Conan the Great

by Leonard Carpenter

  Even in the tepid water, he felt goose-prickles of dread at assaulting an enemy fort nearly naked. Yet his breech clout of thin, twisted silk would drain water swiftly and silently. So would his black mane, tied back as it was behind his ears. A sheathed dagger, looped to the thong at his waist, completed his attire. If he had need of clothing, such as a guard’s uniform, it could be obtained later inside the Tarnhold.

  The wound in his posterior was healed now and well nigh forgotten. His skin, he knew, was burned dark enough not to flash whitely in daylight; even so, he would have to swim deep beneath the surface for long intervals to avoid detection. Paddling smoothly, his feet brushing the rank, weedy slope of the tarn bottom, he rounded a stand of cattail reeds and confronted one massive side of the keep.

  It rose dark and sheer, a brisk swim away across open water. The less lofty curtain wall joined it at one corner. No guards were visible on the angle of the battlement overlooking the tarn, and so Conan dove deep and swam a few dozen strokes out into the open before surfacing to examine the looming pile again.

  The only windows on this side were small chinks high up in the grey-black face. The masonry looked old and creviced; even so, it would be a long, vulnerable climb up to the windows, or to the roof edge that beetled over them. Better to scale the wall alongside the keep, where the joints between ancient and merely antique stonework promised to provide more toeholds.

  But first, Conan decided to inspect the bases of the walls beneath the water; there might be gaps or outflows there that would provide a stealthier means of entry. Filling his lungs, he dove beneath the surface with his eyes skinned open.

  Below, in a gallery of sky-lit yellow-green, Conan marvelled at the sight that awaited him. The water level had indeed risen by two or three fathoms sometime in recent centuries—likely the result of a dam or avalanche downstream. Here on the tarn’s weedy floor lay the former dock and lakeside entry of the castle.

  A stone pier extended straight below him, half-buried now in silt and feathery moss; behind it was a broad terrace, half silted under and littered with sunken, waterlogged limbs and snags. At the back, centred in the shaggy green wall of the keep, yawned a high, rounded archway. It had given access to the lowest levels of the Tarnhold, which now presumably were flooded.

  Such a passage, if still open, was precisely what Conan sought. Lungs straining, he angled his course upward and returned to the lake surface close beside the sheltering wall of the keep. There, judging himself unlikely to be seen, he took an extended rest. Breathing deeply, he filled himself with air in the manner of Vilayet pearl-divers; meanwhile he clung to the wall with one hand and one foot. The weathered stonework was green-slimed beneath the water, dry and crusted above. Small seasonal variations in the tarn’s level were recorded on its surface in horizontal lines of chalky white. The stone crevices at the waterline were filled with dry, papery skins of spiderlike water creatures, abandoned husks which crumbled away at Conan’s touch.

  He took his time, resting well for the dive he intended. There was still no sound or motion from the windows high above, and the curtain wall was invisible from here. No boats or other habitations were in evidence around the tarn, which stretched away darkly to brushy shores fanged by rocks and the bleached spikes of dead trees. Conan thought of tender Yasmela subjected daily to this desolate prospect—if indeed she lived and had sight. Then he drew a last breath and vanished beneath the surface.

  The submerged archway was dark and menacing, with weeds trailing across its cavern-maw, yet Conan could waste no time cutting them away. Feeling the weight of water crinkling at the back of his jaw, he propelled himself downward and inward beneath the keystone of the arch, groping through slimy, ticklish streamers.

  The corridor was deep, and his eyes had little time to adjust to the gloom, but he saw something ahead. Not a door, as he had feared, but a grill work of vertical bars radiating down from the ceiling. The metal rods looked swollen and deformed with rust, and the grill’s pattern was already bent and uneven, so there seemed an excellent chance of slipping past it. With only eight or so of the vertical bars screening a passage as wide as the height of a man, there was almost room to squirm ' through already.

  Swimming up to the grill, he braced a shoulder against one of the bars, clamped a second one with fist and levered forearm, and set his feet against a third. Then he thrust, using all the strength of his shoulders, back, and legs. He felt the metal of the nether bar give way perceptibly. He was just about to renew his effort when a sudden, giddy awareness transformed his underwater world.

