Conan's eyes swept the bloody, naked group, and he cursed to see only a score. In the stress of the moment he grasped a corsair by the neck and shook him so violently that blood from the man's wounds spattered all near them.
`Where are the rest?' he bellowed in his victim's ear.
`That's all!' the other yelled back, above the roar of the geyser. `The others were all killed by those black-'
`Well, get out of here!' roared Conan, giving him a thrust that sent him staggering headlong toward the outer archway. `That fountain is going to burst in a moment-'
`We'll all be drowned!' squawked a Freebooter, limping toward the arch.
`Drowned, hell!' yelled Conan. `We'll be turned to pieces of petrified bone! Get out, blast you!'
He ran to the outer archway, one eye on the green roaring tower that loomed so awfully above him, the other on stragglers. Dazed with blood-lust, fighting, and the thunderous noise, some of the Zingarans moved like men in a trance. Conan hurried them up; his method was simple. He grasped loiterers by the scruff of the neck, impelled them violently through the gate, added impetus with a lusty kick in the rear, spicing his urgings for haste with pungent comments on the victim's ancestry. Sancha showed an inclination to remain with him, but he jerked away her twining arms, blaspheming luridly, and accelerated her movements with a tremendous slap on the posterior that sent her scurrying across the plateau.
Conan did not leave the gate until he was sure all his men who yet lived were out of the castle and started across the level meadow. Then he glanced again at the roaring pillar looming against the sky, dwarfing the towers, and he too fled that castle of nameless horrors.
The Zingarans had already crossed the rim of the plateau and were fleeing down the slopes. Sancha waited for him at the crest of the first slope beyond the rim, and there he paused for an instant to look back at the castle. It was as if a gigantic green-stemmed and white-blossomed flower swayed above the towers; the roar filled the sky. Then the jade-green and snowy pillar broke with a noise like the rending of the skies, and walls and towers were blotted out in a thunderous torrent.
Conan caught the girl's hand, and fled. Slope after slope rose and fell before them, and behind sounded the rushing of a river. A glance over his straining shoulder showed a broad green ribbon rising and falling as it swept over the slopes. The torrent had not spread out and dissipated; like a giant serpent it flowed over the depressions and the rounded crests. It held a consistent course - it was following them.
The realization roused Conan to a greater pitch of endurance. Sancha stumbled and went to her knees with a moaning cry of despair and exhaustion. Catching her up, Conan tossed her over his giant shoulder and ran on. His breast heaved, his knees trembled; his breath tore in great gasps through his teeth. He reeled in his gait. Ahead of him he saw the sailors toiling, spurred on by the terror that gripped them.
The ocean burst suddenly on his view, and in his swimming gaze floated the Wastrel, unharmed. Men tumbled into the boats helter-skelter. Sancha fell into the bottom and lay there in a crumpled heap. Conan, though the blood thundered in his ears and the world swam red to his gaze, took an oar with the panting sailors.
With hearts ready to burst from exhaustion, they pulled for the ship. The green river burst through the fringe of trees. Those trees fell as if their stems had been cut away, and as they sank into the jade-colored flood, they vanished. The tide flowed out over the beach, lapped at the ocean, and the waves turned a deeper, more sinister green.
Unreasoning, instinctive fear held the buccaneers, making them urge their agonized bodies and reeling brains to greater effort; what they feared they knew not, but they did know that in that abominable smooth green ribbon was a menace to body and to soul. Conan knew, and as he saw the broad line slip into the waves and stream through the water toward them, without altering its shape or course, he called up his last ounce of reserve strength so fiercely that the oar snapped in his hands.
But their prows bumped against the timbers of the Wastrel, and the sailors staggered up the chains, leaving the boats to drift as they would. Sancha went up on Conan's broad shoulder, hanging limp as a corpse, to be dumped unceremoniously on to the deck as the Barachan took the wheel, gasping orders to his skeleton of a crew. Throughout the affair, he had taken the lead without question, and they had instinctively followed him. They reeled about like drunken men, fumbling mechanically at ropes and braces. The anchor chain, unshackled, splashed into the water, the sails unfurled and bellied in a rising wind. The Wastrel quivered and shook herself, and swung majestically seaward. Conan glared shoreward; like a tongue of emerald flame, a ribbon licked out on the water futilely, an oar's length from the Wastrel's keel. It advanced no further. From that end of the tongue, his gaze followed an unbroken stream of lambent green, across the white beach, and over the slopes, until it faded in the blue distance.
