Garan the Eternal Read Free Page A

rite of sacrifice which was designed to unite him with the dead?
    Urg touched his arm. “Not so. Thrala has not yet entered the Place of Ancestors.”
    “You know my thoughts?”
    Urg laughed. “Thoughts are easy to read. Thrala lives. Sera served the Daughter as handmaiden while she was yet among us. Sera, please show us Thrala as she was.”
    The woman crossed to a wall where there was a mirror such as Urg had used for Garin’s language lesson. She gazed into it and men beckoned the flier to stand beside her.
    The mirror misted and then he was looking, as if through a window, into a room with walls and ceiling of rose quartz. On the floor were thick rugs of silver rose. And a great heap of cushions made a low couch in the center.
    “The inner chamber of the Daughter,” Sera announced.
    A circular panel in the wall opened and a woman slipped through. She was very young, little more than a girl. There were happy curves in her full crimson lips, joyous lights in her violet eyes. Her shape was human, but her beauty was unearthly. Delicate colors seemed to play faintly upon her pearl white skin, reminding Garin of mother-of-pearl with its lights and shadows. Blue-black hair seemed to veil her as a cloud, reaching below her knees. Her robe of silver net was girdled about her waist by rose-shaded jewels.
    “That was Thrala before the Black Ones took her,” said Sera.
    Urg laughed at Garin’s cry of disappointment as the picture vanished.
    “What care you for shadows when the Daughter herself waits for you. You have but to bring her from the Caves of Darkness....”
    “Where are these Caves—” Garin’s question was interrupted by the pealing of the Cavern gong.

    Sera cried out: “The Black Ones!”
    Urg shrugged. “When they spared not the Ancient Ones how could we hope to escape? Come, we must go to the Hall of Thrones.”
    Before the jade throne of the Lord of the Folk stood a small group of the lizard-men beside two litters. As Garin entered the Lord spoke.
    “Let the outlander come hither that he may see the work of the Black Ones.”
    Garin advanced unwillingly, coming to stand by those struggling things which gasped their message between moans and screams of agony. They were men of the Folk but their black skins were green with rot.
    The Lord leaned forward on his throne. “It is well,” he said. “You may depart.”
    As if obeying his command, the tortured things let go of the life to which they had clung and were still.
    “Look upon the work of the Black Ones,” the ruler said to Garin. “Jiv and Betv were captured while on a mission to the Gibi of the Cliff. It seems that the Black Ones needed material for their laboratories. They seek even to give the Daughter to their workers of horror!”
    A terrible cry of hatred arose from the hall, and Garin’s jaw set. To give that fair vision he had just seen to such a death as this—!
    “Jiv and Betv were imprisoned close to the Daughter and they heard the threats of Kepta. Our brothers, stricken with foul disease, were sent forth to carry the plague to us, but they swam through the pool of boiling mud. They have died but the evil died with them. And I think that while we breed such as they, the Black Ones shall not rest easy. Listen, now, outlander, to the story of the Black Ones and the Caves of Darkness, of how the Ancient Ones brought the Folk up from the slime of a long dried sea and made them great, and of how the Ancient Ones at last went down to their destruction.
    “In the days before the lands of the outer world were born of the sea, before even the Land of the Sun (Mu) and the Land of the Sea (Atlantis) arose from molten rock and sand, there was land here in the far south. A sere land of rock and plains and swamps where slimy life mated, lived, and died.
    “Then came the Ancient Ones from beyond the stars.Their race was already older than this earth. Their wise men had watched its birth-rending from the sun. And when their world perished,