“Aye, so,” Conan marvelled to himself, “’tis she, Yasmela’s maid! Vateesa, girl, I thought you dead!” The king bent over her with freshened attention, and Prince Armiro’s aspect was not unkind either as he reached down and clasped her hand. They did not need to lean so close, however; for her rough voice, impelled by dry sobs, spilled brokenly across the courtyard.
“My mistress died without telling it, Lords—but before I pass out of this world, I must!” Her hand impulsively tightened on that of the young prince. “Armiro, heed me—Conan is your father!” Her streaming eyes sought out the elder king’s. “Conan, Armiro is your son!”
The shock that swept through both men was tangible to all present, and more powerful than the spell of a sorcerer of the third Khitan ring. Yet the two did not at first express any emotion. After staring frozen-faced at the gasping woman for a long heartbeat, they looked up at each other. Their gazes locked together and would not part.
“Armiro, is it possible...?” Conan ventured.
“Why yes, it must be so.” Armiro whispered the fact with amazement. “By Erlik, I have been a sorry fool!” He shook his head in pained fascination, though his eyes could not tear themselves away from Conan’s. “I set inquiries afoot in the court of Khoraja, to no avail! Long I sought my true father, ever in vain. But now, at last...”He rose slowly to his feet, eyes still fixed on Conan’s face. “Now, at last, I can kill you!” His sword, wrenched instantaneously from its sheath, swung savagely at Conan’s head.
No weapon could have risen in time to meet the plunging blade. Instead a dive, swift and pantherine, saved Conan as the still-ringing metal swept past him. It passed an ear’s-breadth over his head, to embed itself with a chunk! in the weathered wooden rail of the chariot. Armiro’s minuscule delay in wrenching it loose gave the king time to dash erect and draw his own steel brand; then both fighters were clear of the chariot, stamping and whirling across the courtyard in a man-made storm of flashing, ringing steel.
Mindful of their monarch’s previous order, and confident too of his skill, none of the Aquilonian warriors moved to interfere. Zenobia, overcome with fatigue and the horror of the spectacle, sank helpless to the platform of the chariot. Thence she looked on, propped up by the arm of elderly Publius. Beside them Vateesa lay senseless, mercifully unaware of the fury her words had caused.
The maid Amlunia, by contrast, capered with excitement as she watched the contest, issuing hoots and cries at the warriors’ most skilful passes. Her applause favoured the prince, but was balanced by that of Delvyn, who called out encouragement for his nominal master’s strokes and parries.
Conan, for his part, found himself severely pressed. Before this, in Yasmela’s bedchamber, the prince had fought with measured zeal and calculated skill against his armourless adversary until the tide of Conan’s strength had surged against him. Now, facing a warrior girded as tightly as he, Armiro’s rash ferocity made him a far more lethal threat. He drove fearlessly in at the king, landing a clashing stroke on the gold-chased hauberk followed by a fierce, ripping upswing that scored into the leather straps of Conan’s harness. In a trice he planted a kick on the Aquilonian’s hip armour that bode fair to stagger the larger man; then, whirling, he delivered a sidelong slash and struck sparks from the jewelled edge of the king’s epaulier, an inch away from the throbbing veins of his neck. After a dozen more such passes of arms, Conan found himself easing back, hoarding his strength and waiting for the safe chance, which never seemed to come.
To complicate matters, he did not want to kill Armiro. He could no longer doubt that the lad was his son. An instinct older than honour. and kingship, deeper than the roots of his tribal Cimmerian boyhood, told him that to slay his child would be impossible. He might disable the youth—fight him to a standstill, or offer up his own life for the sake of the bond. But alas, he sensed that the prince would be only too eager to seize on that.
“Armiro! Son!” he rasped, sidestepping a whistling slash. “It is not meet that we battle so. I offer you a truce!”
“Seducer! Bastard-maker!” Snarling, the prince renewed his attack. “Offer me your belly instead, that I may—” His words were dinned out by the noise of his blade clashing against Conan’s greaves, and by Conan’s sword driving the weapon up and aside. He finished breathlessly with: “Betrayer! You killed my mother, now kill me!”
“You accuse me falsely.” The king, to make himself heard, had to give ground once again. “I never killed her, I swear it! If you can truly say the same, lad, there is no issue between us.”
