The Best of Robert E. Howard: Crimson Shadows (Volume 1) Page 15

“Gaston l’Armon,” the other spoke curtly. “But what is that to you?”

  “Strangers are few in the Black Forest,” grunted the host, “bandits many. Sit at yonder table and I will bring food.”

  The two men sat down, with the bearing of men who have traveled far. One was a tall gaunt man, clad in a featherless hat and somber black garments, which set off the dark pallor of his forbidding face. The other was of a different type entirely, bedecked with lace and plumes, although his finery was somewhat stained from travel. He was handsome in a bold way, and his restless eyes shifted from side to side, never still an instant.

  The host brought wine and food to the rough-hewn table and then stood back in the shadows, like a somber image. His features, now receding into vagueness, now luridly etched in the firelight as it leaped and flickered, were masked in a beard which seemed almost animal-like in thickness. A great nose curved above this beard and two small red eyes stared unblinkingly at his guests.

  “Who are you?” suddenly asked the younger man.

  “I am the host of the Cleft Skull Tavern,” sullenly replied the other. His tone seemed to challenge his questioner to ask further.

  “Do you have many guests?” l’Armon pursued.

  “Few come twice,” the host grunted.

  Kane started and glanced up straight into those small red eyes, as if he sought for some hidden meaning in the host’s words. The flaming eyes seemed to dilate, then dropped sullenly before the Englishman’s cold stare.

  “I’m for bed,” said Kane abruptly, bringing his meal to a close. “I must take up my journey by daylight.”

  “And I,” added the Frenchman. “Host, show us to our chambers.”

  Black shadows wavered on the walls as the two followed their silent host down a long, dark hall. The stocky, broad body of their guide seemed to grow and expand in the light of the small candle which he carried, throwing a long, grim shadow behind him.

  At a certain door he halted, indicating that they were to sleep there. They entered; the host lit a candle with the one he carried, then lurched back the way he had come.

  In the chamber the two men glanced at each other. The only furnishings of the room were a couple of bunks, a chair or two and a heavy table.

  “Let us see if there be any way to make fast the door,” said Kane. “I like not the looks of mine host.”

  “There are racks on door and jamb for a bar,” said Gaston, “but no bar.”

  “We might break up the table and use its pieces for a bar,” mused Kane.

  “Mon Dieu,” said l’Armon, “you are timorous, m’sieu.”

  Kane scowled. “I like not being murdered in my sleep,” he answered gruffly.

  “My faith!” the Frenchman laughed. “We are chance met — until I overtook you on the forest road an hour before sunset, we had never seen each other.”

  “I have seen you somewhere before,” answered Kane, “though I can not now recall where. As for the other, I assume every man is an honest fellow until he shows me he is a rogue; moreover, I am a light sleeper and slumber with a pistol at hand.”

  The Frenchman laughed again.

  “I was wondering how m’sieu could bring himself to sleep in the room with a stranger! Ha! Ha! All right, m’sieu Englishman, let us go forth and take a bar from one of the other rooms.”

  Taking the candle with them, they went into the corridor. Utter silence reigned and the small candle twinkled redly and evilly in the thick darkness.

  “Mine host hath neither guests nor servants,” muttered Solomon Kane. “A strange tavern! What is the name, now? These German words come not easily to me — the Cleft Skull? A bloody name, i’faith.”

  They tried the rooms next to theirs, but no bar rewarded their search. At last they came to the last room at the end of the corridor. They entered. It was furnished like the rest, except that the door was provided with a small barred opening, and fastened from the outside with a heavy bolt, which was secured at one end to the door-jamb. They raised the bolt and looked in.

  “There should be an outer window, but there is not,” muttered Kane. “Look!”

  The floor was stained darkly. The walls and the one bunk were hacked in places, great splinters having been torn away.

  “Men have died in here,” said Kane, somberly. “Is yonder not a bar fixed in the wall?”

  “Aye, but ’tis made fast,” said the Frenchman, tugging at it. “The —”

  A section of the wall swung back and Gaston gave a quick exclamation. A small, secret room was revealed, and the two men bent over the grisly thing that lay upon its floor.