  He felt the rods moving in his clutch, shifting forcibly of their own accord; he saw them flex, too, loosely jointed at the swellings he had thought mere ulcerations of rust. He imagined at first that the grill was collapsing, crushed down, perhaps, by a dead-fall of masonry in the tunnel.

  Then, peering upward into the murky gloom, he grasped a truth that nearly made him spew out all the breath from his lungs and forfeit life at once: the bars he clutched were not metal rods, but living limbs, the armoured legs of a huge underwater spider that had been nesting in the archway. If once asleep, it was now awake; he could see two huge eyes, greenly luminous, glaring down at him from the rim of a blunt, spiderlike body. He could make out mandibles, too—a pale nest of them in the creature’s underside, stirring and writhing in what looked like newly roused hunger. As he watched, two jointed, medium-sized appendages extended downward. Their pointed tips flexed into hooks, making ready to rake him up toward the creature’s eager mouth-parts.

  Convulsively he kicked free, clawing at water to propel himself away toward the archway. But his path was blocked by more of the creature’s legs, which had shifted silently around him, penning him in like the bars of a tall, narrow cage. He twisted in the water and thrust his body halfway out between two of the prisoning legs; simultaneously, nimbly, the limbs moved together to scissor his waist in a tight, jagged embrace.

  Squirming helplessly, Conan fumbled for his hip-thong and wrenched free his dagger. He used the short blade to fence futilely with the hooked talons that poked and probed at his nether limbs, then to hack and stab at one of the jointed legs that held him prisoned. But the armour was hopelessly thick and tough, the joints as tightly sealed and leathery as those of a lobster or crayfish.

  The truth, he knew in his anguished soul, was that the monster had no real need to eat him alive, nor even crush him. All it had to do was detain him there another dozen heartbeats, until his tortured lungs burst and life fled from him in a silvery gush of upward-racing bubbles. His strength was waning fast; he felt himself growing dizzy and weak as he struggled. Defying certain fate, he thrashed ever more desperately, kicking at the legs and feelers, clawing at streamers of weed that softly caressed him and twined in his long, swirling hair.

  Yet his struggles had some effect on the water dweller: still hovering in the middle of the tunnel, the thing was buoyed slowly upward and outward toward the archway—whether by its victim’s frantic strivings, or by the elemental yearning of the air hoarded in the captive’s lungs to fly back to the surface. Conan, nearly blind with asphyxiation, felt himself drifting upward, and felt his head bump the vaulting of the tunnel’s ceiling. With a convulsive effort he stabbed and clawed at the weedy stones overhead, dragging the water spider another few hand’s-breadths after him.

  That brought him to the rim of the entryway, the outermost arch. Hauling himself abreast of it by main force, he reached around the comer and wedged the blade of his dagger in a slimy crevice of stone. Planting both his hands on the hilt, he pulled against the spider-thing’s grip with all his might.

  Conan’s effort did not break the spider’s clutch around his waist. Nor was the creature drawn out of its rocky lair, where it must have seized a firm claw-hold with some of its remaining legs. Instead, the keystone of the arch was tom free. It plummeted down past Conan onto the monster, dragging them both toward the bottom. After it, with a slow, deliberate rumble, came a further aval
anche of loosened stones. Conan felt himself caught up in a mighty surge of water and billowing debris. It smote him; it drove the air out of him, and with it, his life.

  IX

  The Realm of Illusion

  Hell was a dark, cold place.

  Often Conan had wondered what it would be like. He had heard Barachan pirates warn of a watery after-world, and dying Shemites bemoan lakes of unquenchable fire. Æsir ballads, on the other hand, told of a dismal, icy waste curiously like the singers’ northern home. But this particular hell—his own private one, perhaps, or mighty Crom’s repository of spent souls— was a cold, sightless vacancy of hard-edged stone and dripping water. It stank of damp, musty decay.

