The sun had risen over the white Himelian peaks. At the foot of a long
slope a group of horsemen halted and stared upward. High above them a
stone tower poised on the pitch of the mountainside. Beyond and above
that gleamed the walls of a greater keep, near the line where the snow
began that capped Yimsha's pinnacle. There was a touch of unreality
about the whole--purple slopes pitching up to that fantastic castle,
toy-like with distance, and above it the white glistening peak
shouldering the cold blue.
'We'll leave the horses here,' grunted Conan. 'That treacherous slope is
safer for a man on foot. Besides, they're done.'
He swung down from the black stallion which stood with wide-braced legs
and drooping head. They had pushed hard throughout the night, gnawing at
scraps from saddle-bags, and pausing only to give the horses the rests
they had to have.
'That first tower is held by the acolytes of the Black Seers,' said
Conan. 'Or so men say; watch-dogs for their masters--lesser sorcerers.
They won't sit sucking their thumbs as we climb this slope.'
Kerim Shah glanced up the mountain, then back the way they had come;
they were already far up Yimsha's side, and a vast expanse of lesser
peaks and crags spread out beneath them. Among these labyrinths the
Turanian sought in vain for a movement of color that would betray men.
Evidently the pursuing Afghulis had lost their chief's trail in the
night.
'Let us go, then.' They tied the weary horses in a clump of tamarisk and
without further comment turned up the slope. There was no cover. It was
a naked incline, strewn with boulders not big enough to conceal a man.
But they did conceal something else.
The party had not gone fifty steps when a snarling shape burst from
behind a rock. It was one of the gaunt savage dogs that infested the
hill villages, and its eyes glared redly, its jaws dripped foam. Conan
was leading, but it did not attack him. It dashed past him and leaped at
Kerim Shah. The Turanian leaped aside, and the great dog flung itself
upon the Irakzai behind him. The man yelled and threw up his arm, which
was torn by the brute's fangs as it bore him backward, and the next
instant half a dozen tulwars were hacking at the beast. Yet not until it
was literally dismembered did the hideous creature cease its efforts to
seize and rend its attackers.
Kerim Shah bound up the wounded warrior's gashed arm, looked at him
narrowly, and then turned away without a word. He rejoined Conan, and
they renewed the climb in silence.
Presently Kerim Shah said: 'Strange to find a village dog in this
place.'
'There's no offal here,' grunted Conan.
Both turned their heads to glance back at the wounded warrior toiling
after them among his companions. Sweat glistened on his dark face and
his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Then both
looked again at the stone tower squatting above them.
A slumberous quiet lay over the uplands. The tower showed no sign of
life, nor did the strange pyramidal structure beyond it. But the men who
toiled upward went with the tenseness of men walking on the edge of a
crater. Kerim Shah had unslung the powerful Turanian bow that killed at
five hundred paces, and the Irakzai looked to their own lighter and less
lethal bows.
But they were not within bow-shot of the tower when something shot down
out of the sky without warning. It passed so close to Conan that he felt
the wind of rushing wings, but it was an Irakzai who staggered and fell,
blood jetting from a severed jugular. A hawk with wings like burnished
steel shot up again, blood dripping from the scimitar-beak, to reel
against the sky as Kerim Shah's bowstring twanged. It dropped like a
plummet, but no man saw where it struck the earth.
Conan bent over the victim of the attack, but the man was already dead.
No one spoke; useless to comment on the fact that never before had a
hawk been known to swoop on a man. Red rage began to vie with fatalistic
lethargy in the wild souls of the Irakzai. Hairy fingers nocked arrows
and men glared vengefully at the tower whose very silence mocked them.
But the next attack came swiftly. They all saw it--a white puffball of
smoke that tumbled over the tower-rim and came drifting and rolling down
the slope toward them. Others followed it. They seemed harmless, mere
woolly globes of cloudy foam, but Conan stepped aside to avoid contact
with the first. Behind him one of the Irakzai reached out and thrust his
sword into the unstable mass. Instantly a sharp report shook the
mountainside. There was a burst of blinding flame, and then the puffball
had vanished, and the too-curious warrior remained only a heap of
charred and blackened bones. The crisped hand still gripped the ivory
sword-hilt, but the blade was gone--melted and destroyed by that awful
heat. Yet men standing almost within reach of the victim had not
suffered except to be dazzled and half blinded by the sudden flare.
