Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/96

mounted from his gorlak and prayed fervently to Vorvadoss. For a time there was no response.

Then the sands were troubled, and a whirling and dancing of mist-motes blinded the Sindara. Out of the maelstrom the god spoke thinly, and his voice was like the tinkling of countless tiny crystal goblets.

"Thou goest to doom," Vorvadoss said ominously. "But thy son sleeps in Bel Yarnak, and I shall have a worshipper when thou art vanished. Go therefore fearlessly, since god cannot conquer god, but only man who created him."

Speaking thus cryptically Vorvadoss withdrew, and the Sindara, after pondering, continued his journey. In time he came to that incredible abyss from which men say the nearer moon was born, and at its edge he fell prone and lay sick and shuddering, peering down into mist-shrouded emptiness. For a cold wind blew up from the gulf, and it seemed to have no bottom. Looming far in the distance he could just discern the further brink.

Clambering up the rough stones came he whom the Sindara had set out to find; he came swiftly, making use of his multiple appendages to lift himself. He was white and hairy and appallingly hideous, but his misshapen head came only to the Sindara's waist, although in girth his spidery limbs rendered a shocking illusion of hugeness. In his wake came the souls he had taken for his own; they were a plaintive whispering and stirring in the air, swooping and moaning and sighing for lost Nirvana. The Sindara drew his blade and struck at his enemy.

Of that battle sagas are still sung, for it raged along the brink for a timeless interval of eternity. In the end the Sindara was hacked and bleeding and spent, and his opponent was untouched and chuckling loathsomely. Then the demon prepared for his meal.

Into the Sindara's mind came a whisper, the thin calling of Vorvadoss. He said: "There are many kinds of flesh in the universes, and other compounds which are not flesh. Thus doth the Eater of Souls feed." And he told the Sindara of the incredible manner of that feeding, of the fusing of two beings, of the absorption of the lesser, and of the emergence therefrom of an augmented half-god, while the uncaged soul flew moaning in the train of those who served the being. Into the Sindara's mind came knowledge and with it a grim resolve. He flung wide his arms and welcomed the ghastly embrace, for Vorvadoss had also spoken of the manner in which the doom might be lifted.

The thing sprang to meet him, and an intolerable agony ground frightfully within the Sindara's bone and flesh; the citadel of his being rocked, and his soul cowered shrieking in its chamber. There on the edge of the Gray Gulf of Yarnak a monstrous fusion took place, a metamorphosis and a commingling that was blasphemous and horrible beyond all imagining. As a thing disappears in quicksand, so the being and the Sindara melted into each other's body.

Yet even in that blinding agony a sharper pain came to the Sindara as he saw across the plain the beauty of this land over which he had ruled. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful as this green and joyous land of his, and a pain was in his heart, a sense of empty loss and an aching void which could not ever be filled. And he looked away to the black evil eyes of the Eater of Souls that were but inches away from his own, and he looked beyond the being to where cold emptiness lay gray and horrible. There were tears in his eyes and a gnawing ache in his heart for the sil-