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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 4892481" data-attributes="member: 3285">Castle Ambrose: Part 22 – The Viper-Encircled MirrorThere were strange and disastrous portents in the aspect of the skies: flame-bearded meteors had been seen to fall beyond the eastern hills; a comet far in the south had swept the stars with its luminous bosom for a few nights, and had then faded, leaving among men the prophecy of bale and pestilence to come. By day the air was oppressed and sultry, and the blue heavens were heated as if by whitish fires. Clouds of thunder, darkling and withdrawn, shook their fulgurant lances on the far horizons, like some beleaguering Titan army. A murrain, such as would come from the working of wizard spells, was abroad among the cattle. All these signs and prodigies were an added heaviness on the burdened spirits of men, who went to and fro in daily fear of the hidden preparations and machinations of hell.In Hastur, tales of the grave giving up its sheeted dead were rife.  They were admitted without question by the guards at the city gate. Hastur was already thronged with people who had fled to the sanctuary of its stout walls from the adjacent countryside; and no one, not even of the most dubious character, was denied admittance. The walls were lined with archers and pike-bearers, gathered in readiness to dispute the entrance of the dead. Crossbowmen were stationed above the gates, and mangonels were mounted at short intervals along the entire circuit of the ramparts. The city seethed and hummed like an agitated hive.Hysteria and pandemonium prevailed in the streets. Pale, panic-stricken faces milled everywhere in an aimless stream. Hurrying torches flared dolorously in the twilight that deepened as if with the shadow of impending wings arisen from Erebus. The gloom was clogged with intangible fear, with webs of stifling oppression. Through all this rout of wild disorder and frenzy, Hali, like a spent but indomitable swimmer breasting some tide of eternal, viscid nightmare, made his way slowly to the podium. “I am Hali,” he told the crowd.  “And I was a pupil of Nathaire, the necromancer who animated the colossus that even now ravages our land. Nathaire binds and hurls into the bitter depths of the Black Lake certain victims, such as were designated to feed the hunger of Him That Slept Beneath. And I believe those who constitute the body of the colossus are the same that were fed to the Thing in the Lake. I have a solution, a powder that I have crafted that will cause the dead to return peacefully to their tombs and lay down in a renewed slumber of death.”There was a mounting hubbub in the streets, and above the shrill, dismal clamor of frightened voices, the far-off roaring of the giant. Hali shouted louder to be heard.“The dust must be blown into the beast’s face.  I have enough for three attempts.  Who will take up this challenge?”Sebastian stepped forward.  “We will.” They had no time to lose if they were to post themselves in a place of vantage from which they could throw Hali’s powder into the nostrils of the hundred-foot colossus. The city walls and even most of the church spires, were not lofty enough for this purpose. But the great cathedral, standing at the core of Hastur, was the one place from whose roof they could front the invader with success. It was a certainty that the men-at-arms on the walls could do little to prevent the monster from entering and wreaking his malevolent will. No earthly weapon could injure a being of such bulk and nature; for even a cadaver of normal size, reared up in this fashion, could be shot full of arrows or transfixed by a dozen pikes without retarding its progress.Hastily Sebastian filled a huge leather pouch with the powder; and carrying the pouch at his belt, he joined the agitated press of people in the street. Many were fleeing towards the cathedral, to seek the shelter of its august sanctity; and he had only to let himself be borne along by the frenzy-driven stream.The cathedral nave was packed with worshipers, and priests whose voices faltered at times with inward panic were saying solemn masses. Unheeded by the wan, despairing throng, they found a flight of coiling stairs that led tortuously to the gargoyle-warded roof of the high tower.Here Beldin and Sebastian posted, crouching behind the stone figure of a cat-headed griffin. They could see, beyond the crowded spires and gables, the approaching giant, whose head and torso loomed above the city walls. The limbs were rounded into bossed, enormous thews, like the limbs of giants; the flanks were like an insuperable wall; the deltoids of the mighty chest were broad as platform; the hands could have crushed the bodies of men like millstones.... But the face of the stupendous monster, seen in profile athwart the pouring moon, was the face of the Nathaire — re-magnified a hundred times, but the same in its implacable madness and malevolence!A cloud of arrows, visible even at that distance, rose to meet the monster, who apparently did not even pause to pluck them from his hide. Great boulders hurled from mangonels were no more to him than a pelting of gravel; the heavy bolts of arbalests, embedded in his flesh, were mere slivers.Nothing could stay his advance. The tiny figures of a company of pikemen, who opposed him with out-thrust weapons, swept from the wall above the eastern gate by a single sidelong blow of the seventy-foot pine that he bore for a