Yet even allowing for all of the prudence and preparation in the world, he hadn’t lived as long and accomplished as much as he had without becoming inured to terrors which would have turned the bowels of even the most courageous to water. The art, at the high level at which he practiced it, was for neither the weak hearted nor the weak willed, and now he gathered that will-the will of a wizard lord of Kontovar-about himself before he spoke the final word of his current spell.
A brilliant flash enveloped the working chamber. Had there been any witnesses, they would have been painfully blinded for long, purple-and-red minutes. Even if they’d been warned in time to close their eyes, they would have blinked on tears once they opened them again, and the skins of those particularly sensitive to the art would have prickled and burned as if they’d injudiciously exposed themselves to too much sunlight. But once their eyes started working again, they would have seen that the working space at the very heart of the chamber was empty.
It was night on the Ghoul Moor.
The moon drifted overhead, floating in and out of star-spangled cloud rifts, and a cool breeze sent tree branches curtsying in the darkness. Yet there was no darkness in the clearing, where bonfires roared and crackled in snapping showers of sparks at either end of the treeless space. There had been trees here once, and not so very long ago, but they’d been felled with stone axes and hewn into massive, sap-oozing timbers. Their branches, leaves, and twigs had helped fuel those bonfires, but the timbers had been cut and notched, laid up to form a massive, open-air dais for the trio of hulking thrones set upon it.
A shape sat in each of those thrones. Roughly man-shaped, each of them hideous in its own fashion, they loomed monstrous in the dancing, seething firelight. The smallest would have stood at least ten feet tall, had it risen from its throne; the largest was half again that huge, and glaring crimson eyes-pupil-less and touched with a poison-green sheen-glowed like lava in the firelight.
One of them was covered in shaggy, rank hair, thick and snarled with knots. It had huge, six-fingered hands, the fingers tipped with scimitar-shaped claws longer than most daggers, a snouted face with foot-long, boarlike tusks, and a misshapen skull crowned with a six-foot spread of needle-pointed, bulllike horns. Another was hairless, with a thick, plated hide, an extra set of arms, and legs half again as long as they ought to have been. Each plate was crested with its own jagged, two-inch stalagmite of horn, and it wore the head of some nightmare-designed hunting cat with a direcat’s fangs that glittered with the same venomous green luminance dancing in its eyes. But the third-the largest of the three, seated on the central throne-dwarfed that cat-headed horror, for it was an even more nightmarish parody of a hradani. Its hands were enormous, even for something its size, and armed with claws that put its horned companion’s talons to shame. Crawling patterns which might have been tattoos, but were not, moved constantly across its skin in the firelight, like a nest of mating serpents, and that same pestilential green clung to it, wavering about it in a foul, deadly nimbus. It sat there, naked and hairy, blood running down either forearm and painting its massively muscled chest in shining red as it raised the tattered torso of a ghoul and ripped huge, dripping chunks of flesh-chunks larger than a grown man’s head-from it with sawtooth teeth.
The ground before the dais was littered with gnawed and splintered bones, and the clearing beyond was packed with other ghouls. The creatures crouched on their knees, bending forward, faces pressed to the ground as they prostrated themselves worshipfully, and something like a wordless, animallike hymn rose from them. The hairy, horned-headed creature rose, striding to the edge of the dais, and raised a clawed hand. It pointed to one of the kneeling ghouls, and the indicated creature looked up, eyes huge, then squealed as three of its neighbors seized it and dragged it forward. The captive twisted and fought wildly, but strong and fast as ghouls might be, its captors were just as strong, just as fast. And terrified as it might be of its fate, its fellows were even more terrified of their fates if they should allow it to escape.
They didn’t.
They reached the edge of the dais, the waiting monster reached down with one misshapen hand, and its selected victim gave one last, squealing shriek as that hand closed about its throat and lifted it effortlessly into the air. The ghoul squirmed and twisted frantically, its own claws raking uselessly at the hand which had plucked it from the ground. They opened gaping wounds in those strangling fingers, that massive wrist, but those wounds closed again as quickly as they were torn, and the horned creature only roared with hideous, hooting laughter and tightened its grip. Something crunched noisily, the ghoul’s struggles ended abruptly, and the creature returned to its throne, pulled one of the dead ghoul’s arms from its socket with casual, appalling strength and a hideous sucking, tearing sound, and began to feed upon its fresh meal.
A light flashed suddenly on the dais, like some lost lightning bolt. It was less brilliant than the one which had filled Varnaythus’ working chamber in that self-same instant in far distant Sothofalas, well over four hundred leagues to the north. Yet it was bright enough to dazzle eyes no one had warned, and an edge of fresher, sharper fear added itself to the ghouls’ worshiping chant.
The creature which had just begun to feed paused, then grunted contemptuously at the diminutive, human figure that stepped out of that glittering billiance and resumed its interrupted chewing. Its cat-headed fellow only leaned back with disinterested red eyes, resting one set of forearms on the arms of its crude throne while it picked bits of ghoul from between its own fangs with the clawed hand at the end of one of its upper arms. But the biggest, hradani-shaped creature tossed aside what was left of the ghoul it had been devouring and glared at the newcomer.
“You’re late,” it rumbled. Granite boulders screaming their agony as they were crushed in an iron vise might have sounded like that voice, and the stink of death, decay, and blood blew on its words, washing around the human before it.
“No,” Varnaythus replied. His merely mortal voice seemed small and frail after that sound of pulverized stone, but he gazed calmly up at the monster before him, and no witness could have guessed how hard it was for him to appear unshaken. “No, I’m not. This is precisely the time I told you I’d be here.”
“Do you call me liar? ”
The creature’s roar shook the night like a terrier shaking a rat and it half-rose from its throne, yet Varnaythus stood his ground.
“That wasn’t what I said. I said this is the time I told you to expect me here. That happens to be the truth. Whether you were mistaken, misspoke, or lied is more than I can say. And, frankly, of very little interest to me.”