Having seen her on her way to safety, I signalled to Whitey, Jimmy and the remaining handful of watchmen that they, too, should get below where they could better defend the four entrances. Seeing that they understood my signals, I turned to follow Tracy and was greeted by a sight that shocked me rigid. She had fallen and was sliding in the wind across the icy surface of the roof. Ithaqua had seen her and was moving after her!
He came forward and poised himself above the rim of the plateau,
his vast feet seeking purchase on the battlements. From side to side his great bloated head went, slitted star-eyes taking in every detail of what was happening. They found Tracy again and stayed upon her where she finally slid to a halt against a projection of rock. Then the Wind-Walker stepped down onto the roof and reached for her with a massive hand. Immediately she held up her star-stone against his approach â¦
Slits of burning evil opened huge and round as the horror stepped hastily back and lifted into the air. Rage filled every line of his nightmare form. He trembled with an inner fury that swelled him out more hugely yet, completely distorting his already grotesque proportions, then he abruptly thrust up a hand to the clouds that raced across the sky.
I knew instinctively what he was about. While his alien powers could not work
directly
against my sister as long as she held that star-stone, he could use them
indirectly
in a purely physical attack, and now he would simply kill her out of hand and be done with it. I tried to go after her, only to be blown off my feet and sent slithering helplessly across the roof. Fighting to find a hold on the slippery surface, I managed to keep my eyes on Ithaqua and saw him pluck a great ball of ice out of the clouds. I saw his face convulse insanely as he hurled his missile at the roof.
I thought then that Tracy was done for, but I had reckoned without Jimmy Franklin. Tracy was my sister, yes, and I loved her, but Jimmy's love was that of a man for his woman. He fought his way to where she crouched against the outcrop of rock, and dragged her behind it at the very instant that Ithaqua released his ice-bomb. Now that bomb burst like a massive grenade where she had crouched a second earlier, but in the protective lee of the great rock, she and Jimmy were unharmed.
Since she was no longer visible to Ithaqua after the flying shards of ice dispersed, perhaps the monster thought her dead. I think it must have been so, for apparently without another thought for her he turned his attention to me.
And if horror can grin, now this monster grinned; if evil can express delight, Ithaqua was delighted.
Sliding helplessly before the howling wind, flat on my back and scrabbling at the icy stone beneath me, I felt his mind probe mine. Before I could shut him out he said something to me. showed me
alien pictures, made me understand. It was no sort of telepathic transmission that I could ever hope to explain, not even to another telepath, and yet I understood its meaning:
“
So, You are that man of Earth who dared set himself against me. That same one who hurls insults with his mind and threatens with powers of Eld. You are the one who would take the very seed of my being for your own, to make a mere mortal of her You are nothing, man of Earth, and nothing you shall remain.
”
He reached one arm to the sky and pointed his other hand at me. I saw strange energies forming in the clouds, a flickering radiance that ran down his extended arm to his body and turned its barely manlike outline to an ever-changing display of crimson and golden traceries of light. In another instant that electrical nightmare would leap from his outstretched finger to me, and I would cease to be.
“
Father
!” There came a pure, bell-like resonance in my mind, a call which I heard even though it was not directed at me. “
Ithaquaâyou will not take what is mine!
”
Unable to face the crackling holocaust that I knew was soon to come, I had closed my eyes. Now I opened them and lifted my head from the frozen stone surface. Of a number of things that were happening, the most important to me was that Ithaqua had partly turned away from me to face the forward rim of the plateau where now, floating slowly into view, the form of Armandra rose up. With her appearance the wind seemed abruptly to die away, to crouch down into itself and back off like a scolded dog.
“
Armandra
,” I said to her, reaching beyond the alien mask she wore to the sane and human side of her nature, “
I thank you for my lifeâbut not at the expense of your own!
