The Forgotten Gods of Earth Read online

  The Forgotten Gods of Earth

  by Andrew J. Offutt

  Originally published in Worlds of IF, December 1966

  In the haunted caverns beneath ancient Earth he found an enemy that even he could not conquer!

  Kymon of Kir gazed up at the black castle towering into the dim sky, its turrets and minarets resembling dark fingers pointing the way to the forgotten gods of Earth. The Mother Planet of Man had come upon sad times, he thought, when she was reduced to scattered castle-keeps haunted by the ghosts of her illustrious history. Some said magic ruled Earth now; some said science, remembered by the sorcerers who made the Mother Planet an inhospitable place for all save themselves.

  Inhospitable enough it was without the scientist-sorcerers, Kymon thought, a planet full of desolation and twisted black remains of once-was. The descendants of Earth called her Atramentos, now, and shunned the blue-black ball circling tired old Sol.

  Kymon chuckled, the deep-throated sound of a giant of a man from a barbarian land. Men called Earth “barbarian”, too, but not those who had visited his own dark Kir. If magic reigned here, only a Kirian could prevail, Kymon knew — and at that a Kirian with a goodly sword and the muscle to back it up. Well, he thought, soon the black mage Gundrun and all his demonic guardians would go to meet the somber gods of Atramentos. Or he himself would. He loosened the pommel of his long glaive, Goreater, glanced at the ring on his finger and mounted the hill to the castle.

  A small man named Fejj had told him of the place. In the fabled Black Castle of Atramentos, he had said, lay the Princess Yssim, captive of the sorcerer Gundrun. A comely girl she was, with a body to bring fire into a man’s veins — or so she had been, when she had become Gundrun’s prisoner. The castle was rendered impregnable by his spells and his demons. The princess alone knew the whereabouts of the treasure-trove of the pirate Senek, destroyed these twenty years in the Coalsack. Gems and precious metals there were, Fejj had said in his narrow-eyed hiss, to ransom Emperor Titus himself. And Kymon had nodded and listened. The girl was merely sweetening to the spoils.

  A man such as Kymon did not go about rescuing women without good reason. Not, certainly, when they were so easily come by and, those of royal blood, notoriously spoiled and dangerous.

  Over cups of wine in a dim tavern in Yttocs, on Sark, the two men had agreed to share the treasure. Then because Kymon was a barbarous Kirian and such men could be trusted to rely upon their muscles and ability rather than shrewd double dealing, Fejj had told him how to reach the place. He had told, too, of the power of the ring he wore; while it made no magic it negated all spells cast upon the wearer. Guns and science were of no value on the planet men once called Earth, he had said; only magic and copper-backed steel could prevail there. And Kyman had chuckled and showed him his copper-pommeled sword without telling him how he had come by it. Besides, he had reminded the little man, Kirians were not allowed guns anyhow.

  They had made their pact and left, coming by the passage-money the same way Kymon had got the sword. On the great ship slashing through space Fejj had said, “Few men would I trust with the knowledge I have imparted to you Kymon of Kir. But ’tis well-known that barbarians are not back-stabbers, and —”

  And shortly after Kymon had been thus reminded that Fejj was no longer necessary, the little man had met with a terrible accident and had gone to repose in the ship’s refrigerators until planetfall. Kymon found that the ring fit his little finger perfectly.

  Now, gazing up at the castle, Kymon chuckled again. The universe was full of stupid men, he thought, and the myth of barbarian honor served the men of Kir well. He set his foot on the hill on which stood the castle.

  The monster bird came winging down like a giant stormcloud heavy with rain, its leathery wings flapping with the sound of thunder. It paused above his head, steadying itself on wings the size of space-freighters, then folded them and careened down at him.

  Full four bursts from the photon gun Kymon wasted on the bird before he believed Fejj’s words and slung the gun away. Goreater ate. Clapping a hand over the scratches laying bare the great sheaves of muscle in his chest, Kymon looked down at the flopping body of the bird. It writhed even in death, some awlful virescent ichor bubbling from its neck.

  Then it vanished.

