Conan the Victorious

by Robert Jordan

  The others seemed to feel the oppressiveness of the ruins, but neither Conan nor Kang Hou allowed themselves to be affected, outwardly at least. The Cimmerian would allow no such distractions from whatever time he had left. He ghosted through the fading light with a deadly intensity, eyes striving to pierce the layers of green and shadow ahead. And then there was something to see. Lights. Hundreds of scattered lights, flickering like giant fireflies.

  Conan could see little from the ground, but nearby vines like hawsers trailed down from a balcony of what might have once been a palace. Sheathing his sword and shifting the silk-wrapped sorcerous weapon to a place behind his back, the Cimmerian climbed one of the thick vines hand over hand. The others followed as agilely as the monkeys of the forest.

  Crouching behind a green-swathed stone balustrade, Conan studied the lights. They were torches atop poles stuck in the ground, forming a great circle. A knot of Vendhyan cavalrymen clustered around each torch, dismounted and fingering their swords nervously as they peered at the wall of growth surrounding them. Oddly, no insects fluttered in the light of the torches.

  “Their ointment is better than yours, Khitan,” Enam muttered, crushing one of the stinging flies. No one else spoke for the moment.

  It was clear enough what the soldiers guarded. The great circle of torches surrounded a building more massive than any Conan had yet seen in the ruined city. Columned terraces and great domes rose more than twice as high as the tallest tree on the forest floor, yet others of the giant trunks rose in turn from those terraces, turning the huge structure into a small mountain.

  “If they are in that,” Hordo said softly, “how in Zandru’s Nine Hells do we find them? It must have a hundred leagues of corridor and more chambers than a man could count.”

  “They are in there,” Kang Hou said. “And I fear we must find them for more than their lives.”

  Conan eyed the merchant sharply. “What is it you know that I do not?”

  “I know nothing,” Kang Hou replied, “but I fear much.” With that he scurried to the vines and began to climb back down. There was nothing Conan could do but follow.

  Once on the ground again, the Cimmerian took the lead. The two women would be with Kandar, and Kandar would certainly be with Karim Singh and Naipal. In the huge building, Kang Hou said, and for all the denials, Conan was sure the man knew something. So be it, he thought.

  It was a file of wraiths that flitted through the Vendhyan lines, easily avoiding the few soldiers who rode patrol among the clusters at the torches. Bushes and creepers grew from chinks between the marble blocks of the great structure’s broad stairs and lifted tiles on the wide portico at their head. Tall bronze doors stood open, a thick wreathing of vines speaking of the centuries since they had been shifted from their present position. With his sword in advance, Conan entered.

  Behind him he heard the gasps of the others as they followed but he knew what caused the sounds of astonishment and so did not look back. His eyes were all for the way ahead. From the huge portal a wide aisle of grit-covered tiles led between thick columns, layered with gold leaf, to a vast central chamber beneath a dome that towered hundreds of feet above. In the middle of that chamber stood a marble statue of a man, more than half the height of the dome and untouched by time. Conan’s skin prickled at the armor on the figure, stone-carved to represent studded leather. Instead of a nasaled helm, however, a gleaming crown topped the massive head.

  “Can that be gold?” Shamil gasped, staring up at the statue.

  “Keep your mind to the matter at hand,” Hordo growled, “or you’ll not live long enough for worrying about gold.” His eyes had a glitter though, as if he had calculated the weight of that crown to within a feather.

  “I had thought it was but legend,” Kang Hou breathed. “I had hoped it was but legend.”

  “What are you talking about?” Conan demanded. “This is not the first time you have indicated you knew something about this place. I think it is time to tell the rest of us.”

  This time the Khitan nodded. “Two millennia ago, Orissa, the first King of Vendhya, was interred in a tomb beneath his capital city, Maharastra. For five centuries he was worshiped as a god in a temple built over his tomb and containing a great figure of Orissa wearing a gold crown said to have been made by melting the crowns and scepters of all the lands he had conquered. Then, in a war of succession, Maharastra was sacked and abandoned by its people. With time the very location of the city was lost. Until now.”

