Read Online Young Thongor by Lin Carter Adrian Cole - Free Book Online

but only in that it stood erect upon two limbs and had a single head. For it was gaunt as a dead thing, covered with gray, greasy hide, wrinkled and warty like that of a toad. This demon was known to the grimoires as Xarxus of the Crawling Eye, and the Veiled Enchanter had long since bound it to his service by a terrible and unbreakable vow. Its long, lean arms ended in grisly pincers, like a gigantic crab’s, and its head was unspeakably hideous. It had but one eye, and that was a hollow, fleshy pit from whose center slim tentacles sprouted: these flexed and slithered in a loathsome manner, and from this repellant and unnatural organ the demon’s name was derived.
    “I have the boy,” Zazamanc said, when the demon had taken form. “But I cannot comprehend your warnings concerning him: he knows naught of me and is but a rough, untutored savage. I want you to read the future again, to discern if by his capture I have altered or averted the doom that you have foretold.”
    The demon stared down at him, tendrils crawling in the hideous, empty socket that was its only eye. When the tall thing spoke, it was in a voice deeper than ever came from human throat, but curiously flat and without resonance. It spoke even though it had nothing even remotely resembling a mouth, but this did not disturb Zazamanc, who knew that such as Xarxus did not require organs of speech but could resonate the very molecules of the air itself, or cause their thoughts to sound within the minds of those with whom they had uncanny converse.
    I have warned you against having anything to do with this one , the demon said. I have foretold that there approaches down the paths of future time one who is destined to be your bane and the cause of your death. You would be wise to send him hence from this universe you rule .
    Brooding upon his ivory throne, Zazamanc seemed not to have heard the words of the demon. “You can see further into future events than I can,” he mused. “In my Speculum I have foreseen what will happen if he fights in the arena against my monstrous hybrids: his fighting prowess is such that he will escape victorious from every combat, if permitted an even chance and a good weapon. But it would be so easy to slay him…”
    The demon shook its awful head, a familiar human gesture suddenly made horrible by his lack of human features. There is little of the future that I may foretell with any degree of certitude, but this much I can say: the life of that one is linked with your own, and if you slay him, or order him slain, or set him in such danger that his death ensues, your own death will follow swiftly .
    Naked fear glittered in the cold, inscrutable eyes of the Veiled Enchanter. His death was the one thing in all the many worlds and universes that he feared, for he knew all too well what would befall him thereafter, and his soul shrank, shuddering, from the knowledge. His gloved hands clutched uneasily at the arms of his throne.
    “Why do you refuse to read my future in any detail?” he queried in a thin, petulant voice. “You are bound to serve my will by the nature of the vow between us…”
    It is not that I refuse, but that I am unable to comply , the demon said. You are naught but a human, for all your control of magic, and the true nature of time remains hidden from your knowledge, a secret shared only between the Lords of Light and…mine own kind. Know, then, that time is like unto a maze of many thousand intersecting paths: at each single step you face a choice of paths to follow. Which path you may select in any given instance may be calculated, but to project the pattern of your choices further into the maze involves a geometric progression of possible choices, until the further ahead one seeks to predict, one is baffled before an infinite multiplicity of possible paths .
    “Read, then, what you can of my future,” Zazamanc commanded.
    Xarxus complied. Every mortal has seven assassins, appointed by inscrutable Fate to