The Hour of the Dragon - Robert E. Howard (great reads .TXT) 📗

ALL HIS guides entered the chamber. When the door closed, Conan

saw only one man standing before him-a slim figure, masked in a black

cloak with a hood. This the man threw back, disclosing a pale oval of

a face, with calm, delicately chiseled features.

 

The king set Albiona on her feet, but she still clung to him and

stared apprehensively about her. The chamber was a large one, with

marble walls partly covered with black velvet hangings and thick rich

carpets on the mosaic floor, laved in the soft golden glow of bronze

lamps.

 

Conan instinctively laid a hand on his hilt. There was blood on his

hand, blood clotted about the mouth of his scabbard, for he had

sheathed his blade without cleansing it.

 

“Where are we?” he demanded.

 

The stranger answered with a low, profound bow in which the suspicious

king could detect no trace of irony.

 

“In the temple of Asura, your Majesty.”

 

Albiona cried out faintly and clung closer to Conan, staring fearfully

at the black, arched doors, as if expecting the entry of some grisly

shape of darkness.

 

“Fear not, my lady,” said their guide. “There is nothing here to harm

you, vulgar superstition to the contrary. If your monarch was

sufficiently convinced of the innocence of our religion to protect us

from the persecution of the ignorant, then certainly one of his

subjects need have no apprehensions.”

 

“Who are you?” demanded Conan.

 

“I am Hadrathus, priest of Asura. One of my followers recognized you

when you entered the city, and brought the word to me.”

 

Conan grunted profanely.

 

“Do not fear that others discovered your identity,” Hadrathus assured

him. “Your disguise would have deceived any but a follower of Asura,

whose cult it is to seek below the aspect of illusion. You were

followed to the watch tower, and some of my people went into the

tunnel to aid you if you returned by that route. Others, myself among

them, surrounded the tower. And now, King Conan, it is yours to

command. Here in the temple of Asura you are still king.”

 

“Why should you risk your lives for me?” asked the king.

 

“You were our friend when you sat upon your throne,” answered

Hadrathus. “You protected us when the priests of Mitra sought to

scourge us out of the land.”

 

Conan looked about him curiously. He had never before visited the

temple of Asura, had not certainly known that there was such a temple

in Tarantia. The priests of the religion had a habit of hiding their

temples in a remarkable fashion. The worship of Mitra was

overwhelmingly predominant in the Hyborian nations, but the cult of

Asura persisted, in spite of official ban and popular antagonism.

Conan had been told dark tales of hidden temples where intense smoke

drifted up incessantly from black altars where kidnaped humans were

sacrificed before a great coiled serpent, whose fearsome head swayed

for ever in the haunted shadows.

 

Persecution caused the followers of Asura to hide their temples with

cunning art, and to veil they rituals in obscurity; and this secrecy,

in turn, evoked more monstrous suspicions and tales of evil.

 

But Conan’s was the broad tolerance of the barbarian, and he had

refused to persecute the followers of Asura or to allow the people to

do so on no better evidence than was presented against them, rumors

and accusations that could not be proven. “If they are black

magicians,” he had said, “how will they suffer you to harry them? If

they are not, there is no evil in them. Crom’s devils! Let men worship

what gods they will.”

 

At a respectful invitation from Hadrathus he seated himself on an

ivory chair, and motioned Albiona to another, but she preferred to sit

on a golden stool at his feet, pressing close against his thigh, as if

seeking security in the contact. Like most orthodox followers of

Mitra, she had an intuitive horror of the followers and cult of Asura,

instilled in her infancy and childhood by wild tales of human

sacrifice and anthropomorphic gods shambling through shadowy temples.

 

Hadrathus stood before them, his uncovered head bowed.

 

“What is your wish, your Majesty?”

 

“Food first,” he grunted, and the priest smote a golden gong with a

silver wand.

 

Scarcely had the mellow notes ceased echoing when four hooded figures

came through a curtained doorway bearing a great four-legged silver

platter of smoking dishes and crystal vessels.

 

This they set before Conan, bowing low, and the king wiped his hands

on the damask, and smacked his lips with unconcealed relish.

 

“Beware, your Majesty!” whispered Albiona. “These folk eat human

flesh!”

 

“I’ll stake my kingdom that this is nothing but honest roast beef,”

answered Conan. “Come, lass, fall to! You must be hungry after the

prison fare.”

 

Thus advised, and with the example before her of one whose word was

the ultimate law to her, the countess complied, and ate ravenously

though daintily, while her liege lord tore into the meat joints and

guzzled the wine with as much gusto as if he had not already eaten

once that night.

 

“You priests are shrewd, Hadrathus,” he said, with a great beef-bone

in his hands and his mouth full of meat. “I’d welcome your service in

my campaign to regain my kingdom.”

 

Slowly Hadrathus shook his head, and Conan slammed the beef-bone down

on the table in a gust of impatient wrath.

 

“Crom’s devils! What ails the men of Aquilonia? First Servius—now

you! Can you do nothing but wag your idiotic heads when I speak of

ousting these dogs?”

 

Hadrathus sighed and answered slowly: “My lord, it is ill to say, and

I fain would say otherwise. But the freedom of Aquilonia is at an end!

