The Other Tales of Conan

by Howard, R. E.

  The paroxysm passed, leaving him faint and trembling.

  “I understand!” he panted. “He is playing with me, as a cat with a mouse. To have slain me last night in my chamber were too easy, too merciful. So he destroyed the ship in which I might have escaped him, and he slew that wretched Pict and left my chain upon him, so that the savages might believe I had slain him. They have seen that chain upon my neck many a time.

  “But why? What subtle deviltry has he in mind, what devious purpose no human mind can grasp or understand?”

  “Who is this black man?” asked Belesa, a chill of fear crawling along her spine.

  “A demon loosed by my greed and lust to plague me throughout eternity!” he whispered. He spread his long, thin fingers on the table before him and stared at her with hollow, weirdly luminous eyes, which seemed to see her not at all but to look through her and far beyond to some dim doom.

  “In my youth, I had an enemy at court,” he said, as if speaking more to himself than to her “A powerful man who stood between me and my ambition. In my lust for wealth and power, I sought aid from the people of the black arts—a sorcerer who, at my desire, raised up a fiend from the outer gulfs of existence. It crushed and slew mine enemy; I grew great and wealthy, and none could stand before me.

  “But I thought to cheat the wizard of the price a mortal must pay who calls the black folk to do his bidding.

  “He was Thoth-Amon of the Ring, in exile from his native Stygia. He had fled in the reign of King Mentupherra, and when Mentupherra died and Ctesphon ascended the ivory throne of Luxur, Thoth-Amon lingered in Kordava though he might have returned home, dunning me for the debt I owed him. But, instead of paying him the moiety of my gains as I had promised, I denounced him to my own monarch, so that Thoth-Amon must needs willy-nilly return to Stygia in haste and stealth. There he found favor and waxed in wealth and magical might until he was the virtual ruler of the land.

  “Two years ago in Kordava, word came to me that Thoth-Amon had vanished from his accustomed haunts in Stygia. And then one night I saw his brown devil’s face leering at me from the shadows in my castle hall.

  “It was not his material body, but his spirit sent to plague me. This time I had no king to protect me, for upon the death of Ferdrugo and the setting up of the regency, the land, as you know, had fallen into factional strife. Before Thoth-Amon could reach Kordava in the flesh, I sailed to put broad seas between me and him. He has his limitations; to follow me across the seas he must remain in his human, fleshly body. But now this field has tracked me down by his uncanny powers even here in this vast wilderness.

  “He is too crafty to be trapped or slain as one would do with a common man. When he hides, no man can find him. He steals like a shadow in the night, making naught of bolts and bars. He blinds the eyes of guardsmen with sleep. He can command the spirits of the air, the serpents of the deep, and the fiends of the night; he can raise storms to sink ships and throw down castles. I hoped to drown my trail in the blue, rolling waves—but he has tracked me down to claim his grim forfeit…”

  The weird eyes lit palely as Valenso gazed beyond the tapestried walls to far, invisible horizons. “I’ll trick him yet,” he whispered. “Let him delay to strike this night, and dawn shall find me with a ship under my heels, and again I will cast an ocean between me and his vengeance.”

  “Hell’s fire!”

  Conan stopped short, glaring upward. Behind him, the seamen halted—two compact clumps of them, bows in their hands and suspicion in their attitude. They were following an old path made by Pictish hunters, which led due east. Although they had progressed only some thirty yards, the beach was no longer visible.

  “What is it?” demanded Strombanni suspiciously. “Why are you stopping?”

  “Are you blind? Look there!”

  From the thick limb of a tree that overhung the trail, a head grinned down at them: a dark, painted face, framed in thick black hair, in which a hornbill feather drooped over the left ear.

  “I took that head down and hid it in the bushes,” growled Conan, scanning the woods about them narrowly. “What fool could have stuck it back up there? It looks as if somebody were trying his damnedest to bring the Picts down on the settlement.”

  Men glanced at one another darkly, a new element of suspicion added to the already seething cauldron. Conan climbed the tree, secured the head, and carried it into the bushes, where he tossed it into a stream and watched it sink.

