'Your secret is safe with me. For one reason, I too owe Othbaal a heavy debt. If you succeed in your quest ere I find means to discharge it, I shall bear the loss with serenity.'
Conan started forward, his iron fingers gripping the Hyrkanian's shoulder. 'Do you speak truth?'
'May these potbellied Shemitish gods smite me with boils if I lie!'
'Then let me aid you in your vengeance!'
'You? An outsider, who knows nought of the secret ways of Asgalun?'
'Of course! So much the better; having no local ties, I can be trusted.
Come on; let's make a plan. Where is the swine and how do we get to him?'
Farouz, though no weakling, recoiled a little before the primitive elemental force that blazed in the eyes and showed in the manner of the other. 'Let me think,' he said. 'There is a way, if one is swift and daring…'
Later, two hooded figures halted in a group of palms among the ruins of nighted Asgalun. Before them lay the waters of a canal, and beyond it, rising from its bank, the great bastioned wall of sun-dried brick which encircled the inner city. The inner city was really a gigantic fortress, sheltering the king and his trusted nobles and mercenary troops, forbidden to common men without a pass.
'We could climb the wall,' muttered Conan.
'And find ourselves no nearer our foe,' answered Farouz, groping in the shadows. 'Here!'
Conan saw the Hyrkanian fumble at a shapeless heap of marble. 'An ancient ruined shrine,'' grumbled Farouz. 'But―ah!'
He lifted a broad slab, revealing steps leading down into darkness.
Conan frowned suspiciously.
Farouz explained: 'This tunnel leads under the wall and up into the house of Othbaal, which stands just beyond.'
'Under the canal?'
'Aye. Once Othbaal's house was the pleasure-house of King Uriaz, who slept on a down-cushion floating on a pool of quicksilver, guarded by tame lions―yet fell before the avenger's dagger in spite of all. He prepared secret exits from all parts of his houses. Before Othbaal took the house, it belonged to his rival Mazdak. The Anaki knows nothing of this secret, so come!'
Swords drawn, they groped down a flight of stone steps and advanced along a level tunnel in blackness. Conan's groping fingers told him that the walls, floor, and ceiling were composed of huge blocks of stone. As they advanced, the stones became slippery and the air grew dank. Drops of water fell on Conan's neck, making him shiver and swear.
They were passing under the canal. Later, this dampness abated. Farouz hissed a warning, and they mounted another flight of stairs.
At the top, the Hyrkanian fumbled with a catch. A panel slid aside, and a soft light streamed in. Farouz slipped through the opening and, after Conan had followed, closed it behind them. It became one of the inlaid panels of the wall, not differing to the sight from the other panels.
They stood in a vaulted corridor, while Farouz pulled his kaffia around to hide his face and motioned Conan to do likewise. Farouz then led the way down the corridor without hesitation. The Cimmerian followed, sword in hand, glancing to right and left.
They passed through a curtain of dark velvet and came upon an arched doorway of gold-inlaid ebony. A brawny black, naked but for a silken loincloth, started up from his doze, sprang to his feet, and swung a great scimitar. But he did not cry out; his open mouth revealed the cavernous emptiness of the mouth of a mute.
'Quietly!' snapped Farouz, avoiding the sweep of the mute's sword. As the Negro stumbled from his wasted effort, Conan tripped him. He fell sprawling, and Farouz passed his sword through the dark body.
'That was quick and silent enough!' breathed Farouz with a grin. 'Now for the real prey!'
Cautiously he tried the door, while the giant Cimmerian crouched at his shoulder, eyes burning like those of a hunting tiger. The door gave inward, and they sprang into the chamber. Farouz closed the door behind them and set his back to it, laughing at the man who leaped up from his divan with a startled oath. Beside him, a woman half-rose from the cushions and screamed. Farouz said:
'We've run the buck to cover, brother!'
For a fraction of a second, Conan took in the spectacle. Othbaal was a tall, lusty man, his thick black hair gathered in a knot at his nape and his black beard oiled, curled, and precisely trimmed. Late as the hour was, he was fully clad in silken kilt and velvet vest, under which gleamed the links of a mail shirt. He dove for a scabbarded sword that lay on the floor beside the couch.