'Steel touches it off,' grunted Conan. 'Look out--here they come!'
The slope above them was almost covered by the billowing spheres. Kerim
Shah bent his bow and sent a shaft into the mass, and those touched by
the arrow burst like bubbles in spurting flame. His men followed his
example and for the next few minutes it was as if a thunderstorm raged
on the mountain slope, with bolts of lightning striking and bursting in
showers of flame. When the barrage ceased, only a few arrows were left
in the quivers of the archers.
They pushed on grimly, over soil charred and blackened, where the naked
rock had in places been turned to lava by the explosion of those
diabolical bombs.
Now they were almost within arrow-flight of the silent tower, and they
spread their line, nerves taut, ready for any horror that might descend
upon them.
On the tower appeared a single figure, lifting a ten-foot bronze horn.
Its strident bellow roared out across the echoing slopes, like the blare
of trumpets on Judgment Day. And it began to be fearfully answered. The
ground trembled under the feet of the invaders, and rumblings and
grindings welled up from the subterranean depths.
The Irakzai screamed, reeling like drunken men on the shuddering slope,
and Conan, eyes glaring, charged recklessly up the incline, knife in
hand, straight at the door that showed in the tower-wall. Above him the
great horn roared and bellowed in brutish mockery. And then Kerim Shah
drew a shaft to his ear and loosed.
Only a Turanian could have made that shot. The bellowing of the horn
ceased suddenly, and a high, thin scream shrilled in its place. The
green-robed figure on the tower staggered, clutching at the long shaft
which quivered in its bosom, and then pitched across the parapet. The
great horn tumbled upon the battlement and hung precariously, and
another robed figure rushed to seize it, shrieking in horror. Again the
Turanian bow twanged, and again it was answered by a death-howl. The
second acolyte, in falling, struck the horn with his elbow and knocked
it clattering over the parapet to shatter on the rocks far below.
At such headlong speed had Conan covered the ground that before the
clattering echoes of that fall had died away, he was hacking at the
door. Warned by his savage instinct, he gave back suddenly as a tide of
molten lead splashed down from above. But the next instant he was back
again, attacking the panels with redoubled fury. He was galvanized by
the fact that his enemies had resorted to earthly weapons. The sorcery
of the acolytes was limited. Their necromantic resources might well be
exhausted.
Kerim Shah was hurrying up the slope, his hill-men behind him in a
straggling crescent. They loosed as they ran, their arrows splintering
against the walls or arching over the parapet.
The heavy teak portal gave way beneath the Cimmerian's assault, and he
peered inside warily, expecting anything. He was looking into a circular
chamber from which a stair wound upward. On the opposite side of the
chamber a door gaped open, revealing the outer slope--and the backs of
half a dozen green-robed figures in full retreat.
Conan yelled, took a step into the tower, and then native caution jerked
him back, just as a great block of stone fell crashing to the floor
where his foot had been an instant before. Shouting to his followers, he
raced around the tower.
The acolytes had evacuated their first line of defence. As Conan rounded
the tower he saw their green robes twinkling up the mountain ahead of
him. He gave chase, panting with earnest blood-lust, and behind him
Kerim Shah and the Irakzai came pelting, the latter yelling like wolves
at the flight of their enemies, their fatalism momentarily submerged by
temporary triumph.
The tower stood on the lower edge of a narrow plateau whose upward slant
was barely perceptible. A few hundred yards away this plateau ended
abruptly in a chasm which had been invisible farther down the mountain.
Into this chasm the acolytes apparently leaped without checking their
speed. Their pursuers saw the green robes flutter and disappear over the
edge.
A few moments later they themselves were standing on the brink of the
mighty moat that cut them off from the castle of the Black Seers. It
was a sheer-walled ravine that extended in either direction as far as
they could see, apparently girdling the mountain, some four hundred
yards in width and five hundred feet deep. And in it, from rim to rim, a
strange, translucent mist sparkled and shimmered.
Looking down, Conan grunted. Far below him, moving across the glimmering
floor, which shone like burnished silver, he saw the forms of the
green-robed acolytes. Their outline was wavering and indistinct, like
figures seen under deep water. They walked in single file, moving toward
the opposite wall.