”
“
Do not distract me, Hank. All is not lost, not yet, but I need my concentration
.” To think that those mental tones of purest gold had come from the female horror that rode the wind above the rim of the plateau! Her hair was floating in fiery, undulating waves over her head; her face was a deathmask. In that skull-like face, carmine pits of hell blazed in supernatural fury to match her father's own. She was tiny, compared to him, but her hatred and anger were great.
As she rose higher above the battlements, streams of guardsmen and warriors began to rush from the four exits. Pouring out onto the roof, they looked much fiercer than I ever remembered seeing them before, and I believed I knew why. One way or the other this was to
be the final scene, and they knew it. They were here to lay down their lives for their princess, their world. At last they had been given an opportunity to fight, these men who had formed the rear parties, and they had arrived barely in time. Now great hordes of Ithaqua's kite-men were landing all about the roof, freeing themselves from their harnesses, moving into battle positions.
While all this was happening, I was almost unable to believe that somehow I had been spared. I came back to life, and my heart began to beat a little more freely as I saw that those energies Ithaqua had almost hurled at me were dying away, that the traceries of fire no longer permeated his dark form. He had apparently forgotten all about me; now he held out his bloated arms to Armandra in an attitude which, despite his completely alien nature, was almost humanly imploring. In answer she raised one pale arm above her head and rotated her hand, as if to spin the sky upon her fingers. And indeed the clouds immediately above her began to turn with her hand.
Undaunted, Ithaqua stepped closer, his monstrous feet treading air as he narrowed the gap separating him from his daughter, But this was no gap of merely physical dimensions. It was unbridgeable in anything other than the crudest physical sense. She floated back away from him, growing with a scarlet flush, and faster yet her arm twirled above her head. Then, without warning, she lowered her hand to a forward, horizontal position and jabbed it viciously in her hideous father's direction.
From the whirling clouds directly above her, lightning at once struck, branching into a blinding fork that speared at Ithaqua's eyes. He never moved, stood unblinking and still as a hawk on the wind. Only those hellish orbs of his changed; they momentarily flared brighter as twin tongues of lightning were quenched in them. He had not even bothered to ward off Armandra's initial attack; what is the blow of a child to a man full grown? Ah, but that first blow of hers had opened up floodgates of accumulated loathing.
Now she stabbed at her father again and again, her hand like the tongue of some venomous reptile, invoking powers I had once believed to belong to nature alone. Lightning flashed in an almost continuous stream from the clouds to Ithaqua's form, filling him with blue and white fire. Through all of this he stood unharmed, but if she did not hurt him, certainly she angered him.
The imploring attitude he had seemed to adopt fell away and his
massive body began to tremble in rage. One of the hands he held out to Armandra clenched and rose up threateningly, swept across to strike his own shoulder in a strangely human gesture of pride. The game was over, the “offer” was withdrawnânow the Wind-Walker demanded obedience! He might as well have asked it of the wide seas of Earth or the desert's sands. She simply moved farther away and continued to rain down her lightnings, whose bolts became increasingly violent.
So much I saw before being drawn into the tide of renewed battle that washed across the roof. For with Armandra holding Ithaqua's attention so completely, his aerial invaders were on their own against the men of the plateau, and where the latter were concerned, no quarter would be asked and none given. Hearing my name on the lips of every man who fought for the plateau, I joined them, hurling myself headlong into the fighting.
It was then that Whitey found his way to me through the mass of struggling bodies. “Hank,” he gasped, dragging me behind a natural wall of rock that protected one of the openings into the plateau. “Hank, I have an idea.”
“A hunch?”
“No, just an idea. My hunch days are over.”
“All right, what is it?”
“Tracy has a star-stone with her, right? Well, if she can somehow manage to fasten it to a spearheadâtie it firmly with a thong or somethingâdo you suppose you could land it on Ithaqua's warty hide?”
“He makes a big enough target,” I answered. “I suppose I should be able to do it. Come on, let's see if we can get to Tracy and Jimmy.”
