The _Venturer_ swept southward like a living thing, her oars pulled now
by free and willing hands. She had been transformed from a peaceful
trader into a war-galley, insofar as the transformation was possible.
Men sat at the benches now with swords at their sides and gilded helmets
on their kinky heads. Shields were hung along the rails, and sheafs of
spears, bows and arrows adorned the mast. Even the elements seemed to
work for Conan now; the broad purple sail bellied to a stiff breeze that
held day by day, needing little aid from the oars.
But though Conan kept a man on the masthead day and night, they did not
sight a long, low, black galley fleeing southward ahead of them. Day by
day the blue waters rolled empty to their view, broken only by
fishing-craft which fled like frightened birds before them, at sight of
the shields hung along the rail. The season for trading was practically
over for the year, and they sighted no other ships.
When the lookout did sight a sail, it was to the north, not the south.
Far on the skyline behind them appeared a racing-galley, with full
spread of purple sail. The blacks urged Conan to turn and plunder it,
but he shook his head. Somewhere south of him a slim black galley was
racing toward the ports of Stygia. That night, before darkness shut
down, the lookout's last glimpse showed him the racing-galley on the
horizon, and at dawn it was still hanging on their tail, afar off, tiny
in the distance. Conan wondered if it was following him, though he could
think of no logical reason for such a supposition. But he paid little
heed.
Each day that carried him farther southward filled him with fiercer
impatience. Doubts never assailed him. As he believed in the rise and
set of the sun he believed that a priest of Set had stolen the Heart of
Ahriman. And where would a priest of Set carry it but to Stygia? The
blacks sensed his eagerness, and toiled as they had never toiled under
the lash, though ignorant of his goal. They anticipated a red career of
pillage and plunder and were content. The men of the southern isles knew
no other trade; and the Kushites of the crew joined whole-heartedly in
the prospect of looting their own people, with the callousness of their
race. Blood-ties meant little; a victorious chieftain and personal gain
everything.
Soon the character of the coastline changed. No longer they sailed past
steep cliffs with blue hills marching behind them. Now the shore was the
edge of broad meadowlands which barely rose above the water's edge and
swept away and away into the hazy distance. Here were few harbors and
fewer ports, but the green plain was dotted with the cities of the
Shemites; green sea, lapping the rim of the green plains, and the
ziggurats of the cities gleaming whitely in the sun, some small in the
distance.
Through the grazing-lands moved the herds of cattle, and squat, broad
riders with cylindrical helmets and curled blue-black beards, with bows
in their hands. This was the shore of the lands of Shem, where there was
no law save as each city-state could enforce its own. Far to the
eastward, Conan knew, the meadowlands gave way to desert, where there
were no cities and the nomadic tribes roamed unhindered.
Still as they plied southward, past the changeless panorama of
city-dotted meadowland, at last the scenery again began to alter. Clumps
of tamarind appeared, the palm groves grew denser. The shoreline became
more broken, a marching rampart of green fronds and trees, and behind
them rose bare, sandy hills. Streams poured into the sea, and along
their moist banks vegetation grew thick and of vast variety.
So at last they passed the mouth of a broad river that mingled its flow
with the ocean, and saw the great black walls and towers of Khemi rise
against the southern horizon.
The river was the Styx, the real border of Stygia. Khemi was Stygia's
greatest port, and at that time her most important city. The king dwelt
at more ancient Luxur, but in Khemi reigned the priestcraft; though men
said the center of their dark religion lay far inland, in a mysterious,
deserted city near the bank of the Styx. This river, springing from some
nameless source far in the unknown lands south of Stygia, ran northward
for a thousand miles before it turned and flowed westward for some
hundreds of miles, to empty at last into the ocean.
The _Venturer_, showing no lights, stole past the port in the night, and
before dawn discovered her, anchored in a small bay a few miles south of
the city. It was surrounded by marsh, a green tangle of mangroves, palms
and lianas, swarming with crocodiles and serpents. Discovery was
extremely unlikely. Conan knew the place of old; he had hidden there
before, in his corsair days.
As they slid silently past the city whose great black bastions rose on
the jutting prongs of land which locked the harbor, torches gleamed and
smoldered luridly, and to their ears came the low thunder of drums. The
port was not crowded with ships, as were the harbors of Argos. The
Stygians did not base their glory and power upon ships and fleets.
