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As to how the friends and enemies of dreamland might be recognized one from
the other, King Carter said that the true men of dreamland were dreamland's
true friends, of whom only a handful were under Cthulhu's evil spell. The
horned ones of Leng were not true men - indeed, they could hardly be said to
be men at all - but were of the dreamland of a dark dimension paralleling
Yuggoth on the Rim, whence the CCD had brought them when the dreams of men
were very young.
And apart from true men and pseudo-men there were also the utterly inhuman
creatures of dream, some sentient and others barely so. The loyalty of these
beings was more often than not highly suspect. The 'G' creatures, for
instance, were especially suspicious - the gugs, ghasts and ghouls - and only
slightly less sinister were the others: the shantaks, dholes and zoogs.
King Carter had had much to do with all such creatures in his youth, and in
some of them he had found very strange allies indeed. The cats of Ulthar all
knew and loved him; the zoogs of the Enchanted Wood were not disinclined
toward him. He had even befriended the ghouls of dreamland's nether-pits,
whose leader was a special acquaintance of his.
As to the ghasts and gugs, mercifully they were usually content to remain in
their own realms. The ghasts were least bothersome in that real light
destroyed them. They were rarely to be found outside the lightless Vaults of
Zin, where they were hunted by and in turn hunted the gigantic gugs.
Night-gaunts, however, were not to be dealt with so lightly. Though faceless,
they were nevertheless believed to be the secret eyes of Cthulhu's minions in
dreamland. Moreover, many of dream's people still believed that the
night-gaunts held great power over all of dream's lesser creatures. And
certainly the vast and hippocephalic shantak-birds were mortally afraid of
them. Chiefly to be found near the summit of Ngranek on the Isle of Oriab,
night-gaunts also guarded the grim gray peaks dividing Leng and Inquanok,
where they spent the drab daylight hours in caves that scarred the topmost
pinnacles. In the night, though, gaunts flew far and wide throughout
dreamland, and their secretive nature was such that indeed they would make
ideal spies for the CCD.
One of the first tasks for Kuranes' sky-yachts, once Dylath-Leen was secured,
would be to destroy the night-gaunt stronghold atop Ngranek, then to block all
of those entrances leading down into the black and reeking abyss beneath. In
this manner that area of the underworld and all its terrors would be shut off
forever from saner, upper regions of dream.
And so the armies of dream would go from strength to strength. Eventually
there would be great battle-fleets upon the Southern Sea, barring access to
the black galleys of the horned ones; vast stone fortresses would be built and
manned along the border of Inquanok and Leng, ensuring that the horrors of the
latter tableland might forever remain remote. Finally, a way would be sought
to destroy those black places in dreamland - the evil foci of CCD influence -
where Cthulhu's engines of nightmare
pounded detestably, poisoning the healthy dreams of Earth's mortals.
Such places were known to exist in the Enchanted Wood, in certain green deeps
of the Southern Sea, even in the perfumed and often beautiful jungles of
fabled Kled; others were rumored to lie in subterranean vaults beneath Zura's
elusive temples, and in the hinterland of ruined, primordial Sarkomand. There
were many, many places to be freed or cleansed of the curse of Cthulhu; great
battles to be fought and won; temples of evil to be razed and healthy frontier
cities founded. And all to free Man's subconscious mind from the canker of
CCD-inspired nightmares.
For unless Cthulhu's creeping incursion into dreams could be put an end to,
neither the waking world of men nor the universe itself would ever be truly
safe from the horror inherent in His aeon-devised design for the utter
destruction of all sanity and order.
Such were the grim and doom-fraught subjects covered by King Carter through
all of that long day; but in the evening a banquet was prepared in honor of
the visitors from the waking world, and as they sipped the clean red wine of
Ilek-Vad so their apprehension for dreamland's future eased a little. Later,
reclining in silk-cushioned couches that swung gently to and fro beneath the
crystal-clear dome of the city's highest tower, gazing out across the placid
twilight sea where all the stars of night gleamed in a darkly fluid firmament,
Crow and de Marigny talked a while and then fell silent. Both of them were
thinking the same thing: they knew now all they had wanted to know of
Ilek-Vad. It was time to move on.
The next morning King Carter wrote a letter of introduc-
tion for his visitors, a warrant authorizing their new ranks
as Generals of the Annies of Dream, telling briefly of their
origins and their present importance to all dreamland.
They were to take this letter with them to Kuranes in cloud-floating
Serannian, the pink marble city of the clouds; for the pair had intimated
their desire to be once more on their way, and Serannian was to be their next
stop.
Thus, at noon of that same day, the dreamers said their farewells to the king
and flew up in the time-clock over the city. And as the powers that sustained
the great invisible dome of hyperdimensional energy were momentarily revoked
by Ilek-Vad's wizards, they sped away over the twilight sea in the direction
of Serannian.
'Titus,' said de Marigny as they gained speed, 'things seem to be working out
very well.'
'At the moment, yes. Does it bother you?'
'Something bothers me. But it's difficult to pin it down. I mean, everything
seems so easy now - the obstacles are behind us.'
'Perhaps they are.'
'And yet I somehow feel an urgency, a need for greater haste.'
Crow nodded. 'I feel it too. My instinct tells me that all is not as well as
it might be.'
'And there are still many questions,' de Marigny went on. 'For instance, the
weapons we've seen so far. Are they magical or mechanical?'
'A bit of both, I suspect. But that takes us back to an old argument, Henri:
just what is magic? This is Earth's dreamland, remember? If you had been to
Elysia with me, then you might finally be able to put that word "magic" behind
you. In Elysia there are islands that float a mile in the air, just like
Serannian. Surely the science that holds such islands aloft is little short of
"magical"? What you must remember is this: whether in the waking world or the
world of dream, if man wants something badly enough to be, he will make it be!
Is a sky-yacht any more fantastic than an airplane? Are King Carter's
ray-projectors any
stranger than lasers? Dreamland and the waking world are two different
spheres, Henri, certainly- but both were shaped in the minds of men, sleeping
and waking alike!'
De Marigny frowned, then suddenly burst out: 'Star-stones! That's something
else that's been bothering me -are there no star-stones in dreamland? I had
one hanging from a chain around my neck when I set out from Earth, but I'm
damned if it's there now!'
'Ah!' Crow smiled. 'But the star-stones came to Earth from an alien universe,
Henri, an alien dimension. Dreamland guards her boundaries well; she does not
gladly suffer that which is not of Earth and Man's own dreaming.'
'But what of Cthulhu and the CCD?' de Marigny argued. 'What could possibly be
more alien? And yet their emissaries are here.'
'Sentience!' Crow answered. 'They are here because Cthulhu wills it, just as
we are here because we will it.' He shrugged. 'Quite apart from which, of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]