Making our way across the roof was not easy. Through gaps in the tumult we got occasional glimpses of the two of them, Jimmy fighting like a madman side by side with a massive Eskimo guardsman, and Tracy behind them, her back to the same rocky projection that had kept her safe from Ithaqua's ice-bomb, protecting their flanks with her star-stone. But halfway to them we got split up. The last I saw of Whitey for a while, he was tackling a lean Viking, while I myself was faced with a pair of hatchet-faced braves.
I was lucky, managing to kill both my men without being hurt. At the same time I discovered a strange thing; though there was more than one occasion when nearby guardsmen might have stepped in and made things easier, not one of them lifted a hand to help me. I had obviously
reached new heights of legend; Sil-ber-hut-te could look after himself and wouldn't thank anyone for interfering!
But if I could look after myself, the same could no longer be said of Armandra. As I cleared a path for myself through the crush of fighting men, I saw that Armandra was almost spent. The energies she drew from the whirling clouds were less powerful, her stance less steady above the plateau's rim. And her father was beginning to enjoy his invulnerability. As the lightning rained about him, so he would use his great hands to deflect the bolts into the groups of furiously fighting men on the roof. It seemed of absolutely no concern to Ithaqua where these bolts fell or what mayhem they caused; the deaths of his own followers were of no consequence to him.
In any case, within the space of a few seconds more it could be seen that with or without Ithaqua's concern, his human allies were well and truly beaten. Though they fought a desperate, ragged retreat to the battlements, where at last the monstrous shadow of their lord and master fell upon them, still the men of the plateau followed them up, determined that not one of them would escape. The end came quickly even as I watched. Taking full advantage of their opportunity the plateau's soldiers made one last effort, forming an unbreakable wall and moving inexorably forward until the remaining kite-men were simply pushed off the roof into empty space. They fell in a screaming human rain from the rim.
Then I turned my eyes again to the sky, to the bloated figure of Ithaqua and the tiny shape of his daughter as their aerial confrontation continued. But that battle, too, if such an unequal contest could rightly be termed a battle, was almost done. Exhausted, Armandra seemed to waver in the sky, her eyes dulling and brightening spasmodically, while her father waxed ever more triumphant in his mockery of her efforts.
Now there was a complete absence of movement on the roof as every eye followed Armandra's struggle. I was on the point of reaching out to her with my mind to offer whatever mental assistance I could, when above the crazed howling of the wind and following immediately in the wake of yet another deflected bolt of lightning, I heard Whitey cry, “HankâI've got it!”
He was making his way to me across the death-strewn roof with Jimmy and Tracy on his heels. In his hand he carried his secret weapon, its fatal head held well out in front of and away from his body.
And it was at that very moment that Ithaqua suddenly reached out and snatched Armandra out of the sky. Drained of all her strength, she made no effort to escape him but seemed simply to collapse, a doll in the fist of a giant.
“
Armandra, hang on!
” I cried out with my mind. She heard me, even though she was no longer strong enough to answer me, but what I had not reckoned with was that her father would also hear me. He did, and he must also have seen in my mind's eye a picture of the weapon I intended to use against him.
The Wind-Walker immediately turned to face me. He looked down upon me, and upon Whitey as he came rushing across the plateau's roof toward me. The monster's eyes slitted as they followed Whitey, then he lifted his free hand to the sky and thrust it into the lowering gray clouds.
“Whiteyâlook out!” I yelled, but my friend had also seen and knew what was going to happen. He knew, and on this occasion needed no precognition to tell him his fate.
Ithaqua moved closer, looming large over the roof as he hurled his ice-bomb. I saw itâsaw Paul White's horrible but mercifully instant death beneath ten tons of ice that smashed down upon him like a meteoriteâand I also saw his last heroic action in defiance of his destroyer. Not a second too soon, he slid the spear with its star-stone tip in my direction.