  “That is very interesting,” Conan said dryly, “but it has nothing to do with why we are here.”

  “On the contrary,” Kang Hou told him. “If my niece dies, if we all die, we must slay the wizard Naipal before he looses what lies in the tomb beneath this temple. The legends that I know speak vaguely of horrors, but there is a prophecy associated with all of them. ‘The army that cannot die will march again at the end of time.’ ”

  Conan looked again at the carved armor, then shook his head stubbornly. “I am here for the women first. Then I will see to Naipal and the other two.”

  A boot crunched at one side of the chamber and Conan whirled, his broadsword coming up. A Vendhyan soldier, eyes bulging beneath his turbaned helm, clutched at the throwing knife in his throat and fell to lie still on the floor. Kang Hou hurried to retrieve his blade.

  “Khitan merchants seem a tough lot,” Hordo said incredulously. “Perhaps we should include him when we divide that crown.”

  “Matters at hand.” Conan grunted. “Remember?”

  “I do not say leave the women,” the one-eyed man grumbled, “but could we not take the crown as well?”

  Conan paid no heed. His interest lay in where the soldier had come from. Only one doorway on that side of the chamber, and that the nearest to the corpse, opened onto stairs leading beneath the temple. At the base of those stairs he could see a glimmer of light, as of a torch farther on.

  “Hide the Vendhyan,” he commanded. “If anyone comes looking for him, they’ll not think that wound in his throat was made by a monkey.”

  Impatiently hefting his sword, he waited for Hasan and Enam to carry the corpse into a dark corridor and return alone. Without a word, then, he started down.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  In a huge high-ceilinged chamber far beneath the temple once dedicated to Orissa, Naipal again paused in his work to look with longing expectation at the doorway to his power. Many doorways opened into the chamber, letting on the warren of passages that crossed and criss-crossed beneath the temple. This large marble arch, each stone bearing a cleanly incised symbol of sorcerous power, was blocked by a solid mass of what appeared to be smooth stone. Stone it might appear, but a sword rang on it as against steel and left less mark than it would have on that metal. And the whole of the passage from the chamber to the tomb, a hundred paces in length, was sealed with the adamantine substance, so said the strange maps Masrok had drawn.

  The wizard swayed with exhaustion, but the smell of success close at hand drove him on, even numbing the ache behind his eyes. Five of the khorassani he placed on their golden tripods at the points of a carefully measured pentagon he had scribed on the marble floor tiles with chalk made from the burned bones of virgins. Setting the largest of the smooth ebon stones on its own tripod, he threw wide his black-robed arms and began the first incantation.

  “Ka-my’een dai’el! Da-en’var hoy’aarth! Khora mar! Khora mar!”

  Louder the chant rose, and louder still, echoing from the walls, ringing in the ears, piercing the skull. Karim Singh and Kandar pressed their hands to their ears, groaning. The two women, naked save for their veils, bound hand and foot, wailed for the pain. Only Naipal reveled in the sound, gloried in the reverberations deep in his bones. It was a sound of power. His power. Eye-searing bars of light lanced from the largest khorassani to each of the others, then from each of those smaller stones to each of its glowing brothers, forming a pentagram of burning brilliance. The air between the lines of fire shimmered a
nd rippled as though flame sliced to gossamer had been stretched there, and the whole hummed and crackled with fury.

  “There,” Naipal said. “Now the guardian demons, the Sivani, are sealed away from this world unless summoned by name.”

  “That is all very well,” Kandar muttered. Actually seeing the wizard’s power had drained some of his arrogance. “But how are we to get to the tomb? My soldiers cannot dig through that. Will your stones’ fire melt that which almost broke my blade?”

  Naipal stared at the man who would lead the army that was entombed a hundred paces away—at least the man the world would think led it—and watched his arrogance wilt further. The wizard did not like those who could not keep their minds focused on what they were about. Kandar’s insistence that the women should witness every moment of his triumph—his triumph!—irritated Naipal. For the moment Kandar was still needed, but, Naipal decided, something painfully fitting would make way for the prince’s successor. At least Karim Singh, his narrow face pasty and beaded with sweat, had been cowed to a proper view of matters.

