Avon Fantasy Reader No. 7 — page 97: what you’re looking at

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

THE EMPIRE OF THE NECROMANCERS OS passed among them and went forth from the palace, to be communicated at length, by devious ways, to all the dead of Cincor. : All that night, and during the blood-dark day that followed, by wavering torches or the light of the failing sun, an endless army of pene: eaten liches, of tattered skeletons, poured in a ghastly torrent through the streets of Yethly- ‘reom and along the palace-hall where Hestaiyon stood guatd above the slain necromancers. Unpausing, with vague, fixed eyes, they went on like driven shadows to seek the subterranean vaults below the palace, to pass through’ the open door where Illeiro waited in the last vault, and then to wend downward by a thousand thousand steps to the verge of that gulf in which boiled the ebbing fires of earth. There, from the verge, they flung themselves to a second death and the clean annihilation of the bottomless flames. a But, after all had gone to their release, Hestaiyon still remained one in the _ fading sunset, beside the cloven corpses of Mmatmuor and Sodosma. There, as the tablets had directed him to do, he made trial of those spells of elder necromancy which he had known in his former wisdom, and cursed the dismembered bodies with that perpetual life-in-death which Mmatmuor and Sodosma had sought to inflict upon the people of Cincor. And maledictions came from the pale lips, and the heads rolled horribly with glaring eyes, and the limbs and torsos writhed on their imperial couches amid clotted blood. Then, with no backward look, knowing that all was done as had been or- dained and predicted from the first, the mummy of Hestaiyon left the necro- mancers to their doom, and went wearily through the nighted labyrinth of vaults to rejoin Illeiro. . ~ | So, in tranquil silence, with no further need of words, Illeiro and Hestaiyon passed through the open door of the nether vault, and Illeiro locked the door _ behind them with its key of untarnished bronze. And thence, by the coiling stairs, they wended their way to the verge of the sunken flames and were one with their kinsfolk and their people in the last, ultimate nothingness. ~__- But of Mmatmuor and Sodosma, men say that their quartered bodies crawl to and fro to this day in Yethlyreom, finding no peace or respite from their doom of life-in-death, and seeking vainly through the black maze of nether . _ yaults the door that was locked by Illeiro. COMMCOOKS, Conn