The robed figure studied him expressionlessly. “In truth-for there is no longer purpose in disguising from you the truth of our intent-at the first I deemed you no more than a brash barbarian outlaw who had seized the legendary crown of Pictdom through boldness and the whims of fortune. It seemed to me quite possible that, by making your position desperate, a combination of dire threats and bright promises of power and wealth would compel you to obey my secret designs.
“I was in error. Whether you are indeed a greater man than the ambitious savage king I thought to deal with-or merely a madman-I cannot determine. But it is evident that you will not serve me of your free will.”
“Nor of your threats and your lying promises!” Bran swore, knowing he was speaking his death sentence.
“It would have been better,” mused Ssrhythssaa, “had you served us of your free will. Yet if you cannot be our unwitting dupe, it is possible you may become our willing vassal. I know your apish race of old, Bran Mak Morn. There is little man will not do out of greed or fear.”
“If you think I would willingly play traitor to my race, knowing the truth of your evil designs, then you know very little of mankind, and far less of Bran Mak Morn!” the Pict challenged.
Ssrhythssaa contrived to convey scorn in his grotesque tone. “I know enough of apes who think only of bright objects and petty comforts to know that every man has his price-and his limits of endurance. But I think it better that you know more of my race, Bran Mak Morn, and of your own race-enough to know my promises are not idle, nor my threats empty bluster.”
This time Bran’s curses only evoked a flicker of sardonic mirth. Heedless of the Pict’s angry defiance, the ancient serpent-man turned from the iron cage-and reverently approached the Altar of the Black Stone.
14
PHANTASMAGORIA
Ssrhythssaa raised his long arms on high, so that the flowing sleeves of his robes fell back over the pallid scales of his sinewy flesh. His serpent’s hiss whispered a long sibilance of syllables so alien that Bran could scarce be certain they were words in any tongue. It reminded him of a nest of vipers cast upon a fire of green faggots, or long, dry talons dragged over a tight drumhead of human skin.
Once in a plundered villa Bran had come upon a girl’s corpse hanging from a limb over a mosaic floor of a garden. The soft dripping of writhing maggots from the lich’s belly onto the tiles, and their blind wriggling through the scattered leaves, had evoked such a sound of utter abomination.
Darkness suddenly crept upon them from the shadowy recesses of the vast cavern. The eerie luminescence that seeped from the cairn of skulls grew dim, dimmer still. Now it seemed that the Black Stone itself began to glow-to emanate a radiance beyond the spectrum of natural light. Blackness swallowed the entire cavern. And upon the web of blackness the uncanny scintillance of the Black Stone began to weave a pattern of visual images.
At first chaos.
Then coalescence…
The darkness exploded into a phantasmagoria of monstrous shapes and steaming jungles and misshapen cities rearing above the primeval earth. The stars were set in constellations alien to the night skies, and savage beasts and unearthly vegetations such as no man ever looked upon rioted across the shimmering landscape. Colossal images of elder horror shambled across the stars-fought to the death with shapes even more hideously alien. Mountains dissolved into bright beacons of glowing lava. Annihilating energies beyond human conception streamed hellfire from the stars. Star-defying towers crumbled into flame; looming cities slumped stark and lifeless.
Continents reeled. Cities and jungles died in shrieking steam and singing fire. Darkness crept over their buried embers…
Bran understood that a vast spread of eons fled before the rush of images. New continents arose from the ash-choked seas, new jungles rooted upon the crumbling land. New shapes crawled beneath their verdure to gaze in dread wonder at the decaying slag heaps where once alien towers defied the stars and cities floated on lakes of flame.
At first Bran thought the shapes were those of men.
They were not men, although they sought to walk erect. Vaguely Bran recognized in certain of the apish brutes the shape that would someday become man. Others of the beasts only mimicked the shape of emerging man.
For as man painfully evolved from the apes, Bran beheld other monstrous evolutions that sought to attain the guise of man. He saw strange shapes that spawned from the seed of wolves, of bats, of birds of prey, of horses and of goats. The sullen currents of the sea gave forth strange and aborted monsters that sought the slime of land. Other hideous mockeries of anthropomorphosis, the blighted spawn of some mad god’s nightmare. Creatures born of the riving of cosmic energies upon the degenerate progeny of the Elder races and the blind evolution of pre-Adamite earth. And among these shapes of depraved creation crawled serpents from whose bellies grew limbs to lift them from the primeval slime.
There were wars. Wars without quarter. Wars of vengeful savagery and mindless slaughter that surpassed the bloodlust that flamed in the heart of the Pict. Again bizarre cities and towers arose from the haunted jungle. Inhuman armies battled and conquered. Cities reeled in destroying flame and merciless pillage. The ancient soil turned black with libations of strange blood.
It was war to extinction between the rivals of infant mankind and mankind’s apish forebears. Death overshadowed the embattled land-not only in the titanic clash of colossal armies, but in the dark solitude of lonely forest trails, or in the still hours of the night. Creatures half man, half wolf set upon shaggy hunters, fell beneath their flint axes. In isolated huts leather-winged shapes ripped through thatched roofs to flap away into the night with their screaming prey.
How long this unrelenting war for mastery of earth’s dawn continued, Bran Mak Morn could not fathom-no more than could he number the countless myriads of the slain, nor call the names of the ancient heroes whose grim victories are but a lost echo of antediluvian myth.
As the centuries swam before his entranced vision, Bran became aware that mankind was at last winning his first and greatest war. The numbers of the were-creatures ebbed before the determined flow of man’s greater innate savagery and capacity to destroy. The rival cities fell into ruin and were not rebuilt. The inhuman armies dwindled and reeled under inexorable defeat. Into the waste places, the lost regions of the world, they fled, the hunted remnants of the half-human races. Some of them Bran recognized from the dark tales of his own race, and from the legends the Romans told-werewolves and weretigers, batmen and harpies, centaurs and satyrs, sphinxes and cyclopes-other creatures more monstrous and defying recognition.
Of all these abortive spawn of blighted evolution, the serpent-folk proved mankind’s deadliest rival. Theirs was a greater cunning-born of a certain instinctive wisdom imparted to their race through bloodlines that reached back to the smouldering ruins of Elder Earth. The serpent-folk-who hated man for usurping their rightful heritage, and at the same time mimicked human shape-were not so easily conquered.
In open warfare the surging armies of mankind burned the alien cities of the serpent-folk and destroyed their strange altars. The serpent-folk fought back through hideous sorceries and foul treacheries. Their relentless wars spanned centuries, but as ever the tide of humanity flowed stronger. Before the undaunted hordes of the ape-men, the dark wizardry and hellish servants of the serpent-folk could not prevail. When their last citadel fell to the brutish armies of mankind, the few survivors of the serpent-folk fled into the shadow.