Not all his guides entered the chamber. When the door closed, Conan saw
only one man standing before him--a slim figure, masked in a black cloak
with a hood. This the man threw back, disclosing a pale oval of a face,
with calm, delicately chiseled features.
The king set Albiona on her feet, but she still clung to him and stared
apprehensively about her. The chamber was a large one, with marble walls
partly covered with black velvet hangings and thick rich carpets on the
mosaic floor, laved in the soft golden glow of bronze lamps.
Conan instinctively laid a hand on his hilt. There was blood on his
hand, blood clotted about the mouth of his scabbard, for he had sheathed
his blade without cleansing it.
'Where are we?' he demanded.
The stranger answered with a low, profound bow in which the suspicious
king could detect no trace of irony.
'In the temple of Asura, your Majesty.'
Albiona cried out faintly and clung closer to Conan, staring fearfully
at the black, arched doors, as if expecting the entry of some grisly
shape of darkness.
'Fear not, my lady,' said their guide. 'There is nothing here to harm
you, vulgar superstition to the contrary. If your monarch was
sufficiently convinced of the innocence of our religion to protect us
from the persecution of the ignorant, then certainly one of his subjects
need have no apprehensions.'
'Who are you?' demanded Conan.
'I am Hadrathus, priest of Asura. One of my followers recognized you
when you entered the city, and brought the word to me.'
Conan grunted profanely.
'Do not fear that others discovered your identity,' Hadrathus assured
him. 'Your disguise would have deceived any but a follower of Asura,
whose cult it is to seek below the aspect of illusion. You were followed
to the watch tower, and some of my people went into the tunnel to aid
you if you returned by that route. Others, myself among them, surrounded
the tower. And now, King Conan, it is yours to command. Here in the
temple of Asura you are still king.'
'Why should you risk your lives for me?' asked the king.
'You were our friend when you sat upon your throne,' answered Hadrathus.
'You protected us when the priests of Mitra sought to scourge us out of
the land.'
Conan looked about him curiously. He had never before visited the temple
of Asura, had not certainly known that there was such a temple in
Tarantia. The priests of the religion had a habit of hiding their
temples in a remarkable fashion. The worship of Mitra was overwhelmingly
predominant in the Hyborian nations, but the cult of Asura persisted, in
spite of official ban and popular antagonism. Conan had been told dark
tales of hidden temples where intense smoke drifted up incessantly from
black altars where kidnapped humans were sacrificed before a great
coiled serpent, whose fearsome head swayed for ever in the haunted
shadows.
Persecution caused the followers of Asura to hide their temples with
cunning art, and to veil their rituals in obscurity; and this secrecy,
in turn, evoked more monstrous suspicions and tales of evil.
But Conan's was the broad tolerance of the barbarian, and he had refused
to persecute the followers of Asura or to allow the people to do so on
no better evidence than was presented against them, rumors and
accusations that could not be proven. 'If they are black magicians,' he
had said, 'how will they suffer you to harry them? If they are not,
there is no evil in them. Crom's devils! Let men worship what gods they
will.'
At a respectful invitation from Hadrathus he seated himself on an ivory
chair, and motioned Albiona to another, but she preferred to sit on a
golden stool at his feet, pressing close against his thigh, as if
seeking security in the contact. Like most orthodox followers of Mitra,
she had an intuitive horror of the followers and cult of Asura,
instilled in her infancy and childhood by wild tales of human sacrifice
and anthropomorphic gods shambling through shadowy temples.
Hadrathus stood before them, his uncovered head bowed.
'What is your wish, your Majesty?'
'Food first,' he grunted, and the priest smote a golden gong with a
silver wand.
Scarcely had the mellow notes ceased echoing when four hooded figures
came through a curtained doorway bearing a great four-legged silver
platter of smoking dishes and crystal vessels. This they set before
Conan, bowing low, and the king wiped his hands on the damask, and
smacked his lips with unconcealed relish.
'Beware, your Majesty!' whispered Albiona. 'These folk eat human flesh!'
'I'll stake my kingdom that this is nothing but honest roast beef,'
answered Conan. 'Come, lass, fall to! You must be hungry after the
prison fare.'
Thus advised, and with the example before her of one whose word was the
ultimate law to her, the countess complied, and ate ravenously though
daintily, while her liege lord tore into the meat joints and guzzled the
wine with as much gusto as if he had not already eaten once that night.
