Young Thongor by Lin Carter Adrian Cole Read Free Book Online Page A

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