Elysia (3 page)

No, the dreamlands were no fit habitation for such as Moreen and de Marigny — who in any case had never considered himself an expert dreamer — not yet for a while, anyway. Perhaps one day on his deathbed he'd dream himself a white-walled villa there in timeless Celephais, but until then ...

…
The dimension of dream, glimpsed briefly in the eye of memory, slipped away and de Marigny was back .on Borea, on the roof of the plateau. Chill Borea, where for ten days now he and Moreen had been feted like prodigals until, as always, the pleasures had begun to pall; even the great pleasure of human companionship, the company of men such as Silberhutte, Kota'na, Jimmy Franklin and Charlie Tacomah.

And suddenly de Marigny knew that he was tired of his quest, and he . wondered how much longer it could last before he gave in, surrendered to the hopelessness of the thing. Indeed, sometimes he wondered what had kept him going so long . .. but no, that was a lie, for he already knew the answer well enough. It lay not alone in what Titus Crow had told him of Elysia, but also in what he'd said of de Marigny himself:

'You are a lover of mysteries, my friend,' (Crow had said), 'as your father before you, and there's something you should know. You really ought to have guessed it before now, Henri, but there's something in you that hearkens back into dim abysses of time, a spark whose fire burns still in Elysia...'

It had been like, a promise, as if in those words Crow
had willed to him a marvellous inheritance; but what of that promise now? Or could it be that Crow had simply been mistaken, that de Marigny ought never have set his sights on Elysia in the first place? What else had Titus Crow said?

'You will be welcome in Elysia, Henri, but of course you must make your own way there ... It may well be a difficult voyage, and certainly it will be dangerous, for there's no royal road to Elysia ... The pitfalls of space and time are many, but the rewards are great ... When there are obstacles, we'll be watching in Elysia. And if you are where I can't reach you without aid, then I'll ride a Great Thought to you ...'

De Marigny could not restrain a snort of derision, however inwardly-directed. Obstacles? Oh, there'd been 'obstacles,' all right! Time-travel in the clock was invariably complicated by running battles with the Tind'losi Hounds; certain worlds of space seemed friendly but were in fact inimical to human life; the space-time fabric itself had focal points mysterious and dangerous beyond reckoning; and, neither last nor least, there was no dearth of places in the continuum wherein were contained the 'houses' or 'tombs' of the Great Old Ones (more properly their prisons), where they had been locked in untold aeons past by the beneficent Gods of Eld. This had been their punishment for an act, or the massed threat of such an act, monstrous beyond imagining. The Elder Gods had pursued Cthulhu, his ilk and their spawn, through space and time and dimensions
between
the spaces we know, prisoning them wherever they were found. And so they remained to this day, in greater part: imprisoned but immortal, only waiting out the time of their release, when the stars would wheel in their great celestial orbits and finally stand
right
in pre-ordained positions in the firmament. And then, when the stars were right -

A great hand fell on de Marigny's shoulder and he gave a massive start, clutching at the rim of the open viewport where he gazed out from the bartizan. All doomful thoughts were snatched from his mind at once, and he himself snatched back to
the
immediate, the now.

`Henri,' Hank Silberhutte's voice was deep where he stood with an arm around Armandra, 'we thought we'd find you here. Did I startle you? It seemed you were miles away just then, right?'

'Light-years!' de Marigny agreed, turning. He managed a smile, nodded a greeting to Hank, bowed formally to Armandra — and at once felt something of their concern for him, the pain and worry he was causing them. Words of apology would have tumbled out of him then, but the Woman of the Winds had quickly taken his hand in both of hers, to tell him:

'Henri, if you wish it, I think I may be able to help you find Elysia. At least, there is a chance.'

'And what do you say to that?' the Warlord grinned at him.

For a moment, maybe two, de Marigny simply gaped at them. He knew that Armandra had senses beyond the mundane five, was aware that if anyone on Borea could help him, she was that
one.
And yet he had not even considered asking for her help because ... because he was de Marigny and she was his friend, and he knew that you can only beg help from real friends just so often before losing them.

`Well?' the Warlord waited for his answer. And now de Marigny gave it.