cudgel. Then, having cleared the wall, the colossus climbed over it into Hastur.Roaring, chuckling, laughing like a maniacal Cyclops, he strode along the narrow streets between houses that rose only to his waist, trampling without mercy everyone who could not escape in time, and smashing in the roofs with stupendous blows of his bludgeon. With a push of his left hand he broke off the protruding gables, and overturned the church steeples with their bells clanging in dolorous alarm as they went down. A woeful shrieking and wailing of hysteria-laden voices accompanied his passing.Straight towards the cathedral he came, as Sebastian had calculated, feeling that the high edifice would be made the special butt of his malevolence.The streets were now emptied of people; but, as if to hunt them out and crush them in their hiding-places, the giant thrust his cudgel like a battering ram through walls and windows and roofs as he went by. The ruin and havoc that he left was indescribable.Soon he loomed opposite the cathedral tower on which they waited behind the gargoyle. The colossus’ head was level with the tower, and its eyes flamed like wells of burning brimstone as it drew near. Its lips were parted over stalactitic fangs in a hateful snarl; and it cried out in a voice like the rumbling of articulate thunder:"Ho! Ye puling priests and devotees of a powerless God! Come forth and bow to Nathaire the master, before he sweeps you into limbo!"An insupportable terror seized Sebastian. He sought to move, but found he could not.  It was then that Beldin, with hardihood beyond comparison, rose from his hiding-place and stood in full view of the raging colossus."Draw nearer, Nathaire, if indeed it be you, foul robber of tombs and charnels," he taunted. "Come close, for I would hold speech with you."A monstrous look of astonishment dimmed the diabolic rage on the colossal features. Peering at Beldin as if in doubt or incredulity, the giant lowered his lifted cudgel and stepped close to the tower, till his face was only a few feet from the intrepid dwarf. Then, when he had apparently convinced himself of Beldin’s identity, the look of maniacal wrath returned, flooding his eyes with fire and twisting his lineaments into a mask of malignity. His left arm came up in a prodigious arc, with twitching fingers that poised horribly above the head of the dwarf, casting upon him a vulture-black shadow in the full-risen sun. Beldin saw the white, startled faces of the necromancer's pupils, peering over his shoulder from their plank-built basket."Is that you, Stranger?" the colossus roared stormily. "I thought you were rotting in the Castle Ambrose — and now I find you perched atop of this accursed cathedral which I am about to demolish! ... You had been far wiser to remain trapped in the mists."His breath, as he spoke, blew like a charnel-polluted gale on the student. His vast fingers, with blackened nails like shovelblades, hovered in ogreish menace.  With his eyes so focused on Beldin in the cathedral, Nathaire’s colossus did not expect the arrival of Vlad, held aloft by the magic of the Sword of Sylaire.   As the twitching fingers descended towards Beldin, Vlad emptied the contents of the pouch in the giant's face as he flew, and the fine powder, mounting in a dark-gray cloud, obscured the snarling lips and palpitating nostrils from his view.Anxiously they watched the effect, fearing that the powder might be useless after all, against the superior arts and diabolical resources of Nathaire. But miraculously, as it seemed, the evil lambence died in the pit-deep eyes, as the monster inhaled the flying cloud. His lifted hand, narrowly missing the crouching dwarf in its sweep, fell lifelessly at his side. The anger was erased from the mighty, contorted mask, as if from the face of a dead man; the great cudgel fell with a crash to the empty street; and with drowsy, lurching steps, and listless, hanging arms, the giant turned his back to the cathedral and retraced his way through the devastated city.“You,” Sebastian said to Vlad, recovering some of his composure, “are a true hero.”The colossus muttered dreamily to itself as it went; and people who heard it swore that the voice was no longer the awful, thunderswollen voice of Nathaire, but the tones and accents of a multitude of men, amid which the voices of certain of the ravished dead were recognizable. And the voice of Nathaire himself, no louder now than in life, was heard at intervals through the manifold mutterings, as if protesting angrily.Climbing the eastern wall as it had come, the colossus went to and fro for many hours, no longer wreaking a hellish wrath and rancor, but searching, as people thought, for the various tombs and graves from which the hundreds of bodies that composed it had been so foully reft. From charnel to charnel, from cemetery to cemetery it went, through all the land; but there was no grave anywhere in which the dead colossus could lie down.Then, towards evening, men saw it from afar on the red rim of the sky, digging with its hands in the soft, loamy plain beside the river Isoile. There, in a monstrous and self-made grave, the colossus laid itself down, and did not rise again. The ten pupils of Nathaire, it was believed, unable to descend from their basket, were crushed beneath the mighty body; for none of them was ever seen thereafter.“For your efforts, we bestow upon you the Viper-Encircled Mirror,” said Hali.  “Use it wisely.”</blockquote>

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