  Instead of answering the question, Naipal asked one in tones like the caress of a razor’s edge. “Are you sure you made the arrangements I commanded? Carts filled with street urchins should have arrived by now.”

  “They will come,” Kandar answered sullenly. “Soon. I sent my body servant to see if they have come, did I not? But it takes time to gather so many carts. The governor might—”

  “Pray he does only what he has been told,” Naipal snarled.

  The wizard rubbed at his temples fretfully. All of his fine plans, now thrown into a hodgepodge of haste and improvisation by that accursed pan-kur.

  Quickly he took the last four khorassani from their ebony chest and placed them on tripods of gold. So close to the demon’s prison, they would do for the summoning. He was careful to put the tripods well away from the other five to avoid any interaction. A resonance could be deadly. But there would be no resonance, no failure of any kind. The accursed blue-eyed barbarian, the devil spawn, would be defeated.

  “E’las eloyhim! Maraath savinday! Khora mar! Khora mar!”

  Conan was grateful for the pools of light from the distantly spaced torches, each only just visible from the last. Seemingly hundreds of dark tunnels formed a maze under the temple but the torches made a path to follow. And at the end of that path must lie what he sought.

  Suddenly the Cimmerian stiffened. From behind came the sound of pounding feet. Many pounding feet.

  “They must have found the body,” Hordo said with a disgusted glare that took in Hasan and Enam.

  Conan hesitated only an instant. To remain where they were meant a battle they could not in all probability win. To rush ahead meant running headlong into the gods alone knew what. “Scatter,” he ordered the others. “Each must find his way as he can. And Hanuman’s own luck go with us all.”

  The big Cimmerian waited only long enough to see each man disappear down a separate dark passage, then chose his own. The last glimmers of light faded behind him quickly. He slowed, feeling his way along a smooth wall, placing each foot carefully on a floor he could no longer see. With the blade of his sword he probed the blackness ahead.

  Yet abruptly that blackness did not seem as complete as it had. For a moment he thought his eyes might be adapting, but then he realized there was a light ahead. A light that was approaching him. Pressing his back against the wall, he waited.

  Slowly the light drew closer, obviously bobbing in someone’s hand. The shape of a man became clear. It was no torch he carried, though he held it like one, but rather what seemed to be a metal rod topped by a glowing ball.

  Conan’s jaw tightened at this obvious sorcery. But the man coming nearer looked nothing at all like the one he had seen at Kandar’s palace, the man he had thought was Naipal. Recognition came to him in the same instant that the man stopped, peering into the darkness toward Conan was though he sensed a presence. It was Ghurran, but a Ghurran whose apparent age had been halved to perhaps fifty.

  “It is I, herbalist,” the Cimmerian said, stepping away from the wall. “Conan. And I have questions for you.”

  The no-longer-so-old man gave a start, then stared at him in amazement. “You actually have one of the daggers! How—? No matter. With that I can slay the demon if need be. Give it to me!”

  A part of the silk wrapping had scraped loose against the wall, Conan realized, revealing the faintly glowing hilt of silvery metal. With one hand he pushed the cloth back into place. “I have need of it, herbalist. I will pass over how you have made yourself younger, and how that torch was made, but what do you do in this place, at this time? And why did you abandon me to die from the poison after coming so far?”

  “There is no poison,” Ghurran muttered impatiently. “You must give me the dagger. You know not what it is capable of.”

  “No poison!” Conan spat. “I have suffered agonies of it. Not a night gone but the pain was enough to twist my stomach into knots and send fire through my muscles. You said you sought an antidote, but you left me to die!”

  “You fool! I gave you the antidote in Sultanapur! All you have felt is your body purging itself of the potions I gave you to make you think you were still poisoned.”

  “Why?” was all Conan said.