As for the woman, she was not conventionally pretty but still good to look at: red-haired, with a broad, slightly freckled face, and brown eyes sparkling with intelligence.
She was rather broadly built, with shoulders wider than the average, a big bust, and full hips. She gave the impression of great physical vigor.
'Help!' shouted Othbaal, rising to meet the Cimmerian's rush. 'I am beset!'
Farouz started across the wide floor not more than a step behind Conan, but then leaped back to the door through which they had come. With half an ear, Conan was aware of a commotion in the corridor and heard the thump of some heavy object rammed against the door. Then his blade crossed that of the Anaki. The swords clanged in mid-air, showering sparks, flashing and flickering in the lamplight.
Both men attacked, smiting furiously, each too intent on the life of the other to give much thought to showy swordplay. Each stroke had full weight and murderous will behind it. They fought in silence. As they circled, Conan saw, over Othbaal's shoulder, that Farouz had braced his shoulder against the door. From the other side came increasingly heavy blows, which had already torn loose the bolt. The woman had vanished.
'Can you deal with him?' said Farouz. 'If I let this door go, his slaves will pour in.'
'All right so far,' grunted Conan, parrying a ferocious slash.
'Hasten, then, for I cannot hold them much longer.'
Conan plunged in with fresh ferocity. Now it was the Anaki whose attention was devoted to parrying the Cimmerian's sword, which beat on his blade like a hammer on an anvil. The sheer strength and fury of the barbarian began to tell. Othbaal paled under his swarthy skin. His breath came in gasps as he gave ground. Blood streamed from gashes on arms, thigh, and neck. Conan bled, too, but there was no slackening in the headlong fury of his attack.
Othbaal was close to the tapestried wall when suddenly he sprang aside as Conan lunged. Carried off-balance by his wasted thrust, the Cimmerian plunged forward and his sword point clashed against the stone beneath the tapestries. At the same instant, Othbaal slashed at his foe's head with all his waning power.
But Conan's sword of Stygian steel, instead of snapping like a lesser blade, bent and sprang straight again. The falling scimitar bit through Conan's helmet into the scalp beneath. Before Othbaal could recover his balance, Conan's heavy blade sheared upward through steel links and hip bone to grate into the spinal column.
The Anaki reeled and fell with a choking cry, his entrails spilling out on the floor. His fingers clawed briefly at the nap of the heavy carpet, then went limp.
Conan, blind with blood and sweat, was driving his sword in silent frenzy again and again into the form at his feet, too drunken with fury to realise that his antagonist was dead, until Fafouz called:
'Cease, Conan! They've stopped their attack to bring up a heavier ram, and we can run for it.'
'How?' said Conan, dazedly raking the blood from his eyes, for he was still dizzy from the stroke that had cloven his helmet. He tore off the riven, blood-filled headpiece and threw it aside, exposing his square-cut black mane. A crimson torrent descended into his face, blinding him anew. He stooped and tore a strip from Othbaal's kilt to bind up his head.
'That door!' said Farouz, pointing. 'Rufia fled that way, the slut! If you're ready, we'll run.'
Conan saw an inconspicuous little door to one side of the couch. It had been concealed by draperies, but Rufia in her flight had disarranged these and left the door open behind her.
The Hyrkanian took from his girdle the ring that he had pull
ed from the finger of the black slayer, Keluka. He ran across the floor, dropped the ring near Othbaal's body, and continued on toward the small door.
Conan followed him, though he had to crouch and almost turn sideways to get through the door.
They emerged into another corridor. Farouz led Conan by a roundabout route, turning and twisting through a maze of passages, until Conan was hopelessly lost. By this means they avoided the main body of household retainers, gathered in the corridor outside the principal entrance to the room where they had slain Othbaal. Once they aroused feminine screams from a room they passed, but Farouz kept on. Presently they reached the secret panel, entered it, and groped in darkness until they emerged once more into the silent grove.
Conan stopped to get his breath and retie his bandage. Farouz said: 'How is your wound, brother?'
'A scratch only. Why did you drop that ring?'
'To blind the avengers of blood. Tarim! All that trouble, and the strumpet got away.'
Conan grinned wryly in the darkness. Rufia evidently did not regard Farouz as a rescuer. The brief picture that Conan had obtained, in the second before he closed with Othbaal, stuck in his mind. Such a woman, he thought, would suit him very well.
