Elysia. Until then, all Elysia's expatriate children must remain in exile.'
`Why do you say that?' de Marigny asked. 'What do you mean?'
`I have already overstepped myself,' said Curator. He began to turn away. `Farewell, and good fortune ...' He clanked away into dream's oldest, rarest memories.
De Marigny and Moreen watched him go. Then The Searcher said to the time-clock: 'Very well, you have the co-ordinates. Now take us to Exior K'mool. Take us to Theem'hdra, the primal land at the dawn of time.'
Which without more ado the clock set out to do ...
PART THREE : THE END OFTHE BEGINNING OF THE END
1 Exior K'mool
Theem'hdra
There had been other 'primal' lands: Hyborea and Hyperborea, Mu, Uthmal, Atlantis and many others; but in Theem'hdra lay the first, the original Age of Man. It was Pangaea, but not the Pangaea of modern geographers and geologists and theorists. How long ago exactly is of little concern here; suffice it to say that if the 'popular' Pangaea was last week, then Theem'hdra was probably months ago. Certainly it was an Age of Man which predated the Age of Reptiles, and was dust when they were in their ascendancy. But civilizations wax and wane, they always have and always will, and some are lost forever.
Theem'hdra, whereon a primal Nature experimented and created and did myriad strange and nightmarish' things. For Nature herself was in her youth, and where men were concerned ... she had not yet decided which talents men should have and which should be forbidden, discontinued.
In some men, and in certain women, too, the wild workings of capricious Nature wrought weird wonders, giving them senses and powers additional to the usual five. Often these powers .were carried down through many generations; aye, and occasionally such a man would mate with just such a woman and then, eventually, through genealogical patterns and permutations long forgotten to 20th Century scientists, along would come the seventh son of a seventh son, or the ninth daughter of a ninth daughter - and what then?
Mylakhrion the Immortal, who had been less than immortal after all, was the greatest of all Theem'hdra's wizards; and after him, arguably, his far removed descendant, Teh Atht of Kluhn. Next would probably be Mylakhrion's one-time apprentice and heir to many of his thaumaturgies, Exior K'mool. And Exior would not be the first magician whose experiments had led him into dire straits ...
Mylakhrion had been dead for one hundred and twenty years, victim of his own magic. Long before that, Exior's first master, Phaithor Ull, had rendered himself as green dust in an ill-conceived conjuration. And where Um-hammer Kark's vast manse had once sprawled its terraces, walls and pavilions on Mount Gatch by the River Luhr, overlooking the Steppes of Hrossa, a great bottomless pit now opened, issuing hissing clouds of mordant yellow steam. Wizards all, and all gone the way of wizards. Who lives by the wand .. .
And now
`My turn,' gloomed Exior K'mool to himself, where he prowled and fretted in his walled, palace in the heart of ruined Humquass, once-proud warrior city. Lamias flaunted their buttocks at him as he passed, and succubi rubbed him with their breasts, eager to balm him; but Exior said only. 'Bah!' and brushed them aside, or sent them on meaningless errands to keep them from annoying and pestering him. Did not the idiot creatures know that his doom would be theirs also? And could they not see how close that doom was now?
Exior's hair was short-cropped and grey as grey as it had turned on the day he first looked in Mylakhrion's great runebook, one hundred and seventy-three years earlier -and his mien, as might well be imagined, was that of an old man heavy-burdened with wisdom and knowledge and some sin; for it's a hard business being a wizard and remaining free of sin. And yet his long slender back was only slightly bent and his limbs still surprisingly spry. Aye, and his yellow eyes undimmed by his nearly two centuries
of rune-unriddling, and his mind a crystal, where every thought came sharp as a needle. And for this not entirely misleading simulacrum of vitality he could thank long-gone Mylakhrion, whose fountain of youth and elixir of longevity and wrinkle-reducing unguents had kept the years in large part at bay. Alas that he must also 'thank' that elder wage for his current fix, which in all likelihood were his last.