Trading-vessels and war-galleys, indeed, they had, but not in proportion
to their inland strength. Many of their craft plied up and down the
great river, rather than along the sea-coasts.
The Stygians were an ancient race, a dark, inscrutable people, powerful
and merciless. Long ago their rule had stretched far north of the Styx,
beyond the meadowlands of Shem, and into the fertile uplands now
inhabited by the peoples of Koth and Ophir and Argos. Their borders had
marched with those of ancient Acheron. But Acheron had fallen, and the
barbaric ancestors of the Hyborians had swept southward in wolfskins and
horned helmets, driving the ancient rulers of the land before them. The
Stygians had not forgotten.
* * * * *
All day the _Venturer_ lay at anchor in the tiny bay, walled in with
green branches and tangled vines through which flitted gay-plumed,
harsh-voiced birds, and among which glided bright-scaled, silent
reptiles. Toward sundown a small boat crept out and down along the
shore, seeking and finding that which Conan desired--a Stygian fisherman
in his shallow, flat-prowed boat.
They brought him to the deck of the _Venturer_--a tall, dark, rangily
built man, ashy with fear of his captors, who were ogres of that coast.
He was naked except for his silken breeks, for, like the Hyrkanians,
even the commoners and slaves of Stygia wore silk; and in his boat was a
wide mantle such as these fishermen flung about their shoulders against
the chill of the night.
He fell to his knees before Conan, expecting torture and death.
'Stand on your legs, man, and quit trembling,' said the Cimmerian
impatiently, who found it difficult to understand abject terror. 'You
won't be harmed. Tell me but this: has a galley, a black racing-galley
returning from Argos, put into Khemi within the last few days?'
'Aye, my lord,' answered the fisherman. 'Only yesterday at dawn the
priest Thutothmes returned from a voyage far to the north. Men say he
has been to Messantia.'
'What did he bring from Messantia?'
'Alas, my lord, I know not.'
'Why did he go to Messantia?' demanded Conan.
'Nay, my lord, I am but a common man. Who am I to know the minds of the
priests of Set? I can only speak what I have seen and what I have heard
men whisper along the wharves. Men say that news of great import came
southward, though of what none knows; and it is well known that the lord
Thutothmes put off in his black galley in great haste. Now he is
returned, but what he did in Argos, or what cargo he brought back, none
knows, not even the seamen who manned his galley. Men say that he has
opposed Thoth-Amon, who is the master of all priests of Set, and dwells
in Luxur, and that Thutothmes seeks hidden power to overthrow the Great
One. But who am I to say? When priests war with one another a common man
can but lie on his belly and hope neither treads upon him.'
Conan snarled in nervous exasperation at this servile philosophy, and
turned to his men. 'I'm going alone into Khemi to find this thief
Thutothmes. Keep this man prisoner, but see that you do him no hurt.
Crom's devils, stop your yowling! Do you think we can sail into the
harbor and take the city by storm? I must go alone.'
Silencing the clamor of protests, he doffed his own garments and donned
the prisoner's silk breeches and sandals, and the band from the man's
hair, but scorned the short fisherman's knife. The common men of Stygia
were not allowed to wear swords, and the mantle was not voluminous
enough to hide the Cimmerian's long blade, but Conan buckled to his hip
a Ghanata knife, a weapon borne by the fierce desert men who dwelt to
the south of the Stygians, a broad, heavy, slightly curved blade of fine
steel, edged like a razor and long enough to dismember a man.
Then, leaving the Stygian guarded by the corsairs, Conan climbed into
the fisher's boat.
'Wait for me until dawn,' he said. 'If I haven't come then, I'll never
come, so hasten southward to your own homes.'
As he clambered over the rail, they set up a doleful wail at his going,
until he thrust his head back into sight to curse them into silence.
Then, dropping into the boat, he grasped the oars and sent the tiny
craft shooting over the waves more swiftly than its owner had ever
propelled it.
17
'He Has Slain the Sacred Son of Set!'
The harbor of Khemi lay between two great jutting points of land that
ran into the ocean. He rounded the southern point, where the great black
castles rose like a man-made hill, and entered the harbor just at dusk,
when there was still enough light for the watchers to recognize the
fisherman's boat and mantle, but not enough to permit recognition of
betraying details. Unchallenged he threaded his way among the great
black war galleys lying silent and unlighted at anchor, and drew up to a
flight of wide stone steps which mounted up from the water's edge. There
he made his boat fast to an iron ring set in the stone, as numerous
similar craft were tied. There was nothing strange in a fisherman
leaving his boat there. None but a fisherman could find a use for such a
craft, and they did not steal from one another.
