Then horror swept over them and they ran screaming for the outer door, jammed there in a clawing shrieking mob, and burst through like madmen. Arus followed and the half-blind Posthumo struggled up and blundered blindly after his fellows, squealing like a wounded pig and begging them not to leave him behind. He fell among them and they knocked him down and trampled him, screaming in their fear. But he crawled after them, and after him came Demetrio. The Inquisitor had the courage to face the unknown, but he was unnerved and wounded, and the sword that had struck him down was still near him. Grasping his blood-spurting thigh, he limped after his companions. Police, charioteer and watchman, wounded or whole, they burst screaming into the street, where the men watching the building took panic and joined in the flight, not waiting to ask why. Conan stood in the great corridor alone, save for the corpses on the floor.
The barbarian shifted his grip on his sword and strode into the chamber. It was hung with rich silken tapestries; silken cushions and couches lay strewn about in careless profusion; and over a heavy gilded screen a face looked at the Cimmerian.
Conan stared in wonder at the cold classic beauty of that countenance, whose like he had never seen among the sons of men. Neither weakness nor mercy nor cruelty nor kindness, nor any other human emotion was in those features. They might have been the marble mask of a god, carved by a master hand, except for the unmistakable life in them - life cold and strange, such as the Cimmerian had never known and could not understand. He thought fleetingly of the marble perfection of the body which the screen concealed - it must be perfect, he thought, since the face was so inhumanly beautiful. But he could see only the god-like face, the finely molded head which swayed curiously from side to side. The full lips opened and spoke a single word in a rich vibrant tone that was like the golden chimes that ring in the jungle-lost temples of Khitai. It was an unknown tongue, forgotten before the kingdoms of man arose, but Conan knew that it meant, ‘Come!’
And the Cimmerian came, with a desperate leap and a humming slash of his sword. The beautiful head rolled from the top of the screen in a jet of dark blood and fell at his feet, and he gave back, fearing to touch it. Then his skin crawled, for the screen shook and heaved with the convulsions of something behind. Conan had seen and heard men die by the scores, and never had he heard a human being make such sounds in the death-throes. There was a thrashing, floundering noise, as if a great cable were being lashed violently about.
At last the movements ceased and Conan looked gingerly behind the screen. Then the full horror of it all rushed over the Cimmerian, and he fled, nor did he slacken his headlong flight until the spires of Numalia faded into the dawn behind him. The thought of Set was like a nightmare, and the children of Set who once ruled the earth and who now sleep in their nighted caverns far below the black pyramids. Behind that gilded screen there had been no human body - only the shimmering, headless coils of a gigantic serpent.
Conan The Warlord
Prologue: The Skeleton Troop
The Varakiel marshes were a desolate, legend-haunted place for a child to grow up in. From eastern Nemedia they stretch in uncounted leagues of isle and fen toward the sun's birthplace in the Brythunian steppe. Impassable alike to foot, hoof and boat, the great swamp has ever been a stagnant backwater of history, its miry expanse fabled as a death-snare for armies and a last refuge of hunted men.
For a boy of only eleven summers, life on the edge of such a vast, unexplored tract could be tantalizing in its sense of brooding mystery. The forlorn squeak of the marsh birds and the fluting of wind across nodding reeds permeated the soul, especially if the child was a dreamer, without brothers and sisters, and given to wandering away from familiar fields against his parents' warnings.
Lar had left his log raft far behind in the excitement of exploring the new land he had discovered-land that his father, strangely, had never spoken of. Doubtless the harsh old man knew of it, for he knew more of the Varakiel than anyone, and he reverenced its secrets.
Perhaps, then, this part was secret. Whether the cryptic expanse of dry ground was an island or a peninsula, the boy had not yet learned. The answer, in any case, might vary from season to season, depending on the yearly contest of flood and drought.
Lar's progress had been slowed by mires and willow thickets, and by the constant necessity of watching for bear, cat and snake. But ahead the terrain rose and opened out to a stretch of firm, dry grassland, like the farm pastures his father tilled far to westward. Rich, arable land, and yet not homesteaded-why?
