Spawn of the Winds by Brian Lumley Page B

momentarily as a great queen’s to the ringing cheers of her subjects.
    Her eyes shone, then for the space of a single instant blazed bright carmine, twin stars in her regal face!
    Whitey nodded again, then said, “The safest hunch I ever had in
my life, Hank. That woman is without doubt a child of Ithaqua, and we must thank our lucky stars that she appears to have broken away from her monstrous father!”
    II
    On the Ship of Northan
    (Recorded through the Medium of Juanita Alvarez)
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    Half an hour later, during which time the ski-borne ships were brought about and the great bears paraded up onto their decks to be chained to individual rings, the last few wounded men and animals were being brought aboard when Armandra herself took her place at the prow of this ship of her warlord.
    During that interval we had also met Northan the Warlord, if it could be called a meeting. A big man, tall as myself and muscled about his arms and shoulders like one of the bears, he had paused momentarily in the issuing of multilingual commands to stride to the prow of the ship and look us over. He literally did that; looked us over, and the frown of disdain that grew on his darkly handsome face told me that he hardly considered us worth the effort.
    I immediately, irrationally, took a dislike to him. Blue-eyed with light brown skin and long dark hair, his face and form seemed to me to hold elements of many races, a powerful lineage.
    My dislike increased by leaps and bounds when he casually chucked Tracy under the chin, lifted her head and grunted grudgingly. Before I could say or do anything lie had strode away again, but from then on I watched him more closely; not because I believed that Tracy needed a watchdog, but simply because I don’t like being held in any sort of contempt. The man who does that to me or mine must then live up to it.
    I was still thinking dark and as yet unjustified thoughts when finally Armandra came aboard. Her arrival at the prow of the snow-ship was as awe-inspiring as anything we had seen of her yet, for of course she walked down the wind to step aboard the vessel from an invisible platform of air that buoyed her up as if she were a bubble.
    Watching Northan as he strode the deck issuing his orders and pointing here and there with the stock of a short whip, I turned only
in time to see her take the last step that brought her aboard—from a position some fifteen to twenty feet above the frozen surface of the plain—and I would have missed even that last step but for the sudden gasp that went up from the vessel’s crew. That and the fact that all around me men were falling to their knees, heads bowed in absolute reverence. Kota’na went down instantly, dragging Jimmy Franklin with him unprotesting; even Whitey knelt, though it brought a moan of pain to his lips to have to bend his wounded leg. I couldn’t see Tracy for she stood slightly to my rear, but I later learned that even she had humbly lowered her head; Tracy, as proud a girl as ever walked.
    Without any shadow of doubt this Woman of the Winds had magic; a magic which, while my body must ever stay rooted to earth, was nevertheless powerful enough to send my soul walking on air. Oh, yes, she was beautiful, this Armandra.
    Draped as she was in a white fur smock, still her long full body was a wonder of half-real, half-imagined curves that grew out of the perfect pillars of her white thighs. Her neck, framed now in the red silk of her tresses, was long and slender, adorned with a large golden medallion.
    I have never been much of a poet, and no less could do justice to her face. It was the face of an angel; oval and beautifully molded, white as snow. In it great green eves—mercifully green where once I had seen them glow red—stared out from beneath fine golden eyebrows that lay straight and horizontal beneath a high brow. Her nose was straight, too, but delicate and rounded at its tip, while her mouth was curved in