  “Steel backed by copper!” Kymon shouted and swished the sword joyously, spitting in the direction of the discarded pistol. Then he went on, paying little attention to the wounds in his big chest. They would heal, as had scores of others.

  As he drew nearer he began to feel the strangeness of the place, the evil. Trailing tendrils of wraithy stuff like cobwebs seemed to writhe over his face. He blinked and shook his head and raised his hand to tear his way clear. But his hands touched nothing. There was nothing there; no cobwebs, no tendrils, merely the eerie feel of them. He shivered. Neither man nor beast had been woman-spawned to strike fear to the big barbarian’s heart. But this palpable, evil which came of warlocks and shades, the forgotten shadow-world of necromancy and specters, that otherworld of apparitions and divinations and things which a man could feel but not see . . . these brought a shiver to Kymon and set his teeth a-rattle in his head. He touched the ring, realizing he had not used it, that he had fought and destroyed a sorcerer’s demon with nought but his own thews and sword.

  But now fear laid on him fingers cold as the nordic winds of far-off Kir, tightened them about his heart. Again he shivered. He began to shake. He felt hot water and an atrabilous taste in his mouth and he turned away, whimpering, to flee down the hill.

  And then, his knees shaking, his hands chill and wet, he realized what was happening. He managed to mouth a foul barbaric curse despite the sorcery-induced fear which was attacking him. As if rooted in quicksand he turned slowly back to the castle. He raised his left hand, aiming the ring at the misty towers. “I defy you,” he shouted, and thrice he repeated the words Fejj had taught him. And the ring seemed to come alive, to glow and shimmer and pour strength down his arm.

  Magic or ancient science, it was effective. The haze vanished. The ghostwebs ceased their invisible twisting. His fear left him.

  And there before him stood the black castle of Atramentos.

  No longer was it a shadowy thing of fear and unholy blackness; now it was merely a towering pile of blackest basalt, gleaming liquidly even in the moonless night. The door rose before him, twice his height. A chain with links thick as his thumb was looped through the door handle and secured to great spikes on either side.

  Growling low in his throat, Kymon drew Goreater. He sucked in a mighty breath and, laying hold of the pommel with both hands, he swung the sword far back over his shoulder and brought it whistling down with all the strength of his corded muscles. Shock blazed up his arms like tongues of lightning. The sword rebounded and nearly took off his head.

  The chain held, rattling.

  Somewhere laughter rose to fill the air, a wind-howling cackle of glee and mockery. Kymon spun. There was nothing. Only the glistening Trinitite plain and the twisted remains of the civilization that had settled Kir, time out of mind.

  Kymon turned back to the castle, cursing. He bent to examine the door, chain, spikes . . . and saw that the spike on the left had been driven into the castle wall with such force that it had cracked the masonry. He smiled and sheathed his sword. Laying hold of the chain and the spike’s head with both hands, he braced one foot against the wall. Then he drew a deep breath and yanked.

  There was no loosening, no gradual feeling of give. One moment he was tugging with all his strength, his body shaking with the effort. The next he was sprawling heels-over-head as the spike slid from the wall with a rattle of the chain and a crumbling of stone. Kymon picke
d himself up and stepped across the forlorn chain. He set a foot against the door and shoved. It swung in without a sound; he had expected a creak from the aged hinges. An odor of death and mouldering corpses rushed out to embrace him. With Goreater ready in his hand lie entered the murkiness of the entry-hall.

  The serpent was almost upon him a before he knew of its existence. Its shimmering scales rose above him, its xaethic eyes gazed at him like the very fires of blackest hell. Far behind he could see its immense body stretching off along the hallway. He sniffed tihe evil odor of its breath as it hissed, felt the blast of fetid air and hurled himself aside as the eyes blazed up like the coals of a stirred fire and shot forward at him.

  Kymon moved with a swiftness greater even than the reptile’s. The great head swished past. Goreater swished after it, bit into the back of its head with a chunking sound. The monster body shivered and lashed in the final torment of death as the head plopped to the floor and rolled away. It exuded a vast pool of nigrescent ichor. The last lash of the terrible tail caught Kymon just below the knees, sending him skidding and sliding along the floor to sprawl in a great room beyond the hall. Even as he came to an abrasive stop he saw the serpentine body shimmer and vanish. Somehow he clung to Goreater.

