Though the priest’s words were lurid with religious fervour, his speech was relentlessly cold and even. He was an expert at lashing the crowd... as evidenced by the palpable waves of hatred that beat down into the arena like sun into an upturned mirror.
Then the heretics were driven forth from the Convicts’ Gate—common-looking Stygians, a shade darker perhaps from desert sun, dressed in ragged, shapeless clothes that made them look laughable. There were women and men, young and old alike, half a hundred of them at least—no young children, as far as Conan could see over the fringes of shimmering flame and the tongues of smoke that rose from the arena pits.
“The terms of the ordeal are this: The heretics will be armed with wooden clubs, as will the gladiators, who are our temple’s guards and protectors. Any heretics who make it past the flame-pits and the club-wielders will be allowed to exit by the Gate of Heroes. All who repent will be spared.”
While Nekrodias grated on, Memtep came down the line of gladiators dragging a sack of round wooden staves and handing them out. As he gave one to Conan he repeated what he had told the others. “No steel. If they fall on their knees and make the sign of the serpent, spare them.”
Signalled by a blast from the trumpets, the gladiators moved forward. Conan, seeing that the flames and screening smoke hovered thickest at the centre of the arena, headed there. He had no great enthusiasm for this task, but a plan was taking shape in his mind.
Ahead were the so-called devil-worshippers, driven away from the gate by city guards armed with spears. There was no telling what the real beliefs of these unfortunates might be—only that they had somehow offended the High Temple and its political allies. Some of the younger heretics ran forward swinging their clubs, ready to fight for their faith, while most of the women and elders dropped their weapons or let them trail loosely behind in the sand.
The gladiators rushed forward, always eager to finish the fight and make a good impression; this once Conan lagged behind the others, angling his steps toward the area least visible to the raving spectators, where smoke befouled the air and puddled overhead in an obscuring screen.
All around him the battle was joined. Conan heard desperate shouts, the thwack of cudgels and the occasional softer thud of wood smiting flesh and bone. To his left and right, he saw heretics batted or kicked into the searing fire-pits—never the gladiators, even though they were outnumbered. Some of the more combative devil-worshippers were beaten down to their hands and knees, then dragged or flung into the pits by vengeful adversaries who then had to shrink back from the heat and flame that belched forth.
Ahead, in the smoke, Conan saw a man approaching—a white-bearded elder in a tattered robe, his cudgel cradled loose in his folded arms. At the sight of the gladiator before him, the man strode determinedly onward. He never looked back at the plight of his companions, apparently oblivious to the screams and furious shouts that rang out all around.
In the heat-shimmer and yellow smoke-shadow, his gaze met Conan’s.
“Strike me a blow, grandfather,” Conan called out to him in low Stygian dialect. “Go ahead, knock me in the skull! I will fall down, and you can walk on past to safety.”
The man, if he heard him, remained expressionless as he continued forward. He did not take his cudgel firmly in hand or raise it to strike; instead he came on as if to brush negligently past the Cimmerian.
Conan, unsure whether the foreigner could understand him, switched to the near-universal trade jargon of the southern deserts. “Go on,” he challenged, “hit me as hard as you like! I’ll stay down, I promise, and you can lead your people out of here.” He moved over slightly to block the man’s path, hefting his cudgel. “I’ll pretend to put up a fight—no one will ever know the difference.” Coming up directly opposite Conan, the man stopped. His eyes, set in a weather-beaten olive face, fixed for a moment upon the Cimmerian’s. He may even have smiled in the depths of his straggling beard. Then abruptly he turned away to one side. Conan said nothing.
More resolute than ever, the patriarch tossed aside his club. Before Conan could gather his wits and move to stop him, he strode straight to the edge of the nearest fire-pit and, with a deft half-step, jumped in.
Conan stood watching, astonished. Around him the so-called battle was already ending. No captives had made it as far as the Gate of Heroes, and no more heretics wielded clubs. The remainder of them had fallen to their knees in forced repentance.
Some, presumably, still hoped to be reunited with their absent children.
