The sage’s servants nodded mutely—even those who still possessed their tongues—while his voluntary visitors quickly found a reason to absent themselves, leaving the old mage, with his shocked white brows and thin ichthyic whiskers, lost in what they took to be rheumy recollections of a youth they supposed he fantasized as idyllic.
In this, however, Sarn Kathool’s peers were mistaken. His youth had been a harsh and in most respects miserable one, in which any advantage he had gained for himself came only with the greatest expenditures of energy, dedication, perseverance and the steadfast application of a ferocious intelligence. Much of the authority he now wielded was his by virtue of having outlasted his rivals. This was a source more of worry than of nostalgia, or even of pride; for the great colleges of arcane investigation were poorly staffed and even more meagerly attended, and no longer matriculated skilled gleaners of esoterica with anything like the force and variety he had taken for granted in his youth. Few graduated from the remote monastic eyries of the Eiglophian Mountains, and cold were the kitchens of the Mhu Thulan lamaseries.
Sarn Kathool had witnessed the near total decline of civilization, and of man’s civilizing urges, in the course of his lifetime—a paltry few generations on the scale of men less practiced at managing their mortality. And seeing now the relentless, remorseless approach of the glacial age, he felt that the burden was on him to arrest and if possible, reverse humanity’s declining course. The ice would be his unwitting ally—which was well, as it had come to Sarn Kathool from various accounts that those who opposed the advancing sheets of crystalline cold rarely profited thereby.
His plan was to embrace and accept the course of nature, and navigate to an ideal destination of his choosing, rather than allowing blind fate to steer the species. It had been foretold in multiple oracular utterances, and in his own febrile visions, that the great demonic glacier would level the rich Hyperborean landscapes like a razor dragged across a whiskered cheek. Where mighty mountains crumbled and gave way before the blinding advance of frost, flimsy human structures stood no chance. No monuments of the great Hyperborean kings would survive to dazzle distant ages beyond the ice’s reign; few memories would persist even in oral form.
But there was one thing Sarn Kathool relied on to survive the ravening chill, and that was man himself: vulnerable as an individual, but wily and adaptable as a race. Therefore he bent his still keen intellect on devising a scheme for the improvement of the species. The ice would give humankind the chance for reinvention. Sarn Kathool conceived a new beginning, a new race, with all the depravity, evils and ills of this degenerate age bred out of it for good!
No one understood better than Sarn Kathool the audacity and enormity of such a proposition, but his finances were equal to the endeavor. He planned to invest every last pazoor in his creation, and no matter the extravagance of the undertaking, he intended to use all of his resources to their utmost.
From the tip of his tower, set well back in the interior of Mhu Thulan, Sarn Kathool could peer out with a spyglass on a clear, still day and see the proud although abandoned spire of the sorcerer Eibon at the edge of the distant sea. Eibon had vanished from Hyperborea just ahead of a scourge of religious persecution cunningly avoided by Sarn Kathool, who diplomatically kept fanes to both Yhoundeh and Tsathoggua symmetrically installed in the depths of his own citadel.
He daily observed the rituals and offerings appropriate to each god, to ensure that no deity would thwart his aspirations. This also meant he could not count on either one for assistance. To prefer one over the other, to beg a favor of bat-featured Tsathoggua while spurning the elk goddess Yhoundeh, was to invite catastrophe. Therefore magic could play no part in his designs. He turned instead to the far more arcane study of technology, long out of favor in Hyperborea, even though its first seeds had sprouted there, as demonstrated by the occasional discovery of vast clockwork cities beneath the crawling sands of the aural reaches.
Far and wide he sent his scouts and acquisition experts, to retrieve volumes from the rare tome repositories of Mu and the archives of Atlantis; and gradually his own library, already overflowing with rare manuscripts of illuminated pterodactyl skin and vast books cased in yellowed horn of mastodon, became Hyperborea’s most concentrated seat of scientific learning. The incenses and enchanted braziers, reeking of tradition and ceremony, were put aside for strange polished lenses, outré fuming glassware, miles of curved tubing that kept the glasswrights of Commorium busy for years on end. Along with books and secret manuscripts, there flowed into his vast manse a steady procession of youths, bought from orphanages, salvaged from the streets, acquired from slave traders either by exchange of coin or the wholesale raiding and looting of transport ships. Multitudinous were the experts and specialists in Sarn Kathool’s employ, putting all their ingenuity to work on his behalf, while never suspecting the role they played in his grand vision of humanity’s great purification, preservation, and restoration, in hand with the great cold cleansing.
Fighters, merchants, mariners, moneylenders, healers, magistrates, sharp-dealers, assassins—all occupations figured in his plan. For at heart it was simply a matter of people. The Hyperborean people were his responsibility, and he felt it deeply; they were what he sought to preserve, after all; they were reason enough to persevere.
Sarn Kathool was a keen observer and lover of people; and in a way, late in his life, he found his true calling as collector and creator of the same. The techniques of breeding, the basic principles of hybridization and the concentration of desirable traits within a population, along with the elimination of those undesirable, were known to all but the most willfully ignorant. By such rules were fine aurochs bred into prized stock, through generation upon generation of gradual improvement. The ferocious dimetrodons, so popular as guardians of the wealthiest estates, had been bred through the ages for their lurid sails of toxic pigmentation and their loud sibilant bark. The same principles could be seen at work in human breeding. But never before had anyone thought to apply them with the relentless rigor and enthusiasm of Sarn Kathool.
He selected only the sturdiest females from among his growing stock, and those unworthy of refinement he established as their handmaidens and servitors. A similar program was instituted among the males, although toward an entirely different end. The males were set to fighting and rivalry, with all manner of duplicity and martial cunning encouraged, so as to thin the ranks as efficiently as possible and inculcate the most effective predators. The females were not set at each other in open combat, but the winnowing process was no less rigorous. Sarn Kathool reviewed them daily and received the reports of their overseers, in order to evaluate which possessed the most desirable demeanor, the greatest evidence of compassion—the qualities, in short, that one would wish the mother of the coming race to possess.
When the determination had been made, and Sarn Kathool had selected the most promising virgin, she was given a strong narcotic draught and carried immediately to his laboratory, where Sarn Kathool set to work at the heart of an extravagant mechanism fashioned of ranked lenses which permitted him to peer at the inner workings of the corpuscles and animalcules that drove the animate engines of fleshy creatures and vegetative life alike. More, the mechanism was an intricate manipulator of these cells, with meshed gears and serried levers declining into ever finer forms, so that the wizard’s gross physical gestures were translated across great chasms of scale, permitting him to flex a frail index finger and thereby score a precise incision over the surface of an organelle, deploying an edged instrument a thousand times as fine as an ice-flea’s proboscis. With a delicate touch, the ancient sage delved into the prenatal labyrinths of the chosen maid, and therein made infinitely delicate adjustments to the ranks of half-formed homunculi that waited to be summoned forth in service from their mother’s womb.