Within the massive wall of the inner city, a stupendous event was coming to pass. Under the shadows of the balconies stole a veiled and hooded figure. For the first time in three years, a woman was walking the streets of Asgalun.
Knowing her peril, she trembled with fear not wholly inspired by the lurking shadows. The stones hurt her feet in her tattered velvet slippers; for three years the cobblers of Asgalun had been forbidden to make street shoes for women. King Akhlrom had decreed that the women of Pelishtia should be shut up like reptiles in cages.
Rufia, the red-haired Ophirean, favourite of Othbaal, had wielded more power than any woman in Pelishtia save Zeriti, the king's witch-mistress. And now, as she stole through the night, an outcast, the thought that burned her like a white-hot brand was the realization that the fruits of all her scheming had been spilt in a second by the sword of one of Othbaal's enemies.
Rufia came of a race of women accustomed to swaying thrones with their beauty and wit. She scarcely remembered her native Ophir from which she had been stolen by Kothian slavers. The Argossean magnate who had bought her and raised her for his household had fallen in battle with the Shemites, and as a supple girl of fourteen Rufia had passed into the hands of a prince of Stygia, a languorous, effeminate youth whom she came to twist around her pink fingers. Then, after some years, had come the raid of a band of wandering freebooters from the half-mythical lands beyond the Sea of Vilayet, upon the prince's pleasure island on the upper Styx, with slaughter, fire, and plunder, crashing walls and shrieks of death, and a red-haired girl screaming in the arms of a tall Hyrkanian chieftain.
Because she came of a race whose women were rulers of men, Rufia neither perished nor became a whimpering toy. When Mazdak enlisted his band under Akhirom in Anakia, as part of Akhirom's plan to seize Pelishtia from his hated brother, Rufia had gone along.
She had not liked Mazdak. The sardonic adventurer was coldly masterful in his relations with women, keeping a large harem and letting none command or persuade him in the slightest. Because Rufia could endure no rival, she had not been displeased when Mazdak had gambled her away to his rival Othbaal.
The Anaki was more to her taste. Despite a streak of cruelty and treachery, the man was strong, vital, and intelligent. Best of all, he could be managed. He only needed a spur to his ambition, and Rufia supplied that. She had started him up the shining rungs of the ladder―and now he had been slain by a pair of masked murderers who had sprung from nowhere.
Engrossed in her bitter thoughts, she looked up with a start as a tall, hooded figure stepped from the shadows of an overhanging balcony and confronted her. Only his eyes burned at her, almost luminous in the starlight. She cowered back with a low cry.
'A woman on the streets of Asgalun!' The voice was hollow and ghostly.
'Is this not against the king's commands?'
'I walk not the streets by choice, lord,' she answered. 'My master has been slain, and I fled from his murderers.'
The stranger bent his hooded head and stood statue-like. Rufia watched him nervously. There was something gloomy and portentous about him. He seemed less like a man pondering the tale of a chance-met slave-girl than a somber prophet weighing the doom of a sinful people. At last he lifted his head.
'Come,' said he. 'I will find a place for you.'
Without pausing to see if she obeyed, he stalked away up the street.
Rufia hurried after him. She could not walk the streets all night, for any officer of the king would strike off her head for violating the edict of King Akhirom. This stranger might be leading her into worse slavery, but she had no choice.
Several times she tried to speak, but his grim silence struck her silent in turn. His unnatural aloofness frightened her. Once she was startled to see furtive forms stealing after them.
'Men follow us!' she exclaimed.
'Heed them not,' answered the man in his weird voice.
Nothing was said until they reached a small arched gate in a lofty wall. The stranger halted and called out. He was answered from within.
The gate opened, revealing a black mute holding a torch. In its light, the height of the robed stranger was inhumanly exaggerated.
'But this―this is a gate of the Great Palace!' stammered Rufia.
For answer, the man threw back his hood, revealing a long pale oval of a face, in which burned those strange, luminous eyes.
Rufia screamed and fell to her knees. 'King Akhirom!'
'Aye, King Akhirom, O faithless and sinful one!' The hollow voice rolled out like a bell. 'Vain and foolish woman, who ignores the command of the Great King, the King of Kings, the King of the World, which is the word of the gods! Who treads the street in sin, and sets aside the mandates of the Good King! Seize her!'
The following shadows closed in, becoming a squad of Negro mutes. As their fingers seized her flesh, Rufia fainted.
The Ophirean regained consciousness in a windowless chamber whose arched doors were bolted with bars of gold. She stared wildly about for her captor and shrank down to see him standing above her, stroking his pointed, graying beard while his terrible eyes burned into her soul.
'O Lion of Shem!' she gasped, struggling to her knees. 'Mercy!'
As she spoke, she knew the futility of the plea. She was crouching before the man whose name was a curse in the mouths of the Pelishtim; who, claiming divine guidance, had ordered all dogs killed, all vines cut down, all grapes and honey dumped into the river; who had banned all wine, beer, and games of chance; who believed that to disobey his most trivial command was the blackest sin conceivable. He roamed the streets at night in disguise to see that his orders were obeyed.
Rufia's flesh crawled as he stared at her with unblinking eyes.
'Blasphemer!' he whispered. 'Daughter of evil! O Pteor!' he cried, flinging up his arms. 'What punishment shall be devised for this demon?
What agony terrible enough, what degradation vile enough to render justice? The gods grant me wisdom!'
Rufia rose to her knees and pointed at Akhirom's face. 'Why call on the gods?' she shrieked. 'Call on Akhirom! You are a god!'
He stopped, reeled, and cried out incoherently. Then he straightened and looked down at her. Her face was white, her eyes staring. To her natural acting ability was added the terror of her position.
'What do you see, woman?' he asked.
'A god has revealed himself to me! In your face, shining like the sun!
I burn, I die in the blaze of thy glory!'
She sank her face in her hands and crouched trembling. Akhirom passed a shaking hand over his brow and bald pate.
'Aye,' he whispered. 'I am a god! I have guessed it; I have dreamed it.
I alone possess the wisdom of the infinite. Now a mortal has seen it also. I see the truth at last�
�no mere mouthpiece and servant of the gods, but the God of gods himself! Akhirom is the god of Pelishtia; of the earth. The false demon Pteor shall be cast down from his place and his statues melted up…'
Bending his gaze downward, he ordered: 'Rise, woman, and look upon thy god!'
She did so, shrinking before his awful gaze. A change clouded Akhirom's eyes as he seemed to see her clearly for the first time.
'Your sin is pardoned,' he intoned. 'Because you were the first to hail your god, you shall henceforth serve me in honour and splendor.'
She prostrated herself, kissing the carpet before his feet. He clapped his hands. A eunuch entered and bowed.
'Go quickly to the house of Abdashtarth, the high priest of Pteor,' he said, looking over the servant's head. 'Say to him: This is the word of Akhirom, who is the one true god of the Pelishtim, and shall soon be the of all the peoples of the earth: that on the morrow shall be the beginning of beginnings. The idols of the false Pteor shall be destroyed, and statues of the true god shall be erected in their stead.
The true religion shall be proclaimed, and a sacrifice of one hundred of the noblest children of the Pelishtim shall celebrate it…' '
Before the temple of Pteor stood Mattenbaal, the first assistant to Abdashtarth. The venerable Abdashtarth, his hands tied, stood quietly in the grip of a pair of brawny Anaki soldiers. His long white beard moved as he prayed. Behind him, other soldiers stoked the fire in the base of the huge, bull-headed idol of Pteor, with his obscenely exaggerated male characteristics. In the background towered the great seven-storied zikkurat of Asgalun, from which the priests read the will of the gods in the stars.
When the brazen sides of the idol glowed with the heat within, Mattenbaal stepped forward, raised a piece of papyrus, and read:
'For that your divine king, Akhirom, is of the seed of Yakin-Ya, who was descended from the gods when they walked the earth, so is a god this day among ye! And now I command ye, all loyal Pelishtim, to recognise and bow down to and worship the greatest of all gods, the God of gods, the Creator of the Universe, the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom, the king of gods, who is Akhirom the son of Azumelek, king of Pelishtia! And inasmuch as the wicked and perverse Abdashtarth, in the hardness of his heart, has rejected this revelation and has refused to bow down before his true god, let him be cast into the fire of the idol of the false Pteor!'
The Conan Chronology Page 300