Chapter 52

The words came in a sort of hissing sibilance as Annister, reaching that doorway, halted a moment as the tableau was burned into his brain: He saw his father, helpless, his face gray with the hideous terror of that which was upon him, in the grasp of two cloaked and hooded figures, their dark faces grinning with a bestial mirth. And before him, hand upraised and holding a curious, funnel-shaped object at which the man in the corner shrank backward even as he looked, he saw a tall man with a black, forking beard—the…