Elysia Read online

  He took her in his arms, lifted her up as surely and as easily as her familiar winds when she walked in the sky, then lowered her down until his mouth closed on hers with a kiss. And after long moments he slid her down his hard-muscled body until her sandalled feet touched the furs of the floor; and before she could speak again, he said:

  'This - is my home. You - are my life. Borea's my world now, Armandra. My woman, my son, my people are here. If I could go down to the pens and take Morda and ride him out a single mile across the plain and into the Motherworld - if it was as easy, as that - I wouldn't do it. I might ... but only if I could take you with me. And for all its many wonders, the Motherworld is .a common place. It has nothing like you. What would its thronging people make .of a woman of unearthly beauty who walks on the wind and commands the very lightnings?' And he paused.

  He might have said more: how Armandra would be lost on Earth, bewildered, a complete outsider. An alien. A curiosity. A seven-day wonder. And finally a freak. But saying it, even thinking it, hurt him worse than it would hurt her. Which was too much. And so instead he finished with:

  'I love and will love only you. Where you are I must be. Be it Borea, heaven or hell, if you are there it's the place for me. But surely you can see that while I have found my home - the only home I need - our friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny has not yet found his. What you call my "trouble" is in fact his trouble. If you see pain in me, it's only pain for him. Moreen says he's known as The Searcher in a hundred inhabited worlds. Beings who are not men, who don't even think like men, understand his quest and have named him for it. They feel for him. And should. I hide my feelings? No, Armandra, I'm not a child to be homesick. Nor is de Marigny, not for a home he's never seen. But it's his destiny - yes, and it's driving him to distraction. My. pain is this: that I don't know how to help him.'

  Now Armandra felt wretched. She knew that she did not have to look into her man's mind, that everything he had said was right in there. Yes, this strange world with its weird auroras and inhabited moons was his world now but he was still a man of the Motherworld, and so felt for his fellow man, de Marigny The Searcher.

  `Hank, I ' she began, her voice full of shame. But before she could continue, and because he would not let her humble herself

  'I know, I know.' And he patted her, head.

  'But how can we help him?' She desired only to put. things right now. 'Should I commune with my familiar winds? For they have talked to winds from across the farthest reaches of eternity. Perhaps they have heard of this Elysia.'

  Silberhutte nodded. 'It's worth a try.' Then he stood up straighter and squared his shoulders, finally gave a snort and chuckled to himself. Armandra looked at him quizzically, but he only smiled and shook his head.

  'What is it?' she asked, raising the corner of a golden eyebrow.

  He chickled again, then shrugged. 'Once - oh, six years ago - I set out on a vengeance quest to track down and destroy your father. I knew Ithaqua was real: not supernatural but a Being of alien spaces and dimensions. That was my total belief in matters concerning things not of Earth: that Ithaqua was real, and with him others of an incredibly ancient order or pantheon of Beings, the Cthulhu Cycle Deities. Also, I was a telepath. But the rest of me was Texan, and all of me was Earthman, in many ways mundane as any other. And instead of tracking Ithaqua he tracked me and carried me and my crew here to Borea. Since when -

  'Yes?'

  'Why, see how my spheres have widened! And what's become of this vengeful, telepathic but otherwise "mundane" Texan now, eh? Warlord of polyglot peoples on an alien world; adventurer in strange moons; mate to the daughter of the one he vowed to destroy, a woman who walks on the wind and "communes" with puffs of ether from the stars? And when you say: have a word with some winds I know from the other side of eternity," this man nods and answers, "sure, it's worth a try!" ' And now he burst out laughing.

  Barely understanding this sudden bout of self-directed humour, but carried along by it anyway, Armandra joined the laughter; and she hugged him and clung to him for a moment. Then, arm in arm, they set out together to find de Marigny and tell him how she would try to help him .. .