Feeling dazed, Conan wandered in a broad circle through the sand. The heat was intense, the air thick with the stench of tar-oil and smouldering flesh. Slaves were already hurrying to extinguish the fires, by shovelling sand into the pits. Meanwhile, the newly redeemed converts were being herded out through the Beast Gate.
“That was no pretty business,” Muduzaya remarked as they trudged back toward the resting-stools. “I did not slay any of the poor devils myself,” he added lightly, flinging his cudgel down on a pile near the arena wall. “I clubbed one over the ear and knocked him to his knees, but he passed as a convert. He started up a fashion among the others.”
“Where do they come from?” Conan dully asked. “Did they even know what was happening to them?”
Muduzaya shrugged. “They were Altaquans, I think, from the south-eastern part of the empire. Such heathen tribes have been butchered here often enough before.”
Conan grunted, preoccupied. If the greybeard was from Altaqua in the near desert, he should have understood the speech Conan had used. Unless he was stone-deaf... why else would he have turned thus from Conan and thrown away his life?
Brooding, the Cimmerian settled onto his stool, scarcely noticing as the attendants sluiced away the soot and sand with pitchers of scented water. He sat pensive, all but blind to the subsequent events on the day’s program. There were chariots, perhaps... costumed performers, and the sportive slaughter of some large animal. He lost himself in thought... recalling the brief fight, the look on the old man’s face, his leap into the flames. All of it baffled him more than if he himself had been struck on the head with the patriarch’s wooden club.
The code he had learned in his years and travels was one that clung fiercely to life. While a man had a hilt in his hand, so Conan believed, and a clear view to his enemies, there was always hope. Why would a brave man, to all appearances a vigorous clan-leader, resolutely turn his back on life? Conan had offered him a path to freedom, and beyond doubt he had seen it. Did his death, then, amount to bravery or cowardice?... a supreme act of faith or a surrender to hollow despair? Was his deed an expression of profound altruism—to stand up for his beliefs and mayhap cut short the slaughter of his kinsfolk? Or was it blind self-seeking, because he believed his gods would reward him richly in the realms after death?
Conan’s sullen abstraction lasted long, well into the afternoon’s single combats. Saul Stronghand’s name was bandied through the arena and screamed out by the crowd. He fought someone—Sistus, perhaps—and slew him.
Then, of a sudden, Roganthus was striding down the row of fighters with a fixed smile, clapping the Cimmerian firmly on the shoulder as he went. Conan heard Muduzaya shout last-minute instructions after him: “Use your weapon, Roganthus! Do not let him catch you in a grapple.”
Flexing his arms jauntily overhead before the crowd’s cheers, the strongman strode out into the sand... to face Xothar, the Constrictor.
As Roganthus reached the centre of the arena and squared off against his opponent, the circus champion looked supremely confident. He waved his sword high with a boisterous flourish, then cast it away into the sand.
The two wrestlers stooped forward, stalking one another. Roganthus feinted, trying to clap on a neck-hold, and was immediately caught by a powerful grip across his chest. Brutally he was forced down to his knees; then he sank to his haunches.
And never rose again.
The crowd’s frenzy dinned remotely on Conan’s numb e
ars. He felt light-headed—tremorous, as if the sandy expanse before him were a taut drumhead that quivered up and down under relentless strokes.
To mad cheering, Xothar departed the arena. Conan sat nerveless. Then he saw something that made him spring upright, clutching his sword.
The Red Priests were dragging Roganthus’s body off toward the Gate of the Dead.
Conan darted across the sand with sword raised. He heard Muduzaya and the others call his name, but their cries rapidly fell behind. He bolted straight after the mummy-makers, leaping across the comer of one still-warm fire-pit, then another. The stadium crowd took notice, and shouts arose.
Ahead of him, the priests dragged their slack burden through the low-arched doorway, vanishing into interior darkness. Conan ran close on their heels, coming up against the wooden door just as it closed in his face. Heaving mightily, he shoved his way through.