  He lay on a harsh angular surface—a stone stairway, it seemed to be. The lower half of his body trailed in water and was numbed by its chill. He stirred weakly, his limbs feeling—where they had sensation—sore and bruised, as if a dozen demons had thrashed and pummelled him already for his misdeeds. Nevertheless, he was able to drag himself forward to the first dry step and sit upright on it. A short while later, after his numb dizziness diminished, he climbed shakily to his feet and braced himself against a stone wall rising vertical beside him. It felt vertical, at least—but who could say for certain in this sightless, directionless nether realm?

  There seemed, in any event, to be a direction the gods wanted him to go, and he followed it: up the stairs, groping his way step by step. The stairway ended on a level pavement, bounded by another stone wall opposite the first, parallel and just beyond continuous reach of it. It was only a corridor, logic told him, trying rationally to fill in the invisible boundaries. Nevertheless, when passing between the two walls—in the giddy moment after his reluctant hand abandoned one damp, rough surface, and before his other questing hand encountered the second—he felt tempted to fall prone and clutch the stone floor, lest he be hurled blindly off into black, limitless space.

  And yet he persevered. The corridor had turnings, he soon learned. It also had doors, iron-plated, scaled with rust, and fastened or corroded firmly shut. The odour wafting through the doors’ barred grills, in any event, was too sour and too anciently dead to make him want to pass within. Would he, he wondered, eventually find one door unlatched and open, yawning to receive him?

  At a branching of the corridor, he found a treasure. It hung in the air high out of reach, shining and scintillating like the rarest, brightest of gems: a sloping bar of light, firm and steady, illuminating a few scattered dust-motes that drifted overhead.

  The ray did not cast any light on him nor on his surroundings; so far out of reach was it, he could not even find its source and terminus. They were concealed, most likely, by the shelves or buttresses of the vault’s construction. The walls were too wide apart for any mortal to span, and too smooth for even a hillman to climb, so he had to content himself with craning his stiff, sore neck and watching the sliver of light play on wandering motes.

  He found that by jumping high and swiping at air, he could make dust swirl across the beam in shifting patterns. This he did repeatedly; though it was idiot’s play, it reassured him of his own reality. Holding one hand high against the faint scintillation, he saw that he could almost trace its familiar shape: four thick fingers and a callused thumb. He still had shape, that meant—and the sun still shone. Somewhere beyond this inky void the heavens still turned; just possibly, there was a way for him to regain them.

  The discovery caused stirrings deep in his battered awareness. He recalled a long journeying, a swim, a struggle, a clutching menace... perhaps he was not in hell yet, after all. With new resolve he groped onward along a branching wall of the corridor, seeking escape.

  The doorway he next found had no door in its arch. Peering into vacant blackness in search of new light traces, he edged forward—and felt the stones beneath him buckle and slip away into a void. He fell back against the column of the doorway, grasping it and hauling himself up from the devouring abyss. The stones that had collapsed, meanwhile, splashed thunderously into a well that lay unseen beneath.

  Panting in relief, Conan regained his feet in the archway and listened to the lapping of wavelets raised by the fall. There was something strange about the sound, something oddly heavy and viscous. The deep, plopping echoes suggested that the room was floorless and vaulted, a collapsed gallery. Yet the picture his mind formed was different somehow—the image of a pond or fountain, broad and circular, fringed by ruins silhouetted under skies of mottled black. The fluid lapping and tossing in the pool, his inner vision told him, was not water; it was thicker, inky black and oily, and it rippled not with wind but with some mysterious inner force. As he stood listening, the splashing deepened and mingled with a more forceful gushing or gurgling, as of bubbles rising from far beneath the surface. The noise sustained an eerie timbre, almost that of articulate speech.

  Then, as Conan stood caught in his reverie, it became evident that something more portentous was occurring. The gushing and bubbling became a draining sound, that of broad sheets and runnels of inky fluid cascading noisily downward as some massive thing raised itself slowly and ponderously from the centre of the pool....

  Sensing a peril not to his body but to his very soul, he turned and bolted from the doorway. He staggered, groping, along the wall, running blindly, scarcely pausing to wonder whether the floor dropped away again just ahead. The sounds did not pursue him, yet he fled on, up an incline, across the trackless vacancy of another arch or corridor. His motion carried him against a wood panel, a door, which burst rottenly open before his weight. He staggered through into the space beyond, clawed smothering fabric aside... and halted, dazzled.