Kerim Shah nocked an arrow and sent it singing downward. But when it
struck the mist that filled the chasm it seemed to lose momentum and
direction, wandering widely from its course.
'If they went down, so can we!' grunted Conan, while Kerim Shah stared
after his shaft in amazement. 'I saw them last at this spot--'
Squinting down he saw something shining like a golden thread across the
canyon floor far below. The acolytes seemed to be following this thread,
and there suddenly came to him Khemsa's cryptic words--'Follow the
golden vein!' On the brink, under his very hand as he crouched, he found
it, a thin vein of sparkling gold running from an outcropping of ore to
the edge and down across the silvery floor. And he found something else,
which had before been invisible to him because of the peculiar
refraction of the light. The gold vein followed a narrow ramp which
slanted down into the ravine, fitted with niches for hand and foot hold.
'Here's where they went down,' he grunted to Kerim Shah. 'They're no
adepts, to waft themselves through the air! We'll follow them--'
It was at that instant that the man who had been bitten by the mad dog
cried out horribly and leaped at Kerim Shah, foaming and gnashing his
teeth. The Turanian, quick as a cat on his feet, sprang aside and the
madman pitched head-first over the brink. The others rushed to the edge
and glared after him in amazement. The maniac did not fall plummet-like.
He floated slowly down through the rosy haze like a man sinking in deep
water. His limbs moved like a man trying to swim, and his features were
purple and convulsed beyond the contortions of his madness. Far down at
last on the shining floor his body settled and lay still.
'There's death in that chasm,' muttered Kerim Shah, drawing back from
the rosy mist that shimmered almost at his feet. 'What now, Conan?'
'On!' answered the Cimmerian grimly. 'Those acolytes are human; if the
mist doesn't kill them, it won't kill me.'
He hitched his belt, and his hands touched the girdle Khemsa had given
him; he scowled, then smiled bleakly. He had forgotten that girdle; yet
thrice had death passed him by to strike another victim.
The acolytes had reached the farther wall and were moving up it like
great green flies. Letting himself upon the ramp, he descended warily.
The rosy cloud lapped about his ankles, ascending as he lowered himself.
It reached his knees, his thighs, his waist, his arm-pits. He felt as
one feels a thick heavy fog on a damp night. With it lapping about his
chin he hesitated, and then ducked under. Instantly his breath ceased;
all air was shut off from him and he felt his ribs caving in on his
vitals. With a frantic effort he heaved himself up, fighting for life.
His head rose above the surface and he drank air in great gulps.
Kerim Shah leaned down toward him, spoke to him, but Conan neither heard
nor heeded. Stubbornly, his mind fixed on what the dying Khemsa had told
him, the Cimmerian groped for the gold vein, and found that he had moved
off it in his descent. Several series of hand-holds were niched in the
ramp. Placing himself directly over the thread, he began climbing down
once more. The rosy mist rose about him, engulfed him. Now his head was
under, but he was still drinking pure air. Above him he saw his
companions staring down at him, their features blurred by the haze that
shimmered over his head. He gestured for them to follow, and went down
swiftly, without waiting to see whether they complied or not.
Kerim Shah sheathed his sword without comment and followed, and the
Irakzai, more fearful of being left alone than of the terrors that might
lurk below, scrambled after him. Each man clung to the golden thread as
they saw the Cimmerian do.
Down the slanting ramp they went to the ravine floor and moved out
across the shining level, treading the gold vein like rope-walkers. It
was as if they walked along an invisible tunnel through which air
circulated freely. They felt death pressing in on them above and on
either hand, but it did not touch them.
The vein crawled up a similar ramp on the other wall up which the
acolytes had disappeared, and up it they went with taut nerves, not
knowing what might be waiting for them among the jutting spurs of rock
that fanged the lip of the precipice.
It was the green-robed acolytes who awaited them, with knives in their
hands. Perhaps they had reached the limits to which they could retreat.
Perhaps the Stygian girdle about Conan's waist could have told why their
necromantic spells had proven so weak and so quickly exhausted. Perhaps
it was knowledge of death decreed for failure that sent them leaping
from among the rocks, eyes glaring and knives glittering, resorting in
their desperation to material weapons.
There among the rocky fangs on the precipice lip was no war of wizard
craft. It was a whirl of blades, where real steel bit and real blood
spurted, where sinewy arms dealt forthright blows that severed quivering
flesh, and men went down to be trodden under foot as the fight raged
over them.
