The Hour of the Dragon Page 19

  19

  In the Hall of the Dead

  Conan moved cautiously in the direction of the light he had seen, hisear cocked over his shoulder, but there was no further sound of pursuit,though he _felt_ the darkness pregnant with sentient life.

  The glow was not stationary; it moved, bobbing grotesquely along. Thenhe saw the source. The tunnel he was traversing crossed another, widercorridor some distance ahead of him. And along this latter tunnel fileda bizarre procession--four tall, gaunt men in black, hooded robes,leaning on staffs. The leader held a torch above his head--a torch thatburned with a curious steady glow. Like phantoms they passed across hislimited range of vision and vanished, with only a fading glow to tell oftheir passing. Their appearance was indescribably eldritch. They werenot Stygians, not like anything Conan had ever seen. He doubted if theywere even humans. They were like black ghosts, stalking ghoulishly alongthe haunted tunnels.

  But his position could be no more desperate than it was. Before theinhuman feet behind him could resume their slithering advance at thefading of the distant illumination, Conan was running down the corridor.He plunged into the other tunnel and saw, far down it, small in thedistance, the weird procession moving in the glowing sphere. He stolenoiselessly after them, then shrank suddenly back against the wall as hesaw them halt and cluster together as if conferring on some matter. Theyturned as if to retrace their steps, and he slipped into the nearestarchway. Groping in the darkness to which he had become so accustomedthat he could all but see through it, he discovered that the tunnel didnot run straight, but meandered, and he fell back beyond the first turn,so that the light of the strangers should not fall on him as theypassed.

  But as he stood there, he was aware of a low hum of sound from somewherebehind him, like the murmur of human voices. Moving down the corridor inthat direction, he confirmed his first suspicion. Abandoning hisoriginal intention of following the ghoulish travelers to whateverdestination might be theirs, he set out in the direction of the voices.

  Presently he saw a glint of light ahead of him, and turning into thecorridor from which it issued, saw a broad arch filled with a dim glowat the other end. On his left a narrow stone stair went upward, andinstinctive caution prompted him to turn and mount the stair. The voiceshe heard were coming from beyond that flame-filled arch.

  The sounds fell away beneath him as he climbed, and presently he cameout through a low arched door into a vast open space glowing with aweird radiance.

  He was standing on a shadowy gallery from which he looked down into abroad dim-lit hall of colossal proportions. It was a hall of the dead,which few ever see but the silent priests of Stygia. Along the blackwalls rose tier above tier of carven, painted sarcophagi. Each stood ina niche in the dusky stone, and the tiers mounted up and up to be lostin the gloom above. Thousands of carven masks stared impassively downupon the group in the midst of the hall, rendered futile andinsignificant by that vast array of the dead.

  Of this group ten were priests, and though they had discarded theirmasks Conan knew they were the priests he had accompanied to thepyramid. They stood before a tall, hawk-faced man beside a black altaron which lay a mummy in rotting swathings. And the altar seemed to standin the heart of a living fire which pulsed and shimmered, drippingflakes of quivering golden flame on the black stones about it. Thisdazzling glow emanated from a great red jewel which lay upon the altar,and in the reflection of which the faces of the priests looked ashy andcorpse-like. As he looked, Conan felt the pressure of all the wearyleagues and the weary nights and days of his long quest, and he trembledwith the mad urge to rush among those silent priests, clear his way withmighty blows of naked steel, and grasp the red gem with passion-tautfingers. But he gripped himself with iron control, and crouched down inthe shadow of the stone balustrade. A glance showed him that a stair leddown into the hall from the gallery, hugging the wall and half hidden inthe shadows. He glared into the dimness of the vast place, seeking otherpriests or votaries, but saw only the group about the altar.

  In that great emptiness the voice of the man beside the altar soundedhollow and ghostly:

  '... And so the word came southward. The night wind whispered it, theravens croaked of it as they flew, and the grim bats told it to the owlsand the serpents that lurk in hoary ruins. Werewolf and vampire knew,and the ebon-bodied demons that prowl by night. The sleeping Night ofthe World stirred and shook its heavy mane, and there began a throbbingof drums in deep darkness, and the echoes of far weird cries frightenedmen who walked by dusk. For the Heart of Ahriman had come again into theworld to fulfill its cryptic destiny.

  'Ask me not how I, Thutothmes of Khemi and the Night, heard the wordbefore Thoth-Amon who calls himself prince of all wizards. There aresecrets not meet for such ears even as yours, and Thoth-Amon is not theonly lord of the Black Ring.

  'I knew, and I went to meet the Heart which came southward. It was likea magnet which drew me, unerringly. From death to death it came, ridingon a river of human blood. Blood feeds it, blood draws it. Its power isgreatest when there is blood on the hands that grasp it, when it iswrested by slaughter from its holder. Wherever it gleams, blood is spiltand kingdoms totter, and the forces of nature are put in turmoil.