No one cast him more than a casual glance as he mounted the long steps,
unobtrusively avoiding the torches that flared at intervals above the
lapping black water. He seemed but an ordinary, empty-handed fisherman,
returning after a fruitless day along the coast. If one had observed him
closely, it might have seemed that his step was somewhat too springy and
sure, his carriage somewhat too erect and confident for a lowly
fisherman. But he passed quickly, keeping in the shadows, and the
commoners of Stygia were no more given to analysis than were the
commoners of the less exotic races.
In build he was not unlike the warrior casts of the Stygians, who were a
tall, muscular race. Bronzed by the sun, he was nearly as dark as many
of them. His black hair, square-cut and confined by a copper band,
increased the resemblance. The characteristics which set him apart from
them were the subtle difference in his walk, and his alien features and
blue eyes.
But the mantle was a good disguise, and he kept as much in the shadows
as possible, turning away his head when a native passed him too closely.
But it was a desperate game, and he knew he could not long keep up the
deception. Khemi was not like the sea-ports of the Hyborians, where
types of every race swarmed. The only aliens here were negro and Shemite
slaves; and he resembled neither even as much as he resembled the
Stygians themselves. Strangers were not welcome in the cities of Stygia;
tolerated only when they came as ambassadors or licensed traders. But
even then the latter were not allowed ashore after dark. And now there
were no Hyborian ships in the harbor at all. A strange restlessness ran
through the city, a stirring of ancient ambitions, a whispering none
could define except those who whispered. This Conan felt rather than
knew, his whetted primitive instincts sensing unrest about him.
If he were discovered his fate would be ghastly. They would slay him
merely for being a stranger; if he were recognized as Amra, the corsair
chief who had swept their coasts with steel and flame--an involuntary
shudder twitched Conan's broad shoulders. Human foes he did not fear,
nor any death by steel or fire. But this was a black land of sorcery and
nameless horror. Set the Old Serpent, men said, banished long ago from
the Hyborian races, yet lurked in the shadows of the cryptic temples,
and awful and mysterious were the deeds done in the nighted shrines.
He had drawn away from the waterfront streets with their broad steps
leading down to the water, and was entering the long shadowy streets of
the main part of the city. There was no such scene as was offered by any
Hyborian city--no blaze of lamps and cressets, with gay-clad people
laughing and strolling along the pavements, and shops and stalls wide
open and displaying their wares.
Here the stalls were closed at dusk. The only lights along the streets
were torches, flaring smokily at wide intervals. People walking the
streets were comparatively few; they went hurriedly and unspeaking, and
their numbers decreased with the lateness of the hour. Conan found the
scene gloomy and unreal; the silence of the people, their furtive haste,
the great black stone walls that rose on each side of the streets. There
was a grim massiveness about Stygian architecture that was overpowering
and oppressive.
Few lights showed anywhere except in the upper parts of the buildings.
Conan knew that most of the people lay on the flat roofs, among the
palms of artificial gardens under the stars. There was a murmur of weird
music from somewhere. Occasionally a bronze chariot rumbled along the
flags, and there was a brief glimpse of a tall, hawk-faced noble, with a
silk cloak wrapped about him, and a gold band with a rearing
serpent-head emblem confining his black mane; of the ebon, naked
charioteer bracing his knotty legs against the straining of the fierce
Stygian horses.
But the people who yet traversed the streets on foot were commoners,
slaves, tradesmen, harlots, toilers, and they became fewer as he
progressed. He was making toward the temple of Set, where he knew he
would be likely to find the priest he sought. He believed he would know
Thutothmes if he saw him, though his one glance had been in the
semi-darkness of the Messantian alley. That the man he had seen there
had been the priest he was certain. Only occultists high in the mazes of
the hideous Black Ring possessed the power of the black hand that dealt
death by its touch; and only such a man would dare defy Thoth-Amon, whom
the western world knew only as a figure of terror and myth.
The street broadened, and Conan was aware that he was getting into the
part of the city dedicated to the temples. The great structures reared
their black bulks against the dim stars, grim, indescribably menacing in
the flare of the few torches. And suddenly he heard a low scream from a
woman on the other side of the street and somewhat ahead of him--a naked
courtesan wearing the tall plumed head-dress of her class. She was
shrinking back against the wall, staring across at something he could
not yet see. At her cry the few people on the street halted suddenly as
if frozen. At the same instant Conan was aware of a sinister slithering
ahead of him. Then about the dark corner of the building he was
approaching poked a hideous, wedge-shaped head, and after it flowed coil
after coil of rippling, darkly glistening trunk.
