Chapter 4.
The Teeth of Gwahlur
Baffled wrath confused the brain of Conyn the Cimmerian. She knew no more how to go about searching for Murielo than she had known how to go about searching for the Teeth of Gwahlur. Only one thought occurred to her -- to follow the priests. Perhaps at the hiding-place of the treasure some clue would be revealed to her. It was a slim chance, but better than wandering about aimlessly.
As she hurried through the great shadowy hall that led to the portico she half expected the lurking shadows to come to life behind her with rending fangs and talons. But only the beat of her own rapid heart accompanied her into the moonlight that dappled the shimmering marble.
At the foot of the wide steps she cast about in the bright moonlight for some sight to show her the direction she must go. And she found it -- petals scattered on the sward told where an arm or garment had brushed against a blossom-laden branch. Grass had been pressed down under heavy feet. Conyn, who had tracked wolves in her native hills, found no insurmountable difficulty in following the trail of the Keshani priests.
It led away from the palace, through masses of exotic-scented shrubbery where great pale blossoms spread their shimmering petals, through verdant, tangled bushes that showered blooms at the touch, until she came at last to a great mass of rock that jutted like a titan's castle out from the cliffs at a point closest to the palace, which, however, was almost hidden from view by vine-interlaced trees. Evidently that babbling priestess in Keshia had been mistaken when she said the Teeth were hidden in the palace. This trail had led her away from the place where Murielo had disappeared, but a belief was growing in Conyn that each part of the valley was connected with that palace by subterranean passages.
Crouching in the deep, velvet-black shadows of the bushes, she scrutinized the great jut of rock which stood out in bold relief in the moonlight. It was covered with strange, grotesque carvings, depicting women and animals, and half-bestial creatures that might have been gods or devils. The style of art differed so strikingly from that of the rest of the valley, that Conyn wondered if it did not represent a different era and race, and was itself a relic of an age lost and forgotten at whatever immeasurably distant date the people of Alkmeenon had found and entered the haunted valley.
A great door stood open in the sheer curtain of the cliff, and a gigantic dragon's head was carved about it so that the open door was like the dragon's gaping mouth. The door itself was of carven bronze and looked to weigh several tons. There was no lock that she could see, but a series of bolts showing along the edge of the massive portal, as it stood open, told her that there was some system of locking and unlocking -- a system doubtless known only to the priests of Keshan.
The trail showed that Gorulga and her henchemen had gone through that door. But Conyn hesitated. To wait until they emerged would probably mean to see the door locked in her face, and she might not be able to solve the mystery of its unlocking. On the other hand, if she followed them in, they might emerge and lock her in the cavern.
Throwing caution to the winds, she glided through the great portal. Somewhere in the cavern were the priests, the Teeth of Gwahlur, and perhaps a clue to the fate of Murielo. Personal risks had never yet deterred her from any purpose.
Moonlight illumined, for a few yards, the wide tunnel in which she found herself. Somewhere ahead of her she saw a faint glow and heard the echo of a weird chanting. The priests were not so far ahead of her as she had thought. The tunnel debouched into a wide room before the moonlight played out, an empty cavern of no great dimensions, but with a lofty, vaulted roof, glowing with a phosphorescent encrustation, which, as Conyn knew, was a common phenomenon in that part of the world. It made a ghostly half-light, in which she was able to see a bestial image squatting on a shrine, and the black mouths of six or seven tunnels leading off from the chamber. Down the widest of these -- the one directly behind the squat image which looked toward the outer opening -- she caught the gleam of torches wavering, whereas the phosphorescent glow was fixed, and heard the chanting increase in volume.
Down it she went recklessly, and was presently peering into a larger cavern than the one she had just left. There was no phosphorus here, but the light of the torches fell on a larger altar and a more obscene and repulsive god squatting toad-like upon it. Before this repugnant deity Gorulga and her ten acolytes knelt and beat their heads upon the ground, while chanting monotonously. Conyn realized why their progress had been so slow. Evidently approaching the secret crypt of the Teeth was a complicated and elaborate ritual.