Exior's palace had a high-walled courtyard before and high-walled gardens behind; in Humquass' heyday, the palace had been the city's tallest edifice, its towers even higher than the king's own palace. Now it was not only the tallest but the only building, chiefly because Humquass was no more. But the palace, like Exior himself, had survived wars and famines and all the onslaughts and ravages of nature; aye, and it would survive for many a century yet -or should.
It should, for from its foundations up the place was saturated with magical protections: spells against decay and natural disaster, against insect, fungus and human invasion, against the spells of other sorcerers, but mainly against the incursion of that which even now frothed and seethed on the other side of the walls, seeking a way in. A .legacy of Exior's search for immortality. Like Mylakhrion before him, he had sought everlasting life until finally he'd attracted imminent death.
Exior!' croaked a black, fanged, half-man, half-insect thing where it scuttled about his feet as he walked in the gardens. 'A doom is upon you, Exior! A great doom is come upon Exior the Mage!'
'Hush!' he scowled, kicking half-heartedly at the creature and missing. He stooped and found a pebble, hurled it at the scurrying, hybrid monstrosity. 'Away with you! And what are you for a familiar anyway? Be sure that if that slime out there gets me, then that it will surely get you also! Bah! I'd find a better familiar among the cockroaches in my kitchen!'
'But you did find me there,' croaked that unforgiving creature, - half of me, anyway and welded me to Loxzor of the Hrossaks. I, the Loxzor part, was also a magician, Exior - or had you forgotten?'
In fact Exior had forgotten; but now he shook a fist at the thing, yelled: 'How could I forget, with your infernal crowing to remind me day and night? 'Twas your own fault, Hrossak - sending your morbid magics against me. Be thankful I didn't give you the habits and lower half of a dung-beetle - and then make you keeper of the palace privy! Indeed, I still might!'
As the Loxzor-thing hastily withdrew, Exior climbed a ladder beside the wall and carefully looked over.
In his life Exior had seen, had even created, shudder-some things; but nothing he had seen or made or imagined was more noxious, poisonous, mordant or morbid than the frothing slime that lapped all about his palace walls and closed them in. At present the walls and his spells combined to hold the stuff at bay, but for how much longer? In extent the slime covered and roiled over all of olden Humquass' ruins, and lay deep as a thick mist all about. But never before a mist like this.
It was mainly yellow, but where it swirled it was bile-green, or in other places red like bad blood in pus. It was a gas or at worst a liquid, but now and then it would thicken up and throw out tendrils or tentacles like a living thing. And indeed Exior knew that it was a living thing - and the worst possible sort.
Even now, as he stared at the heaving, sickly mass, so it sensed him and threw up groping green arms. But Exior had spelled a dome of power over the .palace, enclosing the entire structure, grounds and all. Now tentacles of slime slapped ag
ainst that invisible wall mere inches from his face, so that he drew himself back and quickly descended the ladder into the gardens.. But not before he'd seen the crumbling and steaming of the walls where the stuff's acid nature was eating into them.
'Shewstone!' muttered Exior then, under his breath. And, stumbling toward the main building: 'Last chance . shewstone ... no spells can help me now ... but if I can find just one possible future for myself ... and then somehow contrive to go there ... Rah! ... Hopeless . Not even Mylakhrion could control time!'
Outside, were it not for the slime, the season would be autumn. In Exior's courtyard, however, it was spring; he controlled the seasons within his own boundaries; but even so, still black clouds were building, and he felt in his bones the nip of winter. The winter of his years, perhaps? His days? His ... hours? Was that all he had left, who so recently sought immortality, hours?
Grinding his teeth with anxiety, Exior entered his basalt palace, followed the corkscrew stairs of a tower where they wound inexorably upward, finally came to that place which had been his room of repose and was, more recently, his workshop. Here he had worked unceasingly to discover a way to nullify the ever-encroaching slime sea, to no avail. For here, scattered about, were the many appurtenances of his art, all sorts and species of occult apparatus.
