Always at his heels he heard the soft, heavy flopping of the toads; and sometimes they rose up like a sudden wall to bar his way and turn him aside ... as if they were herding him deliberately and concertedly to a destined goal.Clark Ashton Smith, “Mother of Toads” (1938).
Having dropped a handful of copper hlili into the open mouth of the porcelain toad at its entrance, the thief Qremm-Thwalan entered the Temple and knelt, as he had each Friday for a trimester, in pretended prayer before the great toad-head altar of argentiferous sandstone. With folded hands and murmuring lips, he seemed a picture of devotion, but his dark eyes flickered beneath half-closed lids as he watched the interminable worship offered up on the altar, whereon a naked priestess, her squat body glistening dully with the sweat of her exertions, was juggling the three gems of Rebbuqqa, symbols of the batrachian goddess in her three aspects: zoöphorous egg; hydrobious tadpole; and chthonic toad. The toad-gems flashed and glittered as they rose and fell in the torch-light, seeming to glare at the kneeling thief like the exoculated eyes of their mythic eponyms: the ruby Trillaloquoth, red and minatory as an eye of that seismopœtic dæmon; the emerald Minnasthwë, green and capricious as an eye of that thalassine nymph; and the diamond Hashimdalor, yellow and luciferous as an eye of that parthenophagous dragon.
And now the priestess was throwing the gems higher and higher as she juggled, sending them nigh to the carved ceiling of the hypogæan Temple, her doughy breasts bouncing with her exertions; and suddenly she had stepped forward, hopping off the altar, and a second priestess had hopped into her place from behind it, caught up the three gems as they fell, and continued to juggle them, her breasts too beginning to shake to the rhythm with which she threw. Thus had the gems been juggled night and day for eight centuries past, never once falling to earth, and Qremm-Thwalan closed his eyes and bowed his head as though in deeper prayer, while secretly tracing the rune of Uzdrazim on the palm of his left hand with the forefinger of his right.
When he raised his head, opening his eyes, his heart flamed with the knowledge that the spell had worked: he looked into perfect darkness, and it was not until he murmured a cantrip of luciferation that Temple again became visible, though still cloaked in a silence of uncanny thickness. The torch-flames that had leapt and smoked around him were as unmoving as carved crystal and there, on the altar, the priestess was frozen in place beneath the three gems, suspended in the air like stars, while in the wall-slits on either side of the altar the arrow-heads gleamed fixedly. There was a squad of priestess-archers behind each wall, arrows notched at full stretch of their bow-strings, and unceasingly vigilant for any attempt at theft. But now Qremm-Thwalan could steal the gems under their very eyes and they would nowise stir: the rune of Uzdrazim, traced on the left palm, freezes the Universe between the diastole and systole of the great heart of Ishul-Wimmaqm that powers the bloodstream of time, and a million kalpa might lapse before the rune-master, bubbled in own-time, traces the reversed rune on his right palm, whereby the heart of Ishul-Wimmaqm beats again and the unchanged Universe moves as before.
Qremm-Thwalan had no need of a million kalpa in which to achieve his purpose: a half-hour would suffice. He rose from his knees and went to fetch an armload of sacred codices from the Temple library, filching them beneath the unseeing gaze of the priestess-librarians and returning with them to the altar, where he laid them at the feet of the frozen priestess-juggler and went to fetch an armload more. When he returned, sweating more than such light labor might ordinarily induce, he used the two codicial armloads to construct a stepped tower, whereby he climbed on profaning feet to take the gem Trillaloquoth from its ærial suspension, replacing it with a counterfeit of red glass that remained suspended as he deconstructed the tower and raised it anew beneath the gem Minnasthwë, which he took and replaced with a counterfeit of green glass.
When, third and finally, he had raised the tower beneath the gem Hashimdalor, taking it and replacing it with a counterfeit of yellow glass, he returned the codices to the Temple library, resisting the temptation to restore them to the shelves out of order and puzzle the priestess-librarians to distraction when the timestream again flowed through the Temple. No, he wished to leave no slightest clew of his burglary, so that none but he would know that eight centuries of juggling had been ended by alien hands. He walked back to the altar and knelt again before it, setting his limbs and head into the exact postures they had occupied at the moment he had traced the rune of Uzdrazim; then, having murmured the cantrip that stripped the frozen Temple of its supernatural illumination, he traced the mirror-reversal of the rune on the sweat-moistened palm of his right hand with the forefinger of his left.