The Cimmerian recoiled, remembering tales he had heard--serpents were
sacred to Set, god of Stygia, who men said was himself a serpent.
Monsters such as this were kept in the temples of Set, and when they
hungered, were allowed to crawl forth into the streets to take what prey
they wished. Their ghastly feasts were considered a sacrifice to the
scaly god.
The Stygians within Conan's sight fell to their knees, men and women,
and passively awaited their fate. One the great serpent would select,
would lap in scaly coils, crush to a red pulp and swallow as a rat-snake
swallows a mouse. The others would live. That was the will of the gods.
But it was not Conan's will. The python glided toward him, its attention
probably attracted by the fact that he was the only human in sight still
standing erect. Gripping his great knife under his mantle, Conan hoped
the slimy brute would pass him by. But it halted before him and reared
up horrifically in the flickering torchlight, its forked tongue
flickering in and out, its cold eyes glittering with the ancient cruelty
of the serpent-folk. Its neck arched, but before it could dart, Conan
whipped his knife from under his mantle and struck like a flicker of
lightning. The broad blade split that wedge-shaped head and sheared deep
into the thick neck.
Conan wrenched his knife free and sprang clear as the great body knotted
and looped and whipped terrifically in its death throes. In the moment
that he stood staring in morbid fascination, the only sound was the thud
and swish of the snake's tail against the stones.
Then from the shocked votaries burst a terrible cry: 'Blasphemer! He has
slain the sacred son of Set! Slay him! Slay! Slay!'
Stones whizzed about him and the crazed Stygians rushed at him,
shrieking hysterically, while from all sides others emerged from their
houses and took up the cry. With a curse Conan wheeled and darted into
the black mouth of an alley. He heard the patter of bare feet on the
flags behind him as he ran more by feel than by sight, and the walls
resounded to the vengeful yells of the pursuers. Then his left hand
found a break in the wall, and he turned sharply into another, narrower
alley. On both sides rose sheer black stone walls. High above him he
could see a thin line of stars. These giant walls, he knew, were the
walls of temples. He heard, behind him, the pack sweep past the dark
mouth in full cry. Their shouts grew distant, faded away. They had
missed the smaller alley and run straight on in the blackness. He too
kept straight ahead, though the thought of encountering another of Set's
'sons' in the darkness brought a shudder from him.
Then somewhere ahead of him he caught a moving glow, like that of a
crawling glow-worm. He halted, flattened himself against the wall and
gripped his knife. He knew what it was: a man approaching with a torch.
Now it was so close he could make out the dark hand that gripped it, and
the dim oval of a dark face. A few more steps and the man would
certainly see him. He sank into a tigerish crouch--the torch halted. A
door was briefly etched in the glow, while the torch-bearer fumbled with
it. Then it opened, the tall figure vanished through it, and darkness
closed again on the alley. There was a sinister suggestion of
furtiveness about that slinking figure, entering the alley-door in
darkness; a priest, perhaps, returning from some dark errand.
But Conan groped toward the door. If one man came up that alley with a
torch, others might come at any time. To retreat the way he had come
might mean to run full into the mob from which he was fleeing. At any
moment they might return, find the narrower alley and come howling down
it. He felt hemmed in by those sheer, unscalable walls, desirous of
escape, even if escape meant invading some unknown building.
The heavy bronze door was not locked. It opened under his fingers and he
peered through the crack. He was looking into a great square chamber of
massive black stone. A torch smoldered in a niche in the wall. The
chamber was empty. He glided through the lacquered door and closed it
behind him.
His sandaled feet made no sound as he crossed the black marble floor. A
teak door stood partly open, and gliding through this, knife in hand, he
came out into a great, dim, shadowy place whose lofty ceiling was only a
hint of darkness high above him, toward which the black walls swept
upward. On all sides black-arched doorways opened into the great still
hall. It was lit by curious bronze lamps that gave a dim weird light. On
the other side of the great hall a broad black marble stairway, without
a railing, marched upward to lose itself in gloom, and above him on all
sides dim galleries hung like black stone ledges.