Here were the misshapen skulls of an ancient order of sub-man, and the teratologically fabulous remains of things which had never been men; bottles of multi-hued liquids, some bubbling and others quiescent; flutes made of the hollow bones of pteranodon prima, capable of notes which would transmute silver into gold and vice-versa; shelf upon shelf of books in black leather and umber skins, at least one of which was tattooed!
Here too were miniature worlds and moons in their orbits, all hanging from the tracked ceiling on mobile ropes of jewelled cowries; and here pentacles of power adorned the mosaic walls and floor, glittering with the fire of gem-chips, from which they were constructed. Sigilinscribed scrolls of vellum were littered everywhere; but alone in the comparatively tidy centre of the room, there was Exior's showpiece: a great ball of clouded crystal upon its stand of carved chrysolite.
Kicking aside the disordered clutter and muttering, `Useless, all useless!' he approached the shewstone, seated himself upon a simple cane chair, made passes to command a preview of possible futures. this was not the first time he had scried upon the future (hardly that, for his greatest art lay in oneiromancy: reading the future in dreams, in which he'd excelled even as an apprentice) but it was certainly the first time he'd achieved such dreary results.
He was shown a future where the slime lapped over the palace, devouring it, and himself with it. He saw a time when Humquass was a scar on the land, like a great sore in earth's healthy flesh. He scried upon a stone raised by some thoughtful soul in a shrine built centrally in the blight, which read:
`Here lies Exior K'mool, or
would if alien energies had
not eaten him entirely away.
Here his shade abides, anyhow.'
But nowhere, for all his desperate passes, could he find a possible future where Exior K'mool lived. A fact he could scarce credit, for his dreams had foretold otherwise: namely that there was a future for him. Indeed he had seen himself, in recurrent dreams, dwelling in a manse whose base was a bowl that floated on a lake of Lava. And he had known the world or lake where the manse drifted on liquid fire as `Lith', and he had lived there a while with the white wizard Ardatha Ell, of whom he'd heard nothing except in his dreams. But where was this future, and Where Lith? The shewstone displayed nought but dooms! All very disheartening.
Exior sighed and let the crystal grow opaque, turned to his runebook and thumbed disconsolately through its pages. Runes and spells and cantrips galore here, but none to help him escape the slime, not permanently, not in this world or time. The stuff's nature was such as could not be avoided, it would pursue him to the end. His end.
And full of despair, at last his eyes lighted upon a spell only three-quarters conceived, borrowed from a fragment Mylakhrion had left behind when long ago he took himself off to his last refuge, the lonely isle of Tharamoon in the north.
At first, staring at the uncompleted page, Exior saw little; but then his eyes widened, his mind began to spark; and finally he read avidly, devouring the rune almost in a glance. A spell to call up the dead, but without necromancy proper. If he could complete the rune, perhaps he could call up some wizard ancestor to his aid. There must surely have been magic in his ancestry, else he himself were not gifted. And what if he erred in completing the thing, and what if it came to nought? Well, and what had he to lose anyway? But if he were to succeed - if indeed he could find and call up some mage ancestor centuries dead - well, even at worst two heads are better than one. And certainly better than none!
He set to work at once.
Using other runebooks, -lesser works, slowly he put the finishing touches to the invocation. No time to check his work however, for day crept toward evening, and a grim foreboding told him that the palace walls and his slime-excluding spell could not last out the night. And so, with stylus that shook even as his hand shook, he set down the last glyph and sat back to cast worried, anxious eyes over the completed rune.
Outside the light was beginning to fail. Exior called for Loxzor - ex-cockroach, ex-Hrossak, ex-wizard - and commanded: 'Look upon this rune. What think you? Will it work?'
Loxzor scuttled, drew himself up to Exior's table on chitin legs, glared at the freshly pigmented page with many-faceted eyes. `Bah!' he harshly clacked. And maliciously: 'What do I know of magic - I'm a cockroach!'
`You refuse to help me?'
`Help yourself, wizard. Your hour is at hand!'