  Henri-Laurent de Marigny was aware of some of the concern he caused in the plateau and among its inhabitants, but aware of it only on the periphery of his consciousness. His ever-advancing obsession would not allow for more than that. No, for now the quest was all that mattered. He knew it, and could do nothing about it. He suspected, too, that but for Moreen he might well have cracked long before now, that she alone was his sanity. Together they had visited many worlds with near-human, half-human, and totally inhuman inhabitants, might easily have settled on several. Oh, yes, for there were wonderful, beautiful islands galore out there in the infinite seas of space. But while they'd rested in these planets and found peace in them, it had never, lasted. Always de Marigny would wake with a cry one morning, sit up and cast about, discover that yesterday's wonders and last night's marvels had turned drab on him and lost their flavour, and his eyes would grow dull while the bright dream he had dreamed receded. And then they would go to the time-clock, and at his command its panel would open and spill out that familiar, pulsing purplish glow, and it would be time to move on.

  And of course he knew that it would be exactly the same here on Bore. But at least there were friends here, completely human friends; which was why, after these last three years of futile search, he had returned. Earth ... ? That thought had never seriously occurred to him. The

  Earth was beautiful but diseased, polluted by men, the one planet of all the worlds de Marigny knew whose inhabitants were systematically raping and ruining her. Indeed; even. Earth's dreamlands were beginning to suffer!

  And that was a thought, an idea, which had occurred more than once: why not give up all Elysian aspirations and dwell instead in the lands of Earth's dreams? Fine, but there are perils even in the dreamlands. And the very least of them lay in waking up! For de Marigny knew that there are certain dreams from which men never wake ...

  The dreamlands, strange dimension formed by the subconscious longings of men. A real place or world, as de Marigny now knew.

  Gazing down from a rock-hewn bartizan at the rim of the plateau, now he smiled — however wryly as his mind went back again to the adventures he had known in Earth's dreamlands with Titus Crow and Tiania of Elysia. For peering from on high like this was not unlike (and yet, in another sense, totally unlike) the vertiginous view from cloud-floating Serannian's wharves of pink-veined marble, where that fabulous city was built in the sky and looked out over an ethereal sea of glowing cirrus and cirrocumulus:

  And remembering that wonderful aerial city, de Marigny's mind could not help but conjure, too, Kuranes: 'Lord of Ooth-Nargei, Celephais, and the Sky around Serannian.' Kuranes, yes! — and Randolph Carter, perhaps Earth's greatest dreamer, a king himself now in Ilek-Vad — and who better for the job, since he himself had probably dreamed Ilek-Vad in the first place?

  Other lands and cities sprang to mind: Ulthar, where no man may kill a cat, and the Isle of Oriab across the Southern Sea, with its principal port Bahama. Aye, incredible places all, and their peoples fabulous as the dreams that Made them; but not all dreams are pleasant, and the dreamlands had their share of nightmares, too.

  Now de Marigny thought of Dylath-Leen in the Bad Days and shuddered, and he tasted something bitter in his mouth as he recalled names and places such as Zura of the Charnel Gardens, the Vale of Pnoth, Kadath in the Cold Waste and Leng's forbidden plateau and hideous hinterland. Especially Leng, where squat, horned beast-men cavorted about balefires to the whine of demon flutes and the bone-dry rattle of crazed crotala

  No, the dreamlands were no fit habitation for such as Moreen and de Marigny — who in any case had never considered himself an expert dreamer — not yet for a while, anyway. Perhaps one day on his deathbed he'd dream himself a white-walled villa there in timeless Celephais, but until then ...

  … The dimension of dream, glimpsed
briefly in the eye of memory, slipped away and de Marigny was back .on Borea, on the roof of the plateau. Chill Borea, where for ten days now he and Moreen had been feted like prodigals until, as always, the pleasures had begun to pall; even the great pleasure of human companionship, the company of men such as Silberhutte, Kota'na, Jimmy Franklin and Charlie Tacomah.

  And suddenly de Marigny knew that he was tired of his quest, and he . wondered how much longer it could last before he gave in, surrendered to the hopelessness of the thing. Indeed, sometimes he wondered what had kept him going so long . .. but no, that was a lie, for he already knew the answer well enough. It lay not alone in what Titus Crow had told him of Elysia, but also in what he'd said of de Marigny himself:

  'You are a lover of mysteries, my friend,' (Crow had said), 'as your father before you, and there's something you should know. You really ought to have guessed it before now, Henri, but there's something in you that hearkens back into dim abysses of time, a spark whose fire burns still in Elysia...'

