The Star Magicians

8. PHANTOMS OF XULTHOOM

TERROR HUNG like a black curtain over the stupendous castle of black stone.

The cold wind screamed like a banshee as it tore through the needle-spires of jagged gray rock that thronged the plain of dim-glittering metallic crystals. As far as the eye could see, the face of Xulthoom showed the same grim visage. Stretching to the horizons, the endless desert of dull, faintly sparkling crystals numbed the eye with eternal sameness.

Here and there, rising like a shattered column of some palace ruined in Time’s dawn, the fang-sharp spires of naked rock rose, scoured clean by the forever-hissing ice-breathed wind.

This was Xulthoom … the planet that drove men mad.

The sky hung close, stiflingly close, pressing down until it seemed to Shangkar’s restless, uneasy spirits as if it lay thick and soft against the very tops of the black minerals of this fantastic goblin-castle. Xulthoom’s face was cloaked in eternal gray mist—mist torn and tattered by the endless winds that swept howling around and around the desert planet; mist that streamed in tendrils like clotted shadow; mist that took on strange shapes and forms to an eye that ached and blurred from the chill breath of the age-long gale.

Sometimes the mists of Xulthoom looked like great vaporous claws, hovering over the black towers to snatch away an unwary guard. Sometimes the whip of the ice-cold wind ripped the gray mist into uncanny likenesses: bat-winged dragons … hideously elongated faces that leered and peered with holes for eyes … floating forms, like ghosts of smoke-shaped demons … or slithering serpents of slimy fog… .

Shangkar cursed, pulling the great cloak of shaggy fur closer about his naked shoulders. It was bad enough to be on this weird, doom-haunted world at all—curse the luck that had made him draw guard-duty at this lonely post!

From the corner of his eye, the Barbarian could just make out the tall form of his companion guard, along the curve of the great crenellated wall. The ragged veils of mist that slid past obscured his comrade’s hulking form from view … then the shrieking wind tore a long rent in the fog-veil, and it was strangely comforting to glimpse the black shape of a fellow human in all this terror-haunted darkness.

All about him rose the giant structure of Djormandark Keep, like a fantastic Castle of the Djinn. It was the only building on all the World of Mists, and no man knew what curious hands had raised so enigmatic a building on this accursed world. The Hooded Men who had ruled this world until yesterday whispered dark legends that Djormandark had been built by the Creatures of Light who had controlled this Galaxy before the creation of men. Millions upon millions of years ago they had returned to the Fire-Mist beyond the Galaxy, from which they had flown in The Beginning of Things. When the first Earthmen had come hither, they had found an empty world, scoured by the merciless winds … gray crystal deserts … gray fangs of rocky spires … endlessly swirling gray mists … and Djormandark’s unthinkably huge castle of black stone, a city-large fortress, a throng of turrets and weird domes, an eternal, age-old Citadel of Mystery, ruling this desert world of choking mists.

Shangkar growled, spitting grit from his sour mouth. He had seen the Hooded Men from whom they had wrenched control of this world … great tall, gaunt, leathery-skinned submen, faces forever hidden behind their cowled robes of woven cloth-of-metal. Perhaps it was the only way men could live on this accursed world, their flesh cloaked against the crystal grit and the dank winds, but their prowling, faceless forms only seemed to add an extra touch of terror to this ghostly world.

Shivering against the chill, Shangkar gazed with fierce cat-eyes, squinting against the blown dust, striving for the familiar sight of his comrade, whose dark form was hidden again by the fogs. Curse the incredible wealth of radium-rubies that drew men to this darkling world! Were it not for the priceless gems locked in the stony caverns far beneath this Keep, the weirdly radioactive jewels the Hooded Men mined in somber silence from the black rock, the Rovers would never have come in flame and thunder to conquer this Ghost-World!

Shangkar grinned sourly, remembering. Two short days from the hour they had hastily quit the trader’s world, hurtling across space from Argion in their mighty, mile-long space fortresses, they had ringed the mist-veiled face of grim Xulthoom with hammering fury. Mighty laser-cannons probing through veils of fog, shattering into flaming gobbets the frail fleet of sky-sleds the Hooded Men had futilely mustered against them … then the great personnel-carriers, shuttling between the orbiting fleet and the planet below … Barbarians howling with blood-lust, drifting down from the sky with their gravity harnesses … hacking with axe and blade and searing beam through the gibbering, hooting hordes of Hooded Men … clashing, struggling clots of bloody men, battering through the foe … across the walls, the domes and aerial bridges … down into the great gloomy fortress beneath … and victory at last, scarlet thunder-throated triumph, as Drask had stood, splattered with gore from throat to heel, a dripping longsword in one brown fist, his booted heel grinding into the throat of M’zzao, Lord of the Hooded Men, while from a thousand Rovers had rung the mighty call:

“HAI-KING!”