`Beastly creature!' Exior cried. `Go then, and suffer the slime when it whelms this place! Begone!' And he chased Loxhor from the chamber. Then -
- Then it was time to test out the spell. The last rune of Exior K'mool
Far removed from his own era - if he could any longer be said to have one representative or contemporary time -The Searcher hovered the time-clock high over. Exior's palace and looked down through the scanners and sensors on the scene below. Beside him, Moreen snuggled> close and said: `Henri, I know we've left Earth's dreamlands far behind - or before us - and that this is the waking world in a time when the Motherworld was in her prime, but looking down there, on that .
`I know,' he answered, grimly. 'You'd swear we were still dreaming, eh? Nightmaring, anyway. It seems Exior K'mool's got himself in deep waters. Also, if that dome of force is anything to go by, he's a wizard of some note.'
To merely human eyes Exior's dome would be invisible, but the clock's sensors and scanners showed it as a pale, vibrating hemisphere, with Exior's palace locked inside like a scene viewed through blue smoke or heat-haze. The scanners also showed the slime, and de Marigny's immediate revulsion told him something of its nature. 'It seems we're to be used yet again,' he commented wryly.
`Used?'
He nodded.. 'We were used to rescue Sssss from the Hounds of Tindalos, likewise Hero and Eldin from Gudge, or more properly Nyarlathotep - and now -'
'Exior K'mool from that ... that filthy stuff ? Or is it in fact a filthy thing? I can't tell, but I know it's nothing of nature. Not as I know nature.'
`It's both,' said de Marigny. `It's a slime, but it gets its form, its purpose, its motive for being from a source which is far worm. Do you know what this stuff is? I do, for I've met it before - or will meet it, in the distant future. In ancient Khem it took, will take, the form of a proud young Pharaoh. But by then it will have a thousand other forms, too. Here in the primal land, it too is primal; Cthulhu uses crude means to achieve his ends; no need for sophistication in a mainly unsophisticated. age.'
`Nyarlathotep! the girl shuddered. 'Again?'
'I'm sure of it,' de Marigny nodded, again. 'The Crawling Chaos - but formless in this age. A mass, crawling, chaotic. A primal force in a primal land. It's an age of magic and monsters, remem
ber? And certainly this stuff is monstrous. It's the morbid mind-juice of the Cthulhu Cycle Deities, telepathy bordering on teleportation; it's something the Great Old Ones have sent to exact a revenge, or collect a debt. It seems Exior has had business with Cthulhu, which is the same as making a deal with the devil!'
`It's eating at those walls,' said Moreen, 'and it seems to me that Exior's dome grows thinner, weaker, with each passing moment. 'Can we get inside?'
`I think so. The time-clock ignores most bathers. It was designed to breach the greatest of them all: time and space and all the planes and angles between and beyond. We'll soon see ...'
He located K'mool in his tower workshop, slipped the clock sideways through space-time, emerged in a shimmer of air within that marvellous room where a moment before the wizard had spoken his rune and completed the intricate attendant passes. And:
`By all the Lords of Darkness!' Exior gasped, his jaw falling open. He stumbled back from the time-clock where it hovered inches over the mosaic floor, tripped, flopped backward into his cane chair. 'I called upon a dead ancestor and got him coffin and all!'
But as de Matigny set the clock down, and he and Moreen stepped out of the open door in a wash of purple, pulsing light 'Two ancestors!' Exior croaked. 'And solider far than any ghosts I ever say before!'
None of which made any sense to the time-travellers, for it was spoken in an alien - a primal - tongue. 'We'll have to speak to him through the dock,' said de Marigny, turning as if to re-enter the time-clock. But -
'Wait!' Exior cried, this time in English. 'No need for any interpreter. I, Exior K'mool, am a master of runes - and what are languages if not runes expressed as words? Magic or mundane, all is one to me; I understand tongues indeed, I've fathomed yours from the merest sentence.'
`Amazing!' said Moreen, round-eyed. She approached the wizard and he made a bow. 'You heard a few words and learned a language! But you must be the 'greatest linguist of all time.'
