Conan and the Manhunters

by John Maddox Roberts

  Conan leaned in through the round hole and looked downward. The interior was Hooded with unnatural red light from the remaining windows. They were almost directly above one of the naked female caryatids.

  'Is anyone down there?' Chamik asked. 'Are we discovered?'

  'No sign of life,' Conan said. 'And no sense in waiting. Give me the rope.' He pulled back from the portal, grasped the coil of rope in his arms and heaved it through the opening. Instantly, he followed after it. The rope fell, uncoiling to its full length, and snapped wildly about for a few seconds. Then it swung lazily, just a few inches short of the floor.

  With a Cimmerian's practised skill in all forms of climbing, Conan lowered himself hand under hand, kicking away from the caryatid from time to time when he swung too close, and in less than a minute dropped soundlessly to the floor. He stepped away from the rope and drew his sword, the blade making a faint hiss as it cleared his sheath.

  All senses alert, Conan looked around. A great silence reigned over the vast interior. There was no movement. The place might have been deserted.

  Quickly, Ubo, Chamik and Mamos came down the rope. Each stood blowing upon his stinging palms for a few seconds, then drew his weapon and stood by his chief. Layla swarmed down with agility and held the end of the rope while her father descended. By the time he reached the floor, his palms were bleeding, but he took no notice. He stood by Conan and surveyed the temple as if his eyes could pierce through its stone walls and floor. He signalled and began to walk slowly toward the far end of the building.

  Just as cautiously, the others followed him. They crouched, sliding their feet so as to make little noise, holding weapons well clear of their bodies to avoid steel clashing against a buckle or the pommel of a sheathed dagger. They drew closer and closer to the awful, repellent altar.

  In some indefinable fashion, the hideous knot of serpents seemed to have changed. When last they had seen it, the thing had been half covered by a heavy cloth. Now fully exposed, it appeared somehow larger, with the serpent-heads protruding farther than they had before. The viper-heads were subtly altered, having no eyes but with their mouths gaping open. The usually impassive Volvolicus seemed to be shaken by the sight, and a line of sweat beads appeared along his hairline. Somehow Conan did not think that this was caused by the mage's strenuous descent down the rope. He leaned close, so that his lips were near Volvolicus's ear.

  'Where are they?' he whispered.

  Slowly the wizard pointed, a long, thin finger extended. It was directed straight down the stairway to the crypt.

  'That solves one part of our problem,' Layla whispered. 'How to get them down there.'

  The bandits rolled their eyes in terror. Even the curse of the wizards seemed a little thing in comparison with returning to that crypt. Conan brandished his blade at them and pointed. His fierce eyes told them that no amount of danger was more certain than the death he would inflict instantly. Gulping, their fingers flexing nervously around the hilts of their swords and daggers, they began to tiptoe down the stairs.

  Layla followed after the bandits, and after her went her father. Conan had a final look around the temple before he started down the steps. Then something about the altar made him pause. It was one of the serpent heads, one that protruded yet farther than the others. It was also somewhat larger, and its sketchy features different from theirs. It had something like the aspect of a human face, but these features were fading and the substance seemed to move, smoothing out to blankness. A thrill of horror went up the Cimmerian's spine as a thin line appeared horizontally across its surface. The line widened into a definite split, then the two edges began to pull back. What they exposed looked horribly like an eye.

  Not waiting to see more, Conan rushed down the stair. At the bottom he found his companions and he heard a loud chanting in a language that was not merely incomprehensible, but was made entirely of syllables unpronounceable by human tongue and palate. The three priests of Ahriman stood bathed in an ugly green light, and that light also revealed that the walls of the chamber were angled in a fashion that was not possible in the natural world, so twisting the human eye that one could not even count how many walls there were. Not only that, but they were in constant, agitated motion, rippling like a vat of sea anemones. It resembled nothing so much as being within the stomach of a giant.

  'What do we do now, Chief?' Mamos cried, terror raising the pitch of his voice to a shriek. All of the bandits seemed paralysed with the horror of their situation.