One of the Irakzai bled to death among the rocks, but the acolytes were
down--slashed and hacked asunder or hurled over the edge to float
sluggishly down to the silver floor that shone so far below.
Then the conquerors shook blood and sweat from their eyes, and looked at
one another. Conan and Kerim Shah still stood upright, and four of the
Irakzai.
They stood among the rocky teeth that serrated the precipice brink, and
from that spot a path wound up a gentle slope to a broad stair,
consisting of half a dozen steps, a hundred feet across, cut out of a
green jade-like substance. They led up to a broad stage or roofless
gallery of the same polished stone, and above it rose, tier upon tier,
the castle of the Black Seers. It seemed to have been carved out of the
sheer stone of the mountain. The architecture was faultless, but
unadorned. The many casements were barred and masked with curtains
within. There was no sign of life, friendly or hostile.
They went up the path in silence, and warily as men treading the lair of
a serpent. The Irakzai were dumb, like men marching to a certain doom.
Even Kerim Shah was silent. Only Conan seemed unaware what a monstrous
dislocating and uprooting of accepted thought and action their invasion
constituted, what an unprecedented violation of tradition. He was not of
the East; and he came of a breed who fought devils and wizards as
promptly and matter-of-factly as they battled human foes.
He strode up the shining stairs and across the wide green gallery
straight toward the great golden-bound teak door that opened upon it. He
cast but a single glance upward at the higher tiers of the great
pyramidal structure towering above him. He reached a hand for the bronze
prong that jutted like a handle from the door--then checked himself,
grinning hardly. The handle was made in the shape of a serpent, head
lifted on arched neck; and Conan had a suspicion that that metal head
would come to grisly life under his hand.
He struck it from the door with one blow, and its bronze clink on the
glassy floor did not lessen his caution. He flipped it aside with his
knife-point, and again turned to the door. Utter silence reigned over
the towers. Far below them the mountain slopes fell away into a purple
haze of distance. The sun glittered on snow-clad peaks on either hand.
High above, a vulture hung like a black dot in the cold blue of the sky.
But for it, the men before the gold-bound door were the only evidence of
life, tiny figures on a green jade gallery poised on the dizzy height,
with that fantastic pile of stone towering above them.
A sharp wind off the snow slashed them, whipping their tatters about.
Conan's long knife splintering through the teak panels roused the
startled echoes. Again and again he struck, hewing through polished wood
and metal bands alike. Through the sundered ruins he glared into the
interior, alert and suspicious as a wolf. He saw a broad chamber, the
polished stone walls untapestried, the mosaic floor uncarpeted. Square,
polished ebon stools and a stone dais formed the only furnishings. The
room was empty of human life. Another door showed in the opposite wall.
'Leave a man on guard outside,' grunted Conan. 'I'm going in.'
Kerim Shah designated a warrior for that duty, and the man fell back
toward the middle of the gallery, bow in hand. Conan strode into the
castle, followed by the Turanian and the three remaining Irakzai. The
one outside spat, grumbled in his beard, and started suddenly as a low
mocking laugh reached his ears.
He lifted his head and saw, on the tier above him, a tall, black-robed
figure, naked head nodding slightly as he stared down. His whole
attitude suggested mockery and malignity. Quick as a flash the Irakzai
bent his bow and loosed, and the arrow streaked upward to strike full in
the black-robed breast. The mocking smile did not alter. The Seer
plucked out the missile and threw it back at the bowman, not as a weapon
is hurled, but with a contemptuous gesture. The Irakzai dodged,
instinctively throwing up his arm. His fingers closed on the revolving
shaft.
Then he shrieked. In his hand the wooden shaft suddenly _writhed_. Its
rigid outline became pliant, melting in his grasp. He tried to throw it
from him, but it was too late. He held a living serpent in his naked
hand, and already it had coiled about his wrist and its wicked
wedge-shaped head darted at his muscular arm. He screamed again and his
eyes became distended, his features purple. He went to his knees shaken
by an awful convulsion, and then lay still.
The men inside had wheeled at his first cry. Conan took a swift stride
toward the open doorway, and then halted short, baffled. To the men
behind him it seemed that he strained against empty air. But though he
could see nothing, there was a slick, smooth, hard surface under his
hands, and he knew that a sheet of crystal had been let down in the
doorway. Through it he saw the Irakzai lying motionless on the glassy
gallery, an ordinary arrow sticking in his arm.
