Back to The Book of Ninety and Nine Doomed Cities
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In a distant time there was a place of the Parathi where many of that people dwelt together in peace, tending their vineyards and fruiting groves and schooling their children among vaulted palaces of stone. Behind that place rose mountains, tall and chill and terrible, yet pleasant enough to behold on a day in spring from the valley below, keeping glittering vigil in their white mantles. On such a day they might seem to be a gathering of wise Gods, with some tenderness towards little beings; but in the winter they could only be Gods from the dark places between the stars, older than mercy or justice. The city of the Parathi stood with its back to those mountains, but its face was turned to look across the river Lek, which is young and wayward in that place, and only restrained by her high banks of black stone. It looked across to a gap in the hills that ran hard by the further bank, through which the first rays of the rising sun shone on the day of midwinter. The sun rose in that place on that day only; and whether that gap was made by chance, or by the work of some race in a forgotten time, I do not know. The Parathi of that place were united in the worship of a God, and for that reason they had condescended to dwell together. and share their goods, and had left off quarrelling and the eating of flesh. For in that time, as in this, the Parathi were for the most part a fierce and obstinate people, given to the hunting of all kinds of beast, and liable to slay one another for debts of honour. Their God was likewise a fierce and obstinate God. The likeness of their God was carven out of white jade and stood in a temple of white jade at the highest point of the city, looking across the Lek towards the hills where the sun was born. The name of that place was in the language of the Parathi the city of the New Born Sun; and the God of that place was pictured in the form of a disk, held aloft by a noble matron of the Parathi.
There came to that place late in the autumn a traveller, of the race of Thudun of Argaon, and as was their custom the people of the city were hospitable to the traveller. They bade her stay by them in one of their vaulted houses of stone that was at that time empty, and gave her to eat and drink of the stores that they had laid by. Nothing did the Parathi ask of their guest, save only a few times they asked her to tell them tales of her journeys; for she had a wise aspect, even as the mountains, and had journeyed in many distant lands. The Parathi of the city were eager to hear her tales, so they gathered together in the amphitheatre that stood hard by the Ossuary of the Gyrfalcons.
And the traveller told tales of the wonders that she had seen in the Vale of Ulmnek, and the dead lakes below Kaawil, and the jumbled heights of Moror in Teglath where Aboleth is worshipped, and in many other places. And all wondered at her tales, and implored her to tell them yet more.
So she continued to speak before the Parathi until midwinter had come, and she had wearied of that place by the river, and of the heavy deep-throated singing of its people, and of their easy laughter; and many other of their practices were become tiresome to her. So when it came to the day of midwinter she again recited before the assembly of the Parathi, but at this time she did not tell of her travels, but instead spoke in syllogisms, and by examples, and of good and evil, and of how things might be proved and disproved by the use of logic. Furthermore she spoke of the motions of the stars and planets, and of what the philosophers of Argaon had determined of life and death. And the traveller disproved by cunning logic the God of that city.
At this all the people of the city, who were gathered as before to hear her speak, fell upon her with their claws and with their teeth, and tore her asunder. Silently and terribly did they kill the traveller, and that day for the first time the floor of the amphitheatre was despoiled with death. But when the philosopher of Argaon was slain, her logic remained logic, and their God remained disproved.
So that very day they left their city of vineyards and palaces, each to wander a different road, and never to look back to where their blind dead God waits high above the white waters of the Lek.
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