Forgetting the presence of the dark chanters, and the ill renown of that isle to which the seas had brought him, he sprang forward to clasp his beloved, crying out her name in an agony of rapture. But she answered not his cry, and responded to his embrace only with a faint trembling. And Yadar, sorely perplexed and dismayed, was aware of the deathly coldness that crept into his fingers and smote through his very raiment from her flesh. Mortally pale and languid were the lips that he kissed, and it seemed that no breath emerged between them, nor was there any rising and falling of the wan bosom against his. In the wide, beautiful eyes that she turned to him, he found only a drowsy voidness, and such recognition as a sleeper gives when but half awakened, relapsing quickly into slumber thereafter.
“Art thou indeed Dalili?” he said. And she answered somnolently, in a toneless, indistinct voice, “I am Dalili.”
To Yadar, baffled by mystery, chilled, forlorn and aching, it was as if she had spoken from a land farther away than all the weary leagues of his search throughout Zothique. Fearing to understand the change that had come upon her, he said tenderly:
“Surely thou knowest me, for I am thy lover, the Prince Yadar, who has sought thee through half the kingdoms of Earth, and has sailed afar for thy sake on the unshored sea.” And she replied like one bemused by some heavy drug, in a soulless voice, as if echoing his words without true comprehension: “Surely I know thee.” And to Yadar there was no comfort in her reply; and his concernment was not allayed by the parrotings with which she answered all his other loving speeches and queries.
He knew not that the three chanters had all ceased their incantation; and verily, he had forgotten their presence in his finding of Dalili. But as he stood holding the girl closely, the men came toward him, and one of them clutched his arm. And the man hailed him by name and addressed him, albeit uncouthly, in a language commonly spoken throughout many parts of Zothique, saying: “We bid thee welcome to the Isle of Naat, from which no living traveller may return.”
Yadar, feeling a dread suspicion, interrogated the man fiercely: “What manner of beings are ye? And why is Dalili in this place? And what have ye done to her?”
“I am Vacharn, a necromancer,” the man replied readily, “and these others with me are my sons, Vokal and Uldulla, who are also necromancers. We dwell in a house behind the crags, and are attended by the drowned people that our sorcery has called up from the sea to a semblance of life and animation. Among our servants is this girl, Dalili, together with the whole crew of that ship in which she sailed from Oroth. For, like the vessel in which thou camest later, the ship was blown far asea and was taken by the ineluctable Black River, and was wrecked finally on the reefs of Naat. And my sons and I, chanting that powerful formula which requires no use of circle or pentacle, summoned ashore the drowned company: even as we have now summoned the crew of that other vessel, from which thou alone wert saved alive by the necromantic swimmer at our command, for a certain purpose.”
Vacharn ended, and stood peering into the dusk intently; and Yadar at that moment heard behind him a noise of slow footsteps coming upward across the shingle from the surf. Turning, he saw emerge from the livid twilight the old captain of that merchant galley in which he had voyaged so unwillingly to Naat; and behind the captain were the sailors and oarsmen. With the paces of sleep-walkers they approached the firelight, the sea-water dripping heavily from their raiment and hair, and drooling from their mouths. Some were sorely bruised, and others came stumbling or dragging with limbs broken by the rocks on which that torrential sea had flung them; and on all their faces was the ghastly look of men who have suffered the doom of drowning.
Stiffly, like automatons, they made obeisance in a body before Vacharn and his sons, acknowledging thus their thralldom to those who had raised them from deep death. In their glassily staring eyes there was no recognition of Yadar, no awareness of outward things; and they spoke only in dull, rote-like recognition of certain obscure words addressed to them by the necromancers.
To Yadar, it was as if he too stood and moved like the living dead in a dark, hollow, half-conscious dream. Even thus, walking side by side with Dalili, and followed by those others, he was led by the enchanters through a dusky ravine that wound secretly toward the uplands of Naat. Obediently he went: but in his heart there was small joy at the finding of Dalili; and his love was companioned by a sick despair.
Vacharn lit the way with a brand of driftwood plucked from the fire; and Yadar beheld vaguely, by its flickering, the black and cruel precipices of a steepening gorge, and the dwarfish crooked pines that leaned malignantly from high ledges, as if to cast with wizard hands a malediction upon the wayfarers. Anon a bloated moon rose red as with sanies-mingled blood behind them, over the wild, racing sea; and, ere its orb had cleared to a death-like paleness, they emerged from the gorge on a stony fell where stood the house of the three necromancers.
Long and low-lying was the house, built of dark granite, with crouching wings half hidden amid the foliage of close-grown cypresses. Behind it a cliff beetled, overhanging it starkly; and above the cliff were somber slopes and ridges piled in the moonlight, rising afar toward the mountainous center of Naat.
To Yadar, it seemed that the mansion was a place pre-empted by death: for no lights burned in its portals and windows; and a silence came from it to meet the stillness of the wan heavens. But, when the necromancers neared the threshold, a word was spoken by Vacharn, echoing distantly in the inner halls and chambers; and as if in answer, lamps were illumined suddenly everywhere, filling the house as with monstrous yellow eyes; and people appeared instantly within the portals like bowing shadows. But the faces of these beings were blanched by the tomb’s pallor, and some were mottled with green decay, or marked by the tortuous gnawing of maggots….
Later, in a great hall of the house, Yadar was bidden to seat himself at a table where Vacharn and Vokal and Uldulla were wont to sit alone during their meals. The table stood on a sort of dais formed of gigantic flagstones; and below, in the main hall, the dead were gathered about other tables, numbering nearly twoscore; and among them sat the girl Dalili, looking never toward Yadar. He, though sorely sick at heart, would have joined her, unwilling to be parted from her side: but a deep languor was upon him, as if an unspoken spell had enthralled his limbs, and he could no longer move at his own volition but must obey in all things the will of Vacharn.
Dully he sat, observing with small wonder the grimness and taciturnity of his hosts, who, dwelling always with the silent dead, had apparently assumed no little part of their manner and similitude. And he saw more clearly than before the common likeness of the three: for all, it seemed, were as brothers of one birth rather than parent and sons; and all were like ageless things, being neither old nor young in the fashion of ordinary men. Yadar could distinguish Vacharn from his sons only by the darker hue of his garments, and the greater breadth of brow and shoulders; and he knew Vokal from Uldulla merely by a sharper pitch of voice and a deeper hollowing of the gaunt cheeks. And more and more was he aware of that weird evil which emanated from the three, powerful and abhorrent as an exhalation of hidden death.
In the thralldom that weighed upon him, he scarcely marvelled at the serving of the strange supper that followed: though meats were brought in by no palpable agency, and wines poured out as if by the air itself; and the passing of the bearers to and fro was betrayed only by a rustle of doubtfully dying footsteps, and a light chillness that came and went.