Conan shivered; he was in a temple of some Stygian god, if not Set
himself, then someone barely less grim. And the shrine did not lack an
occupant. In the midst of the great hall stood a black stone altar,
massive, somber, without carvings or ornament, and upon it coiled one of
the great sacred serpents, its iridescent scales shimmering in the
lamplight. It did not move, and Conan remembered stories that the
priests kept these creatures drugged part of the time. The Cimmerian
took an uncertain step out from the door, then shrank back suddenly,
not into the room he had just quitted, but into a velvet-curtained
recess. He had heard a soft step somewhere near by.
From one of the black arches emerged a tall, powerful figure in sandals
and silken loin-cloth, with a wide mantle trailing from his shoulders.
But face and head were hidden by a monstrous mask, a half-bestial,
half-human countenance, from the crest of which floated a mass of
ostrich plumes.
In certain ceremonies the Stygian priests went masked. Conan hoped the
man would not discover him, but some instinct warned the Stygian. He
turned abruptly from his destination, which apparently was the stair,
and stepped straight to the recess. As he jerked aside the velvet
hanging, a hand darted from the shadows, crushed the cry in his throat
and jerked him headlong into the alcove, and the knife impaled him.
Conan's next move was the obvious one suggested by logic. He lifted off
the grinning mask and drew it over his own head. The fisherman's mantle
he flung over the body of the priest, which he concealed behind the
hangings, and drew the priestly mantle about his own brawny shoulders.
Fate had given him a disguise. All Khemi might well be searching now for
the blasphemer who dared defend himself against a sacred snake; but who
would dream of looking for him under the mask of a priest?
He strode boldly from the alcove and headed for one of the arched
doorways at random; but he had not taken a dozen strides when he wheeled
again, all his senses edged for peril.
A band of masked figures filed down the stair, appareled exactly as he
was. He hesitated, caught in the open, and stood still, trusting to his
disguise, though cold sweat gathered on his forehead and the backs of
his hands. No word was spoken. Like phantoms they descended into the
great hall and moved past him toward a black arch. The leader carried an
ebon staff which supported a grinning white skull, and Conan knew it was
one of the ritualistic processions so inexplicable to a foreigner, but
which played a strong--and often sinister--part in the Stygian religion.
The last figure turned his head slightly toward the motionless
Cimmerian, as if expecting him to follow. Not to do what was obviously
expected of him would rouse instant suspicion. Conan fell in behind the
last man and suited his gait to their measured pace.
They traversed a long, dark, vaulted corridor in which, Conan noticed
uneasily, the skull on the staff glowed phosphorescently. He felt a
surge of unreasoning, wild animal panic that urged him to rip out his
knife and slash right and left at these uncanny figures, to flee madly
from the grim, dark temple. But he held himself in check, fighting down
the dim monstrous intuitions that rose in the back of his mind and
peopled the gloom with shadowy shapes of horror; and presently he barely
stifled a sigh of relief as they filed through a great double-valved
door which was three times higher than a man, and emerged into the
starlight.
Conan wondered if he dared fade into some dark alley; but hesitated,
uncertain, and down the long dark street they padded silently, while
such folk as they met turned their heads away and fled from them. The
procession kept far out from the walls; to turn and bolt into any of the
alleys they passed would be too conspicuous. While he mentally fumed and
cursed, they came to a low-arched gateway in the southern wall, and
through this they filed. Ahead of them and about them lay clusters of
low, flat-topped mud houses, and palm-groves, shadowy in the starlight.
Now if ever, thought Conan, was his time to escape his silent
companions.
But the moment the gate was left behind them those companions were no
longer silent. They began to mutter excitedly among themselves. The
measured, ritualistic gait was abandoned, the staff with its skull was
tucked unceremoniously under the leader's arm, and the whole group broke
ranks and hurried onward. And Conan hurried with them. For in the low
murmur of speech he had caught a word that galvanized him. The word was:
"_Thutothmes!_"
18
'I Am the Woman Who Never Died'
Conan stared with burning interest at his masked companions. One of them
was Thutothmes, or else the destination of the band was a rendezvous
with the man he sought. And he knew what that destination was, when
beyond the palms he glimpsed a black triangular bulk looming against the
shadowy sky.
