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

its touch; and only such a man would dare defy Thoth-Amon, whom the western world knew only as a figure of terror and myth.

 

The street broadened, and Conan was aware that he was getting into the

part of the city dedicated to the temples. The great structures reared

their black bulks against the dim stars, grim, indescribably menacing

in the flare of the few torches. And suddenly he heard a low scream

from—a woman on the other side of the street and somewhat ahead of

him-a naked courtezan wearing the tall plumed head-dress of her class.

She was shrinking back against the wall, staring across at something

he could not yet see. At her cry the few people on the street halted

suddenly as if frozen. At the same instant Conan was aware of a

sinister slithering ahead of him. Then about the dark comer of the

building he was approaching poked a hideous, wedge-shaped head, and

after it flowed coil after coil of rippling, darkly glistening trunk.

 

The Cimmerian recoiled, remembering tales he had heard-serpents were

sacred to Set, god of Stygia, who men said was himself a serpent.

Monsters such as this were kept in the temples of Set, and when they

hungered, were allowed to crawl forth into the streets to take what

prey they wished. Their ghastly feasts were considered a sacrifice to

the scaly god.

 

The Stygians within Conan’s sight fell to their knees, men and women,

and passively awaited their fate. One the great serpent would select,

would lap in scaly coils, crush to a red pulp and swallow as a rat-snake swallows a mouse. The others would live. That was the will of

the gods.

 

But it was not Conan’s will. The python glided toward him, its

attention probably attracted by the fact that he was the only human in

sight still standing erect. Gripping his great knife under his mantle,

Conan hoped the slimy brute would pass him by. But it halted before

him and reared up horrifically in the flickering torchlight, its

forked tongue flickering in and out, its cold eyes glittering with the

ancient cruelty of the serpent-folk. Its neck arched, but before it

could dart, Conan whipped his knife from under his mantle and struck

like a flicker of lightning. The broad blade split that wedge-shaped

head and sheared deep into the thick neck.

 

Conan wrenched his knife free and sprang clear as the great body

knotted and looped and Whipped terrifically in its death throes. In

the moment that he stood staring in morbid fascination, the only sound

was the thud and swish of the snake’s tail against the stones.

 

Then from the shocked votaries burst a terrible cry: “Blasphemer! He

has slain the sacred son of Set! Slay him! Slay! Slay!”

 

Stones whizzed about him and the crazed Stygians rushed at him,

shrieking hysterically, while from all sides others emerged from their

houses and took up the cry. With a curse Conan wheeled and darted into

the black mouth of an alley. He heard the patter of bare feet on the

flags behind him as he ran more by feel than by sight, and the walls

resounded to the vengeful yells of the pursuers. Then his left hand

found a break in the wall, and he turned sharply into another,

narrower alley. On both sides rose sheer black stone walls. High above

him he could see a thin line of stars. These giant walls, he knew,

were the walls of temples. He heard, behind him, the pack sweep past

the dark mouth in full cry. Their shouts grew distant, faded away.

They had missed the smaller alley and run straight on in the

blackness. He too kept straight ahead, though the thought of

encountering another of Set’s “sons” in the darkness brought a shudder

from him.

 

Then somewhere ahead of him he caught a moving glow, like that of a

crawling glow-worm. He halted, flattened himself against the wall and

gripped his knife. He knew what it was: a man approaching with a

torch. Now it was so close he could make out the dark hand that

gripped it, and the dim oval of a dark face. A few more steps and the

man would certainly see him. He sank into a tigerish crouch-the torch

halted. A door was briefly etched in the glow, while the torch-bearer

fumbled with it. Then it opened, the tall figure vanished through it,

and darkness closed again on the alley. There was a sinister

suggestion of furtiveness about that slinking figure, entering the

alley-door in darkness; a priest, perhaps returning from some dark

errand.

 

But Conan groped toward the door. If one man came up that alley with a

torch, others might come at any time. To retreat the way he had come

might mean to run full into the mob from which he was fleeing. At any

moment they might return, find the narrower alley and come howling

down it. He felt hemmed in by those sheer, unscalable walls, desirous

of escape, even if escape meant invading some unknown building.

 

The heavy bronze door was not locked. It opened under his fingers and

he peered through the crack. He was looking into a great square

chamber of massive black stone. A torch smoldered in a niche in the

wall. The chamber was empty. He glided through the lacquered door and

closed it behind him.

 

His sandaled feet made no sound as he crossed the black marble floor.

A teak door stood partly open, and gliding through this, knife in

hand, he came out into a great, dim, shadowy place whose lofty ceiling

was only a hint of darkness high above him, toward which the black

walls swept upward. On all sides black-arched doorways opened into the

great still hall. It was lit by curious bronze lamps that gave a dim

weird light. On the other side of the great hall a broad black marble

stairway, without a railing, marched upward to lose itself in gloom,

and above him on all sides dun galleries hung like black stone ledges.