The Barachan, regaining his wind, grinned at the panting crew. Sancha was standing near him, hysterical tears coursing down her cheeks. Conan's breeks hung in blood-stained tatters; his girdle and sheath were gone, his sword, driven upright into the deck beside him, was notched and crusted with red. Blood thickly clotted his black mane, and one ear had been half torn from his head. His arms, legs, breast and shoulders were bitten and clawed as if by panthers. But he grinned as he braced his powerful legs, and swung on the wheel in sheer exuberance of muscular might.
`What now?' faltered the girl.
`The plunder of the seas!' he laughed. `A paltry crew, and that chewed and clawed to pieces, but they can work the ship, and crews can always be found. Come here, girl, and give me a kiss.'
`A kiss?' she cried hysterically. `You think of kisses at a time like this?'
His laughter boomed above the snap and thunder of the sails, as he caught her up off her feet in the crook of one mighty arm, and smacked her red lips with resounding relish.
`I think of Life!' he roared. `The dead are dead, and what has passed is done! I have a ship and a fighting crew and a girl with lips like wine, and that's all I ever asked. Lick your wounds, bullies, and break out a cask of ale. You're going to work ship as she never was worked before. Dance and sing while you buckle to it, damn you! To the devil with empty seas! We're bound for waters where the seaports are fat, and the merchant ships are crammed with plunder!'
Conan The Buccaneer
Prologue:
DREAM OF BLOOD
Two hours before midnight, the princess Chabela awoke. Drawing the filmy coverlet about her naked body, the buxom daughter of King Ferdrugo of Zingara lay tense and trembling. She stared into the darkness, while cold horror sent thrills of premonition through her quickening nerves. Outside, rain drummed on the palace roofs.
What had it been about, that dark and dreadful dream from whose shadowy clutches her soul had so barely escaped?
Now that the ghastly dream was over, she could hardly recall its details. There had been darkness, and evil eyes glaring through the murk; the glitter of knives―and blood. Blood everywhere: on the sheets, on the tiled floor, crawling beneath the door ―red, sticky, sluggishly flowing blood!
Shuddering, Chabela tore her thoughts from this morbid introspection. The glimmer of a night light caught her glance; it came from a waxen taper in a sconce on the low, ornate prie-dieu across the chamber. On the prie-dieu also stood a small painted icon of Mitra, Lord of Light and chief divinity of the Kor-davan pantheon. An impulse to seek supernatural guidance brought her to stand shivering on the tiles. Wrapping the lacy coverlet about her voluptuous, olive-hued body, she crossed the bedchamber to kneel before the idol. Her night-black torrent of hair poured down her back like a cataract of a liquid midnight.
Atop the prie-dieu stood a small silver canister of incense. She uncapped it and tossed a few grains of the gummy powder into the flickering flame. The rich odor of nard and myrrh filled the air.
Chabela clasped her hands and bowed as if to pray, but no words came. Her mind was a jumble. Strive as she would, she could not attain
the serene inner control required for effective divine supplication.
It came to her that, for many days, shadowy terrors had lurked in the palace.
The old king had seemed distant, distraught, preoccupied with unknown problems.
He had aged astoundingly, as if his vitality were being sucked away by some phantasmal leech. Some of his decrees had been unlike him, at variance with the tenor of his previous reign. There were times when another person's spirit seemed to peer through his faded old eyes, to speak with his slow, harsh voice, or to scrawl a wavering signature on documents that he had dictated. The thought was absurd, but it was there.
And then, these terrible dreams of knives and blood and staring eyes; of thickening, watchful shadows that peered and whisperedl Abruptly, her mind cleared as if a fresh wind from the sea had blown a mist away from her consciousness. She found she could name the feeling of haunting dread that oppressed her. It was as if some dark force had striven to seize control of her very mind.
