He hardly dared take stock of the damage done by the monkey-fight. He had no will to either, because his berserk rage seemed to have used up most of the unnatural vitality lent him by the lotus balm. His body tingled with the drug-dulled pain of a hundred gashes and of new injuries to his neck and shoulder, as well as his throbbing leg. Reaching into the pocket
of his shredded tunic, unstoppering the ointment jar with shaking hands, he applied the pink salve to his mangled, blood-slimed chest and neck.
Less sparingly this time he dabbed it on his tortured thigh. Its effect was not so blissful as before, but the pangs did subside. His heart pumped more steadily behind the wall of his ribs, and he was able to turn dim attention to the room before him.
Lamps hung down from the ceiling, lighting the gallery brightly but to no clear purpose; the only other furnishings hung likewise from the vaultings above. Gongs they were, cymbals, and other metal chimes: a dozen or more sizeable ones spaced in a regular pattern about the room.
They hung from linkages of brass chain, some supported on pivots though their centers, others held from the edges in slings or padded brackets.
No two were alike. The centermost one was also the largest, broader even than the great instrument that had awakened him in the first chamber. This one had its edge scalloped in the form of flaring, radiating flames, so that it resembled a great golden sun around which all the lesser discs floated. It had one other noteworthy feature, a long bronze clapper suspended before it, apparently controlled by a slack chain angling down from an aperture in one wall. This striker might make a serviceable cudgel, Conan thought, if it could be pried loose from instrument's harness.
Feeling no stirrings of pursuit against the door, he hauled himself to his feet and tugged at the handle. Though he had seen no sign of a latch, and heard none, it was now locked securely. Just as well, he told himself; whatever ordeal lay ahead, he would be better able to face it without any chattering pursuers from the last room. His survey of this one satisfied him that another door lay at its far end; he resolved to exit that way.
No sooner did he stride forward, however, than the great gong struck.
The effect was unsettling; possibly the drug or the oval shape of the room intensified the sound, for it smote Conan's ears tangibly and shook him to the very soles of his feet. The working of the clapper-chain, whether by automata or by someone outside the room, set the heavy disc swaying; a further blaring stroke sounded, then another, each action of the chain accentuating its motion until it moved in a ponderous arc from wall to wall.
To lessen the shattering intensity of the noise Conan moved further out into the open, where the sound seemed more diffuse. Now other gongs
were in motion, set swaying ever wider by action of their own supporting chains. The movements must be man-powered, Conan realized, caused by slaves working the chains from outside the room. New tones began to sound―a pair of cymbals dashed together by flexing levers, and a cracked, discordant chime tolled by a dangling, rebounding leaden ball. But most of the gongs had no clappers; they were made simply to swing more and more violently until they clashed against the stone walls, or against one another. Conan cursed the unseen bell-ringers―silently, since cursing aloud would have added nothing to the growing din.
As more and more gongs began striking, the tumult in the room swiftly became intolerable. Conan moved through its midst with hands covering both ears. He gauged the sounds not by their loudness, but by which of his vital organs they seemed to pierce, and how deeply.
He gave up the notion of catching the scalloped sun-gong and prying loose its clapper; it was swinging and twisting too erratically, its jagged metal flames threatening to rip the flesh from his bones if he ventured too close. Now there seemed small chance even of reaching that part of the room, because the other chimes described wider and swifter arcs, making it unsafe to move injudiciously. Conan sidestepped one screaming, razor-edged disc, kept spinning by a ratcheted chain-lever, only to feel another, heavier gong smite his shoulder as it thrummed past at an angle.
He staggered aside, then carefully timed a rush to get out from between them; but on the next swing they collided, making a brain-splitting clangor and sending both wildly spinning. Mercifully, it was not the razor wheel but the blunt chime that struck him again, knocking him sprawling.
