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

class="calibre2">was once Thothmekri, a high priest of Set, who died three thousand

years ago.”

 

“He was an adept of the Black Ring. He knew of the Heart. He will tell

us of its powers.”

 

Lifting the great jewel, the speaker laid it on the withered breast of

the mummy, and lifted his hand as he began an incantation. But the

incantation was never finished. With his hand lilted and his lips

parted he froze, glaring past his acolytes, and they wheeled to stare

in the direction in which he was looking.

 

Through the black arch of a door four gaunt, black-robed shapes had

filed into the great hall. Their faces were dim yellow ovals in the

shadows of their hoods.

 

“Who are you?” ejaculated Thutothmes in a voice as pregnant with

danger as the hiss of a cobra. “Are you mad, to invade the holy shrine

of Set?”

 

The tallest of the strangers spoke, and his voice was toneless as a

Khitan temple bell.

 

“We follow Conan of Aquilonia.”

 

“He is not here,” answered Thutothmes, shaking back his mantle from

his right hand with a curious menacing gesture, like a panther

unsheathing his talons.

 

“You lie. He is in this temple. We tracked him from a corpse behind

the bronze door of the outer portal through a maze of corridors. We

were following his devious trail when we became aware of this

conclave. We go now to take it up again. But first give us the Heart

of Ahriman.”

 

“Death is the portion of madmen,” murmured Thutothmes, moving nearer

the speaker. His priests closed in on cat-like feet, but the strangers

did not appear to heed.

 

“Who can look upon it without desire?” said the Khitan. “In Khitai we

have heard of it. It will give us power over the people which cast us

out. Glory and wonder dream in its crimson deeps. Give it to us,

before we slay you.”

 

A fierce cry rang out as a priest leaped with a flicker of steel.

Before he could strike, a scaly staff licked out and touched his

breast, and he fell as a dead man falls. In an instant the mummies

were staring down on a scene of blood and horror. Curved knives

flashed and crimsoned, snaky staffs licked in and out, and whenever

they touched a man, that man screamed and died.

 

At the first stroke Conan had bounded up and was racing down the

stairs. He caught only glimpses of that brief, fiendish fight—saw men

swaying, locked in battle and streaming blood; saw one Khitan, fairly

hacked to pieces, yet still on his feet and dealing death, when

Thutothmes smote him on the breast with his open empty hand, and he

dropped dead, though naked steel had not been enough to destroy his

uncanny vitality.

 

By the time Conan’s hurtling feet left the stair, the fight was all

but over. Three of the Khitans were down, and slashed and cut to

ribbons and disemboweled, but of the Stygians only Thutothmes remained

on his feet.

 

He rushed at the remaining Khitan, his empty hand lifted like a

weapon, and that hand was black as that of a negro. But before he

could strike, the staff in the tall Khitan’s hand licked out, seeming

to elongate itself as the yellow man thrust. The point touched the

bosom of Thutothmes and he staggered; again and yet again the staff

licked out, and Thutothmes reeled and fell dead, his features blotted

out in a rush of blackness that made the whole of him the same hue as

his enchanted hand.

 

The Khitan turned toward the jewel that burned on the breast of the

mummy, but Conan was before him.

 

In a tense stillness the two faced each other, amid that shambles,

with the carven mummies staring down upon them.

 

“Far have I followed you, oh king of Aquilonia,” said the Khitan

calmly. “Down the long river, and over the mountains, across Poitain

and Zingara and through the hills of Argos and down the coast. Not

easily did we pick up on your trail from Tarantia, for the priests of

Asura are crafty. We lost it in Zingara, but we found your helmet in

the forest below the border hills, where you had fought with the

ghouls of the forests. Almost we lost the trail tonight among these

labyrinths.”

 

Conan reflected that he had been fortunate in returning from the

vampire’s chamber by another route than that by which he had been led

to it. Otherwise he would have run full into these yellow fiends

instead of sighting them from afar as they smelled out his spoor like

human bloodhounds, with whatever uncanny gift was theirs.

 

The Khitan shook his head slightly, as if reading his mind.

 

“That is meaningless; the long trail ends here.”

 

“Why have you hounded me?” demanded Conan, poised to move in any

direction with the celerity of a hair-trigger.

 

“It was a debt to pay,” answered the Khitan. “To you who are about to

die, I will not withhold knowledge. We were vassals of the king of

Aquilonia, Valerius. Long we served him, but of that service we are

free now-my brothers by death, and I by the fulfilment of obligation.

I shall return to Aquilonia with two hearts; for myself the Heart of

Ahriman; for Valerius the heart of Conan. A kiss of the staff that was

cut from the living Tree of Death—”

 

The staff licked out like the dart of a viper, but the slash of

Conan’s knife was quicker. The staff fell in writhing halves, there

was another flicker of the keen steel like a jet of lightning, and the

head of the Khitan rolled to the floor.

 

Conan wheeled and extended his hand toward the jewel-then he shrank

back, his hair bristling, his blood congealing idly.