  “The Picts whose tracks are about this tree weren’t Hornbills,” he growled, returning through the thicket. “I’ve sailed these coasts enough to know something about the sea-land tribes. If I read the prints of their moccasins aright, they were Cormorants. I hope they’re having a war with the Hornbills. If they’re at peace, they’ll head straight for the Hornbill village, and there’ll be trouble. I don’t know how far away that village is—but, as soon as they leam of this murder, they’ll come through the forest like starving wolves. That’s the worst insult possible to a Pict—to kill a man not in war-paint and stick his head up in a tree for the vultures to eat. Damned peculiar things going on along this coast. But that’s always the way when civilized men come into the wilderness; they’re all crazy as Hell. Come on.”

  Men loosened blades in their scabbards and shafts in their quivers as they strode deeper into the forest. Men of the sea, accustomed to rolling expanses of gray water, they were ill at ease with mysterious, green walls of trees and vines hemming them in. The path wound and twisted until most of them quickly lost their sense of direction and did not even know in which direction the beach lay.

  Conan was uneasy for another reason. He kept scanning the trail and finally grunted: “Somebody’s passed along here recently—not more than an hour ahead or us. Somebody in boots, with no woodcraft. Was he the fool who found that Pict’s head and stuck it back up in that tree? No, it couldn’t have been he. I didn’t find his tracks under the tree. But who was it? I found no tracks there, except those of the Picts I’d already seen. And who’s this fellow hurrying ahead of us? Did either of you bastards send a man ahead of us for any reason?”

  Both Strombanni and Zarono loudly disclaimed any such act, glaring at each other with mutual disbelief. Neither man could see the signs Conan pointed out; the faint prints that he saw on the grassless, hard-beaten trail were invisible to their untrained eyes.

  Conan quickened his pace, and they hurried after him, fresh coals of suspicion added to the smoldering fire of distrust. Presently the path veered norrhward, and Conan left it and began threading his way through the trees in a southeasterly direction. The afternoon wore on as the swearing men plowed through bushes and climbed over logs. Strombanni, momentarily falling behind with Zarono, murmured:

  “Think you he’s leading us into an ambush?”

  “He might,” retorted the buccaneer. “In any case, we shall never find our way back to the sea without him to guide us.” Zarono gave Strombanni a meaningful look.

  “I see your point,” said the latter. “This may force a change in our plans.”

  Suspicion grew as they advanced and had almost reached panic proportions when they emerged from the thick woods and saw, just ahead of them, a gaunt crag that jutted up from the forest floor. A dim path, leading out of the woods from the east, ran along a cluster of boulders and wound up the crag on a ladder of stony shelves to a flat ledge near the summit.

  Conan halted, a bizarre figure in his piratical finery. “That trail is the one I followed, when I was running from the Eagle Picts,” he said. “It leads up to a cave behind that ledge. In that cave are the bodies of Tranicos and his captains, and the treasure he plundered from Tothmekri. But a word before we go up after it: If you kill me here, you’ll never find your way back to the trail we followed from the beach. I know you seafaring men; you’re helpless in the deep woods. Of course, the beach lies due west; but, if you have to make your way through the tangled woods, burdened with the plunder, it’ll take you, not hours, but days.
And I don’t think these woods will be very safe for white men, when the Hornbills learn about their hunter.”

  He laughed at the ghastly, mirthless smiles with which they greeted his recognition of their intentions toward him. And he also comprehended the thought that sprang in the mind of each: Let the barbarian secure the loot for them and lead them back to the beach trail before they killed him.

  “All of you stay here except Strombanni and Zarono,” said Conan. “We three are enough to pack the treasure down from the cave.”

  Strombanni grinned mirthlessly. “Go up there alone with you and Zarono? Do you take me for a fool? One man at least comes with me!”

  And he designated his boatswain, a brawny, hard-faced giant, naked to his broad leather belt, with gold hoops in his ears and a crimson scarf around his head.

  “And my executioner comes with me!” growled Zarono. He beckoned to a lean sea-thief with a face like a parchment-covered skull, who carried a two-handed scimitar naked over his bony shoulder.

