The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1 The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1

by Robert E. Howard

  Brent shook his head, absently scanning the walls, as if seeking inspiration in the weapons, antique and modern, which adorned it.

  “You could not understand the language in which he spoke before?”

  “Not a word. All I know is, it wasn’t English and it wasn’t Chinese. I do know the fellow was all steel springs and whale bone. It was like fighting a basketful of wild cats. From now on I pack a gun regular. I haven’t toted one recently, things have been so quiet. Always figured I was a match for several ordinary humans with my fists, anyway. But this devil wasn’t an ordinary human; more like a wild animal.”

  He gulped his whiskey loudly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and leaned toward Brent with a curious glint in his cold eyes.

  “I wouldn’t be saying this to anybody but you,” he said with a strange hesitancy. “And maybe you’ll think I’m crazy–but–well, I’ve bumped off several men in my life. Do you suppose–well, the Chinese believe in vampires and ghouls and walking dead men–and with all this talk about being dead, and me killing him–do you suppose–”

  “Nonsense!” exclaimed Brent with an incredulous laugh. “When a man’s dead, he’s dead. He can’t come back.”

  “That’s what I’ve always thought,” muttered Harrison. “But what the devil did he mean about me feeding him to the vultures?”

  “I will tell you!” A voice hard and merciless as a knife edge cut their conversation.

  Harrison and Brent wheeled, the former starting out of his chair. At the other end of the room one of the tall shuttered windows stood open for the sake of the coolness. Before this now stood a tall rangy man whose ill-fitting garments could not conceal the dangerous suppleness of his limbs, nor the breadth of his hard shoulders. Those cheap garments, muddy and bloodstained, seemed incongruous with the fierce dark hawk-like face, the flame of the dark eyes. Harrison grunted explosively, meeting the concentrated ferocity of that glare.

  “You escaped me in the darkness,” muttered the stranger, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet as he crouched, catlike, a wicked curved dagger gleaming in his hand. “Fool! Did you dream I would not follow you? Here is light; you shall not escape again!”

  “Who the devil are you?” demanded Harrison, standing in an unconscious attitude of defense, legs braced, fists poised.

  “Poor of wit and scant of memory!” sneered the other. “You do not remember Amir Amin Izzedin, whom you slew in the Valley of the Vultures, thirty years ago! But I remember! From my cradle I remember. Before I could speak or walk, I knew that I was Amir Amin, and I remembered the Valley of Vultures. But only after deep shame and long wandering was full knowledge revealed to me. In the smoke of Shaitan I saw it! You have changed your garments of flesh, Ahmed Pasha, you Bedouin dog, but you can not escape me. By the Golden Calf!”

  With a feline shriek he ran forward, dagger on high. Harrison sprang aside, surprizingly quick for a man of his bulk, and ripped an archaic spear from the wall. With a wordless yell like a warcry, he rushed, gripping it with both hands like a bayonet. Amir Amin wheeled toward him lithely, swaying his pantherish body to avoid the onrushing point. Too late Harrison realized his mistake–knew he would be spitted on the long knife as he plunged past the elusive Oriental. But he could not check his headlong impetus. And then Amir Amin’s foot slipped on a sliding rug. The spear head ripped through his muddy coat, ploughed along his ribs, bringing a spurting stream of blood. Knocked off balance, he slashed wildly, and then Harrison’s bull-like shoulder smashed into him, carrying them both to the floor.

  Amir Amin was up first, minus his knife. As he glared wildly about for it, Brent, temporarily stunned by the unaccustomed violence, went into action. From the racks on the wall the scholar had taken a shotgun, and he wore a look of grim determination. As he lifted it, Amir Amin yelped and plunged recklessly through the nearest window. The crash of splintering glass mingled with the thunderous roar of the shotgun. Brent, rushing to the window, blinking in the powder fumes, saw a shadowy form dart across the shadowy lawn, under the trees, and vanish. He turned back into the room, where Harrison was rising, swearing luridly.

  “Twice in a night is too danged much! Who is this nut, anyway? I never saw him before!”

  “A Druse!” stuttered Brent. “His accent–his mention of the golden calf–his hawk-like appearance–I am sure he is a Druse.”

