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.
9.
MONSTERS AMONG THE STARS
DAWN BROKE, cold and dim, over the mist-veiled crystalline deserts of Xulthoom. Although the planet swung in close orbit about its primary, only sixty million miles from Aar, its parent sun, this luminary was an aged, cooling red dwarf. Its somber, blood-crimson globe shed only dim light and little heat that escaped the merciless cold of outer space.
All night, goaded by the stinging lash of Drask’s tongue and impatient blows from the flat of his sword, the grumbling pirate horde had toiled to load their gear and booty aboard the shuttle-boats. The stupendous vaults of treasure, the heaped and piled loot of nameless eons they were forced to abandon to the Hooded Men, who stood silently watching, waiting for the departure of their savage conquerors. Although Tonguth felt a vast relief at the thought that they were at last lifting off this accursed demon-haunted planet, the avarice in his soul panged him at the vision of the uncountable wealth of radium-rubies their abrupt and unexpected departure forced them to leave behind.
For long hours the Chieftain supervised the movement of men, machines and loot. Like a weird flock of man-birds, scores of horn-helmeted Star Rovers drifted up from the goblin turrets of Djormandark Keep, weightless on their gravity belts, soaring up with flapping cloaks into the gaping, capacious holds of the personnel-carriers that hovered waiting in the ghostly fog-drift, ready to lift them into the bellies of the fleet ships in orbit beyond the misty atmosphere.
At last it was accomplished.
Wheezing wearily, dragging a thick forearm across his sweat-dewed brow, Tonguth toiled up the interdeck ramp of the Red Hawk, ancient flagship of the mighty nomad fleet. He entered the gigantic Control Center to join his comrades. Drask sat, staring moodily at the screens, sprawled out in his enormous acceleration chair, but the others had withdrawn a little from him, wary of his furious temper. Abdekiel the Shaman, bland as a fat Buddha, stood calmly beside Shangkar, as old, one-eyed Gorm, the master-pilot, communicated his instructions to the ship’s computer-brain.
The shaman had swiftly recovered from his terror, Tonguth noted. Even though not present when the voice of the Green Goddess had spoken through Her crystal eye, Tonguth knew the whole story. Whispers of the awful warning had gone forth, passed like lightning from man to man, throughout the whole Rover garrison, until every last pirate had heard the grim tale.
Shangkar himself was now recovered from his terrible experience upon the black battlements. His fierce cat-eyes burned like coals in a tawny face still haggard from the ordeal. His bronzed hand twitched by his axe handle, and his cruel nature hungered to be revenged for the humiliation he had suffered before his companions. Smiling thinly, Abdekiel could almost read the thoughts seething with red rage through the brawny barbarian’s skulclass="underline" “Set me within arm’s reach of whatever man, god or spirit worked that foul sorcery on me, and I will write proof in scarlet blood of my manhood!”
The bland smile deepened, curling Abdekiel’s full, fleshy lips. His cool, calculating mind made a note of Shangkar’s emotional state, tagged it and filed it for possible future use. Gross, cold-blooded schemer that he was, the oily shaman knew how to use men to his advantage … how to play subtly, secretly on their fears, hatreds and hungers. This enormous chess game of men and emotions was life itself to him, and the little pleasure he tasted from life’s cup came from this endless, engrossing game.
Drask’s face was grim, shut, unreadable. Tonguth did not seek to make conversation. He joined the others and watched the vast screen suspended above their heads from the second level of the domed chamber.
It was a magnificent, heart-stirring sight. The giant fleet was aligned and ready, a huge glittering crescent of mile-long superbattleships curving away from the Red Hawk to either side in mighty metal wings. The flagship surged ahead now, and the muted drone of her unthinkably powerful nuclear turbines filled the great dim-lit room with soft, monotonous thunder. In the dimness of the room, panel upon panel woke with a flickering pattern of signal-lights. Dark-robed pilot-cadets moved quietly from panel to panel, noting down various readings on clipboards, or whispering softly into throat-microphones.
In the center of the first level, old Gorm sat in the oval heart of a horseshoe console of master controls. Scattered about his central position in an open circle were lesser control stations … so vast was the Red Hawk, so infinitely complex the machines and systems that powered, lit and maneuvered her, that no one pilot alone could keep track of her multiplex operations.
Now on the giant screen the dim, fog-wrapped bulk of Xulthoom was receding like a thrown ball into the dead black of space—slowly at first, forming the illusion of a shallow bowl and blocking half the screen, then becoming convex to the eye, ringed about with black space … then swifter, swifter, falling back from their viewpoint as a shrinking globe.
Now the flare of coronal fires, as the gray planet eclipsed its dim red sun … then it seemed to fall away to one side of the blind, dimly-flaring primary, and rapidly dwindled from view, lost among the stars.
The mood of silent tension that had gripped all now broke as Xulthoom vanished from the screens. Whatever had been the price, they had escaped the weird powers that haunted that World of Eternal Mists.
“Thanks be to Maryash the Protector!” Tonguth grunted to the group in general, heaving his burly shoulders with relief. “I am happy to see the last of that planet of ghosts and darkness! Thraxis give us a healthier world ahead—sunlit and green, with soft women, hard gold, and red wine for our gullets!”
The shaman eyed him obliquely, with fastidious distaste, but Shangkar grinned and flexed his long arms.
“Aye! That filthy ball of fog and grit is no place for a fighting-man! What is the world ahead, Lord?”
Drask woke from dark, brooding dream, and called to a slave for wine. These days, Tonguth thought uneasily, the Warlord seemed to lean ever more heavily on the winecup. Although he was never quite drunk, he seemed never quite sober either, and wine did not calm or fuddle him as it did other, lesser men. Nay … it but fed the seething fires of hatred that gnawed at his heart, inwardly consuming him …
“A fair enough world, from the charts,” the Warlord grated harshly, thirstily downing a cup of Bellerophon’s icy green mint-wine. “Little weaponry, so you can rest easy, my bold heroes. A simple, rustic world … happy village people … few cities … but the richest source in Powermetal any of the Orion stars can boast!”