Conan lay still, enduring the weight of his chains and the despair of
his position with the stoicism of the wilds that had bred him. He did
not move, because the jangle of his chains, when he shifted his body,
sounded startlingly loud in the darkness and stillness, and it was his
instinct, born of a thousand wilderness-bred ancestors, not to betray
his position in his helplessness. This did not result from a logical
reasoning process; he did not lie quiet because he reasoned that the
darkness hid lurking dangers that might discover him in his
helplessness. Xaltotun had assured him that he was not to be harmed, and
Conan believed that it was in the man's interest to preserve him, at
least for the time being. But the instincts of the wild were there, that
had caused him in his childhood to lie hidden and silent while wild
beasts prowled about his covert.
Even his keen eyes could not pierce the solid darkness. Yet after a
while, after a period of time he had no way of estimating, a faint glow
became apparent, a sort of slanting gray beam, by which Conan could see,
vaguely, the bars of the door at his elbow, and even make out the
skeleton of the other grille. This puzzled him, until at last he
realized the explanation. He was far below ground, in the pits below the
palace; yet for some reason a shaft had been constructed from somewhere
above. Outside, the moon had risen to a point where its light slanted
dimly down the shaft. He reflected that in this manner he could tell the
passing of the days and nights. Perhaps the sun, too, would shine down
that shaft, though on the other hand it might be closed by day. Perhaps
it was a subtle method of torture, allowing a prisoner but a glimpse of
daylight or moonlight.
His gaze fell on the broken bones in the farther corner, glimmering
dimly. He did not tax his brain with futile speculation as to who the
wretch had been and for what reason he had been doomed, but he wondered
at the shattered condition of the bones. They had not been broken on a
rack. Then, as he looked, another unsavory detail made itself evident.
The shin-bones were split lengthwise, and there was but one explanation;
they had been broken in that manner in order to obtain the marrow. Yet
what creature but man breaks bones for their marrow? Perhaps those
remnants were mute evidence of a horrible, cannibalistic feast, of some
wretch driven to madness by starvation. Conan wondered if his own bones
would be found at some future date, hanging in their rusty chains. He
fought down the unreasoning panic of a trapped wolf.
The Cimmerian did not curse, scream, weep or rave as a civilized man
might have done. But the pain and turmoil in his bosom were none the
less fierce. His great limbs quivered with the intensity of his
emotions. Somewhere, far to the westward, the Nemedian host was slashing
and burning its way through the heart of his kingdom. The small host of
the Poitanians could not stand before them. Prospero might be able to
hold Tarantia for weeks, or months; but eventually, if not relieved, he
must surrender to greater numbers. Surely the barons would rally to him
against the invaders. But in the meanwhile he, Conan, must lie helpless
in a darkened cell, while others led his spears and fought for his
kingdom. The king ground his powerful teeth in red rage.
Then he stiffened as outside the farther door he heard a stealthy step.
Straining his eyes he made out a bent, indistinct figure outside the
grille. There was a rasp of metal against metal, and he heard the clink
of tumblers, as if a key had been turned in the lock. Then the figure
moved silently out of his range of vision. Some guard, he supposed,
trying the lock. After a while he heard the sound repeated faintly
somewhere farther on, and that was followed by the soft opening of a
door, and then a swift scurry of softly shod feet retreated in the
distance. Then silence fell again.
Conan listened for what seemed a long time, but which could not have
been, for the moon still shone down the hidden shaft, but he heard no
further sound. He shifted his position at last, and his chains clanked.
Then he heard another, lighter footfall--a soft step outside the nearer
door, the door through which he had entered the cell. An instant later a
slender figure was etched dimly in the gray light.
'King Conan!' a soft voice intoned urgently. 'Oh, my lord, are you
there?'
'Where else?' he answered guardedly, twisting his head about to stare at
the apparition.
It was a girl who stood grasping the bars with her slender fingers. The
dim glow behind her outlined her supple figure through the wisp of silk
twisted about her loins, and shone vaguely on jeweled breast-plates. Her
dark eyes gleamed in the shadows, her white limbs glistened softly, like
alabaster. Her hair was a mass of dark foam, at the burnished luster of
which the dim light only hinted.
'The keys to your shackles and to the farther door!' she whispered, and
a slim white hand came through the bars and dropped three objects with a
clink to the flags beside him.
'What game is this?' he demanded. 'You speak in the Nemedian tongue, and
I have no friends in Nemedia. What deviltry is your master up to now?
Has he sent you here to mock me?'
'It is no mockery!' The girl was trembling violently. Her bracelets and
breast-plates clinked against the bars she grasped. 'I swear by Mitra! I
stole the keys from the black jailers. They are the keepers of the pits,
and each bears a key which will open only one set of locks. I made them
drunk. The one whose head you broke was carried away to a leech, and I
could not get his key. But the others I stole. Oh, please do not
loiter! Beyond these dungeons lie the pits which are the doors to hell.'
