Page:Weird Tales Volume 29 Number 1 (1937-01).djvu/95



HEY tell it in Bel Yamak, in a language not of Earth, that a malignant and terrible being once dwelt in that incredible abyss named the Gray Gulf of Yarnak. Not on earth, nor on any planet that spins about any star in the skies we know, is Bel Yarnak; but beyond Betelgeuse, beyond the Giant Stars, on a green and joyous world still in its lusty youth are the towers and silver minarets of this city. Nor are the dwellers in Bel Yarnak anthropoid nor in any way man-like; yet there are fires during the long warm nights in curious hearths, and wherever in this universe there are fires there will be tales told about them, and breathless listeners to bring contentment to the heart of the teller of tales. The Sindara rules benignantly over Bel Yarnak; yet in the old days fear and doom lay like a shroud over the land, and in the Gray Gulf of Yarnak a brooding horror dwelt loathsomely. And a strange enchantment chilled the skies and hid the triple moons behind a darkened pall.

For a being had come to glut its evil hunger in the land, and those who dwelt in Bel Yarnak called it the Eater of Souls. In nowise could this being be described, for none had seen it save under circumstances which precluded the possibility of return. Yet in the gulf it brooded, and when its hunger stirred it would send forth a soundless summons, so that in tavern and temple, by fireside and in the blackness of the night some would rise slowly, with a passionless look of death upon their features, and would depart from Bel Yarnak toward the Gray Gulf. Nor would they ever return. It was said that the thing in the gulf was half a demon and half a god, and that the souls of those whom it slew served it eternally, fulfilling strange missions in the icy wastes between the stars. This being had come from the dark sun, the hydromancers said, where it had been conceived by an unholy alliance between those timeless Ancients who filter strangely between the universes and a Black Shining One of unknown origin. The necromancers said other things, but they hated the hydromancers, who were powerful then, and their rune-casting was generally discredited. Yet the Sindara listened to both schools of mages, and pondered upon his throne of chalcedony, and presently determined to set forth voluntarily to the Great Gulf of Yarnak, which was reputed to be bottomless.

The necromancers gave the Sindara curious implements made of the bones of the dead, and the hydromancers gave him intricately twisted transparent tubes of crystal, which would be useful in battling the Eater of Souls. Thereafter the necromancers and the hydromancers squatted on their haunches in the city gate and howled dismally as the Sindara rode westward on his gorlak, that fleet but repugnantly shaped reptile. After a time the Sindara discarded both the weapons of the hydromancers and the necromancers, for he was a worshipper of Vorvadoss, as had been each Sindara in his time. None might worship Vorvadoss save the Sindara of Bel Yarnak, for such is the god's command; and presently the Sindara dis-