was stronger than the average man, and far quicker and more ferocious.
Her sword was like a living thing in her hand. Where Conan beat down
opposition by the sheer weight and power of his blows, breaking spears,
splitting skulls and cleaving bosoms to the breast-bone, Valeria brought
into action a finesse of sword-play that dazzled and bewildered her
antagonists before it slew them. Again and again a warrior, heaving high
his heavy blade, found her point in his jugular before he could strike.
Conan, towering above the field, strode through the welter smiting right
and left, but Valeria moved like an illusive phantom, constantly
shifting, and thrusting and slashing as she shifted. Swords missed her
again and again as the wielders flailed the empty air and died with her
point in their hearts or throats, and her mocking laughter in their
ears.
Neither sex nor condition was considered by the maddened combatants. The
five women of the Xotalancas were down with their throats cut before
Conan and Valeria entered the fray, and when a man or woman went down
under the stamping feet, there was always a knife ready for the helpless
throat, or a sandaled foot eager to crush the prostrate skull.
From wall to wall, from door to door rolled the waves of combat,
spilling over into adjoining chambers. And presently only Tecuhltli and
their white-skinned allies stood upright in the great throne room. The
survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after
Judgment Day or the destruction of the world. On legs wide-braced, hands
gripping notched and dripping swords, blood trickling down their arms,
they stared at one another across the mangled corpses of friends and
foes. They had no breath left to shout, but a bestial mad howling rose
from their lips. It was not a human cry of triumph. It was the howling
of a rabid wolf-pack stalking among the bodies of its victims.
Conan caught Valeria's arm and turned her about.
"You've got a stab in the calf of your leg," he growled.
She glanced down, for the first time aware of a stinging in the muscles
of her leg. Some dying man on the floor had fleshed his dagger with his
last effort.
"You look like a butcher yourself," she laughed.
He shook a red shower from his hands.
"Not mine. Oh, a scratch here and there. Nothing to bother about. But
that calf ought to be bandaged."
* * * * *
Olmec came through the litter, looking like a ghoul with his naked
massive shoulders splashed with blood, and his black beard dabbled in
crimson. His eyes were red, like the reflection of flame on black water.
"We have won!" he croaked dazedly. "The feud is ended! The dogs of
Xotalanc lie dead! Oh, for a captive to flay alive! Yet it is good to
look upon their dead faces. Twenty dead dogs! Twenty red nails for the
black column!"
"You'd best see to your wounded," grunted Conan, turning away from him.
"Here, girl, let me see that leg."
"Wait a minute!" she shook him off impatiently. The fire of fighting
still burned brightly in her soul. "How do we know these are all of
them? These might have come on a raid of their own."
"They would not split the clan on a foray like this," said Olmec,
shaking his head, and regaining some of his ordinary intelligence.
Without his purple robe the man seemed less like a prince than some
repellent beast of prey. "I will stake my head upon it that we have
slain them all. There were less of them than I dreamed, and they must
have been desperate. But how came they in Tecuhltli?"
Tascela came forward, wiping her sword on her naked thigh, and holding
in her other hand an object she had taken from the body of the feathered
leader of the Xotalancas.
"The pipes of madness," she said. "A warrior tells me that Xatmec opened
the door to the Xotalancas and was cut down as they stormed into the
guardroom. This warrior came to the guardroom from the inner hall just
in time to see it happen and to hear the last of a weird strain of music
which froze his very soul. Tolkemec used to talk of these pipes, which
the Xuchotlans swore were hidden somewhere in the catacombs with the
bones of the ancient wizard who used them in his lifetime. Somehow the
dogs of Xotalanc found them and learned their secret."
"Somebody ought to go to Xotalanc and see if any remain alive," said
Conan. "I'll go if somebody will guide me."
Olmec glanced at the remnants of his people. There were only twenty left
alive, and of these several lay groaning on the floor. Tascela was the
only one of the Tecuhltli who had escaped without a wound. The princess
was untouched, though she had fought as savagely as any.
"Who will go with Conan to Xotalanc?" asked Olmec.
Techotl limped forward. The wound in his thigh had started bleeding
afresh, and he had another gash across his ribs.
"I will go!"
"No, you won't," vetoed Conan. "And you're not going either, Valeria. In
a little while that leg will be getting stiff."
"I will go," volunteered a warrior, who was knotting a bandage about a
slashed forearm.
"Very well, Yanath. Go with the Cimmerian. And you, too, Topal." Olmec
indicated another man whose injuries were slight. "But first aid us to
lift the badly wounded on these couches where we may bandage their
hurts."
