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

door swung apart

and four giant negroes entered. Each was clad only in a silken breech-clout supported by a girdle, from which hung a great key.

 

Xaltotun gestured impatiently toward the king and turned away, as if

dismissing the matter entirely from his mind. His fingers twitched

queeriy. From a cavern green jade box he took a handful of shimmering

black dust, and placed it in a brazier which stood on a golden tripod

at his elbow. The crystal globe, which he seemed to have forgotten,

fell suddenly to the floor, as if its invisible support had been

removed.

 

Then the blacks had lifted Conan-for so loaded with chains was he that

he could not walk-and carried him from the chamber. A glance back,

before the heavy, gold-bound teak door was closed, showed him Xaltotun

leaning back in his throne-like chair, his arms folded, while a thin

wisp of smoke curled up from the brazier. Oman’s scalp prickled. In

Stygia, that ancient and evil kingdom that lay far to the south, he

had seen such black dust before. It was the pollen of the black lotus,

which creates death-like sleep and monstrous dreams; and he knew that

only the grisly wizards of the Black Ring, which is the nadir of evil,

voluntarily seek the scarlet nightmares of the black lotus, to revive

their necromantic powers.

 

The Black Ring was a fable and a lie to most folk of the western

world, but Conan knew of its ghastly reality, and its grim votaries

who practise their abominable sorceries amid the black vaults of

Stygia and the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea. He glanced back at

the cryptic, gold-bound door, shuddering at what it hid.

 

Whether it was day or night the king could not tell. The palace of

King Tarascus seemed a shadowy, nighted place, that shunned natural

illumination. The spirit of darkness and shadow hovered over it, and

that spirit, Conan felt, was embodied in the stranger Xaltotun. The

negroes carried the king along a winding corridor so dimly lighted

that they moved through it like black ghosts bearing a dead man, and

down a stone stair that wound endlessly? A torch in the hand of one

cast the great deformed shadows streaming along the wall; it was like

the descent into hell of a corpse borne by dusky demons.

 

At last they reached the foot of the stair, and then they traversed a

long straight corridor, with a blank wall on one hand pierced by an

occasional arched doorway with a stair leading up behind it, and on

the other hand another wall showing heavy barred doors at regular

intervals of a few feet.

 

Halting before one of these doors, one of the blacks produced the key

that hung at his girdle, and turned it in the lock. Then, pushing open

the grille, they entered with their captive. They were in a small

dungeon with heavy stone walls, floor and ceiling, and in the opposite

wall there was another grilled door. What lay beyond that door Conan

could not tell, but he did not believe it was another corridor. The

glimmering light of the torch, flickering through the bars, hinted at

shadowy spaciousness and echoing depths.

 

In one corner of the dungeon, near the door through which they had

entered, a cluster of rusty chains hung from a great iron ring set in

the stone. In these chains a skeleton dangled. Conan glared at it with

some curiosity, noticing the state of the bare bones, most of which

were splintered and broken; the skull which had fallen from the

vertebrae, was crushed as if by some savage blow of tremendous force.

 

Stolidly one of the blacks, not the one who had opened the door,

removed the chains from the ring, using his key on the massive lock,

and dragged the mass of rusty metal and shattered bones over to one

side. Then they fastened Conan’s chains to that ring, and the third

black turned his key in the lock of the farther door, grunting when he

had assured himself that it was properly fastened.

 

Then they regarded Conan cryptically, slit-eyed ebony giants, the

torch striking highlights from their glossy skin.

 

He who held the key to the nearer door was moved to remark,

gutturally: “This your palace now, white dog-king! None but master and

we know. All palace sleep. We keep secret. You live and die here,

maybe. Like him!” He contemptuously kicked the shattered skull and

sent it clattering across the stone floor.

 

Conan did not deign to reply to the taunt and the black, galled

perhaps by his prisoner’s silence, muttered a curse, stooped and spat

full in the king’s face. It was an unfortunate move for the black.

Conan was seated on the floor, the chains about his waist; ankles and

wrists locked to the ring in the wall. He could neither rise, nor move

more than a yard out from the wall. But there was considerable slack

in the chains that shackled his wrists, and before the bullet-shaped

head could be withdrawn out of reach, the king gathered this slack in

his mighty hand and smote the black on the head. The man fell like a

butchered ox and his comrades stared to see him lying with his scalp

laid open, and blood oozing from his nose and ears.

 

But they attempted no reprisal, nor did they accept Conan’s urgent

invitation to approach within reach of the bloody chain in his hand.

Presently, grunting in their ape-like speech, they lifted the

senseless black and bore him out like a sack of wheat, arms and legs

dangling. They used his key to lock the door behind them, but did not

remove it from the gold chain that fastened it to his girdle. They

took the torch with them, and as they moved up the corridor the

darkness slunk behind them like an animate thing. Their soft padding

footsteps died away, with the glimmer of their torch, and darkness and

silence remained unchallenged.