They passed through the belt of huts and groves, and if any man saw them
he was careful not to show himself. The huts were dark. Behind them the
black towers of Khemi rose gloomily against the stars that were mirrored
in the waters of the harbor; ahead of them the desert stretched away in
dim darkness; somewhere a jackal yapped. The quick-passing sandals of
the silent neophytes made no noise in the sand. They might have been
ghosts, moving toward that colossal pyramid that rose out of the murk of
the desert. There was no sound over all the sleeping land.
Conan's heart beat quicker as he gazed at the grim black wedge that
stood etched against the stars, and his impatience to close with
Thutothmes in whatever conflict the meeting might mean was not unmixed
with a fear of the unknown. No man could approach one of those somber
piles of black stone without apprehension. The very name was a symbol of
repellent horror among the northern nations, and legends hinted that the
Stygians did not build them; that they were in the land at whatever
immeasurably ancient date the dark-skinned people came into the land of
the great river.
As they approached the pyramid he glimpsed a dim glow near the base
which presently resolved itself into a doorway, on either side of which
brooded stone lions with the heads of women, cryptic, inscrutable,
nightmares crystalized in stone. The leader of the band made straight
for the doorway, in the deep well of which Conan saw a shadowy figure.
The leader paused an instant beside this dim figure, and then vanished
into the dark interior, and one by one the others followed. As each
masked priest passed through the gloomy portal he was halted briefly by
the mysterious guardian and something passed between them, some word or
gesture Conan could not make out. Seeing this, the Cimmerian purposely
lagged behind, and stooping, pretended to be fumbling with the fastening
of his sandal. Not until the last of the masked figures had disappeared
did he straighten and approach the portal.
He was uneasily wondering if the guardian of the temple were human,
remembering some tales he had heard. But his doubts were set at rest. A
dim bronze cresset glowing just within the door lighted a long narrow
corridor that ran away into blackness, and a man standing silent in the
mouth of it, wrapped in a wide black cloak. No one else was in sight.
Obviously the masked priests had disappeared down the corridor.
Over the cloak that was drawn about his lower features, the Stygian's
piercing eyes regarded Conan sharply. With his left hand he made a
curious gesture. On a venture Conan imitated it. But evidently another
gesture was expected; the Stygian's right hand came from under his cloak
with a gleam of steel and his murderous stab would have pierced the
heart of an ordinary man.
But he was dealing with one whose thews were nerved to the quickness of
a jungle cat. Even as the dagger flashed in the dim light, Conan caught
the dusky wrist and smashed his clenched right fist against the
Stygian's jaw. The man's head went back against the stone wall with a
dull crunch that told of a fractured skull.
Standing for an instant above him, Conan listened intently. The cresset
burned low, casting vague shadows about the door. Nothing stirred in the
blackness beyond, though far away and below him, as it seemed, he caught
the faint, muffled note of a gong.
He stooped and dragged the body behind the great bronze door which stood
wide, opened inward, and then the Cimmerian went warily but swiftly down
the corridor, toward what doom he did not even try to guess.
He had not gone far when he halted, baffled. The corridor split in two
branches, and he had no way of knowing which the masked priests had
taken. At a venture he chose the left. The floor slanted slightly
downward and was worn smooth as by many feet. Here and there a dim
cresset cast a faint nightmarish twilight. Conan wondered uneasily for
what purpose these colossal piles had been reared, in what forgotten
age. This was an ancient, ancient land. No man knew how many ages the
black temples of Stygia had looked against the stars.
Narrow black arches opened occasionally to right and left, but he kept
to the main corridor, although a conviction that he had taken the wrong
branch was growing in him. Even with their start on him, he should have
overtaken the priests by this time. He was growing nervous. The silence
was like a tangible thing, and yet he had a feeling that he was not
alone. More than once, passing a nighted arch he seemed to feel the
glare of unseen eyes fixed upon him. He paused, half minded to turn back
to where the corridor had first branched. He wheeled abruptly, knife
lifted, every nerve tingling.
A girl stood at the mouth of a smaller tunnel, staring fixedly at him.
Her ivory skin showed her to be Stygian of some ancient noble family,
and like all such women she was tall, lithe, voluptuously figured, her
hair a great pile of black foam, among which gleamed a sparkling ruby.
But for her velvet sandals and broad jewel-crusted girdle about her
supple waist she was quite nude.
'What do you here?' she demanded.
To answer would betray his alien origin. He remained motionless, a grim,
somber figure in the hideous mask with the plumes floating over him. His
alert gaze sought the shadows behind her and found them empty. But there
might be hordes of fighting-men within her call.
She advanced toward him, apparently without apprehension though with
suspicion.
