Kellory the Warlock E-Book

Lin Carter

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 263

Beschreibung

Kellory—the last of the Black Wolves, sole descendant of the Lost Kings of Illyrion. His fighting arm maimed, his homeland stolen, his tribe mercilessly slaughtered by the dread Thungoda Horde, he seeks revenge with the only weapon left to him—sorcery. But the secret arts of witchcraft are not easily surrendered by the Brotherhood of Darkness...

Across the Sea of Sand, with its plethora of terrifying spells and whispering spirits of the night, Kellory seeks the Grimoire of Yaohim—the Book of Shadows—for only within its enigmatic pages will he find the sacred magic that will vanquish his enemies, if he can decipher its mystery before it's too late!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

KELLORY THE WARLOCK

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

DEDICATION

OPENING QUOTATION

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART 2:

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART 3:

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

PART 4:

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

PART 5:

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

PART 6:

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

PART 7

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

KELLORY THE WARLOCK

LIN CARTER

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1984 by Lin Carter.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

To four lovely ladies who write fantasy superbly:

C.J. Cherryh,

Tanith Lee,

Grail Undwin,

and in particular, to Pat McIntosh,

who is fond of Kellory.

OPENING QUOTATION

Zao, Olymbris, Thoorana, Zephrondus, and Great Gulzund;

These five worlds circle the star Kylix in the Unicorn.

Now it is of Zephrondus that I would speak.

No eye but mine has looked upon her many-colored moons,

Her feather-trees, her vast and endless plains,

But I have voyaged thither in my dreams,

And from that far voyaging I bring this tale to you…

—Song of Worlds,

from The Chronicles of Kylix, The First Book.

PART 1

DARK PALACE OF THE FLAME

CHAPTER 1

ON FIRE MOUNTAIN

It was the hour of sunfall. In the depths of the great green sea to the west, the sun-star, Kylix, died in a welter of crimson flame. And in the east the first of the three moons of Zephrondus had new-risen above the dark drear edges of the world, Sligon was its name: the Moon of Pallid Opal.

For three days now, the boy Kellory had made his slow and laborious way along the skyline of the mountains, and now he was in view of his goal at last. He stood on the scarps of glassy obsidian and stared upon Fire Mountain. And despite himself, he felt the taste of fear like brass upon his tongue.

He was tall, this youth, and nearly naked save for a scrap of cloth about his loins and dragonhide sandals strapped high on his long bare legs. Sun and wind had burnt him the hue of old, seasoned leather and his wild unruly mane of black hair—not yet woven in the single braid of a warrior—was held back from his eyes by a leathern thong about the brows. For all the bitter cold of the mountains and the fierce winds that, howling, roved about their wintry peaks, he went bare. The better to climb, unencumbered with the weight of furs: and, as well, he had dwelt among these icy peaks for five of his fifteen years, and the cold he was well accustomed to endure.

As the boy stared up at the great mountain, Yothlymbris, he felt aware again of the grim futility of his quest; yet the thought of turning back did not even occur to him. For five years had he fended for himself in this wild and lonely land, tracking the great apes of the mountains for his meat and, in winter, battling the snow wolves with flaming brands.

He had not seen or spoken to a human being now for three years. His life he held at little worth; what if he lose it among the perils of the peak? No one in all this world of Zephrondus would know or care of his passing, why then should he?

He was dark and lean, this boy, with hard, tough sinewy limbs and strength far beyond his young years. Under the wild mat of his unshorn mane, a narrow white scar snaked across his forehead to lose itself in his scowling black brows. Under those brows—strange in his dark, somber, bitter face—his eyes burned like weird green jewels. There was no laughter in them at all, nor softness in the hard, grim straight line of his mouth or the firm stubborn set of his well-molded jaw.

A long spear of thoyak wood was strapped across his broad shoulders. A crude dagger of rough-hammered iron lay in a scabbard strapped to his lean thigh. The cloth about his loins was held by a girdle of black supple leather about his waist, and fastened to this was a huge moontree-seed hollowed to make a water-gourd, and a coil of rope and a three-pronged bronze hook wherewith he had ascended the dizzying heights of the sheer cliff-walled chasms of these mountains. Save for these, he had nothing in the world. Except his memories, which burned like frozen iron. And the black leather glove he wore on his right hand.

Above him soared the sky-tall height of Yothlymbris: Fire Mountain, his people called it once. Now he saw the reason why. And, for the first time, he felt the sour taste of hopelessness.