This was done quickly. As they stooped to pick up a woman who had been
stunned by a war-club, Olmec's beard brushed Topal's ear. Conan thought
the prince muttered something to the warrior, but he could not be sure.
A few moments later he was leading his companions down the hall.
Conan glanced back as he went out the door, at that shambles where the
dead lay on the smoldering floor, blood-stained dark limbs knotted in
attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate,
glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the ghastly
scene in a dusky emerald witch-light. Among the dead the living moved
aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conan heard Olmec call a
woman and direct her to bandage Valeria's leg. The pirate followed the
woman into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.
* * * * *
Warily the two Tecuhltli led Conan along the hall beyond the bronze
door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire.
They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which
bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by
the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and
halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad
dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of
Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened silently under their
fingers. Awed, they stared into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty
years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a
hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could
befall a man of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through
their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topal that bronze
door was like the portal of hell.
They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conan pushed
past them and strode into Xotalanc.
Timidly they followed him. As each man set foot over the threshold he
stared and glared wildly about him. But only their quick, hurried
breathing disturbed the silence.
They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door
of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber
that was a counterpart of Olmec's throne room.
Conan glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and
stood listening intently. He heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty
feel. He did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in
Xuchotl.
"Come on," he muttered, and started down the hall.
He had not gone far when he was aware that only Yanath was following
him. He wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one
arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, his distended eyes
fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a
divan.
"What the devil?" Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt
a faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous
head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the
head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the
lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the
hideous eyes were glazed.
Conan peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there
limp in death, but such a serpent as he had never seen in his
wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it,
and its color was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new
angle from which he surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what
had caused its death.
"It is the Crawler!" whispered Yanath.
"It's the thing I slashed on the stair," grunted Conan. "After it
trailed us to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could
the Xotalancas control such a brute?"
The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.
"They brought it up from the black tunnels _below_ the catacombs. They
discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli."
"Well, it's dead, and if they'd had any more of them, they'd have
brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on."
They crowded close at his heels as he strode down the hall and thrust on
the silver-worked door at the other end.
"If we don't find anybody on this floor," he said, "we'll descend into
the lower floors. We'll explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs.
If Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will
be lighted--what the devil!"
They had come into the broad throne chamber, so similar to that one in
Tecuhltli. There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same
divans, rugs and hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column
stood behind the throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not
lacking.
Ranged along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered
shelves. And on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly
preserved, stared at the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as
they had stared for only the gods knew how many months and years.
* * * * *
Topal muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing
in his wide eyes. Conan frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung
on a hair-trigger.
Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.
"There is my brother's head!" he murmured. "And there is my father's
younger brother! And there beyond them is my sister's eldest son!"
Suddenly he began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook
his frame. He did not take his eyes from the heads. His sobs grew
shriller, changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn
became an unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.
Conan laid a hand on his shoulder, and as if the touch had released all
the frenzy in his soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the
Cimmerian with his sword. Conan parried the blow, and Topal tried to
catch Yanath's arm. But the madman avoided him and with froth flying
from his lips, he drove his sword deep into Topal's body. Topal sank
down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy
dervish; then he ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with
his sword, screeching blasphemously.
Conan sprang at him from behind, trying to catch him unaware and disarm
him, but the madman wheeled and lunged at him, screaming like a lost
soul. Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian
side-stepped, and as the maniac went past, he swung a cut that severed
the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the man dead beside his dying
victim.
Conan bent over Topal, seeing that the man was at his last gasp. It was
useless to seek to stanch the blood gushing from the horrible wound.
"You're done for, Topal," grunted Conan. "Any word you want to send to
your people?"
"Bend closer," gasped Topal, and Conan complied--and an instant later
caught the man's wrist as Topal struck at his breast with a dagger.
"Crom!" swore Conan. "Are you mad, too?"
"Olmec ordered it!" gasped the dying man. "I know not why. As we lifted
the wounded upon the couches he whispered to me, bidding me to slay you
as we returned to Tecuhltli----" And with the name of his clan on his
lips, Topal died.
Conan scowled down at him in puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect
of lunacy. Was Olmec mad, too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than he had
realized? With a shrug of his shoulders he strode down the hall and out
of the bronze door, leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring
dead eyes of their kinsmen's heads.
Conan needed no guide back through the labyrinth they had traversed. His
primitive instinct of direction led him unerringly along the route they
had come. He traversed it as warily as he had before, his sword in his
hand, and his eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for
it was his former allies he feared now, not the ghosts of the slain
Xotalancas.
