Conan shook his head. With Nanaia a captive, he could not afford to throw his life away by a mad rush into the well of blackness, where ambushes might make any step a march of death. They fell back to the camp and the frightened horses, which were frantic with the stench of fresh-spilt blood.
“When the moon rises high enough to flood the canyon with light,” said Tubal, “they will shoot us with arrows from the ravine.”
“We must take the chance,” grunted Conan. “Maybe they are poor shots.”
They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence as the moonlight, weird and ghostly, grew in the canyon, and boulder, ledge, and wall took shape. No sound disturbed the brooding quiet. Then, by the waxing light, Conan investigated the four dead men left behind by the attackers. As he peered from face to bearded face, Tubal exclaimed:
“Devil-worshipersl Sabateans!”
“No wonder they could creep like cats,” muttered Conan. In Shem he had learned of the uncanny stealth of the people of that ancient and abominable cult, which worshiped the Golden Peacock in the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea. “What are they doing here? Their homeland is in Shem. Let’s see – Ha!”
Conan opened the man’s robe. There on the linen jerkin that covered the Sabatean’s thick chest appeared the emblem of a hand gripping a flame-shaped dagger. Tubal ripped the tunics from the other three corpses. Each displayed the fist and knife. He said:
“What sort of cult is this of the Hidden Ones, that draws men from Shem and Khitai, thousands of miles asunder?”
“That’s what I mean to find out,” answered Conan. They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence. Then Tubal rose and said:
“What now?”
Conan pointed to dark splotches on the bare rock floor, which the moonlight now made visible. “We can follow that trail.”
Tubal wiped and sheathed his knife, while Conan wound around his waist a coil of thin, strong rope with a three-pointed iron hook at one end. He had found such a rope useful in his days as a thief. The moon had risen higher, drawing a silver thread along the middle of the ravine.
Through the moonlight, they approached the mouth of the ravine. No bowstring twanged; no javelin sighed through the night air; no furtive figures flitted among the shadows. The blood drops speckled the rocky floor; the Sabateans must have carried grim wounds away with them.
They pushed up the ravine, afoot, because Conan believed their foes were also afoot. Besides, the gulch was so narrow and rugged that a horseman would be at a disadvantage in a fight.
At each bend they expected an ambush, but the trail of blood drops led on, and no figures barred their way. The blood spots were not so thick now, but they were enough to mark the way.
Conan quickened his pace, hoping to overtake the Sabateans. Even though the latter had a long start, their wounds and their prisoner would slow them down. He thought Nanaia must still be alive, or they would have come upon her corpse.
The ravine pitched upward, narrowing, then widened, descended, bent, and came out into another canyon running east and west. This was a few hundred feet wide. The bloody trail ran straight across to the sheer south wall and ceased.
Tubal grunted. “The Kushafi dogs spoke truth. The trail stops at a cliff that only a bird could fly over.”
Conan halted, puzzled. They had lost the trace of the ancient road in the Gorge of Ghosts, but this was undoubtedly the way the Sabateans had come. He raised his eyes up the wall, which rose straight for hundreds of feet. Above him, at a height of fifteen feet, jutted a narrow ledge, a mere outcropping a few feet wide and four or five paces long. It seemed to offer no solution, but halfway up to the ledge he saw a dull smear on the rock of the wall.
Uncoiling his rope, Conan whirled the weighted end and sent it soaring upward. The hook bit into the rim of the ledge and held. Conan went up it, clinging to the thin, smooth strand, as swiftly as most men would have climbed a ladder. As he passed the smear on the stone he confirmed his belief that it was dried blood, such as might have been made by a wounded man climbing or being hauled up to the ledge.
Tubal, below, fidgeted and tried to get a better view of the ledge, as if fearing it were peopled with unseen assassins. But the shelf lay bare when Conan pulled himself over the edge.