Lowering the butt of his fishing spear to serve as a walking stick, Lar took up a swinging gait, scanning the horizon for tall trees or other vantage points.
Then, rounding an alder clump, he froze. A hideous sight reared just ahead of him: the bleached skeleton of a horse, upright and at the gallop, bearing on its back a grinning, skeletal rider clad in rusting scraps of armor!
Lar did not flee in superstitious terror. He regarded panic as beneath him, and his reason told him there was no immediate danger. He merely shrank back behind the screen of foliage and stood stock-still, listening. He heard only the rustle of leaves stirring in a breeze that had just arisen. No hoofbeats, no clank of arms. When the pounding of his heart subsided, Lar crept forth and looked past the alders once again.
The spectral rider was still there, galloping in place through sparse meadow grass. There was only one movement to the tableau, that of the fluttering, windborne tatters of colorless cloth yet clinging to the bones and decaying armor-clasps.
Spying carefully, Lar could see that horse and rider were fixed to the ground and held upright by a vertical wooden stake; it passed straight through the belly and saddle of the horse and up the empty rib cage of the horseman. He shuddered to note that the skull itself was impaled on the stake, the pointed end of which had apparently poked through bone to raise the rust-eaten crown of the helm a few inches above its normal fit.
Lar knew that slow impalement was a mode of execution favored by the stern Brythunians. He guessed instinctively that the rider, if not the horse, had been placed in that position while still living. The thought sickened him, yet he could not tear his eyes away.
He walked forward, widely skirting the elongated, big-toothed skull of the war stallion while gazing up at the dead rider. And he saw with a thrill of delicious fear that the horseman was the leader of a troop.
Spaced about the clearing in a loose formation, nine other horses and riders were impaled, each as ancient and desiccated as the first. Some of them had sunk to the bases of their weathered stakes, where they lay as mere piles of rust-stained bones, while others sported crusty-gray leather hauberks and wore the green-brass hilts of rotted iron tulwars at their waists.
Most peasant boys would have been overcome by the weird menace of the place. They would have run home, babbling incoherent tales for their parents to dismiss laughingly or to silence with stern, frightened looks.
But Lar was different; he was a dreamer, and his mind had ranged wider than the minds of most boys of eleven winters. In early boyhood he had pondered deeply the meaning of certain remarks heard on late evenings before the fire, when the adults thought him safely asleep in his chimney-corner.
Now he moved among the skeletons, chill awe sweeping over him. At the center of the cavalry formation lay another relic, the ruin of a chariot. The team that pulled it had not been staked upright as had the others, yet it waited patiently in its traces-three tumbled clumps of bone, tangled with leather harness straps in the grass. The vehicle was a mass of collapsed timbers: gray, splitting spokes and spars bleached white as the bones around them, crusted with lichen and with curling flakes of once-gaudy paint.
Mingled in the debris were parts of an eleventh human skeleton, the skull incomplete, doubtless cloven by some long-since rotted blade. Lar liked not the look of the ancient headbone's unbroken half, noting a strange flatness and elongation in contrast with the other skulls on display, and an odd prominence of tooth.
But there, in the midst of it all, shining from beneath a tattered leather scrap that might once have been a shield or an awning, Lar's eye caught the glint of an untarnished surface. He peered into the shadow and gasped. A golden statue! Kneeling before the wreckage, remembering to watch for swamp adders, he peeled back the leather fragment. Dry bones clacked as he shoved them eagerly aside.
It was an oval gem case, molded and embellished to look like a golden serpent's head. To one who had seen but few pieces of worked metal in his life, the intricacy of it seemed miraculous. The eyes were great gems; when Lar gingerly rubbed the dust from one of them with a fingertip, the faceted surface gleamed deep green. The serpent's fangs were also jewels, tapering prisms as clear as icicles.
Looking over the chest, Lar could see hinges at its rear. He placed a trembling hand between the fangs and raised the lid. It was heavy and stiff with disuse, but he managed to force it back to an upright position. The inner surface of the serpent's mouth blazed in the sun's rays, mirror-polished white gold. The bottom of the chest was full of blood-red gems from among which the snake's gold tongue protruded. But the real prize rested on the two-pronged tongue-a golden, jewel-encrusted chaplet.