  The room ahead of him was full of the brightness of day. He had to shut his eyes—yes, and raise his hands to shield his tissue-thin eyelids against the light’s intensity. But not before he had glimpsed someone—a female form, soft and graceful—starting up within the room.

  “Conan? Is it you?”

  The voice was familiar to him, hauntingly so.

  “Is it, can it really be Conan of Cimmeria? I have dreamed of you for the last three nights!” He felt gentle hands prying his fingers aside from his face, letting in light that scorched his eyelids. “Yes, you are my Conan! You have aged but little—nay, you are comelier than ever.” He felt soft kisses placed on his eyelids, his cheeks, his dry, panting lips. “And you are a king!” The face that pressed his, he realized, was wet with tears.

  “Yasmela—by Ishtar, girl, I have found you!” Rather than remaining in an ungainly crouch intended for flight, he sank to one knee on the thick carpet beneath their feet. “A moment ago I thought I was in hell. Now I know I am in paradise!”

  He forced his eyelids open briefly, admitting a slit of searing brightness; it conveyed a beauty that seemed every bit as searing. With eyelids clamped tight again, he dwelt long on the after-image: berry-stained lips, deep brown eyes, finely sculptured features, and dark hair fringed with golden radiance.

  “You are even more beautiful, Yasmela, if that were possible!” He pressed closer and she cradled his head in her arms. With her body shielding him from the light, he was able to blink his eyes open again, to see before him the soft olive skin of her bosom nestled in fringed, gauzy fabric and adorned with the delicate chain of a gold pendant.

  The two clung together in silence for many moments; by the time they eased apart and Conan rose to his feet, his eyes were tuned to take in every detail of the place with a steady, blue-glinting gaze.

  It was a lavish apartment, broad-arched between gracefully carved pillars, fitted with the richest furnishings and draperies. At its far side, a three-panelled balcony doorway opened on a view of a mountain lake, its waters bright with afternoon sun. An exit to an adjoining room stood open at one side. The portal by which he had burst in was a plain one, its planks grey with age, now hanging ajar in its splintered wooden jamb. It had been concealed by a richly embroidered arras, which trailed to the floor from a broken pole.

  “Th
at way leads to the cellars,” Yasmela said. “They are flooded and unhealthy, as you probably know.” She left his side and went to close the door.

  “Aye, shut it well.” Conan went along with her to help. “You might catch an ague... or something might catch you.” Breaking off a piece of thick wooden splinter, he laid it against the jamb, then drove the door shut with the sole of his foot, wedging it tight. “This should be made faster yet, with spikes,” he added, turning to her. “But tell me, Yasmela, what is this place? Are we still in the Tarnhold? My mind has been afuddled ever since I awoke in yon crypt.”

  “Why yes, we are in Tarnhold. My window overlooks Aubril Tam. ’Tis even more beautiful at sunset, if you will but stay....”

  “Yes, certainly—but confound it, Yasmela, it is not the same! That lake is wholesome to look on, and the trees outside your window live and flourish.” He strode toward the tall glazed doors, whose curtains were tied back in graceful knots. “This room of yours, and the balcony—the ramshackle prison I saw could never contain such wealth and ease!”

  “Oh yes, Conan, I understand.” She followed him across the room, detaining him with a gentle touch on his arm. “This castle, the Tarnhold, is an ancient place. Over the centuries it has housed high-born folk of Khoraja who are out of favour, and who... seek refuge here. Powerful warding spells have been placed on the estate to make it seem forbidding, so as to turn outsiders away. Doubtless when first you saw it, you were ensnared by the illusion.”

  “I see—at least, I think I do. But what of the spider-thing that nearly drowned me in the lake? Was that an illusion, too?” Stopping short at the sill of the balcony, lest it melt away beneath his feet, he cocked his head suspiciously outside. Sun played bright on the marble tile of the terrace, and flowers spilled in many-hued riot down the sides of urns set into the carved balustrade.