“What is it? Tell me!”
“Drask has made his move even more swiftly than I had expected,” he said dully. “Even now the Rovers are loading the loot of Argion aboard their fleets, making ready for departure. No time now to fly to the World of Green Magic to confer with your Mistress! Every moment counts. We must follow the fleet to Xulthoom, flying invisible and indetectible, shadowing them. But what I shall do to stop them, once we reach the Mist-World, I … do not … know!”
Lurn’s soul froze within her at the chill note of despair in Calastor’s voice, and she clutched his arm with white fingers, staring with him at the glowing screens.
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 calclass="underline"
“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!