The Devil in Iron, Respawned
by Roberta E. Howard
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Roberta E. Howard
A Conyn the Barbarian story
A Gender Switch Adventure
* * *
One
The fisherwoman loosened her knife in its scabbard. The gesture was instinctive, for what she feared was nothing a knife could slay, not even the saw-edged crescent blade of the Yuetshi that could disembowel a woman with an upward stroke. Neither woman nor beast threatened her in the solitude which brooded over the castellated isle of Xapur.
She had climbed the cliffs, passed through the jungle that bordered them, and now stood surrounded by evidences of a vanished state. Broken columns glimmered among the trees, the straggling lines of crumbling walls meandered off into the shadows, and under her feet were broad paves, cracked and bowed by roots growing beneath.
The fisherwoman was typical of her race, that strange people whose origin is lost in the gray dawn of the past, and who have dwelt in their rude fishing huts along the southern shore of the Sea of Vilayet since time immemorial. She was broadly built, with long, apish arms and a mighty bosom , but with lean loins and thin, bandy legs. Her face was broad, her forehead low and retreating, her hair thick and tangled. A belt for a knife and a rag for a loin cloth were all she wore in the way of clothing.
That she was where she was proved that she was less dully incurious than most of her people. Women seldom visited Xapur. It was uninhabited, all but forgotten, merely one among the myriad isles which dotted the great inland sea. Women called it Xapur, the Fortified, because of its ruins, remnants of some prehistoric kingdom, lost and forgotten before the conquering Hyborians had ridden southward. None knew who reared those stones, though dim legends lingered among the Yuetshi which half intelligibly suggested a connection of immeasurable antiquity between the fishers and the unknown island kingdom.
But it had been a thousand years since any Yuetshi had understood the import of these tales; they repeated them now as a meaningless formula, a gibberish framed to their lips by custom. No Yuetshi had come to Xapur for a century. The adjacent coast of the mainland was uninhabited, a reedy marsh given over to the grim beasts that haunted it. The fisher's village lay some distance to the south, on the mainland. A storm had blown her frail fishing craft far from her accustomed haunts and wrecked it in a night of flaring lightning and roaring waters on the towering cliffs of the isle. Now, in the dawn, the sky shone blue and clear; the rising sun made jewels of the dripping leaves. She had climbed the cliffs to which she had clung through the night because, in the midst of the storm, she had seen an appalling lance of lightning fork out of the black heavens, and the concussion of its stroke, which had shaken the whole island, had been accompanied by a cataclysmic crash that she doubted could have resulted from a riven tree.
A dull curiosity had caused her to investigate; and now she had found what she sought, and an animal-like uneasiness possessed her, a sense of lurking peril.
Among the trees reared a broken domelike structure, built of gigantic blocks of the peculiar ironlike green stone found only on the islands of Vilayet. It seemed incredible that human hands could have shaped and placed them, and certainly it was beyond human power to have overthrown the structure they formed. But the thunderbolt had splintered the ton-heavy blocks like so much glass, reduced others to green dust, and ripped away the whole arch of the dome.
The fisherwoman climbed over the debris and peered in, and what she saw brought a grunt from her. Within the ruined dome, surrounded by stone dust and bits of broken masonry, lay a woman on a golden block. She was clad in a sort of skirt and a shagreen girdle. Her black hair, which fell in a square mane to her massive shoulders, was confined about her temples by a narrow gold band. On her bare, muscular breast lay a curious dagger with a jeweled pommel, a shagreen-bound hilt, and a broad, crescent blade. It was much like the knife the fisherwoman wore at her hip, but it lacked the serrated edge and was made with infinitely greater skill.
The fisherwoman lusted for the weapon. The woman, of course, was dead; had been dead for many centuries. This dome was her tomb. The fisherwoman did not wonder by what art the ancients had preserved the body in such a vivid likeness of life, which kept the muscular limbs full and unshrunken, the dark flesh vital. The dull brain of the Yuetshi had room only for her desire for the knife with its delicate, waving lines along the dully gleaming blade.
