“You—” he choked out the word. “You will be Ithaqua’s, I promise you!” His voice rose, bubbling with insane rage. “And when he’s done with you, if I have to wait a lifetime, then—”
“Out!” I told him. “Now—before I kill you out of hand!”
I motioned to Whitey. He opened the door—then threw his weight against the Russian’s back. With a gurgled cry of astonishment Zchakow hurtled out and down. Moments later he staggered into view on the snow and without looking back made his way to a wolf mount. He was helped onto its back and took a fistful of white mane, yanking the animal about face. He kicked the wolf’s flanks, driving it in the direction of the pyramid.
Hunched over his mount’s back like some nightmare hag, Zchakow threw up his head to utter a weird, ululant cry that rang loud in frozen air. As its echoes died away there came the sharp crack of Jimmy’s rifle from the nose of the plane.
“Here they come!” Whitey yelled, crouching down quickly behind his machine gun. I moved to my window. And then all hell broke loose.
IV
Battle on Borea
(Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
Out there on the plains of snow behind the advancing single rank of wolf-warriors, six white-robed priests threw up their arms to the skies and repeated the departing Russian’s eerie cry. We heard that concerted wail even as we opened fire on the charging warriors—heard it and saw its result.
As the first of the advancing riders went down beneath our bullets, the gray skies of Borea began to darken over. Black clouds piled up out of nowhere and a rushing wind filled the air with loose snow. Through this whirling white screen the wolf-warriors reached the plane, dividing into two main groups, one battering at the windows of the nose while the other gathered about the door. Whitey’s target was a mass of snarling wolf-masks and inscrutable, flat leathery faces. Riders stood up on the backs of their mounts, ready to leap in at us through the open door, only to find a deadly hail of lead spraying out at them from that opening. The snow of the plain in a wide area about the door began to turn red with spouting blood, animal and human alike, spilling out like scarlet pearls on a vast white feather bed. On and on the machine gun chattered its mad message of death, hot barrel swinging in a wide arc.
In the nose of the aircraft Jimmy constantly changed his position, now firing to the left, now right, and the sharp crack of his rifle was accompanied by a steady piling up of white-robed bodies and huge carcasses. In my own position, I was able to lean out of the window and pick off riders as they circled the plane trying to find vulnerable spots in our defenses. But seeing that the fuselage windows were too small to admit our attackers, I quickly moved down into the plane’s nose to put a shot through a window on that side away from Jimmy. Then we sat back to back. He blazed away with his rifle; I rested my pistol across my forearm as I carefully picked off my targets one by one.
It was a sickening, bloody massacre—there could be no thrill in this wholesale taking of life. And no sooner had this thought occurred to me than the wolf-warriors broke off their attack, drawing back to their previous positions away from the plane and becoming lost in the madly blowing snow. Many riderless wolves trotted after the surviving party of mounted animals.
“Hold your fire!” I cried. “No point in wasting ammunition.” I looked around the interior of the aircraft. “Anyone hurt?”
Grim faces turned in my direction. Thumbs up from Whitey; a cheerless grin from Jimmy. Tracy came to me and took hold or my arm. It suddenly dawned on me how cold the plane must be now—how cold Tracy must be.
“Tracy, I—”
“It’s all right, Hank,” she hushed me. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I was frightened at first—of the Russian, of those wolf-things—but now I’m fine. Just a bit cold.” She blew on her hands and thrust them deep into parka pockets. “Didn’t Jimmy say that there were two pistols?”
Before I could answer her, Whitey called to me from the door. “Hank, they’re up to something. Come and have a look.”
I went to the door and peered over his shoulder. The wind still moaned like a thousand demons in pain, like all the ghosts of the spaces between the spheres, rushing here and there and flinging up the snow in our faces. Between flurries I saw that Whitey was right; the Children of the Winds were definitely up to something. Having lost about twenty percent of their number, several of the remaining riders had now dismounted. I saw one of them call over a pair of riderless animals and pull their great heads close—and in the next instant I understood.
“They’re going to send in the wolves alone!” I yelled.