Horror filled her; a sob of loathing shook her rounded body. Her full young breasts, proud globes of pale tan under the lacy veils, rose and fell. She threw herself prone before the little altar, her black hair sliding in gleaming coils over the tiles. She prayed: "Lord Mitra, defender of the House of Ramiro, champion of mercy and justice, chastiser of depravity and cruelty, help me, I beg thee, in my hour of need!
Tell me what to do, I beseech thee, mighty Lord of Light!"
Rising, she opened the golden box beside the canister on the prie-dieu and drew forth a dozen slim rods of carven sandalwood. Some of these divining straws were short, some long; some were branched or crooked, others straight and plain.
She threw them down at random on the floor before the altar. The clatter of the slender sticks was loud in the silence.
She peered down at the jumble of fallen rods, the black bell of her hair framing her young face. Her eyes rounded with awe.
The sticks spelled T-O-V-A-R-R-O.
The girl repeated the name. "Tovarro," she said slowly. "Go to Tovarro…"
Determination flashed in her dark eyes. "I will!" she vowed. Tonight! Ill rout out Captain Kapellez…"
As she moved about the chamber, flashes of lightning from the storm outside intermittently lighted the scene. She snatched garments from a chest. She gathered up a baldric with a scabbarded rapier and collected a warm cloak. She glided about the boudoir with a swift economy of motion.
From the prie-dieu, Mitra watched with glassy eyes. Was there a faint glitter of ghostly intelligence in the painted gaze? And a slight expression of stern pity on those sculptured lips? Was the rumble of distant thunder his voice? None could say.
Within the hour, however, Ferdnigo's daughter was gone from the palace. Thus was set in motion a sequence of fantastic events, which would bring a mighty warrior, a dreaded sorcerer, a proud princess, and ancient gods into a weird confrontation on the edge of the known world.
Chapter One
AN OLD ZINGARAN CUSTOM
The wind had been rising, whipping gusts of rain before it. Now, after midnight, the damp sea wind howled through the cobbled alleys that led away from the harbor. It swung the painted wooden signs above the doors of inns and taverns.
Starved mongrels cowered, shivering, in doorways against the wind and rain.
At this late hour, the revelers were done. Few lights burned in the houses of Kordava, capital of Zingara on the Western Ocean. Heavy clouds obscured the moon, and tattered rags of vapor scudded across the gloomy sky like ghosts. It was a dark, secretive hour ―the time of night when hard-eyed men whisper of treason and robbery; when masked assassins slink through nighted chambers, envenomed daggers bright in their black-gloved hands. A night for conspiracy; a night for murder.
A tramp of feet and the occasional clink of a sword in its scabbard made itself heard above the sounds of wind and rain. A detachment of the night watch ―six men, booted and cloaked, with hat brims pulled low against the weather and with pikes and halberds on shoulder―strode through the nighted streets. They made little noise, save an occasional low-voiced remark in the liquid Zingaran tongue. They glanced right and left sharply for signs r,x doors or windows feloniously forced; they listened for sounds of disturbance; they tramped on, thinking of the flagons of wine they would down, once their dank patrol was over.
After the watch had passed an abandoned stable with its roof half fallen in, two shadowy figures, who had been standing motionless inside, came to life. From beneath his cloak, one produced a small dark lantern and uncovered its bull's eye. The beam of the candle inside the lantern picked out a spot on the stable floor.
Stooping, the man with the lantern brushed dirt away and uncovered a stone trap door, to which was stapled a short length of chain ending in a bronze ring. Both men seized the ring and heaved. The trapdoor rose with a squeak of unoiled hinges. The two dark figures disappeared into the aperture, and the trap door returned with a thump to its former position.
A narrow stone stair spiraled down into darkness, feebly broken by the wavering beam of the dark lantern. Old and worn were the stones of this stair; mold and fungus beslimed the rounded steps. The must of centuries of decay wafted up the shaft.
The two black-cloaked men descended the stair with cautious, silent steps.
Silken masks concealed their features. Like shadowy specters, they felt their way downward, while a wet sea breeze from the passageways below―secret tunnels connected with the open sea―stirred their cloaks and raised them like the wings of giant bats.