'You priests are shrewd, Hadrathus,' he said, with a great beef-bone in
his hands and his mouth full of meat. 'I'd welcome your service in my
campaign to regain my kingdom.'
Slowly Hadrathus shook his head, and Conan slammed the beef-bone down on
the table in a gust of impatient wrath.
'Crom's devils! What ails the men of Aquilonia? First Servius--now you!
Can you do nothing but wag your idiotic heads when I speak of ousting
these dogs?'
Hadrathus sighed and answered slowly: 'My lord, it is ill to say, and I
fain would say otherwise. But the freedom of Aquilonia is at an end.
Nay, the freedom of the whole world may be at an end! Age follows age in
the history of the world, and now we enter an age of horror and slavery,
as it was long ago.'
'What do you mean?' demanded the king uneasily.
Hadrathus dropped into a chair and rested his elbows on his thighs,
staring at the floor.
'It is not alone the rebellious lords of Aquilonia and the armies of
Nemedia which are arrayed against you,' answered Hadrathus. 'It is
sorcery--grisly black magic from the grim youth of the world. An awful
shape has risen out of the shades of the Past, and none can stand before
it.'
'What do you mean?' Conan repeated.
'I speak of Xaltotun of Acheron, who died three thousand years ago, yet
walks the earth today.'
Conan was silent, while in his mind floated an image--the image of a
bearded face of calm inhuman beauty. Again he was haunted by a sense of
uneasy familiarity. Acheron--the sound of the word roused instinctive
vibrations of memory and associations in his mind.
'Acheron,' he repeated. 'Xaltotun of Acheron--man, are you mad? Acheron
has been a myth for more centuries than I can remember. I've often
wondered if it ever existed at all.'
'It was a black reality,' answered Hadrathus, 'an empire of black
magicians, steeped in evil now long forgotten. It was finally overthrown
by the Hyborian tribes of the west. The wizards of Acheron practised
foul necromancy, thaumaturgy of the most evil kind, grisly magic taught
them by devils. And of all the sorcerers of that accursed kingdom, none
was so great as Xaltotun of Python.'
'Then how was he ever overthrown?' asked Conan skeptically.
'By some means a source of cosmic power which he jealously guarded was
stolen and turned against him. That source has been returned to him, and
he is invincible.'
Albiona, hugging the headsman's black cloak about her, stared from the
priest to the king, not understanding the conversation. Conan shook his
head angrily.
'You are making game of me,' he growled. 'If Xaltotun has been dead
three thousand years, how can this man be he? It's some rogue who's
taken the old one's name.'
Hadrathus leaned to an ivory table and opened a small gold chest which
stood there. From it he took something which glinted dully in the mellow
light--a broad gold coin of antique minting.
'You have seen Xaltotun unveiled? Then look upon this. It is a coin
which was stamped in ancient Acheron, before its fall. So pervaded with
sorcery was that black empire, that even this coin has its uses in
making magic.'
Conan took it and scowled down at it. There was no mistaking its great
antiquity. Conan had handled many coins in the years of his plunderings,
and had a good practical knowledge of them. The edges were worn and the
inscription almost obliterated. But the countenance stamped on one side
was still clear-cut and distinct. And Conan's breath sucked in between
his clenched teeth. It was not cool in the chamber, but he felt a
prickling of his scalp, an icy contraction of his flesh. The countenance
was that of a bearded man, inscrutable, with a calm inhuman beauty.
'By Crom! It's he!' muttered Conan. He understood, now, the sense of
familiarity that the sight of the bearded man had roused in him from the
first. He had seen a coin like this once before, long ago in a far land.
With a shake of his shoulders he growled: 'The likeness is only a
coincidence--or if he's shrewd enough to assume a forgotten wizard's
name, he's shrewd enough to assume his likeness.' But he spoke without
conviction. The sight of that coin had shaken the foundations of his
universe. He felt that reality and stability were crumbing into an abyss
of illusion and sorcery. A wizard was understandable; but this was
diabolism beyond sanity.
'We cannot doubt that it is indeed Xaltotun of Python,' said Hadrathus.
'He it was who shook down the cliffs at Valkia, by his spells that
enthrall the elementals of the earth--he it was who sent the creature of
darkness into your tent before dawn.'