The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (33 page)

It fell like a thunderbolt from above, swept by him like a whirlwind, and swung down upon the white bear-thing with a scream of fury.

The mountains shook as the two came together, and the stars were blotted out.

Ragged black wings beat with cyclone force. Shaggy white jaws roared and crunched. Scythe-sharp black claws caught at the white breast and tore it asunder. The white thing moaned, and toppled, and came apart in chunks of broken snow.

The black shape whirled about and glared at the boy for the space of a single heartbeat.

And black eyes stared deep into his golden ones.

Then the black wings spread and caught the wind and it was gone. Thongor lay gasping in the snow, the sword fallen from his nerveless hand.

Agony lanced through him as circulation returned to his half-frozen body. Hot blood went pumping through numb flesh; he shook his head dully, trying to waken his sluggish, frozen brain.

He had attained manhood, after all.

He had gone up on the heights alone, and there the vision had come to him, and he had seen his totem-beast, and learned his True Name.

And he was blest above all the warriors of his tribe since time began: for the beast of his vision was the Black Hawk of Valkarth itself, the symbol of his race. And he knew then that his destiny would be stranger and more wondrous and more terrible than that of other men.

And he had seen a prophecy, too.

He had seen the Black Hawk fight and slay the Snow Bear. The ghost-beasts had fought there on the windy heights near to the blazing stars, and from that fight the Black Hawk had borne away the victory.

He drank down cold wine and rested for a time.

Then he went on, to make the prophecy come true.

* * * *

It was the month of Garang in late spring, and the thaws had begun. The great snow that lay thick upon the heights and that cumbered the steep slope of the cliffs was rotten and lay loose, water trickling here and there. When he crossed over to the other side of the ridge he could look down on the valley where the tents of the Snow Bear tribe stood out black against the snow, which reddened, now, to the first shafts of dawn.

They were weary after the long battle, the Snow Bear warriors—those of them that had survived. They had killed and killed and come away with the Black Hawk treasure of mammoth-ivory and red gold and with those of the Black Hawk women and girl-children who had not been fortunate enough to die beside their men.

They had feasted long, drunk deep, and caroused lustily and late, the victorious Snow Bear warriors. And now they slept heavily, gorged on meat and blood and wine and womanflesh.

From that sleep they would not awaken.

For a long moment the boy stood, arms folded against his breast, looking down on the camp.

His face was grim and expressionless, like a mask cast in hard bronze. He was a boy in years, but the iron of manhood had entered his soul. He knew what he must do; the spirits of the dead called to him in the windy silence, and he hearkened, and bent to the task.

With the great sword he began to cut the snow away.

It was not hard to do; the growing warmth of a Northlands spring had done half the job for him. The broken masses of snow began to roll down the steep, high slopes; as they came whirling down, they broke more snow loose, and each mass became a greater mass, until at last a mountain of heavy snow poured like a ponderous white river down the cliffs to collide in thunder on the floor of the valley below.

They had put up their tents close under those cliffs, the Snow Bear warriors, to block away the wind. Now it was snow that came down upon them, not wind, and by the time the avalanche came thundering down upon the tents it weighed many tons.

It crushed them into the earth, smothered them and their treasure and the ruined, broken, empty-eyed women they had taken captive; and in that thundering white fury not one lived.

The tribes of Valkarth have a simple faith.

Only those brave warriors who face the foe, and fight, and fall in battle, only their bold spirits are borne by the War Maids to the Hall of Heroes, to feast eternity away before the throne of Father Gorm.

And what of they that die by accident in gross and drunken slumber? The shamans shrug and do not say. But they do not die the death of men, the death of warriors; the Hall of Heroes does not open to such as they. Their miserable souls slink cringing through the grey mists and cold shadows of the Underworld forever.

The vengeance of Thongor was completed.

5

Red Dawn

Morning lit the east and the stars fled, one by one, before the red shafts of dawn.

When Thongor had made certain that not a single foe had survived the avalanche, he turned away and set his face to the sun.

The task was accomplished and he had lived.

Where, now, would he go? To a valley of corpses and an empty hut, whose walls would ring no more to his father’s joyous laughter and his mother’s quiet, crooning songs?

Not there; he could not go back.

But where, then? No other tribe would take him in, for life in the Northlands was a grim, bleak struggle for existence, and every mouth that was fed meant that another must go hungry.

His people were extinct; there was nowhere for him to go.