  “What the hell is a Druse?” bellowed Harrison, in a spasm of irritation. His bandages had been torn and his cuts were bleeding again.

  “They live in a mountain district in Syria,” answered Brent; “a tribe of fierce fighters–”

  “I can tell that,” snarled Harrison. “I never expected to meet anybody that could lick me in a stand-up fight, but this devil’s got me buffaloed. Anyway, it’s a relief to know he’s a living human being. But if I don’t watch my step, I won’t be. I’m staying here tonight, if you’ve got a room where I can lock all the doors and windows. Tomorrow I’m going to see Woon Sun.”

  II

  Few men ever traversed the modest curio shop that opened on dingy River Street and passed through the cryptic curtain-hung door at the rear of that shop, to be amazed at what lay beyond: luxury in the shape of gilt-worked velvet hangings, silken cushioned divans, tea-cups of tinted porcelain on toy-like tables of lacquered ebony, over all of which was shed a soft colored glow from electric bulbs concealed in gilded lanterns.

  Steve Harrison’s massive shoulders were as incongruous among those exotic surroundings as Woon Sun, short, sleek, clad in close-fitting black silk, was adapted to them.

  The Chinaman smiled, but there was iron behind his suave mask.

  “And so–” he suggested politely.

  “And so I want your help,” said Harrison abruptly. His nature was not that of a rapier, fencing for an opening, but a hammer smashing directly at its objective.

  “I know that you know every Oriental in the city. I’ve described this bird to you. Brent says he’s a Druse. You couldn’t be ignorant of him. He’d stand out in any crowd. He doesn’t belong with the general run of River Street gutter rats. He’s a wolf.”

  “Indeed he is,” murmured Woon Sun. “It would be useless to try to conceal from you the fact that I know this young barbarian. His name is Ali ibn Suleyman.”

  “He called himself something else,” scowled Harrison.

  “Perhaps. But he is Ali ibn Suleyman to his friends. He is, as your friend said, a Druse. His tribe live in stone cities in the Syrian mountains–particularly about the mountain called the Djebel Druse.”

  “Muhammadans, eh?” rumbled Harrison. “Arabs?”

  “No; they are, as it were, a race apart. They worship a calf cast of gold, believe in reincarnation, and practice heathen rituals abhorred by the Moslems. First the Turks and now the French have tried to govern them, but they have never really been conquered.”

  “I can believe it, alright,” muttered Harrison. “But why did he call me ‘Ahmed Pasha’? What’s he got it in for me for?”

  Woon Sun spread his hands helplessly.

  “Well, anyway,” growled Harrison, “I don’t want to keep on dodging knives in back alleys. I want you to fix it so I can get the drop on him. Maybe he’ll talk sense, if I can get the cuffs on him. Maybe I can argue him out of this idea of killing me, whatever it is. He looks more like a fanatic than a criminal. Anyway, I want to find out just what it’s all about.”

  “What could I do?” murmured Woon Sun, folding his hands on his round belly, malice gleaming from under his dropping lids. “I might go further and ask, why should I do anything for you?”

  “You’ve stayed inside the law since coming here,” said Harrison. “I know that curio shop is just a blind; you’re not making any fortune out of it. But I know, too, that you’re not mixed up with anything crooked. You had your dough when you came here–plenty of it–and how you got it is no concern of mine.

  “But, Woon Sun,” Harrison leaned forward and lowered his voice, “do you remember that young
Eurasian Josef La Tour? I was the first man to reach his body, the night he was killed in Osman Pasha’s gambling den. I found a note book on him, and I kept it. Woon Sun, your name was in that book!”

  An electric silence impregnated the atmosphere. Woon Sun’s smooth yellow features were immobile, but red points glimmered in the shoe-button blackness of his eyes.

  “La Tour must have been intending to blackmail you,” said Harrison. “He’d worked up a lot of interesting data. Reading that note book, I found that your name wasn’t always Woon Sun; found out where you got your money, too.”

  The red points had faded in Woon Sun’s eyes; those eyes seemed glazed; a greenish pallor overspread the yellow face.