The words were barely out of my mouth when a great white shape came leaping up out of the flurrying snow to slam head and forelegs in through the open door. The huge wolf hung there for a moment, yellow eyes wild above snarling gnashing fangs, scrabbling at the rubber of the floor with massive paws before falling back outside. The sight of the thing had so petrified me that I hadn’t managed to get off a shot. Now I pulled myself together.
Whitey had been thrown back from his position, the machine gun too, and as he struggled to get his weapon back into place a second wolf flew at the door. I almost had the door shut when the beast landed; its wild rush and weight jammed the door wide open on bent hinges, throwing me back.
Yet another wolf leaped, sending the gun flying for a second time. The beast found a purchase with three of its great paws before I could start forward, ram my pistol in its ear and pull the trigger. The convulsing body fell back outside.
Now Jimmy had come out of the nose to help Whitey with the big gun, at the same time firing his rifle with one hand, as if it were a pistol. A snarling mask with yellow eyes appeared, framed momentarily in the opening as forepaws gripped the lower sill—then one of the eyes turned red as I fired point-blank into that grinning wolf-face. Again the door was clear, and now there came a brief lull in which I quickly reloaded my spare magazines.
But the lull was far too brief, for as Whitey finally got the machine gun back into position yet another wolf crashed into the opening of the door, scrabbling and snarling hideously as it fought to get inside. Both Jimmy and I fired simultaneously, and again a great white body toppled out of sight.
Tracy suddenly yelled and Jimmy dived past me to pump off three rapid shots at a massive white head that was tearing with slavering jaws at the frame of the broken window in the nose. As the wolf howled and jerked back its bloodied head, so the machine gun coughed back into life. With a wild glad cry Whitey traversed left and right, hurling a deadly stream of lead out into the teeth of the wind.
For several moments he fired until, realizing that this second attack had stopped as quickly as it had begun, I yelled, “Save your shots!”
The lunatic chatter of the machine gun died away, and with it the howling of the wind seemed also to retreat, crying with a distant voice as the whirling snowflakes fell once more to the frozen plain.
“Save it,” I said yet again, unnecessarily. “I think we’ve won the first round. Let’s keep something for later.”
Within the space of only a few more minutes the frozen plain outside our aircraft was as still as a winter scene on a postcard. The remainder of the wolf-warriors and their mounts, and a fair number, too, of riderless wolves, stood well back and out of effective range.
And it was then, when even the smallest of the swirling snowdevils had subsided, that I saw for the first time the true composition of those previously noted anomalous humps out on the great white plain. Unwilling at first to credit the evidence of my own eyes, I focused on the nearest mass with a pair of binoculars. That unnatural wind called up by Ithaqua’s priests had blown much of the surface snow from the queer shape, revealing much more of its basic outline. Half of it, at least, was completely clear of the shrouding snow.
It was a ship. As a boy ships had always fascinated me. British by the style of her, there she lay on the snow, keeled over on
one side like some vast, stranded whale. A vessel of heavy steel plates with powerful propellers and a reinforced steering system. At a guess, an icebreaker of the late ’20s, fashioned perhaps in the shipyards of the Weir or the Tyne and long since paid for by Lloyds of London; “lost with all hands, somewhere inside the Arctic Circle.” Little they knew of it …
Again I swept the plain with my binoculars until I found another shape I recognized. And again it was the shape of a ship—a Viking dragonship!
Proudly that ancient sea-serpentprow lifted yet from the sea—albeit a sea of snow—and still a number of round, painted shields adorned the sweeping line of the hull. A big dragon, this ship, like Fafnir risen from deeps of frozen ocean, but the great mast was broken and the decks were awash in ice. It seemed to me as I gazed that the songs of old Norse ghosts came whispering to me across the bitter wastes, and a voice that called on Odin and screamed for red revenge.
When Jimmy Franklin’s hand fell on my shoulder I started violently. “What the—?”
“Easy, Hank,” he calmed me. “It’s just me, Jimmy. I’ve been using the glasses too, and I too have felt it, the aching and the loneliness. The Snow-Thing has a lot to pay for.”