  And good it was that he did.

  “Black devils of Gnish!” he muttered. He got to his feet, crouching, aching and smarting from more than one abrasion. Here there was light, bathing the big room and reflecting back from a gleaming floor of tesselated tile. Approaching him now were men who were not men, alive but not alive — creatures dead but not dead. Full half a score of them there were, bearing the gaping wounds that had been the violent death of them. The eyes of one popped wide, and his black tongue lolled forth as it had at the moment he had been slain by the reptile in some dark yesterday. They advanced, creatures returned to life by Gundrun’s evil spells, and Kymon saw himself mirrored in them. These were his predecessors; would-be heroes who had come here on the same mission as his. Now clawed hands rose as they came jerkily at him.

  The first Kymon met with flashing sword to send his arm flopping away across the floor, black blood spattering forth. The fingers continued to flex and clutch. The shriek ripped from the creature’s throat chilled Kymon’s very blood. But the howl and gore told him that though these men might be dead, they were alive, too, and could be killed . . . again. He hurled the thing aside, the scarlet stump of its arm pumping out pseudolife.

  And then Goreater was a flashing, live thing, spattering walls and ceiling and floor with the steaming crimson wake of its terrible smiting. He ran a black giant from Tiamar through and through and yanked free the sword, feeling the dying man’s claws tear his arm as he fell. A smallish fellow Kymon seized and gripped by his heels and swung him in an arc to down one, two, three of the others. Then he released the man and heard the revolting popping noise as his skull burst against the wall and spewed forth rank red and gray. Whilst the others shrank back, checked by their awe, Kyman struck the heads from the three men he had downed.

  Kymon’s battle cry ripped from his lips as he spun to the man whose arm he had lopped off. The fellow’s head leaped to join his severed arm on the gore-slippery floor. He turned in time to dodge an axe in the hands of a creature whose face was one great wound that had been ripped and shredded in some bygone time by the monster bird outside. Kymon’s foot swept up and completed the destruction of that dead face, crushing nose and teeth and bursting eyeballs from their sockets to sail like agates into the air. Blood bathed Kymon’s leg in warm stickiness.

  But four remained now, and Kymon roared at them to come join their comrades. They came, mindless things, restored but temporarily from the dead to serve as fighting machines for the master of this castle of horror. The cry of the maimed and the dying was in Kymon’s ears and his veins, and his own battle cry joined them to spur him forward.

  They fell, gushing forth their carmine juices, their souls leaping forth to meet their liberator, the flashing Goreater. And the awesome sword drank and ate; and once again these men died. The musty halls of that darkling castle reeked and smoked with blood and gore, rang with the fearsome cry of the big barbarian from the mountains of far Kir, with the dying cries of those sent to destroy him.

  And then he stood alone. His nostrils flared as he stood panting, surrounded by the corpses and heads and limbs no longer joined one to the other. His feet were planted in curdling blood. Their blood and his dripped from his hands, trickled warmly down his bare legs.

  Deliberately, with the unconcerned industriousness of a woodsman cutting trees, he hacked the heads from those not already beheaded. In the event he failed, Gundrun would no longer use these men who should long ago have been walking the afterworld with the shades of their friends.

  He bellowed out his rage and his challenge.

  “Gundrun! Blackest creature on Earth’s face — resurrector of slain men! Gundrun! Your oversized sparrow died outside — your swollen fishing worm in the hall — and at my feet lie ten heads severed from their decomposing bodies! Gundrun, commander of the legions of hell! What else send you to meet Kymon of Kir?”

  His voice ran down empty halls, dashed into dark empty rooms and out again, slashed through the thick webs of long undisturbed spiders and set them a-tremble, rose up the long stairway before him, shouted back at him from shroud-draped walls of shiny basalt.

  He waited. Again he filled his lungs to roar out his challenge, again he flung wide his jaws to shout.

  Then at the head of the steps stood Gundrun, black sorcerer of Atramentos.

