Elysia Read online

  'Where are we going?' she asked innocently.

  `We? We?' he teased her, playing down his as yet unfounded fears. 'Who said anything about "we"? But as for me, I'm off to see if I can arrange an audience with Kthanid in his glacier palace.'

  'Oh?' she raised an eyebrow. 'And I should stay home and prepare a meal for you, right?' And she put her hands on her hips, pretending to scowl.

  Inside Crow his mechanical heart picked up speed; something gnawed at him, worried at his guts; time was wasting and a monstrous cloud loomed ever closer. But still he played this lover's game with Tiania. 'Of course, woman, what else?' he barked. 'And doesn't a man deserve a good meal when he's been out working all day and returns home to ... to

  The smile had fallen from her face. For all their banter, now Tiania had sensed something of her man's apprehension and knew it was real. And perhaps for the first time, she too felt that leaden, stifling oppressiveness, an as yet vague but steadily increasing sensation of DOOM in the atmosphere of Elysia. Suddenly frightened, she threw herself into his arms. `Oh, Titus! Titus! I feel it now! But what is it?'

  He hugged her, comforted her, growled: 'Damned if I know. But I intend to find out. Come on!'

  They hurried out from their bedroom in the base of a turret onto ornamental 'battlements' that offered a fantastic view of Elysia — or part of Elysia, anyway. To the east a synthetic golden sun burned behind a lowering bank of cloud, and an unaccustomed chill wind rippled the fields far below. There was more than the usual movement in the sky, too, where from all quarters flights of lithards could be seen wearing the bright colours of dignitaries and bearing their favoured riders north.

  North? Across the Frozen Sea to the Icelands?

  Crow and Tiania glanced apprehensively, speculatively at each other. This would seem to confirm their private thoughts and suspicions. He nodded his leonine head. 'And didn't I say I wanted an audience with Kthanid, in the Hall of Crystal and Pearl?'

  Before she could answer there came a throb of wings and rush of air, and up from below there soared a monstrous, magnificent shape well known to both of them. A great lithard, the veriest dragon, flew in the skies of Elysia! Oth-Neth, first representative of his race — intelligent dinosaur of doomed Thak'r-Yon, a world long since burned up in the heart of its exploding sun — alighted in a flash of bright scales, a sighing furling of membrane wings, on the battlements close by.

  'Oth-Neth!' cried Tiania, and she ran to the great beast and threw her arms about his neck.

  'Tiania,' the creature returned, soft-voiced, lowering its great head to facilitate her fondling.

  Crow might witness this same scene a thousand times and still be awed. Here was a monster out of Earth's oldest mythologies a draw out of Asian hinterlands, and all of a natural green and gold iridescence — and Tiania caressing the beast as if it were a favourite horse. No, he automatically corrected himself, greeting it — greeting him —like an old friend, which he was. Oth-neth, green and golden dragon from the Tung-gat tapestries, a creature such as might sport in the Gardens of Rak. And here on a mission.

  Oth-Neth wore green, the emerald saddle and reins of Tiania's household. He had been sent to collect her.

  `What about me?' Crow strode forward, rested a hand on the creature's flank.

  'You?' Oth-Neth bent his head to look at him. 'You, too, Tituth.' (The lithard's command of human languages was imperfect: he lisped, as did all his race.) 'But you go quick, direct to Kthanid! Flying cloak ith better for you.'

  Crow looked him straight in his saucer eyes. 'Do you know what's happening?'

  'No,' an almost imperceptible shake of the great head. `But ... I think trouble. Big trouble! Look!' He turned his head to the skies. High above Elysia, beyond the flying-zones of lithards and cloaks and winged creatures alike, time-clocks in all their varieties were blinking into existence in unprecedented numbers. And all of them wending east toward the slowly rising, strangely dulled sun, to the Blue Mountains and the subterranean, miles-long corridor of clocks. Elysia's children were returning from a thousand voyagings and quests, answering the summons of the masters of this weird, wonderful place.

  Crow stared for a moment longer, his high brow furrowed, then hurried back into the castle. He returned with a scarlet flying cloak and quickly slipped into its harness. Tiania had already climbed into the ornate emerald saddle at the base of the lithard's neck, but she paused to lean down and kiss Crow where he now stood poised on the battlements.

