Carrying her with careful tenderness, he limped toward the reed-masked riverbank and lay her down gently on the dry, cushioning reeds. Filling his cupped palms with river water, the barbarian bathed her white face and cleansed her cuts as gently as a mother might tend her child.
Her wounds proved superficial, mere bruises, save for the cut on her brow. And even that, although it had bled heavily, was far from mortal.
Conan grunted with relief and bathed the girl's face and brow with cold, clear water. Then, awkwardly pillowing her head against his chest, he dribbled some of the water between her half-parted lips. She gasped, choked a little, and came awake―staring up at him from eyes like dark stars, clouded with bewilderment and the shadows of fear.
'Who―what―the bats!'
'They are gone now, girl,' he said gruffly. 'You have naught to fear.
Came you hither from Yaralet?'
'Yes―yes―but who are you?'
'Conan, a Cimmerian. What is a lass like you doing on a battlefield?'
he demanded.
But she seemed not to hear. Her brow frowned a little, as one in thought, and half under her breath she repeated his name.
'Conan―Conan―yes, that was the name!' Wonderingly she lifted her gaze to his scarred, brown face. 'It was you I was sent to seek. How strange that you should find me!'
'And who sent you to seek me, wench?' he rumbled suspiciously.
'I am Hildico, a Brythunian, slave to the House of Atalis the Far-seeing, who dwells yonder in Yaralet. My master sent me in secret to move among the warriors of King Yildiz, to seek one Conan, a mercenary of Cimmeria, and to bring him by a private way to his house within the city. You are the man I seek!'
'Aye? And what does your master want with me?'
The girl shook her dark head. 'That I know not! But he said to tell you that he means no harm, and that much gold can be yours, if you will come.'
'Gold, eh?' he mused, speculatively, helping her to her feet and steadying her with a brawny arm about her slim white shoulders as she staggered weakly.
'Yes. But I came not to the field in time to seek you before the battle. So I hid in the reeds along the river's edge to avoid the warriors. And then―the bats! Suddenly they were everywhere, swooping upon the fallen, killing― and one horseman fled from them into the reeds, trampling me under his hooves unawares―'
'What of this horseman?'
'Dead,' she shuddered. 'A bat tore him from the saddle and let his corpse fall into the river. I swooned, for in its panic, the horse struck me…' She lifted one small hand to her gashed brow.
'Lucky you were not slain,' he growled. 'Well, lass, we shall visit this master of yours, to learn what he wants of Conan―and how he knows my name!'
'You will come?' she asked breathlessly. He laughed and, vaulting astride the black mare, lifted her to the saddlebow before him with powerful arms.
'Aye! I am alone, amid enemies, in an alien land. My employment ended when Bakra's army was destroyed. Why should I scruple to meet a man who has picked me from ten thousand warriors, and who offers gold?'
They rode across the shallow ford of the river and across the gloom-drenched plain towards Yaralet, stronghold of Munthassem Khan.
And Conan's heart, which never beat more joyously than when thrilled with the promise of excitement and adventure, sang.
IV
The House of Atalis
A strange conclave was taking place in the small, velvet-hung, taper-lit chamber of Atalis, whom some men called a philosopher, others a seer, and others a rogue.
This figure of mystery was a slender man of medium height, with a splendid head and the ascetic features of a dedicated scholar, yet in his smooth face and keen eyes was something of the shrewd merchant. He was clad in a plain robe of rich fabric, and his head was shaven to denote devotion to study and the arts. As he talked in low tones with his companion, a third viewer―had any been present―might have observed something strange and curious about him. For Atalis, as he conversed, gestured with his left hand only. His right arm lay stretched across his lap at an unnatural angle. And from time to time his calm, clever features were hideously contorted with a sudden spasm of intense pain, at which time his right foot, hidden under his long robes, would twist back excruciatingly upon his ankle.
His companion was one whom the city of Yaralet knew and praised as Prince Than, scion of an ancient and noble house of Turan. The prince was a tall, lithe man, young and undeniably handsome. The firm, clean outline of his soldierly limbs and the steely quality of his cool grey eyes belied the foppishness of his curled and scented black locks and jewelled cloak.