  His eyes blazed down at Kymon’s as had the dead serpent’s. A slender nose arced out between those eyes, hooked like the beak of the prodigious bird. Below that nose writhed tendrils of mustache like the fear-wraiths that had touched Kymon outside the warlock’s lair. And below the mustache was a lipless slash of a mouth, resembling nothing more than the old wounds of the dead men at Kymon’s feet. His body was lost in a long, ungirt robe of unreflecting black.

  “Kymon of Kir, is it?” Gundrun asked, and he laughed, and Kymon knew then the source of the disembodied laughter he had heard outside. “And you have destroyed my guardians and penetrated to the very marrow of my keep! Well Kirian, well-met! Join me here, mightiest of men, that I need fear no more such intrusions. Be my guardian of the Black Castle!”

  Kymon’s eyes glittered like the bubbling tar pits of Midaldithon as he stared back at the thaumaturge. “Join you, Hell-creature? Live here as guardian of this tomb? I love life too much to live here with death!”

  Gundrun’s drooping mustaches wriggled like tentacles, and his mouth pretended to smile. He waved his hand, tracing invisible patterns in the air. And the air was filled with the golden glow of a thousand lights; the birdsongs of lutes and the belly-booms of drums and the ululating skirl of pipes. A vision of the finest of succulent foods from every galaxy, the richest wines served in aureate goblets. There were pillows of the softest fabrics and hues. And there were women; slender girls with breasts round and cupped as the goblets, eyes telling of love and desire, hips churning and yearning toward him. And there were others, too, deep-chested women with cavernous dark navels winking in their round bellies and bronzed arms to crush a man in their embrace. Kymon gasped; they were Kirian women! Women of his own world, their eyes for him and him alone, their bodies coppery chalices of sensuality. Kymon saw, and his great sword was forgotten in his lifeless hand as he started toward them with eyes like those of the dead-alive men he had slain. He dropped the sword, raised his hands.

  And the vision flickered and faded. Only for a moment did it pale, then it began to return in full color and sound and promise — but in that brief failing of Gundrun’s powers the mists faded from Kymon’s eyes and brain as if dissipated by the morning sun. Again his eyes, clear and blazing, glared up the steps at the black-robed man.

  “Call you this foul illusion life? Call you the world of men shallow? Nay, sorcerer — it is your necromancy which is shallow! Your sp
ell has but reminded me of what will be mine when I return to Kir a rich man. Your world is death, and I am here to see that you join the other dead things in it!” He frowned, slowly lowered his head to follow the sorcerer’s gaze. And then he knew why the illusion had flickered, why Gundrun stared, why there was the hint of fear in his eyes. Kymon was looking down at the ring.

  He scooped up his sword and set a foot upon the steps, grinning. And then Gundrun raised his arms, wrists like clean-picked skeletons emerging from loose black sleeves. Blue light flickered and danced at his fingertips. In that instant that he stiffened his arms, pointing his talons at the barbarian, Kymon flung up his hand and pointed the ring. He shouted, three ringing times, “I defy you!”

  Lightning leaped from Gundrun’s fingers. Down at Kymon it crackled in sizzling streams of cobalt blue. It flashed before his face so that he winced and closed his eyes against its searing glare. But he felt nothing; nothing save the power and strength coursing down his arm from the ring, shaking him as his voice had shaken the dusty cobwebs.

  He opened his eyes. All around him shimmered the blue-sizzling lightning, but it was checked, held at bay by the power of the ring. With a wild roar he hurled himself up the stairs, holding the ring before him and swinging up Goreater. His war cry filled the air.

  “When came you by that accursed ring?” Gundrun shouted, and fear shrilled his voice. “The ring of Br — it negates my mag — get back — NO!”

  Gundrun of Atramentos died, screaming and waving his skeletal arms as Goreater bit through his skull and forehead and nose and mouth and neck and was covered to its copper hilt with spurting blood. Kymon left the body where it lay and bounded back down the steps. He waded again through the noisome river of gore with its islands of headless corpses. He rushed down one dim corridor and up another, leaving scarlet prints in his wake. Then he found the huge brass-bound door Fejj had described.