The floor offered no protection; by some fiendish geometry of the chains, the height of the gongs' sweeps varied. The instruments sometimes clattered or scraped across the flags, scything even into the remotest angles of floor and wall. Worse, the swinging chains tangled with the lamps overhead, sending them careening in long, flaring arcs. Besides raining down hot oil, their motions made it nearly impossible to judge the speed and direction of the gong-sweeps. The place became a hell of thunderous sound, swooping shadows, screaming, hurtling metal, and shattering collisions. Each new tolling warned of a deadly rush by one of the howling gongs; but there were never any certainties. Rules and trajectories, obscure at best, changed without warning.
Through it all Conan crept, huddling low for illusory safety, no longer
daring or caring to shield his ears. Carefully he timed his snail-like progress, scuttling or diving aside when the mad ballistics of the place threatened to destroy him. Reaching the room's center at last, he sidestepped a whirling gong whose tone dropped from a shriek to a moan as it grazed him. He heard a strident clanging and looked around―to see the sun-edged disc jerked sharply off its course by its rigid clapper-chain, spinning and hurtling toward him in a wide arc. Before he could move, it was upon him―and past him, its polished, oscillating face brushing him on three sides gently as a lover's embrace before it spun away.
Vowing not to waste this god-given luck, he flung himself forward along the scraped, battered floor through a momentarily clear space. Panting, he advanced with redoubled pains, relying on sound as well as sight, trying to judge the speed and direction of each gong-stroke by the way it smote his throbbing ears and quivered in his guts. For every three lunges forward he gave back two, peering around desperately in the flaring, plummeting light, cowering in the meager cover of the room's edge. Seeing at last the opportunity to dash for his goal, he balked without knowing why; an instant later, two careening gongs crashed together before him, lacerating the air where his body should have been. The collision altered the patterns, placing him instantly at risk; desperately he leaped to one of the reeling gongs, grabbed its chain, and clung there, spinning giddily with it to the far end of the room, where it dashed him breathless against the long-sought door.
Gasping, croaking, he scrabbled at the door-handle and dragged it open. Racing to avoid being demolished by a final gong-stroke, he flung himself through and collapsed on the other side.
Chapter 10
Blood and Lotus
He awoke to a silence that thundered in his ears like the mightiest cataract of the River Styx. Yet it was true silence, with no trace of the gonging and pealing he had left behind in the oval chamber. How long since that din had ceased, and how long he had lain huddled and stiff in near-darkness, his half-seen surroundings gave no hint. This room appeared to be one of dim smokes and eerie radiances; it might hold new perils, but he hardly cared.
Drawing himself up to a sitting position, he took from his pouch the jar of lotus ointment. He repeated the applications that had brought him this far, treating his neck and thigh, smearing the salve also around his earholes in the hope of offsetting the damage done by the clamor of the gongs. This time the balm produced no noticeable sensation; his mind remained slack and jaded, with barely enough will to drive his nerveless body forward. Yet when he crawled to his feet, he found that his leg would again haltingly support him. He limped ahead, not bothering to stop and try the door at his back.
The limits of the room were invisible in smoky gloom. The fumes seemed to rise from the floor, from pans or braziers whose reddish glow faintly illumined the spreading, billowing columns. They must find some outlet in the darkne
ss above, he reasoned, else the air of the place would be unbreathable; but even so, his nostrils tingled with the pungency of burning wood and of more aromatic substances laid over it. Not lotus, Conan judged―at least, not lotus alone.
He made for the nearest group of braziers, thinking he saw some object in their midst. As he came near, tears blurred his sight; his head clogged and grew near-opaque with fumes. Yet, by stooping through the leaning smoke-columns and fanning his hands to clear the air before his face, he was able to advance between the fires. He confronted the grotesque thing that stood limned by their glow: a body broken on a bamboo rack.
The male figure, once splendid, now lay torn and gashed by patient, exhaustive torture; no shred of costume or uniform was left to clothe his violated dignity. Death had been inflicted by a means Conan had seen used before by Hwong warriors against their Turanian captives: in preparation, a leg-thick joint of thungee thorn-tree was straightened by a soaking in brine. Lashed behind the sloping rack, it was made fast to the victim by means of a braided yoke across his chin. As the thorn limb dried slowly, resuming its natural curve, its daggery hide was forced forward into the sufferer's spine; meanwhile his head was drawn steadily backward until, with any luck, he strangled or his neck snapped.
