Iced on Aran, Page 3

  Eldin caught on. “We weren’t right for this place …” he mused. “But the old iceman himself, he was.”

  Hero nodded. “As for the look on his face: pleased with himself, did you say? Looks more to me like he’s just sighed a long, last grateful sigh—and it’s frozen there forever.”

  They made their way back to the ice steps. “And this one?” the Wanderer stood, sword in hand, beside the image of the Lord of Ooth-Nargai.

  “Leave it be,” said Hero. “If there’s a sort of sympathetic magic in these things … I’d hate to think we were the ones brought some sort of doom down on old Kuranes. And who are we to decide a man’s destiny, anyway? You never know, p’raps he will want to come up here one day—and maybe the old iceman has a son of his own, eh? You know: to carry on the line, and the work?”

  Frustrated, Eldin returned to his own ice sculpture. “Well, this at least is one destiny I can decide!” he declared.

  “That I’ll grant you,” said Hero, coming up behind. “These really don’t belong here at all.” With great grunting heaves they wrested their images from their bases and threw them flat.

  And with a great deal more courage than skill, the pair steered their amazing sledges down across the ice, less rapidly across scree and rock faces, shudderingly into the heart of the trees on Aran’s lower slopes. From there they continued on foot, and as the statues melted behind them, so their steps grew lighter along the leafy way …

  AUGEREN

  David Hero’s sudden exclamation—“Eldin!”—caused the older dreamer to start. He’d been dozing by their fire, while Hero had sat lost in his own thoughts, peering deep into the flickering flames.

  “Eh? What? Did you call out, lad? Whazzup?” Eldin the Wanderer cast fearfully about in the firelight, saw nothing amiss, shrugged the blanket off his broad shoulders and reached for his sword anyway. “Was I asleep?”

  “Eldin!” said Hero again, more quietly this time, and offered a decisive nod of his head.

  The other, still only half-awake, frowned his puzzlement. “Of course I am!” he said. “Who’d you think I was?”

  “Funk and Wagnalls!” the younger dreamer delightedly slapped his thigh, tossed another broken branch onto the fire. “Or maybe Chambers Twentieth Century?” He held up a finger, grinned knowingly.

  Eldin was wide awake now. “Huh!” he scowled. “A joke’s a joke and that’s understood. Nothing wrong with a bit of horseplay. I was nodding off and you startled me awake. But what’s all this Funk and Wagnalls stuff? Not like you to burst out cursing in the middle of the night. Are you sure you’re all right, lad? Or maybe you were dreaming, too, eh?”

  “Dreaming?” Hero stopped grinning. “Not a bit of it. It’s just that I remembered something, that’s all. From the waking world, I think. A book I used to own—a book of words!”

  “Oh? Curse-words?”

  “The meaning of words!” said Hero. “Eldin!”

  “Yes?”

  “No, no! Not you Eldin. The word Eldin.”

  “Daft as a brush,” the older dreamer declared with no lack of certainty. “P’raps I’d best stay awake in case you go for my throat in the night!”

  “Look,” Hero sighed resignedly. “Names aren’t just names, you know—they are also words which contain meanings. My own name, f’rinstance: Hero. Now what’s a hero, eh?”

  “Someone brave, daring, rescuer of maidens in distress,” Eldin shrugged. “Answerer of calls beyond duty, dragon-slayer, quester!”

  “Right!” Hero jumped up, strode to and fro. “And when you think of me, Hero, what do you get? I mean, how do I fit the pattern?”

  “Loosely,” said Eldin. “Mainly chicken, seducer of distressed maidens, dragon runner-away-from, quester at a price.”

  “Oaf!” Hero snorted.

  “Tired oaf,” Eldin corrected him. “I was just about to start kipping in earnest, when you—”

  “Forget it!” Hero snapped, cutting him short. “What’s in a name, eh? I mean, if you don’t want to know the meaning of your name—if you see nothing of any importance in the source or lineage of your character—then just forget it …”

  He came back to the fire, stood over Eldin and scowled at him for a while. Then he threw himself down in his own place and yanked his blanket over himself. “Good night!” he snarled.

