Spawn of the Winds Read Online Free Page B

boarded. Tracy didn’t show herself until we were airborne and well to the north. And like a fool, after first blowing my stack, I decided to let her stay. To head back then would have been to slow the work down for a whole day, and the team was anxious to get on with the job. In any case, there wouldn’t be a great deal for Tracy to see, would there?
    So that was how she came to be on board, and looking back now I suppose it’s just as well for the rest of us that she was. God only knows what our fate might have been without her. But I’ve been straying a bit, I think.
    After her third or fourth period of sleep, Tracy woke to an unsettling, irritable and unaccustomed feeling quite different from any emotional disturbance she might have expected to suffer in her present circumstances. She felt drawn somehow to the frosted windows, and even began to clear a large area of one of them before she realized what she was doing, but not before the huge form of the horror hurtling through the void outside began to take on an ominous shape through the glass.
    Then Tracy knew that the compulsion she felt and the inner voice she heard in her head insistently demanding that she warm the glass of the window until it cleared to its normal transparency, was not her own but the hypnotically telepathic voice of the being who now rushed with the plane on an unguessable course. And recognizing the fact that she knew him, Ithaqua grew angry. He doubled, then redoubled his mental effort to control her.
    She saw his alien lust clearly in her mind even as she stepped
closer to the window, reaching out her warm, trembling zombie hands to the task imposed by the Wind-Walker’s will. And she knew, too, his purpose; to bend her mind, body and soul, completely and everlastingly to his will through those evilly flaring eyes of his, which loomed dully behind an all-too-thin layer of frosted glass.
    And instinctively, impelled by horror alone, Tracy’s hands flew to her breast, finding my star-shaped talisman there and unconsciously pressing that sigil of the Elder Gods to her heart. Instantly the Wind-Walker withdrew from her mind, recoiling and shrivelling before that abhorred symbol of the power of Good as a feather before a candle’s flame. And Tracy did not know why, suddenly, the magnet pull on her mind was at an end, leaving her stumbling, numb, almost completely drained of strength. She only knew that beyond the semi-opaque window those eyes blazed more hideously yet, and that the plane now shook like a toy in the fist of a demented giant as Ithaqua’s rage brought on a massive trembling.
    She moved away from the window on unsteady legs and gradually the shaking of the plane subsided. For a spell she moved dazedly about the aircraft, listening to the maddeningly slow beatings of our hearts and doing what she could to improve our comfort until, feeling hunger stir, she turned herself again to making coffee and preparing something to eat. And as she was about that task, the temperature began to drop in the aircraft, plunging in the space of only a minute or so from its previously frozen chill into sub-zero temperatures. A sheet of deep white stretched itself over the windows of the nose and fuselage, completely obscuring once more the horror sailing on the winds of the void outside. Icy fingers spread over the metal walls, rubber floor coverings, equipment and motionless men.
    It was no natural cold, but an awful condition brought about through the will of Ithaqua. As such it could not affect Tracy, unknowingly protected as she was by the star-shaped symbol of Eld that she wore about her neck, instead it speeded her to the task of throwing extra blankets over our all but inanimate forms where they lay about the floor, to insulate us as much as possible from the incredibly cold.
    Having done what she could for us and astonished and frightened that she herself should feel nothing of the effects of the plummeting