She was fidgeting in nervous impatience before the chanting and bowing were over, but presently they rose and passed into the tunnel which opened behind the idol. Their torches bobbed away into the nighted vault, and she followed swiftly. Not much danger of being discovered. She glided along the shadows like a creature of the night, and the black priests were completely engrossed in their ceremonial mummery. Apparently they had not even noticed the absence of Gwarunga.
Emerging into a cavern of huge proportions, about whose upward curving walls gallery-like ledges marched in tiers, they began their worship anew before an altar which was larger, and a god which was more disgusting, than any encountered thus far.
Conyn crouched in the black mouth of the tunnel, staring at the walls reflecting the lurid glow of the torches. She saw a carven stone stair winding up from tier to tier of the galleries; the roof was lost in darkness.
She started violently and the chanting broke off as the kneeling blacks flung up their heads. An inhuman voice boomed out high above them. They froze on their knees, their faces turned upward with a ghastly blue hue in the sudden glare of a weird light that burst blindingly up near the lofty roof and then burned with a throbbing glow. That glare lighted a gallery and a cry went up from the high priestess, echoed shudderingly by her acolytes. In the flash there had been briefly disclosed to them a slim white figure standing upright in a sheen of silk and a glint of jewel-crusted gold. Then the blaze smoldered to a throbbing, pulsing luminosity in which nothing was distinct, and that slim shape was but a shimmering blur of ivory.
"Yelay!" screamed Gorulga, her brown features ashen. "Why have you followed us? What is your pleasure?"
That weird unhuman voice rolled down from the roof, reechoing under that arching vault that magnified and altered it beyond recognition.
"Woe to the unbelievers! Woe to the false children of Keshia! Doom to them which deny their deity!"
A cry of horror went up from the priests. Gorulga looked like a shocked vulture in the glare of the torches.
"I do not understand!" she stammered. "We are faithful. In the chamber of the oracle you told us--"
"Do not heed what you heard in the chamber of the oracle!" rolled that terrible voice, multiplied until it was as though a myriad voices thundered and muttered the same warning. "Beware of false prophets and false gods! A demon in my guise spoke to you in the palace, giving false prophecy. Now harken and obey, for only I am the true god, and I give you one chance to save yourselves from doom!
"Take the Teeth of Gwahlur from the crypt where they were placed so long ago. Alkmeenon is no longer holy, because it has been desecrated by blasphemers. Give the Teeth of Gwahlur into the hands of Thutmekri, the Stygian, to place in the sanctuary of Dagon and Derketo. Only this can save Keshan from the doom the demons of the night have plotted. Take the Teeth of Gwahlur and go; return instantly to Keshia; there give the jewels to Thutmekri, and seize the foreign devil Conyn and flay her alive in the great square."
There was no hesitation in obeying. Chattering with fear the priests scrambled up and ran for the door that opened behind the bestial god. Gorulga led the flight. They jammed briefly in the doorway, yelping as wildly waving torches touched squirming black bodies; they plunged through, and the patter of their speeding feet dwindled down the tunnel.
Conyn did not follow. She was consumed with a furious desire to learn the truth of this fantastic affair. Was that indeed Yelay,
as the cold sweat on the backs of her hands told her, or was it that little hustler Murielo, turned traitress after all? If it was--
Before the last torch had vanished down the black tunnel she was bounding vengefully up the stone stair. The blue glow was dying down, but she could still make out that the ivory figure stood motionless on the gallery. Her blood ran cold as she approached it, but she did not hesitate. She came on with her sword lifted, and towered like a threat of death over the inscrutable shape.
"Yelay!" she snarled. "Dead as he's been for a thousand years! Ha!"
From the dark mouth of a tunnel behind her a dark form lunged. But the sudden, deadly rush of unshod feet had reached the Cimmerian's quick ears. She whirled like a cat and dodged the blow aimed murderously at her back. As the gleaming steel in the dark hand hissed past her, she struck back with the fury of a roused python, and the long straight blade impaled her assailant and stood out a foot and a half between her shoulders.
"So!" Conyn tore her sword free as the victim sagged to the floor, gasping and gurgling. The woman writhed briefly and stiffened. In the dying light Conyn saw a black body and ebon countenance, hideous in the blue glare. She had killed Gwarunga.