 

For no longer a withered brown thing lay on the altar. The jewel

shimmered on the full, arching breast of a naked, living man who lay

among the moldering bandages. Living? Conan could not decide. The eyes

were like dark murky glass under which shone inhuman somber fires.

 

Slowly the man rose, taking the jewel in his hand. He towered beside

the altar, dusky, naked, with a face like a carven image. Mutely he

extended his hand toward Conan, with the jewel throbbing like a living

heart within it. Conan took it, with an eery sensation of receiving

gifts from the hand of the dead. He somehow realized that the proper

incantations had not been made-the conjurement had not been completed-life had not been fully restored to his corpse.

 

“Who are you?” demanded the Cimmerian.

 

The answer came in a toneless monotone, like the dripping of water

from stalactites in subterranean caverns. “I was Thothmekri; I am

dead.”

 

“Well, lead me out of this accursed temple, will you?” Conan

requested, his flesh crawling.

 

With measured, mechanical steps the dead man moved toward a black

arch. Conan followed him. A glance back showed him once again the

vast, shadowy hall with its tiers of sarcophagi, the dead men sprawled

about the altar; the head of the Khitan he had slain stared sightless

up at the sweeping shadows.

 

The glow of the jewel illuminated the black tunnels like an en-sorceled lamp, dripping golden fire. Once Conan caught a glimpse of

ivory flesh in the shadows, believed he saw the vampire that was

Akivasha shrinking back from the glow of the jewel; and with her,

other less human shapes scuttled or shambled into the darkness.

 

The dead man strode straight on, looking neither to right nor left,

his pace as changeless as the tramp of doom. Cold sweat gathered thick

on Conan’s flesh. Icy doubts assailed him. How could he know that this

terrible figure out of the past was leading him to freedom? But he

knew that, left to himself, he could never untangle this bewitched

maze of corridors and tunnels. He followed his awful guide through

blackness that loomed before and behind them and was filled with

skulking shapes of horror and lunacy that cringed from the blinding

glow of the Heart.

 

Then the bronze doorway was before him, and Conan felt the night wind

blowing across the desert, and saw the stars, and the starlit desert

across which streamed the great black shadow of the pyramid.

Thothmekri pointed silently into the desert, and then turned and

stalked soundlessly back in the darkness. Conan stared after that

silent figure that receded into the blackness on soundless, inexorable

feet as one that moves to a known and inevitable doom, or returns to

everlasting sleep.

 

With a curse the Cimmerian leaped from the doorway and fled into the

desert as if pursued by demons. He did not look back toward the

pyramid, or toward the black towers of Khemi looming dimly across the

sands. He headed southward toward the coast, and he ran as a man runs

in ungovernable panic. The violent exertion shook his brain free of

black cobwebs; the clean desert wind blew the nightmares from his soul

and his revulsion changed to a wild tide of exultation before the

desert gave way to a tangle of swampy growth through which he saw the

black water lying before him, and the Venturer at anchor.

 

He plunged through the undergrowth, hip-deep in the marshes; dived

headlong into the deep water, heedless of sharks or crocodiles, and

swam to the galley and was clambering up the chain on to the deck,

dripping and exultant, before the watch saw him.

 

“Awake, you dogs!” roared Conan, knocking aside the spear the startled

lookout thrust at his breast. “Heave up the anchor! Lay to the doors!

Give that fisherman a helmet full of gold and put him ashore! Dawn

will soon be breaking, and before sunrise we must be racing for the

nearest port of Zingara!”

 

He whirled about his head the great jewel, which threw off splashes of

light that spotted the deck with golden fire.

 

Chapter 20: Out of the Dust Shall Acheron Arise

 

WINTER HAD PASSED from Aquilonia. Leaves sprang out on the limbs of

trees, and the fresh grass smiled to the touch of the warm southern

breezes. But many a field lay idle and empty, many a charred heap of

ashes marked the spot where proud villas or prosperous towns had

stood. Wolves prowled openly along the grass-grown highways, and bands

of gaunt, masterless men slunk through the forests. Only in Tarantia

was feasting and wealth and pageantry.

 

Valerius ruled like one touched with madness. Even many of the barons

who had welcomed his return cried out at last against him. His tax-gatherers crushed rich and poor alike; the wealth of a looted kingdom

poured into Tarantia, which became less like the capital of a realm

than the garrison of conquerors in a conquered land. Its merchants

waxed rich, but it was a precarious prosperity; for none knew when he

might be accused of treason on a trumped-up charge, and his property

confiscated, himself cast into prison or brought to the bloody block.

 

Valerius made no attempt to conciliate his subjects. He maintained

himself by means of the Nemedian soldiery and by desperate

mercenaries. He knew himself to be a puppet of Amalric. He knew that

he ruled only on the sufferance of the Nemedian. He knew that he could

never hope to unite Aquilonia under his rule and cast off the yoke of

his masters, for the outland provinces would resist him to the last

drop of blood. And for that matter the Nemedians would cast him from

his throne if he made attempt to consolidate his kingdom. He was

caught in his own vise. The gall of defeated pride corroded his soul,

and he threw