In the Green Star's Glow by Lin Carter

Author:Lin Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14.

The Sorcerer Quoron

When the bodiless head looked at her, Niamh froze with ghastly horror.

Then she saw that the eyes were wide and unfocused. The gleam of intelligence did not shine in them; they were the blank, unseeing eyes of an idiot-thing.

The loose mouth worked wetly and the head spoke.

"Wa-wa-w-aaah?"

As she stared in horror and revulsion, a dribble of slime drooled from the working lips of the thing as it babbled meaningless noises.

Then a sound came from behind her. A dry cough!

She spun to see a weird, hunched form in the doorway. It was hideous, and curiously disparate. The head was lean, fine-boned, ascetic—even handsome, in a pure, nobly proportioned way.

But its handsomeness ended at the neck.

The body was that of a twisted dwarf with a hunched shoulder and warped, diminutive legs. Swathed in a loose white gown it was, and the gown bulged peculiarly, and in the most surprising places, as if there were portions of the body beneath that gown that bore little or no semblance to the human body.

The creature in the doorway fixed her with a cold, ironic gaze of appraisal. Niamh was very near swooning—the hanging head was still drooling and babbling in a witless manner behind her—but she drew herself up and regarded the being who could only be her captor with a superb pretense of hauteur.

The cold, ironic eyes moved beyond her to the hanging thing. The slight smile left the thin lips and was replaced by an expression of sadness mingled with a curious contempt.

"You are a most persistent young woman," observed the dwarf. "I had thought you safely tucked away, but here you are, freely wandering my tower and prying into my most closely guarded secrets. Well, having intruded upon Wa-Wa's privacy, what do you think of him?"

"Wa-Wa?" she repeated faintly. He nodded at the thing behind her.

"Yes, I call it that partly because I have to call it something, and partly because that is the only sound it seems to know how to make. I have been trying to teach it human speech, but, alas, in that, as in so much else, my artistry falls short of its goal. Well, speak up, girl. What do you think?"

Niamh had recovered some of her self-possession by now. She had nothing to lose from speaking bluntly, so she spoke her mind. It did not seem to her that this hunched, deformed cripple could possibly do her any harm. Her own body was lithe and strong; if it came to a contest, she thought it likely she could turn the tables and make the captor captive.

"I think you should put the pitiful thing out of its misery," she said coldly. "Why do you permit it to continue in this grisly mockery of life? The humane thing to do—"

Something flared in the cold, cruel eyes of the dwarf.

" 'Mockery of life,' indeed! My dear young woman, you are looking upon the noblest miracle of science wrought by human hands on this planet since the dead, forgotten

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