Elysia (22 page)

No matter, we'll build one.' Ardatha used cohesive magic to draw together a great mass of heat-resistant matter, which formed like a scab on the bubbling lake below. Exior pictured the manse as he had seen it in his shewstone, formed it in two hemispheres, welded them together. The work took moments, but it drained both of them.

`Let's get inside,' said Exior, breaking his connection with the clock and slowing all the way down to normal time. And within the lava-floating manse, after briefly resting, they each constructed rooms to their own tastes. Later still:

`It seems we've known each other for some time,' said Exior, where they sat sipping conjured essence in a room with tinted portals.

'Because we knew it would be, it feels like it has always been,' replied Ardatha Ell. 'In fact, when I explored a little of Lith's future, from Elysia, I was surprised to find your manse er, this place floating here. I had intended to come anyway, you see, as an agent for Kthanid. It seems
that Lith, in some manner yet unknown to me, will soon become vastly important.'

'Oh? Could that be, I wonder, because the son of my most remote sons, Henri-Laurent de Marigny, called The Searcher, and Moreen are even now en-route here?'

Ardatha was pleased. 'So they've fathomed all dues, overcome all obstacles, have they? Kthanid foresaw it, of course or at least, that was one of the futures
he
foresaw. But so many possible futures! Kthanid is incredible! Such computations! Such permutations! But he chose the best future he could, then set about to make it work out that way.'

This conveyed a great deal to Exior's wizard's mind. He drew much more from Ardatha's words than any ordinary man might ever comprehend. 'In my shewstone,' he said after a while, 'I saw that we played a game. It was strange to me. Obviously it had not been invented in my time, though it reminded me of frothy, which is also played on a board.'

`That must have been chess,' Ardatha beamed. 'A favourite of mine!' He conjured a board and pieces. 'Here, let me explain the rules .

They played, and at the same time and for long hours amused themselves with certain matters of cryptical conjecture - hypothetical problems of interest only to magicians - and yet still found time and space to carry on a more nearly normal conversation:

'Your purpose in coming here?' Ardatha eventually asked. 'Apart from carrying out a temporal necessity, of course. That is to say, having
seen
yourself here - and while obviously you obeyed the omen and came here was that the only reason?' Wizards seldom have only one motive for their actions.

1
seek
immortality,' Exior explained. 'I have done so for years. When de Marigny mentioned his goal, Elysia, I saw the answer at once. For as I said to him: Elysia
is
immortality! And so, since this manse, Lith, and you yourself formed a focal point, a way-station along de Marigny's route ...'

'Hmm!' Ardatha mused. 'And how will you complete the final stage? From here to Elysia, I mean, when the time comes?'

`In the time-clock, with The Searcher and his woman. Won't you join us? Since you already have a place in Elysia, and Lith being such a boring place and all

'I think not,' answered Ardatha Ell. 'You see, I don't know how long I may be called upon to stay here - or even
why I'm
here except that it was Kthanid's wish that I should come. Also, I rode a Great Thought to this place. My shell - my flesh-and-blood body, that is - is still in Elysia. And so when I return it shall be a simple matter of instantaneous transfer. However, I thank you for your-' He paused abruptly, came stiffly erect in his chair.

'Is there something?' Exior enquired.

Ardatha unfolded his tall, spindly frame, stood up. 'A messenger enters my sky-sphere in Elysia,' he said, his eyes far away. 1 had expected some such. A message from Kthanid. Come, you shall see.'

He quickly loped to his room and Exior followed on behind. There they seated themselves before Ardatha's shewstone, in which a picture had already formed. A Dchi-chi stood at the threshold of Ardatha Ell's inner sanctum in his sky-floating sphere high over Elysia. Ardatha himself - or his body - lay suspended on a gravitic bed of air in the centre of the room. All was silent until the Elysian wizard's Lith facet made a six-fingered pass, and then the scene came alive with conversation:

`I beg to differ,' came a voice from some mechanical source, but dearly Ardatha's voice, or a good imitation. 'The lesser part, surely? For his recumbent shell here is only the flesh of Ardatha Ell. The mind - which is greater
by far, which is more truly
me — that is
in Exior K'mool's manse in Andromeda.' And so the conversation continued, as we have previously seen, while in Lith Exior and Ardatha looked on. Until finally the Dchi-chi passed his message.

In Lith Ardatha absorbed that message, reeled for a moment, then frowned mightily. And from the shewstone he heard himself say: 'There, all done. Aye, and this is an important task Kthanid has set .me. You should have said so before now, little bird, instead of posing and parroting.'