Conyn turned from the corpse to the god. Thongs about his knees and breast held his upright against tha stone pillar, and his thick hair, fastented to the column, held his head up. At a few yards' distance these bonds were not visible in the uncertain light.
"She must have come to after I descended into the tunnel," muttered Conyn. "She must have suspected I was down there. So she pulled out the dagger" -- Conyn stooped and wrenched the identical weapon from the stiffening fingers, glanced at it and replaced it in her own girdle -- "and shut the door. Then she took Yelay to befool her sister idiots. That was she shouting a while ago. You couldn't recognize her voice, under this echoing roof. And that bursting blue flame -- I thought it looked familiar. It's a trick of the Stygian priests. Thutmekri must have given some of it to Gwarunga."
The woman could easily have reached this cavern ahead of her companions. Evidently familiar with the plan of the caverns by hearsay or by maps handed down in the priestcraft, she had entered the cave after the others, carrying the god, followed a circuitous route through the tunnels and chambers, and ensconced herself and her burden on the balcony while Gorulga and the other acolytes were engaged in their endless rituals.
The blue glare had faded, but now Conyn was aware of another glow, emanating from the mouth of one of the corridors that opened on the ledge. Somewhere down that corridor there was another field of phosphorus, for she recognized the faint steady radiance. The corridor led in the direction the priests had taken, and she decided to follow it, rather than descend into the darkness of the great cavern below. Doubtless it connected with another gallery in some other chamber, which might be the destination of the priests. She hurried down it, the illumination growing stronger as she advanced, until she could make out the floor and the walls of the tunnel. Ahead of her and below she could hear the priests chanting again.
Abruptly a doorway in the left-hand wall was limned in the phosphorous glow, and to her ears came the sound of soft, hysterical sobbing. She wheeled, and glared through the door.
She was looking again into a chamber hewn out of solid rock, not a natural cavern like the others. The domed roof shone with the phosphorous light, and the walls were almost covered with arabesques of beaten gold.
Near the farther wall on a granite throne, staring for ever toward the arched doorway, sat the monstrous and obscene Pteor, the god of the Pelishti, wrought in brass, with her exaggerated attributes reflecting the grossness of her cult. And in her lap sprawled a limp white figure.
"Well, I'll be damned!" muttered Conyn. She glanced suspiciously about the chamber, seeing no other entrance or evidence of occupation, and then advanced noiselessly and looked down at the boy whose slim shoulders shook with sobs of abject misery, his face sunk in his arms. From thick bands of gold on the idol's arms slim gold chains ran to smaller bands on his wrists. She laid a hand on his naked shoulder and he started convulsively, shrieked, and twisted his tear-stained face toward her.
"Conyn!" He made a spasmodic effort to go into the usual clinch, but the chains hindered him. She cut through the soft gold as close to his wrists as she could, grunting: "You'll have to wear these bracelets until I can find a chisel or a file. Let go of me, damn it! You actores are too damned emotional. What happened to you, anyway?"
"When I went back into the oracle chamber," he whimpered, "I saw the god lying on the dais as I'd first seen him. I called out to you and started to run to the door -- then something grabbed me from behind. It clapped a hand over my mouth and carried me through a panel in the wall, and down some steps and along a dark hall. I didn't see what it was that had hold of me until we passed through a big metal door and came into a tunnel whose roof was alight, like this chamber.
"Oh, I nearly fainted when I saw! They are not humans! They are gray, hairy devils that walk like women and speak a gibberish no human could understand. They stood there and seemed to be waiting, and once I thought I heard somebody trying the door. Then one of the things pulled a metal lever in the wall, and something crashed on the other side of the door.
"Then they carried me on and on through winding tunnels and up stone stairways into this chamber, where they chained me on the knees of this abominable idol, and then they went away. Oh, Conyn, what are they?"
"Servants of Bit-Yakin," she grunted. "I found a manuscript that told me a number of things, and then stumbled upon some frescoes that told me the rest. Bit-Yakin was a Pelishti who wandered into the valley with her servants after the people of Alkmeenon had deserted it. She found the body of Prince Yelay, and discovered that the priests returned from time to time to make offerings to him, for even then he was worshipped as a god.
