Authors: Brian Lumley
De Marigny sighed, allowed himself to slump for a moment. `That's the closest I
ever want
to come,' he said. 'That Cthulhu mind-stuff - Nyarlathotep, sentient slime, call it what you will - could have entered the dock as easily as the Hounds of Tindalos themselves. But now,' he straightened up, ' - now let's get out of here'
`Wait!' something clacked harshly where it scuttled about their feet. `And what of me?'
De Marigny saw the thing, gave a violent start. 'What in the name of all the hells - ?'
'This is Loxzor,' said Moreen. 'He got in while you and Exior were busy.' She looked reproachfully at the wizard. `And Loxzor's not quite what he seems to be, either. Like Exior, he's something of a linguist yes, and he's been telling me a few things.'
Exior hastily offered his version, and added: 'But since he's here anyway ... I suppose we could always take him back to his steppes?. If you feel inclined.'
De Marigny flew the time-dock south-west at Exior's direction, brought it to rest on a hill crested with a bleak stone shell. 'My castle,' clacked Loxzor, 'fallen into ruins through these fifteen years of hybridism.' He scuttled out of the door as soon as de Marigny opened it for him, crying: 'Ruined, aye, all ruined - thanks to Exior K'mool!'
`No,' Exior shook his head, 'thanks to your own dark inclinations, Loxzor. However, since I'll no more be here to suffer you as a neighbour, I'll now unspell you.' He pointed a bony finger, uttered a word. It had a strange sound, that word, impossible to remember or repeat, except for Exior. Green lightning lashed from his finger, set the hideous roach-man leaping and shrieking where it covered him in a mesh of emerald fire. There came a puff of smoke, and when it cleared -
Loxzor of the Hrossaks stood there, a whole man again. A pallid, yellowy bronze in his dark cloak and cowl, he stood hunched, scowling. At his feet a cockroach scurried. He spied it, said '
Hah!' -
crushed it with his naked foot.
`And there stands Loxzor,' said Exior in disgust. 'He shared that poor creature's body many a year, and now pulps the life out of it without a moment's thought. Well, farewell, Hrossak wage but one last piece of advice. 'Ware wizards whose powers are greater than your own, eh, Loxzor?'
Loxzor stared stonily, eyes yellow and unforgiving. The three turned away from him, entered the dock. As the door closed on
them, Moreen
queried: 'But what's he doing now?'
Exior, during their brief flight to Hrossa had explored something of the dock's workings; his wizard's mind had quickly discovered the use of most of its 'accessories'. On entering the clock this second time, he had followed Moreen's lead in tuning himself to the scanners. De Marigny, taking the actual controls (as it were), was startled yet again when Exior answered Moreen's query with a cry of warning:
`Hurry, Searcher!' hissed the wizard. 'That's a "follow-him" spell he's weaving! See, he makes his wicked passes, points in the direction of my late palace in Humquass - and now he points directly at us!'
De Marigny saw saw, too, the thin trail of noxious yellow vapour, like the trail of a meteorite, on the horizon, . speeding toward them and gave the clock its instructions. Wisps of slime, made aerial and lightning-swift by Loxzor's spell, arced down toward the clock ... but the clock was no longer there.
'I think,' said de Marigny with feeling, piloting the clock into the future, 'that if that was Theem'hdra, then I've had all I want of it!'
'What of Loxzor?' asked Moreen.
'Eh?' said Exior. 'But surely you heard me warn him, child? Never a mind so contrary, so warped, as Loxzor's. And never a man so doomed.'
`Oh?' said de Marigny.
Exior nodded. 'The mind-slime has lost us, but Loxzor's spell calls for a victim. Such black magic as he used carried its own retribution. The slime now follows him ...'
'And no escape?' Moreen was full of pity.
`None,' Exior shook his head. 'It will, follow him to the end and take him, just as it would have taken me but for your intervention.'
There was a long silence, then Moreen said: 'I sensed him as a cruel creature, but still he was a man. It seems a monstrous way for a man to die.'