“No issue!” Armiro’s voice rose suddenly to a shriek. “Vile deserter, I am your issue! What of your betrayal, your cowardly flight?” He drove in at Conan with a blind, furious thrust. “Why, knave, did you leave me fatherless, and my mother unprotected? Where were you?"
Conan parried the desperate thrust with all the strength in both his arms; then, for the first time, he saw his attacker’s blade waver indecisively in air. Looking to his adversary’s face, he was amazed to see Armiro’s fierce, hawk-like eyes blinded with streaming tears. A new surge of feeling welled up in him—or rather, a vacancy: a vast, aching abyss of misunderstanding and loss.
The emotions were disabling—dangerous, Conan knew. Yet he could not bring himself to drive in and exploit Armiro’s weakness. And before steel could clash again—if, indeed, it would have—a fresh turmoil exploded nearby. The dark water in the pool had been seething and surging, ever more violently cascading and foaming. Strangely, though, the frothing dark liquid did not splash the onlookers; it stayed contained within the pond’s stone rim. Now great bubbles surfaced and belched forth words in godly command.
“Fight and slay! Slash and kill! Strive mightily, O champions, for the winner shall win the world, and with it my divine favour!” As the gargantuan voice chanted its litany, gaunt skeletal arms thrust up from the waves to frolic and applaud. A long, compound appendage, formed of more than one black, dripping limb jointed together, jutted up and thumped a rusty sword against an antique shield held high aloft by a similar gruesome limb. Where the decaying metal clanked together, small, brilliant lightnings darted outward from the impacts.
Then a scream sounded from among the clustered watchers. Both royal fighters, standing distracted by the unholy spectacle, at once turned their eyes in the other direction.
Most of the newcomers gaped silent, appalled by the sudden horror in the fountain; it was the ailing servant-woman Vateesa who cried out. She had arisen from the chariot bed, and now she stumbled forward, drawing anxious Queen Zenobia and Publius after her with the urgency of her halting steps.
“There it is!” she cried. “The monster, it killed milady!” She raised a trembling hand toward Kthantos’ heaving fountain and the upraised, frolicking arms. “That thing, that cursed thing, came to us in the night wearing this very robe”—she plucked distractedly at her own soiled, outsized garment—“and killed Princess-Regent Yasmela! I was lying near to death, but the dream awoke me—the nightmare that came true! It made me rise up and journey half across the world....”
With a final, piteous gasp, Vateesa toppled forward and fell to the paves—as dead, seemingly, as her beloved queen. Zenobia, stricken by grief, knelt over her, and then cried out with an upraised, despairing face, “’Tis true, Conan, ’tis true! When first she found her way to me in Tarantia, the poor wanderer, she told of a dark, eldritch thing that came to the tower to strangle her mistress! Yasmela died trying to escape it.” The queen looked up imploringly at the two combatants. “Conan did not slay Yasmela, nor did Armiro!” She raised her hand to point an accusing finger. “It was that creature, that abomination—the evil thing in the pond!”
“Lies, all lies,” the jester Delvyn proclaimed of a sudden. Waving hands to draw attention to himself, he moved in front of the still-pointing Zenobia. “Not lies of yours, milady! I beg your pardon, for I do not think you would seek to mislead your royal husband—but lies of the mad servant’s making! Certainly Kthantos d
id not kill Yasmela! I know not who did, but not he! He is a noble god, an honourable god who would not stoop so low. To accuse him is sheer blasphemy....” The dwarf, in his attempt to be earnest, began to seem more pathetically comic than ever he had in jest. None laughed at his blustering, but eyed him suspiciously, until the sullen-faced Amlunia flared up.
“What matters it anyway?” she cried, drawing her dagger and flourishing it overhead. “On with the combat, I say! We fight for the world, not for the honour. of a dead mistress! Come, champions, fight and slay! — So that I may give the mercy stroke to the loser, and lavish myself upon the victor!”