  'You must do as Feng-Yoon commanded!' Volvolicus said, having to shout to make his voice heard above the rumbling chant and the even more horrid sounds coming from around them. Conan could not understand how they had not heard any of this ghastly cacophony while they were above. 'To the wall with them!' Layla cried.

  For the first time, the priests seemed to take notice of them. Their faces looked less human than ever. They continued their chant, but their visages altered into a parody of terror. Conan leapt before the one named Shosq and thrust his sword at the priest's belly.

  'Back!' Conan commanded. 'Get back against the wall!'

  At this, Tragthan ceased his chant. 'No! You must not do this! It will be—'

  But the Cimmerian was beyond hearing him. He wanted to be away from this place as he had desired few things in his life. He pushed at his hilt, forcing the priest backward a slow, reluctant step at a time.

  'It cannot be!' screamed the priest. 'The Lord Ahriman will take—' Then the priest's back touched the repulsively rippling wall and his face was transfigured by pain and horror. His voice rose into a prolonged howl, smoke and vile fluids shot from his mouth. The shapeless, crawling stuff of the wall began to ooze over him. Still the priest howled and bubbled.

  The bandits snapped from their paralysis and rushed forward. Ubo and Chamik seized Nikas, one to each arm, and thrust him toward the wall, hurling him face-first into the unearthly, half-organic substance. It erupted into finger-like tendrils that grasped Nikas and oozed an acidic fluid over him. As the bandits gaped, Nikas began to smoke and liquefy.

  Mamos took Tragthan by the throat and shoved him back, digging at the priest's belly with the point of his dagger. 'Back!' Mamos screamed with a hysterical laugh. 'Back into the wall!' He pushed and Tragthan fought, resisting with the reptilian strength of a desperate python.

  Layla ran to Tragthan and added her weight to that of Mamos's. Fighting at every step, the arch-priest staggered back. 'No! Lord Ahriman wakes! We must control his advent, else—' Then his inhuman eyes began to start from their sockets, for his back had touched the wall and he was sinking into it like a man falling into thick mud. Layla jumped back, but Tragthan's claw-like hand sank its talons deeper into the shoulder of Mamos, convulsively drawing him closer. The black substance of the wall wrapped them in thin tendrils, and Mamos's high-pitched laugh rose to a keening wail as the two figures, human and semi-human, began to melt together.

  'Out!' Conan shouted. 'Get out of here now!' He could take no more. Shifting his sword to his left hand, he drew his dirk with his right and hurled it, splitting the back of: Mamos's skull and the brain beneath. He hoped that sudden death would spare the bandit from being absorbed into the unthinkable being of Ahriman.

  Ubo and Chamik needed no urging. They rushed to the stair. Even as they bounded upward, the walls and ceiling, which had been of natural stone, began to alter, to lose their clear definition as cut stone and become something hideously other, and to glow an unhealthy green.

  'Go!' Conan shouted, shoving at Volvolicus, who stood transfixed. His daughter seized an arm and began to drag him toward the metamorphosing stairway. The wizard seemed to shake off his paralysis and stumbled toward relative safety. The Cimmerian was close behind them, pushing at Volvolicus's back.

  Conan's flesh crawled as he felt the steps shift and soften beneath his feet. From behind them came rushing, liquid sounds, as if the crypt were filling with thick, viscous fluids. The shrieking of the priests could still be heard
above the horrid uproar; then it trailed away in choking gurgles. The walls of the stair began to ripple and contract.

  Just as Conan thought he could bear no more, he and his companions burst from the stairway into the temple. Even as the Cimmerian dived head foremost through the opening, it shut behind him with a disgusting, smacking sound. He scrambled to his feet and saw that Ubo and Chamik were backing away, pointing behind him and looking even more terrified than they had down in the crypt. Behind them some sort of commotion was stirring, but Conan had no attention to spare for it. Sword still in hand, he whirled and was frozen to the spot by the horror that was rising before him.

  The former altar was now in a grotesque writhing motion, the snakes transformed into squirming tentacles tipped with wetly flexing, toothless mouths, each rimmed with waving scarlet tendrils. A thicker central tentacle bore a huge, glowing eye that shone yellow and swarmed with tiny pupils. The monstrous object rose from the floor on a thick neck ridged and grooved like the rough bark of a tree. A sickening, acidic stench filled the air as an opening gaped in the fore-part of the neck and belched forth glowing steam. With growing dismay, Conan realized that the disgusting mouth had been the door to the crypt. The stairway was the grotesque creature's gullet.