Beside Atalis, who sat in a high-backed chair of dark wood carven by intricate skill with leering gargoyles and grinning faces, stood a small table of ebony inlaid with yellow ivory. Upon this rested a huge fragment of green crystal, as large as a human head. It flickered with a weird inward glow, and from time to time the philosopher would break off his low conversation to peer deeply within the glitterinp stone.
'Will she find him? And will he come?' Prince Than said, despairingly.
'He will come.'
'But every moment that passes increases our danger. Even now Munthassem Khan may be watching, and it is dangerous for us to be together…'
'Munthassem Khan lies drugged with the dream lotus, for the Shadows of Nergal were abroad in the hour of sunset,' said the philosopher. 'And some danger we must risk, if ever the city is to be freed of this bloody-handed scourge!' His features knotted sickeningly in an involuntary grimace of intolerable pain, and then smoothed out again.
He said grimly, 'And you know, O Prince, how little time is left to us.
Desperate measures for desperate men!'
Suddenly the prince's handsome face contorted with panic and he turned upon Atalis with eyes suddenly gone dead as cold marble. Almost as swiftly, light and animation returned to his gaze, and he sank back in his chair, pale and sweating.
'Very―little―time!' he gasped.
A hidden gong rang softly, somewhere within the dark and silent house of Atalis the Far-seeing. The philosopher raised his left hand to check the prince's involuntary start.
A moment later, one of the velvet wall-hangings drew aside, revealing a hidden door. And within the door, like a bloody apparition, stood the giant form of Conan with the half-fainting girl leaning on his arm.
With a little cry, the philosopher sprang to his feet and went toward the grim Cimmerian. 'Welcome―thrice welcome, Conan! Come, enter. Here is wine―food―'
He gestured to a tabouret against the further wall and took the fainting girl from Conan. The Cimmerian's nostrils widened like those of some famished wolf at the scent of the food; but also, like a wolf, suspicious, wary of a trap, his smouldering blue eyes raked the smiling philosopher and the pale prince, and pried into every corner of the small chamber.
'See to the wench. She was trampled by a horse but brought me your message,' he growled, and without ceremony he swaggered across the room, and poured and drained a goblet of strong red wine. Tearing a plump leg from a platter of roast fowl, he chewed hungrily. Atalis tugged a bell-rope and gave the girl into the keeping of a silent slave, who appeared from behind another hanging as if by magic.
'Now, what is this all about?' the Cimmerian demanded, seating himself on a low bench and wincing from the pain of his gashed thigh. 'Who are you? How do you know my name? And what do you want of me?'
'We have time for talk, but later,' Atalis replied. 'Eat, drink, and rest You are wounded―'
'Crom take all this delay! We shall talk now.'
'Very well. But you must let me cleanse and bind your wound while we talk!'
The Cimmerian shrugged impatiently and yielded with poor grace to the philosopher's swift ministrations. As Atalis sponged his gashed thigh, smeared the gaping wound with a scented salve, and bound it with a strip of clean cloth, Conan appeased his hunger by wolfing down the cold spiced meat and drinking deeply of the red
wine.
'I know you, although we have never met,' Atalis began in a smooth, soft voice, 'because of my crystal―there, on yonder stand by the chair.
Within its depths I can see and hear for a hundred leagues.'
'Sorcery?' Conan spat sourly, having the warrior's contempt for all such magical mummery.
'If you like,' Atalis smiled ingratiatingly. 'But I am no sorcerer―only a seeker after knowledge. A philosopher, some men call me―' His smile twisted into a terrible grin of agony, and with prickling scalp Conan watched the philosopher stagger as his foot bent horribly.
'Crom! Are you sick, man?'
Gasping from the pain, Atalis sank into his high-backed chair. 'Not sick―cursed. By this fiend who rules us with a dread sceptre of hell-born magic…'
'Munthassem Khan?'
Atalis nodded wearily. 'That I am no sorcerer has spared my life―thus far. For the satrap slew all wizards in Yaralet; I, being but a humble philosopher, he let live. Yet he suspects that I know something of the Black Arts and has cursed me with this deadly scourge. It withers up my body and tortures my nerves, and will end in a convulsion of death, ere long!' He gestured at the unnaturally twisted limb that lay lifeless across his lap.