'You are not a priest,' she said. 'You are a fighting-man. Even with
that mask that is plain. There is as much difference between you and a
priest as there is between a man and a woman. By Set!' she exclaimed,
halting suddenly, her eyes flaring wide. 'I do not believe you are even
a Stygian!'
With a movement too quick for the eye to follow, his hand closed about
her round throat, lightly as a caress.
'Not a sound out of you!' he muttered.
Her smooth ivory flesh was cold as marble, yet there was no fear in the
wide, dark, marvelous eyes which regarded him.
'Do not fear,' she answered calmly. 'I will not betray you. But are you
mad to come, a stranger and a foreigner, to the forbidden temple of
Set?'
'I'm looking for the priest Thutothmes,' he answered. 'Is he in this
temple?'
'Why do you seek him?' she parried.
'He has something of mine which was stolen.'
'I will lead you to him,' she volunteered so promptly that his
suspicions were instantly roused.
'Don't play with me, girl,' he growled.
'I do not play with you. I have no love for Thutothmes.'
He hesitated, then made up his mind; after all, he was as much in her
power as she was in his.
'Walk beside me,' he commanded, shifting his grasp from her throat to
her wrist. 'But walk with care. If you make a suspicious move--'
She led him down the slanting corridor, down and down, until there were
no more cressets, and he groped his way in darkness, aware less by sight
than by feel and sense of the woman at his side. Once when he spoke to
her, she turned her head toward him and he was startled to see her eyes
glowing like golden fire in the dark. Dim doubts and vague monstrous
suspicions haunted his mind, but he followed her, through a labyrinthine
maze of black corridors that confused even his primitive sense of
direction. He mentally cursed himself for a fool, allowing himself to be
led into that black abode of mystery; but it was too late to turn back
now. Again he felt life and movement in the darkness about him, sensed
peril and hunger burning impatiently in the blackness. Unless his ears
deceived him he caught a faint sliding noise that ceased and receded at
a muttered command from the girl.
She led him at last into a chamber lighted by a curious seven-branched
candelabrum in which black candles burned weirdly. He knew they were far
below the earth. The chamber was square, with walls and ceiling of
polished black marble and furnished after the manner of the ancient
Stygians; there was a couch of ebony, covered with black velvet, and on
a black stone dais lay a carven mummy-case.
Conan stood waiting expectantly, staring at the various black arches
which opened into the chamber. But the girl made no move to go farther.
Stretching herself on the couch with feline suppleness, she intertwined
her fingers behind her sleek head and regarded him from under long
drooping lashes.
'Well?' he demanded impatiently. 'What are you doing? Where's
Thutothmes?'
'There is no haste,' she answered lazily. 'What is an hour--or a day, or
a year, or a century, for that matter? Take off your mask. Let me see
your features.'
With a grunt of annoyance Conan dragged off the bulky headpiece, and the
girl nodded as if in approval as she scanned his dark scarred face and
blazing eyes.
'There is strength in you--great strength; you could strangle a
bullock.'
He moved restlessly, his suspicion growing. With his hand on his hilt he
peered into the gloomy arches.
'If you've brought me into a trap,' he said, 'you won't live to enjoy
your handiwork. Are you going to get off that couch and do as you
promised, or do I have to--'
His voice trailed away. He was staring at the mummy-case, on which the
countenance of the occupant was carved in ivory with the startling
vividness of a forgotten art. There was a disquieting familiarity about
that carven mask, and with something of a shock he realized what it was;
there was a startling resemblance between it and the face of the girl
lolling on the ebon couch. She might have been the model from which it
was carved, but he knew the portrait was at least centuries old. Archaic
hieroglyphics were scrawled across the lacquered lid, and, seeking back
into his mind for tag-ends of learning, picked up here and there as
incidentals of an adventurous life, he spelled them out, and said aloud:
'Akivasha!'
'You have heard of Princess Akivasha?' inquired the girl on the couch.
'Who hasn't?' he grunted. The name of that ancient, evil, beautiful
princess still lived the world over in song and legend, though ten
thousand years had rolled their cycles since the daughter of Tuthamon
had reveled in purple feasts amid the black halls of ancient Luxur.
'Her only sin was that she loved life and all the meanings of life,'
said the Stygian girl. 'To win life she courted death. She could not
bear to think of growing old and shriveled and worn, and dying at last
as hags die. She wooed Darkness like a lover and his gift was life--life
that, not being life as mortals know it, can never grow old and fade.