  Conan shrugged his shoulders. “Very well. Follow me.”

  They were close on his heels as he strode up the winding path and mounted the ledge. They crowded him close as he passed through the cleft in the wall behind it, and their breath sucked greedily between their teeth as he called their attention to the iron-bound chests on either side of the short, tunnel-like cavern.

  “A rich cargo here,” he said carelessly. “Silks, laces, garments, ornaments, weapons—the loot of the southern seas. But the real treasure lies beyond that door.”

  The massive door stood partly open. Conan frowned. He remembered closing that door before he left the cavern. But he said nothing of the matter to his eager companions as he drew aside to let them through.

  They looked into a wide cavern, lit by a strange, blue glow that glimmered through a smoky, mistlike haze. A great ebon table stood in the midst of the cavern, and, in a carved chair with a high back and broad arms, which might once have stood in the castle of some Zingaran baron, sat a giant figure, fabulous and fantastic. There sat Bloody Tranicos, his great head sunk on his bosom, one hand still gripping a jeweled goblet—Tranicos, in his lacquered hat, his gilt-embroidered coat with jeweled buttons that winked in the blue flame, his flaring boots and gold-worked baldric, which upheld a jewel-hilted sword in a golden sheath.

  And ranging the board, each with his chin resting on his lace-bedecked breast, sat the eleven captains. The blue fire played weirdly on them and on their giant admiral, as it flowed from the enormous jewel on the tiny ivory pedestal, striking glints of frozen fire from the heaps of fantastically-cut gems that shone before the place of Tranicos—the plunder of Khemi, the jewels of Tothmekri! The stones whose value was greater than that of all the rest of the known jewels in the world put together!

  The faces of Zarono and Strombanni showed pallid in the blue glow. Over their shoulders, their men gaped stupidly.

  “Go in and take them,” invited Conan, drawing aside.

  Zarono and Strombanni crowded avidly past him, jostling each other in their haste. Their followers were treading on their heels. Zarono kicked the door wide open—and halted, with one foot on the threshold, at the sight of a figure on the floor, previously hidden from view by the partly-closed door. It was a man, prone and contorted, with his head drawn back between his shoulders and his white face twisted in a grin of mortal agony.

  “Galbro!” exclaimed Zarono. “Dead! What—” With sudden suspicion, he thrust his head over the threshold. Then he jerked back and screamed: “There’s death in the cavern!”

  Even as he screamed, the blue mist swirled and condensed. At the same time, Conan hurled his weight against the four men bunched in the doorway, sending them staggering—but not headlong into the misty cavern as he had planned. Suspecting a trap, they were recoiling from the sight of the dead man and the materializing demon. Hence his violent push, while it threw them off their feet, yet failed of the result he desired. Strombanni and Zarono sprawled half over the threshold on their knees, the boatswain tumbled over their legs, and the executioner caromed against the wall.

  Before Conan could follow up his ruthless intention of kicking the fallen men into the cavern and holding the door against them until the supernatural horror within had done its deadly work, he had to run and defend himself against the frothing onslaught of the executioner, who was the first to regain his balance and his wits.

  The buccaneer missed a tremendous swipe with his headsman’s sword as the Cimmerian ducked, and the great blade banged against the stone wall, spattering blue sparks. The next instant, the executioner’s skull-faced head rolled on the cavern floor under the bite of Conan’s cutlass.

  In the split seconds this swift action consumed, the boatswain regained his feet and fell on the Cimmerian, raining blows with a cutlass that would have overwhelmed a lesser man. Cutlass met cutlass with a ring of steel that was deafening in the narrow cavern.

  Meanwhile the two captains, terrified of they knew not what in the cavern, scuttled back out of the doorway so quickly that the demon had not fully materialized before they were over the magical boundary and out of its reach. By the time they rose to their feet, reaching for their swords, the monster had diffused again into blue mist.

  Hotly engaged with the boatswain, Conan redoubled his efforts to dispose of his antagonist before help could come to him. The boatswain dripped blood at each step as he was driven back before the ferocious onslaught, bellowing for his companions. Before Conan could deal the finishing stroke, the two chiefs came at him with swords in their hands, shouting for their men.

