Young Thongor Read online

  “With his magical arts he constructed a crystal of durable substance; within that crystal he built a private universe where time could not come and Death did not exist nor could enter therein. A gorgeous city he constructed, raised by the hands of invisible and captive spirits, and therein a magic land was created, over which Zazamanc shall rule forever, an undying king, immortal and omnipotent as a god.

  “This city he named Ithomaar the Eternal, for nothing within it can ever age or die. And the kingdom over which Zazamanc rules is the dwelling place of captive peoples such as you and I—unwary travelers, lured by the mystery of the crystal and its singing voice—who have entered into this magical land and cannot ever leave.”

  “These things are fantasies, grandfather!” Thongor growled.

  “Alas, my son, they are utter truth,” Yllimdus said gently. “Tell me: what year is it in the great beyond, the world from which you came?”

  “Why, let me see; it is winter in the six thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth year of the Kingdom of Man,” Thongor said. There ensued a silence of some duration. Then—

  “So long…so very long,” whispered the old man with no face. “Ah, lad, it was spring in the Year of the Kingdom of Man four nine seven one when I came hither on that venture…for two thousand years I have dwelt here in this accursed paradise beyond the reach of Time!”

  “Gods! Can this thing be true?” Thongor muttered.

  Yllimdus sighed: “All too true, lad; here we can never die. Oh, I have prayed for death in my centuries…but we are beyond Death’s hand, here, aye…and beyond the power of the Nineteen Gods themselves!”

  “This sorcerer, this Zazamanc,” the boy asked. “What will he do with me?”

  A dim echo of horror entered the gentle tones of the ancient man.

  “He will…play…”

  9

  The Veiled Enchanter

  In this dim world where no sun shone to light the day nor moon to shed her pallid radiance by night, it was impossible to guess the passage of time. Thongor soon discovered this strange truth. Tall windows, narrowed, pointed, barred with thick grilles of that strange brass-like metal which Yllimdus had named orichalc, let in the dim, opal light. Thongor thought to observe the movement of time by the shifting across the floor of the patch of strangely colored radiance cast through that pointed, narrow window…but it did not move, nor did it wane.

  At some unguessable time later, the warriors came to take him before the Enchanter for judgement. Yllimdus had warned him that to the proud, cold immortal who ruled this miniscule world, lesser men were slaves, toys, nothing but cattle. Here in this world his art had made him a very god, and he could play with his human toys as he wished. Men could not die in this dim, eternal world, but they could suffer. So, as the whim struck him, Zazamanc the Veiled Enchanter transformed them—mutilated them into weirdly horrible monsters. Some were quaint, droll hybrids: men with the heads of insects, women with flower petals instead of hair, dwarfed little beings, gaunt giants, men with neither arms nor legs who wriggled about like naked, pallid, fleshy serpents.

  Yllimdus himself had been a courtier until his Lord wearied of his cautious advice and sage counsel. And thus, with a potent cantrip, the old man had been transformed into a faceless thing of horror. Thongor’s eyes smoldered with rage and the nape-hair bristled on his neck like the hackles of some jungle beast. The wild boy was no stranger to cruelty. Nature herself was cruel, and men were her children and had inherited much of her ways. But the boy knew only the sudden, savage cruelty of swift death, or red roaring war, of man battling against man or against brute.

  This sort of cruelty, casual, cold, cynical—this was new to him. And it chilled him with an unsettling mixture of horror and nausea and contempt. He wondered what sort of a man could so negligently and carelessly disfigure another man who had done him no greater ill than merely to bore him…if, indeed, Zazamanc was only a man.

  For this was of the species of cruelty man usually suffered at the hands of playful and uncaring gods. Was, then, this Veiled Enchanter a god? True: he had created all of this miniature world within the jewel, and that was godlike.

  And—a thrill of dread went through the boy at the thought—if he was a god, could gods be slain?

  The warriors who escorted the savage boy through the magnificent palace of the Enchanter were curious beings themselves, and as he paced along in their midst, young Thongor stole many curious, covert glances at them in a covert fashion.

  They were not bird-warriors like those who had arrested him beyond the city. These were cold-faced, pale, expressionless men. They were automaton-like, as the warriors in the fantastic avian costumes had been. But most of all they were like dead men somehow, in some grisly and necromantic fashion, imbued with the uncanny semblance of life, but devoid of life’s animation.