He had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when he
heard something moving ahead of him--something which gasped and panted,
and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later
Conan saw a man crawling over the flaming floor toward him--a man whose
progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was
Techotl and his eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in his
breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of his clutching hand.
With the other he clawed and hitched himself along.
"Conan," he cried chokingly, "Conan! Olmec has taken the yellow-haired
woman!"
"So that's why he told Topal to kill me!" murmured Conan, dropping to
his knee beside the man, who his experienced eye told him was dying.
"Olmec isn't so mad as I thought."
Techotl's groping fingers plucked at Conan's arm. In the cold, loveless
and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli his admiration and
affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human
oasis, constituted a tie that connected him with a more natural humanity
that was totally lacking in his fellows, whose only emotions were hate,
lust and the urge of sadistic cruelty.
"I sought to oppose him," gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to
his lips. "But he struck me down. He thought he had slain me, but I
crawled away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware,
Conan! Olmec may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! He is a
beast. Take Valeria and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Olmec and
Tascela lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save
the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you
have slain him, there is naught in the forest to harm you. He was the
god Olmec worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to him, the very
old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Olmec
has taken Valeria to the Chamber of the----"
His head slumped down and he was dead before it came to rest on the
floor.
* * * * *
Conan sprang up, his eyes like live coals. So that was Olmec's game,
having first used the strangers to destroy his foes! He should have
known that something of the sort would be going on in that black-bearded
degenerate's mind.
The Cimmerian started toward Tecuhltli with reckless speed. Rapidly he
reckoned the numbers of his former allies. Only twenty-one, counting
Olmec, had survived that fiendish battle in the throne room. Three had
died since, which left seventeen enemies with which to reckon. In his
rage Conan felt capable of accounting for the whole clan single-handed.
But the innate craft of the wilderness rose to guide his berserk rage.
He remembered Techotl's warning of an ambush. It was quite probable that
the prince would make such provisions, on the chance that Topal might
have failed to carry out his order. Olmec would be expecting him to
return by the same route he had followed in going to Xotalanc.
Conan glanced up at a skylight under which he was passing and caught the
blurred glimmer of stars. They had not yet begun to pale for dawn. The
events of the night had been crowded into a comparatively short space of
time.
He turned aside from his direct course and descended a winding staircase
to the floor below. He did not know where the door was to be found that
let into the castle on that level, but he knew he could find it. How he
was to force the locks he did not know; he believed that the doors of
Tecuhltli would all be locked and bolted, if for no other reason than
the habits of half a century. But there was nothing else but to attempt
it.
Sword in hand, he hurried noiselessly on through a maze of green-lit or
shadowy rooms and halls. He knew he must be near Tecuhltli, when a sound
brought him up short. He recognized it for what it was--a human being
trying to cry out through a stifling gag. It came from somewhere ahead
of him, and to the left. In those deathly-still chambers a small sound
carried a long way.
Conan turned aside and went seeking after the sound, which continued to
be repeated. Presently he was glaring through a doorway upon a weird
scene. In the room into which he was looking a low rack-like frame of
iron lay on the floor, and a giant figure was bound prostrate upon it.
His head rested on a bed of iron spikes, which were already
crimson-pointed with blood where they had pierced his scalp. A peculiar
harness-like contrivance was fastened about his head, though in such a
manner that the leather band did not protect his scalp from the spikes.
This harness was connected by a slender chain to the mechanism that
upheld a huge iron ball which was suspended above the captive's hairy
breast. As long as the man could force himself to remain motionless the
iron ball hung in its place. But when the pain of the iron points caused
him to lift his head, the ball lurched downward a few inches. Presently
his aching neck muscles would no longer support his head in its
unnatural position and it would fall back on the spikes again. It was
obvious that eventually the ball would crush him to a pulp, slowly and
inexorably. The victim was gagged, and above the gag his great black
ox-eyes rolled wildly toward the man in the doorway, who stood in silent
amazement. The man on the rack was Olmec, prince of Tecuhltli.
_6. The Eyes of Tascela_
"Why did you bring me into this chamber to bandage my legs?" demanded
Valeria. "Couldn't you have done it just as well in the throne room?"
She sat on a couch with her wounded leg extended upon it, and the
Tecuhltli woman had just bound it with silk bandages. Valeria's
red-stained sword lay on the couch beside her.
She frowned as she spoke. The woman had done her task silently and
efficiently, but Valeria liked neither the lingering, caressing touch of
her slim fingers nor the expression in her eyes.