Kellory was a savage of Barbaria, although his ancestors had been mighty kings. He could not read, neither could he write. And he had never seen a book in all his young life. Thus he had never heard the word volcano. But now as he stared up grimly at the flickering sheet of crimson flame that danced about the crest of Mount Yothlymbris, he knew why no man had ever come to the gates of Phazdaliom the Enchanter. With a moat of liquid fire about the castle on the crest, it was not surprising.

Not that any idle traveler would care to disturb the Green Enchanter, even without his blazing moat. In Zephrondus, as in every other world whereof I have knowledge (and they are legion), one does not lightly intrude upon the seclusion of magicians.

But Kellory had a very good reason: vengeance!

Now that he had paused long enough to catch his breath, he continued on his journey. From the glassy scarp whereon he stood, the chasm plunged down two thousand feet to dim enshadowed depths below. But across the chasm a flat boulder of black gneiss lay. If he could spring across the gap, he would be on the walls of Fire Mountain.

There was no spire or ledge above the level coign of gneiss which he could snag with the tri-pronged brazen hook that swung at his hip. So he would have to jump the gap. It was, or looked to be, twelve feet wide. So near. So very near. Yet to miss… He would not even live to feel the crimson agony as his body broke on the cruel rocks far below: the speed of his fall would smother him long ere he reached the bottom.

Kellory drew back to the farthest corner of the scarp of sleek obsidian—back, until his naked shoulders pressed against the ragged granite wall down which he had lithely clambered a few moments before. Then, bracing the sole of one foot against the wall, he pushed against it for extra leverage—and threw himself out, over the dizzying abyss and into space.

For one brief, flashing instant, he flew between earth and heaven. Then, in the next, he crashed flat, chest and arms and lean belly, against the edge of the black gneiss boulder. His legs hung over the lip of the chasm. His hands clawed desperately for a purchase on the smooth stone. They slipped, and he slid back a pace, so that his narrow hips were over the edge. But he bit his lip fiercely, and clawed for a purchase on the stone—and found one.

Slowly, inch by inch, he hauled himself up over the edge until he could slide one bare knee over the ledge.

At length, he lay flat on the gneiss boulder, exhausted, sobbing for breath, aching in every muscle, bruised.

But he had traversed the chasm. And he was on Fire Mountain at last.

CHAPTER 2

THE BURNING BRIDGE

It took him most of the night to scale the rugged sides of Mount Yothlymbris. Kellory was as agile as a monkey: every inch sinewy muscle. He had a fearless head for heights, and a recklessness that amounted to daredeviltry. But his right hand, gloved in black leather, was stiff and useless, and lack of it greatly hampered his ability to climb.

From scarp to scarp he went, while the Opal Moon rode up the zenith; from spire to spire and ledge to ledge he labored, while the Emerald Moon and the Moon of Amber climbed to join their sister on the heights. Dawn was a pallid ghost haunting the world’s far eastern rim when he came to the crest at last.

And gazed upon the Lake of Flame.

It was a glimpse into the Inferno, that lake. Red light beat up from it, and poisonous winds like the breath of the desert simoon blew over those burning waves. The bitter stench of sulphur hung heavy on the air. Kellory crawled to the edge of the lava lake and peered over, though the baking heat made his fierce green eyes ache and water.

Imagine a restless mirror of sullen, glowing crimson. A yellow froth of sulphurous foam bescummed the sluggish waves of the liquid flame. Little serpents of bright canary fire flickered and crawled over the wrinkled, cherry-red surface of the lava. The light that glowed up from it was like the breath of a furnace. Such a deathly, incandescent lake smolders before the brass gates of Pandemonium, city of hell.

Kellory could not survive the Luciferian embrace of those thick, crawling waves for an instant. Like a moth in a candle-flame he would crisp and char. But cross it he must.

He circled the lake of fiery brimstone. The margin was like no other land on all Zephrondus. The up-spewings of the blazing moat, the stony vomitings, lay curdled and scaly like petrified black serpents, in a Laocoön-tangle of porous, glass-sharp lava-stone. Aye, had it not been for the tough sandals of dragonhide he wore on his feet, high-laced over the ankles, the sharp-bladed stony serpents would probably have slashed his feet to gory ribbons, as if he had walked barefoot across a field of naked razors.