The door banged shut behind him, and he was instantly blind. After the intense glare of the arena, whatever light there was within the tomblike chamber was as nothing to his watering eyes. He heard shouts and the scuffing of feet nearby and felt the impact of robed bodies. He raised his sword and, even as his blade and knuckles slammed into the low ceiling, felt the hilt wrested out of his grip. He laid hold of a scrawny assailant, lifted him off the floor—and felt an urn break over his skull, flooding his face with tepid water or, possibly, blood.
“Hold him! Pull him down! Hit him again!” The frightened cries echoed wildly around him. “He is crazed with slaughter from the arena!”
“Devils, damn mummy-stuffers!” Conan roared into blind, struggling darkness. “Give me back Roganthus! He is a proud Bossonian! They like to be buried in open fields, with flowers and grass— not gutted and wrapped and plastered up in a wall!”
In a spasm of rage, Conan threw off several of his attackers. He lunged forward—only to ram his head into an unseen pillar. The blow filled his eyes at last with light: bright pinpricks, swirling and many-coloured.
“Enough now! Hold him, but let him lie down flat.” Amid the flaring pinwheels, Conan saw a true flame moving near his face and felt hard fingers probe his throbbing skull. “He is unharmed and still conscious... remarkable. You there, tell me, what is your name?”
By a dizzying effort, Conan managed to recall it and give form to the syllables.
“Good, now lie still. I am Manethos, Chief Priest here in the Circus mortuary. Calm yourself... we will not hurt your friend or do anything you do not wish us to.”
As the lights within his skull faded, Conan could discern ghostly outlines of things around him. The room was lit by tapers hung in wall brackets, spaced at frequent intervals. The hollow-eyed, short-bearded priest who knelt over him with the others also held a candlestick in one hand. In the dimness, the red of their cowled robes looked black as dried blood.
“You cannot hurt Roganthus, not any more,” Conan told Manethos. “But what about me? You have tried to drag me in here before, and I was a good deal farther from death then than I am now! Do you intend to gut and stuff me as well?” “Nonsense,” Manethos soothed him, “we would not kill you, nor harm you in any way. My acolytes and I have no charter to deal with the living... not at this stage of our inquiries, anyway.” There seemed to be a faint note of bitterness in his voice. “We serve only the dead.”
“Am I to be turned loose, then?” Conan asked gruffly. “For, ’tis said among the gladiators that none who passes through yonder gateway ever comes back, be he alive or dead.”
“That is utter nonsense,” Manethos brusquely assured him. “There is no band of ruffians more foolishly superstitious than your gladiators! Come, now, and see if you can stand yourself upright.”
With the help of his captors, Conan found his feet; almost immediately he reeled. As he pitched forward against Manethos, his eyes met with a horrific sight. There on a raised stone slab—supine, and laid open to the air with hooks, brass clamps, and wooden splints—was the slashed-open body of Sistus, the young gladiator lately of Dath’s company.
“Fiend! Vile necromancer!” Shoving Manethos away, Conan felt himself instantly gripped on all sides—which was fortunate, in that it kept him from toppling over. “What are you doing to that poor lad,” he croaked, “if not slicing and plucking him to pieces bit by bit!”
“The slicing was done by your associate, the one they call Stronghand, I would say,” Manethos replied. “Blunt-Sword would be a better name for him, judging by his handiwork. He is the one who killed this boy; we are only examining the wounds and drawing what conclusions we can about the body and its parts, the miracle of the gods that you and your ham-handed friends love to defile and destroy.”
“It is indecent, what you are doing here,” Conan indignantly countered. “A man’s innards are his own personal property. Peeking and probing at them like that violates his privacy.”
Manethos laughed. “Better that it be done by vultures, flies, and rodents, I suppose?”
“Yes, in the natural order of things,” Conan affirmed. “Any unseemly interest in the dead is foul and unwholesome, amounting to the crime of necromancy. The knowledge you obscenely quest after is beyond human ken, reserved for the gods.” “Nonsense,” Manethos said, “it is all very straightforward. Tell me, have you ever really looked at the bodies you cleave apart?”