Somewhat impressed, Conan tried the keys dubiously, expecting to meet
only failure and a burst of mocking laughter. But he was galvanized to
discover that one, indeed, loosed him of his shackles, fitting not only
the lock that held them to the ring, but the locks on his limbs as well.
A few seconds later he stood upright, exulting fiercely in his
comparative freedom. A quick stride carried him to the grille, and his
fingers closed about a bar and the slender wrist that was pressed
against it, imprisoning the owner, who lifted her face bravely to his
fierce gaze.
'Who are you, girl?' he demanded. 'Why do you do this?'
'I am only Zenobia,' she murmured, with a catch of breathlessness, as if
in fright; 'only a girl of the king's seraglio.'
'Unless this is some cursed trick,' muttered Conan, 'I cannot see why
you bring me these keys.'
She bowed her dark head, and then lifted it and looked full into his
suspicious eyes. Tears sparkled like jewels on her long dark lashes.
'I am only a girl of the king's seraglio,' she said, with a certain
proud humility. 'He has never glanced at me, and probably never will. I
am less than one of the dogs that gnaw the bones in his banquet hall.
'But I am no painted toy; I am of flesh and blood. I breathe, hate,
fear, rejoice and love. And I have loved you, King Conan, ever since I
saw you riding at the head of your knights along the streets of Belverus
when you visited King Nimed, years ago. My heart tugged at its strings
to leap from my bosom and fall in the dust of the street under your
horse's hoofs.'
Color flooded her countenance as she spoke, but her dark eyes did not
waver. Conan did not at once reply; wild and passionate and untamed he
was, yet any but the most brutish of men must be touched with a certain
awe or wonder at the baring of a woman's naked soul.
She bent her head then, and pressed her red lips to the fingers that
imprisoned her slim wrist. Then she flung up her head as if in sudden
recollection of their position, and terror flared in her dark eyes.
'Haste!' she whispered urgently. 'It is past midnight. You must be
gone.'
'But won't they skin you alive for stealing these keys?'
'They'll never know. If the black men remember in the morning who gave
them the wine, they will not dare admit the keys were stolen from them
while they were drunk. The key that I could not obtain is the one that
unlocks this door. You must make your way to freedom through the pits.
What awful perils lurk beyond that door I cannot even guess. But greater
danger lurks for you if you remain in this cell.
'King Tarascus has returned--'
'What? Tarascus?'
'Aye! He has returned, in great secrecy, and not long ago he descended
into the pits and then came out again, pale and shaking, like a man who
had dared a great hazard. I heard him whisper to his squire, Arideus,
that despite Xaltotun you should die.'
'What of Xaltotun?' murmured Conan.
He felt her shudder.
'Do not speak of him!' she whispered. 'Demons are often summoned by the
sound of their names. The slaves say that he lies in his chamber, behind
a bolted door, dreaming the dreams of the black lotus. I believe that
even Tarascus secretly fears him, or he would slay you openly. But he
has been in the pits tonight, and what he did there, only Mitra knows.'
'I wonder if that could have been Tarascus who fumbled at my cell door
awhile ago?' muttered Conan.
'Here is a dagger!' she whispered, pressing something through the bars.
His eager fingers closed on an object familiar to their touch. 'Go
quickly through yonder door, turn to the left and make your way along
the cells until you come to a stone stair. On your life do not stray
from the line of the cells! Climb the stair and open the door at the
top; one of the keys will fit it. If it be the will of Mitra, I will
await you there.' Then she was gone, with a patter of light slippered
feet.
Conan shrugged his shoulders, and turned toward the farther grille. This
might be some diabolical trap planned by Tarascus, but plunging headlong
into a snare was less abhorrent to Conan's temperament than sitting
meekly to await his doom. He inspected the weapon the girl had given
him, and smiled grimly. Whatever else she might be, she was proven by
that dagger to be a person of practical intelligence. It was no slender
stiletto, selected because of a jeweled hilt or gold guard, fitted only
for dainty murder in milady's boudoir; it was a forthright poniard, a
warrior's weapon, broad-bladed, fifteen inches in length, tapering to a
diamond-sharp point.
He grunted with satisfaction. The feel of the hilt cheered him and gave
him a glow of confidence. Whatever webs of conspiracy were drawn about
him, whatever trickery and treachery ensnared him, this knife was real.
The great muscles of his right arm swelled in anticipation of murderous
blows.
He tried the farther door, fumbling with the keys as he did so. It was
not locked. Yet he remembered the black man locking it. That furtive,
bent figure, then, had been no jailer seeing that the bolts were in
place. He had unlocked the door, instead. There was a sinister
suggestion about that unlocked door. But Conan did not hesitate. He
pushed upon the grille and stepped from the dungeon into the outer
darkness.
As he had thought, the door did not open into another corridor. The
flagged floor stretched away under his feet, and the line of cells ran
away to the right and left behind him, but he could not make out the
other limits of the place into which he had come. He could see neither
the roof nor any other wall. The moonlight filtered into that vastness
only through the grilles of the cells, and was almost lost in the
darkness. Less keen eyes than his could scarcely have discerned the dim
gray patches that floated before each cell door.
