Shadows Out of Time

By the time the little group reached the clearing where their leader had discovered the barred door to the dungeons of the Blind Ones, Crom-Ya had revealed his plan to them and was relieved to learn of their sympathy. He then had them direct their power wands at the four corners of the huge metal door. The portal soon glowed white and sprang out of its frame. Two of the cones could not evade the hurtling mass nor survive the damage to their bodies. The third, daunted by the tragedy, declared he would wait outside while Crom-Ya descended. If they had been followed and were discovered, the facts would speak for themselves, so his desire to remain “on guard” must be nothing more than fear. The Great Race were bad enough, but how much worse must be the beings whom they so feared?

As the Cimmerian mind had dearly hoped, there was a long ramp leading from the opening to the dark depths below. He began slowly to make his way down. The darkness around him was not impenetrable since his alien sense organs were not precisely like human eyes. They operated more like the sonar with which bats are gifted.

His sense of the passage of time in this realm, even above ground, was fluctuating, unstable. He had not been able to grasp it. So he was not sure how long his descent took, but at length he came to a level floor. He knew he needn’t go any further when he realized that the Blind Beings, a huge mob of them, had gathered to meet him. In a moment he would know their attitude toward him, the only cone-creature any of them could have seen in millennia — if they lived so long. He realized he knew nothing about these beings. Had the original generation imprisoned here eventually succumbed, replacing themselves with new generations? Or were they the originals? Would they slay him, a representative, as they must suppose, of their agelong oppressors?

But he had nothing to fear. They must have had telepathic abilities not dissimilar to those of the Great Race who so feared them. Crom-Ya learned much that day. It is useless to try to represent in words what they said, since their medium of communication was so very different from that of human beings of the Hyborian Age or ours. But we may share the gist.

The Blind Beings conveyed that they were no invaders but rather the original inhabitants of the city, long ago displaced by the invaders from a world called something analogous to “Yith.” None knew what danger or disaster they had fled via mind transference. But the so-called Blind Beings had not been psychically displaced as Crom-Ya and so many others had been, as whole planetary civilizations and species had been, but rather had been driven underground with weapons fashioned by the Great Race. The invaders from Yith had taken up residence in a primitive cone race native to earth, supplying them with an intelligence evolution had denied them. On their own world, those of Yith had existed in the form of sentient gases or vapors. They were thus practiced in mind-jumping, but this had not been needful in the case of the Blind Beings, whose amoeboid forms had not proven suitable for some reason.

To his utter astonishment, the beings welcomed Crom-Ya as their prophesied deliverer! Now that he had opened the way for them, they would emerge from the depths to overrun the Great Race, sending them fleeing into some other world. Well, perhaps, he supposed, they were right! This was exactly his goal! Fleetingly, Crom-Ya wondered if this “prophecy” had somehow been planted in the minds of these creatures or their ancestors by Rang-Thalun from the distant future. After all he had seen and lived through, nothing any longer seemed impossible, or even unlikely.

“I have four of their weapons here. You can use them to blow open the other doors inside the Great Race’s fortress, your fortress! Of course, they possess a stockpile of these force-weapons, but from all I have seen I believe their plan is not to fight you, but only to flee into some future world by mind-projection as they have before. They post armed sentries at all the doors, but I now believe they are intended only to prevent their captives doing what we are doing.” Withal, he held out the four weapons, one in each tentacle; each was taken by a huge, translucent pseudopod. He received no further communication from the Blind Beings, but he measured their excitement from the sudden chorus of eerie flute-like whistling.

The snail-like locomotion of the Great Race body was quite effective against the weight of gravity. It seemed to take less time to ascend the ramp than it had taken to descend it, but who knew? There was, after all, his inconsistent perception of time.