High above the sleeping town, the towers of the castle of Villagro, duke of Kordava, soared against the somber sky. Few lights burned in the tall, slitted windows, for few of the dwellers were awake.
Far beneath this pile of ancient masonry, however, a man sat studying parchments by the light of a tall golden candelabrum, whose branches bore the likeness of intertwined serpents.
No cost had been spared to render the stony vault a seat of luxury. Walls of damp, rough stone were hung with richly embroidered tapestries. The cold stone flags of the floor were hidden by a thick, soft carpet of many colors―scarlet, gold, emerald, azure, and violet―in the complex, florid designs of distant Vendhya.
A taboret of gilded wood, decorated with subtly sensuous groupings of meticulously detailed nude figures in carved relief, bore a silver tray laden with refreshments: wine of Kyros in a crystal decanter, fruit and pastries in silver bowls.
The desk, whereat the man sat reading, was huge and ornately carved after the style of imperial Aquilonia to the northeast. An inkwell of gold and crystal held a peacock plume for a quill. A slender sword lay across the desk like a paperweight.
The man himself was of middle years, perhaps fifty, but lean and elegant. His slender legs were clad in black silken hose and graceful shoes of the beautifully tooled leather of Kordava, with gemmed buckles, which flashed as he impatiently tapped his toe. His wiry torso was clad in a doublet of turquoise velvet, the sleeves of which were puffed and slashed to display an inner lining of peach-colored satin. Snowy lace foamed at his lean wrists. A huge jewel gleamed on each finger of his carefully-groomed hands.
The man's age was revealed by the sagging flesh of his jowls and the dark, baggy circles beneath his cold, quick, dark eyes. He had obviously tried to hide his years, for the hair that was smoothly combed to his shoulders was dyed, and a veneer of powder softened the lines in his aristocratic features. But the cosmetics failed to conceal the roughened flesh, the discolor-ations beneath the hard, weary eyes, and the wattled neck.
With one bejewelled hand, he played with the parchments―official documents with gilt and crimson seals and fluttering ribbons, inscribed with ornate cursive penmanship. The man's tapping toe and the frequent glances at the handsome water clock on the sideboard betrayed his impatience. He also sent his dark glance toward a heavy arras in the corner.
Behind the man at the desk, a silent Kushite slave stood with heavily muscled arms folded upon his naked ches
t. Golden hoops flashed in his elongated earlobes; the candlelight shone on the musculature of his splendid torso. A naked scimitar was thrust through a crimson sash.
With a clashing of tiny gears, the water clock chimed. It was two hours past midnight.
With a muffled curse, the man at the desk threw down the crackling parchment he had been studying. At that instant, the arras was drawn aside, disclosing the mouth of a secret passage. Two men, cloaked and masked in black, stood in the mouth of the passage. One bore a small lantern; the light of the candelabrum sparkled on the intruders' wet cloaks.
The seated man had set one hand on the hilt of the rapier that lay across the desk, while the Kushite seized the scimitar at his waist. As the two men entered the chamber and doffed their masks, however, the older man relaxed.
"It's all right, Gomani," he said to the black, who again folded his arms on his chest and resumed his indifferent stare.
The two newcomers dropped their cloaks to form shapeless black heaps on the floor and bowed to him at the desk. The first man, tossing back the cowl of his robe to disclose a bald or shaven skull, hawk-nosed features, aloof black eyes, and a thin mouth, clasped his hands before his breast and bowed over them.
The other man set down his lantern and made a leg with courtly grace, doffing his plumed hat in a low bow and murmuring "My lord Duke!" When he rose again to stand nonchalantly with one hand on the jeweled hilt of a long sword, it could be seen that he was a tall, slender, black-haired man with sallow skin and a sharp-featured, predatory face. His thin black mustachios were so precise that they might have been added to his face by an artist. He had a flavor of spurious gentility: a touch of theatrical flamboyance and more than a touch of the piratical.
Villagro, duke of Kordava, fixed the gaunt Zingaran with an icy glance. "Master Zarono, I am not accustomed to being kept waiting," he observed.
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