“Yes, fight!” The most spirited urgings still came from the animated pool, whose heavings were violent as ever. “These interruptions stay the business at hand—which is no mere business, but a ritual sacred to me! Fight and slay, I adjure you, and cast the victim’s body into the sacrificial pool! Finish quickly, if you do not wish to see my divine wrath visited on all present!” The godly decrees the pool belched forth were wasted on the combatants. For it seemed that, in the last few soul-wrenching moments, some silent understanding had passed between king and prince. Resolutely Conan sheathed his sword, Armiro following suit. The prince muttered a curt word to Conan, and the king nodded and turned.
Both men strode to the nearest brazier, set in a low retaining wall a few paces from the pond’s rim. Standing at either end and seizing the metal mesh of its rim in their gauntleted hands, they wrenched at it together and pulled it free of the stone. Facing one another, they shuffled its weight to the rim of the pond and, with a heave, cast it in.
The glowing, flaming coals seethed as they met the dark fluid; the metal itself frothed and steamed. It made a hissing sputtering mass as it sank out of sight in the pool, driving a gout of grey vapour skyward.
At this assault, the bubbling voice clamoured forth afresh, expressing not pain or fear, but outrage. “So! You join together in mutiny against me, your rightful lord! Fools, you know not what fate you call upon yourselves! Do you really wish to set your eyes upon the face of the Living God?”
As the voice lathered forth, its timbre deepened and intensified, as if some change were taking place in its watery bed—as if, in fact, it was rising to the surface. The crowd of Aquilonians watched in dread uncertainty. But the two fighters, father and newly acknowledged son, paid no heed, intent as they were on a new exploit.
Conan, flanked closely by Armiro, clambered to the top of the breast-high retaining wall. Striding to the scorched, splintered pillar that had been struck by Kthantos’ lightning, the king set his armoured shoulder against it, while Armiro drew his sword. The prince began driving his blade into the gaping crack near the column’s base, widening the fissure by prying out chunks of shattered granite. Before long he was hacking savagely with chiming steel at the britde stone. Meanwhile Conan strained and battered at the monolith, his armour scraping and clashing against it in his efforts to topple it into the pool.
From the water below a monstrous birth commenced. A shape, which at first resembled a gnarled stump or a huge, knotted turban, broke the wave-tormented surface. Its colour was the gleaming black of the pond, striated by glossy greenish veins; it continued to rise until it stood out of the water taller than a man, poised on a thick, pliant stem.
Then the tightly wrapped tentacles began to unfold. Aghast, the onlookers saw that its shape was that of a fist, which soon blossomed forth into a hand—an inhumanly tapering, sinuous one, it was true, but hand-like in its gargantuan form.
In the tips of all five supple, boneless fingers, large lidded eyes blinked open to survey the scene. Simultaneously, in the concave palm of the monstrous fistule gaped a mouth, circular in shape and ringed by pointed triangular teeth. The pulsations of this orifice, large enough to engorge a man whole, gave the thing a hideous, flesh-hungry look.
There was no knowing whether this was the god Kthantos’ main part, or how much more of him might lurk beneath the surface; but its emergence brought shouts of terror from the watchers. It was enough, even, to overawe several of the Black Dragon guards; they froze in their tracks an unseemly time before rushing forward with Prospero to join their king’s struggle with the pillar.
The earliest of them arrived too late, in any case... for, rocked by the efforts of king and prince, the column had already begun to topple. It gave way with a grinding rumble, twisting aside from the centre of the pool as it gathered force. Meanwhile, the thing emerging from the water had found its voice again—a voice that smote their ears with its full volume, unmuffled by the inky fluid. “HERETICS!” it thundered more brutally than before— “FAITHLESS INFIDELS! NOW LEARN THE WAGES OF THOSE WHO LEAGUE AGAINST THEIR GOD-”
The quintet of eyes, peering from the tips of the waving black fingers, focused on the soldiers nearest the wall. The titanic hand stretched toward them; a moment later, the shadow of the pillar swept across the grasping thing. Then it was obscured entirely by the curtain of black water that flew skyward as the column struck the pond.
The pillar smote the curb of the pool with a deep, seismic impact, granite tolling against granite like massive bronze. It fell to one side, but once in the basin it rolled and settled toward the centre, trundling to the place where Kthantos had been. There the god no longer was, having disappeared from the surface of the water.
