Ship of Dreams Read online

  The effect upon the gaunts was immediate, electrifying, and life-saving. They angled their folded-back wings, swooped in upon Eldin, caught at him with their prehensile paws and dragged him through a straining downward curve which, as it flattened out, ran so close to the surface of the sea that he thought he could taste the salt spray.

  Then the curve began to climb once more as the gaunts bore him up higher; and higher still he could see in the darkening sky the silhouette of two more pairs of flyers with human figures suspended between them. No, there were three other groups in the sky, and as Eldin strained his eyes to make out the shape of the third, so he gasped his amazement.

  For the third was the silhouette of that great gaunt he had seen once before, and sure enough it bore upon its back the dark blot of a rider!

  Now, straining to hold their human burdens aloft, the gaunts wheeled and made for the looming landmass of Oriab, and in the space of a minute or so they were flying close enough together for Eldin to shout across to his equally bewildered companions: “Hey, you two! Are you all right?”

  “Aye,” yelled Hero in answer, and:

  “Aye,” came Limnar’s reply.

  The parties closed with each other until soon only the great gaunt and its lone rider were left outside of hailing distance; and now Hero gave voice to his thoughts. “Eldin, what in thunder is all this about?” he demanded. “The last time we saw this performing aerial troupe they were trying to tip us out of the sky—trying to kill us. Now they’re saving our lives! What do you make of it?”

  “The only one who can answer that question for you,” Eldin shouted back, “is riding that great gaunt there. And listen, we might have been at odds with him last time we met, but right now I’m all for him.”

  “Do you know the one who controls the gaunts?” questioned Limnar Dass. “But this is fantastic! If ever I get back to Serannian, they’ll never believe me. Gaunts? Saving the lives of men? Why, it’s unheard of!”

  Now they were winging over Oriab and the lights of the island’s great port, Baharna, were beginning to gleam as the sun sank down below the western horizon. Without pause the gaunts sped on, and now the three found themselves growing increasingly uneasy as night deepened. They shouted questions to one another, even a little banter, but for all their assumed levity each knew that his voice was pitched too high, and so they quickly fell into silence. Soon only the throb of membranous wings and the chill whip of the air remained to fill in the night’s darkness.

  Then in the distance the three spied mountains and finally great jagged crests of rock where they stood as black silhouettes against a sky full of stars. “Those are the mountains of Oriab,” Eldin informed his companions, and more quietly: “And I’ve heard some damned strange things about ’em, too …”

  Now the gaunts began to circle lower until they alighted upon the narrow rim of what looked like the cone of some small, prehistoric volcano. Depositing their human cargo upon the rim, they again took to the air and flapped wearily away. A moment later there came the throb of even greater wings and the largest gaunt of all landed on the far side of the rim, its rider firmly seated upon its hunched shoulders. The moon now rode the night sky and silvered the newcomer’s face, which was young, not especially cruel, indeed … a little frightened?

  For long moments the gaunt-master and the group of three exchanged searching glances. Then—

  “Well, lad,” said Eldin in a fatherly manner, beginning to make his way carefully around the precipitous rim toward the spot where the great gaunt perched, “it seems we owe you our—”

  “Stay where you are!” came a sharp warning. “You owe me nothing, and I owe you less than that. One step closer and I’ll order my gaunts back and have you hurled from the rim. You may as well know it right now; I’m sworn to kill you! One wrong move … and your deaths will come that much more swiftly.”

  “You intend to kill us?” said Hero. “Then what the hell are you playing at? You could have let us fall into the Southern Sea—which would have done the job admirably!”

  “After my first attempt upon your lives,” the gaunt-master explained, “I decided that if chance permitted I would first tell you why I am sworn to kill you. Now I have that chance and so, before you die—”

  “Cold-blooded son of a slut!” Limnar suddenly snapped. “I don’t know what these two have done to you, but I for one have done nothing.”