She went into the shadows to cheat age and death--'
Conan glared at her with eyes that were suddenly burning slits. And he
wheeled and tore the lid from the sarcophagus. It was empty. Behind him
the girl was laughing and the sound froze the blood in his veins. He
whirled back to her, the short hairs on his neck bristling.
'You are Akivasha!' he grated.
She laughed and shook back her burnished locks, spread her arms
sensuously.
'I am Akivasha! I am the woman who never died, who never grew old! Who
fools say was lifted from the earth by the gods, in the full bloom of
her youth and beauty, to queen it for ever in some celestial clime! Nay,
it is in the shadows that mortals find immortality! Ten thousand years
ago I died to live for ever! Give me your lips, strong man!'
Rising lithely she came to him, rose on tiptoe and flung her arms about
his massive neck. Scowling down into her upturned, beautiful countenance
he was aware of a fearful fascination and an icy fear.
'Love me!' she whispered, her head thrown back, eyes closed and lips
parted. 'Give me of your blood to renew my youth and perpetuate my
everlasting life! I will make you, too, immortal! I will teach you the
wisdom of all the ages, all the secrets that have lasted out the eons in
the blackness beneath these dark temples. I will make you king of that
shadowy horde which revels among the tombs of the ancients when night
veils the desert and bats flit across the moon. I am weary of priests
and magicians, and captive girls dragged screaming through the portals
of death. I desire a man. Love me, barbarian!'
She pressed her dark head down against his mighty breast, and he felt a
sharp pang at the base of his throat. With a curse he tore her away and
flung her sprawling across the couch.
'Damned vampire!' Blood was trickling from a tiny wound in his throat.
She reared up on the couch like a serpent poised to strike, all the
golden fires of hell blazing in her wide eyes. Her lips drew back,
revealing white pointed teeth.
'Fool!' she shrieked. 'Do you think to escape me? You will live and die
in darkness! I have brought you far below the temple. You can never find
your way out alone. You can never cut your way through those which guard
the tunnels. But for my protection the sons of Set would long ago have
taken you into their bellies. Fool, I shall yet drink your blood!'
'Keep away from me or I'll slash you asunder,' he grunted, his flesh
crawling with revulsion. 'You may be immortal, but steel will dismember
you.'
As he backed toward the arch through which he had entered, the light
went out suddenly. All the candles were extinguished at once, though he
did not know how; for Akivasha had not touched them. But the vampire's
laugh rose mockingly behind him, poison-sweet as the viols of hell, and
he sweated as he groped in the darkness for the arch in a near-panic.
His fingers encountered an opening and he plunged through it. Whether it
was the arch through which he had entered he did not know, nor did he
very much care. His one thought was to get out of the haunted chamber
which had housed that beautiful, hideous, undead fiend for so many
centuries.
His wanderings through those black, winding tunnels were a sweating
nightmare. Behind him and about him he heard faint slitherings and
glidings, and once the echo of that sweet, hellish laughter he had heard
in the chamber of Akivasha. He slashed ferociously at sounds and
movements he heard or imagined he heard in the darkness near him, and
once his sword cut through some yielding tenuous substance that might
have been cobwebs. He had a desperate feeling that he was being played
with, lured deeper and deeper into ultimate night, before being set upon
by demoniac talon and fang.
And through his fear ran the sickening revulsion of his discovery. The
legend of Akivasha was so old, and among the evil tales told of her ran
a thread of beauty and idealism, of everlasting youth. To so many
dreamers and poets and lovers she was not alone the evil princess of
Stygian legend, but the symbol of eternal youth and beauty, shining for
ever in some far realm of the gods. And this was the hideous reality.
This foul perversion was the truth of that everlasting life. Through his
physical revulsion ran the sense of a shattered dream of man's idolatry,
its glittering gold proved slime and cosmic filth. A wave of futility
swept over him, a dim fear of the falseness of all men's dreams and
idolatries.
And now he knew that his ears were not playing him tricks. He was being
followed, and his pursuers were closing in on him. In the darkness
sounded shufflings and slidings that were never made by human feet; no,
nor by the feet of any normal animal. The underworld had its bestial
life too, perhaps. They were behind him. He turned to face them, though
he could see nothing, and slowly backed away. Then the sounds ceased,
even before he turned his head and saw, somewhere down the long
corridor, a glow of light.
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