Conan lifted his knife and smote, and the watchers were dumbfounded to
see his blow checked apparently in midair, with the loud clang of steel
that meets an unyielding substance. He wasted no more effort. He knew
that not even the legendary tulwar of Amir Khurum could shatter that
invisible curtain.
In a few words he explained the matter to Kerim Shah, and the Turanian
shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, if our exit is barred, we must find
another. In the meanwhile our way lies forward, does it not?'
With a grunt the Cimmerian turned and strode across the chamber to the
opposite door, with a feeling of treading on the threshold of doom. As
he lifted his knife to shatter the door, it swung silently open as if of
its own accord. He strode into the great hall, flanked with tall glassy
columns. A hundred feet from the door began the broad jade-green steps
of a stair that tapered toward the top like the side of a pyramid. What
lay beyond that stair he could not tell. But between him and its
shimmering foot stood a curious altar of gleaming black jade. Four great
golden serpents twined their tails about this altar and reared their
wedge-shaped heads in the air, facing the four quarters of the compass
like the enchanted guardians of a fabled treasure. But on the altar,
between the arching necks, stood only a crystal globe filled with a
cloudy smoke-like substance, in which floated four golden pomegranates.
The sight stirred some dim recollection in his mind; then Conan heeded
the altar no longer, for on the lower steps of the stair stood four
black-robed figures. He had not seen them come. They were simply there,
tall, gaunt, their vulture-heads nodding in unison, their feet and hands
hidden by their flowing garments.
One lifted his arm and the sleeve fell away revealing his hand--and it
was not a hand at all. Conan halted in mid-stride, compelled against his
will. He had encountered a force differing subtly from Khemsa's
mesmerism, and he could not advance, though he felt it in his power to
retreat if he wished. His companions had likewise halted, and they
seemed even more helpless than he, unable to move in either direction.
The seer whose arm was lifted beckoned to one of the Irakzai, and the
man moved toward him like one in a trance, eyes staring and fixed, blade
hanging in limp fingers. As he pushed past Conan, the Cimmerian threw an
arm across his breast to arrest him. Conan was so much stronger than the
Irakzai that in ordinary circumstances he could have broken his spine
between his hands. But now the muscular arm was brushed aside like straw
and the Irakzai moved toward the stair, treading jerkily and
mechanically. He reached the steps and knelt stiffly, proffering his
blade and bending his head. The Seer took the sword. It flashed as he
swung it up and down. The Irakzai's head tumbled from his shoulders and
thudded heavily on the black marble floor. An arch of blood jetted from
the severed arteries and the body slumped over and lay with arms spread
wide.
Again a malformed hand lifted and beckoned, and another Irakzai
stumbled stiffly to his doom. The ghastly drama was re-enacted and
another headless form lay beside the first.
As the third tribesman clumped his way past Conan to his death, the
Cimmerian, his veins bulging in his temples with his efforts to break
past the unseen barrier that held him, was suddenly aware of allied
forces, unseen, but waking into life about him. This realization came
without warning, but so powerfully that he could not doubt his instinct.
His left hand slid involuntarily under his Bakhariot belt and closed on
the Stygian girdle. And as he gripped it he felt new strength flood his
numbed limbs; the will to live was a pulsing white-hot fire, matched by
the intensity of his burning rage.
The third Irakzai was a decapitated corpse, and the hideous finger was
lifting again when Conan felt the bursting of the invisible barrier. A
fierce, involuntary cry burst from his lips as he leaped with the
explosive suddenness of pent-up ferocity. His left hand gripped the
sorcerer's girdle as a drowning man grips a floating log, and the long
knife was a sheen of light in his right. The men on the steps did not
move. They watched calmly, cynically; if they felt surprise they did not
show it. Conan did not allow himself to think what might chance when he
came within knife-reach of them. His blood was pounding in his temples,
a mist of crimson swam before his sight. He was afire with the urge to
kill--to drive his knife deep into flesh and bone, and twist the blade
in blood and entrails.