  It had been like, a promise, as if in those words Crow had willed to him a marvellous inheritance; but what of that promise now? Or could it be that Crow had simply been mistaken, that de Marigny ought never have set his sights on Elysia in the first place? What else had Titus Crow said?

  'You will be welcome in Elysia, Henri, but of course you must make your own way there ... It may well be a difficult voyage, and certainly it will be dangerous, for there's no royal road to Elysia ... The pitfalls of space and time are many, but the rewards are great ... When there are obstacles, we'll be watching in Elysia. And if you are where I can't reach you without aid, then I'll ride a Great Thought to you ...'

  De Marigny could not restrain a snort of derision, however inwardly-directed. Obstacles? Oh, there'd been 'obstacles,' all right! Time-travel in the clock was invariably complicated by running battles with the Tind'losi Hounds; certain worlds of space seemed friendly but were in fact inimical to human life; the space-time fabric itself had focal points mysterious and dangerous beyond reckoning; and, neither last nor least, there was no dearth of places in the continuum wherein were contained the 'houses' or 'tombs' of the Great Old Ones (more properly their prisons), where they had been locked in untold aeons past by the beneficent Gods of Eld. This had been their punishment for an act, or the massed threat of such an act, monstrous beyond imagining. The Elder Gods had pursued Cthulhu, his ilk and their spawn, through space and time and dimensions between the spaces we know, prisoning them wherever they were found. And so they remained to this day, in greater part: imprisoned but immortal, only waiting out the time of their release, when the stars would wheel in their great celestial orbits and finally stand right in pre-ordained positions in the firmament. And then, when the stars were right -

  A great hand fell on de Marigny's shoulder and he gave a massive start, clutching at the rim of the open viewport where he gazed out from the bartizan. All doomful thoughts were snatched from his mind at once, and he himself snatched back to the immediate, the now.

  `Henri,' Hank Silberhutte's voice was deep where he stood with an arm around Armandra, 'we thought we'd find you here. Did I startle you? It seemed you were miles away just then, right?'

  'Light-years!' de Marigny agreed, turning. He managed a smile, nodded a greeting to Hank, bowed formally to Armandra — and at once felt something of their concern for him, the pain and worry he was causing them. Words of apology would have tumbled out of him then, but the Woman of the Winds had quickly taken his hand in both of hers, to tell him:

  'Henri, if you wish it, I think I may be able to help you find Elysia. At least, there is a chance.'

  'And what do you say to that?' the Warlord grinned at him.

  For a moment, maybe two, de Marigny simply gaped at them. He knew that Armandra had senses beyond the mundane five, was aware that if anyone on Borea could help him, she was that one. And yet he had not even considered asking for her help because ... because he was de Marigny and she was his friend, and he knew that you can only beg help from real friends just so often before losing them.

  `Well?' the Warlord waited for his answer. And now de Marigny gave it.

  Stepping forward, he briefly, fiercely hugged the Woman of the Winds, then lifted her bodily up above him. And still words would not come. 'Armandra, I ... I ...' Then, ashamed of his own emotions, he set her down again, dumbly shook his head and backed off. And under Armandra's stern, steady gaze, finally he lowered his head.

  At last she said: 'You men of the Motherworld would all seem much of a kind: you have the same strengths and the same weaknesses. Fortunately the former outweigh the latter, which in any case are often ... endearing?' Looking up, de Marigny saw that her great green eyes were sparkling.

  At which her husband put arms round the shoulders of both of them and began laughing uproariously...

  2 Elysia

  There were strange stirrings in the Elysian ether, ominous undercurrents more psychic than physical, which weighed on the souls of certain dwellers in that weird and wonderful land. The source of this dawning — dread? — was intangible as yet, but to those few who sensed it, its approach was anticipated as surely as the bite of a mosquito in the darkness of a room, in those taut moments after its hum fades to silence. Titus Crow had come awake to that silence, and had known instinctively that the bite was still to come. Not immediately but soon, and not merely the sting of a mosquito .