There followed the matter of the Dchi-chi's exit from Ardatha's sphere his hasty, somewhat fearful exit —after which, chuckling good-naturedly, the wizards in Lith returned to their game of chess.

And in a little while: 'What was Kthanid's message?' Exior asked.

`It contained the reason for my being here,' Ardatha answered. 'Which is this: that I keep a vigil.' He won the game in three moves, produced a wand which elongated into a rod six feet long, stuck its ferrule in the floor and bent his ear to the silver handle. He seemed to listen to something for a moment, straightened up, smiled grimly. 'A vigil, aye,' he repeated.

And then he explained in greater detail ...

In Elysia all was ready, all preparations made. Kthanid
—only
Kthanid — had retained a measure of surveillance on the outside multiverse, and now even he was 'blind' to occurrences beyond Elysia's boundaries. Nothing physical or mental departed from or entered into Elysia. No Great Thoughts went out, no travellers returned; no telepathic transmissions were sent or received; no time-clocks plied the limitless oceans of time and space. Elysia lay silent, hidden, secret, more mythical than ever before ...

And yet, because Kthanid himself was of the flesh and the mind of the Great Old Ones, he was not entirely closed off, not totally insulated from their activity. In his own incredib!e dreams he heard echoes from outside. The massed mind of the Great Old Ones — their use of telepathy, their 'Great Messenger', Nyarlathotep, which , carried their thoughts between them in their various prison environs — would occasionally impinge upon Kthanid's mind; and then, in snatches however brief, he would learn what they were about.

When de Marigny and Moreen had. left Borea in the time-clock — and when Ithaqua had tormented certain minds to extract information from them, which was then passed on to the rest of the Great Old Ones, particularly Cthulhu Kthanid had known it. He had known, too, of the loss of countless Tind'losi Hounds in a black hole, and of the saving of Sssss. From Earth's dreamlands, echoes had reached him of damage inflicted on Cthulhu's plans to further his infiltration of Man's subconscious mind, and one shriek of mental fury and frustration had signalled a strike against Nyarlathotep 'himself.

Most of which had been anticipated

And between times:

In the Vale of Dreams the gigantic N'hlathi had emerged from their immemorial burrows to graze on the seeds of great poppies, and even now a team of Dchi-chis attempted communication with them. Even more ominous, the N'hlathi were seen to be harvesting poppy seed, storing the great green beads in their burrows. And those burrows themselves were now seen for what they really were; for when the seals on the N'hlathi doors had sprung and the doors had opened, then those massive cylinders — the `burrows' themselves — had slowly unscrewed from the basalt cliffs. More than mere hibernation cells, those cylinders: thirty feet in diameter and sixty feet long, of a white metal unknown even to Elysia's science, they had commenced to give off certain hyper-radiations — the selfsame energies which powered Elysia's time-clocks! The
burrows of the N'hlathi
were
time-clocks — which they now provisioned as for flight!

As for the pattern those doors had duplicated, the great whorl of Andromeda and the emergence of certain stars of ill-omen there:

Now indeed those stars were very nearly right; in fact, only one more was needed to complete the pattern. Its . location was well known to Kthanid, its condition, too. For this was a dying star, but a star with a difference. It was the second of twins, the first of which had already self-destructed, and it harboured in its core the seed of universal chaos.

The name of this star?

It was Lith, of course. Lith, where
even
now Ardatha Ell kept vigil, monitoring the fatal foetal pulse of that which might well signal a new beginning or a monstrous end ...

When de Marigny slipped the time-clock sideways in space-time and entered their manse in Lith, Exior K'mool and Ardatha Ell were waiting for him. Nor did they fail to note the wisps of greenish mist, materializing into a thin, vapid slime that clung in a sticky layer to the windows of the upper dome, which he brought with him out of the past. The manse was rune-protected, however, and constructed of near-impervious materials, so that they were mainly unconcerned. But Exior sniffed and commented:

`So Loxzor's follow-me spell was effective after all, at least in part. A little of Cthulhu's mind-slime managed to follow the time-clock, and so has found me again. Much weakened now, I note. Why, I could banish it with a simple "get-thee-gone".'

'Let it be,' said Ardatha Ell. 'It changes nothing — indeed, we may even benefit ...'