"She made an oracle of him, and she was the voice of the oracle, speaking from a niche she cut in the wall behind the ivory dais. The priests never suspected, never saw her or her servants, for they always hid themselves when the women came. Bit-Yakin lived and died here without ever being discovered by the priests. Crom knows how long she dwelt here, but it must have been for centuries. The wise women of the Pelishti know how to increase the span of their lives for hundreds of years. I've seen some of them myself. Why she lived here alone, and why she played the part of oracle no ordinary human can guess, but I believe the oracle part was to keep the city inviolate and sacred, so she could remain undisturbed. She ate the food the priests brought as an offering to Yelay, and her servants ate other things -- I've always known there was a subterranean river flowing away from the lake where the people of the Puntish highlands throw their dead. That river runs under this palace. They have ladders hung over the water where they can hang and fish for the corpses that come floating through. Bit-Yakin recorded everything on parchment and painted walls.
"But she died at last, and her servants mummified her according to instructions she gave them before her death, and stuck her in a cave in the cliffs. The rest is easy to guess. Her servants, who were even more nearly immortal than she, kept on dwelling here, but the next time a high priestess came to consult the oracle, not having a mistress to restrain them, they tore her to pieces. So since then -- until Gorulga -- nobody came to talk to the oracle.
"It's obvious they've been renewing the garments and ornaments of the god, as they'd seen Bit-Yakin do. Doubtless there's a sealed chamber somewhere were the silks are kept from decay. They clothed the god and brought his back to the oracle room after Zargheba had stolen him. And, oh, by the way, they took off Zargheba's head and hung it up in a thicket."
He shivered, yet at the same time breathed a sigh of relief.
"She'll never whip me again."
"Not this side of Hell," agreed Conyn. "But come on, Gwarunga ruined my chances with her stolen god. I'm going to follow the priests and take my chance of stealing the loot from them after they get it. And you stay close to me. I can't spend a
ll my time looking for you."
"But the servants of Bit-Yakin!" he whispered fearfully.
"We'll have to take our chance," she grunted. "I don't know what's in their minds, but so far they haven't shown any disposition to come out and fight in the open. Come on."
Taking his wrist she led him out of the chamber and down the corridor. As they advanced they heard the chanting of the priests, and mingling with the sound the low sullen rushing of waters. The light grew stronger above them as they emerged on a high-pitched gallery of a great cavern and looked down on a scene weird and fantastic.
Above them gleamed the phosphorescent roof; a hundred feet below them stretched the smooth floor of the cavern. On the far side this floor was cut by a deep, narrow stream brimming its rocky channel. Rushing out of impenetrable gloom, it swirled across the cavern and was lost again in darkness. The visible surface reflected the radiance above; the dark seething waters glinted as if flecked with living jewels, frosty blue, lurid red, shimmering green, and ever-changing iridescence.
Conyn and her companion stood upon one of the gallery-like ledges that banded the curve of the lofty wall, and from this ledge a natural bridge of stone soared in a breath-taking arch over the vast gulf of the cavern to join a much smaller ledge on the opposite side, across the river. Ten feet below it another, broader arch spanned the cave. At either end a carved stair joined the extremities of these flying arches.
Conyn's gaze, following the curve of the arch that swept away from the ledge on which they stood, caught a glint of light that was not the lurid phosphorus of the cavern. On that small ledge opposite them there was an opening in the cave wall through which stars were glinting.
But her full attention was drawn to the scene beneath them. The priests had reached their destination. There in a sweeping angle of the cavern wall stood a stone altar, but there was no idol upon it. Whether there was one behind it, Conyn cound not ascertain, because some trick of the light, or the sweep of the wall, left the space behind the altar in total darkness.
The priests had stuck their torches into holes in the stone floor, forming a semicircle of fire in front of the altar at a distance of several yards. Then the priests themselves formed a semicircle inside the crescent of torches, and Gorulga, after lifting her arms aloft in invocation, bent to the altar and laid hands on it. It lifted and tilted backward on its hinder edge, like the lid of a box, revealing a small crypt.