  “The skeleton of a man!” said Gaston. “And behold, how his bony leg is shackled to the floor! He was imprisoned here and died.”

  “Nay,” said Kane, “the skull is cleft — methinks mine host had a grim reason for the name of his hellish tavern. This man, like us, was no doubt a wanderer who fell into the fiend’s hands.”

  “Likely,” said Gaston without interest; he was engaged in idly working the great iron ring from the skeleton’s leg bones. Failing in this, he drew his sword and with an exhibition of remarkable strength cut the chain which joined the ring on the leg to a ring set deep in the log floor.

  “Why should he shackle a skeleton to the floor?” mused the Frenchman. “Monbleu! ’Tis a waste of good chain. Now, m’sieu,” he ironically addressed the white heap of bones, “I have freed you and you may go where you like!”

  “Have done!” Kane’s voice was deep. “No good will come of mocking the dead.”

  “The dead should defend themselves,” laughed l’Armon. “Somehow, I will slay the man who kills me, though my corpse climb up forty fathoms of ocean to do it.”

  Kane turned toward the outer door, closing the door of the secret room behind him. He liked not this talk which smacked of demonry and witchcraft; and he was in haste to face the host with the charge of his guilt.

  As he turned, with his back to the Frenchman, he felt the touch of cold steel against his neck and knew that a pistol muzzle was pressed close beneath the base of his brain.

  “Move not, m’sieu!” The voice was low and silky. “Move not, or I will scatter your few brains over the room.”

  The Puritan, raging inwardly, stood with his hands in air while l’Armon slipped his pistols and sword from their sheaths.

  “Now you can turn,” said Gaston, stepping back.

  Kane bent a grim eye on the dapper fellow, who stood bareheaded now, hat in one hand, the other hand leveling his long pistol.

  “Gaston the Butcher!” said the Englishman somberly. “Fool that I was to trust a Frenchman! You range far, murderer! I remember you now, with that cursed great hat off — I saw you in Calais some years agone.”

  “Aye — and now you will see me never again. What was that?”

  “Rats exploring yon skeleton,” said Kane, watching the bandit like a hawk, waiting for a single slight wavering of that black gun muzzle. “The sound was of the rattle of bones.”

  “Like enough,” returned the other. “Now, M’sieu Kane, I know you carry considerable money on your person. I had thought to wait until you slept and then slay you, but the opportunity presented itself and I took it. You trick easily.”

  “I had little thought that I should fear a man with whom I had broken bread,” said Kane, a deep timbre of slow fury sounding in his voice.

  The bandit laughed cynically. His eyes narrowed as he began to back slowly toward the outer door. Kane’s sinews tensed involuntarily; he gathered himself like a giant wolf about to launch himself in a death leap, but Gaston’s hand was like a rock and the pistol never trembled.

  “We will have no death plunges after the shot,” said Gaston. “Stand still, m’sieu; I have seen men killed by dying men, and I wish to have distance enough between us to preclude that possibility. My faith — I will shoot, you will roar and charge, but you will die before you reach me with your bare hands. And mine host will have another skeleton in his secret niche. That is, i
f I do not kill him myself. The fool knows me not nor I him, moreover —”

  The Frenchman was in the doorway now, sighting along the barrel. The candle, which had been stuck in a niche on the wall, shed a weird and flickering light which did not extend past the doorway. And with the suddenness of death, from the darkness behind Gaston’s back, a broad, vague form rose up and a gleaming blade swept down. The Frenchman went to his knees like a butchered ox, his brains spilling from his cleft skull. Above him towered the figure of the host, a wild and terrible spectacle, still holding the hanger with which he had slain the bandit.

  “Ho! ho!” he roared. “Back!”

  Kane had leaped forward as Gaston fell, but the host thrust into his very face a long pistol which he held in his left hand.

  “Back!” he repeated in a tigerish roar, and Kane retreated from the menacing weapon and the insanity in the red eyes.

  The Englishman stood silent, his flesh crawling as he sensed a deeper and more hideous threat than the Frenchman had offered. There was something inhuman about this man, who now swayed to and fro like some great forest beast while his mirthless laughter boomed out again.