And then it was that a verse from the old warriors’ song he had sung over his father’s grave for a dirge returned to him. And he thought of the Southlands, of the Dakshina, the lush jungle-countries that lay beside the warm waters of the Gulf, beyond the Mountains of Mommur to the south.

There, bright young cities glittered in the bold sun, with green gardens, and laughing girls. There, fiery kings and princes contended in mighty wars, and kingdoms lay ripe and ready for the taking. He thought of gold and gems, of fruit warm from the sun, of whirling battles on the green plains, of dark-eyed, barbaric women…

And he set the great broad sword back in its scabbard, and drank deep of the red wine, watching dawn rise up over the edges of the world to fill the land with light; and he set his face towards the south, that last of the Black Hawk warriors.

And he passed from sight, down the hill-slope, striding with long steps towards the place where the great range of purple mountains marched across the world from west to east.

His heart lifted within him, for the night was over. And as he strode from view, he lifted his voice and sang again that warriors’ song…

Out there, beyond the setting sun,

Are kingdoms waiting to be won!

And crowns, and women, gold and wine—

Courage! And hold the battleline!

THE DEVIL’S CRYPT, by E. Hoffmann Price

I.

Satan’s Footprints

Guidebook tourists to Southern France concentrate on Biarritz; but those who love unspoiled antiquity prefer Bayonne, that gray-walled city that basks in the warmth of the Pyrenees and guards the road to Spain. The moat that girdles the citadel is dry, and the drawbridges are no longer serviceable; but at sunrise, when the Lachepaillet Wall and the cathedral spires seem floating on banks of low-lying river mists from the Nive and the Adour, Bayonne is a hashish dream rather than a city.

France and Spain, England and Navarre, have contended for possession of that fortress; and before them, the Moors occupied that old city which was once the encampment of Roman legions; but it is only at night that one remembers the crypts and passages that undermine the citadel, and senses that the soil, which for centuries has drunk the blood of defender and invader alike, is still thirsty.

Bayonne is an old gray sphinx, somnolently smiling through the veils of her mystery.

Two men emerged from the Lachepaillet Gate as the cathedral clock struck eleven. They were bareheaded, and in full evening dress. Davis Barrett, the younger, was tall, bronzed, and rugged as the massive masonry of the walls. The elder was grizzled, with fine, stern features and brist­ling, close-cropped hair, which gleamed white in the moon­light. It was no promenade to continue a private ­discussion that would have been disturbed by the laughter and music and tingling glasses in José Guevara Millamediana’s luxurious apartment; they walked with expectant, searching alertness; and the elder was perturbed, as though he feared to find what they sought.

“Why,” demanded Barrett, “do you think you’ll find Louise here, of all places?”

“Her apartment, just a block from Don José’s, must have been her destination, but she’s not there. And since she left without her cloak, she must have intended to return in a few minutes. As it is —”

D’Artois shrugged, regarded his friend. Barrett glanced up toward the parapet along which ran rue Lachepaillet.

“She could have slipped,” he admitted.

“Precisely, my friend,” replied Pierre d’Artois. “With a bit too much of Don José’s wine—a moment of dizziness, a misstep in the mist—there’s no guard rail up there.”

Barrett agreed. It was logical; yet he sensed that his companion had withheld more than he had expressed. He shivered in anticipation of the end of what had started as a casual courtesy to allay the misgivings of Yvonne Marigny concerning the unduly prolonged absence of her sister, Louise.

They bounded the swelling curve of the bastion that marks the turn of the wall toward the Gate of Spain. Barrett’s heart and breath for a moment stopped as he abruptly halted, frozen by the horror that confronted them.

The gray sphinx had lifted her veil, and revealed not her seduction, but her terror and darkness.

A woman lay on the sandy bottom of the dry moat. Fright had so hideously transfigured her face that it was her scarlet gown and blue-black hair and silver
lamé
slippers rather than the olive-tinted features which Barrett recognized. He saw how Louise Marigny had died, and tried to convince himself that it was illusion, and the fantasy of a moon-haunted night.

“Pierre—look at her throat! Look at —” His voice cracked, and for a moment failed. Louise Marigny’s throat had been terribly mangled, as by a beast of prey. Barrett resolutely denied the thoughts that followed his first impression.

D’Artois, his seamed features pale and drawn, nodded.

“My friend, look again. You have seen but half of it.”

Barrett wondered what further horror there could be; but his gray eyes followed the old man’s commanding gesture and saw the footprints of that which had roamed by moonlight.

