Star of doom v1 0, p.11
sTAR OF dOOM V1.0, page 11
Sonja walked to her clothes and put them on.
The sun was dipping toward distant forests as they mounted their horses and continued on their way through the late afternoon.
Sonja and Daron halted, dismounted and let their horses graze while they themselves stretched their legs, sipped cool water from a small creek and munched on fruit. They were silent, each with his or her own thoughts. Sonja thought back to her waking up in Daron’s arms—waking up to Daron’s kisses, and kissing him back. Half-asleep, half-awake, eager to caress Daron, eager for him to take her in his arms—had she been truer to herself than she was when awake?
Thinking this and wondering at it, her memory suddenly flashed back to the day she and Daron had left the village. Surprised at herself, Sonja found herself reminded of old Iatos’s words to her on a morning that seemed centuries ago:
“What if you’ve come to expect slaps, and the next thing you hear is music? If you expect slaps, you may react to music as you would to a slap. Whose fault is that?
If you’ve grown up with enemies, you think everyone is an enemy. If you’ve used a knife only for killing, then how can you teach yourself that it can also be used for slicing bread—or for carving some beautiful work of art from a piece of wood?”
Suddenly excited at remembering Iatos’s words and Daron’s kisses at the same time, Sonja felt a leap of emotion, a new trustfulness, and found herself smiling and imagining Daron’s face.
She turned and looked where he sat by her, a short distance away.
Something in his attitude chilled the wild emotions which had suddenly erupted within her.
“Daron?”
He was staring towards the sunset far to the west, staring to where the burning orange globe was setting afire the treetops and sending up a darkly clouded, purple and azure twilight—plumes of blue incense rising from coals in a brazier.
“What is it, Daron?”
“The…amulet.” His hands were on his tunic. “It’s getting warmer. It feels very warm.”
Sonja’s voice dropped a bit. “Osylla—? Or—your father, you mean?”
“My father,” he said, staring at the dying sun. “Soon…”
It appeared first as only a shadow on a hillside—a dark streak etched into the surrounding gray shale and tufted overgrowth. But as they rode nearer, the shadow reformed into a series of shadows to show a truer aspect of what they approached: stone columns, a long expanse of stairs, trees with gnarled roots hovering bn the slope above. As the last of the sunlight died and was almost imperceptibly replaced by frosty moonlight, Sonja and Daron drew close to the hillside and its queer shadows, and knew that it was what they were looking for: A small stone hut, a row of columns and wide stone stairs stood at the threshold of some door leading into the hill itself.
Their horses balked as they came closer; Daron’s shied and tried to rear, and he swore at it while trying to keep it steady. As they came to the expanse of flat stone in front of the stairs—a wide area paved with many flagstones, apparently centuries old—Daron ripped open his tunic and cursed in Mitra’s name.
“What is it?” Sonja called to him—although immediately she understood his problem. For Daron had tom the amulet from inside his shirt and was bouncing it in his right hand. It glowed with shifting hues of orange, yellow and fiery red, a brilliant gleam of white at its center.
“Mitra, Mitral” he growled. “The damned thing is too hot to hold!”
He dismounted awkwardly, and as he did so the blazing jewel fell to the ground. Sonja got down also; Daron’s mount briefly hid her view of the gem, but again she heard him swearing, this time in amazement. When she stepped around, she saw what was happening.
The blazing amulet was sending up a yellowish cloud of smoke and crumbling before their eyes there on the flat stones before the portico. Sonja heard a loud hissing noise, like steam issuing from a lidded cauldron, and suddenly from the heart of the jewel a spark of dazzling fire streaked upward and vanished-into the night sky, too quickly for the eye to follow.
“Erlik—!”
Sonja ran forward and knelt. Where the opalescent gem had so recently flamed in splendor there was now only a lump of dark ash lying on the flags.
“He has returned to the Fullness,” said Daron, awe in his voice.
“You mean—Urrim?”