Prince Than gazed with wild eyes at Conan. 'I, too, have been cursed by this hell-spawn, for that I am next to Munthassem Khan in rank and he thinks I may desire his throne. Me he has tortured in another way: a sickness of the brain―spasms of blindness that come and go―which will end by devouring my brain and leaving me a mindless, sightless, mewling thing!'
'Crom!' Conan swore softly. The philosopher gestured.
'You are our only hope! You alone can save our city from this black-hearted devil that torments and plagues us!'
Conan stared at him blankly. 'I? But I am no wizard, man! What a warrior can do with cold steel, I can do; but how can I combat this devil's magic?'
'Listen, Conan of Cimmeria. I will tell you a strange and awful tale…'
V
The Hand of Nergal
In the city of Yaralet (said Atalis) when night falls, the people bar their windows, bolt their doors, and sit shuddering behind these barriers, praying in terror with candles burning before their household gods till the clean, wholesome light of dawn etches the squat towers of the city with living fire against the paling skies.
No archers guard the gates. No watchmen stride the lonely streets. No thief steals nimbly through the winding alleys, nor do painted sluts simper and beckon from the dark shadows. For in Yaralet, rogues and honest folk alike shun the night-shadows: thief, beggar, assassin, and bedizened wench seek haven in foul-smelling dens or dim-lit taverns.
From dusk to dawn, Yaralet is a city of silence, her black ways empty and desolate.
It was not always thus. Once this was a bright and prosperous city, bustling with commerce, with shops and bazaars, filled with happy people who lived under the strong hand of a wise and gentle satrap―Munthassem Khan. He taxed them lightly, ruling with justice and mercy, busy with his private collection of antiquities and in the study of these ancient objects which absorbed his keen, questing mind. The caravans of slow-pacing camels that wound from the Desert Gate bore always with them, amongst the merchants, his agents seeking for rare and curious oddities to purchase for their master's private museum.
Then he changed, and a terrible shadow fell over Yaralet. The satrap was like one under a powerful and evil spell. Where he had been kind, he became cruel. Where generous, greedy. Where just and merciful, secretive, tyrannical, and savage.
Suddenly, the city guard seized men―nobles, wealthy merchants, priests, magicians―who vanished into the pits beneath the satrap's palace, never to be seen again.
Some whispered that a caravan from the far south had brought to him something from the depths of demon-haunted Stygia. Few had glimpsed it, and of those one said shudderingly that the thing was carven with strange, uncouth hieroglyphs like those seen on the dusty Stygian tombs. It seemed to cast an evil spell over the satrap, and it lent him amazing powers of black sorcery. Weird forces shielded him from those despairing patriots who sought to slay him. Strange crimson lights blazed in the windows of a tall tower of his palace, where men whispered that he had converted an empty suite into a grim temple to some dark and bloody god.
And terror walked the streets of nighted Yaralet, as if summoned from the realm of death by some awesome, devil-purchased lore.
Exactly what they feared at night, the people did not know. But it was no vain dream against which they soon came to bolt their doors. Men hinted at slinking, batlike forms glimpsed from barred windows―of hovering, shadowy horrors alien to human knowledge, deadly to human sanity. Tales spread of doorways splintered in the night, of sudden unearthly cries and shrieks torn from human throats―followed by significant, and utter, silence. And they dared to tell of the rising sun illuminating broken doors that swung in houses suddenly and unaccountably empty…
The thing from Stygia was the Hand of Nergal.
'It looks,' said Atalis softly, 'like a clawed hand carven of old ivory, worked all over with weird glyphs in a forgotten tongue. The claws clasp a sphere of shadowy, dim crystal. I know that the satrap has it: I have seen it here' ―he gestured―'in my crystal. For, although no enchanter, I have learned some of the Dark Arts.'
Conan stirred restlessly. 'And you know of this thing?'