  Old Yllimdus had spoken of these, back in the prison hall. He had used a curious word to describe them—avathquar—“living dead.” An odd, uneasy, disturbing word. Thongor’s hide crawled at the touch of them, cold and flaccid, like the puffy flesh of corpses.

  Yllimdus, who had been imprisoned for more than a year in the great hall, having incurred the dislike of his Lord, had warned him of these, and had said that not everyone came through the Jewel Amid the Seven Pillars alive. Some were drawn through, and were dead when they materialised within the miniature world. Perhaps it was these fresh cadavers, magically animated by some occult science that became the avathquar. It was a peculiarly unsettling thought, and he eyed them with guarded curiosity as they led him along.

  They seemed completely drained and empty, with none of life’s warmth and passion. He wondered if they truly lived, or if they were but automatons of dead flesh vitalized in some weird manner by the power of the Enchanter. They were splendid specimens of manhood, surely, tall, strongly built and handsome in a regular sort of way. But they strode along like puppets, looking neither to the right nor the left, their pale, stern faces hard and blank, no sign of alertness in their cold, empty eyes.

  Bemused by such thoughts as these, Thongor saw little of the superb corridors and halls and chambers through which they led him: ever after he retained but a blurred impression of blazing tapestries seething with color and motion, or glowing figurines and statuettes of unearthly grace and lifelike detail, or of carved, marbled walls and fretted screens of ivory and soaring columns and arched and vaulted ceilings painted with weird and mythological frescoes.

  At length they led him into a colossal hall floored with black marble like a gigantic mirror. Far above, lost in dim shadows, an enormous dome reared on thick columns of a sea-green stone unfamiliar to him. About the walls, more of the zombie-like warriors stood, motionless as graven images, immaculate in dazzling, sun-gold armor.

  For these things he had no attention.

  It was that which occupied the very center of the gloomy hall which seized and held his fascinated gaze. A tall chair of scarlet crystal, three times human height. And in the chair a man was seated.

  10

  Burning Eyes

  Zazamanc bore the appearance of a slim, tall, youthful man with strong arms, long legs, and a coldly beautiful face, which bore no slightest sign of age. He was attired in complicated and fantastic garments of many colors: puce, canary, blood-scarlet, lavender, mauve, subtle gray, deep violet.

  His raiment was unlike any costume that Thongor had ever seen or heard of. Tight hose clothed his long, slender legs; a tunic or jerkin, gathered and tucked and folded according to the dictates of some alien fashion, adorned his torso; sleeves of various lengths protruded one from the other. Long gloves were drawn over his lean, strong hands, and strange rings of metal and stone and crystal twinkled and flashed as he moved his fingers.

  A cowl, trimmed with strange, purple fur, was drawn about his head but did not cover his face. This held and fascinated the boy. It was of a supernal, an unhuman, beauty. A high, broad white brow, arched and silken-black eyebrows, long imperial nose, firm, de
licately modeled chin, thin-lipped but exquisitely carved mouth—these were his features.

  They were flawless; without blemish. No wrinkle marred the purity of that godlike brow. No slightest shade of emotion lent warmth to the cold perfection of that face. It was like an idealized sculpture: cold, beautiful, pure, but inhuman.

  The eyes alone held life and expression.

  Strange eyes they were…black and cold as frozen ink…depthless as bottomless pits…cold and deep, but burning with a fierce, unholy flame of vitality. Behind their enigmatic gaze the boy somehow sensed a vast, cool, limitless intellect as far removed from the ordinary mind of mankind as man is from, say, the groveling insects or the squirming serpents.

  They brought him before the tall scarlet throne and he stood erect and unbowing as that black, burning gaze swept him slowly from head to foot. With careful, judicious deliberation the Veiled Enchanter scanned him slowly.

  When he spoke, and then only, did Thongor understand his cognomen. For, from brow to chin, his coldly perfect visage was delicately veiled behind a transparent membrane of some slight fabric, thin almost to the point of invisibility. Why a man should wear a veil which veiled nothing, and through which the eye could clearly see, was but the least of the mysteries Thongor had yet encountered in this tiny world of magic and beauty and depraved horror.