"They have taken the rest of the wounded into the other chambers,"
answered the woman in the soft speech of the Tecuhltli women, which
somehow did not suggest either softness or gentleness in the speakers. A
little while before, Valeria had seen this same woman stab a Xotalanca
woman through the breast and stamp the eyeballs out of a wounded
Xotalanca man.
"They will be carrying the corpses of the dead down into the catacombs,"
she added, "lest the ghosts escape into the chambers and dwell there."
"Do you believe in ghosts?" asked Valeria.
"I know the ghost of Tolkemec dwells in the catacombs," she answered
with a shiver. "Once I saw it, as I crouched in a crypt among the bones
of a dead queen. It passed by in the form of an ancient man with flowing
white beard and locks, and luminous eyes that blazed in the darkness. It
was Tolkemec; I saw him living when I was a child and he was being
tortured."
Her voice sank to a fearful whisper: "Olmec laughs, but I _know_
Tolkemec's ghost dwells in the catacombs! They say it is rats which gnaw
the flesh from the bones of the newly dead--but ghosts eat flesh. Who
knows but that----"
She glanced up quickly as a shadow fell across the couch. Valeria looked
up to see Olmec gazing down at her. The prince had cleansed his hands,
torso and beard of the blood that had splashed them; but he had not
donned his robe, and his great dark-skinned hairless body and limbs
renewed the impression of strength bestial in its nature. His deep black
eyes burned with a more elemental light, and there was the suggestion of
a twitching in the fingers that tugged at his thick blue-black beard.
He stared fixedly at the woman, and she rose and glided from the
chamber. As she passed through the door she cast a look over her
shoulder at Valeria, a glance full of cynical derision and obscene
mockery.
"She has done a clumsy job," criticized the prince, coming to the divan
and bending over the bandage. "Let me see----"
With a quickness amazing in one of his bulk he snatched her sword and
threw it across the chamber. His next move was to catch her in his giant
arms.
Quick and unexpected as the move was, she almost matched it; for even as
he grabbed her, her dirk was in her hand and she stabbed murderously at
his throat. More by luck than skill he caught her wrist, and then began
a savage wrestling-match. She fought him with fists, feet, knees, teeth
and nails, with all the strength of her magnificent body and all the
knowledge of hand-to-hand fighting she had acquired in her years of
roving and fighting on sea and land. It availed her nothing against his
brute strength. She lost her dirk in the first moment of contact, and
thereafter found herself powerless to inflict any appreciable pain on
her giant attacker.
The blaze in his weird black eyes did not alter, and their expression
filled her with fury, fanned by the sardonic smile that seemed carved
upon his bearded lips. Those eyes and that smile contained all the cruel
cynicism that seethes below the surface of a sophisticated and
degenerate race, and for the first time in her life Valeria experienced
fear of a man. It was like struggling against some huge elemental force;
his iron arms thwarted her efforts with an ease that sent panic racing
through her limbs. He seemed impervious to any pain she could inflict.
Only once, when she sank her white teeth savagely into his wrist so that
the blood started, did he react. And that was to buffet her brutally
upon the side of the head with his open hand, so that stars flashed
before her eyes and her head rolled on her shoulders.
Her shirt had been torn open in the struggle, and with cynical cruelty
he rasped his thick beard across her bare breasts, bringing the blood to
suffuse the fair skin, and fetching a cry of pain and outraged fury from
her. Her convulsive resistance was useless; she was crushed down on a
couch, disarmed and panting, her eyes blazing up at him like the eyes of
a trapped tigress.
A moment later he was hurrying from the chamber, carrying her in his
arms. She made no resistance, but the smoldering of her eyes showed that
she was unconquered in spirit, at least. She had not cried out. She knew
that Conan was not within call, and it did not occur to her that any in
Tecuhltli would oppose their prince. But she noticed that Olmec went
stealthily, with his head on one side as if listening for sounds of
pursuit, and he did not return to the throne chamber. He carried her
through a door that stood opposite that through which he had entered,
crossed another room and began stealing down a hall. As she became
convinced that he feared some opposition to the abduction, she threw
back her head and screamed at the top of her lusty voice.
She was rewarded by a slap that half stunned her, and Olmec quickened
his pace to a shambling run.
But her cry had been echoed, and twisting her head about, Valeria,
through the tears and stars that partly blinded her, saw Techotl limping
after them.
Olmec turned with a snarl, shifting the woman to an uncomfortable and
certainly undignified position under one huge arm, where he held her
writhing and kicking vainly, like a child.
"Olmec!" protested Techotl. "You cannot be such a dog as to do this
thing! She is Conan's woman! She helped us slay the Xotalancas, and----"
* * * * *