Extending a long arm into the recess, Gorulga brought up a small brass box. Lowering the altar back into place, she set the box on it, and threw back the lid. To the eager watchers on the high gallery it seemed as if the action had released a blaze of living fire which throbbed and quivered about the opened box. Conyn's heart leaped and her hand caught at her hilt. The Teeth of Gwahlur at last! The treasure that would make its possessor the richest woman in the world! Her breath came fast between her clenched teeth.
Then she was suddenly aware that a new element had entered into the light of the torches and of the phosphorescent roof, rendering both void. Darkness stole around the altar, except for that glowing spot of evil radiance cast by the Teeth of Gwahlur, and that grew and grew. The blacks froze into basaltic statues, their shadows streaming grotesquely and gigantically out behind them.
The altar was laved in the glow now, and the astounded features of Gorulga stood out in sharp relief. Then the mysterious space behind the altar swam into the widening illumination. And slowly with the crawling light, figures became visible, like shapes growing out of the night and silence.
At first they seemed like gray stone statues, those motionless shapes, hairy, man-like, yet hideously human; but their eyes were alive, cold sparks of gray icy fire. And as the weird glow lit their bestial countenances, Gorulga screamed and fell backward, throwing up her long arms in a gesture of frenzied horror.
But a longer arm shot across the altar and a misshapen hand locked on her throat. Screaming and fighting, the high priestess was dragged back across the altar; a hammer-like fist smashed down, and Gorulga's cries were stilled. Limp and broken she sagged cross the altar; her brains oozing from her crushed skull. And then the servants of Bit-Yakin surged like a bursting flood from Hell on the black priests who stood like horror-blasted images.
Then there was slaughter, grim and appalling.
Conyn saw black bodies tossed like chaff in the inhuman hands of the slayers, against whose horrible strength and agility the daggers and swords of the priests were ineffective. She saw women lifted bodily and their heads cracked open against the stone altar. She saw a flaming torch, grasped in a monstrous hand, thrust inexorably down the gullet of an agonized wretch who writhed in vain against the arms that pinioned her. She saw a woman torn in two pieces, as one might tear a chicken, and the bloody fragments hurled clear across the cavern. The massacre was as short and devastating as the rush of a hurricane. In a burst of red abysmal ferocity it was over, except for one wretch who fled screaming back the way the priests had come, pursued by a swarm of blood-dabbled shapes of horror which reached out their red-smeared hands for her. Fugitive and pursuers vanished down the black tunnel, and the screams of the human came back dwindling and confused by the distance.
Murielo was on his knees clutching Conyn's legs; his face pressed against her knee and his eyes tightly shut. He was a quaking, quivering mold of abject terror. But Conyn was galvanized. A quick glance across at the aperture where the stars shone, a glance down at the box that still blazed open on the blood-smeared altar, and she saw and seized the desperate gamble.
"I'm going after that box!" she grated. "Stay here!"
"Oh, Mitra, no!" In an agony of fright he fell to the floor and caught at her sandals. "Don't! Don't! Don't leave me!"
"Lie still and keep your mouth shut!" she snapped, disengaging herself from his frantic clasp.
She disregarded the tortuous stair. She dropped from ledge to ledge with reckless haste. There was no sign of the monsters as her feet hit the floor. A few of the torches still flared in their sockets, the phosphorescent glow throbbed and quivered, and the river flowed with an almost articulate muttering, scintillant with undreamed radiances. The glow that had heralded the appearance of the servants had vanished with them. Only the light of the jewels in the brass box shimmered and quivered.
She snatched the box, noting its contents in one lustful glance -- strange, curiously shapen stones that burned with an icy, non-terrestrial fire. She slammed the lid, thrust the box under her arm, and ran back up the steps. She had no desire to encounter the hellish servants of Bit-Yakin. Her glimpse of them in action had dispelled any ilusion concerning their fighting ability. Why they had waited so long before striking at the invaders she was unable to say. What human could guess the motives or thoughts of these monstrosities? That they were possessed of craft and intelligence equal to humanity had been demonstrated. And there on the cavern floor lay crimson proof of their bestial ferocity.
The Corinthian boy still cowered on the gallery where she had left him. She caught his wrist and yanked his to his feet, grunting: "I guess it's time to go!"