Atalis smiled faintly. 'Know of it? Aye! Old books speak of it and whisper the dark legend of its bloody history. The blind seer who penned the Book of Skelos knew it well… Nergal's Hand they name it, shudderingly. They say it fell from the stars into the sunset isles of the uttermost west, ages upon ages before King Kull rose to bring the Seven Empires beneath his single standard. Centuries and ages beyond thought have rolled across the world since first bearded Pictish fishermen drew it dripping from the deep and stared wonderingly into its shadowy fires! They bartered it to greedy Atlantean merchants, and it passed east across the world. The withered, hoary-bearded mages of elder Thule and dark Grondar probed its mysteries in their towers of purple and silver. The serpent men of shadow-haunted Valusia peered into its glimmering depths. With it, Kom-Yazoth whelmed the Thirty Kings until the Hand turned upon and slew him. For the Book of Skelos says the Hand brings two gifts unto its possessor―first, power beyond all limit―then, death beyond all despair.'
Only the calm voice of the philosopher droned through the hushed room, but the black-headed warrior thought he could hear, as in a dream, the faint echo of thundering chariots, the clash of steel, the cry of tormented kings drowned in the clangor of collapsing empires…
'When all of the elder world was broken in the Cataclysm and the green sea rolled in restless fathoms above the shattered spires of lost Atlantis, and the nations sank one by one in red ruin, the Hand passed from the knowledge of men. For three thousand years the Hand slept, but when the young kingdoms of Koth and Ophir awoke and slowly emerged from the murk of barbarism, the talisman was found. The dark wizard-kings of grim Acheron plumbed its secrets, and when the lusty Hyborians broke that cruel kingdom beneath their heel, it passed southwards into dusty Stygia, where the bloody priests of that black land set it to terrible purposes in rites of which I dare not speak. It fell, when some swarthy sorceror was slain, and was buried with him, sleeping away the centuries… but now tomb robbers have roused the Hand of Nergal again, and it has come into the possession of Munthassem Khan. The temptation of ultimate and absolute power, which it holds out to all, has corrupted him, as countless others have been corrupted, who fell beneath its insidious spell. I fear me, Cimmerian, for all these lands, now that the Demon's Hand wakes and dark forces walk the earth again…'
Atalis' voice died away in whispering silence, and Conan growled uneasily, bristling.
'Well… Crom, man, what have I to do with such matters?' he rumbled.
'You alone can destroy the influence of the talisman over the satrap's mind!'
The smouldering blue eyes widened. 'How?'
'You alone possess the counter-talisman.'
'I? You are mad―I hold no truck with amulets and suchlike magical trash―!'
Atalis stilled him with a lifted palm. 'Did you not find a curious golden object before the battle?' he queried, softly. Conan started.
'Aye, that I did―at Bahari, yestereve, as we lay in camp―' He plunged one hand into his pocket-pouch and drew out the smooth, glowing stone.
The philosopher and the prince stared at it, drawing in their breaths.
'The Heart of Tammuz! Yes, the counter-talisman in very truth―!'
Heart-shaped it was, and large as a child's fist, worked in golden amber or perhaps rare yellow jade. It lay there in the Cimmerian's hand, glowing with soft fires, and he remembered with a prickling of awe how the healing, tingling warmth of it had driven from his body the supernatural chill of the bat-winged shadows.
'Come, Conan! We shall accompany you. There is a secret passageway from this my chamber into the satrap's hall―an underground tunnel like that by which my slave, Hildico, led you under the city streets into my house. You, armed with the protection of the Heart, shall slay Munthassem Khan, or destroy the Hand of Nergal. There is no danger, for he lies deep in a magical slumber, which comes upon him whenever he has need to summon forth the Shadows of Nergal, as he has already done this night to overwhelm the Turanian army of King Yildiz. Come!'
Conan strode to the table and drained the last of the wine. Then, shrugging, muttering an oath to Crom, he followed the limping seer and the slim prince into a dark opening behind an arras.
In a moment they were gone, and the chamber lay empty and silent as a grave. The only motion came from flickering lights within the green, jagged crystal beside the chair. Within its depths one could see the small figure of Munthassem Khan, lying in a drugged sleep within his mighty hall.
The Conan Chronology Page 145