Elak of Atlantis Read Online Free PDF

side. Dalan and Lycon flanked the two. The oarsmen seized their weapons, met the invaders. Swords clashed blindingly.
    “Stay here, Lycon,” Elak said suddenly. “Guard Velia.” He sprang down into the pit among the mob of yelling swordsmen. A few arrows fell, but the galleys swayed and pitched so that accurate marksmanship was impossible. Still stronger came the storm wind, darker grew the clouds.
    “’Ware, Elak!” Lycon’s voice.
    The tall adventurer ducked a sweep of steel that came out of nowhere, saw a grinning swarthy face rise up behind him. The rapier danced into a dazzling shimmer, and the man went down coughing blood. Then Elak caught sight of Granicor fighting his way toward him, gray beard blood-spattered, shouting furious oaths. He sprang to meet the duke.
    The ships heeled, rocked sickeningly in the trough of the waves. From the corner of his eye Elak saw a flicker of red fire, realized that Dalan was battling, too. The Druid’s magic turned the tide.
    Cold steel men could battle, but not this searing flame that sprang out of empty air to leave blistered corpses in its wake. The struggle went back to the gunwales, back and back to Granicor’s galley, carrying Elak and the duke with it. Dimly Elak heard Dalan’s exultant shout, the shrill cry of Velia.…
    Without warning disaster struck. A blast of frigid resistless air, a maelstrom of wind that smashed down on the two craft and ripped them asunder, sent them plunging through waters gone insane. Elak saw Dalan’s galley being swept away, heard Granicor roaring in triumph as he plunged forward. He tensed for a leap, realizing as he sprang that he would fall short.
    Salt water drove into hisnostrils, choking him. He went down like a plummet, clinging grimly to his sword. Somehow he held his breath, fighting up toward a dim, hazily translucent green light. And somehow he kept afloat in a madness of racing seas, hanging to the fragment of an oar that drifted within his reach… but at last darkness took him, and he went down into the shadows.
    Shadows that whispered, mocking him. Dim shadows, with cool blue eyes of Elf, moving swiftly in errands of mystery… vague visions of strangeness and of magic… and the faces of Velia and Lycon and the Druid, anxious and afraid. They were searching for him, he knew, and he tried to call a reassuring message. But the dreams faded and were gone.…
     
    5. THE DWELLERS ON THE ISLE
    Elak awoke very slowly, conscious of a dull pain in his chest. A sudden gray sky lowered above him as he opened aching eyes. Nearby waves crawled up whispering on a slate-dark beach. He tried to sit up and discovered that his arms were bound tightly.
    He turned to see tall rocks hemming him in, monolithic eidolons that rose up in all directions save seaward. His attention was drawn by a flicker of movement to a slab of rock that towered twenty feet above him; there was a very narrow crevice splitting it, and from it came a man.
    Elak could not repress a start. Before him was a Pikht—a member of the almost legendary race that had held Atlantis so many eons ago that their very existence had almost been forgotten. White men from the east had warred upon the Pikhts, exterminating them ruthlessly, until, on Crenos Isle, there dwelt what was probably the last survival of the race.
    The man was dark-skinnedand very short—scarcely five feet in height—and hairless. Not even his pale eyes were fringed by lashes. He wore no more than a loincloth, and great muscles crawled beneath the smooth skin. His somber face had an indefinably bestial cast, and Elak thought suddenly of tales he had heard of the kinship of Pikhts to the beasts—that these men were the first beings who had possessed the true human form, and who had possessed powers lost to those of a higher stage of evolution.
    The Pikht bent over Elak, a knife in his hand. His voice was thick, guttural, and Elak could scarcely understand the Atlantean tongue he spoke. “Get up, stranger.