Lar knew of crowns and treasures only through the fanciful tales spun by his uncles on midwinter evenings. Still, he understood instantly the ornament's use. He longed to place it on his brow .and view his reflection in the gleaming lid of the cask.
A sudden chill passed through him, and a terror touched his heart. He felt sure that if he dared look up, he would see the skeletal horsemen coming to life, flexing their chalk-white limbs, swiveling their creaky-hinged necks, wheeling their ghastly steeds toward him. He scarcely dared to raise his eyes. But finally he did, and saw that nothing was amiss. The riders were still there, the nearest looming over him as hideous as ever, yet motionless.
Iron clouds rolled over the marshland's distant reeds and trees, warning of a weather change. But nothing moved in the meadow except grass stalks. The wind among the bones made a faint sibilance in Lar's ears.
After all, he asked himself, what could be so evil or unholy about this place? Why should he fear to glimpse these vestiges of ancient power and mystic wonder? All his life he had heard the grandfolk prattle superstitiously against eldritch things; now he knew that he despised their cowardice! Not for him the cringing fears of ignorant serfs. He turned to the cask and reached inside to take the chaplet.
As his hand closed on the prize, he heard a metal latch disengage, and the lid of the chest slammed tightly down on his arm. He cried out in agony, feeling one of the ornamental serpent's needle-sharp fangs pierce his flesh to the bone.
Lar sobbed as he used his free hand to force the heavy, spring-loaded lid open, struggling to withdraw his arm. The deep perforation burned fiercely, like lye-yet already he felt a numbness creeping along the injured limb. His brain, too, was beginning to cloud.
As he pushed himself away from the chest and staggered upright, his dimming senses scarcely noticed that the serpent's jewel-pointed fang dripped not only blood, but yellow venom.
Three days later, his father found him staggering through a reed-choked slough near the leek field. He was dazed, and neither questions nor blows would bring him to speech. The old man hoisted his son on his shoulder and carried him back to their cottage, where the boy's mother waited.
"Lar! Oh Lar, my dearest child, why did you disobey me? Promise that you will never leave your mother's side again!" The distraught woman bathed and dried him, laid him on a pallet before the fire, and made a poultice for the festering wound on his arm.
Later, when the father had plodded off again to the fields, she tried to feed hot soup to her boy, but he would not take any. When she coaxed him, raising the wooden spoon to his lips, he seized her arm and bit it deeply. She screamed in his clutch; the wound burned like lye.
CHAPTER 1
The Dance of the Clubs
The dungeon was rank with the smells of human misery. Its fetid gloom made a tangible fog of despair that somehow was only deepened by the single source of light: a thin, dusty ray falling from a window grating high overhead. Where it struck the water puddled together with rotting hay on the floor, wisps of steam arose.
A score or more of the room's prisoners lounged or squatted in the shadows around its rough stone walls. Some of them were Nemedian serfs, swarthy-faced men clad in coarse, knee-length shirts corded at the waist with frayed rope. Others had more exotic rags and a more foreign look: jaunty street-thieves of Dinander, or wealthless travelers run afoul of municipal authority. The inmates varied widely in their physical health also, from the robust toughs loitering in choice positions near the cell door, to peasant wretches broken by torture, moaning in the darkest corners.
Least fortunate of all was the one who sprawled facedown in the center of the wet floor, his limbs twisted under him and one dirty, sandaled ankle protruding into the barred patch of daylight. It was his plight that seemed to concern his fellows the most, and they called attention to it in loud voices.
"Jailer! Poor Stolpa's dead! Come haul him away!"
"Yes, come and get him. He's starting to stink!"
A stout, full-bearded prisoner ambled to the wooden door and gave it three hard kicks that failed even to rattle its heavy timbers. He leaned down and shouted through the peephole: "Warden! Come along here! The fellow's been dead half the morning. He's going to sprout maggots!"