  `Titus,' she began, 'I — ' but words wouldn't come.

  He looked at her beautiful face and form, only half-concealed by an open jacket and knee-length trousers of soft grey, and felt her fear like a physical thing; not fear for herself or Elysia, nor even Titus Crow himself who in any case had often shown himself to be near-indestructible but for them, for they had become as one person and could not be apart. And: 'I know,' he said quietly., And then, brightening: 'But we don't know what it is yet. It may be ... very little.'

  They both knew he deliberately made light of it, but she nodded anyway. Then Oth-Neth launched himself from the castle's wall and soared north; and Crow's fingers found the control studs of his cloak, which at once belled out and bore him aloft; and in the next moment girl, dragon and man were flying north to join the streams of other fliers where they made for Kthanid's glacial palace ...

  Crow sped on ahead. He guessed that Oth-Neth deliberately held back, letting him gain a lead and a little extra time. For what? So that he could talk to Kthanid in private? That seemed unlikely, with all these others heading for that same rendezvous. But -Crow accelerated and shot ahead anyway.

  And as he flew his cloak, so it was suddenly important to Crow that he look at Elysia again, let the place impress itself upon his mind. It had dawned on him that if ever he had known a real home — a place to be, where he wanted to be — that home was here. Now, for the first time, he consciously desired to remember it. Knowing his instincts, how true they ran, that was a very bad omen indeed. And so, until journey's end, he deliberately absorbed all he could of Elysia, letting it soak into him like water into a sponge.

  Elysia was not a planet; if it had been, then it would be the most tremendous colossus among worlds. But there was no real horizon that Crow had ever seen, no visible curvature of rim, only a gradual fading into distance. Oh, there were mountains with towering peaks, and many of them snow-clad; but even from the tops of these Elysia Could be seen to go on endlessly into distant mists, a land vast as it was improbable and beautiful.

  Beautiful, too, its structures, its cities. But such cities! Fretted silver spires and clusters of columns rose every' where, fantastic habitations of Elysia's peoples; but never vying with each other and always with fields and rivers and plains between. Even in the most abstract of cities there were parks and woodlands and rivers and lakes like bright ribbons and mirrors dropped carelessly on the landscape, yet always complementing it perfectly. And away beyond lines of low, domed hills misty with distance, yet more cities; their rising terraces of globes and minarets sparkling afar, where dizzy aerial roadways spread unsupported spans city to city like the gossamer threads of strange communal cobwebs.

  Sky-islands, too (like Serannian in the land of Earth's dreams, or Tiania's castle and the gardens around it), apparently floating free but in fact anchored by the same gravitic devices which powered Elysia and kept her positioned here in this otherwise empty parallel dimension; and all of these aerial residences dotted here and there, near and far, seemingly at random and at various heights; but perfectly situated and structured to suit their dwellers, who might in form be diverse as their many forms of gravity-defying architecture. And yet the sky so vast that it was not, could not be, cluttered.

  Flying machines soared or hovered in these skies where-ever the eye might look (or would in normal times), and through tufted drifting clouds green and golden dragons, the lithards, pulsed majestically on wings of ivory and leather. Nor were the lithards and flying craft sole users of the
ir aerial element: a few of Elysia's races were naturally gifted with flight, and there were even some who might simply will it! Then there were the users of flying cloaks, like Crow's; and finally, today especially, there were the time-clocks .

  But Elysia was not all city and sky and mountain; she had mighty forests, too, endless valley plains, fields of gorgeous green and yellow, and oceans more beautiful even than the jewel oceans of Earth. The Frozen. Sea was one such: patterned like a snowflake one hundred miles across, its outer rim was cracked into glittering spokes of ice, while at the core a nudeus of icebergs had crashed together in ages past to form a mighty frozen monolith. Titus Crow flew across the Frozen Sea even now, and beyond it -

  - There in the Icelands, whose temperature ideally suited certain of Elysia's inhabitants — there dwelled Kthanid in his palace at the heart of a glacier. Kthanid, spokesman of the Elder Gods themselves.