Man, beast, or devil, its feet were webbed; yet for all the resemblance of the tracks to those of some monstrous aquatic fowl of aeons past, there was that which suggested a hybrid combining the feet of an anthropoid with those of a web-footed bird, or bird-like reptile.

“And the prints end after a few paces,” muttered d’Artois.

“It might have jumped to the bank,” countered Barrett, making a final effort to lend a touch of sanity to the outrageous implications of the suddenly ending trail.

D’Artois shook his head.

“Impossible. Facing the way its tracks indicate, it would have had to clear the moat by leaping crabwise. It must have flown away.”

“Good Lord! A bird with feet that large! Or a winged reptile—couldn’t possibly be!” Barrett was thinking of the
pterodactyl,
that flying, reptilian slayer which has been extinct for uncounted thousands of years.

D’Artois for a moment studied the uncanny trail.

“Something worse than any honest reptile,” he muttered somberly. Then, to Barrett: “Let’s notify the
Sûreté.
At once.”

Barrett was glad to leave that sinister spot; but as d’Artois turned: “Pierre, one of us should watch here until the police arrive.”

“There is no time to waste in courtesies to the dead,” he countered. “And I may need your assistance.
Allons!”

And presently, passing the Lachepaillet Gate, they ascended the slope, skirted the parapet, then turned down rue Tour de Sault, near whose end was the 13th-Century ruin which d’Artois had restored and modernized, making of it a town house wherein he was not only comfortable, but content in being in the heart of the old city he loved so well.

D’Artois led the way to his study on the second floor, stepped to the telephone, and called the Prefect of Police. The machine gun sputter of d’Artois’s French was too much for Barrett, but he caught a phrase from time to time, and the incredulous horror of the Prefect’s voice as it filtered faintly from the receiver.

“He will make plaster casts of the footprints; he will measure the stride; he will look for bits of hair, thread, lint,” d’Artois enumerated as he replaced the instrument. Then, with an expansive gesture, “but he will find nothing!”

Barrett set down the decanter of
Vieux Armagnac,
whose level he had appreciably pulled down while listening to d’Artois remarks. The fiery liquor burned out the chills that had raced up and down his spine.

“You haven’t much respect for the Prefect,” he said with something approaching a smile. D’Artois’s extensive studies in criminology and psychology at times made him critical of the
Sûreté.

“This is something which transcends scientific crime detection,” the old man countered. “It is not a case of an assassin disguising his feet with something which will leave an outlandish footprint. Yet that is what
Monsieur le Préfet
will attempt to prove, and he will fail.

“But I will approach from another angle.”

As he spoke, d’Artois, with swift gesture, swept his desk clear of its accumulated debris. Then he laid out a sheet of paper and with a compass drew a circle which he divided into twelve equal sectors. That done, he took from a bookcase a thin volume whose pages were divided into columns. It was an ephemeris.

“Mon ami,”
explained d’Artois in response to Barrett’s exclamation, “astronomical tables are not exclusively used for navigation. An ephemeris, you recollect, is also used by astrologers.”

“I am inquiring into the planetary aspects. In the meantime, do you swill the rest of my brandy. Your stomach doubtless needs settling.”

Barrett selected a cigar from d’Artois’s humidor; then, his curiosity overcoming him, he peered over the old man’s shoulder, watching him enter astrological symbols in the twelve sectors of the circle. The cigar had accumulated less than an inch of ash when d’Artois thrust back his chair.

“I see more than murder and mutilation,” he declared. “I see a sinister configuration that cries out of an old and malignant magic. Neptune, in the Eighth House, indicates death by
strange spiritual causes.
And look at the position of Saturn, the lord of those who follow
subterranean pursuits;
Uranus, the sovereign of thaumaturgists and black magicians; and over all is the evil aspect of the moon, the mother of sorcery.”

“Still and all, Pierre,” interjected Barrett, perplexed by the astrological jargon, “you’ve only repeated what we already know. We saw it was uncanny and horrible. Anyway, this astrology business —”

“Has been degraded by charlatans, I grant,” snapped d’Artois. “But it is none the less a true science, and only limited by the intelligence of the investigator.

“I am looking into the background of this monstrous crime. And the first move is to seek
underground,
a black magician working in some of the hidden vaults beneath the city. Check up on all those known or suspected of having occult connections. Thus we have already eliminated all common criminals,
n’est-ce pas?”

Barrett, impressed by his friend’s solemnity, conceded the point, outrageous as it was to hear a sane, hard-bitten old soldier and scholar to speak of black magic as an actual menace; but d’Artois’s ensuing assertion left Barrett too astonished even to protest.