Another dozen strides would carry him to the steps where the sneering
demons stood. He drew his breath deep, his fury rising redly as his
charge gathered momentum. He was hurtling past the altar with its golden
serpents when like a levin-flash there shot across his mind again as
vividly as if spoken in his external ear, the cryptic words of Khemsa:
'_Break the crystal ball!_'
His reaction was almost without his own volition. Execution followed
impulse so spontaneously that the greatest sorcerer of the age would not
have had time to read his mind and prevent his action. Wheeling like a
cat from his headlong charge, he brought his knife crashing down upon
the crystal. Instantly the air vibrated with a peal of terror, whether
from the stairs, the altar, or the crystal itself he could not tell.
Hisses filled his ears as the golden serpents, suddenly vibrant with
hideous life, writhed and smote at him. But he was fired to the speed of
a maddened tiger. A whirl of steel sheared through the hideous trunks
that waved toward him, and he smote the crystal sphere again and yet
again. And the globe burst with a noise like a thunderclap, raining
fiery shards on the black marble, and the gold pomegranates, as if
released from captivity, shot upward toward the lofty roof and were
gone.
A mad screaming, bestial and ghastly, was echoing through the great
hall. On the steps writhed four black-robed figures, twisting in
convulsions, froth dripping from their livid mouths. Then with one
frenzied crescendo of inhuman ululation they stiffened and lay still,
and Conan knew that they were dead. He stared down at the altar and the
crystal shards. Four headless golden serpents still coiled about the
altar, but no alien life now animated the dully gleaming metal.
Kerim Shah was rising slowly from his knees, whither he had been dashed
by some unseen force. He shook his head to clear the ringing from his
ears.
'Did you hear that crash when you struck? It was as if a thousand
crystal panels shattered all over the castle as that globe burst. Were
the souls of the wizards imprisoned in those golden balls?--Ha!'
Conan wheeled as Kerim Shah drew his sword and pointed.
Another figure stood at the head of the stair. His robe, too, was black,
but of richly embroidered velvet, and there was a velvet cap on his
head. His face was calm, and not unhandsome.
'Who the devil are you?' demanded Conan, staring up at him, knife in
hand.
'I am the Master of Yimsha!' His voice was like the chime of a temple
bell, but a note of cruel mirth ran through it.
'Where is Yasmina?' demanded Kerim Shah.
The Master laughed down at him.
'What is that to you, dead man? Have you so quickly forgotten my
strength, once lent to you, that you come armed against me, you poor
fool? I think I will take your heart, Kerim Shah!'
He held out his hand as if to receive something, and the Turanian cried
out sharply like a man in mortal agony. He reeled drunkenly, and then,
with a splintering of bones, a rending of flesh and muscle and a
snapping of mail-links, his breast burst outward with a shower of blood,
and through the ghastly aperture something red and dripping shot through
the air into the Master's outstretched hand, as a bit of steel leaps to
the magnet. The Turanian slumped to the floor and lay motionless, and
the Master laughed and hurled the object to fall before Conan's feet--a
still-quivering human heart.
With a roar and a curse Conan charged the stair. From Khemsa's girdle he
felt strength and deathless hate flow into him to combat the terrible
emanation of power that met him on the steps. The air filled with a
shimmering steely haze through which he plunged like a swimmer, head
lowered, left arm bent about his face, knife gripped low in his right
hand. His half-blinded eyes, glaring over the crook of his elbow, made
out the hated shape of the Seer before and above him, the outline
wavering as a reflection wavers in disturbed water.
He was racked and torn by forces beyond his comprehension, but he felt
a driving power outside and beyond his own lifting him inexorably upward
and onward, despite the wizard's strength and his own agony.
Now he had reached the head of the stairs, and the Master's face floated
in the steely haze before him, and a strange fear shadowed the
inscrutable eyes. Conan waded through the mist as through a surf, and
his knife lunged upward like a live thing. The keen point ripped the
Master's robe as he sprang back with a low cry. Then before Conan's
gaze, the wizard vanished--simply disappeared like a burst bubble, and
something long and undulating darted up one of the smaller stairs that
led up to left and right from the landing.
Conan charged after it, up the left-hand stair, uncertain as to just
what he had seen whip up those steps, but in a berserk mood that drowned
the nausea and horror whispering at the back of his consciousness.
He plunged out into a broad corridor whose uncarpeted floor and
untapestried walls were of polished jade, and something long and swift
whisked down the corridor ahead of him, and into a curtained door. From
within the chamber rose a scream of urgent terror. The sound lent wings
to Conan's flying feet and he hurtled through the curtains and headlong
into the chamber within.