  `Elder Gods.' They were not gods, and Kthanid himself would be the first to admit it, but so many races down all the ages of time and on a thousand different worlds had seen them as gods that the name had stuck. No, not gods but scientists, whose science had made them godlike. Beneficent Beings of Eld, they were, but not all of them had been benign.

  [NOTE to this ebook: the paper original from which this ebook was derived was owned by a rare and accomplished Adept and Ipsissimus. He had turned down this page in the book, for use in future reference to this part of the book, of special relevance to him regarding the CCD.]

  Crow was across the Frozen Sea now and began to feel the chill of the Icelands. Oth-Neth's body-heat would warm Tiania, he knew, until they were down in the heart of the great glacier; and as for his own welfare: this body T3RE had built for him would come to no great harm. And in any case, it was more a chill of .the spirit he felt than the frosty burn of bitter winds. For still that leaden feeling was on him.

  Away in the west, beyond the ice-shard glittering rim of the Frozen Sea, he glimpsed the blue waters of a somewhat more temperate ocean, where majestic icebergs sailed and slowly melted, but then in another moment the view was shut off as he soared down over frozen foothills and set his course parallel. to a procession of lithards who bore their riders doubtless to the same destination: Kthanid's council-chamber in the great Hall of Crystal and Pearl.

  Kthanid: super-sentient Kraken, Eminence, Sage and Father of Elysia. And benign ...

  But there was that One born of Kthanid's race and spawned in his image who was not benign, that bestial, slobbering bereft Great Old One whose cause and cult Crow had fought against all his days, that one true prime evil whose seat for three and a half billions of years had been drowned R'lyeh in Earth's vast Pacific Ocean — Cthulhu! And now Crow wondered: why did that thought spring to mind? From where?

  'And he once more quickened the pace of the cloak as finally he spied ahead a frozen river of immemorial ice and the jagged crevasse that guarded the entrance to Kthanid's sub-glacial palace.

  - Normally Crow would, show his respect, enter cautiously and continue on foot to the council-chamber, but these were not normal times. He flew the cloak dexterously into the mouth of a fantastically carved cavern, then down sweeping flights of ice-hewn steps into the heart of the glacier, until at last he swooped along a horizontal tunnel carved of ice whose floor was granite worn smooth by centuries of glaciation. And now he smelled those strange and exotic scents only ever before smelled here, borne to him on a warm breeze from inner regions ahead.

  It grew warmer still as the core of the glacier drew closer, until suddenly the dim blue light of the place came brighter, as if here some secret source of illumination was hidden behind the soft sheen of ice walls. Then those walls themselves, like the floor, became granite, and finally Crow arrived at a huge curtain of purest crystals and pearls strung on threads of gold. And he knew that beyond the curtain - whose priceless drapes went up to a dim ceiling, and whose width must be all of a hundred feet - lay the vast and awe-inspiring Hall of Crystal and Pearl, throne-room and council-chamber of Kthanid the Eminence.

  Crow had been here before, on several occasions, but they had never been ordinary times; and now once more he felt himself on the verge of momentous things, whose nature was soon to be revealed. But ... here was no longer a place for flying. He alighted, slipped out of the cloak's harness and folded that device over his arm, finally parted the jewel curtains and stepped through.

  And now indeed he knew that Oth-Neth had been correct, that trouble, 'big trouble,' was brewing in Elysia.

  Again, as always, Crow felt amazement at the sheer size of the hall, that inner sanctum wherein Kthanid thought his Great Thoughts. He stood upon the titan-paved floor of massive hexagonal flags of quartz and eyed the weird angles and proportions of the place, with its high-arched ceiling soaring overhead. Enormously ornate columns rose up on all sides, supporting high balconies made vague by the rising haze of light; and everywhere the well remembered white, pink and blood hues of multi-coloured crystal, and the shimmer of mother-of-pearl where the polished linings of prehistoric conches decorated the marching walls.

  The only thing that seemed different was the absence of the customary centrepiece a vast scarlet cushion bearing the sphere of a huge, milky crystal. Kthanid's 'shewstone' - but all else was just as Crow remembered it. Or would be, except that on those previous occasions Kthanid had seemed alone in his palace; whereas now -

  - Now, where mighty, Kthanid sat in his private alcove, its pearl-beaded curtains thrown back - now he gazed out upon a multitude!