Stepping forward, he briefly, fiercely hugged the Woman of the Winds, then lifted her bodily up above him. And still words would not come. 'Armandra, I ... I ...' Then, ashamed of his own emotions, he set her down again, dumbly shook his head and backed off. And under Armandra's stern, steady gaze, finally he lowered his head.

At last she said: 'You men of the Motherworld would
all seem much of a kind: you have the same strengths and the same weaknesses. Fortunately the former outweigh the latter, which in any case are often ... endearing?' Looking up, de Marigny saw that her great green eyes were sparkling.

At which her husband put arms round the shoulders of both of them and began laughing uproariously...

There were strange stirrings in the Elysian ether, ominous undercurrents more psychic than physical, which weighed on the souls of certain dwellers in that weird and wonderful land. The source of this dawning — dread? — was intangible as yet, but to those few who sensed it, its approach was anticipated as surely as the bite of a mosquito in the darkness of a room, in those taut moments after its hum fades to silence. Titus Crow had come awake to that silence, and had known instinctively that the bite was still to come. Not immediately but soon, and not merely the sting of a mosquito .

Outwardly ... all seemed ordered — as it had been immemorially in Elysia — but inside:

`There's a knot in my stomach,' said Crow, hurriedly dressing in forest-green jacket and bark-brown, wide-bottomed trousers, tightening his belt and peering out at the sky through the stone windows of the aerial castle which he and Tiania called home. And scanning that sky he frowned, for even the synthetic sunrise seemed wrong this morning, and on the far, flat horizon, the wispy clouds were tinged a leaden grey.

Tiania was only half awake. 'Ummm!' she said, not wanting to argue, her head deep in pillows.

`Something's up,' she heard her man declare. He sniffed at the air and nodded to himself. 'Why, even the clouds are grey!'

Now she was coming awake. 'Did you never see grey clouds before?' she mumbled. 'Perhaps it will rain! It's good for the gardens.'

'No,' he shook his leonine head, 'it's not that
kind
of
grey. It's more a feeling than a colour.' He went to her, gently lifted her head from the pillows, kissed her soft, unwrinkled brow. 'Come on, Tiania. You're
a
child of Elysia, and a favourite child at that. Can't you feel it? It's in the air, I tell you, and it's been there for some time. Something
is
wrong!'

At that she sat up, and Titus Crow was frozen by sudden awareness of her nearness, her beauty. It was the same each morning, the same every night: he looked at her and knew she was his, and every fibre of his body thrilled to the knowledge. Tiania had the perfect shape of a beautiful girl, but that was where any further comparison with a female of planet Earth must surely end. Most definitely!

To describe her in detail would take many thousands of words, most of them superlatives. The mind tires of searching for them, and the reader's mind would weary of absorbing them. And so, to simplify matters:

Tiania's hair was a green so dark as to be almost black, with highlights of aquamarine and flashing emerald tints. All coils and ringlets, it reached to her waist, which seemed delicate as the stem of a wineglass. Her flesh was milk-of pearl, not the nacreous gleam of shell-heart but the soft glow of a pearl's outer skin. Her eyes were huge, the colour of beryl and infinitely deep, under arching emerald eyebrows in a slender, pixie face. Pixie, too, her ears and delicate nub of a nose, so that when she smiled she might well be some tomboy elf — except that she literally radiated Essence of Woman. She
was
plainly human, and yet quite alien; a girl, yes, but one whose genes had known the mysteries of Eld.

Crow shook his head in silent wonder, a ritual of his that she'd grown used to even if she didn't fully understand it. And: 'Nothing so beautiful lived before you,' he said quite simply.

'Ridiculous!' she answered, rising up and shaking back
her hair — but at the same time blushing rose. 'Why! There are flowers in the Gardens of Nymarrah —'

`Nothing human,' he cut her off.

She kissed him, began to dress. 'Then we're a match, for you're a fine, big man.'

