The Tenth First One

Chapter Twenty-Four

From the cold, nitrous foot of the stone steps, Nyrass led the questers into brightly lighted, sumptuous subterranean apartments which would rival in their opulence any of the wizard's own rooms in the castle far above. They would never have suspected that such a place could exist down here, and by the neatness of the rooms it was obvious that they were occupied. But by whom? Hero asked this of Nyrass as he led them through one well-kept room after another.

"Why, by my good and faithful servant Ebraim Borak, of course! For this is where I keep my most precious books, my instruments-all of the many appurtenances of wizardry-and I'm too old to keep the place neat and tidy for myself. Ebraim does it for me, and his payment is that I keep him here, safely hidden away from the forces of law and order."

"Wizard," Eldin rumbled, "you've made a big mistake bringing me here, for when I meet up with Borak, I'll-"

"You'll do nothing, my large friend," said Nyrass, unperturbed. "Now save your breath and don't argue, for you'll see soon enough that this Ebraim Borak is not the same man who sent you on your fool's quest."

Eldin might have argued for all the wizard's words, but at mat moment a door opened and a green-clad man bustled in, smiling broadly as he saw the four and bowing to them. Then, without a word being spoken, he set about to fill the wells of the room's many lamps where they stood in niches in the walls. All the while he hummed to himself and smiled, exuding an air of pleased satisfaction which was very nearly tangible.

For a long moment the questers stared at the man where he busied himself, then Eldin stepped forward and spun him about. "Borak!" The scar-faced dreamer's face was a mask of anger as he spat out the other's name. "Ebraim Borak!"

The smile never left the Ossaran's face for a moment. As Eldin scowled, so Borak smiled, and gradually it dawned on the brawny adventurer that indeed diis was not the man he had met in Hymat Zorathin's tavern on the Street of Rats so many nights ago. The same body and face, certainly, but not the same mind. Not any mind to speak of!

For Borak's smile was blank as his eyes, and no slightest sign of recognition showed upon his face. Eldin might be the man in the moon for all the Ossaran knew or cared.

Slowly the burly dreamer released Borak, who immediately returned to his task of filling the lamps. Aghast, Eldin turned his suddenly pale face to Nyrass; and the wizard smiled his sad, wan smile and said, "And are you satisfied now, Eldin the Wanderer? Or would your punishment have been greater than mine?"

No answer came, neither from Eldin nor from the others, and so Nyrass nodded and said: "Very well ... Now men, if you will please follow me into the final chamber? And here at last you shall see the shew-stone prison of the mad First One."

The final room had nothing of the opulence of the others. It was the wizard's workshop and made no pretense to be anything else. Benches littered with complicated apparatus were set against two of the cold stone walls; the flags of the floor were of unadorned stone; the ceiling had been blackened in places by strange fires and several supporting columns were stained with oddly-colored marks and splashes. One wall was covered with scrawled signs and symbols, while another was hung with a great mirror whose bronze frame was of rearing Krakens. But in the very center of the room-upon a stone table whose base was bolted to the floor-there stood the shew-stone of which Nyrass had spoken, and without preamble he led his guests to it.

The glass globe was smoky-blue, big as a large skull, perfectly round-and completely opaque!

"What?" grunted Eldin, peering into the veiled heart of die globe and seeing nothing. "What? And is this the supposed home of the tenth First One?"

Letting Eldin peer, Nyrass turned to Hero and Aminza. "Your friend is a hard man to convince," he wryly commented, "but I can understand his disappointment. It must be very hard to have come so far, only to be thwarted at the last." He turned back to Eldin. "Would you truly spy upon Klarek-Yam in his globe?" he asked.

"That I would," replied Eldin, "if only to be sure he's in there!"

"Very well, it shall be done. I long ago devised a means by use of which I might know what Klarek-Yam was about. Lately I have not used it; frankly, I've feared to learn what fresh marvels he has discovered toward making his escape! But now, since your curiosity demands it-"

He went to a bench and took up a slender, rune-carved rod of wood more nearly the shape and size that the adventurers would expect of a true wand, and with this in hand turned to the great mirror where it hung on its wall.

