The clock of dreams, p.9
The Clock of Dreams, page 9
part #3 of Titus Crow Series
The horror, while being twice as big as any of its loathsome species viewed before, was nevertheless endowed with the same noxiously thin outline as lesser gaunts and wore precisely the same aspect. Horns sprouted from its faceless head; it was barb-tailed and bat-winged; its skin looked rubbery, cold, and damp – and, possibly worst of all, it was utterly silent.
Then de Marigny was rushed abruptly aloft as Crow let go his hold on the cloak’s harness to leap to the ledge close to Tiania. Yet again struggling to bring the cloak under his control, de Marigny all but missed what followed next. As it was he heard Crow’s cry of rage and horror … and he saw the gray shape of that giant among night-gaunts as it lifted skyward on silently beating pinions, bearing aloft the wriggling, shrieking, slender form of Tiania grasped in prehensile paws!
IV
Atal’s Elixir
On the wide ledge of the white rock’s peak high above the desert, Titus Crow raged silently in the night and shook his scimitar at the diminishing gray shape that flapped away against a background of strange constellations. By the time de Marigny had landed beside him, however, the naked giant had recovered his equilibrium sufficiently to cry out in a half-choked voice: ‘Quickly, man, out of the cloak! Hurry, Henri, I must get after that monster!’
Seeing instantly how useless and time-consuming it would be to argue – aware that the cloak was designed to operate at maximum efficiency with only one passenger and that it was Titus Crow’s prerogative to pursue the huge night-gaunt and rescue Tiania, if such was at all possible – de Marigny immediately unfastened the cloak’s harness and helped Crow into it. Then, without another word spoken, Crow grabbed his friend around the waist with one arm, his other hand flying to the collar studs that controlled the cloak.
Another moment saw de Marigny deposited none too gently on the desert’s sandy floor.
Rising again into the night, Crow called: ‘Can you find your way back to Ulthar, Henri?’
‘I know the way,’ de Marigny shouted back. ‘Five miles or so from here I pick up the Skai and simply follow the river. No need to worry about me, Titus. I’ll see you in Ulthar … both of you! Good luck!’
‘Thanks. I fancy I’ll need all the luck I can get,’ Crow’s answer came back from the heights. ‘Take care, Henri.’ For a moment or two he was a vague batshape against the blue crystal stars, then he was gone.
Half an hour and a little more than two miles later, as he strode out over the desert dunes in the direction of Ulthar, led on by the sweet scent of night-blooming flowers on the banks of the Skai, de Marigny glanced for the tenth time apprehensively over his shoulder. It was his imagination, of course, but for the last twenty minutes or so, since shortly after he set out from the foot of the white rock pinnacle, he had had the feeling that he was being followed. Yet each time he looked back there was nothing to be seen, only the low dunes and occasionally the rock jutting starkly against the night-dark sky.
Climbing to the top of a high dune, he glanced back yet again and this time spied in the distance the darkly looming basalt towers of Dylath-Leen. No healthy lights showed in the city, only a dull glow from the watchfires at its rim. It shocked de Marigny to be reminded how close he still was to that nightmare-cursed city, and he determined there and then to increase his distance from it as rapidly as humanly possible. It did not seem likely that the horned ones could be on his trail already, and yet – He shuddered and felt the short hairs rise at the back of his neck, a reaction not alone engendered of the desert’s chill, and turned once more toward friendly Ulthar; but even as he turned he saw a movement in the corner of his eye. Something had slipped silently from shadow to shadow less than a hundred yards to his rear. Now he remembered something Grant Enderby had told him – about how expert the horned ones were at tracking their prey – and he shuddered again.
Quickly de Marigny slid down the side of the dune and looked about for a vantage point. He ran for a boulder that lay half-buried in the sand and hid behind it. As he went to his knees in the shadows he heard a distant but distinct wail rising in the night air. The cry reached its highest note, quavered inquiringly, then died into eerie silence. It was almost immediately answered by a second call, from a point de Marigny judged to be just beyond the tall dune; and while these were not the ululant alert cries with which he was now familiar, nevertheless the dreamer knew that they were given voice by those same horned horrors from Leng!