'Ah, but just a man for all that,' he answered, as he invariably did. Which was far from true, for Crow was wont to forget now and then that since his transition he was rather more than a man. But whichever, she returned his appreciative gaze with equal raptness, for Tiania never tired of Titus Crow. What she saw was this:

A man, yes, but a man glowing with health, ageless as a rock. He looked a young forty, but that would be to grant him more than 'a quarter of a century! And even
that
would be a false reading, based solely on Earth-time. For rebuilt from his own pulp by a robot physician on a robot world, he had spent more than sixty years in T
3
RE's vats alone! And that was where he had undergone his transition proper: in the laboratory of T3RE, whose robot hands and tools and lasers had built him the way he was now. And almost literally ageless, too, for in Crow the ageing process was glowed down in a ratio of one to ten. Twenty years from now he would look more or less the same, but Tiania would have started to catch up with him. That was a problem they would face as it arose ...

While she finished dressing he pulled on boots and tucked his trousers into their tops, forming piratical bells. It gave him a swashbuckling air which he admitted to liking. But appearances were secondary in his mind now, where his thoughts were too sombre for theatrical posing. By then, too, Tiania was ready. And:

'Where are we going?' she asked innocently.

`We?
We?'
he teased her, playing down his as yet unfounded fears. 'Who said anything about "we"? But as for me, I'm off to see if I can arrange an audience with Kthanid in his glacier palace.'

'Oh?' she raised an eyebrow. 'And I should stay home and prepare a meal for you, right?' And she put her hands on her hips, pretending to scowl.

Inside Crow his mechanical heart picked up speed; something gnawed at him, worried at his guts; time was wasting and a monstrous cloud loomed
ever
closer. But still he played this lover's game with Tiania. 'Of course, woman, what else?' he barked. 'And doesn't a man deserve a good meal when he's been out working all day and returns home to ... to

The smile had fallen from her face. For all their banter, now Tiania had sensed something of her man's apprehension and knew it was real. And perhaps for the first time, she too felt that leaden, stifling oppressiveness, an as yet vague but steadily increasing sensation of DOOM in the atmosphere of Elysia. Suddenly frightened, she threw herself into his arms. `Oh, Titus! Titus! I feel it now! But what is it?'

He hugged her, comforted her, growled: 'Damned if I know. But I intend to find out. Come on!'

They hurried out from their bedroom in the base of a turret onto ornamental 'battlements' that offered a fantastic view of Elysia — or part of Elysia, anyway. To the east a synthetic golden sun burned behind a lowering bank of cloud, and an unaccustomed chill wind rippled the fields far below. There was more than the usual movement in the sky, too, where from all quarters flights of lithards could be seen wearing the bright colours of dignitaries and bearing their favoured riders north.

North? Across the Frozen Sea to the Icelands?

Crow and Tiania glanced apprehensively, speculatively at each other. This would seem to confirm their private thoughts and suspicions. He nodded his leonine head. 'And didn't I say I wanted an audience with Kthanid, in the Hall of Crystal and Pearl?'

Before she could answer there came a throb of wings and rush of air, and up from below there soared a monstrous, magnificent shape well known to both of them. A great lithard, the veriest dragon, flew in the skies of Elysia! Oth-Neth, first representative of his race — intelligent dinosaur of doomed Thak'r-Yon, a world long since burned up in the heart of its exploding sun — alighted in a flash of bright scales, a sighing furling of membrane wings, on the battlements close by.

'Oth-Neth!' cried Tiania, and she ran to the great beast and threw her arms about his neck.

'Tiania,' the creature returned, soft-voiced, lowering its great head to facilitate her fondling.

Crow might witness this same scene a thousand times and still be awed. Here was a monster out of Earth's oldest mythologies a
draw
out of Asian hinterlands, and all of a natural green and gold iridescence — and Tiania caressing the beast as if it were a favourite horse. No, he automatically corrected himself, greeting it — greeting
him
—like an old friend, which he was. Oth-neth, green and golden dragon from the Tung-gat tapestries, a creature such as might sport in the Gardens of Rak. And here on a mission.

Oth-Neth wore green, the emerald saddle and reins of Tiania's household. He had been sent to collect her.

`What about me?' Crow strode forward, rested a hand on the creature's flank.