  The youth on the gaunt’s back inclined his head toward Limnar and pointed a trembling hand at him. “I have no quarrel with you,” he informed, “but see that you don’t anger me. Are these your friends?” And he tossed his head to indicate Hero and Eldin.

  “Deny us,” Hero urgently whispered. “If you’d save your skin, Limnar, deny us right now.”

  “They are my friends, yes,” answered Limnar, ignoring Hero’s advice. “Though I’ve known them only a little while, I believe that they’re good men—basically. What can they have done that you should want them dead?”

  “They murdered my uncle,” said the other immediately, though without a trace of passion.

  Hero looked at Limnar and shook his head in the moonlight. “We’ve murdered no one,” he denied.

  “Certainly no one’s uncle,” added Eldin.

  “Oh, you do not know me,” said the youth as he leaned forward to pat his gaunt’s hideous head, “but I know you. My name is Gytherik Imniss, and my uncle was called Thinistor Udd!”

  “Udd the wizard!” gasped Eldin. “So that’s what all this is about.”

  “We killed a wizard in the Great Bleak Range of mountains,” Hero quickly explained to Limnar. “It was self-defense. In fact, we didn’t actually kill him. Aminza Anz killed him, but we had a hand in it …”

  “I know that my uncle died by a girl’s hand,” said Gytherik, “and that she has gone where I can’t follow her—back to the waking world. But you two were part of it, as you’ve admitted, and you are still here.”

  “Your uncle was a black-hearted wretch with evil designs on the entire dreamlands,” Hero spat out the words. “When we put an end to him we did every man, woman and child in the dreamlands a great favor, including you, Gytherik.”

  “I know what sort of a wizard he was,” answered the gaunt-master. “Aye, and that everything you say of him is true. Nevertheless I must kill you.”

  “But why?” asked Eldin. “If you had no love for your uncle, why do you seek to murder us?”

  “Murder?” said the youth, for the first time uncertain.

  “Murder, certainly!” cried Limnar. “If they killed your uncle out of duty to their fellow men, and if you yourself know that it is so … why, to kill them now would be nothing less than murder!”

  After long moments Gytherik slowly shook his head. “No,” he said, “it would be vengeance.”

  “But you didn’t like your uncle,” said Eldin, exasperation in his voice.

  “Like him? I hated him!” cried Gytherik with feeling. “It’s not my vengeance which falls upon you, Hero of Dreams and Eldin the Wanderer, but the vengeance of Thinistor himself!”

  “But—” the pair began in unison, turning to each other, mouths agape in the moonlight.

  “Now listen,” Gytherik cut them short, “and I will tell you why I must kill you.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Slowly, carefully Gytherik dismounted to stand beside the great gaunt where it crouched on the far side of the rim like some monstrous gargoyle suddenly come to life. He stretched his legs for a second or two, never for a moment taking his eyes from the three friends where they faced him across the gaping throat of the dead volcano. The gaunt stretched too, shaking back its great bat-wings and craning its rubbery neck in a curious fashion.

  “Yes,” Gytherik finally began, “Thinistor Udd was my uncle—but no love between us, be sure of that. For where Mathur Imniss, my father, was good, his half-brother Thinistor was purest evil. They shared the same mother, you see, but their fathers we
re different. Thinistor was first-born, and his father was something of a sorcerer—a rather slipshod sorcerer, I gather—who vanished forever during some strange, necromantic experiment. It was almost as if he recognized the curse already sprung from his loins into the dreamlands, and that he deliberately removed himself as penance!

  “Ten years passed and Grandmother took a second husband, my grandfather, Irik Imniss; and in Grandmother’s last possible years, eventually Mathur was born. She died giving him life, and some nineteen years later, Grandfather followed her. Thinistor, the older half-brother, remained single, but when Mathur was in his thirties he met and married a young woman, my mother. By then my uncle was almost sixty years of age and he owned half of the house; Father owned the other half, living there with his new wife.