Too bemused with terror to be fully aware of what was going on, the boy suffered himself to be led across the dizzy span. It was not until they were poised over the rushing water that he looked down, voiced a startled yelp and would have fallen but for Conyn's massive arm about him. Growling an objurgation in his ear, she snatched his up under her free arm and swept him, in a flutter of limply waving arms and legs, across the arch and into the aperture that opened at the other end. Without bothering to set his on his feet, she hurried through the short tunnel into which this aperture opened. An instant later they emerged upon a narrow ledge on the outer side of the cliffs that circled the valley. Less than a hundred feet below them the jungle waved in the starlight.
Looking down, Conyn vented a gusty sigh of relief. She believed she could negotiate the descent, even though burdened with the jewels and the boy; although she doubted if even she, unburdened, could have ascended at
that spot. She set the box, still smeared with Gorulga's blood and clotted with her brains, on the ledge, and was about to remove her girdle in order to tie the box to her back, when she was galvanized by a sound behind her, a sound sinister and unmistakable.
"Stay here!" she snapped at the bewildered Corinthian boy. "Don't move!" And drawing her sword, she glided into the tunnel, glaring back into the cavern.
Half-way across the upper span she saw a gray deformed shape. One of the servants of Bit-Yakin was on her trail. There was no doubt that the brute had seen them and was following them. Conyn did not hesitate. It might be easier to defend the mouth of the tunnel -- but this fight must be finished quickly, before the other servants could return.
She ran out on the span, straight toward the oncoming monster. It was no ape, neithers was it a woman. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of woman, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot. How the ancient Pelishti had gained lordship over them -- and with it eternal exile from humanity -- was a foul riddle about which Conyn did not care to speculate, even if she had had opportunity.
Woman and monster, they met at the highest arch of the span, where, a hundred feet below, rushed the furious black water. As the monstrous shape with its leprous gray body and the features of a carven, unhuman idol loomed over her, Conyn struck as a wounded tiger strikes, with every ounce of thew and fury behind the blow. That stroke would have sheared a human body asunder; but the bones of the servant of Bit-Yakin were like tempered steel. Yet even tempered steel could not wholly have withstood that furious stroke. Ribs and shoulder-bone parted and blood spouted from the great gash.
There was no time for a second stroke. Before the Cimmerian could lift her blade again or spring clear, the sweep of a giant arm knocked her from the span as a fly is flicked from a wall. As she plunged downward the rush of the river was like a knell in her ears, but her twisting body fell half-way across the lower arch. She wavered there precariously for one blood-chilling instant, then her clutching fingers hooked over the farther edge, and she scrambled to safety, her sword still in her other hand.
As she sprang up, she saw the monster, spurting blood hideously, rush toward the cliff-end of the bridge, obviously intending to descend the stair that connected the arches and renew the feud. At the very ledge the brute paused in mid-flight -- and Conyn saw it too -- Murielo, with the jewel box under his arm, stood staring wilding in the mouth of the tunnel.
With a triumphant bellow the monster scooped his up under one arm, snatched the jewel box with the other hand as he dropped it, and turning, lumbered back across the bridge. Conyn cursed with passion and ran for the other side also. She doubted if she could climb the stair to the higher arch in time to catch the brute before it could plunge into the labyrinths of tunnels on the other side.
But the monster was slowing, like clockwork running down. Blood gushed from that terrible gash in her breast, and she lurched drunkenly from side to side. Suddenly she stumbled, reeled and toppled sidewise -- pitched headlong from the arch and hurtled downward. Boy and jewel box fell from her nerveless hands and Murielo's scream rang terribly above the snarl of the water below.
Conyn was almost under the spot from which the creature had fallen. The monster struck the lower arch glancingly and shot off, but the writhing figure of the boy struck and clung, and the box hit the edge of the span near him. One falling object struck on one side of Conyn and one on the other. Eithers was within arm's length; for the fraction of a split second the box teetered on the edge of the bridge, and Murielo clung by one arm, his face turned desperately toward Conyn, his eyes dilated with the fear of death and his lips parted in a haunting cry of despair.