Now de Marigny shot frantic glances to left and right, his eyes searching the desert’s starlit gloom for areas of deeper shadow that might hide his onward flight toward the river. And as he did so there came to his ears many more of the inquiring cries – except that now certain of the creatures who uttered those hideous bayings obviously flanked him! Indeed, one of those cries had seemed to come from somewhere behind where he crouched, from the direction of the Skai itself. And this cry had been different in that it had seemed somehow – triumphant?
So intent was he upon gauging the exact directions whence these latter sounds had issued that he almost failed to hear the soft footfalls in the sand. Too late, he did hear them, and he turned with a single gasp of horror in time to see only the jeweled hilt of a scimitar in the instant before it struck him between the eyes …
When de Marigny regained consciousness he believed for a moment that he had somehow returned through the barriers of dream to the waking world. But not so. Though the sun stood at its zenith and hurt his eyes behind his fluttering eyelids, the dreamer knew that indeed he was still a prisoner of dreamland; more than ever a prisoner, for the buildings and towers that loomed blackly upwards before him, and the steps that sent knives of pain lancing into his spine where he was tied to them were a basalt quarried in dreamland. This could only be Dylath-Leen; and sure enough, if he tilted his head right back at an angle he could see – the great ruby! ‘Ah, our friend from the waking world of men has finally returned to us – with a very sick head, no doubt!’ The squat speaker leaned carelessly on the hilt of his scimitar, its point digging into the rough grain of the steps and its blade curving uncomfortably close to de Marigny’s rib cage. The coarse black silk of the horned one’s baggy breeches was stained and grimed, the red sash at his waist festooned with knives. He wore huge rubies in the rings on his fat fingers and an evil grin upon his face, in which veiled, slightly slanted eyes regarded de Marigny almost hungrily.
And suddenly the dreamer was aware of his pain. His skin felt completely dehydrated, baked dry under the noon sun; his back, which through long hours of unconsciousness had lain across the sharp comers of three of the dais steps, felt as though it might break in pieces at any moment; his head ached abominably and felt grotesquely swollen. Naked, his entire body was bruised from being brutally dragged across miles of desert sands; his lips, tongue, and throat were parched, and leather thongs cut into his wrists and ankles where they were tied.
‘Dreamer, we are going to kill you!’ This time the speaker emphasized his words by idly kicking de Marigny’s bruised ribs. De Marigny barely held back the cry of agony that sprang to his lips, managing at the same time to lift his head up high enough to see that he was ringed by perhaps twenty of the horned ones. Their leader, the speaker, wore no shoes, and de Marigny knew that the extreme pain he had felt when his tender ribs were kicked was due to the fact that his torturer had hooves instead of feet.
‘We are going to kill you,’ that monstrous being said again, ‘but it is entirely up to you how we do it. You can die slowly, very slowly, losing first your hands, then your feet, and your so-called manhood. Then your ears, your eyes, your tongue at the very end. It would take at least a day, perhaps two. Or you could die the hard way!’
He paused to let that last sink in, then continued: ‘On the other hand, we could be merciful.’
‘I doubt,’ de Marigny groaned, ‘if your sort know the meaning of mercy.’
‘Ah, but we do! For instance, it would be merciful to lop off your head with a single stroke – but before you are granted that boon, there are several things I want to know.’
The horned one waited expectantly but de Marigny made no answer.
‘If I have your eyes propped open with slivers of wood, and your head tied back, you would very quickly, very painfully go blind. The sun is singularly unkind to those who stare so at her. But before that becomes necessary–’
‘You want to know something.’
‘Correct! You have been listening to me. That is good. There are several things I wish to know, yes. One: how did you come into Dylath-Leen so secretively, and manage to kill three of our colleagues so efficiently before they could even raise the alarm? Two: how were you able to smuggle your friends so cleverly, so swiftly away, when you yourself were later caught Three: where are your friends now, for we must bring them back here in order that they may keep an important appointment. And finally, four: what is in this vial, which was all you carried other than your knife and a length of rope?’