  “Thinistor had inherited his father’s appetite for sorcery, however—his books and apparatus, too—and as a result of the secretive and doubtful experiments he constantly carried out in his private rooms my mother soon came to loathe and fear him. As if to batten upon her fear, and despite the fact that he was her senior by forty years, Uncle Thinistor began paying her unwanted attentions; and this while she was carrying me!

  “Now in all the years they had lived together, there had never been any love between the half-brothers. Mathur had worked and prospered while Thinistor studied the dark arts and frittered away his half of Grandfather’s inheritance. Mathur had never liked Thinistor’s experiments, but he was used to the other’s strange ways and they had not greatly bothered him. Now, seeing that his wife went in fear of Thinistor and because she was carrying me, he reacted as any good man would. Since Thinistor was so much older, and thin and wasted by reason of his dark magics, the younger brother did not thrash him but merely threw him out; and he paid him more than fairly for his half of the house. Thinistor went, taking his books and other thaumaturgical devices with him.

  “And the years passed …

  “When I was old enough to understand these things my father explained them to me, and I have remembered. Thus, even before I knew my uncle, I hated him.

  “When I was fifteen Thinistor came back and I met him for the first time. At first Father wasn’t keen to see him again, but Thinistor held a trump card. He had been passing through Nir (where our house still stands) and had heard of my mother’s sickness … or so he said. Now, my mother’s sickness was a strange thing, a sleeping, moaning, wasting thing, with which no ordinary physician could cope. For six long months she had suffered and declined, until Father was at his wits’ end what to do about it. Then Thinistor came.

  “He looked his age but was spritely enough, and indeed it seemed (or so my father told me) that he had changed. No more a mere wizard but a mystic, a man of great power—a traveling doctor who healed with his hands and his mind—Thinistor offered his advice, his services; and of course Father accepted.

  “At first it seemed that all would be well. Mother responded wonderfully to Uncle Thinistor’s treatment, which seemed to consist mainly of prayer, and she quickly returned to her previous strength and beauty. But as soon as she was well she turned from Thinistor. It was not that she was ungrateful, rather that her old fears had returned—and as it turned out, not without good reason.

  “For although the old man had done nothing to arouse her suspicions, still she was obsessed by the idea that it was Thinistor she had to blame for her peculiar ailment in the first place. He had cursed her, she told my father, in order to ‘cure’ her and thus place us all in his debt.

  “While my father laughed at her fears, his laughter was uneasy. For indeed he too was beginning to sense that Thinistor was not what he pretended to be. There was still that dark side to him, which day by day cast its shadow until the whole household seemed filled with its gloom. And still Thinistor had done nothing to deserve this covert condemnation—nothing which could be seen, that is. And obviously he was a good doctor (albeit a ‘faith-healer,’ as he had it) as witness my mother’s complete recovery …

  “It was then that my uncle began to take an interest in me. What he knew could be taught, he said, and he was thinking of taking an apprentice. He had a house in the Great Bleak Mountains, which was where he meditated, studied herbal medicines and worked to perfect his curative powers .of mind over matter; all of which were important but subsidiary to his principal task, which was the cultivation of ‘universal health and peace of mind.’

  “Oh, yes—a very worthy man—my Uncle Thinistor …

  “But no, my father would not hear of my apprenticeship to his half-brother, and so Thinistor must find himself another pupil. My uncle was displeased but said little. Father was in his debt and could not bring himself to ask him to leave; the very idea of throwing him out seemed unworthy, since through him my mother was returned to her full strength; and so Thinistor remained in his rooms as of old and returned to his studies. He would not stay long in Nir, he said, but must soon return to his own place in the mountains.