But then, few men ever came to this place, for few indeed were they who would trouble the seclusion of the Green Enchanter…

Amidst the lake of liquid fire, a black spire lifted. The crest of that spire was hewn (by, it was whispered, no human hand, but through the uncanny artifice of captive djinn) into a fantastic black castle. Through the drifting fumes of powdery yellow sulphur, he could see the looming bulk: an ebon mass of walls, turrets, pylons, domes, columns. Glass-smooth they were, and the changeful and wavering red fight of the lava moat was eerily reflected therein, as in warped and ebon mirrors.

In that weird black castle, carven from the mountain peak, dwelt Phazdaliom the Green Enchanter. And Kellory would gain his gates or perish.

And then he saw the bridge.

All of harsh red iron it was, spanning the fiery lake like a Titan’s scimitar. The boy’s heart sank within him. He had hoped to gain entry into the Enchanter’s dark palace by secret and devious paths; but this looked the only means. It was walk the bridge, or swim the moat—and flesh cannot endure the burning kiss of those red waves.

Like a gliding shadow he crept to the portal of the bridge. Here iron pillars loomed, and they were worked to the leering likeness of devil-heads, with mirrored balls of black glass for eyes, wherein whose orbs the red fires of the lake blazed and crawled with sentient movements.

Eyes of slithering fire stared down at the boy who stood before the gate. Dagger-fanged jaws of rust-enscaled iron gaped in cruel mockery. And upon the brows of those snarling masks was cut the Sign of Fear.

But Kellory must go forward now. So, defiantly, he set one sandaled foot upon that bridge—

And sprang back with a gasp of pain! Crouching, he peered at the sole of his leathern sandal. It was black and smoking as if a burning brand had been pressed against it but a moment before. And again his spirits sank within him: of course! After numberless aeons through which the iron bridge had arched above those incandescent waves, the metal had soaked up the furnace-hearted heat.

The iron bridge was red-hot, and it burned like fire. He could not go ten steps before his sandals would crisp and sear. To go farther would mean he must crawl between the wizard’s gates, with feet mere blackened knobs of charred and useless flesh!

CHAPTER 3

THE AVENUE OF AUTOMATONS

Kellory fell to his knees before the frowning portcullis of the Enchanter’s castle, panting for breath, stifling in the sulphurous air of the moat, eyes streaming.

He had traversed the burning bridge by a simple expedient. Thoroughly soaking his leathern sandals in water from the moontree gourd that hung at his waist, he had dared the arch of glowing steel. The boy could run like a deer: many tunes his fleetness of foot had saved him from capture by a Thungoda war party man-hunting in the mountains; now his flying feet had carried him safely across the span of red-hot iron. But his sandals, dried in the baking heat, were charred and smoldering. He tore them from his blistered feet with shaking fingers, and hurled them into the flaming moat, together with the spear strapped to his shoulders, which encumbered his movements. Gingerly favoring his raw and tender feet, he climbed erect and looked about him. He stood before the palace gate…and it stood open, a titanic valve of ancient black wood that must have weighed a ton. The Sigil of Phazdaliom was worked on the front of this enormous door: an open, unsleeping Eye picked out in glittering dust of emeralds.

He glided silently within the open port and crept into the inky shadows of a great pillar.

Without, all had been baking heat and sulphurous smoke. But the moment he crossed the threshold of the dark palace, it was as if an invisible barricade held back the beating flames of the lava moat. For here within, the air was fresh and clean and dewy. Bruised, aching, running with oily perspiration and smeared from crown to heel with ashes and dirt, the tired boy leaned against the cool stone of the column, drinking in the pure sweet air thankfully.

But there was no time to rest. The intolerable thirst for vengeance had driven him this far—where no man else of all the world below had ever dared to come—and it would be an irony of ironies, should the unseen hand of the Enchanter strike him down before he had pierced the inner heart of the citadel. So he went forward on hesitant feet, green eyes burning like some jungle beast’s as they searched the night-black shadows, alert for a trap, wary for the slightest motion, sound, or sign of peril.

He traversed a column-lined arcade and found himself at the mouth of a long avenue lined with statues. Beyond, at the end of this way, rose the inner castle, a gloomy mass against the pearly curtain of dawn: a fantastic thronging of minarets, arcades, towers and turrets, that lifted tier by tier into the clear morning. He saw that the castle was a mass of brooding blackness—save for one ominous window, tall and narrow and pointed, that burned with green light like an unsleeping eye; like the emerald Eye emblazoned on the wizard’s door. It gazed down at him, a blank, cold glaze of icy phosphorescence, like the vigilant orb of some colossal ebon-mailed dragon, coiled about a secret treasure. A chill went through him as he looked at that one ominous window, blazing with light while all the castle else went slumbering and dark. But he went on.