  Eldin scratched his chin, frowned at the figure huddled on the other side of the fire. Hero had him hooked and Eldin knew it. Now the younger dreamer would probably make him beg for an explanation; Eldin would lose face, which the other would greatly relish. Also, Hero had doubtless dreamed up a silly origin for Eldin’s name. Here in Earth’s dreamlands “Eldin” was synonymous now with wanderlust, chiefly (Eldin liked to think) because it was his name, his dream-name. What he’d been called in the waking world was lost forever now, an entire dimension away. He couldn’t remember, and only very rarely felt a yearning to know. Here he was Eldin the Wanderer, and that was good enough. Except—

  “Very well,” he capitulated gruffly. “So be it … What’s it mean?” He got up, stretched, stepped round the fire and prodded Hero with a booted toe. “Eh, eh? Since you’ve started this silliness you might as well finish it. Except, be warned: if you’ve made my name something oafish, it’ll very likely warrant a clout!”

  Hero snored loudly.

  “What?” Eldin booted him again, heavier this time. “No one goes to sleep that fast! Up, up! I want to know the meaning of my bloody name!”

  Hero sat up, gave a deep sigh. “We’ve a busy day tomorrow,” he said. “Trekking in unfamiliar territory, and an unknown monster—a maneater—to track, trap or kill. We should both get some sleep.”

  “Up, I said!” Eldin repeated. “I was sleeping, remember? And anyway, how’ll I be able to sleep with this on my mind?”

  Hero got up, put his hands behind his back, ambled to the edge of the firelight and back. “On your what?” he inquired. “Your ‘mind’?” He sniffed and cocked a wondering eyebrow. Then he looked over his shoulder into the darkness beyond the fire’s glow and shivered. “Brrr!” he said, his tone shuddery.

  “Eh? Brrr!? Don’t change the subject!” said Eldin sharply. “And anyway, it isn’t cold tonight.”

  “Nothing to do with the cold, old lad,” Hero shook his head. “Goosebumps.”

  “They don’t, you know,” Eldin returned.

  “Eh?”

  “Geese. I’ve seen ‘em fight, heard ’em honk, watched ’em fly south for the winter. But I never saw a one bump.”

  “The fact is”—Hero ignored Eldin’s wit—“I’m restless. It’s this quest of ours—call it a mission—that Kuranes has sent us on. It’s like nothing we ever did before. I was thinking about it, rolling his—its?—name around in my head: ‘Augeren,’ and that started me off on the meaning of names.”

  Eldin hoisted himself up on to the horizontal branch of a dead, toppled tree and dangled his feet. He snapped off a smaller branch and tossed it into the fire, watched the sparks leap and the flames jiggle. The circle of light expanded a little, and night’s shadows drew back.

  Hero turned his back on the dark, gazed earnestly at Eldin. “Fact is,” he said again, “I don’t like this job we’re on one little bit. I’ve a feeling it’s a sight more sinister than it seems—and after what Kuranes has told us, that’s saying a lot! ‘Augeren’ … brrr!”

  Eldin hadn’t said much about their current job until now, but he had given it plenty of thought—and he knew exactly what Hero meant. Not about this silly “meaning of names” business, but about the actual nature of the beast they pursued. Call it a beast, or “Augeren,” or a Thing; call it whatever you liked. It still came down to the same thing in the end: it was unknown but seemed all-knowing; it had been experienced (horribly) but never seen; it struck like lightning out of the darkness at totally innocent victims; and it always killed. And it ate. But most monstrous of all was how it killed and what it ate …

  As for Augeren’s hunting-ground:


  Between Inquanok and Leng—that northern plateau of ill-repute which sits like some vast and forbidden iceberg at dreamland’s one suspected pole—there stands a range of gaunt gray peaks no dreamer has ever been known to scale. Or if someone has climbed them, he never lived to return and report the fact. The range forms an eyrie for Shantak-birds, who build their massive nests on ledges halfway up; while the topmost pinnacles are eaten into by caves which, according to legend, are the gloomy resting-, nesting-, or mating-places of night-gaunts.