To put the matter in its correct perspective, and also to clear the air, de Marigny said, 'As Exior points out, Loxzor brought it on himself. The best thing to do is forget him. After all, he's already a million years dead.'
And that was that ...
'How did you get in that mess?' de Marigny asked Exior when they were well underway.
'It's a long story,' said Exior.
'Tell me anyway.'
Exior shrugged. 'As a boy,' he began, 'I was apprenticed under Phaithor Ull. In his dotage, Phaithor sought immortality - we all do - and made himself the subject of several thaumaturgies. One morning when I went to wake him, he was a heaping of green dust on his bed, all spread out in the shape of a man. His rings were in the `hand' formed of the dust, as was his wand. It, too, fell into dust the moment I took it up.
'Later I
served
Mylakhrion, however briefly. To test my worthiness, he sent me on a quest. I was to find and return to him a long-lost runebook. I succeeded - barely! My reward: Mylakhrion gave me his palace, made me mage to Morgath the then King of Humquass. And off
he went
to seek immortality! Strange how men want to live forever, eh?'
De Marigny smiled, however wryly, and nodded. 'Some men seek to slow time down, yes,' he said. 'Others speed it up!'
'Eh? Oh, yes! Your time-clock, of course. Very droll! But to continue:
'Eventually I, too, began to feel the weight of my years. Humquass was forsaken, except for me. The city fell into decay. Years went fleeting. Naturally and unnaturally I too sought immortality. I went to Tharamoon hoping to find Mylakhrion. His potions and ointments and fountain of vitality had held the years back a little, but not entirely. Perhaps by now he'd discovered the secret, maybe he'd even share it with me. So I thought. But in Tharamoon, when I found Mylakhrion's tower, it too was a ruin. Mylakhrion's bones lay broken at its base.
'I searched the place top to bottom, brought back with me all I could of his paraphernalia: books and cyphers, powders, elixirs, unguents and the likes. And I read Mylakhrion's works most carefully. His diary, too ...
`He had fallen foul of Cthulhu, who sleeps and dreams and makes men mad. Do you know of Cthulhu?'
Too much!' de Marigny frowned.
'To know his name is too much!' said Exior. 'Mylakhrion had promised to do Cthulhu's bidding in return for immortality. But when that most monstrous of the Great Old Ones ordered that which might free the, prisoned demons of his evil order . Mylakhrion refused! For which Cthulhu killed him. Mylakhrion had broken. the pact - Cthulhu broke Mylakhrion.'
De Marigny nodded. 'That's a familiar pattern,' he said. 'And you fell for it too, eh?'
Exior hung his head. 'Indeed. Foolish old Exior K'mool, who thought himself mightier than Mylakhrion. I made the same pact, for I was sure I could defend myself against Cthulhu's wrath. As you have seen, there was no defence - except this. Flight into the future.'
Something bothered de Marigny. 'But you had made a form of agreement, a contract with Cthulhu. And did you get your immortality? It seems unlikely, for if we hadn't come along in the time-clock you'd be dead. If you can die you're hardly immortal.'
Exior looked up and slowly smiled. A wondering smile, very peculiar. 'But I am not dead,' he, pointed out. There was something about his voice ...
De Marigny said: 'Tell me, just exactly what did Cthulhu tell you about immortality? How were you to make yourself immortal?'
Exior shrugged. 'All a trick!' he snorted. 'The only way I could become immortal was in my children's children. Which is the same for all men, for all creatures, even for the simple flowers of the field. A blade of wheat grows, sheds its seed, dies - and is reborn from its seed. And a man? This was the immortality for which Cthulhu drove so hard a bargain. A man's natural right!'
Moreen had overheard all. `Then perhaps you've succeeded after all,' she said. 'Or if not immortality, something close to it.'
They looked at her. 'He's right, you know,' she said to de Marigny. 'About how you both look alike. Like two petals of the same flower .
`Ridiculous!' said de Marigny. 'There are eons between us.'
She smiled. 'Then that really would be immortality, wouldn't it?'