I nodded. “Yes, he has.”
“See over there,” Jimmy pointed across the gleaming plain at what looked like a large outcrop of rock jutting up through the snow and ice. “Part of Earth’s heritage, stolen by Ithaqua like a magpie might steal a bright button. What do you make of it?”
I turned my binoculars in that direction, focusing on the monolith. The view I got was not as distinct as I would have liked, but nevertheless the outlines of that tremendous menhir showed up clear enough to suggest the origins of the primitive but colossal artists whose work it was. Eskimo, very probably, though of no really definite ethnic lineage that I could pinpoint—that mansion-sized block of carved black basalt reeked of age.
Vague images stirred behind my mind’s eye—of the gauntly gigantic carvings of Easter Island and the Temple of Ramses the Great at Abu Simbel, which would be dwarfed beside this monumental work—but I guessed, I knew, that it was older by far than these. Lost Mu and legendary Lomar might have raised vaguely similar colossi in those ages when the forebears of Khem and Babylon were wandering desert tribes, but this vast sculpture predated even such lost or drowned monument as these.
Cut into many of the monoliths flat facets were larger-than-life pictures of mighty mammoths, shown mainly in attitudes of frenzied fear, flight, stampede! And beside the carved pachyderms ran men, squat aborigines carrying axes and spears, and also sabertooth tigers, massive reindeer and bison, wolves, bears and foxes. A primitive, Paleolithic panorama, wherein all the characters fled in terror of one universal enemy. And that enemy stood out suddenly in the upper areas of the massive block as finally I corrected the magnification of the binoculars until the hitherto blurred pictures came up fine and sharply etched.
Ithaqua! A crude representation, true, but no less obscene for that, the Thing that Walks on the Wind, a being known and dreaded and worshipped by the very earliest of man’s forebears. Alien the Snow-Thing most certainly was, but his conceit was almost human. The primitives of Earth had sculpted a vast monument to his might, and he had brought it here with him to this world of snow and winds.
“I think I can understand why he wanted to bring that here,” Jimmy said, perhaps reading what was in my mind. “But why the ships, why People? What sort of creature is Ithaqua really, and why does he, well, migrate between worlds, between dimensions? I’ve read just about all you ever collected on the Wind-Walker, Hank, but sometimes I really think that we all must be missing something somewhere.”
“I don’t think we’ve missed much, Jimmy,” I told him. “But there are certain things that haven’t been written down yet—ideas Peaslee has been toying with, odd bits and pieces of information that the Wilmarth Foundation hasn’t yet categorized, probabilities that the hunchmen have come up with—stuff like that. And since I’ve had to coordinate all this, well, I have ideas of my own.”
I put down the binoculars and looked to see how the others were making out. Whitey had made himself comfortable behind the machine gun. A cigarette drooped from his mouth and he appeared to be completely relaxed. His finger lay alongside his weapon’s trigger-guard, however, and his partly hooded eyes were sharply alert as they moved slowly over the thinned ranks of the seemingly impassive wolf-warriors. Tracy was merely a green and brown bulk in her camouflaged parka, calmly watchful where she half-reclined in a leather bucket-seat in the nose of the plane. I couldn’t see her face for she had the hood of the inner parka up over her head, but her breathing made small regular plumes in the icy air.
Jimmy looked at me expectantly. “Go on, I’m still listening,” he reminded me.
I paused for a moment to sort out my thoughts, then began to talk. “All right, let’s see if I can tell you something you don’t already know.” It seemed a good idea at that, to chat about it, pass a little time until—until whatever was going to happen, happened.
“Ithaqua,” I began, “is a horror come down the ages from the very mists of myth. He was known to the Ptetholites and his image may be found on Auderic cromlechs. The ancient peoples of all the lands adjacent to the Arctic Circle have left evidence of his being, and as recently as the early 19th Century certain North American and Canadian Indian tribes have fashioned likenesses of him on their totems. Just such as we’ve seen on the totems of his worshippers here on Borea.”