“And the first of these devil mongers and dabblers in the occult that I will investigate is our charming host of the evening, Don José. He is the head of a clique that has gathered in Bayonne. On the surface, they seem to be harmless cranks who babble of telepathy, mysticism, and the like; but to­night’s tragedy confirms my contention that modern Bay­onne is living up to its ancient reputation for being a nest of malignant occultists and necromancers!”

“Good God, Pierre!” Barrett finally contrived to ejaculate. “Why—that’s utterly impossible —”

“So was the gruesome tragedy in the moat,” retorted d’Artois, his blue eyes cold and glittering as sword points by moonlight. “And wait till I tell you the rest:
Yvonne and Louise are twins.
If there is one iota of truth in astrology, Yvonne will succumb, or at the best, narrowly escape the doom that overtook her sister.

“Their horoscopes, while, of course, not identical, would be so similar that both would be susceptible to the occult evil that is stalking tonight. The stars have warned us. You watch the living while I set out to trip up the monster responsible for that ghastly crime. Hurry—before it’s too late!”

Barrett’s last remnant of skepticism melted before his friend’s unwavering conviction. He followed d’Artois to the street, and through the river mists that billowed from the Nive and marched up rue Tour de Sault like a phantom army.

II.

The Beast from the Crypt

D’ Artois’s car was parked near Don José’s house. “I will not only need it tonight,” explained d’Artois as they hurried along rue Lachepaillet, “but we must also get Mademoiselle Yvonne—get her away from that party. That Spaniard —”

“But I don’t see how he could be connected with it,” contended Barrett. “He was there, all the time, among his guests. Yvonne just stepped out for a moment for a breath of air, or —”

“Imbécile!”
snorted d’Artois. “That’s just the point: Don José being always in sight of his guests gives him a perfect but deceptive alibi.”

“But that doesn’t prove —”

“Of course it proves nothing. But if you’d read that fellow’s book on Tibetan magic, and heard the rumors of his doings near the roof of the world, you would think twice,
pardieu!

“Alone, I am handicapped. But fortunately there is in Bay­onne an occultist who can help me. A profound scholar whose researches can perhaps save the day: Sidi Abdur­rahman, an Oriental mystic and
Chêla,
a disciple of an occult Adept.”

Barrett shuddered as they passed the bastion of the Lachepaillet wall and heard the detectives, already on the case, and the crisp, incisive voice of the Prefect who had appeared to take charge in person. And then, presently, they heard music, and laughter, the mirth of Don José’s guests. Barrett nerved himself to ascend the stairs and enter the glow of lights and the mocking presence of gaiety.

Yvonne, they learned, had left Don José’s house only a few minutes after d’Artois and Barrett had gone in search of Louise.

“Por Dios, Señor,”
said the courtly Spaniard, ”she fancied her sister was ill and went home to join her. I trust that you will present my compliments and regrets to the lovely Louise. I am indeed sorry that she had to leave so early. Is it possible that she may return for her wrap?”

Don José was mocking them; and Barrett, remembering d’Artois dreadful surmises, sought to deny the thought that Yvonne, like her sister, had gone out into the mist and the moonlight to meet a horrible death; nor was he reassured by the fierce glitter in d’Artois’s eyes and the twitch of his waxed moustache as he paused a moment before replying, “I will take her wrap, and leave it on my way past their apartment.”

D’Artois and the Spaniard regarded each other as though they had crossed swords instead of glances; and during the exchange Barrett sensed a sudden tension, a current of deadly animosity, like a dagger biting through a shroud of silk. He saw Don José’s cheeks for an instant lose their olive tint; and the dark eyes, troubled by the frosty, unwavering stare of d’Artois, seemed eager to shift.

“Sacré salaud!
hissed d’Artois, ”you know she will never need her wrap. I am busy this evening—
and you know why.
But I will meet you, with sword or pistol. Soon.”

Don José recoiled before the insult and the vague accusation. Then he shrugged, smiled blandly, twisted his black moustache.

“Señor,
I have not the least idea why you insult me, or what you are implying. Neither am I interested. But if you live long enough, and your courage is equal to the occasion, I will be happy to meet you with any weapons you may prefer.”

The stilted, formal speech would have seemed absurd to Barrett had he not sensed the deadly, blazing hatred that flashed for an instant from Don José’s eyes.

“Mordieu, cordieu, pardieu!”
retorted d’Artois, advancing a pace. “If anything happens to Mademoiselle Yvonne, I will not meet you with weapons—I will dismember you by hand.”