The avenue, he perceived by the nacreous morning light, was strewn with crushed diamonds. They caught the morning in a tangle of dazzling rays, like the wink and glitter of some enormous ice field that shimmered and sparkled under the slow uncoiling fires of the aurora. Strange it was to tread that incredible pave, strewn—almost contemptuously—with the wealth of a thousand Emperors. But he went down the avenue of statues with a lightsome tread, one hand on the hilt of his dagger, eyes roaming warily the thick-mantled shadows that lay beyond. And ever and anon his gaze lifted to meet again the cold phosphorescent scrutiny of that window that burned like a dragon’s open eye.

And then he froze with incredulous horror.

For the statues…moved!

He had thought them mere idols of hewn and carven stone, but now he saw they were fashioned each from shining steel. Like fantastic suits of goblin armor they stood in their ranked scores, lining the glittering avenue of diamonds. But, if armor, not…untenanted. For steel arms raised, stiffly brandishing fantastic pikes and scimitars of burnished steel, and, behind the frozen leer of mask-like visors, eyes of sentient crystal flashed with yellow topaz fire. Weirdly crested helms turned creakingly to face the dawn, and claw-like metal hands lifted mace and brand and morning star with jerking, mechanical movement.

A thrill of unbelief went through the shrinking boy. But he remembered, then: the old shaman of his tribe, that once had been a high priest of the gods in the greatness of the Lost Kingdom, had told him in whispers of these creatures. The automatons of the Enchanter—the living warriors of soulless steel! How could he have forgotten the terrible and undying guardians of the dark palace?

But—oddly—they seemed to see him not. The crystalline gaze that burned mindlessly behind the mask-like visors was lifted only to the morn. A wave of relief went through him, and he crept on down the avenue of shattered diamonds as the mechanical automatons of Phazdaliom made their salute to the new-born day.

CHAPTER 4

THE CORRIDOR OF BLOOD

Here, too, in the inmost citadel, the portals stood open as if in silent invitation to the trespasser. Silent as a gliding shadow or a drifting ghost, the bare brown figure of the boy crept through the marble doorway, which was carven in the likeness of befanged and yawning serpent-jaws, and vanished into the gloom that lay beyond.

He paused in the dense shadows to take stock of his surroundings. And, as his eye flitted from here to there, a vast awe awoke within his savage young heart—and a cold, creeping dread, as well.

He stood at the edge of a colossal rotunda. The pave was all of snowy marble veined and laced with frozen veils of pallid rose. Around the circular wall of this rotunda, which was fitted with plates of brass that flashed like shining gold, rose slender and serpentine pilasters of lucent alabaster. Up and up the graceful spiraling pillars went, to support a vast dome of milky glass that flushed rich crimson with the fires of dawn.

It was not the purity of the rare stone that filled the lad with awe and dread, but the shocking and disquieting knowledge that this vast space was too huge. It must have been half a mile from one side to the other…and that was far too enormous for the size of the citadel. A weird thrill went through him, and he felt the touch of nameless and cosmic fear like a cold wind blowing on his neck from invisible gulfs.

The interior of the citadel was larger than the exterior! Icy globules of sweat burst out on his brow and on his naked breast. This seeming contravention of the very laws of the physical universe was, somehow, more disquieting than all the ghouls and monstrous mantichores with which his imagination had peopled the palace of the Enchanter. It was as if, here within the wizard’s house, space itself was twisted awry and subtly bent to new dimensions.

Somehow, he did not dare cross that vast mesa of snowy marble to its distant farther side. Instead he crept around the enormous floor, keeping well within the shadow cast by the pillars.

He came to a doorway hung with night-dark purples, and crept therethrough.

He found himself in a curious antechamber, the walls whereof were hung with a weird tapestry of woven sword-blades that swayed and swung with faint, clashing, silvery music to the breath of winds unfelt by him. The antechamber was carpeted with the skins of hippogriff and chimera.

Like a brown shadow he crossed the strange chamber where the arras of interlaced and razory steel slithered and sang to the touch of unknown winds, and came to a curious doorway.

It was an arch, a continuous curve, made of yellowed ivory, and the ivory was all of one piece. Seventeen feet high the ivory arch soared, and nine feet from side to side it was: the boy’s imagination shuddered away from attempting to conceive the vast enormity of the Beast from whose single tusk so incredible an archway had been cut.