 

Conan shivered; he was in a temple of some Stygian god, if not Set

himself, then someone only less grim. And the shrine did not lack an

occupant. In the midst of the great hall stood a black stone altar,

massive, somber, without carvings or ornament, and upon it coiled one

of the great sacred serpents, its iridescent scales shimmering in the

lamplight. It did not move, and Conan remembered stories that the

priests kept these creatures drugged part of the time. The Cimmerian

took an uncertain step out from the door, then shrank back suddenly,

not into the room he had just quitted, but into a velvet-curtained

recess. He had heard a soft step somewhere near by.

 

From one of the black arches emerged a tall, powerful figure in

sandals and silken loincloth, with a wide mantle trailing from his

shoulders. But face and head were hidden by a monstrous mask, a half-bestial, half-human countenance, from the crest of which floated a

mass of ostrich plumes.

 

In certain ceremonies the Stygian priests went masked. Conan hoped the

man would not discover him, but some instinct warned the Stygian. He

turned abruptly from his destination, which apparently was the stair,

and stepped straight to the recess. As he jerked aside the velvet

hanging, a hand darted from the shadows, crushed the cry in his throat

and jerked him headlong into the alcove, and the knife impaled him.

 

Conan’s next move was the obvious one suggested by logic. He lifted

off the grinning mask and drew it over his own head. The fisherman’s

mantle he flung over the body of the priest, which he concealed behind

the hangings, and drew the priestly mantle about his own brawny

shoulders. Fate had given him a disguise. All Khemi might well be

searching now for the blasphemer who dared defend himself against a

sacred snake; but who would dream of looking for him under the mask of

a priest?

 

He strode boldly from the alcove and headed for one of the arched

doorways at random; but he had not taken a dozen strides When he

wheeled again, all his senses edged for peril.

 

A band of masked figures filed down the stair, appareled exactly as he

was. He hesitated, caught in the open, and stood still, trusting to

his disguise, though cold sweat gathered on his forehead and the backs

of his hands. No word was spoken. Like phantoms they descended into

the great hall and moved past him toward a black arch. The leader

carried an ebon staff Which supported a grinning white skull, and

Conan knew it was one of the ritualistic processions so inexplicable

to a foreigner, but which played a strong-and often sinister-part in

the Stygian religion. The last figure turned his head slightly toward

the motionless Cimmerian, as if expecting him to follow. Not to do

what was obviously expected of him would rouse instant suspicion.

Conan fell in behind the last man and suited his gait to their

measured pace.

 

They traversed a long, dark, vaulted corridor in which, Conan noticed

uneasily, the skull on the staff glowed phosphorescently. He felt a

surge of unreasoning, wild animal panic that urged him to rip out his

knife and slash right and left at these uncanny figures, to flee madly

from this grim, dark temple. But he held himself in check, fighting

down the dim monstrous intuitions that rose in the back of his mind

and peopled the gloom with shadowy shapes of horror; and presently he

barely stifled a sigh of relief as they filed through a great double-valved door which was three times higher than a man, and emerged into

the starlight.

 

Conan wondered if he dared fade into some dark alley; but hesitated,

uncertain, and down the long dark street they padded silently, while

such folk as they met turned their heads away and fled from them. The

procession kept far out from the walls; to turn and bolt into any of

the alleys they passed would be too conspicuous. While he mentally

fumed and cursed, they came to a low-arched gateway in the southern

wall, and through this they filed. Ahead of them and about them lay

clusters of low, flat-topped mud houses, and palm-groves, shadowy in

the starlight. Now if ever, thought Conan, was his time to escape his

silent companions.

 

But the moment the gate was left behind them those companions were no

longer silent. They began to mutter excitedly among themselves. The

measured, ritualistic gait was abandoned, the staff with its skull was

tucked unceremoniously under the leader’s arm, and the whole group

broke ranks and hurried onward. And Conan hurried with them. For in

the low murmur of speech he had caught a word that galvanized him. The

word was: “Tuttothmes!”

 

Chapter 18: “I Am the Woman Who Never Died”

 

CONAN STARED WITH burning interest at his masked companions. One of

them was Thutothmes, or else the destination of the band was a

rendezvous with the man he sought. And he knew what the destination

was, when beyond the palms he glimpsed a black triangular bulk looming

against the shadowy sky.

 

They passed through the belt of huts and groves, and if any man saw

them he was careful not to show himself. The huts were dark. Behind

them the black towers of Khemi rose gloomily against the stars that

were mirrored in the waters of the harbor; ahead of them the desert

stretched away in dim darkness; somewhere a jackal yapped. The quick-passing sandals of the silent neophytes made no noise in the sand.

They might have been ghosts, moving toward that colossal pyramid that

rose out of the murk of the desert. There was no sound over all