De Marigny shook his head, said: 'But -- '
- We
think we
went back into time of our own accord,' she cut him off, determined to make her point, `but what if he really
did
call us back - to save him? Perhaps Cthulhu didn't cheat him after all, the secret did lie in his children's children. He was saved, made "immortal", by his own descendent - by you, Henri.'
Her reasoning is sound,' said Exior. 'And with luck, I shall yet make myself truly immortal. You seek Elysia, correct? Yes, and so do I - now! Why, Elysia
is
immortality!'
`That's playing with words,' de Marigny protested - but he remembered that Titus Crow had told him to look in his past. Not
the
past but
his
past. And wasn't there something else Crow had said to him long ago: about a spark in de Marigny carried down all the ages, which would flare up again one day in Elysia?
`We can put the girl's theory to the test,' Exior cut in on his thoughts. 'Wizards often run in unbroken lines of descent. You are a wizard,
even
though you deny it. Oh, you haven't discovered your full potential yet, but it's there. The proof is this: your father would have been another.'
`My father?' de Marigny almost laughed out loud. 'My father was a 20th Century jazz buff who lived in New Orleans! He -' But here the smile died on The Searcher's lips and his jaw dropped. For Etienne-Laurent de Marigny had also been New Orleans' premier mystic and occultist - and even now he was a prominent figure in the land of Earth's dreams.. In short, a magician. In his lifetime and after it. A wizard!
Wide-eyed, de Marigny gazed at Exior K'mool. And Exior gazed at him.
And the time-clock sped into the future ...
`Time travel takes time.' De Marigny grinned and did it again: 'An amazingly accurate alliteration.'
`What's that?' Moreen had been half asleep.
`Nothing,' said de Marigny. 'Sorry I woke you. I was just thinking out loud. About time travel. It takes time.'
Exior approached, his face animated, excited in the clock's soft purple glow. 'Yes, it does,' he agreed, 'if you only use this wonderful device as a conveyance. And of course you must, for the time-clock is vital to you. It has to go where you go.'
`Just what are you getting at?' de Marigny raised an eyebrow. 'And you really shouldn't go wandering about in here on your own. The clock's a death-trap for the unwary. You could end up almost anywhen.
`Precisely my point. You use it as a conveyance, but it could be used as a gateway!'
De Marigny nodded. 'We know that. Titus Crow has used it that way. As for myself: I don't know how to. I've never had to or even wanted to. In any case, if I did use the clock that way, what if I couldn't find my way back again?'
`Exactly!' Exior answered. 'You depend upon the clock — but I don't. The only place
I
want to be is Ardatha Ell's manse in Lith. And right now I'm wasting time getting there.'
'What?' de Marigny had suddenly realized what Exior was saying. 'Exior, you're out of your mind! I've piloted this ship for more than six years now, and I still don't know half of all there is to know about it. And you're telling me that after a few short hours of travel in the clock you plan to use it as a gateway?'
`Henri,' said Exior patiently, 'I unriddle runes, languages, systems. My mind is built that way. Yours, too, but undeveloped as yet. The time-clock's systems are intricate, yes, but not unfathomable. Your friend Titus Crow has done it, and I'm going to do it too — now.'
`Now?' Moreen gasped.
'I only came back to say goodbye for now. For of course, I'll see you both again in the lava-floating manse on Lith.'
`But ... right now?' de Marigny still couldn't accept it. mean — how?'
Exior smiled, meshed his mind deeper with the clock, deeper than de Marigny had ever dared to go. 'Like this,' he said. His form wavered, broke down into bright points of light, blinked out.
And de Marigny and Moreen stood alone ...
Exior and Ardatha Ell met over the lava lakes. Below, no manse was anywhere visible. Exior, now an extension of the time-clock, slowed himself down, cruised into the future rather than rocketed. His speed was now only a little faster than true time itself. 'No manse,' he said to the other, deeming introductions unnecessary.
`Indeed,' said Ardatha. 'I had assumed it was your place.' `And I thought it was yours!'