  “Gaston the Butcher!” he shouted, kicking the corpse at his feet. “Ho! ho! My fine brigand will hunt no more! I had heard of this fool who roamed the Black Forest — he wished gold and he found death! Now your gold shall be mine; and more than gold — vengeance!”

  “I am no foe of yours,” Kane spoke calmly.

  “All men are my foes! Look — the marks on my wrists! See — the marks on my ankles! And deep in my back — the kiss of the knout! And deep in my brain, the wounds of the years of the cold, silent cells where I lay as punishment for a crime I never committed!” The voice broke in a hideous, grotesque sob.

  Kane made no answer. This man was not the first he had seen whose brain had shattered amid the horrors of the terrible Continental prisons.

  “But I escaped!” the scream rose triumphantly. “And here I make war on all men . . . What was that?”

  Did Kane see a flash of fear in those hideous eyes?

  “My sorcerer is rattling his bones!” whispered the host, then laughed wildly. “Dying, he swore his very bones would weave a net of death for me. I shackled his corpse to the floor, and now, deep in the night, I hear his bare skeleton clash and rattle as he seeks to be free, and I laugh, I laugh! Ho! ho! How he yearns to rise and stalk like old King Death along these dark corridors when I sleep, to slay me in my bed!”

  Suddenly the insane eyes flared hideously: “You were in that secret room, you and this dead fool! Did he talk to you?”

  Kane shuddered in spite of himself. Was it insanity or did he actually hear the faint rattle of bones, as if the skeleton had moved slightly? Kane shrugged his shoulders; rats will even tug at dusty bones.

  The host was laughing again. He sidled around Kane, keeping the Englishman always covered, and with his free hand opened the door. All was darkness within, so that Kane could not even see the glimmer of the bones on the floor.

  “All men are my foes!” mumbled the host, in the incoherent manner of the insane. “Why should I spare any man? Who lifted a hand to my aid when I lay for years in the vile dungeons of Karlsruhe — and for a deed never proven? Something happened to my brain, then. I became as a wolf — a brother to these of the Black Forest to which I fled when I escaped.

  “They have feasted, my brothers, on all who lay in my tavern — all except this one who now clashes his bones, this magician from Russia. Lest he come stalking back through the black shadows when night is over the world, and slay me — for who may slay the dead? — I stripped his bones and shackled him. His sorcery was not powerful enough to save him from me, but all men know that a dead magician is more evil than a living one. Move not, Englishman! Your bones I shall leave in this secret room beside this one, to — ”

  The maniac was standing partly in the doorway of the secret room, now, his weapon still menacing Kane. Suddenly he seemed to topple backward, and vanished in the darkness; and at the same instant a vagrant gust of wind swept down the outer corridor and slammed the door shut behind him. The candle on the wall flickered and went out. Kane’s groping hands, sweeping over the floor, found a pistol, and he straightened, facing the door where the maniac had vanished. He stood in the utter darkness, his blood freezing, while a hideous muffled screaming came from the secret room, intermingled with the dry, grisly rattle of fleshless bones. Then silence fell.

  Kane found flint and steel and lighted the candle. Then, holding it in one hand and the pistol in the other, he opened the secret door.

  “Great God!” he muttered as cold sweat formed on his body. “This thing is beyond all reason, yet with mine own eyes I see it! Two vows have here been kept, for Gaston the Butcher swore that even in death he would avenge his slaying, and his was the hand which set yon fleshless monster free. And he — ”

  The host of the Cleft Skull lay lifeless on the floor of the secret room, his bestial face set in lines of terrible fear; and deep in his broken neck were sunk the bare fingerbones of the sorcerer’s skeleton.

  FORBIDDEN MAGIC

  Weird Tales, July 1929

  There came to me a Shape one summer night

  When all the world lay silent in the stars

  And moonlight crossed my room with ghostly bars.

  It whispered hints of weird unhallowed sight;

  I followed, then in waves of spectral light

  Mounted the shimmery ladders of my soul,

  Where moon-pale spiders, huge as dragons, stole —

  Great forms like moths with wings of whispy white.