  “Because I had need of you. My body was too frail to make this journey alone, but as soon as I saw the contents of those chests, I knew I must. Naipal prepares to loose a great evil on the world, and only I can stop him. But I must have that dagger!”

  A widening of Ghurran’s eyes warned Conan as much as did the increase in light. The Cimmerian dropped to a crouch and threw himself to one side, twisting and stabbing as he did. A Vendhyan tulwar sliced above his head, but his own blade went through the soldier’s middle. The dying man fell, and his two fellows, rushing at his heels, went down in a heap atop Conan. The big Cimmerian grappled with them in the light of their fallen torch. Ghurran and his glowing rod had vanished.

  In a struggling pile the three men rolled atop the torch. One of the Vendhyans screamed as the flames were ground out against his back, then screamed again as a dagger found his flesh. Conan’s hands closed on the head of the soldier who had slain his companion by mistake. The sound of a neck breaking was a loud snap in the dark.

  But it need not be total dark Conan thought as he climbed to his feet. Without hesitation he unwrapped the strange weapon. A dagger, Ghurran had called it, but what monstrous hand could use it so, the Cimmerian wondered. And it could slay the demon. What demon? But for whatever hand or purpose the silvery blade had been wrought, its faint glow was light of a sort in the blackness of the tunnel, if light of an eerie grayish-blue. By it Conan recovered his broadsword and again began a slow progress through the tunnels. Soon he heard voices, hollow echoes in the distant passages. With difficulty he determined a direction. Grimly he moved toward the source.

  Thunder smote the chamber, and the obsidian form of Masrok floated in the void of its fiery cage. The silvery weapons held in five of its eight arms looked no different, yet in some fashion they had an aura of having been used recently, a pulsation that reached into the back of a human mind and whispered of violence and death. Karim Singh and Prince Kandar edged back from the huge figure, no matter that it was confined. The bound women seemed frozen with shock and fear.

  “You slice matters too finely, O man,” Masrok boomed. Crimson eyes flickered to the blazing pentagram in what could not possibly have been nervousness. “A delay of but another beat of a human heart and my other selves would have been on me. Who would serve you then, O man?”

  “Masrok, I command you—” Naipal began when half a score of Vendhyan soldiers burst into the chamber.

  “Prince Kandar!” one of them cried. “Someone has—”

  “You dare intrude!” Naipal howled. He spoke a word that made even him shiver, and lightning flared from the largest of the khorassani. A single shriek rent the air, and a cinder, only vaguely resembling the soldi
er who had shouted, fell and shattered into charred chunks on the stone floor. Turban-helmed men ran, screaming with terror.

  Karim Singh and Prince Kandar both tried to speak at once.

  “My men are not to be slain out of hand,” Kandar shouted.

  “The message could have been important,” the wazam cried.

  Both men clamped their teeth on further words as Naipal’s dark eyes came to rest on them. “He dies whom I wish to die, and what is important is what I say is important. This is important!” The wizard turned his attention back to the demon, which had watched what had happened impassively. “You will open the way to the tomb for me, Masrok. I care not how.”

  “From within this cage?” Masrok replied with a hint of its former sarcasm.

  “Open it!”

  For a moment scarlet eyes met those of ebon, then the demon’s mouth opened, and the sound that emerged sent shudders through human flesh. Only for an instant, however. The sound rose with blinding speed to send a stabbing pain in the ears, and beyond. Yet still Masrok’s straining jaws told of a cry continuing.

  Suddenly that call was answered. Suddenly there were—things in the chamber. What exactly or how many it was impossible to tell, for it pained the eye to gaze on them directly, and under a sidelong glance, the numbers and forms seemed to shift constantly. Impressions were all that could be made out, and they enough to bring a lifetime of nightmares. Fangs dripping spittle that bubbled and hissed on the stone. Razor claws gleaming like steel and needle spines glittering like crystal. Sparkling scales in a thousand hues and leathery wings that seemed to stretch farther than the eye could see, farther surely than the walls of the chamber.