  The Cimmerian was shaken from his horrified reverie when he understood that he was surrounded by foreign sorcerers and that they were all ignoring him, engaged as they were in casting their complex spells with strange gestures and songs and incomprehensible apparatus. Foremost among them stood Volvolicus, his arms raised and spread, eyes wild as he screamed out a powerful spell. Above them, the very stones of the temple began to shift. A round, glowing window fell from the clerestory and shattered, exploding into a mighty scarlet glare. Another huge stone fell upon the unnatural head of Ahriman, pulping several of its tentacles.

  Around the lower rim of the chaotic head of the god, some of the tentacles grew and thickened, transforming into reaching arms. They groped toward the rushing figures on the temple floor. A Zamoran's spell proved inadequate protection and he was snatched up screaming and thrust into the thing's gaping maw.

  Volvolicus turned and directed his spell toward one of the caryatids. Slowly, a change came over the stone woman and she began to move. Creaking, her head turned toward the god who was struggling to be born into the world of men. Her leg stretched out and she descended from her base, tearing loose the massive, blocky capital she had been supporting. A large piece of the ceiling above the capital collapsed and shattered into fragments on the floor.

  The magnificent, naked giantess of marble strode toward the monster, the floor of the temple trembling beneath her! feet. She raised the heavy block of stone overhead, and the carved muscles of her back rolled powerfully as she hurled the capital into the midst of the writhing tentacles. The awful head reeled under the blow, and foul fluids gushed from the crushed tentacles. The stone woman rushed forward and grappled with the creature, the two of them swaying in an obscene embrace.

  'Chief!' Ubo pleaded, tugging at Conan's tunic. 'Come! This is no place for us!' A great crash made them turn. Another caryatid was stepping down from her base amid a shower of masonry.

  'The whole place must come down soon!' Chamik said. 'If the god does not eat us first!'

  'Aye,' Conan agreed. 'We've no work in this place. Let us be gone.' He looked around for Layla and saw her backed against a stone pedestal beneath one of the still stationary caryatids. With her arms pressed against the unyielding stone, she stared upward at the rising head of the god, the horror of the events before her finally destroying her iron nerve. Conan rushed to her side and pulled her away even as the naked stone woman above her began to move.

  'Get away from there!' Conan shouted, snatching her from beneath the descending foot of the colossus. They ran from the falling blocks as the caryatid strode toward the struggling mass, the chains of marble with which she had been bound clattering against her naked thighs.

  'Oh, no!' shouted Ubo. 'Have we not troubles enough?' He halted in his mad race for the portal, for armed soldiers were pouring in through the now open gateway, the fang-like bars of the portcullis looming above them.

  'Over here!' Conan said, punching and dragging his companions behind the vacated base of a stone giantess. 'They'll pay us no notice once they see what lies before them.'

  Indeed, the soldiers came to a skidding halt when they saw the struggle going on at the far end of the nave. Four of the stone caryatids now grappled with the god, their glossy stone

  skin slimed with the sickening fluids as they tore tentacles from the unnatural thing with their hands and bit at it with teeth of marble.

  'What is all this?' shouted a near-hysterical voice. 'I will not have it! I must have my treasure back!' Someone pushed through the gaping mass of soldiers and strode out before them.

  'What is—' Torgut Khan's jaw dropped as his eyes took in the spectacle. He scanned the gigantic room, the frantically struggling forms, the wildly gyrating figures of the magicians, who made the temple flash with the power of their spells. More of the windows fell from above, causing the light of a distant star to explode throughout the nave even as chunks of stone rained down. Unable to comprehend all he saw, Torgut Khan's eyes fastened upon Conan, still crouching behind the pedestal with his companions.

  'You!' the viceroy shrieked. 'You brought all this about!' He snatched a spear from a guardsman. 'Die, barbarian!' With all his might, he hurled the weapon at the Cimmerian.

