Spawn of the Winds Read Online Free

clear the frost and ice away from an area of the glass. And so she looked out.
    Picture it for yourself, Juanita: to be in a plane full of icy corpses, like the interior of some weirdo outsize freezer, listening to a strange rushing hum, like a distant wind blowing through a thousand telegraph wires. To know the nightmare of being lost and alone, trapped in an ice-tomb high in mountain fastnesses. And then to peep out and discover that as bad as your plight might have seemed a moment ago, its terrors could never have equalled the horror facing you now. For staring right back at her, with the plane held at arm’s length in front of him as he flew through the star-voids, was Ithaqua, the Thing that Walks on the Wind!
    Strange starlanes—a hyperspace dimension where inconceivable currents rush and roar in interstellar spaces—and a being of utterly alien energies who knows the ways between the spheres as an eel knows the derelict and weed-strewn deeps of the dark Sargasso. But it wasn’t only this sudden inundating flood of revelation that caused Tracy to faint away on the frosted floor of the plane. Neither that nor the sight of strange stars shooting dizzyingly by—like summer showers of meteorites magnified a thousand times—as Ithaqua hurtled through the void. No, it was the look on the Wind-Walker’s face. It was those eyes, seeming to peel away the metal hull of the plane like tinsel to stare into Tracy’s very soul. For she knew that those eyes saw her even as they narrowed in that inhuman face—and she knew, too, that they had filled suddenly with all the lusts of hell.
    Thinking back to what Tracy told me when I came out of the freeze on Borea, I’m inclined to believe that time must be different for Ithaqua when he glides along the star winds, and for anything he carries with him. Not slowed down, as might be expected, but accelerated somehow. According to our calculations we’ve been on Borea for three months, and we left Earth four months ago, but Tracy reckons
she slept only three or four times during the whole trip. As for myself, I wouldn’t know one way or the other. I do remember dreams—of Tracy’s head on my cold chest and her hands on my face, and her voice, crying out to me about the horror outside the plane.
    But that’s jumping things a bit. I’ll tell it as Tracy told it to me.
    When she came to after her faint it was dark; she’d accidentally knocked off the cabin lights when she slipped down the wall. The control-panel lights were still on though, and she could see well enough in their glow. Deciding to leave the main lights off to conserve the batteries, she set about making herself a sandwich and some coffee.
    That was when she first noticed that despite the ice and frost everywhere she herself was not unbearably cold. And the star-stone about her neck was warm.
    She felt a lot better after a bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee; but she kept well away from the windows and refused even to think about what was outside. And through all this there was no sensation of free-falling, none of the physiological phenomena of spaceflight at all; which leads me to believe that in fact Ithaqua was moving between dimensions.
    Then Tracy noticed another queer thing. She had moved over to sit beside me on the cabin floor, and as she sipped the last of her coffee she saw that my right arm had moved; it had left a clear space in the frost on the rubberized surface of the deck. She caught her breath. I couldn’t be alive, could I? No, not possibly. There I was, white as a snowflake and looking stiff as mutton in a freezer. But putting her ear to my chest Tracy listened breathlessly until she heard a heartbeat. Just one, and then several seconds later, another.
    From then on, except during those periods when she was sleeping, Tracy spent her time frantically trying to rouse me from my strange, frozen sleep; not only me but Whitey and Jimmy, too. Jimmy