The first thing he saw was a heavy bronze ring set in the stone above the ledge, out of sight from below. The metal was polished by usage. More blood was smeared along the rim of the ledge. The drops led across the ledge to the sheer wall, which showed much weathering at that point. Conan saw something else: the blurred print of bloody fingers on the rock of the wall. He studied the cracks in the rock, then laid his hand over the bloody hand print and pushed. A section of the wall swung smoothly inward. He was staring into the door of a narrow tunnel, dimly lit by the moon somewhere at the far end.
Wary as a stalking leopard, he stepped into it. At once he heard a startled yelp from Tubal, to whose view it seemed that he had melted into solid rock. Conan emerged head and shoulders to exhort his follower to silence and then continued his investigation.
The tunnel was short; moonlight poured into it from the other end, where it opened into a cleft. The cleft ran straight for a hundred feet and made an abrupt bend, like a knife-cut through solid rock. The door through which he had entered was an irregular slab of rock hung on heavy, oiled bronze hinges. It fitted perfectly into its aperture, its irregular shape making the cracks appear to be merely natural seams in the cliff.
A rope ladder of heavy rawhide was coiled just inside the tunnel mouth. Conan returned to the ledge outside with this, made it fast to the bronze ring, and let it down. While Tubal swung up in a frenzy of impatience, Conan drew up his own rope and coiled it around his waist again.
Tubal swore strange Shemitic oaths as he grasped the mystery of the vanishing trail. He asked: “But why was not the door bolted on the inside?”
“Probably men are coming and going constantly, and a man might be in a hurry to get through from the outside without having to shout to be let in. There was little chance of its being discovered; I should not have found it but for the blood marks.”
Tubal was for plunging instantly into the cleft, but Conan had become wary. He had seen no sign of a sentry but did not think a people so ingenious in hiding the entrance to their country would leave it unguarded.
He hauled up the ladder, coiled it back on its shelf, and closed the door, plunging that end of the tunnel into darkness. Commanding the unwilling Tubal to wait for him, he went down the tunnel and into the cleft.
From the bottom of the cleft, an irregular knife-edge of starlit sky was visible, hundreds of feet overhead. Enough moonlight found its way into the cleft to serve Conan’s catlike eyes.
He had not reached the bend when a scuff of feet beyond it reached him. He had scarcely concealed himself behind a broken outcrop of rock, split away from the side wall, when the sentry came. He came in the leisurely manner of one who performs a perfunctory task, confident of his own security. He was a squat Khitan with a face like a copper mask. He swung along with the wide roll of a horseman, trailing a javelin.
He was passing Conan’s hiding place when some instinct brought him about in a flash, teeth bared in a startled snarl, spear whipping up for a cast or a thrust. Even as he turned, Conan was upon him with the instant uncoiling of steel-spring muscles. As the javelin leaped to a level, the scimitar lashed down. The Khitan dropped like an ox, his round skull split like a ripe melon.
Conan froze to immobility, glaring along the passage. As he heard no sound to indicate the presence of any other guard, he risked a low whistle which brought Tubal headlong into the cleft. The Shemite grunted at the sight of the dead man.
Conan stooped and pushed back the Khitan’s upper lip, showing the canine teeth filed to points. “Another son of Erlik, the Yellow God of Death. There is no telling how many more may be in this defile. We’ll drag him behind these rocks.”
Beyond the bend, the long, deep defile ran empty to t
he next kink. As they advanced without opposition, Conan became sure that the Khitan was the only sentry in the cleft.
The moonlight in the narrow gash above them was paling into dawn when they came into the open at last. Here the defile broke into a chaos of shattered rock. The single gorge became half a dozen, threading between isolated crags and split-off rocks, as a river splits into separate streams at its delta. Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone stood up like gaunt ghosts in the pale predawn light.
Threading their way among these grim sentinels, the adventurers presently looked out upon a level, rock-strewn floor that stretched three hundred paces to the foot of a cliff. The trail they had followed, grooved by many feet in the weathered stone, crossed the level and twisted a tortuous way up the cliff on ramps cut in the rock. But what lay on top of the cliffs they could not guess. To right and left, the solid wall veered away, flanked by broken pinnacles.
“What now, Conan?” In the gray light, the Shemite looked like a mountain goblin surprised out of his cave by dawn.