  Even as the spear hurtled toward him, Conan was in motion not away or to one side of the weapon's path, but directly toward it. When the cruel, flesh-piercing point was only three feet from his body, Conan leaned easily aside and caught it as it passed, catching the shaft precisely at the balance-point.

  'Thanks,' he said as he made a half-turn and faced toward Ahriman and the stone women. His arm came up and back, balancing the ash shaft in his palm, the steel point pausing for a moment by his right ear. Then he cast the weapon with a mighty surge of his whole body, every muscle putting its force behind the weapon, every bone adding its own power of leverage.

  The onlookers gazed in stupefaction as the spear flew in a high arc for the entire length of the nave, soaring for a distance no ordinary man could ever achieve. The spear reached the top of its trajectory and began to descend, seeming to pick up speed in the process. It passed over the beautiful, glossy shoulder of a marble woman and sank its full length into the evil, staring eye.

  A terrible, unearthly moan resounded through the temple, its high pitch rending to the ears, its low tones shaking yet more masonry from the ravaged temple. The twisting tentacles began to change colour, and thin streamers of yellow and blue lightning crawled over the monster's surface, glowing green where they crossed. A stone woman thrust one entire arm and shoulder into the thing's gaping mouth and tore out a great handful of something that resembled greyish brain tissue. She dropped the nauseating mass to the floor and reached inside for more.

  Regaining control of their limbs, the soldiers whirled and fled screaming, dropping weapons and shields, knocking over and trampling upon one another, forgetting everything in their terrible, driving need to get out. They crowded into the gateway, filling it to choking. Torgut Khan was in their midst, hacking at his own men with his sword to carve himself a faster means of exit.

  'Now is our chance!' Conan said. 'All will be chaos out side and we can escape unnoticed.'

  'My father!' Layla cried, tugging at him.

  'There is nothing we can do to help him,' Conan said. 'He will survive or he will not. We must be away.'

  She tried to pull back. 'I will not leave him!'

  With a muttered curse, Conan grasped both her wrists in one hand, stooped, and gathered her ankles in the other. He hoisted her over his shoulders and began to trot toward the gate like a shepherd returning a lost sheep to his flock.

  'Women sometimes have strange moods,' Ubo commiserated, running alongside the barbarian. They reached the gate just as the
last of the soldiers passed through and paused outside.

  'Let them spread the panic,' Conan cautioned.

  'Aye,' said Chamik. 'That is wise.'

  The square had filled, the townspeople awakened sleep and drawn to the site of the commotion. Fire-gongs were ringing all over the town, for the light flaring through the great holes in the temple roof had caused distant watchmen to think the town centre was afire. The outrush of the terrified soldiers spread the panic to the gawkers as well, and the soldiers even plied their weapons against the townsfolk, stabbing and cutting down many in their frantic need to escape. Soon the uproar was general.

  'There's a cool one,' Ubo commented. He pointed to a tall man who was walking calmly toward the temple, ignoring the chaos around him. He began to mount the steps as if he were in his own house. Conan recognized the long black robe as Stygian, and the cadaverous features and shaven skull as belonging to the priestly caste. The man crossed the stone pave and did not glance at them as he passed within. Thoth-amon had arrived.

  'This way,' Conan said. Still carrying the thrashing woman across his shoulders, he ran along the edge of the square and ducked into an alley between two buildings. With his unerring sense of direction, he led them through a warren of narrow streets, where the inhabitants were thrusting their sleep-tousled heads from windows and doorways to ask each other what was happening.

  Soon they were back at the stable, where they found Auda awake, their horses saddled and ready. Conan set Layla down. 'Are you prepared to act sensibly now?' She nodded silently.

  'What goes on?' Auda asked. 'There is uproar all over the city!'

  'Heroic doings,' Ubo told him. 'We slew a god, but the folk are confused, so we must not tarry to await their thanks.' He swung into his saddle and the others did the same.

  They rode from the stable to the nearby gate, where the guards accosted them.

  'Who are you? You must wait until we open the gates in the morning to leave the city! There is an emergency, do you not hear the gongs and see the fires?' The officer of the