The elixir! De Marigny gasped involuntarily as his questioner mentioned Atal’s elixir. He had forgotten about the vial until now. The horned one heard the dreamer’s gasp and was quick to note how his eyes had widened fractionally, however momentarily. ‘Eh?’ he grunted. ‘Something I said? About this strange little bottle of liquid, perhaps?’ He held the vial out, between thumb and forefinger, where de Marigny could see it.
‘A man, with no food, no water, coming out of nowhere with nothing but a knife, a rope, and this – and yet you somehow succeeded in rescuing your two friends. Amazing! And such a little thing, this vial, to sustain the three of you across the desert to Ulthar. What does it contain?’
De Marigny’s brain whirled as he sought an advantageous way to answer the horned one’s question. ‘A … a poison,’ he finally offered. ‘It contains a deadly poison.’ His questioner lifted his scimitar, allowing its point to scrape slowly up the line of de Marigny’s ribs, and peered intently at its shiny blade. For a long moment he was silent, then: ‘Oh, no, no, no, my friend.’ His voice was low now, oily, deadly; his eyes glittered dangerously.
‘That will never do. A little vial of poison – no more than a dozen or so drops – to murder an entire city?’
De Marigny writhed both physically and mentally, like a great intelligent moth pinned to some entomologist’s card. He had hoped that his interrogator would make him drink his own ‘poison’ – which by now should have properly fermented – but the ruse had not worked. Then, like a flash of lightning illuminating the dark clouds of the dreamer’s mind, there came a scene remembered from his youth. From a book, perhaps, or a cartoon viewed in some moviehouse of childhood. It was the picture of a rabbit: Br’er Rabbit! And suddenly de Marigny believed that there might after all be a way out. He could but try.
‘If I tell you what is in the vial – if I reveal the secret of the magical potion it contains – will you swear to set me free unharmed?’
The horned one pretended to give de Marigny’s proposal some consideration, fooling the dreamer not at all, then grated: ‘Agreed. After all, it is not you we want but the two you stole from us. If what you have to tell us has some bearing on their present whereabouts, then we will set you free.’ Now it was de Marigny’s turn to feign deliberation.
Finally he said, ‘It is an elixir to increase one’s strength tenfold. One sip of the potion – one drop – and a man may leap the tallest dune at one bound, stride over the desert to Ulthar in the space of a single hour, fight like ten men to overcome tremendous odds, aye, and never once feel the effort.’
The horned one folded the vial carefully in his fat fist and stared at de Marigny intently. ‘Is this true?’
‘How else do you suppose I came out of the night, without provisions, defeating your three guardsmen like so many children to be tossed aside? How else do you explain the utter absence of the two I rescued, gone now like the wind over the desert? Doubtless they are even now in Ulthar, at the Temple of the Elder Ones, where Atal–’
‘Atair hissed his interrogator. ‘What do you know of Atal?’
‘Why, it was Atal gave me the elixir, to speed me on my quest!’
A murmuring swelled in the crowd of horned ones standing about, mutterings of hatred, of awe and amazement – of greed for the magic elixir, if elixir it was. Now de Marigny’s questioner opened his fist once more to stare lustfully at the tiny bottle it contained. Then his expression grew very sly.
‘No, I do not believe you. I think that after all it is perhaps a poison, and that you would trick me into tasting it. If so, then –’ He quickly unstoppered the vial and thrust it toward de Marigny’s face. The dreamer, expecting that this might happen, lifted up his head and opened his mouth wide, straining his neck to reach the tiny bottle.
Immediately the horned one snatched back his arm. He grinned evilly. ‘So your story is true! It… must be.’ His grin was quickly replaced by a look of strange anticipation. He licked his wide lips and his hand actually trembled as once more he studied the vial with wide eyes.
‘Let me try it, Garl,’ came a guttural rasp from one who stood behind the leader. ‘No, me,’ another voice demanded. ‘Hold!’ Garl held up his hand.
‘There is still one question unanswered.’ He turned his gaze once more to de Marigny’s face. ‘If indeed you tell the truth, how was it we caught you so easily? Why did you not escape, like your friends, by leaping away over the dunes and speeding to Ulthar?’
‘Simple.’ De Marigny attempted a shrug as best he could. ‘I neglected to heed Atal’s warning.’ ‘Which was?’