  The Cimmerian bounded back and leaped out on to the ledge. Although he felt himself a match for all three men—each a famed swordsman—he did not wish to be trapped by the crews, which would come charging up the path at the sound of the battle.

  These were not coming with as much celerity as he expected, however. They were bewildered by the sounds and the muffled shouts issuing from the cavern above them, but no man dared start up the path for fear of a sword in the back. Each band faced the other tensely, grasping their weapons but incapable of decision. When they saw the Cimmerian bound out on the ledge, they still hesitated. While they stood with their arrows nocked, he ran up the ladder of handholds niched in the crag near the cleft and threw himself prone on the summit of the crag, out of their sight.

  The captains stormed out on the ledge, raving and brandishing their swords.

  Their men, seeing that their leaders were not at sword-strokes, ceased menacing each other and gaped in bewilderment

  “Dog!” screamed Zarono. “You planned to trap and murder us! Traitor!”

  Conan mocked them from above. “Well, what did you expect? You two were planning to cut my throat as soon as I got the plunder for you. If it hadn’t been for that fool Galbro, I should have trapped the four of you and explained to your men how you rushed in heedless to your doom.”

  “And with us both dead, you’d have taken my ship and all the loot, too!” frothed Strombanni.

  “Aye! And the pick of each crew! I’ve been thinking of coming back to the Main for months, and this was a good opportunity!

  “It was Galbro’s footprints I saw on the trail, although I know not how the fool learned of this cave, or how he expected to lug the loot away by himself.”

  “But for the sight of his body, we should have walked into that deathtrap,” muttered Zarono, his swarthy face still ashy.

  “What was it,” said Strombanni. “Some poisonous mist?”

  “Nay, it writhed like a live thing and came together in some fiendish form ere we backed out. It is some devil bound to the cave by a spell.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” their unseen tormentor yelled sardonically.

  “What shall we do?” Zarono asked Strombanni. “The treasure cavern cannot be entered.”

  “You, can’t get the treasure,” Conan assured them from his eyrie. “The demon will strangle you. It nearly got me, when I stepped in there. Liste
n, and I’ll tell you a tale the Picts tell in their huts when the fires bum low!

  “Once, long ago, twelve strange men came out of the sea. They fell upon a Pictish village and put all the folk to the sword, except a few who fled in time. Then they found a cave and heaped it with gold and jewels. But a shaman of the slaughtered Picts—one of those who escaped—made magic and evoked a demon from one of the lower hells. By his sorcerous powers, he forced this demon to enter the cavern and strangle the men as they sat at wine. And, lest this demon thereafter roam abroad and molest the Picts themselves, the shaman confined it by his magic to the inner cavern. The tale was told from tribe to tribe, and all the clans shun the accursed spot.

  “When I crawled in there to escape the Eagle Picts, I realized that the old legend was true and referred to Tranicos and his men. Death guards old Tranicos’s treasure!”

  “Bring up the men!” frothed Strombanni. “We’ll climb up and hew him down!”

  “Don’t be a fool!” snarled Zarano. “Think you any man on earth could climb those handholds in the teeth of his sword? We’ll have the men up here, right enough, to feather him with shafts if he dares show himself. But we’ll get those gems yet. He has some plan of obtaining the loot, or he’d not have brought thirty men to bear it back. If he could get it, so can we. We’ll bend a cutlass blade to make a hook, tie it to a rope, and cast it about the leg of that table, then drag it to the door.”

  “Well thought, Zarono!” came down Conan’s mocking voice. “Exactly what I had in mind. But how will you find your way back to the beach path? It’ll be dark long before you reach the beach, if you have to feel your way through the woods, and I’ll follow you and kill you one by one in the dark.”

  “If’s no empty boast,” muttered Strombanni. “He can move and strike in the dark as subtly and silently as a ghost. If he hunts us back through the forest, few of us will live to see the beach.”

  “Then we’ll kill him here,” gritted Zarono. “Some of us will shoot at him, while the rest climb the crag. If he is not struck by arrows, some of us will reach him with our swords. Listen! Why does he laugh?”