"The mirror is my window on the tiny world of the mad First One," he explained, "and my wand is the cord with which I draw the curtains!" And he tapped gently upon the kraken-adorned glass with the wand's tip, A thin beam of light so intense as to seem almost a solid shaft of silver leapt the distance from the shew-stone to the mirror, which in the same instant was no longer a mirror but a picture of such marvelous clarity that it seemed the glass itself had become a doorway through which Nyrass and his guests might step into the scene beyond.

The scene itself-when the adventurers had recovered their senses sufficiently to look-was of a room much like the very room in which they stood, with benches and books, chemical and alchemical apparatus and walls literally covered with scrawled glyphs and symbols of every esoteric connection. And yet no one was present in that room and nothing stirred.

"Oh?" said Eldin after a while, his voice less blustery than normal. "And where's Klarek-Yam?"

"You see those arched doorways?" answered Nyrass, "Klarek-Yam is in one of the many rooms beyond. Try not to be impatient, for he rarely absents himself from his experiments for very long. He has only one ambition-to be out of the shew-stone and about his insane task-which means that he must constantly try and try again to find a means by which to free himself. You see all of those great books there? That was Soomus' one oversight: that those tomes of magic were locked in the sphere with Klarek-Yam."

As Nyrass finished speaking something moved in the shadow of a doorway to the right of the scene, at which the adventurers crowded closer. A figure, manlike in outline, or so it seemed, clad in a hooded robe like the cowled cassock of some monkish order, entered the picture and turned toward a bench whereon a massive, black-bound book lay open at a page of glowing symbols.

Eldin, moving still closer to the mirror, accidentally disturbed a small glass flask where it stood upon a bench. The flask fell to the floor and shattered loudly. Nyrass' guests froze on the instant, but the wizard seemed not at all perturbed.

"He can't hear you," he told them, "though certainly he'll see us if he turns mis way. He, too, has a mirror, you see, so that this room of mine is transparent to him as his is to me."

"He looks much like a man, this Klarek-Yam," said Hero, his voice a whisper despite Nyrass' assurance that the First One could not hear him. "I did not picture the First Ones as being so ... manlike?"

"They are not!" said Nyrass with a shudder. "Be thankful he wears his robe, for beneatii it is a monster-at least in our eyes. Be thankful, too, that with this sole exception the First Ones are good as their aspect is evil!"

Even as Nyrass spoke the gray-robed figure in the mirror-room turned and looked directly at the four where they stood. Eldin took a hasty step to the rear as Aminza threw her arms about his burly neck and gave a little shriek. Hero's eyes went wide and the flesh began to crawl on his arms and back. Only Nyrass remained unmoved, and he nodded an accustomed greeting to the creature who gazed out of the mirror at him. Klarek-Yam nodded back, an almost imperceptible movement of his hooded head, and continued to stare.

They could only see the First One's eyes, but that was quite sufficient. They flared and sputtered like yellow pits of hell, those eyes-like great gaping sockets in a skull- and the intensity of their gaze was such that it gnawed at the very souls of the adventurers where they stared back.

"Well," said Nyrass after a moment, shattering the silence and causing his guests to start in shock, "and shall we try a little experiment of our own? For I didn't come all the way down here simply to satisfy your curiosity, my young friends. No, indeed. This may be the end of your quest, but it's only the beginning of mine."

"What do you mean, Nyrass?" asked Hero, his voice a little croaky from the sudden clamminess of his mouth.

"Why simply that you've brought me the wands I need to strengthen Soomus' barrier about Klarek-Yam, of course. At least, that is how I plan to use them in the very near future-with your permission?"

Hero and Aminza at once reached inside their shirts and produced their wands, and so swift was their reaction to Nyrass' request that he was given no chance to check them. In any case, his interest still centered upon the figure of Klarek-Yam where the First One stood in his mirror-room, and so he only became aware of their deadly blunder through the immediate change in the visage of the monster beyond the mirror.

"Not just now.'" cried Nyrass, staggering back away from the kraken-glass, his mouth falling open in horror as he saw the wands in Hero's and Aminza's hands. But already he was far too late.

For as each new descendant of Soomus had become Klarek-Yam's keeper down the eons, so had the mad First One sworn vengeance on the whole human race-in the dreamlands and in the waking world alike. And in all those countless years he had dreamed of this moment many thousands of times; when at last he would be able to use his eon-won dark knowledge to the full through the medium of the Wands of Power!