  “You’ve hidden yourself well, Woon Sun,” muttered the detective. “But double-crossing your society and skipping with all their money was a dirty trick. If they ever find you, they’ll feed you to the rats. I don’t know but what it’s my duty to write a letter to a mandarin in Canton, named–”

  “Stop!” The Chinaman’s voice was unrecognizable. “Say no more, for the love of Buddha! I will do as you ask. I have this Druse’s confidence, and can arrange it easily. It is now scarcely dark. At midnight be in the alley known to the Chinese of River Street as the Alley of Silence. You know the one I mean? Good. Wait in the nook made by the angle of the walls, near the end of the alley, and soon Ali ibn Suleyman will walk past it, ignorant of your presence. Then if you dare, you can arrest him.”

  “I’ve got a gun this time,” grunted Harrison. “Do this for me, and we’ll forget about La Tour’s note book. But no double-crossing, or–”

  “You hold my life in your fingers,” answered Woon Sun. “How can I double-cross you?”

  Harrison grunted skeptically, but rose without further words, strode through the curtained door and through the shop, and let himself into the street. Woon Sun watched inscrutably the broad shoulders swinging aggressively through the swarms of stooped, hurrying Orientals, men and women, who thronged River Street at that hour; then he locked the shop door and hurried back through the curtained entrance into the ornate chamber behind. And there he halted, staring.

  Smoke curled up in a blue spiral from a satin divan, and on that divan lounged a young woman–a slim, dark, supple creature, whose night-black hair, full red lips and scintillant eyes hinted at blood more exotic than her costly garments suggested. Those red lips curled in malicious mockery, but the glitter of her dark eyes belied any suggestion of humor, however satirical, just as their vitality belied the languor expressed in the listlessly drooping hand that held the cigaret.

  “Joan!” The Chinaman’s eyes narrowed to slits of suspicion. “How did you get in here?”

  “Through that door over there, which opens on a passage which in turn opens on the alley that runs behind this building. Both doors were locked–but long ago I learned how to pick locks.”

  “But why–?”

  “I saw the brave detective come here. I have been watching him for some time now–though he does not know it.” The girl’s vital eyes smoldered yet more deeply for an instant.

  “Have you been listening outside the door?” demanded Woon Sun, turning grey.

  “I am no eavesdropper. I did not have to listen. I can guess why he came. And you promised to help him?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” answered Woon Sun, with a secret sigh of relief.

  “You lie!” The girl came tensely upright on the divan, her convulsive fingers crushing her cigaret, her beautiful face momentarily contorted. Then she regained control of herself, in a cold resolution more dangerous than spitting fury. “Woon Sun,” she said calmly, drawing a stubby black automatic from her mantle, “how easily, and with what good will could I kill you where you stand. But I do not wish to. We shall remain friends. See, I replace the gun. But do not tempt me, my friend. Do not try to eject me, or to use violence with me. Here, sit down and take a cigaret. We will talk this over calmly.”

  “I do not know what you wish to talk over,” said Woon Sun, sinking down on a divan and mechanically taking the cigaret she offered, as if hypnotized by the glitter of her magnetic black eyes–and the knowledge of the hidden pistol. All his Oriental immobility could not conceal the fact that he feared this young pantheress–more than he feared Harrison. “The detective came here merely on a friendly call,” he said. “I have many friends among the police. If I were found murdered they would go to much trouble to find and hang the guilty person.”

  “Who spoke of killing?” protested Joan, snapping a match on a pointed, henna-tinted nail, and holding the tiny flame to Woon Sun’s cigaret. At the instant of contact their faces were close together, and the Chinaman drew back from the strange intensity that burned in her dark eyes. Nervously he drew on the cigaret, inhaling deeply.

  “I have been your friend,” he said. “You should not come here threatening me with a pistol. I am a man of no small importance on River Street. You, perhaps, are not as secure as you suppose. The time may come when you will need a friend like me–”

  He was suddenly aware that the girl was not answering him, or even heeding his words. Her own cigaret smoldered unheeded in her fingers, and through the clouds of smoke her eyes burned at him with the terrible eagerness of a beast of prey. With a gasp he jerked the cigaret from his lips and held it to his nostrils.