"Get rid of him! Get him out!" A chorus of yells and hoots built to a raucous crescendo. All the able men contributed lustily, with one exception.
He was a northern barbarian-a tall, well-muscled youth of perhaps eighteen seasons, with shaggy black hair and the faintest shadow of a beard. His ill-fitting townsman's shirt and trousers made a parody of his hulking size; yet as he lounged against the wall near the cell door, his catlike ease belied the ungainliness of his garb. He kept his eyes steadily on the doorway, whispering at intervals to the man beside him, a broken-nosed ruffian who now and again added a jeer to the general outcry.
"They are coming!" The crook-nosed man's battered face suddenly grew serious. "Just look to your own part, Conan! The others will do theirs."
"Aye, Rudo. May Crom favor us!"
A loud thump sounded at the door. The youth eased himself upright as his cellmates' shouts died away.
"You scum!" a gravelly voice racketed through the peephole. "Let's have some order in there, or I'll shoot quarrels into the lot of you!"
The bearded door-kicker took a step forward in front of the spyhole, spreading his hands amicably, and pointed to the motionless one in the center of the floor. "Your Honor, Stolpa's been dead for hours, and the cell's crowded as it is. We'd like to have him out of here, please."
"Dead, eh?" the unseen warder rasped. "And which of you miscreants throttled him?"
The spokesman nervously clasped his hands. "No one, sir. He's been ailing for some time, as you know."
"Well then, let his ailing carcass rot. And yours with it, Falmar!" The voice murmured irritably aside for a moment, then came back to the eyehole. "How do I know it's not a trick?"
A stir of displeasure sounded among the prisoners, and crook-nosed Rudo stepped quickly from his place beside the barbarian. He went to the middle of the cell and, waving aside the bearded man, addressed the door. "Sir. With your permission. . . ."
Elaborately he swung back his buskined foot, aimed and planted a kick in the middle of the inert body, with force enough to drive it a handsbreadth across the slimy floor.
"Stolpa's suffering has ended, sir." Rudo faced the door and lowered his head slightly. "Ours is only commencing. Will you take him, sir?"
The prisoners waited, as still as stones. After a moment an indistinct question and answer were exchanged outside the cell. Then the voice barked in through the peephole, "All right. But you must fetch him out, in case he died of the creeping palsy. Two of you carry him forth, no more."
Rudo and Falmar stooped over the body and hoisted i
t up by its legs and arms. As the dull sliding of the doorbolt sounded, the inmates shifted nervously.
The heavy panel grated inward.
"Come on, then! Be quick about it." The harsh voice belonged to a man with a gray-jowled face, wearing the bronze helmet and red-leather vest of a municipal guard. He indicated the way through the door with a jerk of his crossbow, and the corpse-bearers lugged their burden forward. A second, leaner jailer grasped the door by its bolt brackets, waiting to close it on their heels.
As they passed through the portal, the prisoners' tense watchfulness finally disintegrated; they made sudden, swift rush for the exit. The northern youth sprang to the door and, seizing the nearest guard's arm so as to wrench it free of the door handle, dragged the man bodily inside the cell; meanwhile, the two corpse-carriers set violently on the senior warder. Their attack was aided by their dead burden, Stolpa, who sprang out of their arms in a miraculous, frenzied resurrection.
Inside the dungeon the young barbarian took precious moments to beat down the guard with savage blows of his elbows and fists. He seized the man's cudgel, wrenching and twisting at its lanyard until he heard joints crack in the wrist it was tied to; finally the thong pulled loose. Clutching the hardwood baton, he threw aside its former owner, relinquishing him to the driving feet and fists of other prisoners.
Then, shrilling a bloodcurdling war-whoop, he hurled himself into the stream of men pouring through the doorway.
By that time the wardroom was a mass of fighting bodies. The thick-jowled warden was down and disarmed, trying to crawl out from beneath the fight, his face bright with blood from a split in his scalp. At least four other guards had joined the fray; as the barbarian shouldered through the crowd, two more uniformed men mustered up the narrow stone stair from the torture-rooms.
The Conan Compendium Page 191