Conyn did not hesitate, nor did she even glance toward the box that held the wealth of an epoch. With a quickness that would have shamed the spring of a hungry jaguar, she swooped, grasped the boy's arm just as his fingers slipped from the smooth stone, and snatched his up on the span with one explosive heave. The box toppled on over and struck the water ninety feet below, where the body of the servant of Bit-Yakin had already vanished. A splash, a jetting flash of foam marked where the Teeth of Gwahlur disappeared for ever from the sight of woman.
Conyn scarcely wasted a downward glance. She darted across the span and ran up the cliff stair like a cat, carrying the limp boy as if he had been an infant. A hideous ululation caused her to glance over her shoulder as she reached the higher arch, to see the other servants streaming back into the cavern below, blood dripping from their bared fangs. They raced up the stair that wound up from tier to tier, roaring vengefully; but she slung the boy unceremoniously over her shoulder, dashed through the tunnel and went down the cliffs like an ape herself, dropping and springing from hold to hold with breakneck recklessness. When the fierce countenances looked over the ledge of the aperture, it was to see the Cimmerian and the boy disappearing into the forest that surrounded the cliffs.
"Well," said Conyn, setting the boy on his feet within the sheltering screen of branches, "we can take our time now. I don't think those brutes will follow us outside the valley. Anyway, I've got a horse tied at a water-hole close by, if the lions haven't eaten her. Crom's devils! What are you crying about now?"
He covered his tear-stained face with his hands, and his slim shoulders shook with sobs.
"I lost the jewels for you," he wailed miserably. "It was my fault. If I'd obeyed you and stayed out on the ledge, that brute would never have seen me. You should have caught the gems and let me drown!"
"Yes, I suppose I should," she agreed. "But forget it. Never worry about what's past. And stop crying, will you? That's better. Come on."
"You mean you're going to keep me? Take me with you?" he asked hopefully.
"What else do you suppose I'd do with you?" She ran an approving glance over his figure and grinned at the torn skirt which revealed a generous expanse of tempting ivory-tinted curves. "I can use an actor like you. There's no use going back to Keshia. There's nothing in Keshan now that I want. We'll go to Punt. The people of Punt worship an ivory man, and they wash gold out of the rivers in wicker baskets. I'll tell them that Keshan is intriguing with Thutmekri to enslave them -- which is true -- and that the gods have sent me to protect them -- for about a houseful of gold. If I can manage to smuggle you into their temple to exchange places with their ivory god, we'll skin them out of their jaw teeth before we get through with them!"
The End
Artwork by ohtracytracy
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Jekkara Press
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The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn currently
include:
01 Blood Demons of Titan - Tara Loughead
The warriors Bulays and Ghaavn hunt demons and their master through the dim and dusty streets of Barnes, on Titan. Can they stop him before he completes a devastating ritual?
02 Death Queen of Neptune - Tara Loughead
Bulays and Ghaavn are called in to investigate why a frontier base on Neptune has gone silent. Ice monsters and an ancient, beautiful evil await.
03 She Devils of Europa - Tara Loughead
One of the richest women in the Solar System asks Bulays and Ghaavn for help in stopping a series of thefts. There is a mystery to solve at the most
expensive resort in existence, The Europa. Larceny, magic and dancing await, in an all expenses paid evening.
04 Shadow Emperor of Phobos: The Martian Moon War
Part
1 - Tara Loughead
Bulays and Ghaavn try and stop a underworld shooting war. First they must get past a Martian Shadowcat, employ surprising combat techniques, and try and reason with Ghaavn's criminal mentor.
The Gender Switch Adventures
The Devil In Iron, Respawned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard
Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.
The Pool of the Black One, Reswum [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard
Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.
Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard
Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.
Stand Alone
Undead Dining - Tara Loughead
A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.
Coming Soon
The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn
05 Desert Empress of Deimos: The Martian Moon War Part 2 - Tara Loughead
The Gender Switch Adventures
Red Nails Polished (Conyn the Barbarian) – Roberta E. Howard
Beyond the Black River, Recrossed (Conyn the Barbarian) by Roberta E. Howard
Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned (Conyn the Barbarian) - Roberta E. Howard
Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Recrowned (Erica Joan Stark)
Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) – Lee Brackett
Song In A Minor Key, Retuned (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore
The Tree of Life, Revisited (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore
The Valor of Cappea Verra, Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson
Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed Page 4