Shangkar spat. All too soon the joy of fierce, bloody combat had ended, the victory-feast, the torture of the Hooded Lords, the carousal of drunken, gorged battle-companions in the torchlit hall… .

Now, naught but long hours of duty in this black citadel. Now, long, empty hours of boredom in this grim castle of brooding terror. Long hours of duty on the wall, striving to hold your mind clean of the taint of madness as you stared out at the gray eternal sameness of this ghostly world … and the strange things that happened.

The shadows, glimpsed in hall and chamber, that were not phantom-figures born of fog and wind … the cold fingers that touched your throat at night, as you huddled in light, uneasy sleep, shivering against the dank chill … fingers which tore sleep from you with a start of terror and brought you yelling to your feet, tugging mace from belt, to face—nothing.

And the whispers.

No one remembered just when they had started. Faint, faint voices whispering about you … soon you found yourself straining every nerve to hear the words they gibbered, words you could never—quite—make out!

Morale was crumbling. The men off-duty fell into savage quarrels over the smallest trifles—a filched sleeping-fur, a missing gem, a casual but untactful word. Sudden berserk explosions of fury that left hacked corpses and frightened, bloody-handed men to face Drask’s swift, grim justice and the headsman’s cold blade. How much longer would they remain chained to this hell-world of whispering phantoms?

With a sudden start, Shangkar was jerked from his thoughts. The veil of thick, clotted mist had passed long minutes ago, but his eyes, staring ahead, unseeing, busy with brooding thoughts, had but now noticed that the familiar form of his fellow-guardsman was—no longer there!

Cold sweat started from Shangkar’s brow. Ripping his axe from its scabbard at his waist, he hurled along the curve of the crenellated, hip-high wall, boots thudding and slapping in the sudden silence. Silence? He stopped, gasping for breath, a glint of animal fear in his staring eyes.

The wind had stopped howling.

In the breathless silence, Shangkar dropped his eyes to the spreadeagled form that lay before him against the wet black stone.

It was so silent he could hear the uneven hammering of his heartbeat.

From the shadows, the white, white face of his comrade stared directly up at him with wide, unseeing eyes.

Shangkar dropped to his knees, sobbing for breath. He tore open his comrade’s fur cloak, fumbling with icy fingers over the man’s naked chest.

The face was white as clean paper. Every drop of blood had left it. And stamped upon it was an indescribably horrible expression of unhuman, mind-shattering fear. Those glazed and sightless eyes had looked upon something so awful that the mind behind those eyes had shattered into madness upon the instant.

There was no mark upon the body. No pulse thudded in the motionless naked chest. The man was dead.

He had been … frightened … to death.

Shangkar turned away into the curve of the wall and vomited—over and over again, splattering the stones with sour acid, spasm after spasm of uncontrollable nausea tearing out his guts … until at last he huddled gasping and drained of strength, gagging at the sour taste in his dry mouth, his eyes wide with horror, staring blankly out into the gray drift of fog-faces.

It was then that the whispers began… .

Far below, in the great echoing hall, Drask sat on a huge throne of black stone, wrapped in furs against the chill. Even here, deep within the central keep, you could hear the wind that never stopped, howling like a mad dog beyond the yard-thick walls of solid rock.

Before him a great fire blazed on the stone pave, sending a wavering ruddy light but little warmth to ease the bone-deep chill. In one gloved hand he held a massive goblet of the fiery purple liquor of far Valthome. In the other he restlessly rolled and tossed a superb radium-ruby. At dawn of yesterday, when they had at last broken through the doors of the mighty vaults, exposing a flood of the glittering gems, this one great ruby had rolled from the rest and struck against his boot. He had bent and picked it up, and now he mechanically played with the gorgeous jewel while he listened distractedly to Abdekiel’s slow, purring voice.

“… Shangkar is still sane. I have given him to drink of the Wine-of-Dreams, and he will pass the rest of the night in healing slumber. The shock of finding his comrade dead of terror almost shattered his mind as well… . There is some uncanny curse over this haunted world, my Lord. For the good of the men, we should leave, and leave at once!”

“We will leave when the last gem from the empty vaults has been transferred to the fleet, and not one moment before, you frightened pig!” the Warlord rasped irritably, draining his goblet at a draft and hurling the goblet from him, to clang like a golden bell against the cold pavestone somewhere in the shadows beyond the reach of the firelight.

Abdekiel’s yellow face was an impassive mask in the red, wavering light.

“My Lord—we have been on this world but two days. In that small stretch of time eleven men have been slain in fights—fights that spring up from a word, a glance, nothing more. Six more you have executed for causing these fights. Seven others have gone raving mad … they say the shadows whisper to them!”