“I think we must be close to listen!”
Over the cliffs rolled the blaring reverberation they had heard the night before, but now much nearer: the strident roar of the giant trumpet.
“Have we been seen?” wondered Tubal, fingering his knife.
Conan shrugged. “Whether we have or not, we must see ourselves before we try to climb that cliff. Here!”
He indicated a weathered crag, which rose like a tower among its lesser fellows. The comrades went up it swiftly, keeping its bulk between them and the opposite cliffs. The summit was higher than the cliffs. Then they lay behind a spur of rock, staring through the rosy haze of the rising dawn.
“Pteor!” swore Tubal.
From their vantage point, the opposite cliffs assumed their real nature as one side of a gigantic mesalike block, which rose sheer from the surrounding level, four to five hundred feet high. Its vertical sides seemed unscalable, save where the trail had been cut into the stone. East, north, and west it was girdled by crumbling crags, separated from the plateau by the level canyon floor, which varied in width from three hundred paces to half a mile. On the south, the plateau abutted on a gigantic bare mountain, whose gaunt peaks dominated the surrounding pinnacles.
But the watchers gave but little attention to this topographical formation. Conan had expected, at the end of the bloody trail, to find some sort of rendezvous: a cluster of horsehide tents, a cavern, perhaps even a village of mud and stone nestling on a hillside. Instead, they were looking at a city, whose domes and towers glistened in the rosy dawn like a magical city of sorcerers stolen from some fabled land and set down in this wilderness.
“The city of the demons!” cried Tubal. “It is enchantment and sorcery!” He snapped his fingers to ward off evil spells.
The plateau was oval, about a mile and a half long from north to south and somewhat less than a mile from east to west. The city stood near its southern end, etched against the dark mountain behind it. A large edifice, whose purple dome was shot with gold, gleamed in the dawn. It dominated the flat-topped stone houses and clustering trees.
The Cimmerian blood in Conan’s veins responded to the somber aspect of the scene, the contrast of the gloomy black crags with the masses of green and the sheens of color in the city. The city awoke forebodings of evil. The gleam of its purple, gold-traced dome was somehow sinister. The black, crumbling crags formed a fitting setting for it. It was like a city of ancient, demonic mystery, rising with an evil glitter amidst ruin and decay.
“This must be the stronghold of the Hidden Ones,” muttered Conan. “Who’d have thought to find a city like this in an uninhabited country?”
“Not even we can fight a whole city,” grunted Tubal.
Conan fell silent while he studied the distant view. The city was not so large as it had looked at first glance. It was compact but unwalled; a parapet around the edge of the plateau furnished its defense. The two and three-storey houses stood among surprising groves and gardens surprising because the plateau looked like solid rock without soil for growing things. He reached a decision and said:
“Tubal, go back to our camp in the Gorge of Ghosts. Take the horses and ride to Kushaf. Tell Balash I need all his swords, and bring the kozaki and the Kushafis through the cleft and halt them among these defiles until you get a signal from me, or know I’m dead.”
“Pteor devour Balash! What of you?”
“I go into the city.”
“You are mad!”
“Worry not, my friend. It is the only way I can get Na-naia out alive. Then we can make plans for attacking the city. If I live and am at liberty, I shall meet you here; otherwise, you and Balash follow your own judgment.”
“What do you want with this nest of fiends?”
Conan’s eyes narrowed. “I want a base for empire. We cannot stay in Iranistan nor yet return to Turan. In my hands, who knows what might not be made of this impregnable place? Now get along.”
“Balash loves me not. He’ll spit in my beard, and then I’ll kill him and his dogs will slay me.”
“He’ll do no such thing.”
“He will not come.”
“He would come through Hell if I sent for him.”
“His men will not come; they fear devils.”
“They’ll come when you tell them the devils are but men.”
Tubal tore his beard and voiced his real objection to leaving Conan. “The swine in that city will flay you alive!”
“Nay, I’ll match guile with guile. I shall be a fugitive from the wrath of the king, an outlaw seeking sanctuary.” Tubal abandoned his argument. Grumbling in his beard, the thick-necked Shemite clambered down the crag and vanished into the defile. When he was out of sight, Conan also descended and walked toward the cliffs.