The ivory arch was hung with a curious curtain of gold tissue. Thin and pallid and transparent as vapor was this delicate silken hanging, but the folds thereof were heavy as perdurable lead. For all his strength, the warrior lad could not budge the fold of that curtain by a finger’s breadth. He paused, panting, and searched the weird chamber with a frightened eye—and spied a second entranceway he had not at first perceived.

Of strange dark gold was this second doorway, and set terribly therein, like ghoulish and repulsive gems, were wet, glistening, naked human eyeballs.

From this terrible door he shrank in loathing. Slowly, painfully, laboriously, the living eyes swiveled in their golden sockets to stare at him. There was an uncanny desperation in the gazing of those bodiless eyes. They stared at him with a horrible and an awful urgency. A message was in the fixed staring of those eyes, a poignant beseeching, an unspoken warning.

But no curtain, save impalpable shadow, barred his path.

Pressing white lips tight against a spasm of nausea, the lad shiveringly passed through the horrid doorway and found himself suddenly standing knee-deep in crimson gore!

Almost he sprang back—but then he realized, with a quaver of terrible relief, that it was but illusion.

He stood at one end of a long hall. The walls thereof were hung with a strange arras whereon a phantasmagoria of nameless and hybrid monstrosities coupled and cavorted, snarled and brayed, squirmed and battled, in a curious travesty of life.

The floor of this grim corridor was paved with a lucent stone the hue of freshly-shed human gore. Blood-red light beat up from this loathsome stone, bathing his feet in horrid luminance. His flesh crept on his bones as he stepped cautiously forward. It was like wading through hot, wet blood. Warmth was in this stone, and light was captive there, as if radiant atoms burned within the scarlet crystal. Shivering with revulsion, he strode grimly forward, but at every step he half-expected to feel the crawling moisture of hot fluid bathing his naked flesh.

Down the corridor of blood he passed, step by reluctant step, averting his eyes hastily from the half-alive obscenities that writhed and bellowed on the queer tapestry.

At the end of the gory hallway lay a door draped in the blackest and softest of velvets. Above, on the amber architrave of the portal, the emerald Eye of Phazdaliom glittered watchfully.

And Kellory half-knew what awaited him beyond the black curtain.

CHAPTER 5

THE THRONE OF THE SLEEPER

The dark curtains parted and he glided soundlessly through—to stop short, stifling the gasp that rose to his lips unbidden.

Silent as the grave and dark as death was this chamber. The walls were hung with a variety of nameless artworks. Intricate and curious and wonderful were they, seductive to the eye, conducive to meditation, and all were fashioned from substances of autumnal and somnolent hues. Rich old browns like the dregs of autumn ale; slumberous purples and darkening mauves; deep, slothful crimsons like cold and sluggish blood; vague and dreamy grays, like softest essence of shadows; and depthless, satiny blacks.

The chamber was floored with a night-dark crystal wherein, at amazing depths, small star-like points of icy fire were seemingly imbedded. To tread on this starry floor of black crystal was like walking across wintry skies.

Above, the ceiling rose to a peaked dome. Small lamps of starry silver hung by gemmy chains, and from these a thick and stifling incense fumed in slow coils of midnight-blue vapor. The dome was completely obscured with this perfumed smoke, and the air was heavy with slumberous fragrances.

But Kellory noted these things with but one single all-envisioning glance. His attention was riveted upon that which stood in the center of the chamber.

Picture a great, capacious throne hewn all from softly-glowing amber. The tree whose oozing veins had shed so vast a drop of congealing amber must have been as mighty a nemoral colossus as Yggdrasil itself.

Strewn with thick, strange, soft furs of deepest purple was this amberous throne.

And seated therein, as if overtaken by sleep amidst his brooding thoughts, a man sprawled motionless.

The blood pounding in his temples, scarce daring to breathe lest the faint susurration of an indrawn breath arouse the throned slumberer, Kellory sank to a crouch on the floor of starry crystal, his hand going automatically to the hilt of his rude dagger. With alert and feral eyes, like a timorous beast, he took in the sleeper from crown to toe. For this, he knew, was Phazdaliom the Green Enchanter.

He wore the likeness of a young man, pale and delicate and slim; but Kellory knew that six centuries had passed since first this wan and epicene youth drew breath upon Zephrondus.