Nay, the freedom of the whole world may be at an end! Age follows age

in the history of the world, and now we enter an age of horror and

slavery, as it was long ago.”

 

“What do you mean?” demanded the king uneasily.

 

Hadrathus dropped into a chair and rested his elbows on his thighs,

staring at the floor.

 

“It is not alone the rebellious lords of Aquilonia and the armies of

Nemedia which are arrayed against you,” answered Hadrathus. “It is

sorcery-grisly black magic from the grim youth of the world. An awful

shape has risen out of the shades of the Past, and none can stand

before it.”

 

“What do you mean?” Conan repeated.

 

“I speak of Xaltotun of Acheron, who died three thousand years ago,

yet walks the earth today.”

 

Conan was silent, while in his mind floated an image-the image of a

bearded face of calm inhuman beauty. Again he was haunted by a sense

of uneasy familiarity. Acheron-the sound of the word roused

instinctive vibrations of memory and associations in his mind.

 

“Acheron,” he repeated. “Xaltotun of Acheron-man, are you mad? Acheron

has been a myth for more centuries than I can remember. I’ve often

wondered if it ever existed at all.”

 

“It was a black reality,” answered Hadrathus, “an empire of black

magicians, steeped in evil now long forgotten. It was finally

overthrown by the Hyborian tribes of the west. The wizards of Acheron

practised foul necromancy, thaumaturgy of the most evil kind, grisly

magic taught them by devils. And of all the sorcerers of that accursed

kingdom, none was so great as Xaltotun of Python.”

 

“Then how was he ever overthrown?” asked Conan skeptically.

 

“By some means a source of cosmic power which he jealously guarded was

stolen and turned against him. That source has been returned to him,

and he is invincible.”

 

Albiona, hugging the headsman’s black cloak about her, stared from the

priest to the king, not understanding the conversation. Conan shook

his head angrily.

 

“You are making game of me,” he growled. “If Xaltotun has been dead

three thousand years, how can this man be he? It’s some rogue who’s

taken the old one’s name.”

 

Hadrathus leaned to an ivory table and opened a small gold chest which

stood there. From it he took something which glinted dully in the

mellow light-a broad gold coin of antique minting.

 

“You have seen Xaltotun unveiled? Then look upon this. It is a coin

which was stamped in ancient Acheron, before its fall. So pervaded

with sorcery was that black empire, that even this corn has its uses

in making magic.”

 

Conan took it and scowled down at it. There was no mistaking its great

antiquity. Conan had handled many coins in the years of his

plunderings, and had a good practical knowledge of them. The edges

were worn and the inscription almost obliterated. But the countenance

stamped on one side was still clear-cut and distinct. And Conan’s

breath sucked in between his clenched teeth. It was not cool in the

chamber, but he felt a prickling of his scalp, an icy contraction of

his flesh. The countenance was that of a bearded man, inscrutable,

with a calm inhuman beauty.

 

“By Crom! It’s he!” muttered Conan. He understood, now, the sense of

familiarity that the sight of the bearded man had roused in him from

the first. He had seen a coin like this once before, long ago in a far

land.

 

With a shake of his shoulders he growled: “The likeness is only a

coincidence-or if he’s shrewd enough to assume a forgotten wizard’s

name, he’s shrewd enough to assume his likeness.” But he spoke

without conviction. The sight of that coin had shaken the foundations

of his universe. He felt that reality and stability were crumbling

into an abyss of illusion and sorcery. A wizard was understandable;

but this was diabolism beyond sanity.

 

“We cannot doubt that it is indeed Xaltotun of Python,” said

Hadrathus. “He it was who shook down the cliffs at Valkia, by his

spells that enthrall the elementals of the earth-he it was who sent

the creature of darkness into your tent before dawn.”

 

Conan scowled at him. “How did you know that?”

 

“The followers of Asura have secret channels of knowledge. That does

not matter. But do you realize the futility of sacrificing your

subjects in a vain attempt to regain your crown?”

 

Conan rested his chin on his fist, and stared grimly into nothing.

Albiona watched him anxiously, her mind groping bewildered in the

mazes of the problem that confronted him.

 

“Is there no wizard in the world who could make magic to fight

Xaltotun’s magic?” he asked at last.

 

Hadrathus shook his head. “If there were, we of Asura would know of

him. Men say our cult is a survival of the ancient Stygian serpent-worship. That is a lie. Our ancestors came from Vendhya, beyond the

Sea of Vilayet and the blue Himelian mountains. We are sons of the

East, not the South, and we have knowledge of all the wizards of the

East, who are greater than the wizards of the West. And not one of

them but would be a straw in the wind before the black might of

Xaltotun.”

 

“But he was conquered once,” persisted Conan.

 

“Aye; a cosmic source was turned against him. But now that source is

again in his hands, and he will see that it is not stolen again.”

 

“And what is this damnable source?” demanded Conan irritably.

 

“It is called the Heart of Ahriman. When Acheron was overthrown, the

primitive priest who had stolen it and turned it against Xaltotun hid

it in a haunted cavern and built a small temple over the cavern.

Thrice thereafter the temple was rebuilt, each time greater and more

elaborately than before, but always on the site of the original

shrine, though men forgot the