  Then round the world the sighing of the loon

  Shook misty lakes beneath the false dawn’s gleams.

  Rose-tinted shone the skyline’s minaret.

  I rose in fear and then with blood and sweat

  Beat out the iron fabrics of my dreams

  And shaped of them a web to snare the moon.

  THE SHADOW KINGDOM

  Weird Tales, August 1929

  1. A King Comes Riding

  The blare of the trumpets grew louder, like a deep golden tide surge, like the soft booming of the evening tides against the silver beaches of Valusia. The throng shouted, women flung roses from the roofs as the rhythmic chiming of silver hoofs came clearer and the first of the mighty array swung into view in the broad white street that curved round the golden-spired Tower of Splendor.

  First came the trumpeters, slim youths, clad in scarlet, riding with a flourish of long, slender golden trumpets; next the bowmen, tall men from the mountains; and behind these the heavily armed footmen, their broad shields clashing in unison, their long spears swaying in perfect rhythm to their stride. Behind them came the mightiest soldiery in all the world, the Red Slayers, horsemen, splendidly mounted, armed in red from helmet to spur. Proudly they sat their steeds, looking neither to right nor to left, but aware of the shouting for all that. Like bronze statues they were, and there was never a waver in the forest of spears that reared above them.

  Behind those proud and terrible ranks came the motley files of the mercenaries, fierce, wild-looking warriors, men of Mu and of Kaa-u and of the hills of the east and the isles of the west. They bore spears and heavy swords, and a compact group that marched somewhat apart were the bowmen of Lemuria. Then came the light foot of the nation, and more trumpeters brought up the rear.

  A brave sight, and a sight which aroused a fierce thrill in the soul of Kull, king of Valusia. Not on the Topaz Throne at the front of the regal Tower of Splendor sat Kull, but in the saddle, mounted on a great stallion, a true warrior king. His mighty arm swung up in reply to the salutes as the hosts passed. His fierce eyes passed the gorgeous trumpeters with a casual glance, rested longer on the following soldiery; they blazed with a ferocious light as the Red Slayers halted in front of him with a clang of arms and a rearing of steeds, and tendered him the crown salute. They narrowed slightly as the mercenaries strode by. They saluted no one, the mer
cenaries. They walked with shoulders flung back, eyeing Kull boldly and straightly, albeit with a certain appreciation; fierce eyes, unblinking; savage eyes, staring from beneath shaggy manes and heavy brows.

  And Kull gave back a like stare. He granted much to brave men, and there were no braver in all the world, not even among the wild tribesmen who now disowned him. But Kull was too much the savage to have any great love for these. There were too many feuds. Many were age-old enemies of Kull’s nation, and though the name of Kull was now a word accursed among the mountains and valleys of his people, and though Kull had put them from his mind, yet the old hates, the ancient passions still lingered. For Kull was no Valusian but an Atlantean.

  The armies swung out of sight around the gem-blazing shoulders of the Tower of Splendor and Kull reined his stallion about and started toward the palace at an easy gait, discussing the review with the commanders that rode with him, using not many words, but saying much.

  “The army is like a sword,” said Kull, “and must not be allowed to rust.” So down the street they rode, and Kull gave no heed to any of the whispers that reached his hearing from the throngs that still swarmed the streets.

  “That is Kull, see! Valka! But what a king! And what a man! Look at his arms! His shoulders!”

  And an undertone of more sinister whisperings: “Kull! Ha, accursed usurper from the pagan isles” — “Aye, shame to Valusia that a barbarian sits on the Throne of Kings.” . . .

  Little did Kull heed. Heavy-handed had he seized the decaying throne of ancient Valusia and with a heavier hand did he hold it, a man against a nation.

  After the council chamber, the social palace where Kull replied to the formal and laudatory phrases of the lords and ladies, with carefully hidden, grim amusement at such frivolities; then the lords and ladies took their formal departure and Kull leaned back upon the ermine throne and contemplated matters of state until an attendant requested permission from the great king to speak, and announced an emissary from the Pictish embassy.