III. The Hidden Ones
Conan reached the foot of the cliffs and began mounting the steep road without having seen any human being. The trail wound interminably up a succession of ramps, with low, massive, cyclopean walls along the outer edges. This was no work of Ilbarsi hillmen; it looked ancient and as strong as the mountain itself.
For the last thirty feet, the ramps gave way to a flight of steep steps cut in the rock. Still no one challenged Conan. He passed through a line of low fortification along the edge of the mesa and came upon seven men squatting over a game.
At the crunch of Conan’s boots on the gravel, the seven sprang to their feet, glaring wildly. They were Zuagirs desert Shemites, lean, hawk-nosed warriors with fluttering kaffias over their heads and the hilts of daggers and scimitars protruding from their sashes. They snatched up the javelins they had laid beside them and poised them to throw.
Conan showed no surprise, halting and eyeing them-tranquilly. The Zuagirs, as uncertain as cornered wildcats, merely glared.
“Conan!” exclaimed the tallest of the Zuagirs, his eyes ablaze with fear and suspicion. “What do you here?”
Conan ran his eyes over them all and replied: “I seek your master.”
This did not seem to reassure them. They muttered among themselves, moving their javelin arms back and forth as if to try for a cast. The tall Zuagir’s voice rose:
“You chatter like crows! This thing is plain: We were gambling and did not see him come. We have failed in our duty. If it is known, there will be punishment. Let us slay him and throw him over the cliff.”
“Aye,” agreed Conan. “Try it. And when your master asks: ‘Where is Conan, who brought me important news?’ say ‘Lo, you did not consult with us about his man, so we slew him to teach you a lesson!’ “
They winced at the irony. One growled: “Spear him; none will know.”
“Nay! If we fail to bring him down with the first cast, he’ll be among us like a wolf among sheep.”
“Seize him and cut his throat!” suggested the youngest of the band. The others scowled so murderously at him that he fell back in confusion.
“Aye, cut my throat,” taunted Conan, hitching
the hilt of his scimitar around within easy reach. “One of you might even live to tell of it!”
“Knives are silent,” muttered the youngster. He was rewarded by a javelin butt driven into his belly, which doubled him up gasping. Having vented some of their spleen on their tactless comrade, the Zuagirs grew calmer. The tall one asked Conan: “You are expected?”
“Would I come otherwise? Does the lamb thrust his head unbidden into the lion’s maw?”
“Lamb!” The Zuagir cackled. “More like a gray wolf with blood on his fangs.”
“If there is fresh-spilt blood, it is but that of fools who disobeyed their master. Last night, in the Gorge of Ghosts “
“By Hanuman! Was it you the Sabatean fools fought? They said they had slain a Vendhyan merchant and his servants in the gorge.”
So that was why the sentries were careless! For some reason the Sabateans had lied about the outcome of the battle, and the Watchers of the Road were not expecting pursuit.
“None of you was among them?” said Conan.
“Do we limp? Do we bleed? Do we weep from weariness and wounds? Nay, we have not fought Conan!”
“Then be wise and make not their mistake. Will you take me to him who awaits me, or will you cast dung in his beard by scorning his commands?”
“The gods forbid!” said the tall Zuagir. “No order has been given us concerning you. But if this be a lie, our master shall see to your death, and if be not a lie, then we can have no blame. Give up your weapons and we will take you to him.”
Conan gave up his weapons. Ordinarily he would have fought to the death before letting himself be disarmed, but now he was gambling for large stakes. The leader straightened up the young Zuagir with a kick in the rump, told him to watch the Stair as if his life depended on it; then barked orders at the others.
As they closed around the unarmed Cimmerian, Conan knew their hands itched to thrust a knife into his back. But he had sown the seeds of uncertainty in their primitive minds, so that they dared not strike.
They started along the wide road that led to the city. Conan asked casually: “The Sabateans passed into the city just before dawn?”
The Other Tales of Conan Page 34