  'And here I stand, the master of the Heart, and have summoned you tocome secretly, who are faithful to me, to share in the black kingdomthat shall be. Tonight you shall witness the breaking of Thoth-Amon'schains which enslave us, and the birth of empire.

  'Who am I, even I, Thutothmes, to know what powers lurk and dream inthose crimson deeps? It holds secrets forgotten for three thousandyears. But I shall learn. These shall tell me!'

  He waved his hand toward the silent shapes that lined the hall.

  'See how they sleep, staring through their carven masks! Kings, queens,generals, priests, wizards, the dynasties and the nobility of Stygia forten thousand years! The touch of the heart will awaken them from theirlong slumber. Long, long the Heart throbbed and pulsed in ancientStygia. Here was its home in the centuries before it journeyed toAcheron. The ancients knew its full power, and they will tell me when byits magic I restore them to life to labor for me.

  'I will rouse them, will waken them, will learn their forgotten wisdom,the knowledge locked in those withered skulls. By the lore of the deadwe shall enslave the living! Aye, kings and generals and wizards of oldshall be our helpers and our slaves. Who shall stand before us?

  'Look! This dried, shriveled thing on the altar was once Thothmekri, ahigh priest of Set, who died three thousand years ago. He was an adeptof the Black Ring. He knew of the Heart. He will tell us of its powers.'

  Lifting the great jewel, the speaker laid it on the withered breast ofthe mummy, and lifted his hand as he began an incantation. But theincantation was never finished. With his hand lifted and his lips partedhe froze, glaring past his acolytes, and they wheeled to stare in thedirection in which he was looking.

  Through the black arch of a door four gaunt, black-robed shapes hadfiled into the great hall. Their faces were dim yellow ovals in theshadow of their hoods.

  'Who are you?' ejaculated Thutothmes in a voice as pregnant with dangeras the hiss of a cobra. 'Are you mad, to invade the holy shrine of Set?'

  The tallest of the strangers spoke, and his voice was toneless as aKhitan temple bell.

  'We follow Conan of Aquilonia.'

  'He is not here,' answered Thutothmes, shaking back his mantle from hisright hand with a curious menacing gesture, like a panther unsheathinghis talons.

  'You lie. He is in this temple. We tracked him from a corpse behind thebronze door of the outer portal through a maze of corridors. We werefollowing his devious trail when we became aware of this conclave. We gonow to take it up again. But first give us the Heart of Ahriman.'

  'Death is the portion of madmen,' murmured Thutothmes, moving nearer thespeaker. His priests closed in on cat-like feet, but the strangers didnot appear to heed.

  'Who can look upon it without desire?' said the Khitan. 'In Khitai wehave
heard of it. It will give us power over the people which cast usout. Glory and wonder dream in its crimson deeps. Give it to us, beforewe slay you.'

  A fierce cry rang out as a priest leaped with a flicker of steel. Beforehe could strike, a scaly staff licked out and touched his breast, and hefell as a dead man falls. In an instant the mummies were staring down ona scene of blood and horror. Curved knives flashed and crimsoned, snakystaffs licked in and out, and whenever they touched a man, that manscreamed and died.

  At the first stroke Conan had bounded up and was racing down the stairs.He caught only glimpses of that brief, fiendish fight--saw men swaying,locked in battle and streaming blood; saw one Khitan, fairly hacked topieces, yet still on his feet and dealing death, when Thutothmes smotehim on the breast with his open empty hand, and he dropped dead, thoughnaked steel had not been enough to destroy his uncanny vitality.

  By the time Conan's hurtling feet left the stair, the fight was all butover. Three of the Khitans were down, slashed and cut to ribbons anddisemboweled, but of the Stygians only Thutothmes remained on his feet.

  He rushed at the remaining Khitan, his empty hand lifted like a weapon,and that hand was black as that of a negro. But before he could strike,the staff in the tall Khitan's hand licked out, seeming to elongateitself as the yellow man thrust. The point touched the bosom ofThutothmes and he staggered; again and yet again the staff licked out,and Thutothmes reeled and fell dead, his features blotted out in a rushof blackness that made the whole of him the same hue as his enchantedhand.

  The Khitan turned toward the jewel that burned on the breast of themummy, but Conan was before him.

  In a tense stillness the two faced each other, amid that shambles, withthe carven mummies staring down upon them.

  'Far have I followed you, oh king of Aquilonia,' said the Khitan calmly.'Down the long river, and over the mountains, across Poitain and Zingaraand through the hills of Argos and down the coast. Not easily did wepick up your trail from Tarantia, for the priests of Asura are crafty.We lost it in Zingara, but we found your helmet in the forest below theborder hills, where you had fought with the ghouls of the forests.Almost we lost the trail again tonight among these labyrinths.'

