Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

| THE EMPIRE OF THE NECROMANCERS 91 | hills beneath a younger sun; he submitted to their contumelies and insults. 4 asleep flushed and gross, amid their arrogated splendor. There was little speech among the living dead; and son and father, daughter making ho comment on their evil lot. But at last, one midnight, when .the a Ileiro took counsel with Hestaiyon, his eldest ancestor, who had been famed antiquity. | Hestaiyon stood apart from the others, in a corner of the shadowy hall. He was brown and withered in his crumbling mummy-cloths; and his lightless obsidian eyes appeared to gaze still upon nothingness. He seemed not to have heard the questions of Illeiro; but at length, in a dry, rustling whisper, he responded: 3 “I am old, and the night of the sepulcher was long, and [ have forgotten - much. Yet, groping backward across the. void of death, it may be that I shall retrieve something of my former wisdom; and between us we shall devise a mode of deliverance.” And Hestaiyon searched among the shreds of memory, as one who reaches into a place where the worm has been and the hidden: archives of old time have rotted in their covers; till at last he remembered, and said: ! | “I recall that I was once a mighty wizard; and among other things, I knew the spells of necromancy but employed them not, deeming their use and the raising up of the dead an abhorrent act. Also, I possessed other knowledge; and perhaps, among the remnants of that ancient lore, there is something which may serve to guide us now. For I recall a dim, dubitable prophecy, - made in the primal years, at the founding of Yethlyreom and the empire, | Ee of Cincor. The prophecy was, that an evil greater than death would befall the emperors and the people of Cincor in future time; and that the first and the last of the Nimboth dynasty, conferring together, would effect a mode of release and the lifting of the doom. The evil was not named in the prophecy; but it was said that the two emperors would learn the solution of their prob-— lem by the breaking of an ancient clay image that guards the nethermost — _ yault below the imperial palace in Yethlyreom.” | Then, having heard this prophecy from the faded lips of his forefather, ~ Illeiro mused a while, and said: - And night by night he watched them nod in their drunkenness, till they fell — and mother, lover and beloved, went to and fro without sign of recognition, — tyrants lay in slumber, and the flames wavered in the necromantic lamps, ~ as a great wizard in fable and was reputed to have known the secret lore of im COMIC OOOKS.CO©