  “It is a savage boy; doubtless from the Northlands; I believe I recall a race of strong Barbarians who dwelt of old on the wintry tundras of that portion of Lemuria,” the Enchanter said idly. His voice was like his face: cold, perfect, clear, but devoid of warmth or animation.

  “I recall the race; but that was…long ago.”

  For an instant it seemed to Thongor that the black flame of those eyes bore within their fierce depths a measureless weariness, an age-old boredom. Perhaps even something of—futility?

  “He is young and strong, bred of brave warriors, I doubt me not. It might be amusing to see that strength…take him hence to the Arena Master. We shall see this youthful prowess on the Day of the Opal Vapors. Take him away now…”

  The guards saluted with mechanical perfection, and led Thongor from the silent hall. Behind, sitting tall and straight and regal in the scarlet chair, the Veiled Enchanter continued staring straight ahead, into nothingness, with no expression on his cold and beautiful face.

  11

  In the Speculum

  Zazamanc stood in his magical laboratorium. Corrosive vapours swirled about him, caught in twisted tubes of lucent glass. Fiery liquors seethed in crucibles of lead over weird fires of glowing minerals. Trapped forever between two panes of quartz, a mad phantasm screamed soundlessly, caught in a two-dimensional hell. Strange and terrible was this place of many magics: the air stank of dire wizardries; the brimstone odors of the Pit reeked therein.

  The square stone chamber was oddly lit. Wandering, ghostly globules of insubstantial luminance drifted like bubbles of light, to and fro, ice-blue, scarlet, blinding white. Their shifting radiance cast eerie black shadows crawling over the uneven walls, clustering like frightened bats in the darkest corners.

  A vast globe of silvery metal bore a strange image: a huge, insectoid thing, with a naked, exposed, and swollen brain, and black, glittering, compound eyes, squatting in green caverns of porous rock, where glassy stalactites and strange crystal outcroppings caught and flickered with vagrant wisps of light.

  This was one of the Insect Philosophers who dwelt in the dead core of earth’s moon, and with whom, by his art, Zazamanc sometimes conversed.

  With a white crawling fungoid intelligence, on the twilight zone of the planet Mercury, he also communicated at times; and with a crystalloid but sentient mineral being on one of the moons of Saturn.

  The insectoid thing with the monstrous brain faded slowly from the surface of the silver sphere. The image was replaced with a different scene. A sweltering area of burning sand where a half-naked boy struggled with a huge crimson beast. Zazamanc drew in his breath sharply, watching in suspense. The boy held, for weapon, a hooked sickle. His wild, black mane streamed about his yelling, contorted face; his strange gold eyes blazed lion-like through the tangle of his locks.

  The crimson thing roared and foamed, and batting wildly at the nimble, leaping figure with heavy paws bladed with black claws like scythed razors. At length the boy darted within the reach of those grasping arms.

  Zazamanc sucked in his breath and held it.

  The sickle flashed, catching the light, as it swung in a wicked arc. It slashed through the distended throat of the roaring crimson brute and in an instant it lay gasping out bubbling gore on the wet sands, while Thongor stood panting, sweaty, streaming with blood, but triumphant.

  Zazamanc uttered a curse and permitted the image to lapse into its component atoms of light. The surface of the silver sphere went black and dull.

  Turning away from the speculum, the Veiled Enchanter crossed the cluttered, crowded chamber to a huge desk that was a cube of gray, cracked stone. On top of this a jumble of parchment scrolls lay sprawled in a litter of amulets, periapts, talismanic rings, and instruments peculiar to the magician’s art.

  Shoving aside two of these, an arthane and a bollime, the Enchanter uncovered a vast and ponderous book. This tome was of peculiar and alien workmanship: no terrene product of the bookwright’s art, surely. The leaves were bound between two plates of perdurable metal, but a rare, unearthly metal, blue as sapphire stone, and filled with radiant flakes of gold light. The twin plates were deeply embossed with large glyphs of geometric complexity. And the leaves within were even more strange: of flexible, lucent stuff, glassy and crystalline and yet supple.

  The pentacles, with which these leaves were inscribed, were of red-orange, green-black, silver, violet and a strange throbbing color that seemed somehow to belong between the hues of heliotrope and jasper, but which was a color not otherwise found on earth and belonging to no spectrum of normal light. In some odd fashion, these magical diagrams had been inked within the very substance of the flexible crystal leaves.