De Marigny and Moreen emerged cautiously from the clock, found the wizards waiting. The final stages of their trip had not been uneventful: Tind'losi Hounds had chased them for seven million years, ignoring the time-clock's weapon in a manner de Marigny had never seen before, in a suicidal way that had puzzled and worried and wearied him. They had lost countless thousands tracking him, and had only given up the chase when he reverted to three-dimensioned space over Lith.

But now the time-travellers squared up, nodded their tired acknowledgment to Exior, gazed up in awe at Ardatha Ell.

'Crow's friend,' that towering, slender, powerful person nodded, returning de Marigny's gaze; but though he spoke
to them, Moreen and her Earthman noted that his lips moved never a fraction. 'De Marigny The Searcher — and Moreen, whose innocence and beauty shall surely whelm all Elysia. Eventually ... ' And still his lips hadn't moved.

Moreen blushed and smiled at his compliment, but de Marigny frowned. 'Eventually?' he repeated the wizard's word. 'Soon, we had hoped.'

Ardatha inclined his sharp-featured head. 'Well, it's true that the futures are narrowing down,' he said, 'but until a thing is we can never be entirely certain that it will be. Only the past is fixed, and even that is not entirely immutable.'

'Ahem!'
said Exior. 'Best remember, Ardatha, that their ways with words are not our ways. Their thoughts run straighter courses than ours.'

He was right in more ways than one; by now de Marigny's thoughts were more than
ever
one-tracked. `Ardatha,' he pressed, 'you know why we're here. You yourself hail from Elysia. If anyone can help us get there — '

— Wait!' said Ardatha, holding up a six-fingered hand. 'Waste no more words, Searcher, the matter is out of my hands — and out of yours — now. Now we can only wait.'

`Wait?' de Marigny cast a puzzled glance at Moreen, who was equally mystified. 'Wait here, on Lith? But wait for what?'

'For whatever will be,' the wizard answered. Bending his ear to his silver-handled sensor, he listened patiently for a moment or two to the strengthening pulse in Lith's core. 'Aye, for what will surely be,' he repeated. 'One thing I
can
tell you, Searcher,' and he straightened up. 'It won't be a long wait. No, not long at all.' And more than that he would not, must not, say ...

De Marigny slept and dreamed.

In weed-festooned, submarine R'lyeh, Cthulhu's groping face-tentacles reached for and almost found him before he fled screaming into time. Bat-winged, like flapping black rags of evil, the Hounds of Tindalos awaited him there, came winging out from the corkscrew towers of Tindalos itself at de Marigny's approach. To escape them he transferred from time to space, found himself on the shore of a vilely lapping lake somewhere in the Hyades. Turning his gaze from the waters of that lake to the sky, he saw the black stars burning and knew at once where he was. Along the shoreline, coming his way,
a Thing
in yellow flopped, and in the waters something monstrous floundered! De Marigny wrenched himself free of the place, where even now the Lake
^-
of Hales waters broke in a lashing of loathsome tentacles. Hastur wallowed in The Searcher's wake . . . And now de Marigny wandered in unknown space and time lost and alone in some weird parallel dimension. But alone for a moment only. For now, surging out of nameless vacuum, came a frothing, liquescent, blasphemous shapelessness that masked its
true
horror behind a congeries of iridescent globes and bubbles the primal jelly seething forever 'beyond the nethermost angles' — Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold!

De Marigny screamed again as the thing covered him, folding him into its mass -

- And found himself like a child in Moreen's arms, awake, hugged safe to her. bosom.

`Henri! Henri!' she rocked him. 'What was it? A dream?'

He shuddered, sat up on his bed in the room Ardatha and Exior had made for them. 'A ... a dream? A nightmare!' He hugged her, forced himself to stop trembling. 'Just a nightmare. Yes, that's all it was ...' But in his mind he could still hear the thin chittering of the Hounds, the black gurgling of Hali, and frothing and seething of Yog-Sothoth, and the — laughter? — of Cthulhu in his watery sepulchre; all of these sounds, withdrawing now as he came more fully awake.

'I came to wake you,' Moreen said, 'and found you
shouting and tossing. Henri, Ardatha wants you. He says it's nearly time.'

De Marigny got up at once, followed her a little unsteadily into the communal room. Ardatha Ell was there, his ear pressed to the silver handle of his elongated wand. Exior was also present, but he stood much closer to the time-clock. Both magicians were plainly excited, agitated.