  Shunned by many, still the gaunt gray peaks are regarded by most as a blessing, a provision of beneficent gods. If men cannot climb them and so proceed into awful, mist-shrouded Leng, likewise no thing of Leng is likely to attempt the feat in reverse. But between the foot of the gray range and Inquanok, there in the misty twilight valleys and foothills where they slope at first greenly, then stonily oceanward—with the onyx quarries of Inquanok on every hand and farms scattered sparsely here and there about—this was the region of the terror. This was where it had started, as if seeping slowly out of Leng and across the gray peaks, until recently it had reached Urg and crossed into Inquanok itself.

  As for what “it” was: there was no lack of clues, but paradoxically no jot of evidence to point to any known predator. It was, indeed, the Unknown.

  The thing took its victims in darkness. Here the young, favored daughter of a farmer, carried off soundlessly from her bed and never more seen alive; there the young son of a quarrier, snatched from some makeshift shack at the rim of one of the deep quarries and bundled away in the night. A Shantak, perhaps? But how could so vast a creature possibly sneak down against the stars and the moon unseen and enter into a farmhouse or quarrier’s shack? Low stone houses and wooden shacks do not have doors or windows sizeable enough to accommodate Shantaks, not without considerable structural damage!

  What about Lengites, the horned, wide-mouthed, slant-eyed almost-humans known to inhabit or infest Leng? Or even a Lengite-Shantak collaboration? The Lengites were said to tame and even occasionally ride the hippocephalic Shantak; so couldn’t one of those squat, cloven-hooved horrors be the raider? Well possible, but unlikely. The men of Inquanok are wont to make slaves of (or do much worse things to) serious wrongdoers of whatever race; in the present circumstances, only let them sniff an almost-human in the vicinity … he’d be strung up at once, and almost certainly without trial.

  Night-gaunts might seem the best bet, but were they really? There was now a body of evidence to show that they were not the monsters previously supposed; quite apart from which they had no faces, hence no mouths, ergo no “appetites” as such. And on that last note they were definitely out, as were Shantaks and almost-humans. Not that these last-mentioned had no feeding habits; indeed they did, and pretty awful ones at that. But the unknown thing’s appetite was such as to leave other messy eaters agog, possibly even turned to jelly. For Augeren, who or whatever he was, ate only bone marrow!

  “Bone marrow!” said Hero, as if reading Eldin’s thought. “Brrrr! To have the juices sucked out of your very bones!”

  Eldin felt a shudder go up his spine. “Enough of the brrrs,” he pleaded. “You’ve got me at it now! And anyway that last one of yours was over the top—it had four ‘r’s.” He jumped down from his branch, faced his younger companion across the sputtering fire.

  The difference in their ages would be maybe fifteen years, perhaps a little more. Eldin could be anything between forty-five and fifty years of age—hardly an old lad—and Hero at thirty was a deal more than a mere teenager. Both of them were prone to gross exaggeration, however, especially with regard to each other. Hero needled at Eldin’s maturity as if he were well into advanced senility, and the Wanderer carped at Hero’s comparative youth for all the world as if he were still in diapers! To any outsider their constant jibing and mutually acid sense of humor would appear most disconcerting. But it was their way; it meant nothing; they loved each other better than brothers.

  In appearance:

  Eldin had a scarred, bearded, quite unhandsome and yet not unattractive face which housed surprisingly clear blue eyes. Stocky and heavy, but somehow gangly to boot, there was something almost apish about him; yet his every move and gesture (when he was not merely clowning) hinted at a sensitivity and keen intelligence behind his massive physical strength. He usually dressed in black, while Hero affected a garb of dark brown.

  Hero was tall, well-muscled, as blond in dreams as he’d once been in the waking world. His eyes were a lighter blue than Eldin’s; but they could darken very quickly in a fury, or take on a dangerous steely glint in a tight spot. His nature in fact was usually easy-going; but while he loved songs a fair bit and girls a great deal, still he was wizard-master of any sword in a fight, and the knuckles of his fists were like crusty knobs of rock. He was very different from Eldin, yes, but the lands of Earth’s dreams occasionally make for strange traveling companions.

  But they were not entirely disparate; what they had in common was this: they both were infected with unquenchable wanderlust, and they were both ex-waking worlders. Extinct (extinguished, anyway) on the purely physical plane, they now existed as questers in the lands of Earth’s dreams. Only the occasional flash of memory served to remind that there’d ever been a life before this one; and rare as such insights were, still they could prove poignant, so that the pair usually tried as best they might to put the waking world far from mind. They could never go back there; it was a world of uttermost mystery and fantasy to them now. Sometimes they even argued about the very existence of that other, rather more mundane place.