Turning to the left, he moved swiftly and noiselessly along the line of
dungeons, his bare feet making no sound on the flags. He glanced briefly
into each dungeon as he passed it. They were all empty, but locked. In
some he caught the glimmer of naked white bones. These pits were a relic
of a grimmer age, constructed long ago when Belverus was a fortress
rather than a city. But evidently their more recent use had been more
extensive than the world guessed.
Ahead of him, presently, he saw the dim outline of a stair sloping
sharply upward, and knew it must be the stair he sought. Then he whirled
suddenly, crouching in the deep shadows at its foot.
Somewhere behind him something was moving--something bulky and stealthy
that padded on feet which were not human feet. He was looking down the
long row of cells, before each one of which lay a square of dim gray
light that was little more than a patch of less dense darkness. But he
saw something moving along these squares. What it was he could not tell,
but it was heavy and huge, and yet it moved with more than human ease
and swiftness. He glimpsed it as it moved across the squares of gray,
then lost it as it merged in the expanses of shadow between. It was
uncanny, in its stealthy advance, appearing and disappearing like a blur
of the vision.
He heard the bars rattle as it tried each door in turn. Now it had
reached the cell he had so recently quitted, and the door swung open as
it tugged. He saw a great bulky shape limned faintly and briefly in the
gray doorway, and then the thing had vanished into the dungeon. Sweat
beaded Conan's face and hands. Now he knew why Tarascus had come so
subtly to his door, and later had fled so swiftly. The king had unlocked
his door, and, somewhere in these hellish pits, had opened a cell or
cage that held some grim monstrosity.
Now the thing was emerging from the cell and was again advancing up the
corridor, its misshapen head close to the ground. It paid no more heed
to the locked doors. It was smelling out his trail. He saw it more
plainly now; the gray light limned a giant anthropomorphic body, but
vaster of bulk and girth than any man. It went on two legs, though it
stooped forward, and it was grayish and shaggy, its thick coat shot with
silver. Its head was a grisly travesty of the human, its long arms hung
nearly to the ground.
Conan knew it at last--understood the meaning of those crushed and
broken bones in the dungeon, and recognized the haunter of the pits. It
was a gray ape, one of the grisly man-eaters from the forests that wave
on the mountainous eastern shores of the Sea of Vilayet. Half mythical
and altogether horrible, these apes were the goblins of Hyborian
legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world, cannibals and
murderers of the nighted forests.
He knew it scented his presence, for it was coming swiftly now, rolling
its barrel-like body rapidly along on its short, mighty bowed legs. He
cast a quick glance up the long stair, but knew that the thing would be
on his back before he could mount to the distant door. He chose to meet
it face to face.
Conan stepped out into the nearest square of moonlight, so as to have
all the advantage of illumination that he could; for the beast, he knew,
could see better than himself in the dark. Instantly the brute saw him;
its great yellow tusks gleamed in the shadows, but it made no sound.
Creatures of night and the silence, the gray apes of Vilayet were
voiceless. But in its dim, hideous features, which were a bestial
travesty of a human face, showed ghastly exultation.
Conan stood poised, watching the oncoming monster without a quiver. He
knew he must stake his life on one thrust; there would be no chance for
another; nor would there be time to strike and spring away. The first
blow must kill, and kill instantly, if he hoped to survive that awful
grapple. He swept his gaze over the short, squat throat, the hairy
swagbelly, and the mighty breast, swelling in giant arches like twin
shields. It must be the heart; better to risk the blade being deflected
by the heavy ribs than to strike in where a stroke was not instantly
fatal. With full realization of the odds, Conan matched his speed of eye
and hand and his muscular power against the brute might and ferocity of
the man-eater. He must meet the brute breast to breast, strike a
death-blow, and then trust to the ruggedness of his frame to survive the
instant of manhandling that was certain to be his.
As the ape came rolling in on him, swinging wide its terrible arms, he
plunged in between them and struck with all his desperate power. He felt
the blade sink to the hilt in the hairy breast, and instantly, releasing
it, he ducked his head and bunched his whole body into one compact mass
of knotted muscles, and as he did so he grasped the closing arms and
drove his knee fiercely into the monster's belly, bracing himself
against that crushing grapple.
For one dizzy instant he felt as if he were being dismembered in the
grip of an earthquake; then suddenly he was free, sprawling on the
floor, and the monster was gasping out its life beneath him, its red
eyes turned upward, the hilt of the poniard quivering in its breast. His
desperate stab had gone home.
Conan was panting as if after long conflict, trembling in every limb.
Some of his joints felt as if they had been dislocated, and blood
dripped from scratches on his skin where the monster's talons had
ripped; his muscles and tendons had been savagely wrenched and twisted.
If the beast had lived a second longer, it would surely have dismembered
him. But the Cimmerian's mighty strength had resisted, for the fleeting
instant it had endured, the dying convulsion of the ape that would have
torn a lesser man limb from limb.
6