Robert Adams - The Savage Mountains

She opened her slender arms to him and he entered into Her embrace and he found Her silver-hued flesh cool and pleasing to the touch and the scent of Her was redolent of Moon-washed hills thick-grown with wild thyme. Their lips met, locked, and Her kiss was cold fire, consuming all his being, leaving nought behind save the aroused and stiffening ardor of his loins.

And when he had worshiped in the manner She desired, when his loins had freely poured out a measure of their most precious offering, then did the two arise from the billowy, silver couch and stroll, hand in hand, across the springy, silver-bladed turf, to where a silver fountain plashed misty silver water. They sat down on the cool stone verge of the basin—all white marble, veined with the Holy Silver.

She spoke. “Dearest Kohg, the future of your people can be far brighter than you and other mortals now believe. Once more will I allow you to spy out those places and people and events which will shape the good and the ill.

“I need not instruct you, for you have done this before. Observe the past; see or be one with the present, as you desire; then descry the futures which lie ahead and choose the one you think best for your people … our people.

“When, at last, you are done, return to me and I will again send you home.

“Go you, now, loved lover.”

Beneath his hurtling body, the night-cloaked mountains rushed by. The nahkhahrah saw twinkling lights ahead, swooped lower and recognized his village and the jagged sprawl of camps surrounding it. He swept on, eastward, over the range which lay between the village and the wind-scoured, flinty waste of the Great Plateau. He blinked in amazement when he saw the huge stone-and-timber fort now rising above the icy plain. It had been reported to him, naturally, by his scouts, but they had failed to impress him with the awesome size and strength of the defenses. Even without wishing a glimpse of the possible outcome, he dismissed all thoughts of hurling his Ahrmehnee against those stout, well-manned walls.

Veering to his left, he plunged northward. Only a few days’ ride from his village, thousands of lowland cavalry slumbered in and around a deserted village. A day behind them, wild creatures scuttled about a battlefield, crouching upon stiff Ahrmehnee corpses and gorging themselves on cold human flesh. And farther north lay horror upon horror of burned villages; the dead—or what the ravenous scavengers had left of them—lay thickly sown and living folk huddled, shivering, in the inhospitable mountains.

Turning about, the nahkhahrah bore to the south. Here, the camped lowlanders were not in one place, but in many, widely scattered. Behind them, forty miles wide, lay a swath of death amid ashes and ruin. The carnage had been fearsome here, and the destruction far more total than that to the north.

“He who wrought this,” the nahkhahrah thought, “must be truly a monster of the Ancient Evil.”

“Monsters of the Ancient Evil are assuredly abroad in these mountains.” Her voice once more enveloped him. “But he who despoiled these, your folk, is not one of them, dear Kohg.”

Recalling his plan to seize the Valley of the Maidens, the nahkhahrah bore about to the northwestward and, presently, he was gliding above the battlemented hills and ridges into a bank of noisome mist. From under the mist shone an eerie, roseate glow. The glow was strongest near the center of the largest vale, and he swept toward it. The air in the valley was warm, almost hot, and as he approached the source of that rosy radiance, the heat increased manyfold.

Something warned him to not come any closer to his objective, so he dove through the mist just shy of a huge fissure in the rocks. It belched forth a steady column of smoke and stench which brought tears to the eyes and acute discomfort to the skin. Waves of unbearable heat bartered at him, and he blinked himself away. The clear menace of that fissure sent a shudder coursing through him.

Rising swiftly, he blinked the future, six moons ahead, and saw a scene of utter desolation. Tumbled rocks surrounded a wide bowl of bubbling, smoking almost-liquid. Nowhere was there any sign of a living creature.

“But… but, Lady? How? Why?” he begged silently.

And he felt himself whisked back to the present. Out of the yawning mouth of the entry cavern filed a long line of pack animals. Some bore strange devices strapped upon their backs, others, panniers which he could sense contained gold and silver, tons of the precious metals. The train was guided by strange-looking men and women in stranger garments. At its head rode three he recognized: the People-of-Powers. And though they spoke in a language he knew he had never heard, he could understand them.

“You’re dead certain the charges will do what we planned?” queried Dr. Erica Arenstein anxiously. “Those that the gas didnt kill, those who only got a whiff of it, are going to be rather angry when they waken and find they’ve been robbed.”

The Ahrmehnee-looking man who rode on her left snorted derisively. “Scant need of fear from that quarter, my dear Erica. Every last horse in their herd is presently roaming about these mountains, if not still running.”

“Don’t be suicidally cocksure, Dr. Corbett,” the woman admonished him. “They are a stubborn race. If need be, they’ll track us on foot, and unless we can get better speed out of these damned mules than we got in bringing them north, we’ll be run down within a day’s ride of here.”

“Not to worry, honey,” assured the other Ahrmehnee, him to whom she had first spoken, now riding a bit behind as the trail had become too narrow for three abreast. He glanced at an odd bracelet on his left wrist, then stated, “The tunnel will be sealed in thirty-two minutes, and before any of them—or many of them, at least—can climb up through those caverns and go down the walls, the main charges will blow. But by that time, well have that mountain yonder between us and the volcano. I calculate that the charges I planted will be just enough to trigger a full-scale eruption.”

The woman, whom the nahkhahrah had known as Sahrah Sahrohyuhn, threw back her head and laughed merrily … and the nahkhahrah thought that never had he heard a more chilling sound.

“There, Kohg Taishyuhn, ride those you would term ‘monsters.’”

“But … but, Lady, they are of You. They possess Powers.”

“Poor mortal Kohg, you have been deceived. Those are not of Me. They are of a cankering sore upon the face of the troubled land. They and their kind honor not Gods but, rather, an abstraction they call ‘Science.’ Long, long ago, when untold millions of the races of man had forsaken the Gods to grovel at the altars of Science, the monstrous creations of that false god almost swept the lands clean of human life. Your people know of this through the tales of ‘The War of the Earth-Gods’ and ‘The Great Catastrophe,’ Kohg.

“Few men survived the holocaust. Even today, the lands are peopled by but a bare shadow of the numbers on whom I once shed My rays. These Ancient Monsters move and breathe only through an unspeakable perversion of the Laws of Nature. And—their future objective is nothing less than the enslavement of all other living creatures. Not many recognize the menace they present, Kohg, and one who does is him they would have had you make war upon, him you call ‘Undying Devil,’ him who calls himself, ‘Milo Morai, High Lord of the Confederation.’ “

“But, the Devil is my enemy,” protested the nahkhahrah. “He drove my people from our rich lands, drove us into these mountains, and now have his folk soaked the earth with Ahrmehnee blood yet again. He is Your enemy, as well, Lady. He worships Your enemy, Sun.”

The Voice remained cool and soothing in and about him. “He is not My enemy. Dear Kohg, I am all true Gods. I but appear to men in the guise they venerate and expect. To you, I am Moon Goddess, to Milo, am I God of Sun and Wind; some call That which is Me Steel or Rain; in the north I am worshiped as Blue Lady; even farther north, in the Black lands, men call upon Me as Ahlah.