“Yes. Do not grieve for him, Sonja. He has gone forth from here to be reunited with the One who was before all the worlds. Not so fortunate are we and others like us, who must yet endure the cycles of birth and death for many ages.”
Sonja looked at the night sky, then nodded. “So, all is well with Urrim. I believe you, Daron—I must believe you. But now it seems we have our own destiny to pursue. Where does it lie?”
Daron looked up at the entranceway in the hillside. “This must be it,” he said in a hushed tone. “The jewel can lead us no farther.”
They tethered their horses to some saplings and, loosening their swords in their scabbards, began their way across the flagstones towards the flat, low steps. A cool breeze blew against them from across the wide fieldland, blowing dead leaves across the stone, scattering small pebbles and bits of grit that swirled in tiny wind funnels. The moon, as full and brilliant as the watching eye of Mitra himself, broke from behind a length of wispy cloud and poured silent light upon the scene.
That moonlight revealed the inset behind the stone-columned portico in the hillside. It was an opening, an opening upon which at one time had hung a door. But now only the hinges remained, and those were rusted and bent on the iron staples driven straight into the rock of the hillside.
Daron and Sonja stared for a long moment into that opening. The moonlight showed them the first few yards of its floor, but beyond that was naught but a black void, unbroken and silent.
“Well…” Daron commented, feeling in his pouch for flint, and steel.
But Sonja was already a step ahead of him, using her boot-knife to cut free the branch of a tree growing through cracked stones in the paving.
Gather some of that grass over there,” she indicated to Daron. “It looks dry enough.”
He got together a tight handful of drying bunch-grass, and Sonja tied it to the end of her branch. “It won’t last long,” she admitted, “but it’s better than no light at all. Unless you have an oil lamp on you, by any chance.”
“Fresh out of oil lamps tonight, I’m afraid.”
“There.” She finished tying the grasses with a length of leather thong. “Let’s get into the mouth of the cave, out of the wind.” .
It was silent and somehow ominous, standing there. The sounds of the rattling, dead leaves and the occasional nicker of the horses just outside seemed strangely distant, as though just beyond some invisible veil.
“Hold the torch steady, Daron, please.”
“Sorry…”
She continued scraping flint and steel until a spark caught on the dry grass; the dead tufts blazed up instantly, showing them a long tunnel straight ahead.
“Damn,” Sonja commented in a low voice. “That torch won’t last long.”
Daron walked ahead with the burning brand, Sonja only a step behind him. Once away from the mouth of the tunnel, their torch burned more slowly and did not flicker or waver. The tunnel had been hewn from the solid rock and went straight back into the hillside.
They hurried on. As the torch began to sputter, rapidly burning out of fuel, Sonja and Daron both noticed an open doorway to their left. They peered briefly in, saw nothing, went on.
“At least,” Daron said, “we can go as long as the light holds out—no chance of getting lost. We can always go back for more torches.
Intrigued by what little they had seen within the stone tunnel, Sonja agreed, and they walked more quickly.
A second door, open but shadowed, appeared on their right, then a third on their left again. Sonja passed closest to this last, and as they went by she thought she heard—very faintly, perhaps mistakenly—a small noise issue from the darkness inside.
She slowed her steps. “Daron…”
But he, a few paces ahead, waved to her. “Hurry, Sonja. The torch is about gone, but I think I see light up ahead.”
“What?”
“Come on, come on!”
There was, Sonja saw, a slight bend to the tunnel, and as they rounded it, Daron’s observation proved true. It was light, definitely—light emanating from the end of the tunnel. The floor sloped gently down.
Then the torch burnt out, the last wisps of flaming grass fluttering in dying sparks against the walls of stone. Daron cast the branch to the ground and hastened on, Sonja just behind him.
As he hurried down the sloping floor of the tunnel, he whispered tensely, “The light—it’s in a room. Sonja, there’s a room!”
“All right, all right, don’t go too fast. We don’t know what we might be letting ourselves in for!”
The doping tunnel floor ended at a large, open arch in the rock. Inside they saw a room -a huge, subterranean chamber lit with torches and a multitude of oil lamps.
