Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
trade paperback, $17.00, 317 p.
This is the first of four extremely short stories in the annals of Kull, or at least first in the order of arrangement in this volume. This one is different from any of the Kull stories that have come before it. It was submitted to Weird Tales, but Farnsworth Wright obviously didn't care for it since it wasn't published until 1967 in the Lancer Books volume King Kull.
The tale opens with Kull listening to Brule, his chancellor Tu, Ka-nu the Pictish ambassador, and the slave and scholar Kathulos discussing philosophy (nothing new there). Kathulos is saying that what we perceive as reality is an illusion. To make his point, he gives an example of sound and silence, saying that sound is the absence of silence, while silence is the absence of sound. Kathulos mentions that Raama, the greatest sorcerer who ever lived, thousands of years ago locked a primordial silence in a castle in order to save the universe.