‘Too much of the elixir affects a man like too much wine, slowing him down and dulling his senses for a while. After freeing the other two dreamers, thinking to make myself stronger and faster still, I took a second sip of the elixir. Before I knew it –’
‘We caught you. Hmm! I believe you, yes. And I also believe that with the aid of your elixir we might even recapture the ones you freed. But first the elixir’s powers must be tested.’
‘I’ll test it, Garl,’ came a concerted babble of cries from the crowding horned ones. ‘Me!’
‘No, let me be the one, Garl!’ De Marigny’s inquisitor turned on his colleagues. ‘What? You’d all like to be stronger than Garl, would you?’ He laughed and shook a fat finger at them. ‘None of that, my lads. The elixir is far too precious to waste on fools and hotheads. Later, perhaps, I’ll handpick a raiding party – and tonight we’ll look for certain absent friends in Ulthar – but right now I myself will test the illustrious Atal’s elixir! Stand back, all of you!’
Though the sun blazed high overhead, it was not the heat of that golden orb that brought fresh streams of sweat to de Marigny’s brow but the slow and deliberate way in which Garl of Leng lifted one hand up to his alien face – that and the way his other hand lifted high his scimitar.
‘If you have lied to me, dreamer, then at least you’ll have earned yourself a quick death. That is the only bonus such lies will bring you, however. And now –’ He barely touched his lips to the rim of the tilted vial.
First a look of puzzlement changed the horned one’s features, then a frown. ‘A not unpleasant taste,’ he began, ‘though somewhat –’ Then he reeled drunkenly backward down the dais steps, his scimitar falling with a clatter from a suddenly spastic hand that clawed its way to his throat. He swayed at the foot of the dais for a second only, bulging eyes fixed upon the vial still clenched in one shaking hand.
Then his outline wavered; he seemed to puff outwards as his flesh became a mist; finally his clothes fell in a silken rain to the cobbles of the square.
The vial fell too, cushioned by the coarse silks. Hanging in the air, all that remained of Garl was a rapidly diminishing echo, a thin squeal of outrage and horror!
Then de Marigny’s hoarse laughter broke the stunned silence. Hearing the derision in the dreamer’s voice, the awed crowd of horned ones was galvanized into activity. As one of them stooped to snatch up the fallen vial and others fought over the remaining silks, the rest ringed de Marigny on the steps.
Scimitars whispered from scabbards and flashed in the sun, and for a moment the dreamer thought that he was done for. Then -
‘Hold, lads!’ shouted the one who had snatched up the vial. ‘I, Barzt, now lead you – and I claim the right to avenge Garl myself. But first there is something I must know.’ He tickled de Marigny’s throat with the point of his scimitar. ‘You, man from the waking world, dreamer. Where have you sent Garl with your dark magic?’
‘He’s gone to a hell worse than anything even you could imagine,’ de Marigny chuckled. ‘Worse by far than any torture you could apply to me. You see, the “elixir” was a poison after all, the key to a gate which opens to the blackest hells. Even now Garl screams in eternal agony, where he will curse me in his torment forever; but I am safe from him here in dreamland. Kill me now, if you will, for I am satisfied that Garl has paid for the deaths of my two friends from the waking world. They, too, drank of the poison rather than suffer the indignities of your vile paws. Kill me – kill me now!’ He offered up his throat.
‘Only –’
De Marigny paused, as if biting his tongue, feigning sudden horror. Then, to the crowding horned ones, it seemed as if he attempted to cringe into himself upon the dais steps. ‘No!’ he forced a strangled cry from parched lips. ‘No, not… not that!’
‘Wha -?’ began the frowning Barzt. Then he noticed how de Marigny’s terrified eyes had fastened upon the vial he held so gingerly away from his vile body.
And Barzt’s eyes lit at once with a fiendish delight.
‘So!’ he cried. ‘Garl will curse you in his torment forever, will he? Well then, go to this hell you speak so eloquently of, dreamer, where you, too, may suffer its eternal torments – and Garl’s tender mercies!’ So saying, standing on the dreamer’s hair to hold his head still, he stooped and touched the vial to de Marigny’s lips.