  Zazamanc opened the ponderous volume and began an intent perusal of the sorcerous lore. The boy Thongor must die. And in a grim and bloody manner.

  And—soon!

  But how?

  12

  Jothar Jorn

  The arena stood on the further edge of the city of Ithomaar, a vast, circular amphitheatre like an enormous crater. This bowl-shaped depression had been scooped out of the ground by captive genii, its sloping sides terraced into tiers and fitted out with curved marble benches. The gladiators themselves, and the cages that held the beasts they were to fight against, dwelt in subterranean crypts below the arena floor. To these, the bird-masked and unspeaking warriors conducted the youthful barbarian.

  They brought him to a huge, fat, half-naked man who had been working out with the swordsmen. He was crimson from his exertions, his massive torso glittering with sweat, and as Thongor came up to him he was toweling himself dry and emptying an enormous drinking horn filled with dark ale. One of the bird-guards proffered a slim ivory tablet to him. It was inscribed with a brief directive, written in emerald inks, in queer, hooked characters such as the barbarian boy had never before seen. The man scruti nized them quickly, then raised thoughtful, curious eyes to Thongor.

  “A Northlanderman, eh? Tall for your age, and built like a young lion. Well, cub, I doubt not those strong arms will provide merry entertainment for our Lord, come the Day of Opal Vapors!” His voice was hearty and genial, and his great, broken-nosed slab of a face, beefy-red, glistening with perspiration, was cheerful and honest. His little eyes were light blue and good-humored. Thongor rather liked the look of him, and slightly relaxed his stiff, guarded stance. The gamesmaster noted this, and chuckled.

  “My name is Jothar Jorn and I am our Lord’s gamesmaster,” he said. “You’ve naught to fear from me, lion cub, so long as you do as you are told, and quick about it, too.”

  “I am Thongor of Valkarth,” the boy said.

&n
bsp; The gamesmaster nodded, looking him over with quick, keen eyed. “Valkarth: I might have guessed, from the color of those eyes. Snow Bear tribe?”

  Thongor bristled and a red glare came into his strange gold eyes. “My people were the Black Hawk clan, and the Snow Bear tribe were—are—their enemies,” he said fiercely.

  The big man eyes him with frank, friendly curiosity. “You’re a bit mixed on your tenses, lad. ‘Were—are’—which would you have?”

  Thongor’s head drooped slightly and his broad young shoulders slumped. In a flat, listless voice he said: “My people are dead, fallen in battle before the dogs of the Snow Bear; my father, my brothers…”

  A sympathy rare in this primitive age shone in the small blue eyes of the big man. “All…of your people slain in war by the other tribe?” he asked in low, subdued tones.

  Thongor’s head came up proudly and his shoulders went back. “All are dead; I am the last Black Hawk,” he said bleakly.

  “Well…well…” Jothar Jorn cleared his throat loudly, and shook himself a little. “In that case, you will be hungry,” he said in his hearty way. “Hungry enough to—eat a Snow Bear, shall we say?”

  The boy grinned soberly, then laughed. And they went in to dinner.

  Jothar Jorn bade an underling lead the barbarian to the common room where the gladiators ate at long benches, and set a repast before him such as the boy had not seen for as long as he could remember. A succulent steak, rare and bloody, swimming in its own steaming juices, tough black bread and ripe fruit and a tankard full of heady ale. Thongor fell on the feast ravenously, reflecting that if this was captivity, then it might not be so bad, after all.

  13

  The Pits of Ithomaar

  Ten days passed, and busy days they were. As a newcomer to the City in the Jewel, Thongor was curious about everything and kept his eyes and ears open. He soon learned that Jothar Jorn had entered the magic crystal only twenty years before: he had been gamesmaster of the arena of Tsargol, a seacoast city far to the south, head of an expedition into the mountainous country of Mommur, trapping beasts for use in the games then to be held in celebration of the coronation of Sanjar Thal, Sark of Tsargol. He, too, had glimpsed the jewel from afar, having left his trappers behind, hot in pursuit of a mountain dragon, and had been caught by the siren-like lure of the crystal even as had the Valkarthan boy.