“Gods!” Daron breathed, tingling all over. “Sonja, I feel so strange. I feel warm, even feverish—”
“Take it easy, you’re just excited.”
“My palms are wet. There’s something in there, it’s tugging at me.”
He hurried on, threw out his arms and grabbed the sides of the entrance with both hands, as though to hold himself up from collapsing. He spoke no more, but stared within.
Sonja approached from behind, looking over Daron’s shoulder. Her brows creased. Familiar as she had become with Wizards and their abodes of magic, she froze in shock. She saw, too, that Daron was now visibly trembling, shivering and sweating and only barely holding himself upright with his white-knuckled grasp of the rocky door frame.
The room was lit with dim yellow torches and oil lamps, and with stranger sources of light as well. Crystalline globes of many sizes illuminated the chamber with diaphanous banners of purple, blue, pink and saffron. There were altars, tables and windows—windows!—cut into the living rock and showing, where there should have been only more rock, strange tableaus of creatures upon windy plains, all in red and mauve and yellow—horrible life forms and phantasms. Braziers full of liquids boiled and sent up fumes; books lay open, their leaves fluttering though Sonja felt no breeze. Runes and cartouches were hewn into the floor, the walls, the ceiling, some inset with jewels, some with glowing metals, others with glossy woods and bits of bone.
In the center of the strange room, in the midst of all its strange objects and lights, a huge double circle had been channeled into the stone floor. The channels were filled with candles and torches and fuming incenses which sent up a globe of blue vapor. Within that vapor, in the middle of the double circle, sat a man—tall, gaunt and pale—dressed in a black robe and a scarlet robe. His head was bald and shiny, his eyes were drawn deeply into their sockets, and his arms were thrown out and the fingers splayed; his body was shuddering and his lips working soundlessly.
A sorcerer—gaunt as death but alive, veiled from dear sight by the blue smoke of incense, mumbling soundlessly as he stared directly at Sonja and Daron.
Shuddering, hugging the stone entranceway, Daron gasped, “My…my father!”
Daron stared into the chamber, feet planted firmly, arms braced on the sides of the archway as though he were resisting a compulsion. His eyes never left the motionless sorcerer, his father, within the blue-hazed magical circles. He did not speak, but his arms trembled as he clutched the arch’s sides.
Sonja, however, was less entranced. After her initial surprise and shock at the magical vibrancy of the room, she held back instinctively from its atmosphere of malignancy, for she sensed that that atmosphere was thick with more than the pluming incense fumes and the miasmic swirling of colored lights. Some intuition warned her not to let herself enter that room; and she was still uneasy about the sound she had heard back down the tunnel.
Reaching carefully past Daron, she took up an oil lamp that burned on a low stand just within the door. The air of the chamber prickled against her skin, but the lamp was reassuringly solid. Daron still stared in fascination at the circle of candles and smoke. Keeping her eyes on him, Sonja backed away with the oil lamp.
“Watch him, Daron,” she admonished, hoping he could still hear her. “If he comes out of his trance, warn me. I’m going to check on something.” Then she turned down the tunnel and proceeded by the lamp’s filmy light.
After a few moments she came to the door on her right and paused outside to see if she had truly heard any noise.
It came again—that dim, muffled sound, unrecognizable but certainly there.
Holding forth the lamp, Sonja stepped into the room, and for the second time within minutes felt cold shock ripple through her. More shadowed than illuminated by the light of her lamp was a large stone room, empty save for a plain rough table, a chair, some unlit torches on the walls—and the strange object in the center. Upon a stone dais stood a huge, crystalline sphere, a great globe twice the length of a man in diameter, and shining by some luminescence from within.
Sonja doubted her own vision. Something white seemed to flicker within the sphere, but because the oil lamp was dim and the light within the sphere was one moment brilliant and the next moment cloudy and fitful, she could not be sure she was not imagining it. And if there were—what…? some demon? some trapped foulness?—brought up from hell or down from the Void by the black sorcerer down the tunnel…
Lifting her oil lamp, Sonja lit three of the torches nearest her on the walls, then faced again the sphere on the dais. She was astonished; she stepped closer, setting down her lamp and loosening her sword.
