The Dark God Walks

Chapter Nine

Reaching the cave entrance under the overhang, Hero paused. The bristling of the short hairs at the base of his neck warned him that apart from all else there was something here completely outside human experience, dreaming or otherwise, something which never should be in any sane or ordered universe. A wind was rushing from the tunnel, carrying with it a rotten smell that had him pinching his nostrils in disgust. He stood, as at the lip of a tomb freshly opened after many centuries, and his eyes widened as he saw, deep in the gloom of the cave, a greenish light swelling and brightening even as he watched. Something was coming down the tunnel from Yibb-Tstll's temple, and the way die dreamer's feet suddenly seemed rooted to the earth, he knew that whatever it was it boded ill for any merely human adversary.

Dawn's light was brightening rapidly now, and the wind from the west had slackened slightly. Incapable of motion and feeling that chill but gentle wind on his back, Hero's eyes bugged as he watched the green glow pulsing closer still and his inner mind screamed for him to take some defensive action, to run and put distance between himself and the unknown horror. Then, breaking his paralysis-

"David!" came Eldin's cry, carried on the wind that blew from the looming keep. "Man, come back and give me a hand. I can't handle all of them myself!" At that the younger dreamer half-turned, saw his companion less than a hundred yards away, hard pressed by the flight of gaunts which had returned and now hovered about him where he slashed and hacked. Alone, he could barely hold them at bay; and slowly but surely they were driving him back toward die cave's entrance, back to whatever it was mat came in greenish rottenness, looming ever larger from the depths of the tunnel.

Hero cast one more glance into the gloomy bowels of the mountain, enough to make out the outline of the thing that moved there in its nimbus of emerald fire, and then his feet seemed to grow wings as he sped back to Eldin and joined him in fighting off the gaunts.

"What now, lad?" Eldin panted, his face white in the half-light and drawn with awful exertions. "Back to the cave?"

"No," gasped Hero, skewering a gaunt and withdrawing his blade before the dead creature could crash to earth at his feet. "I've seen what's coming after us. I think it's Yibb-Tsdl himself. And these damned gaunts are simply here to slow us down!"

Eldin roared his anger as one of the rubbery monsters fell onto his back, almost throwing him from his feet. He leaned forward and Hero lopped off the horror's blind head. On the next instant, as the carcass of the headless creature slid from the older man's straining frame, the remaining gaunts lifted skyward in a concerted throbbing of wings. For a second the two dreamers stared at each other wide-eyed, then gazed back toward the cave beneath the overhang.

Yibb-TstH's bulk was emerging into the still dim light, surrounded by a greenish glow, and one look at that black god of horror was almost too much for the adventurers to bear. Eldin grasped Hero's arm and croaked: "The cliffs, quick! We must go the way we came!"

"No," the other answered, gulping air into lungs which felt starved, galvanizing a body that seemed utterly unmanned. "No, the gaunts would pick us off the cliff like flies off a wall ..."

"What, then?"

"The final crest. Perhaps we'll have room to fight the gaunts off up there, and we might just be able to start an avalanche and-"

"-And send that great horror to hell! Yes, lad, I like your idea. But the way I feel, you might yet end up seeing this thing through on your own!" And Eldin coughed up a great red blotch and spat it onto a patch of snow.

Inadvertently, as they fled for the slope that climbed to the final crest of snow, the two found themselves drawn to look back again at the thing that pursued them: Yibb-Tstll-a loathsomeness from the dead spaces between the stars-whose living visage made his previously stony aspect seem almost warm and friendly by comparison!

Greenly illumined, Yibb-Tstll seemed to flow tower-ingly, purposefully toward them. The god's feet, or whatever other members propelled him, were hidden beneath his billowing cloak. His eye-that single eye, where recently there had been two-was now alive, redly glistening, quick with a hideous mobility. It slid over the surface of the demon-god's pulpy face with a swift and apparently aimless motion.

