Kellory the Warlock

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5THE THRONE OF THE SLEEPER

The dark curtains parted and he glided soundlessly through—to stop short, stifling the gasp that rose to his lips unbidden.

Silent as the grave and dark as death was this chamber. The walls were hung with a variety of nameless artworks. Intricate and curious and wonderful were they, seductive to the eye, conducive to meditation, and all were fashioned from substances of autumnal and somnolent hues. Rich old browns like the dregs of autumn ale; slumberous purples and darkening mauves; deep, slothful crimsons like cold and sluggish blood; vague and dreamy grays, like softest essence of shadows; and depthless, satiny blacks.

The chamber was floored with a night-dark crystal wherein, at amazing depths, small star-like points of icy fire were seemingly imbedded. To tread on this starry floor of black crystal was like walking across wintry skies.

Above, the ceiling rose to a peaked dome. Small lamps of starry silver hung by gemmy chains, and from these a thick and stifling incense fumed in slow coils of midnight-blue vapor. The dome was completely obscured with this perfumed smoke, and the air was heavy with slumberous fragrances.

But Kellory noted these things with but one single all-envisioning glance. His attention was riveted upon that which stood in the center of the chamber.

Picture a great, capacious throne hewn all from softly-glowing amber. The tree whose oozing veins had shed so vast a drop of congealing amber must have been as mighty a nemoral colossus as Yggdrasil itself.

Strewn with thick, strange, soft furs of deepest purple was this amberous throne.

And seated therein, as if overtaken by sleep amidst his brooding thoughts, a man sprawled motionless.

The blood pounding in his temples, scarce daring to breathe lest the faint susurration of an indrawn breath arouse the throned slumberer, Kellory sank to a crouch on the floor of starry crystal, his hand going automatically to the hilt of his rude dagger. With alert and feral eyes, like a timorous beast, he took in the sleeper from crown to toe. For this, he knew, was Phazdaliom the Green Enchanter.

He wore the likeness of a young man, pale and delicate and slim; but Kellory knew that six centuries had passed since first this wan and epicene youth drew breath upon Zephrondus.

The sleeper had pallid and attenuated features, shadowed with melancholy. His face was pale and smooth as old wax, and time had drawn no harsh lines therein. Winged brows curved above translucent slumbering lids, as if etched with a delicate pencil. The long straight nose, the firm, mobile lips, the lean and delicate jaw were aristocratic, and touched with sorrow. Weariness sat on his pale smooth brow; there was languor and boredom in the sulky drooping of the full lips; a cryptic and profound reverie shadowed those features with a funereal sorrow.

His garments were somber and complicated, with many foldings and of an exquisite softness and delicacy of materials. The hues of these fantastical garments were all of green; but of a thousand subtly differing shades and tints of this primary color. Dark mystic greens like the shrouded fires that blaze in the cores of mighty emeralds; pallid hues of attenuated chartreuse; the lambent and lustrous green that shimmers in the scintillant eyes of feral and slinking cats; vibrant, vital greens that burn in the free foliage of springtime, and deep poisonous shades, the green of putrid and rotten flesh and the loathsome and deadly green of serpent-venom. Lucent and luminous tints, the greens of milky jade, and radiant chrysoprase, and apple-green chalcedony, and crystalline sparkling chrysoberyl.

One long slim hand, whereon strange talismanic rings glinted with dull fires, lay like the creamy petals of a dying lily along the curve of his thigh. The other drooped languidly over the massy arm of the luminous amber-yellow chair.

The sleeper made no slightest movement, and Kellory began to breathe again. Indeed, slumber lay so heavily upon the pale man with weary, jaded features that he seemed more like a corpse than one who merely slumbered. Layer upon layer of heavy, drugged slumber enwrapped him like dim, tenacious swathings of subtle shadow. He looked as if he had slumbered here for a thousand centuries of slow-moving time.

In the death-like stillness and funereal darkness of the chamber, whose dim air was heavy with drowsy, suffocating nard and opiate myrrh, Kellory felt his senses dull and his alertness waver. He felt, in his weariness, that he, too, might fall into a trance-like slumber in this inmost room whose every appurtenance and detail of decor was given over to the courting and the seduction of sleep. With a sharp effort, he snapped awake, digging the nails of his one good hand into his thigh so that the bite of pain would hold off the narcotic slumber that seemed about to envelop him.

Still the sleeper did not awake; slowly his fears were allayed and the tired boy began to relax. He was here where he had sought to come. Vengeance, like a burning and insatiable thirst raging within the very core of his being, had driven him to face all but unendurable perils, to come to stand in the presence of Phazdaliom.

Now—to do that for which he had dared and suffered so much.

He rose lithely to his feet, and approached the sleeper on silent naked feet. His left hand went out to touch the slumbering figure on his shoulder…it hung, hesitating…then it brushed the shoulder of the soft garments.

And the throne, and the figure within the throne, like an apparition—vanished!