  “She-devil!” It was a shriek of pure terror. Hurling the smoking stub from him, he lurched to his feet where he swayed dizzily on legs suddenly grown numb and dead. His fingers groped toward the girl with strangling motions. “Poison–dope–the black lotos–”

  She rose, thrust an open hand against the flowered breast of his silk jacket and shoved him back down on the divan. He fell sprawling and lay in a limp attitude, his eyes open, but glazed and vacant. She bent over him, tense and shuddering with the intensity of her purpose.

  “You are my slave,” she hissed, as a hypnotizer impels his suggestions upon his subject. “You have no will but my will. Your conscious brain is asleep, but your tongue is free to tell the truth. Only the truth remains in your drugged brain. Why did the detective Harrison come here?”

  “To learn of Ali ibn Suleyman, the Druse,” muttered Woon Sun in his own tongue, and in a curious lifeless sing-song.

  “You promised to betray the Druse to him?”

  “I promised but I lied,” the monotonous voice continued. “The detective goes at midnight to the Alley of Silence, which is the Gateway to the Master. Many bodies have gone feet-first through that gateway. It is the best place to dispose of his corpse. I will tell the Master he came to spy upon him, and thus gain honor for myself, as well as ridding myself of an enemy. The white barbarian will stand in the nook between the walls, awaiting the Druse as I bade him. He does not know that a trap can be opened in the angle of the walls behind him and a hand strike with a hatchet. My secret will die with him.”

  Apparently Joan was indifferent as to what the secret might be, since she questioned the drugged man no further. But the expression on her beautiful face was not pleasant.

  “No, my yellow friend,” she murmured. “Let the white barbarian go to the Alley of Silence–aye, but it is not a yellow-belly who will come to him in the darkness. He shall have his desire. He shall meet Ali ibn Suleyman; and after him, the worms that writhe in darkness!”

  Taking a tiny jade vial from her bosom, she poured wine from a porcelain jug into an amber goblet, and shook into the liquor the contents of the vial. Then she put the goblet into Woon Sun’s limp fingers and sharply ordered him to drink, guiding the beaker to his lips. He gulped the wine mechanically, and immediately slumped sidewise on the divan and lay still.

  “You will wield no hatchet this night,” she muttered. “When you awaken many hours from now, my desire will have been accomplished–and you will need fear Harrison no longer, either–whatever may be his hold upon you.” She seemed struck by a sudden thought and halted as she was turning toward the door that opened on the corridor.

/>   “‘Not as secure as I suppose’–” she muttered, half aloud. “What could he have meant by that?” A shadow, almost of apprehension, crossed her face. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Too late to make him tell me now. No matter. The Master does not suspect–and what if he did? He’s no Master of mine. I waste too much time–”

  She stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind her. Then when she turned, she stopped short. Before her stood three grim figures, tall, gaunt, black-robed, their shaven vulture-like heads nodding in the dim light of the corridor.

  In that instant, frozen with awful certainty, she forgot the gun in her bosom. Her mouth opened for a scream, which died in a gurgle as a bony hand was clapped over her lips.

  III

  The alley, nameless to white men, but known to the teeming swarms of River Street as the Alley of Silence, was as devious and cryptic as the characteristics of the race which frequented it. It did not run straight, but, slanting unobtrusively off River Street, wound through a maze of tall, gloomy structures, which, to outward seeming at least, were tenements and warehouses, and crumbling forgotten buildings apparently occupied only by rats, where boarded-up windows stared blankly.

  As River Street was the heart of the Oriental quarter, so the Alley of Silence was the heart of River Street, though apparently empty and deserted. At least that was Steve Harrison’s idea, though he could give no definite reason why he ascribed so much importance to a dark, dirty, crooked alley that seemed to go nowhere. The men at headquarters twitted him, telling him that he had worked so much down in the twisty mazes of rat-haunted River Street that he was getting a Chinese twist in his mind.

  He thought of this, as he crouched impatiently in the angle formed by the last crook of that unsavory alley. That it was past midnight he knew from a stealthy glance at the luminous figures on his watch. Only the scurrying of rats broke the silence. He was well hidden in a cleft formed by two jutting walls, whose slanting planes came together to form a triangle opening on the alley. Alley architecture was as crazy as some of the tales which crept forth from its dank blackness. A few paces further on the alley ended abruptly at the cliff-like blankness of a wall, in which showed no windows and only a boarded-up door.