The drying of this spiky limb had been speeded by the heat of the braziers, Conan guessed―if indeed the torture had been carried out here.
Still, the end could not have been quick in coming.
Viewing the stretched, distorted corpse, Conan realized abruptly that the dark obscurity of its outline might not be due alone to the faintness of
the brazier's glow. Leaning closer, he saw that the smudged, blood-crusted skin was neither yellow nor desert-dusky but of a rarer, blacker hue. From where he stood, the victim's face was invisible, bent back sharply over rim of the rack; full of foreboding, Conan shuffled stiffly around the makeshift frame. The inverted features, though swollen and distended, confirmed his deepest fear, leaving no room for doubt: The man was Juma.
Unbelievingly, Conan extended a hand to brush the skin of his dead friend's, cheek. It was dusty-dry, as unnaturally warm as the brazier-smoke billowing all around.
Reeling backward, choking suddenly on bitter smoke and bitterer wrath, Conan blundered away from the horrid scene. He lurched blindly, stumbling against red-hot firetrays without noticing the pain, shambling off into darkness with scorched, streaming eyes. But the flash of murderous anger he felt was quickly drowned by despair; what could he do, alone and weaponless in the unguessed expanse of this prison?
He must, he told himself, have lain in his stupor for hours. During that time Phang Loon had seized Juma―perhaps because of Conan's own thoughtless questions―and brought him here, to suffer the most agonizing death conceivable. Unless, of course, the warlord had lied to him in the first chamber, having already trapped the Kushite, already slain him…
But then, what of it? He had no means of retaliation in any case. If he cried out now, shouted his defiance to the unseen watchers who surely lurked above, what could it possibly accomplish? What would it seem but a plea for mercy, a laughable admission of weakness? Never that!
Instead Conan clenched the sorrow within his breast, determined to dull its pain and save it along with the last vestiges of his strength.
Regaining his vision, yet still disoriented in the darkness, he cast about to find his friend's body once again. Here, just ahead, was a group of smoking braziers; but were these the same ones? He doubted it; the color of their faint, vaporous flames was not reddish but yellow, and their fumes spicier, almost cloying. Yet some dim object did lurk in their midst…
Gripped by curiosity, Conan shielded his face against heat and smoke and ventured forward.
The figure limned by the flickering yellow light was not a dead man, but a living one. Dressed in a loose-sleeved robe of embroidered gold silk, a
white silken loin-wrap, delicately pointed slippers, and a loose silk cap, he reclined at ease―but on bed ill-suited to his finery: it was a grimy cot of rough bamboo, stretched with the coarsest canvas. Fumes shrouded the figure's head, seeping from a long, narrow-bowled pipe whose stem lingered near his lips; through this smaller cloud of smoke a familiar, aquiline face could be seen.
"Babrak!" With elation almost matching his despair of a moment before, Conan stepped haltingly forward. "Glad I am to see you, my friend!
At least you are alive… did Phang Loon's men drag you here too?" Unable to kneel on his injured leg, Conan stooped down awkwardly in front of his reclining friend. "Babrak, know you: They have murdered Juma! Or given him to the Hwong to kill, it makes no difference; I'll have their living guts for it, either way! He died cruelly―his body lies over yonder, have you seen it? Babrak, fellow, are you in your senses?"
To Conan's queries the young Turanian responded only with vacuous looks and vacant, open-mouthed half smiles. His face, sheened faintly in the firelight by perspiration, wore a lax, uncharacteristic expression. His eyes had dilated to deep brown voids, eerily unfocused. His only positive act was to touch his parted lips at intervals with the pipe's ivory mouthpiece and draw between them a visible, twining torrent of gray smoke.
"Come, lad―you are drugged even more hopelessly than I! You have learned to crave lotus, in dishonor to your faith!" Hovering before his friend's cot, Conan tried to make a jest of it. "We should never have given you to that fancy tavern-trollop; like as not she was Phang Loon's aging mother!" His laugh barked hollow, lacking true spirit and eliciting no reaction from Babrak. "But never mind, lad, this stupor will pass. We will get you away from here, out of those unmanly clothes and out of the clutches of the drug, somehow! Come, help me escape this hellish place and avenge Juma!" He extended a hand to the supine youth.