Thus, in that instant before Nyrass cried out, Klarek-Yam had ripped from his robe the third wand-had produced it and held it up to the mirror in his microscopic apartments in the shew-stone-and at his command there commenced a rapid and irreversible sequence of events.

Beams of silver light flashed from his wand, thwugh the mirror, and sped to the wands in the hands of the two adventurers. Hero and Aminza were hurled backward across the room, the wands snatched from them by an irresistible force; and as the silver beams withdrew through the mirror, so the wands went with them. Now Klarek-Yam once more possessed all three wands, and now too he could use them in his eon-plotted fashion.

Lathi's wand would provide the power needed by his own rod to melt the space-time barrier which surrounded him, and Thinistor's wand would guide him through me warp and into the land of Earth's dreams. The crazed First One seemed to swell outward then, filled with a terrible strength. He threw off his robe, held up the wands in triumph, and for one mad moment stood fully revealed-a gray upright slug with corrugated skin and tentacles for arms-before the mirror shivered into a thousand fragments!

As that occurred so Nyrass' shew-stone also disintegrated with a roar that shook the room and tossed wizard and dreamers alike against the walls like so many rag dolls, and when the reverberations of that great blast died away ... There stood Klarek-Yam, free at last, amidst shattered stone fragments where once the prison crystal had stood upon its table. His tentacles writhed namelessly and his eyes blazed hideously in his slug's head as he peered about the still smoking room; and in a moment his gaze alighted upon the figure of the wizard Nyrass where he struggled to his feet in a Uttered corner.

"Nyrass!" came a great croak like the massed grunting of toads. "Spawn of Soomus! Now feel the wrath of Klarek-Yam! Now journey where no being or thing ever journeyed before, and never shall again!"

The alien abomination pointed all three tentacle-wrapped wands at the half-stunned, stumbling wizard- and in that same instant a green-clad figure entered the room, took in the scene at a glance, threw himself headlong between the crazed First One and the helpless form of his master. Unsmiling for once, Ebraim Borak took the full burst of eerie energy which Klarek-Yam now released. For a single instant the Ossaran's outline seemed to pulse and glow-and then his empty green robe crumpled formlessly to the floor!

By now Hero and Eldin were on their feet, swords drawn, their faces fear-drained masks as they staggered toward Klarek-Yam. In their shocked condition they were no threat to the First One and he knew it. He ignored them and re-aligned his wands upon Nyrass. Then-

Klarek-Yam uttered a single, astonished, croaking shriek as the tentacle which held the wands withered, blackened and turned to ashes and smoke in an instant. His other appendages immediately followed suit, and the circular mouth in his rubbery head was all set to frame a second cry when the incredibly swift corruption caught up with it also, turning his head to motes of colored dust. And only a column of writhing, vile-smelling smoke remained where the maniac First One had stood.

The entire-decomposition-of Klarek-Yam's being had been so rapid that the falling wands had not yet clattered to the floor when the thing was over and done with ...

"It was Soomus saved us," Nyrass told them much later, when they had returned to the higher, less claustrophobic regions of the castle. "And to think I have underrated my ancestor all these many years. I might have known he'd foresee Klarek-Yam's eventual escape and take precautions against it. His method was simple, really. So long as Klarek-Yam remained within his shew-stone prison he was near-immortal, but if ever he left it-"

"All of those unnumbered centuries would catch up with him, eh?" guessed Hero.

"Exactly. And so ancient was the mad First One that he should have been dust a quarter-billion years ago .. ."

"But what of the rest of the First Ones?" queried Aminza. "The nine who lie sleeping in the great keep high in the mountains? Will they, too, decay and fly into dust when the Keeper rouses them up?"

"No, child, not them," Nyrass shook his old head. "The magic which holds them in thrall is the Magic of Science. That of my ancestor Soomus-" he shrugged. "That was only-magic!"

"Well, well!" said Eldin. "So Klarek-Yam's bottle-world was nothing really but a miniature Shangri-la, eh?"

"Shangri-la?" frowned Hero, as at hearing the name of some dimly distant, all but forgotten place.

"Er, yes," said Eldin knowledgeably, but he nevertheless matched Hero's frown. "It's, er, a valley that lies beyond the Onyx Columns of the South-"

"-You think!" cried Hero and Aminza together, and they all three laughed out loud.