'Ardatha,' de Marigny began, `Moreen tells me that you -'

'Yes, yes,' said the wizard, cutting him short. And: 'Sit, please sit, both of you. Now, I have a tale to tell - which in itself contains something of an explanation, if you can unriddle it but just so much time in Which to tell it. The stars are coming right, de Marigny - do you know what that means?'

De Marigny drew a sharp breath, let it out more slowly. 'Yes,' he said, 'only too well.'

'They are coming right ... now,' Ardatha nodded, 'at any moment. We shall have -' he snapped his fingers,
- that
much warning!'

De Marigny looked blank, shook his head. 'I -'

"This star, Lith itself, is the final one in the pattern,' Ardatha said. 'And Lith is about to nova, perhaps supernova!' Even as he spoke the manse rocked, and beyond
the
tinted windows geysers of molten rock vented fire and steam at a madly boiling sky of smoke and bilious gases. As the floor tilted back to a level keel, de Marigny jumped to his feet, grasped Moreen's hand and headed for the dock.

`Wait!', cried Ardatha Ell, his mouth a thin, hard and immobile slit in his face. 'You may
not
run from this, Searcher - not if you want to enter Elyria!'

De
Marigny paused, turned and stared hard at the tall magician. 'I don't run for my own sake, Ardatha Ell. You'd better get that fact fixed firmly in your head. And you'd better talk fast too, while I'm still here to hear you. I don't know about you and Exior, but if this dead sun is about to explode, Moreen and I - '

'It is the
way
to Elysia!' again Ardatha cut him off.

De Marigny opened the clock's door and purple light streamed out.

'Go on then, flee!' Ardatha Ell shouted from a closed mouth. 'Time yet for you to get away, Searcher. Run - and lose everything!'

'Hear him out,' croaked Exior K'mool. 'At least hear
him
out, son of my sons. You cannot imagine how much depends upon it.'

De Marigny held Moreen close. The interior of the clock was but a step away. 'Go on then,' he said. 'We're listening.'

Ardatha sighed, put his ear back to the sensor for a moment, again straightened up. The manse rocked again, but less violently. Ardatha waited for the disturbance to cease before beginning. Then -

'Once long ago, where now the Milky Way sprawls its myriad stars against the sky, there was nothing. And there, to that vacuous region, came Azathoth.

`Born in billions of tons of cosmic dust, in matter forged by gravity, in the slow seepage of massively heavy metals toward a universal centre, he
was
a Nuclear Chaos. And the report of his coming went out to the farthest stars, so that even now its echoes have not died away! But while Azathoth was of Nature, a true power without sentience, still he spawned others which
had
sentience: he was not only, in a sense, the Father of all "life" as we know it, but also of certain thermal, rather thermonuclear beings.' Ardatha paused, shrugged, continued:

'I will not go into nuclear genealogy here; your scientists will one day fathom it in their own way, define it in their own terms - if they tread warily. But just as there may be intelligence in air, and in water, in earth and even in space, so may there be intelligence in fire.. Alas, but nuclear fire transmutes all things: metal into liquid or gas or other
metals, life into death, time into space and vice versa. Its massive release warps space-time itself. Yes, and it transmuted the thermal beings, too. They themselves were changed by their own chaos of energy. Sanity into madness! They became as mad and ungovernable as the unthinking Father who spawned them. Mercifully their insanity is self-destructive: they are born mad, and on the instant annihilate themselves — and, unfortunately, all who stand near. Which is the reason why even the Beings of the Cthulhu Cycle fear them ...

`So, what shall we call such creatures, who, when they are "summoned" or born, can turn worlds to cinders and rekindle dying suns to nuclear furnaces? In eons past they were named the Azathi — Children of Azathoth. Now, I have said that they die in the instant of their birth, which is self-evident. But if they can be kept — or keep themselves — in a prolonged or extended foetal condition, then their excess 'madness', their energy, may be drawn off and used. Unwittingly, men have been doing this since the construction of the first atomic pile; though of course theirs is only a synthetic form of the actual Azathoth life-force itself, without the sentience of the Azathi. But not only men have used — are using — this awesome power!

'Long ages past Cthulhu saw a use for such primal forces. He calculated the angles between the Nggr, the Hang and the Nng, fathomed the warp-energy required to release him and his brethren and their allies from their prisons. Then
he
searched far and wide in time and space, seeking to learn that precise place and moment when the stars would be
almost
right, when with a little assistance the space-time matrix might be caused to warp sufficiently to break his bonds. And he saw that eventually, in Andromeda; just such an almost-perfect pattern would form itself. A vast equation, complete but for two missing qualities or quantities — forces which Cthulhu himself must insert into the equation. The Azathi, of course!