There was a man inside the sphere—a man floating amid the milky clouds. Yet, no—surely not—the luminescence from within must have tricked her with its wavering glow.
No! It was a man! Now his face came close to her again, the burning, frantic eyes stared at her, distorted by the curve of the globe! It was an old man, trapped and desperate. He rapped upon the shimmering edge of his glassy prison with his knuckles; he seemed to strike with all his might, yet his motion was slowed by the thick vapors which surrounded him, so that all that came through was the dull sound which Sonja had heard earlier.
Not knowing what to do, she stood where she was. The old man in the sphere swam toward her again, seeming to fight currents that pulled at him and at the vapors within the globe.
There was a mist on the inside of the sphere that was like the glistening film that forms on the surface of cold glass in a warm room. Now, as the prisoner plunged haphazardly into view once more, he tried to write quickly upon this film, tracing letters with his finger. His face held an anguished look; he stretched and turned as the currents tugged at him, striving to complete his brief message, rubbing the letters backwards upon the film. In a moment, although he was sucked back into the mists before he could complete his words, Sonja saw enough to understand.
His finger had traced: EMOIADOL—
Free me!
Instantly, Sonja charged up the short steps of the dais, no longer willing to abide die man’s obvious torment when she might do something to ease it. With a sudden exertion, she put her hands to the crystalline surface, braced her legs, dug her boots into the stone floor and heaved against the shining globe.
It was unpleasantly warm to the touch. For a moment it rocked with her initial powerful thrust, and then moved no more.
The wrinkled face of the trapped man swam into view again, gaunt with agony, pleading. His lips moved. Sonja could not follow his words; yet she did not need to. She knew what he wanted her to do.
Furious that her first attempt had accomplished nothing, Sonja drew her sword and stepped back nimbly, allowing herself just the right space in which to whirl it. To her surprise, the blade seemed to glow with a blue light: the same sort of bluish haze which formed the atmosphere of the sorcerer’s chamber down the tunnel. She blinked, and the vapors of the globe seemed to take on a bluish cast—the same blue glow which had visited her in the swamp, and on the night of her destiny years ago…
“Erlik and Tarim!” Sonja howled, bringing up her sword, and in a broad side-swing she smashed it full against the crystal sphere.
It bounced back. A ringing vibration jolted her arm and stung her wrist as the blade whipped back through the air. She swore angrily, snarling as she hauled back to try another blow, regardless of the pain it might bring her.
But the old man in the sphere came into view again, waving his arms slowly through the blue-white mist. He pointed at Sonja, then away from her. She followed his eyes, turned, saw again the one small table that stood in the corner of the room.
Upon it lay an object.
“That?” she yelled to the man.
Did he nod affirmatively as the mists pulled him back again?
Growling, Sonja sheathed her sword with a clang, jumped down from the dais, went to the table and picked up the object. It was a rock, very heavy, with an uncommon smoothness, almost an oily feel to it. It had been shaped into a rude egg-shape, and upon it were runes or sigils which she could not understand.
“What am I supposed to do with this? Recite some kind of—?”
Her first impulse was to hurl it at the sphere in anger; then, pulling herself up, Sonja reflected that that might not be a bad idea. She held it up in her hand, saw the face, old and wizened, appear again behind the surface of the sphere.
The man’s eyes seemed to implore her as he gestured at himself with his hands.
Sonja’s lips drew back in a snarl, her nostrils flared. With all her might she threw the rock straight at the sphere; she had just a glimpse of the speeding missile before some warning inner voice caused her to throw herself belly-first to the floor, fold her arms tightly over her head—
A tremendous explosion shook the room. Sonja was bounced clear of the floor for a moment. When she opened her eyes and gasped for the breath that had been knocked out of her, she saw only an impenetrable blue fog and heard only a feeble, floundering scuffle as of an old man lying on the floor not far away…