  They had been visiting Celephais, down and very nearly out, as usual, when King Kuranes of Ooth-Nargai had called them to his Cornish manor-house there. For years without number Kuranes—himself an ex-waking worlder, now a power in the dreamlands—had been working for political liaison with Inquanok, that most guarded, secretive, misty place, far to the north across the strange blue waters of the Cerenerian Sea. But the men of Inquanok seemed mainly cold and aloof, sharp-featured and suspicious of outsiders, proud of a heritage dating back (according to rumor, in which the dreamlands abound) to certain of the gods themselves. And truth to tell their features were not unlike those of a titan and nameless god, carved in ages beyond memory into Mount Ngranek’s stony face. They held to strange, sometimes dubious worship; their rites called for strict adherence and their laws were inviolable, carrying heavy penalties; their Veiled King was rumored to be un- if not inhuman, as were the priests of the great temple of certain “Elder Ones,” who were not the wholesome Elder Gods worshipped by the venerable Atal of Ulthar.

  But Inquanok’s merchants were human, certainly, and its taverners and quarriers, and for a long time now a secret circle of responsible citizens had questioned—however privately and in whispers—the autocracy of the Veiled King and his priestlings, always working indirectly but purposefully toward their overthrow. All the dreamlands wanted Inquanok onyx; increased commerce might bring prosperity to many, pave the way for strong alliances, dispel mystery, open up all the lands of dream to the onyx city’s sailors and merchantmen … were it not for the Veiled King’s policy of insularity, the fact that Inquanok must be a land kept ever apart.

  The Veiled King had not been interested in tales of terror and monstrous abductions and murders from Inquanok’s hinterland; indeed, it seemed doubtful that such tales had even reached his ears, for in his vast palace and forbidden temple he had little to do with common men and their problems. But as for the common men themselves …

  When the daughter of a well-to-do merchant was taken from her father’s rich house on Inquanok’s very outskirts, and left some miles away in the desert for the drear dawn to discover dead and drained of marrow … that has been the turning point. Local help was nowhere available: police or other custodians of the law there were none, for all miscreants were left to the justice of the Veiled King’s priests and palace officials. Petitions to the palace were productive of nothing, were n
ot even answered. Privately organized parties of four or five good men would go out into the deserts or other wild places and return days later with nothing to report—or, worse, with one of their number missing. The terror did not restrict itself to children.

  But with this last atrocity fresh in the minds of Inquanok’s people—the death of this innocent little girl, her body and bones all drilled through and juices sucked out—finally it was time to seek assistance from outside. Kuranes’ long-term attempts at liaison and trans-Cerenerian alliance were remembered: a message of entreaty was sent in secret to Celephais, addressed to the Lord of Ooth-Nargai, Celephais, and the Sky Around Serannian himself. In other words, to Kuranes.

  And who better? Hadn’t he been mainly responsible for dreamland’s victory in the War of the Mad Moon? Wasn’t it Kuranes who’d successfully defended sky-floating Serannian against Zura of Zura’s plot to topple that aerial island to its doom? And didn’t he from time to time employ certain sellswords, questers who’d tackle any job at a price? If Kuranes couldn’t help, then who could?

  “Can you remember,” asked Hero now, “what Kuranes told us of this Augeren?”

  “He told us several things,” Eldin grunted. “None of them pleasant. A young man walking his girl near Urg was buffeted on the head. He came to almost at once, heard his young lady’s faint cry of horror from a misty copse, stumbled to her rescue. This, of course, is assumption, for he did not live to tell it himself. But while he ran he yelled for help; several cotters were startled up, came out with lanthorns; there followed something of a hue and cry. The girl was found almost at once, unharmed but shocked witless by something she’d seen, the closeness of her shave. Her young man—he was finished, all bones intact except for one, which alas was his skull. It had been drilled right through, his brain pierced. Doubtless the monster would have sucked his marrow, except for the cotters charging about with their lanthorns. As for the girl …”