 

Chapter 5: The Haunter of the Pits

 

CONAN LAY STILL, enduring the weight of his chains and the despair of

his position with the stoicism of the wilds that had bred him. He did

not move, because the jangle of his chains, when he shifted his body,

sounded startlingly loud in the darkness and stillness, and it was his

instinct, born of a thousand wilderness-bred ancestors, not to betray

his position in his helplessness. This did not result from a logical

reasoning process; he did not lie quiet because he reasoned that the

darkness hid lurking dangers that might discover him in his

helplessness. Xaltotun had assured him that he was not to be harmed,

and Conan believed that it was in the man’s interest to preserve him,

at least for the time being. But the instincts of the wild were there,

that had caused him in his childhood to lie hidden and silent while

wild beasts prowled about his covert.

 

Even his keen eyes could not pierce the solid darkness. Yet aftera

while, after a period of time he had no way of estimating, a faint

glow became apparent, a sort of slanting gray beam, by which Conan

could see, vaguely, the bars of the door at his elbow, and even make

out the skeleton of the other grille. This puzzled him, until at last

he realized the explanation. He was far below ground, in the pits

below the palace; yet for some reason a shaft had been constructed

from somewhere above. Outside, the moon had risen to a point where its

light slanted dimly down the shaft. He reflected that in this manner

he could tell the passing of the days and nights. Perhaps the sun,

too, would shine down that shaft, though on the other hand it might be

closed by day. Perhaps it was a subtle method of torture, allowing a

prisoner but a glimpse of daylight or moonlight.

 

His gaze fell on the broken bones in the farther comer, glimmering

dimly. He did not tax his brain with futile speculation as to who the

wretch had been and for what reason he had been doomed, but he

wondered at the shattered condition of the bones. They had not been

broken on a rack. Then, as he looked, another unsavory detail made

itself evident. The shin-bones were split lengthwise, and there was

but one explanation; they had been broken in that manner in order to

obtain the marrow. Yet what creature but man breaks bones for their

marrow? Perhaps those remnants were mute evidence of a horrible,

cannibalistic feast, of some wretch driven to madness by starvation.

Conan wondered if his own bones would be found at some future date,

hanging in their rusty chains. He fought down the unreasoning panic of

a trapped wolf.

 

The Cimmerian did not curse, scream, weep or rave as a civilized man

might have done. But the pain and turmoil in his bosom were none the

less fierce. His great limbs quivered with the intensity of his

emotions. Somewhere, far to the westward, the Nemedian host was

slashing and burning its way through the heart of his kingdom. The

small host of Poitanians could not stand before them. Prospero might

be able to hold Tarantia for weeks, or months; but eventually, if not

relieved, he must surrender to greater numbers. Surely the barons

would rally to him against the invaders. But in the meanwhile he,

Conan, must lie helpless in a darkened cell, while others led his

spears and fought for his kingdom. The king ground his powerful teeth

in red rage.

 

Then he stiffened as outside the farther door he heard a stealthy

step. Straining his eyes he made out a bent, indistinct figure outside

the grille. There was a rasp of metal against metal, and he heard the

clink of tumblers, as if a key had been turned in the lock. Then the

figure moved silently out of his range of vision. Some guard, he

supposed, trying the lock. After a while he heard the sound repeated

faintly somewhere farther on, and that was followed by the soft

opening of a door, and then a swift scurry of softly shod feet

retreated in the distance. Then silence fell again.

 

Conan listened for what seemed a long time, but which could not have

been, for the moon still shone down the hidden shaft, but he heard no

further sound. He shifted his position at last, and his chains

clanked. Then he heard another, lighter footfall-a soft step outside

the nearer door, the door though which he had entered the cell. An

instant later a slender figure was etched dimly in the gray light.

 

“King Conan!” a soft voice intoned urgently. “Oh, my lord, are you

there?”

 

“Where else?” he answered guardedly, twisting his head about to stare

at the apparition.

 

It was a girl who stood grasping the bars with her slender fingers.

The dim glow behind her outlined her supple figure through the wisp of

silk twisted about her loins, and shone vaguely on jeweled breastplates. Her dark eyes gleamed in the shadows, her white limbs

glistened softly, like alabaster. Her hair was a mass of dark foam, at

the burnished luster of which the dim light only hinted.

 

“The keys to your shackles and to the farther door!” she whispered,

and a slim White hand came through the bars and dropped three objects

with a clink to the flags beside him.

 

“What game is this?” he demanded. “You speak in the Nemedian tongue,

and I have no friends in Nemedia. What deviltry is your master up to

now? Has he sent you here to mock me?”

 

“It is no mockery!” The girl was trembling violently. Her bracelets

and breastplates clinked against the bars she grasped. “I