The empty socket which once had housed the other eye-the great emerald that now jounced against Hero's thigh-moved in similarly pointless circles and dripped a black pus that steamed where it splashed on the stony ground. But if the movements of Yibb-TstU's hideous orb and its companion socket seemed aimless, the determined way in which he now moved after the dreamers most certainly was not!

What few gaunts remained had gathered themselves to the huge monster and disappeared beneath his weirdly fluttering cloak. Their presence there did not, however, slow him down, and for all his vast bulk he flowed effortlessly up the final slope, obliterating the tracks that the dreamers had left in the thawing snow.

Now, approaching the crest of the snow-ridge, the two struggled through clinging, knee-deep snow that drenched their legs, slowing and tiring them until at last, almost exhausted, they reached the very top. And there they were finally obliged to call a halt; for at their feet, as if some giant had sliced both snow and mountain with a massive sword, a sheer fall of rock went down and down for thousands of feet into mighty, misty deeps.

Before them the seemingly bottomless chasm-where the morning mists now boiled upward, climbing the sheer face of rock toward them-and to the rear the lumbering god of unknown dimensions beyond dreamland, bent upon the recovery of his emerald eye ... and certainly upon less mentionable things.

"Thinistor Udd lives!" croaked Eldin. "See, the green light follows the god like a long trail, winding away back to his temple. It was the wizard sent Yibb-Tstll after us."

"Whoever sent him, I'll jump before I give myself up to that" Hero pantingly declared. As he spoke a warm glow bathed their backs: the sun, risen at last on what could well be their last morning in Earth's dreamland.

And still the horror came on, his stench reaching them like the breath of an open tomb as he climbed the slope of snow. Down on all fours went the adventurers, frantically shaping great balls of wet snow which they propelled down the slope toward Yibb-Tstll's hideous form. Gathering snow and momentum as they rolled, the balls smashed into the monster god with the impact of boulders; but what they had in weight they lacked in consistency, flying apart and tumbling past the lumbering giant in wetly bouncing fragments that avalanched down to the plateau of the keep. And Yibb-Tstll was impeded not at all.

Less than fifty feet separated the pair at bay from that awful Being when the latter's cloak suddenly burst open to release upon the beleaguered dreamers the few remaining gaunts. Balanced precariously on a narrow and infirm ribbon of snow, Hero and Eldin were hardly in a good position to do battle with the creatures; it was as much as they could do to protect themselves. And still the terrible form of Yibb-Tstll came on, his single eye sliding over his face more rapidly now, perhaps in nameless anticipation ...

Aminza knew she dared wait no longer. The look on Thinistor's face told her that much. Seated with his back against the base of his stalagmite throne, the wizard's yellow eyes were wide and full of mad delight, and the corners of his mouth curved upward in an awful smile. Aminza had little doubt that in some magical way he "saw" whatever sight presented itself to Yibb-Tstll, carried back to him, perhaps, by the greenly weaving umbilicus of light that still streamed from Thinistor's wand. If that was the case then her dreamer friends must be in a fearsome plight.

And if they were done for, then so was Aminza. She feared the wizard, yes, and also the pair of gaunts that silently clung to the cave's ceiling; but the wild men of the waking world that she had befriended were her last hope, her one chance for freedom.

Lithe as a cat, in one flowing movement she came to her feet and flew at Thinistor, snatching up the heavy stave from where it lay beside him and whirling it once about her head. She heard the throb of rubbery wings as the shadows of the gaunts fell across her; but then, before the wizard could do more than turn his feral eyes on her, she swung the metal stave against his head.

Thinistor gave a single shriek-high and bubbling-as the ancient bones of his skull caved in where the stave embedded itself in soft brain ... and then all was chaos!

The greenly glowing light dimmed and flickered; one gaunt, instantly frozen in stone, crashed down to the floor with a shock that shivered it to fragments; the other smashed blindly into the cave's wall, its wings snapping like chalk as it too returned to its stony state. Then the green light flickered one last time and, with a crackling of alien energies, snapped out. Thinistor dropped his wand and fell to one side. He lay still, his yellow eyes wide and blind, accusingly staring at Aminza as his brains trickled out of his shattered skull.