The sleeper had pallid and attenuated features, shadowed with melancholy. His face was pale and smooth as old wax, and time had drawn no harsh lines therein. Winged brows curved above translucent slumbering lids, as if etched with a delicate pencil. The long straight nose, the firm, mobile lips, the lean and delicate jaw were aristocratic, and touched with sorrow. Weariness sat on his pale smooth brow; there was languor and boredom in the sulky drooping of the full lips; a cryptic and profound reverie shadowed those features with a funereal sorrow.

His garments were somber and complicated, with many foldings and of an exquisite softness and delicacy of materials. The hues of these fantastical garments were all of green; but of a thousand subtly differing shades and tints of this primary color. Dark mystic greens like the shrouded fires that blaze in the cores of mighty emeralds; pallid hues of attenuated chartreuse; the lambent and lustrous green that shimmers in the scintillant eyes of feral and slinking cats; vibrant, vital greens that burn in the free foliage of springtime, and deep poisonous shades, the green of putrid and rotten flesh and the loathsome and deadly green of serpent-venom. Lucent and luminous tints, the greens of milky jade, and radiant chrysoprase, and apple-green chalcedony, and crystalline sparkling chrysoberyl.

One long slim hand, whereon strange talismanic rings glinted with dull fires, lay like the creamy petals of a dying lily along the curve of his thigh. The other drooped languidly over the massy arm of the luminous amber-yellow chair.

The sleeper made no slightest movement, and Kellory began to breathe again. Indeed, slumber lay so heavily upon the pale man with weary, jaded features that he seemed more like a corpse than one who merely slumbered. Layer upon layer of heavy, drugged slumber enwrapped him like dim, tenacious swathings of subtle shadow. He looked as if he had slumbered here for a thousand centuries of slow-moving time.

In the death-like stillness and funereal darkness of the chamber, whose dim air was heavy with drowsy, suffocating nard and opiate myrrh, Kellory felt his senses dull and his alertness waver. He felt, in his weariness, that he, too, might fall into a trance-like slumber in this inmost room whose every appurtenance and detail of decor was given over to the courting and the seduction of sleep. With a sharp effort, he snapped awake, digging the nails of his one good hand into his thigh so that the bite of pain would hold off the narcotic slumber that seemed about to envelop him.

Still the sleeper did not awake; slowly his fears were allayed and the tired boy began to relax. He was here where he had sought to come. Vengeance, like a burning and insatiable thirst raging within the very core of his being, had driven him to face all but unendurable perils, to come to stand in the presence of Phazdaliom.

Now—to do that for which he had dared and suffered so much.

He rose lithely to his feet, and approached the sleeper on silent naked feet. His left hand went out to touch the slumbering figure on his shoulder…it hung, hesitating…then it brushed the shoulder of the soft garments.

And the throne, and the figure within the throne, like an apparition—vanished!

CHAPTER 6

IN THE JAWS OF THE TRAP

Gone instantly, like a puff of vapor, throne and occupant winked out of existence. Kellory whirled to dart for the door, but he saw, in the next instant, and with a thrill of icy horror, that the chamber was no longer open. Unbroken, the wall stretched on all four sides! The door through which he had passed a moment before had vanished as swiftly and as magically as had the enthroned and somnolent Enchanter.

The panic of a trapped beast flamed up in the wild boy. Eyes afire, he spun about, snatching the dagger from the scabbard strapped to his slim bare thigh. Silvery light from the starry lamps glittered on the cold iron blade.

Softly, yet clearly, a languorous voice began speaking out of the empty air.

“Very foolish was it of you, Kellory, to dream you might with impunity venture into my citadel. No other mortal or immortal—of this world or the others—hath been so daring, or so impetuous, or so foolhardy, as to brave the many enchantments of this sanctum. Such courage, or such stupidity, astonishes me, youth. I would know the motive for your unparalleled intrusion—and it is for this reason alone that I hold in abeyance the many blasts of withering magic suspended about you. Answer swiftly and with candor, thou son of Thedric Ironmane, thou scion of the Black Wolf people, nor think that ever I shall permit you to leave this chamber living.”

The voice spoke in cool, measured tones, wherein a weary boredom was manifest. Cultured and precise and musical was that low voice, but behind its drawling and melodious tones the ring of deadly and implacable menace could be sensed. Kellory had fallen into a fighting crouch. Now, but slowly and reluctantly, he rose to his full height, sliding the futile dagger back into its leathern sheath.

Quieting his hammering pulses, the half-grown, defenseless boy was silent while he mastered his fear—the vast and unmanning fear that had welled up within him at the first sound of that cold, polished and merciless voice.