Drask grunted moodily, tossing the gem into the air and watching it twinkle in the fire-glow.

“Hortha, who died from sheer fright last night, without a mark on his body, is not the first to die so, although we have kept this from the men. He is the fourteenth. The fourteenth to be … frightened to death … within fourteen hours! One man, you see, my Lord, for each hour we remain here … and I doubt not the shadows will continue taking their grisly toll—”

“You croak like a hoarse vulture, old toad,” Drask spat. “Do you have a woman’s soft heart beneath that fat blubber?” Abdekiel’s slitted eyes flashed venomously, but he chose not to answer the insult. “And one man has taken his own life: Diothar, who slit his throat with his own knife last night. He was no ignorant boy, no stupid peasant—he was a Chieftain and Noble of the Varkonna, your own clan, my Lord! An Elder and Advisor of your own Council! Now he is dead—by his own hand! Lord—we must leave—before—before—”

“Silence!”

Goaded to fury, Drask sprang to his feet, dashing the radium-ruby against the stone pave in his rage.

And then there was a long, long moment of utter astounded silence, as the two men stared at the smoldering jewel. A sheath of red crystal had shattered from the jewel as it struck the stone pave. And exposed now to the eye, the gem was … a great emerald, slow-pulsing fires glowing deep within it, throbbing like a living heart.

An emerald talisman of the Green Goddess.

Drask drew in a long, uneven breath. There was no doubt whatever in his mind. The gem was identical with the other, smaller talisman that had pulsed with similar witch-fires in the hilt of the dancing-girl’s dagger … that member of the Green Sisterhood who had spied upon him in distant Argion.

As they stood motionless, a calm, sweet voice filled the echoing silence … a fiercely sweet voice, chiming with cold mockery, vibrant with strange, seductive power … a voice that could never spring from a human throat … suave, metallic, singing like the music of little golden bells:

“Drask of the Varkonna, the Goddess commands! Harken and heed Her words. The Queen of Green Magic forbids that you advance one parsec further into the Orion Spur! Quit this world of Xulthoom without delay—leave forever this region of space, which is by the Goddess Niamh forever forbidden to the Star Rovers. Lead your nomad-fleets back to the bleak Rim-worlds from whence your forefathers came, and bend your savage talents to taming those cold worlds upon the edge of the Galaxy. Know that if your fleets advance hither from Xulthoom one parsec deeper into the Spur, I shall destroy you and break your fleets forever.”

The voice fell silent. From his holster, Drask tore a laser gun and leveled its searing thread of ruby fire at the speaking crystal that lay before him, pulsing against the black pave. It exploded like a thunder-clap. Oily green smoke boiled up into the shadows. Echoes boomed and gobbled away among the dim reaches of the ceiling. The stone pave hissed and seethed in a puddle of lava before the droning needle of energy.

Guards came racing into the hall, swords glinting in the firelight.

“My Lord! My Lord! What’s amiss? We heard you fire—”

Drask snapped off the laser-beam and hurled the weapon from him with an oath, striking one blank-faced guard to his knees as it thudded against his shoulder.

The Warlord sank, white-faced and shaking, into the huge throne of black stone where before him for endless ages since the coming of the first Earthmen none but the Lords of the Hooded Men had ruled.

He clutched his shaking hands together with savage fury. The tendons stood out like bronze bands on his lean arms as he strove to quell the trembling of his fingers. At last he drew a long breath, having conquered the tremor. He sagged back in the throne, gazing wearily around him. Abdekiel lay huddled on the floor, face hidden in his fat yellow hands, whimpering with terror.

“Nothing is wrong, fools. What could be wrong? Am I not sole, unquestioned Master here? Have we aught to fear on this accursed world but—shadows—voices—whispers?”

His voice rang harshly, like a cracked bell against the moaning undertone of the shaman’s whine. The guards looked at each other, white-faced.

“Get your stupid faces out of here, and bring me wine! And find Lord Tonguth, that black dog, in whatever kennel he is hiding in. Tell him to pass the word—tomorrow at dawn we quit this mad world forever.”

They waited, blank-faced. Drask lifted a carven mask-like visage to glare at them with savage hawk-gold eyes.

“What are you waiting for, pigs?” he snarled.

Bewildered, one guard fumbled for a salute.

“Th-the Lord Tonguth, Sire—he will ask of us what destination you intend—”

Drask laughed, mockingly.

“Back to the Rim-Stars, that’s what my Lord Tonguth wants to hear, I doubt not! Well, tell the tallow-gutted coward that we shall strike further into the Orion Spur—two parsecs on—to the next world on our plan of march. Now get out—and bring me wine, do you hear? Wine!”

They stumbled out, leaving Drask alone with the sobbing, huddled figure of the shaman … alone with shadows and whispers, and the dim flicker of the dying fire.