“Speak up, big brother,” Tracy’s voice interrupted, coming to me from the front of the plane. She inclined her head slightly in my direction. “I’m not quite in on all of this yet, so it there’s anything else I should know I’ll gladly listen in.”
I nodded, pleased with her plucky acceptance of everything, and raised my voice. “Among many other names, Ithaqua has been called ‘God of the Great White Silence,’ ‘the Snow-Thing,’ ‘God of the Winds,’ ‘the Death-Walker,’ ‘the Thing that Walks on the Wind,’ ‘the Strider in Strange Spaces,’ ‘the Wind-Walker’ and ‘Lord of the Winds.’ Such is his fascination, his morbid attraction for various popular writers that they have created remarkably good fictions based upon the ancient legends. Algernon Blackwood, a British author of world-wide repute, no doubt fashioned his ‘Wendigo’ on Ithaqua; and August Derleth, whose home was in Wisconsin and not so very far removed from the far northern territories, was the author of a number of extremely original and remarkably accurate stories about Ithaqua’s incursions.
“He is the original air-elemental, in which every other Earthly myth and legend having regard to beings of the air has its source. The prototype of Gaoh, Chastri-Shahl, Quetzalcoatl, Negafok, Hotura, Tha’thka and Enlil, Ithaqua is given mention in the most ancient and most forbidden works known to man; and his winged totem-symbol is carved upon Geph’s broken columns and crumbling stelae along with the insignia of the rest of the loathsome Cthulhu Cycle Deities. For of course Ithaqua is of the CCD, a prime elemental whose true origin is as dim and conjectural as that of the Universe itself.
“The Wilmarth Foundation believes that in forgotten prehistoric times, in ages predating Earthly life as we know and recognize it in its mundane forms, there was a battle. Earth and the Solar System formed the battleground. Beings of whom little is now known—super scientists named in those same forbidden books I have already mentioned as ‘the Elder Gods’—won the interplanetary war. The CCD, defeated but still threatening, were banished to prison environments. Mental and genetic blocks were planted upon them, imprinted within them, just as modern criminals are made to wear handcuffs or shackles. These blocks were designed to repeat through heredity, so that any offspring of the CCD would be imprisoned by those same restrictions no less than their forebears.
“Ithaqua was perhaps the least penalized of all the Cthulhu Cycle Deities in that he was banished to the alien star-winds which he still walks and, on Earth, to the windswept icewastes of the Arctic Circle and lands adjacent
. In this he is the fulcrum upon which the futures of all his alien ‘cousins’ of the cycle balance. Comparatively free of the restrictions of the Elder Gods, he is the hope of the CCD; he is the one to whom all of the others look for eventual release from their immemorial imprisonment. And that is not his only ambition.
“Ithaqua is miscegenetic, with a taste for strong, beautiful white women. In this respect as in all others he is completely unscrupulous, sating his lusts whenever the mood takes him and with whatever woman is unfortunate enough to be to hand. He has already foisted children upon mankind—mated with ‘the daughters of Adam’—but of his progeny there are no known survivors. Three children there were that we know of, all of them born to white women; and all of them, mercifully, too alien to live. There may have been others that we don’t know of, but that seems unlikely.
“Certainly, though, there have been other women out in the snows; women who have known Ithaqua’s attentions without being strong enough, either physically or mentally, to suffer them and live knowing what they knew. Why, there’s evidence to show that the Wind-Walker has had whole communities of worshippers in Canada, and that human sacrifices are still periodically made to him. Nearly always young, attractive women. As to why he desires children—”
“It’s a terribly lonely existence,” Whitey cut in, “walking the spaces between the spheres.”
I nodded. “Yes, that’s probably it in a nutshell.”
“That—thing—lonely?” Jimmy Franklin frowned. “But loneliness is a human emotion, surely?”
“What about a swan that loses its mate?” Tracy argued. “Or a dog when his master dies? Surely that is loneliness?”
Whitey half nodded his head, half shook it in a curiously self-denying gesture. “He is lonely,” he said, “but it’s a loneliness that’s different from anything we could ever conceive of. And it’s more than just loneliness, too. He has a definite purpose.”