Babrak's face signaled no comprehension. That the Turanian even saw his friend was evidenced by one thing and one thing only: In response to Conan's beckoning hand, the reclining one drew the pipe out of his mouth, so slowly that a trail of smoke braided visibly from its yellowed, cracked tip to his moist lips. In languid generosity he held forth the lotus pipe, offering it to Conan.
From this gesture Conan recoiled, stricken with horror. Rather than
snarling in rebuke or dashing the pipe out of his friend's hand, he stumbled off between the fires. He must restrain his anger, he told himself; if he really meant to bring Babrak out of this place, it would have to be done gently. Though Crom knew, he could barely drag himself through this maze; burdened by another drugged victim, his hope of survival would be scant.
A deeper sorrow clenched his gut. True, he had watched others fall beneath the spell of the lotus, but never one so dear to him as Babrak! And never had he seen any escape who lay so deep in its grip as the waif of Tarim seemed to have sunk overnight. Surely, 'twould be better to come back for him later at the head of an armored troop… or perhaps, just take the added price of his loss out of Phang Loon's entrails! In truth, the lad might be deader to him now than Juma was. And he himself might already be facing the same forlorn death.
His despair had set him wandering off in the smoky dark, and long moments passed before he resolved to turn and try dragging the youth bodily from his cot of stupor. But the drifting smokes continued to play strange tricks; the billows floating nearest did not look like the ones he had most recently left. The transparent flames shooting from the beds of the braziers seemed too tall and ghostly, their color too pallidly, spectrally blue. Conan edged nearer to find out.
The shape reposing among these sultry fires tantalized his gaze. And although an eerie intuition told him what to expect, he had to press into the domain of the hot, choking smoke to be sure. Only then, through blinking, tear-rimmed eyes could he affirm that Phang Loon's third captive was his lover Sariya.
She lay on the padded satin of an exquisitely carved and painted couch, contoured long and low for sleep and for less passive relaxations. Her attire in the braziers' suffocating heat was well-suited to either pastime: a glossy silk ribbon o
f skirt, whose disarray succeeded in covering only her navel; a trifling shoulder-cape which, although perfectly arranged, concealed nothing at all; ear-bangles, chest-bangles, ankle bracelets, and a pair of tight jeweled slippers, which appeared only to imprison and constrict her shapely feet rather than clothing them.
She yet lived and desired, as the lazy sinuousness of her movements showed. Whether she lay in the grip of narcotics or of more native ecstacies was uncertain, for she languished like a harem-slave awaiting
her pasha, her eyes distractedly roving the drifting vapors overhead. Her slim hands idly stroked and plucked the velvet couch and the softer velvet of her own skin, which shone lushly agleam with perspiration in the dim blue glare.
All her womanly warmth, all her loving frankness and freshness were lost in this bizarre tableau. Yet Conan's male desires were stirred; he had to remind himself to hail her with words, not stumble forward and try to address her earthier cravings with his drugged, battered body.
"Sariya! So the fiend has fetched you here as well―doubtless on my account!" His voice rasped hoarse with passion and with more debilitating emotions. "Come, girl, we will fight our way out of this place and return to our little hut. 'Tis a night of sore tragedy, but the best can yet be saved, I swear to you."
The woman heard his voice, that was plain; her self-caresses promptly ceased. Yet, instead of a thrill of recognition, her lovely face showed confusion as her almond eyes flicked aside to penetrate the drifting smoke.
Her rubied, moistened lips pouted nervously, as if in apprehension. Then her eyes found the speaker and widened in a gaze of fear.
"Sariya, girl, 'tis I, Conan! Come, let us escape from here! I need your soft shoulder as my crutch."
Croaking the words hoarsely, he reached for her. Yet he clutched only emptiness as she shrank away to the far corner of her couch. Trying pathetically to cover her nakedness with slim red-nailed hands, she regarded him wild-eyed, with her painted mouth agape, her supple throat convulsing in a shrill, terrified scream.
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