A frightful scene met his glare. Yasmina cowered on the farther edge of
a velvet-covered dais, screaming her loathing and horror, an arm lifted
as if to ward off attack, while before her swayed the hideous head of a
giant serpent, shining neck arching up from dark-gleaming coils. With a
choked cry Conan threw his knife.
Instantly the monster whirled and was upon him like the rush of wind
through tall grass. The long knife quivered in its neck, point and a
foot of blade showing on one side, and the hilt and a hand's-breadth of
steel on the other, but it only seemed to madden the giant reptile. The
great head towered above the man who faced it, and then darted down, the
venom-dripping jaws gaping wide. But Conan had plucked a dagger from his
girdle and he stabbed upward as the head dipped down. The point tore
through the lower jaw and transfixed the upper, pinning them together.
The next instant the great trunk had looped itself about the Cimmerian
as the snake, unable to use its fangs, employed its remaining form of
attack.
Conan's left arm was pinioned among the bone-crushing folds, but his
right was free. Bracing his feet to keep upright, he stretched forth his
hand, gripped the hilt of the long knife jutting from the serpent's
neck, and tore it free in a shower of blood. As if divining his purpose
with more than bestial intelligence, the snake writhed and knotted,
seeking to cast its loops about his right arm. But with the speed of
light the long knife rose and fell, shearing halfway through the
reptile's giant trunk.
Before he could strike again, the great pliant loops fell from him and
the monster dragged itself across the floor, gushing blood from its
ghastly wounds. Conan sprang after it, knife lifted, but his vicious
swipe cut empty air as the serpent writhed away from him and struck its
blunt nose against a paneled screen of sandalwood. One of the panels
gave inward and the long, bleeding barrel whipped through it and was
gone.
Conan instantly attacked the screen. A few blows rent it apart and he
glared into the dim alcove beyond. No horrific shape coiled there; there
was blood on the marble floor, and bloody tracks led to a cryptic arched
door. Those tracks were of a man's bare feet....
'_Conan!_' He wheeled back into the chamber just in time to catch the
Devi of Vendhya in his arms as she rushed across the room and threw
herself upon him, catching him about the neck with a frantic clasp, half
hysterical with terror and gratitude and relief.
His wild blood had been stirred to its uttermost by all that had passed.
He caught her to him in a grasp that would have made her wince at
another time, and crushed her lips with his. She made no resistance; the
Devi was drowned in the elemental woman. She closed her eyes and drank
in his fierce, hot, lawless kisses with all the abandon of passionate
thirst. She was panting with his violence when he ceased for breath, and
glared down at her lying limp in his mighty arms.
'I knew you'd come for me,' she murmured. 'You would not leave me in
this den of devils.'
At her words recollection of their environment came to him suddenly. He
lifted his head and listened intently. Silence reigned over the castle
of Yimsha, but it was a silence impregnated with menace. Peril crouched
in every corner, leered invisibly from every hanging.
'We'd better go while we can,' he muttered. 'Those cuts were enough to
kill any common beast--or _man_--but a wizard has a dozen lives. Wound
one, and he writhes away like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom
from some source of sorcery.'
He picked up the girl and carrying her in his arms like a child, he
strode out into the gleaming jade corridor and down the stairs, nerves
tautly alert for any sign or sound.
'I met the Master,' she whispered, clinging to him and shuddering. 'He
worked his spells on me to break my will. The most awful thing was a
moldering corpse which seized me in its arms--I fainted then and lay as
one dead, I do not know how long. Shortly after I regained consciousness
I heard sounds of strife below, and cries, and then that snake came
slithering through the curtains--ah!' She shook at the memory of that
horror. 'I knew somehow that it was not an illusion, but a real serpent
that sought my life.'
'It was not a shadow, at least,' answered Conan cryptically. 'He knew he
was beaten, and chose to slay you rather than let you be rescued.'
'What do you mean, _he_?' she asked uneasily, and then shrank against
him, crying out, and forgetting her question. She had seen the corpses
at the foot of the stairs. Those of the Seers were not good to look at;
as they lay twisted and contorted, their hands and feet were exposed to
view, and at the sight Yasmina went livid and hid her face against
Conan's powerful shoulder.