Free Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter Page A

coiling steps to the next story. There, the rooms contained only books. Feeling his way from room to room in utter darkness, he wished impatiently for the wizard’s crystal rod of light. They had decided that a light was too dangerous, as a passing Druid might see it through one of the Tower’s many windows.
    Thongor was moving down a hall when the sound first came to his notice. A slow, dragging rasp, dry and stealthy. He stopped cold, listening. The sound was repeated again. It was some distance from him, the full length of the hall. A soft rustle, a leathery slither.
    Perplexed, Thongor wrinkled his brow. It was not a footstep…it sounded more like someone dragging himself along the floor…yet it was not that, for there came to his ears neither the soft thud of palms against the stone nor the heavy breathing such exertion would have demanded.
    Green flames burned, phosphorescent spots of fire against the darkness.
    Eyes !
    They hung at knee level, questing the dark. Thongor felt his hackles rise on his neck. His primitive senses gave him uncanny warning…
    Again the rasping slither, and the lambent eyes of weird green flame glided forward a few feet.
    Serpents? Were the silent halls of the Tower guarded by clammy reptiles? That explained why the wizard’s glass had not revealed tenants in the Tower: needing no light, and dwelling in the dark, they would be invisible.
    Silently Thongor retreated back down the corridor, avoiding a patch of dim light where a window cast vague illumination on the floor. He waited as the dry rasp continued. And then—
    His barbarian blood literally froze in his veins as the unknown guardian of the hall slid into the light and was revealed in all its repellent, loathly horror.
    Imagine a pallid serpent as long as a man’s body and thick about as his upper thigh, a serpent upon whose fluid and questing neck grew, not the blunt, wedge-shaped head of a snake —but the dead-white, masklike face of a woman.
    Slanted eyes of lambent green flame glowed in a colorless face whose perfect feminine beauty clashed revoltingly with its snakelike body. Bald, the round skull gleamed naked in the dull light. Scarlet lips smiled seductively, revealing hideous fangs.
    It was a slorg, one of the dread woman-headed serpents of the Lemurian deserts to the east. Thongor’s skin crawled with revulsion as he looked upon it. Never before had he seen one of the slithering monsters, but he knew it well from shuddering legends of desert warriors who had awakened to find themselves in the clammy embrace of the slorg, crept upon them in the stillness of the star-gemmed night.
    For a moment the slorg hovered motionless there in the dim luminance, its masklike face and blazing eyes swaying on the long neck as it quested for its prey. Then it moved, slithering and wriggling, from the shaft of light that fell from the square window. He heard its belly scrape along the stone of the floor and a surge of nausea gripped him. He fought the gut-twisting disgust down and drew forth his great Valkarthan broadsword with a faint rasp of steel against worn leather. The hilt of the sword felt wet against his sweating palms.
    In the dim darkness he searched for the pallid gliding length of the slorg. It was not far away. If it came near him, perhaps he could kill it swiftly and without undue noise, which might attract others…
    And then he heard them wriggling down the hall. He knew not how many they were. Their eyes of lambent phosphor burned with evil green fire through the gloom. And he heard for the first time the sibilant hiss of the slorg’s hunting song. The sinister, throaty hissing made his blood congeal with loathing.
    He hated serpents. His cold, windswept northern home knew them not. The slithering serpents that infested the rotting jungles of the Southland filled him with disgust and horror.
    He could see the glowing eyes clearly now. Five, six, perhaps a dozen of them. They glided unerringly toward him. Perhaps they