Moving aside, the priest commended the flayed-open corpse to Conan’s view. “See here, this central spherule is the heart, which beats in your chest while you live. It works as a pump, just like the screw-pumps in the farm fields hereabouts, forcing blood humours to all parts of the body. And this bag here is the stomach, where food is burned up with acid to fuel the inner thermodynamic. It all works together, and every mortal is the same. Animals, too, are formed very similarly.”
“Oh, so?” Conan, observing that young Sistus’s body appeared to have been drained of blood— which had evidently been gathered in pitchers and basins near the foot of the slab—turned his face away in disgust. “What, then, is the end of all this hidden knowledge you lust after? Is it to command the dead, mayhap? Or gain fiendish power over the living, through some dark rite of your priesthood?” Manethos shrugged, glum-faced. “First, to bind and heal the wounds your kind take such delight in inflicting. Second, perhaps, to learn enough from this mortal clay to help treat other sorts of ills, the baneful humours and indispositions that have plagued humanity since ancient times.” He shook his cowled head. “Alas, our temple elders have enjoined us from applying these bold new arts, or otherwise experimenting with the cure and comfort of the living. For the time being, at least, our studies are confined to this dim workshop in the bowels of the arena. It is, fortunately, a perfect source of freshly hewn corpses—so long as we wrap them up neatly and consecrate them when we are finished. We are, as you say, mere mummy-makers.”
“To my mind it is all unsavoury and downright unhealthy,” Conan stubbornly maintained, meanwhile probing at the sore dome of his forehead. “If such infernal dabbling be not wizardry, I warn you that they border closely on it.”
“And then, of course,” Manethos resumed, “there is a third possible fruit of our researches— one that may interest you more.” He moved forward past Conan with his candlestick, letting the intruder and the encircling priests crowd after him. “It involves thinking up new and more effective ways of killing and injuring the human creature, using knowledge of the sort we have gleaned in our explorations.”
Conan moved after Manethos, interested. The Red Priest had gone to kneel beside the body of Roganthus, which was laid out prone on a straw mat along one of the crypt’s mortared stone walls. “This individual,” he said, “has just died a singularly painless death at the hands of one Xothar, the temple killer from our eastern domain. I have seen only one or two examples of his work before, and the pattern is unvarying. You will notice that there are no wounds, no bruises, no purpling of the lips, nor any swelling or protrusion of the tongue and eyeballs. It is utterly characteristic.”
&
nbsp; Conan peered down in the flickering light at his good friend Roganthus. Even in spite of the intact and peaceful appearance of the corpse, he could not repress a shudder. “How does he manage it?” he asked.
“Quite simply. He is not a throttler, but a stiller.” Manethos’s long finger hovered in the area of the dead man’s throat. “Through careful training, he does not wring the neck, crush the windpipe, and snap the throat-bone—nor even block off the mouth and nose openings, thereby trapping whatever air is left in the lungs. He takes his method from giant temple serpents, the pythons and boas.”
Gesturing expressively with his pale hands, Manethos moved down the body to the dead man’s chest. “By inhumanly concentrated strength, he expels the air from his victim’s lungs—perhaps with the help of a harmless tap to the belly-plexus, here.” With two fingers he prodded the dead man’s thick middle. “Then, by maintaining intense pressure, he simply keeps his prey from drawing breath. There is no fund of air to be used up, no leakage, no intense panic and struggle, as with a strangling. Life simply ceases—a consecrated and holy form of killing under temple law, acceptable as an honoured sacrifice to Almighty Set.” Manethos folded his hands neatly. “That particular special skill of his is why they call him the Constrictor.”
Conan shivered. “What you have described, Manethos, is just as evil and unsavoury as all your doings here. Death is far better the manly way, with old-fashioned blows and blood-letting.” He arose from his crouch beside Roganthus’s corpse. “Still, if you are going to honour his poor remains...”
The Red Priest arose with him. “I promise you, temple law forbids us to do anything but a simple mummy-wrap, with spices and scents—”
“As a prized morsel for All-Father Set.” Conan shrugged regretfully. “Very well. I do not think he would object, except to the manner and untimeliness of his death. As long as you swear to treat him decently...” He gazed around the room. “Now, you said I would be permitted to leave? I have had enough of these gloomy caverns—by Crom, what is that?”
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