At the sight, the warriors atop the ledge cheered and exulted. In the excitement Conan and Armiro even embraced, laughed together bright-eyed, and smote one another’s armoured backs in congratulation. Yet their gazes returned warily to the pool as they wondered what new horror might emerge. Part of the fluid had been splashed out, along with gouts of muck, foul-smelling bones, and rusted armour scraps which now smirched and littered the white granite of the court. A sizeable crack had also been made in the pond’s curbing; it gaped darkly, extending beneath the black waterline.
“Look,” a guardsman suddenly shouted, “the level is falling! The water is flowing into the crack-down, into the mountain below!”
And so it indisputably was. On the pond’s surface, oily currents could be seen curling into the crack, and from the crevice a faint gurgling could be heard. Each moment more of the granite basin was exposed, with more of its reeking, bone-littered bottom muck. Nowhere in it could Kthantos’ shape be seen.
“Fools, have you truly thrown away your chance?” This cry came from Amlunia, who ran to the edge of the pond and stared out across it in outraged disbelief. “With the help of Kthantos’ power, the world could have been ours! But now... if you have killed him...”
“If they have killed him, harlot, they have killed one too few!” So shrieked Zenobia as she darted forward from beside Vateesa’s fallen body. “If you love your grasping god Kthantos so—then join him, slut!” Overtaking the warrior woman beside the pool and striking before the leman could draw sword, she dealt out a shove followed by a vicious kick. Amlunia faltered an instant on the mud-slimed granite, then toppled over the curb to land with a splash in the retreating water and filth. Her fall was hailed with applause and delighted outcries from the watchers.
Amlunia was unhurt by the fall, through black-slimed from neck to toe. Cursing and threatening her attacker, she immediately started scrambling up the slippery side of the basin. Then something impeded her; there came a faint stirring in the water near her ankles, and all at once she began to slip backward toward the centre of the pool.
Her face showed that something was terribly amiss. Thrashing and struggling in earnest, she gave a panicked cry. She clawed desperately at the hard granite and thin, yielding mud, but it availed nothing; screaming and sobbing as she went, she was drawn relentlessly back into the ebbing water. Near the pond’s centre where the fallen pillar tapered out of sight, the last splashes flurried, along with Amlunia’s gargling, drowning cries. Then she was gone. It happened so swiftly the onlookers could scarcely credit it—and it transpired without any reappearance of the pool’s sinister occupant.
“By Crom, a hideou
s death even for a traitor!” Conan sprang down from the wall to join Zenobia and draw her back from the pond’s edge. “Can it mean we have not killed Kthantos?”
From the place where the last dregs of pond pooled down the fissure in the stone, amid a steaming waste of filth, a faint, familiar voice gurgled up.
“Killed a true god?” it demanded. “By a mere gaggle of thankless mortals? Delayed... yes, perhaps! Vexed... indeed, most certainly! But killed? No, never!”
The voice was receding but seemed inclined to speak on. “And do not fear for the life of the one called Amlunia. I rest now, but I do not go to my repose alone. I have been given a young, fresh soul to keep me company. Mortals, I accept your sacrifice—a warm spirit and supple body to amuse me for a millennium or two. Come, my dear, snuggle closer....” Here the god’s accents were interrupted by a flurry of bubbles that seemed to indicate a struggle of some sort, along with shriller frothings that almost suggested screams.
Then, though it was broken and nearly inaudible, Kthantos’ voice resumed: “... My legacy to those on earth... my high priest who failed me. In consequence, he is removed from my protection... spell is ended. He must make his own way in his own form. My curse upon... fickle mortals.... Live in fear until my return.”
With those last conjurations and threats, Kthantos’ gurgling dwindled to nothingness. Behind him was left a thin, foul film of sludge and debris in the hollow granite basin. No trace remained of his repellent physical shape, nor of luckless Amlunia.
Conan stood clasping Zenobia with one arm, frowning and mumbling over the last words of the vanished god. “High priest? —In his own form—?” Of a sudden, he relinquished his hold on the queen and stood gazing around the courtyard, his weapon again raised. “Delvyn!” he called out, “dwarfish rogue, where are you fled to?”
His question was answered by several of his guards, who stood at the edge of the paved court. They called to him and pointed toward the tethered horses, where it seemed Delvyn had fled, possibly in hopes of escaping on his own undersized mount.
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