'You?' Oth-Neth bent his head to look at him. 'You, too, Tituth.' (The lithard's command of human languages was imperfect: he lisped, as did all his race.) 'But you go quick, direct to Kthanid! Flying cloak ith better for you.'

Crow looked him straight in his saucer eyes. 'Do you know what's happening?'

'No,' an almost imperceptible shake of the great head. `But ... I think trouble. Big trouble! Look!' He turned his head to the skies. High above Elysia, beyond the flying-zones of lithards and cloaks and winged creatures alike,
time-clocks in all their varieties were blinking into existence in unprecedented numbers. And all of them wending east toward the slowly rising, strangely dulled sun, to the Blue Mountains and the subterranean, miles-long corridor of clocks. Elysia's children were returning from a thousand voyagings and quests, answering the summons of the masters of this weird, wonderful place.

Crow stared for a moment longer, his high brow furrowed, then hurried back into the castle. He returned with a scarlet flying cloak and quickly slipped into its harness. Tiania had already climbed into the ornate emerald saddle at the base of the lithard's neck, but she paused to lean down and kiss Crow where he now stood poised on the battlements.

`Titus,' she began, 'I — ' but words wouldn't come.

He looked at her beautiful face and form, only half-concealed by an open jacket and knee-length trousers of soft grey, and felt her fear like a physical thing; not fear for herself or Elysia, nor even Titus Crow himself who in any case had often shown himself to be near-indestructible
but for
them,
for they had become as one person and could not be apart. And: 'I know,' he said quietly., And then, brightening: 'But we don't know what it is yet. It may be ... very little.'

They both knew he deliberately made light of it, but she nodded anyway. Then Oth-Neth launched himself from the castle's wall and soared north; and Crow's fingers found the control studs of his cloak, which at once belled out and bore him aloft; and in the next moment girl, dragon and man were flying north to join the streams of other fliers where they made for Kthanid's glacial palace ...

Crow sped on ahead. He guessed that Oth-Neth deliberately held back, letting him gain a lead and a little extra time. For what? So that he could talk to Kthanid in private? That seemed unlikely, with all these others heading for that same rendezvous. But
^-
Crow accelerated and shot ahead anyway.

And as he flew his cloak, so it was suddenly important to Crow that he look at Elysia again, let the place impress itself upon his mind. It had dawned on him that if
ever
he had known a real home — a place to be, where he
wanted
to be — that home was here. Now, for the first time, he consciously desired to remember it. Knowing his instincts, how true they ran, that was a very bad omen indeed. And so, until journey's end, he deliberately absorbed all he could of Elysia, letting it soak into him like water into a sponge.

Elysia was not a planet; if it had been, then it would be the most tremendous colossus among worlds. But there was no real horizon that Crow had ever seen, no visible curvature of rim, only a gradual fading into distance. Oh, there were mountains with towering peaks, and many of them snow-clad; but even from the tops of these Elysia Could be seen to go on endlessly into distant mists, a land vast as it was improbable and beautiful.

Beautiful, too, its structures, its cities. But
such
cities! Fretted silver spires and clusters of columns rose every' where, fantastic habitations of Elysia's peoples; but never vying with each other and always with fields and rivers and plains between. Even in the most abstract of cities there were parks and woodlands and rivers and lakes like bright ribbons and mirrors dropped carelessly on the landscape, yet always complementing it perfectly. And away beyond lines of low, domed hills misty with distance, yet more cities; their rising terraces of globes and minarets sparkling afar, where dizzy aerial roadways spread unsupported spans city to city like the gossamer threads of strange communal cobwebs.

Sky-islands, too (like Serannian in the land of Earth's dreams, or Tiania's castle and the gardens around it), apparently floating free but in fact anchored by the same
gravitic devices which powered Elysia and kept her positioned here in this otherwise empty parallel dimension; and all of these aerial residences dotted here and there, near and far, seemingly at random and at various heights; but perfectly situated and structured to suit their dwellers, who might in form be diverse as their many forms of gravity-defying architecture. And yet the sky so vast that it was not, could not be, cluttered.