When again he raised his head and opened his eyes, the altar was bright and active before him again, the priestess juggling as busily as ever, unaware that her ritually laved and sacramentally talced hands threw counterfeits of glass and that the three true gems were tucked in a pouch of seal-leather beneath Qremm-Thwalan’s streaming left armpit. The thief devoted five minutes more to his feigned devotions, allowing the unnatural heat of his body to subside, then rose to his feet and left the Temple, dropping this time a pair of silver tsamorr into the open mouth of the porcelain entrance-toad as he passed it, and climbing the steps that led to the streets of the desert-city of Imbaqmosor. Six centuries before the city had been surrounded by insect-busy, toad-loud swamps and marshes, before a shifting of winds and lessening of rainfall began to drain them and approximate Imbaqmosor’s to the clime of the inaqueous south. Now the cult of the toad-goddess Rebbuqqa was conducted in a land of sand, thorn, and vulture, and her Temple, lowered by finger’s-breadths at unguessable expense even as the juggling continued, had burrowed deep beneath ground to protect its vatic amphibia – toads, frogs, and newts – against desiccation.
Qremm-Thwalan, himself of desert stock from the south, regretted the vanishment of swamp and marsh not at all, and sought the inn at which he had been staying with barely a thought for the tradition he had shattered. Here he bathed and dressed in fresh robes before paying an exhorbitant rent to his landlord without a murmur and saddling his horse for the journey ahead. The guard on the city gate, familiar with his comings and goings over the past trimester, waved him through with his halberd and a bored and unsuspicious “Pass, friend”; and Qremm-Thwalan was soon trotting east over the well-paved desert road, celebrating the success of his theft with a flagon of pomegranate wine from his saddle-pouch.
By now night was fallen and even if, by some unimaginable mischance, the theft had been detected in the Temple and traced to him, he would have ample time to hear the hoofbeats of pursuit on the road behind him and conceal himself and his horse in a thicket of wayside thorn. He raised the flagon to his lips and drank, reflecting that the change-over of priestess-jugglers was nearly due again, and that the very priestess he had robbed would soon be hopping toad-like to the Temple floor. The thought of it brought a smile to his wine-moistened lips as he lowered the flagon; but in the next instant the smile vanished, for there, blazing redly on the eastern horizon ahead of him between the ears of his horse, was a star with which he was entirely unacquainted, despite the extensive if unsystematic astronomical knowledge he had acquired on his long sessions of nocturnal burglary.
The star was apparently a nova, born during the day and now revealed by the turning of the great crystal sphere of the heavens around stationary earth, and even god-disdaining Qremm-Thwalan, unpunished profaner of a thousand temples and shrines, mused a little on the coincidence of its appearance simultaneous with his burglary of burglaries. He raised the flagon to his lips for the final time and drained it with one eye still on the rising star, whose appearance nagged at him now with a strange sense of familiarity. Then, as he tossed the flagon aside and heard it shatter on the flags of the desert road, he swore aloud, for now there were two novæ on the eastern horizon: the blazing red nova, rising with præternatural speed, had been joined by a nova of shimmering green. Now he knew whereof the red nova was reminiscent: it had the likeness of Trillaloquoth, the dæmon-eye ruby once eternally juggled in the Temple of Rebbuqqa with its two co-ævals: Minnasthwë, the nymph-eye emerald green as the second nova before him, and Hashimdalor, the dragon-eye diamond yellow as the nova that he knew must soon rise to join the two others.
As the recognition struck him he felt his saddle slip beneath him, as though the girths and straps were suddenly loosened, and a pair of long whips threshed the air ahead of him, glimpsed as they interrupted the light of the rising novæ. He cried out as the reins slackened in his hands and the saddle slipped again, and he felt his feet striking a hard curved surface on either side. Now the metamorphosis was unmissable: his horse had vanished beneath him, and he was riding the back of a great beetle or cockroach with busily twiddling antennæ. As the yellow light of the third nova mingled over him with the red and green of the first and second, he threw himself from his now-hateful mount, crying a prayer to his long-neglected natal deity, dune-riding Uuruum.
He seemed to fall a great distance before he hit the earth, but the shock of landing nowise discomfited him. As he scuttled away on the six legs he had acquired in the fall, his newly sprouted antennæ twiddling in panic, the crystalline lenses of his compound eyes reported that the three novæ were rising and falling in the east like the three great gems in the Temple of Rebbuqqa; and with his last spark of human intellect he realized that he was back there, scuttling over the sandstone flags before the altar as the toad-that-had-been-a-priestess hopped fatly in pursuit.