  Conan reflected that he had been fortunate in returning from thevampire's chamber by another route than that by which he had been led toit. Otherwise he would have run full into these yellow fiends insteadof sighting them from afar as they smelled out his spoor like humanbloodhounds, with whatever uncanny gift was theirs.

  The Khitan shook his head slightly, as if reading his mind.

  'That is meaningless; the long trail ends here.'

  'Why have you hounded me?' demanded Conan, poised to move in anydirection with the celerity of a hair-trigger.

  'It was a debt to pay,' answered the Khitan. 'To you who are about todie, I will not withhold knowledge. We were vassals of the king ofAquilonia, Valerius. Long we served him, but of that service we are freenow--my brothers by death, and I by the fulfilment of obligation. Ishall return to Aquilonia with two hearts; for myself the Heart ofAhriman; for Valerius the heart of Conan. A kiss of the staff that wascut from the living Tree of Death--'

  The staff licked out like the dart of a viper, but the slash of Conan'sknife was quicker. The staff fell in writhing halves, there was anotherflicker of the keen steel like a jet of lightning, and the head of theKhitan rolled to the floor.

  Conan wheeled and extended his hand toward the jewel--then he shrankback, his hair bristling, his blood congealing icily.

  For no longer a withered brown thing lay on the altar. The jewelshimmered on the full, arching breast of a naked, living man who layamong the moldering bandages. Living? Conan could not decide. The eyeswere like dark murky glass under which shone inhuman somber fires.

  Slowly the man rose, taking the jewel in his hand. He towered beside thealtar, dusky, naked, with a face like a carven image. Mutely he extendedhis hand toward Conan, with the jewel throbbing like a living heartwithin it. Conan took it, with an eery sensation of receiving gifts fromthe hand of the dead. He somehow realized that the proper incantationshad not been made--the conjurement had not been completed--life had notbeen fully restored to his corpse.

  'Who are you?' demanded the Cimmerian.

  The answer came in a toneless monotone, like the dripping of water fromstalactites in subterranean caverns. 'I was Thothmekri; I am dead.'

  'Well, lead me out of this accursed temple, will you?' Conan requested,his flesh crawling.

  With measured, mechanical steps the dead man moved toward a black arch.Conan followed him. A glance back showed him once again the vast,shadowy hall with its tiers of sarcophagi, the dead men sprawled aboutthe altar; the head of the Khitan he had slain stared sightless up atthe sweeping shadows.

  The glow of the jewel illuminated the black tunnels like an ensorceledlamp, dripping golden fire. Once Conan caught a glimpse of ivory fleshin the shadows, believed he saw the vampire that was Akivasha shrinkingback from the glow of the jewel; and with her, other less human shapesscuttled or shambled into the darkness.

  The dead man strode straight on, looking neither to right nor left, hispace as changeless as the tramp of doom. Cold sweat gathered thick onConan's flesh. Icy doubts assailed him. How could he know that thisterrible figure out of the past was leading him to freedom? But he knewthat, left to himself, he could never untangle this bewitched maze ofcorridors and tunnels. He followed his awful guide through blacknessthat loomed before and behind them and was filled with skulking shapesof horror and lunacy that cringed from the blinding glow of the Heart.

  Then the bronze doorway was before him, and Conan felt the night windblowing across the desert, and saw the stars, and the starlit desertacross which streamed the great black shadow of the pyramid. Thothmekripointed silently into the desert, and then turned and stalkedsoundlessly back in the darkness. Conan stared after that silent figurethat receded into the blackness on soundless, inexorable feet as onethat moves to a known and inevitable doom, or returns to everlastingsleep.

  With a curse the Cimmerian leaped from the doorway and fled into thedesert as if pursued by demons. He did not look back toward the pyramid,or toward the black towers of Khemi looming dimly across the sands. Heheaded southward toward the coast, and he ran as a man runs inungovernable panic. The violent exertion shook his brain free of blackcobwebs; the clean desert wind blew the nightmares from his soul and hisrevulsion changed to a wild tide of exultation before the desert gaveway to a tangle of swampy growth through which he saw the black waterlying before him, and the _Venturer_ at anchor.

  He plunged through the undergrowth, hip-deep in the marshes; divedheadlong into the deep water, heedless of sharks or crocodiles, and swamto the galley and was clambering up the chain on to the deck, drippingand exultant, before the watch saw him.

  'Awake, you dogs!' roared Conan, knocking aside the spear the startledlookout thrust at his breast. 'Heave up the anchor! Lay to the doors!Give that fisherman a helmet full of gold and put him ashore! Dawn willsoon be breaking, and before sunrise we must be racing for the nearestport of Zingara!'

  He whirled about his head the great jewel, which threw off splashes oflight that spotted the deck with golden fire.