'Cthulhu knew that at least three of Azathoth's primal children had controlled or contained themselves. Oh, they were mad but not so mad as to will themselves to annihilation. He searched the void for them, at last found two. We shall call them Azatha and Azathe, and they were all the Lord of R'lyeh required to put his eon-formed plan into being, to set ticking his unthinkable cosmic time-bomb! As for Azathu, the third of Azathoth's primal children: he could not be found, perhaps he had after all become unstable, detonated in some remote region.

`But Azatha and Azathe remained, out there in the deepest, darkest reaches, forging ever outward in abysses beyond man's wildest reckoning. And Cthulhu reached out after them sent his Great Messenger, Nyarlathotep, to parley with them — and made a pact. It was this: that they return, locate themselves in the hearts of certain suns, remain dormant down all the eons and wait on his instructions. Then, at a time of his choosing, he would awaken them, let them be fulfilled, give them glory and life-everlasting, free them of their elemental madness! His reward? — the very multiverse would see how great are the works of Cthulhu, who causes stars to blaze up at his coming!

`Since then ... the stars have wheeled in their inexorable courses, the pattern has formed, the time is nigh. A little while ago a star exploded, became a super-nova on Andromeda's far flank. That was Azatha. And in the heart of Lith, at this very moment ..

De Marigny, despite his urge to get away, had been fascinated by Ardatha Ell's story. Now he completed the wizard's tale: 'Azathe?'

Ardatha nodded. 'And the pattern will be complete. All chains broken, all "spells" unspelled. The Great Old Ones will be free.'

Moreen spoke up: 'But how can that possibly help us? We seek Elysia, from which place Henri hopes to fight the Great Old Ones, assist in their destruction.'

'Wait!' Ardatha commanded. He listened yet again to his wand and his eyes grew huge. 'Soon now!' he hissed. 'Very soon!'

Exior,' said de Marigny, his voice tense, 'get in the clock. You, too, Moreen.'

Outside, beyond the windows, the lava lake had grown calm. It was an utterly unnatural calm, producing a leaden oppressiveness that came right through the walls of the manse to those within. The lava swirled slowly, sluggishly, red-veined under a crumbling crust of black rock and ash; the smoke- and gas-clouds churned low overhead; in the distance, lightning raced in weird patterns along the underside of the clouds, springing sporadically to strike the sullenly shuddering surface.

'Well,' said de Marigny, one foot on the clock's threshold. 'Is there an answer to Moreen's question? How
can
the death, or rebirth, of this star help us?'

Ardatha smiled, a strange cold smile. 'You have seen how Cthulhu is a great magician, a fabulous mathematician. Aye, but he is not the only one. The N'hlathi knew Cthulhu's purpose at once, and they fashioned a reminder and a warning in the Vale of Dreams in Elysia. Kthanid is of the very flesh of Cthulhu; when he knew what Cthulhu would do, he set about to maintain a balance. You ask "where is Elysia?" Elysia is where Kthanid and his elder-council desire it to be. When Lith evaporates, space-time will warp and thrust
in the direction
of Elysia, and your time-clock will be propelled through that warp, that fracture,
into
Elysia. Don't fight it, de Marigny. Don't try to fly out of it or avoid it. Do nothing! All has been calculated.'

De Marigny knew he must enter the clock, but there was still so much he didn't understand. 'But how do you know all of these things?' he asked. 'How can you be sure?'

Ardatha raised an eyebrow. 'And am I not a magician in my own right? Some of it I have fathomed, unriddled. And some I have had from Cthulhu himself. For have I not eavesdropped on his communications with Azathe? This was Kthanid's reason for sending me here, so that he might know the precise moment when —' He paused, came instantly alert as never before.

Ardatha's wand began to tremble. The tremors rapidly spread themselves to the entire manse; it shuddered, rocked, was shaken as in the fist of some inconceivable colossus.

'Ardatha!' de Marigny cried out loud over the groaning and grinding of the manse. 'Quick, man — get in the clock!'

'I don't need your time-clock, Searcher,' said the wizard. 'But you do. You need it right now. Good luck, Henri!' He snatched up his wand — which at once retracted to its normal size — saluted the time-clock with a strange gesture, disappeared like a light switched off !

Moreen and Exior dragged de Marigny into the time-clock. And after that —