  At first glance it appeared to Crow that half of Elysia must be here - including several who ranked almost as high at Kthanid himself, and whose appearances were similarly or even more outré - for the great hall was packed. No simple council-meeting this, for not Only were these High Eminences here but also representatives of a dozen different races, and lords and leaders from all of Elysia's many cities and lands and parts.

  Among those assembled were several high-placed lithards, wearing their black leather neck-bands of office; and Crow at once recognized Esch, Master Linguist of the bird-like Dchi-chis, a man-sized archeopteran who bent his plumed head in a silent nod of greeting; and then there were several 'Chosen' ones: usually but not always members of manlike bipedal races whose natural beauty was favoured by the Elder Gods, including several fragile-seeming varieties Crow could only ever think of as pixies, elves or fairies. There .were insect-beings, too, and squat, amphibian fin-creatures; even a solitary member of the D'horna-ahn, an energy spiral who gyrated close to Esch where they hummed electrically at each other in muted, cryptical conversation.

  Of the handful of Elder Gods who were there: Crow spied a great, gently mobile congeries of golden spheres that half-hid a writhing shape of sheerest nightmare, and he knew that this was Yad-Thaddag, a `cousin' of YogSothoth, but infinitely good where the latter was black and putrid evil. Also, in an area apart from the rest, a lambent flame twice the height of a man, tapered at top and bottom, twirled clockwise where it stood `still' upon its own axis and threw out filaments of flickering yellow energy;- and this too was a member of the elite Elder Gods, a Thermal Being born in eons past in the heart of a star, whose half-life was five billion years! And all of them here to talk, exchange thoughts or otherwise commune with Kthanid.

  And Titus Crow, a mere man, summoned to a meeting such as this ...

  `Mere man?' came Kthanid's thoughts from where he sat upon a throne in his arched alcove. 'That you are not, Titus Crow, and well you know it. Men are not "mere" creatures; you, of all men, are not "mere." Indeed, this entire assembly has waited on your arrival more than that of any other.' Crow's entrance had been noted, and in more ways than one. Now he felt the golden orbs of Kthanid's eyes full upon him, and the mainly silent throng parted to let him come forward. This he did, losing count of the strides which took him across those great hexagonal flags to the alcove where Kthanis sat at an onyx table. And there before the Elder God, a scarlet cushion; and upon the cushion, the milky shew
stone

  3 Kthanid

  Crow arrived at the foot of the huge steps up to the dais, paused there and stood straight as a ramrod, his hands, at his sides, his head bowed. It was a measure of his respect; his stance told eloquently of his recognition of Kthanid, that he stood in the presence of a superior Being. Then:

  `Yes,' said Kthanid, but directing his thoughts at Crow alone this time. 'Well, we're one and all superior in our way, else we'd not be here in Elysia in the first place. Titus, come up here to me. We need a little privacy.' Crow lifted his head, climbed the steps. Behind him the curtains swept shut and closed the alcove in; but not before Kthanid sent out a final thought in the direction of all those gathered there: 'Please wait. Accept our apology that we exclude you from this, but its nature is such that it involves only the Earthman and myself Only be sure it is a matter of great moment . .

  Now he spoke openly (albeit telepathically) to Crow, saying, `Titus, we now stand in a completely private place. Here we two may converse, and none hear us. Wherefore you may answer as you please, without consideration to my position here.'

  `You know there's no one I hold in higher esteem,' Crow answered without hesitation. 'What could you ask me that I could refuse, or to which I might answer no?'

  `Perceptive, aye!' Kthanid nodded. 'Indeed the seed of Eld runs strong in you. As to what it is I must ask of you -' and he paused.

  During that pause, however brief a moment, Crow took the opportunity to look fully upon this great alien scientist, truly a Great Old One, and marvelled at what he saw. There had been a time when such a sight had almost unmanned him, but now he could look at Kthanid and ignore his monstrousness. For indeed beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, and knowing what Crow knew, Kthanid was beautiful.