  “Then, within the space of a single week, things began to change. My father’s business, which was stoneworking and house-building, ran into trouble. He had planned and started to build five new cottages for families moving from Ulthar to Nir. Now they could not come, neither could they pay him for work already done. He had other jobs, however—repairs to walls and extensions to houses—and so turned to them; but within the space of a few days he fell and broke his arm. Then there was crop failure and prices rose alarmingly; and Father’s arm was stiff and long in the healing; and people began to move from Nir to the shores of the Southern Sea where the fishing was good, and so things went from bad to worse. Night-gaunts were seen in the dusk over the hamlets of the plain, and people said this was the worst omen of all and made the old signs against great evil. It was as if a curse had fallen over Nir and the surrounding countryside, particularly over the house of Mathur Imniss.

  “Again Thinistor broached the subject of my apprenticeship, offering Father enough gold to tide him through the bad times. And again Father denied him and told him to put the idea out of his mind. Then Thinistor grew angry and it was seen that indeed he had kept his real self hidden from our eyes. He left one night without saying goodbye, and we began to believe we had seen the last of him and things seemed so much better. Despite the fact that we were near penniless, at least we were happy again.

  “So things stood for two long years. Then …

  “One day my father took a walk alone in the hills as was his wont, but as dusk crept in Mother began to worry about him. He did not usually stay out so long. The lights of the town were coming on one by one as people lit the narg-oil lanterns in their houses and cottages, and still no sign of Father. In the end, to set Mother’s mind at rest, I myself went out to follow the old paths he used, but searching was useless in the dark and so it would be better if I waited for morning’s light. On my way home in the night I saw strange shadows in the sky which filled me with a great dread …

  “We did not sleep that night, my mother and I, but in the dawn light went out into the hills to search for Father. We found the cane which he always carried, not really as an aid to walking but for its comfort and as a deterrent against hill-wolves or wandering zoogs, and also his pipe and pouch of herbs and thagweed—but of my father himself … Never a trace.

  “Now the villagers knew and loved Mathur Imniss as one of their own. When they heard of our plight they came out by the score to help search the hills, woods, copses and ditches, all to no avail. They did find, close to where we had discovered Father’s things, the footprints of huge gaunts in the sandy soil, but that was all. Father was gone, and news of his disappearance went quickly over the plain and into the neighboring towns. People began to lock their doors and windows at night, and to read omens in the dawns and sunsets and in the configuration of stars …

  “I could get no work and Mother was sick with worrying over Father’s unknown fate; our money had finally run out; the town’s misers and moneylenders had their eyes on our large house and the
walled plot in which it stood. In short, things were desperate. Mother began to talk of selling up and moving to a smaller house, but I wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Better times would come, I kept telling her. Father might yet return to us. Our fortunes were bound to change. If only I could find work, even a part-time job. If only this, if only that. If only we had accepted Thinistor’s money and I had become his apprentice. It would have been for a few years only, after all …

  “And as if he had been waiting for just such desperate times to come upon us—as if, indeed, he had plotted and planned the whole thing—that was when Thinistor returned. He said he had been in Ulthar where someone had told him of our troubles, and that then he had hurried to Nir in order to offer his assistance. And yes, his offer of work was still open to me. I was, after all, his nephew. Seeing our plight, how could he refuse to help us!

  “Well, this was the opportunity I had prayed for, and my uncle’s gold was as good as anyone else’s … And so I packed a few belongings, kissed my mother a fond farewell, and went with Thinistor back to the Great Bleak Range of mountains.

  “You, David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer—you who killed Thinistor Udd—know well enough where he lived, and you also know that he was the blackest of all sorcerers. I too was made aware of the depths of his evil nature, but not until I had wandered through his cavern lair and found the monstrous black idol he worshiped there; not until I saw how the gaunts of night obeyed his commands; not until he himself told me how he had sent those gaunts to steal my father away from Mother and me!

  “And I too might have killed him there and then, if I had been given the chance—except Thinistor made me a promise. That promise he made, it stayed my hand and made me his slave. And when he knew that he held me helpless, then he told me of his ambition to become the greatest sorcerer in all the dreamlands, commanding kings as they command common men. With the aid of what he had found in the great Keep of the First Ones, he was sure he would succeed.