  Outwardly ... all seemed ordered — as it had been immemorially in Elysia — but inside:

  `There's a knot in my stomach,' said Crow, hurriedly dressing in forest-green jacket and bark-brown, wide-bottomed trousers, tightening his belt and peering out at the sky through the stone windows of the aerial castle which he and Tiania called home. And scanning that sky he frowned, for even the synthetic sunrise seemed wrong this morning, and on the far, flat horizon, the wispy clouds were tinged a leaden grey.

  Tiania was only half awake. 'Ummm!' she said, not wanting to argue, her head deep in pillows.

  `Something's up,' she heard her man declare. He sniffed at the air and nodded to himself. 'Why, even the clouds are grey!'

  Now she was coming awake. 'Did you never see grey clouds before?' she mumbled. 'Perhaps it will rain! It's good for the gardens.'

  'No,' he shook his leonine head, 'it's not that kind of grey. It's more a feeling than a colour.' He went to her, gently lifted her head from the pillows, kissed her soft, unwrinkled brow. 'Come on, Tiania. You're a child of Elysia, and a favourite child at that. Can't you feel it? It's in the air, I tell you, and it's been there for some time. Something is wrong!'

  At that she sat up, and Titus Crow was frozen by sudden awareness of her nearness, her beauty. It was the same each morning, the same every night: he looked at her and knew she was his, and every fibre of his body thrilled to the knowledge. Tiania had the perfect shape of a beautiful girl, but that was where any further comparison with a female of planet Earth must surely end. Most definitely!

  To describe her in detail would take many thousands of words, most of them superlatives. The mind tires of searching for them, and the reader's mind would weary of absorbing them. And so, to simplify matters:

  Tiania's hair was a green so dark as to be almost black, with highlights of aquamarine and flashing emerald tints. All coils and ringlets, it reached to her waist, which seemed delicate as the stem of a wineglass. Her flesh was milk-of pearl, not the nacreous gleam of shell-heart but the soft glow of a pearl's outer skin. Her eyes were huge, the colour of beryl and infinitely deep, under arching emerald eyebrows in a slender, pixie face. Pixie, too, her ears and delicate nub of a nose, so that when she smiled she might well be some tomboy elf — except that she literally radiated Essence of Woman. She was plainly human, and yet quite alien; a girl, yes, but one whose genes had known the mysteries of Eld.

  Crow shook his head in silent wonder, a ritual of his that she'd grown used to even if she didn't fully understand it. And: 'Nothing so beautiful lived before you,' he said quit
e simply.

  'Ridiculous!' she answered, rising up and shaking back her hair — but at the same time blushing rose. 'Why! There are flowers in the Gardens of Nymarrah —'

  `Nothing human,' he cut her off.

  She kissed him, began to dress. 'Then we're a match, for you're a fine, big man.'

  'Ah, but just a man for all that,' he answered, as he invariably did. Which was far from true, for Crow was wont to forget now and then that since his transition he was rather more than a man. But whichever, she returned his appreciative gaze with equal raptness, for Tiania never tired of Titus Crow. What she saw was this:

  A man, yes, but a man glowing with health, ageless as a rock. He looked a young forty, but that would be to grant him more than 'a quarter of a century! And even that would be a false reading, based solely on Earth-time. For rebuilt from his own pulp by a robot physician on a robot world, he had spent more than sixty years in T3RE's vats alone! And that was where he had undergone his transition proper: in the laboratory of T3RE, whose robot hands and tools and lasers had built him the way he was now. And almost literally ageless, too, for in Crow the ageing process was glowed down in a ratio of one to ten. Twenty years from now he would look more or less the same, but Tiania would have started to catch up with him. That was a problem they would face as it arose ...

  While she finished dressing he pulled on boots and tucked his trousers into their tops, forming piratical bells. It gave him a swashbuckling air which he admitted to liking. But appearances were secondary in his mind now, where his thoughts were too sombre for theatrical posing. By then, too, Tiania was ready. And: