After the wind died, the three travelers looked at each other. Both women made a fuss over Conan's wound. In truth, it was hardly more than a scratch; still, he did not object to their ministrations. He said, "If that is the worst we have to face on this journey, it will be no hardship."
"Unfortunately, that might well be the least of our worries," Tuanne said. "I have heard tales that would make these beasts seem like sparrows."
"Spare me the tales," Conan said. "Some things are better left unspoken."
The three started along the path again.
The denizens of Neg's moat had an unexpected feeding, as dozens of fat, juicy spiders began to leap into the water, swimming for the castle. The feast did not last long, however, as the taste of the ensorcelled arachnids lay exceedingly foul upon the palates of the submarine guards. Whether it was the natural flavor of tarantula or some vouchsafe bitterness added by magic mattered not to the fishes of the circle; the unspoken word passed among them rapidly: pauugh! Eat not the black crawlies, they taste bad in the extreme!
So it was that some two dozen of the hardiest tarantula reached the base of Neg's castle. Following rat burrows and mole paths, they continued onward, gaining entrance to the home of the one they sought. He called to them, the accursed one did, and they went to fulfill their destiny, as messengers of an angry god.
Skeer trudged along, bearing a bowl of fruit for his majesty Neg's diet, when he saw the spiders. So startled was he that he dropped the wooden bowl, scattering grapes, dates, and plums over the floor in a shower. The bowl clattered loudly on the gray flagstones.
"What is that racket?" Neg called.
Skeer, petrified, could not summon an answer.
The spiders scurried for the zombie, close to their goal at last.
Neg entered the hallway. "Skeer, what clumsiness have you discovered-?" He stopped, and looked at the spiders. "Ho, friends of yours, be these?"
"Th-th-they began following me in the c-c-city of Opkothard, Master!"
"Ah. The Shes. I have heard of the curse. They are ensorcelled, sent to kill you. You must have offended the local priests somehow. Came a long way, they did."
"M-m-master, can you not help me?"
Neg laughed, long and hard.
The spiders drew nearer, and Skeer stood as if rooted to the floor.
"M-master?"
"Fool! You are dead! What harm can these do to you now?"
Abruptly, Skeer knew the truth of it. He was dead!
"Fetch me another bowl of fruit, lout." Neg turned and swept out of the hall.
The first spider reached Skeer's leg. Its touch bothered him, but when it sank its fangs into his calf, it was no more bothersome than a mosquito bite would have been when he was alive. He reached down to crush the spider, then merely brushed it away. What would it do?
The spider scuttled back a few feet, and was surrounded by its fellows, who stopped. It seemed somehow to be communicating.
Skeer turned, first picking up the overturned fruit bowl, and started back toward the kitchen. The spiders followed. He stopped.
They stopped.
He took two steps.
The tarantulas scuttled along.
He stopped again.
The spiders froze.
Skeer laughed. How frustrating it must be to find their quarry dead but still moving. What was an ensorcelled creature to do? Biting Skeer was a waste of venom, perhaps that was what the one had told the others. So now, their purpose blocked, where should they go? Apparently, they had decided to follow Skeer, lacking any other purpose. Like so many dogs, following him.
Skeer started back toward the kitchen, and his eight-egged retinue followed, keeping a span of distance between him and themselves. He laughed again. Odd how things turned out. Who would have thought a few weeks ago that he would be dead, enthralled as a zombie, and lord of perhaps thirty-odd fat and furry spiders? Good that he was not a storyteller or minstrel-no one would believe such a tale. It was too fanciful for words or song.
He went to attend to his master's chore, followed by his wiggling, furry carpet.
At the inn, six dead men crowded into the empty room. They looked at the brazier in silence, smelled the magical herbs and spices in silence, and realized where their quarry had gone, again without audible sound.
Two of the zombies left, to gather ingredients. The others awaited their return. Leaving the world for magic lands might have gained their quarry time, but it bought them little else-the Men With No Eyes would not be deterred by such a tactic.
Later, when the smoke cleared, the small room at the inn once again stood empty, and the innkeep shuddered as he wondered how so many people had gone in and none had come out.
Chapter Nineteen
The Opkothardian morgue attendant had recovered from his fright, though he would swear there were gray hairs on his head and in his beard that had not been there before. Seeing six dead men rise and walk again certainly was enough to take several years off any sane man's life.
Of course, he thought, as he leaned against the cool wall of the morgue, staring at this latest batch of charges, those six had been unusual. Outlanders, and dead by violence, so who knew what evil lurked in their souls? All the corpses currently occupying his vault were, thank the Nameless, local people, and dead of natural causes, for the most part: a jar of bad figs laid one family of four down, the red fever took several more, a collapsed wall gave him three workers who were slower to move than others. And one very old man had simply removed his clothes and laid down in the public baths to be fished out several hours later when someone noticed he had not surfaced. Little chance for evil doings in this lot.
He was calm enough, then, when he heard the rat skittering in the back among the far tables. Rats he could deal with.
He picked up the dart he had had Zenk the knifemaker construct for him. This item consisted of a length of wood a few inches long with a sharpened nail sticking from one end and stabilizing feathers on the other. It looked like a short and squat arrow, but it was accurate when thrown at close range, and he had lately skewered many an unsuspecting rodent with it. He grinned as he slowly made his way back toward the dark corner.
The grin faded abruptly when he saw the wrinkled corpse of the drowned old man sit up suddenly. The only thing he could think to do in his terror was to toss the dart. The small weapon stuck in the old man's shoulder, but if it bothered the corpse, it did not show.
Then the others began to stir. All around him, the dead rose from their slabs, not speaking, but moving as though alive otherwise.
The morgue attendant ran screaming from the room. The only way he would ever enter it again, he swore, was when somebody carried his lifeless body inside!
Nearing the In-Between Lands, Tuanne stopped suddenly, and seemed to sway as if she might fall. Conan said, "Are you all right?"
"It's Neg," she said, eyes closed. "He has begun to use the power of the talisman. He calls to the dead."
Conan and Elashi looked around. They were alone.
"I can feel it pull at me," Tuanne continued. "It is a strong call. A command."
"Can you resist it?" Elashi asked.
"For now. Do you have the salt I gave you?"
Conan looked at the woman from the desert. He knew not of this.
Elashi said, "I have it."
"If I should falter, you must use it. If Neg's power grows, I will have to go to him. By a different path than that upon which we now tread."
"But the dangers-"
"It will not matter. I will have to obey."
"Then let us hurry," Conan said. "The sooner we arrive and dispatch this cursed man, the better."
As the "day" wore on, Conan began to see the effects of Neg's sorcery. In the distance, figures appeared, walking at right angles to the path upon which the trio traveled. When these grew nearer, Conan reached for his sword.
"Nay," Tuanne said. "They will not harm us. Look at them."
They were people right eno
ugh, Conan saw. But what the blue fire of his eyes reflected upon were people in thrall. Men, women, children, marching across their path, unaware of Conan and his companions. They seemed to be sleepwalkers, looking straight ahead, as if drawn by some invisible string.
"The souls of the dead who have yet to make the final passage into the Gray Lands," Tuanne said. "They are called back to their bodies by the power of Neg's weird.
"Most are recently dead; some, likely, have been in the ground longer, but had passage delayed for some reason. Those bodies will not be pleasant to look upon when their former owners return."
"Ugh," Elashi said.
Conan did not speak to this, but his reaction paralleled Elashi's. A corpse more than a few days moldering, even in winter, was not an appetizing sight.
The numbers of the crosswalkers grew as the three neared the jungle; hundreds, mayhaps thousands of them had passed and there seemed to be no end to them.
"Within a few days Neg will have an army surrounding his castle," Tuanne said. "All the dead for a thousand miles will flock to him. No one not in his command will be able to even approach his stronghold. No one alive."
Tuanne swayed again, and stopped walking. She started to walk after the latest group moving aslant to them.
"Tuanne!" Elashi called.
The zombie woman took another step, then stopped. She shook her head, turned to look at her companion, then quickly stepped back onto the path. "His power increases," she said.
Conan saw that Elashi held cupped in her palm a measure of salt crystals. She returned them to her purse and dusted her hand.
"We shall arrive at the edge of the jungle in an hour, I judge," Conan said. "Come."
The armies of the night were stirring.
In his highest chamber, Neg looked through the window out into his domain-it was all his domain now!-at the figures in the distance. They came. From all directions, as far as Neg's eye could discern, they came.
He laughed, deep and booming, and waved to those who could not see him but who felt his call. Come to me, he thought, come and join the most powerful force ever assembled. An unkillable, unstoppable force, commanded by me. Come!
The power flowed through him stronger now, as he grew more used to the workings of it. It streamed away from him as light streamed from the sun. He was god to all the dead, and they were his worshippers, come to bow to him.
The armies of the night stirred, and came to their master.
Surprise was too mild a term for what the Disguise Master felt. He should be dead, no man could live after such a stroke as the barbarian had delivered with his heavy blade. He recalled it vividly: as his entire life sped by, the gods-be-cursed Conan had chopped down, and-The Disguise Master reached up and felt his head.
There lay down the middle of his skull a gap, half the width of his finger, narrowing by the time it reached a spot between his eyes in the front, and the crown in the back. Inside the gap he felt a squishy softness-his brain, he did not doubt and at that instant the Disguise Master very nearly went mad. No man could live with such a wound!
It was then that he realized that he was not breathing.
He could draw in a breath, true enough, but it did not seem to matter if he held or released it. Experimentally, he spoke, and that worked well enough, if he remembered to pull in enough air to work his voice.
Realization dawned at the same instant that he felt compelled to start walking.
He was dead.
Dead he was, but brought back somehow. Therefore, he must be a zombie. And, likely it was Neg who commanded his feet to move. The unnaturalness of it filled him with dread, but then there came an ameliorating thought: perhaps he might have a second chance at slaying Conan, did he still live.
The smile that crossed the Disguise Master's face twisted his lips in a cruel sneer as he thought of that possibility. Perhaps the gods were not to be cursed after all.
As he moved down the road for he knew not where, he saw others moving as he did. There was Brute, sans one arm, plodding along. Others he did not recognize, many of them. This Neg had power, no doubt of that. Well. He would see what he would see. Meanwhile, he would content himself with the thought of meeting Conan again. This time, should it happen, he would have an advantage: a dead man could not be slain.
Across the land they rose.
Malo, who had been a Suddah Oblate, stood and shuffled to the west. Behind him, two of his brother priests also found themselves alive but not alive.
A nightwatchman who had been careless dug his way through still-damp earth and joined the parade of dead.
Two mountain bandits who had been ambitious but unskilled drew what the beasts had left of them together and started down the mountain.
Across the land, they rose. The gutter scum of Shadizar; the hanged footpads of Numalia; the sacrificed of black Stygian rites; the good, the evil, the criminal, and the blameless. All who had died within a thousand miles of Neg's castle, all who had not yet been awarded a permanent place in the Gray Lands, all who had limbs enough to walk or to crawl, all of them rose, from biers, from sepulchers, from coffins, from unmarked graves. Rose, they did, and went to meet their new master.
The armies of the night marched.
Night fell suddenly in the In-Between Lands. Dusk laid the softest of hands on the road, and then night fell almost as quickly as a lamp deprived of fat.
The jungle edge lay five minutes away, but Conan had no desire to attempt that entrance in the dark.
"We camp here," he said. No one disagreed.
He journeyed to the nearest copse to obtain firewood. He did not know if the creatures that inhabited this world would fear fire, but fear it or not, a flaming brand shoved into one's face would give one pause in any event.
They ate dried strips of fruit and smoked fish that Elashi had packed in her purse. Conan washed the distasteful stuff down with small sips of wine he had thought to bring in a leather bottle. He drank sparingly-a man would not want his wits dulled here-and wondered if the fire might draw unwanted attention. Upon reconsideration, he decided that he would find a sheltered spot away from the fire, the better to see the surrounding territory, and anything that might find its way to the light.
Overhead, there were stars, but no moon. The sky bore no resemblance to any he had ever seen: the familiar constellations did not shine here. Here, he saw a curve of points that seemed like a knife blade; an irregular ring that lay low on the horizon; a thick collection of hard diamonds that almost seemed like a man's fist. Had there been any doubt that the land he walked was other than his world, this sky would certainly have dispelled it.
After the meal Conan added wood to the fire. "Let us move away from the fire," he said. "So that anything curious about it will not happen upon us unawares."
Again, neither woman demurred, and they found a ring of scrubby bushes half a minute's walk from the fire. He considered sitting watch, but since Tuanne did not sleep, decided that his time would be better spent in rest. Her eyes were better suited to the dark than his, and she could awaken him if danger threatened.
With Elashi on one side and Tuanne on the other, Conan drifted into a deep and tired slumber.
He awoke to see that Tuanne was gone.
False dawn lay over the In-Between Lands. The fire had burned down to a few glowing coals and leaving the path had drawn no new terrors, but Tuanne was nowhere in sight.
He sat up, and Elashi awoke.
"What is it?"
"Tuanne is gone," he said.
They scrambled to their feet and left the cover of the brush, but the darkness was impenetrable beyond a few spans.
"We must find her!" Elashi said.
"It is too dark," Conan replied. "We would only lose the path ourselves."
"We cannot leave her here!"
"I am open to suggestion."
Elashi fell silent.
"She said her path would differ from ours, if she succumbed to Neg's call," Conan said. "We must get to Ne
g's castle; that is our best hope of saving her."
"How will we get out of this place?" Elashi asked, voicing Conan's own worry. "I do not know the spell, nor do you."
"She said this path was built especially for us. Perhaps there will be some indication when we reach the proper point."
"And perhaps we shall wander around in this place until our bones turn to dust!"
"I am open to suggest-"
"Stop saying that!"
The first rays of the strange dawn began to light the dark sky, and Conan kept his words within. There was nothing else to be done. He could understand her fear.
Better she should say it than he.
The novelty of being followed by his own small hirsute army soon palled for Skeer. They followed him everywhere. Since he was spared sleep and elimination, he did not have to worry about awakening to a spidery blanket, or treading on one in the confines of an outhouse; still, they never left him.
In a fit of pique, Skeer decided to eliminate the damned things. He lunged across the small distance separating the tarantulas from himself. Almost as if they anticipated his move, the furry-legged creatures scattered. As fast as he could move, he only managed to catch one of them under his sandaled foot. It gave out a satisfying crunch! and splattered arachnidal gore in a spokelike pattern, but try as he did, he could not catch any of the others. He was certain that their speed was not natural, so fast did they skitter away. Were he alive, he would have exhausted himself trying to kill the things. As it was, he eventually realized the futility of his efforts, despite his lack of anything better to do.
As soon as he ceased trying to mash the life from them, the spiders regrouped. Twenty-two of the little bastards, he counted. Life had had its bad moments; death, it seemed, was ever so much worse.
Skeer walked the empty halls of Neg's castle, stirring seldom-trod dust and thinking black thoughts.
Tuanne knew she was lost. The touch of Neg's mind was but fleeting upon her, other than the same compunction that drew the others walking the In-Between Lands, but with that touch she knew he had seen her.
The Conan Compendium Page 43