Scrambling down into the dome, she lifted the weapon from the woman's breast. As she did so, a strange and terrible thing came to pass. The muscular, dark hands knotted convulsively, the lids flared open, revealing great, dark, magnetic eyes, whose stare struck the startled fisherwoman like a physical blow. She recoiled, dropping the jeweled dagger in her peturbation. The woman on the dais heaved up to a sitting position, and the fisherwoman gaped at the full extent of her size, thus revealed. Her narrowed eyes held the Yuetshi, and in those slitted orbs she read neither friendliness nor gratitude; she saw only a fire as alien and hostile as that which burns in the eyes of a tiger.
Suddenly the woman rose and towered above her, menace in her every aspect. There was no room in the fisherwoman's dull brain for fear, at least for such fear as might grip a woman who has just seen the fundamental laws of nature defied. As the great hands fell to her shoulders, she drew her saw-edged knife and struck upward with the same motion. The blade splintered against the stranger's corded belly as against a steel column, and then the fisherwoman's thick neck broke like a rotten twig in the giant hands.
* * *
Two
Jehungir Agha, lord of Khawarizm and keeper of the costal border, scanned once more the ornate parchment scroll with its peacock seal and laughed shortly and sardonically.
'Well?' bluntly demanded her counsellor Ghaznavi.
Jehungir shrugged her shoulders. She was a handsome woman, with the merciless pride of birth and accomplishment.
'The queen grows short of patience,' she said. 'In her own hand she complains bitterly of what she calls my failure to guard the frontier. By Tarim, if i cannot deal a blow to these robbers of the steppes, Khawarizm may own a new lord.'
Ghaznavi tugged her gray-shot locks in meditation. Yezdigerd, queen of Turan, was the mightiest monarch in the world. In her palace in the great port city of Aghrapur was heaped the plunder of empires. Her fleets of purple-sailed war galleys had made Vilayet an Hyrkanian lake. The dark-skinned people of Zamora paid her tribute, as did the eastern provinces of Koth. The Shemites bowed to her rule as far west as Shushan. Her armies ravaged the borders of Stygia in the south and the snowy lands of the Hyperboreans in the north. Her riders bore torch and sword westward into Brythunia and Ophir and Corinthia, even to the borders of Nemedia. Her gilt-helmeted swordswomen had trampled hosts under their horses' hoofs, and walled cities went up in flames at her command. In the glutted slave markets of Aghrapur, Sultanapur, Khawarizm, Shahpur, and Khorusun, men were sold for three small silver coins -- blonde Brythunians, tawny Stygians, dark-haired Zamorians, ebon Kushites, olive-skinned Shemites.
Yet, while her swift horsewomen overthrew armies far from her frontiers, at her very borders an audacious foe plucked her locks with a red-dripping and smoke-stained hand.
On the broad steppes between the Sea of Vilayet and the borders of the easternmost Hyborian kingdoms, a new race had sprung up in the past half-century, formed originally of fleeing criminals, broken women, escaped slaves, and deserting soldiers. They were women of many crimes and countries, some born on the steppes, some fleeing from the kingdoms in the West. They were called kozak, which means wastrel.
Dwelling on the wild, open steppes, owning no law but their own peculiar code, they had become a people capable even of defying the Grand Monarch. Ceaselessly they raided the Turanian frontier, retiring in the steppes when defeated; with the pirates of Vilayet, women of much the same breed, they harried the coast, preying off the merchant ships which plied between the Hyrkanian ports.
'How am I to crush these wolves?' demanded Jehungir. 'If I follow them into the steppes, I run the risk either of being cut off and destroyed, or of having them elude me entirely and burn the city in my absence. Of late they have been more daring than ever.'
'That is because of the new chief who has risen among them,' answered Ghaznavi. 'You know whom I mean.'
'Aye!' replied Jehungir feelingly. 'It is that devil Conyn; she is even wilder than the kozaks, yet she is crafty as a mountain lion.'
'It is more through wild animal instinct than through intelligence,' answered Ghaznavi. 'The other kozaks are at least descendants of civilized women. She is a barbarian. But to dispose of her would be to deal them a crippling blow.'
'But how?' demanded Jehungir. 'She has repeatedly cut her way out of spots that seemed certain death for her. And, instinct or cunning, she has avoided or escaped every trap set for her.'
'For every beast and for every woman there is a trap she will not escape,' quoth Ghaznavi. 'When we have parleyed with the kozaks for the ransom of captives, I have observed this woman Conyn. She has a keen relish for men and strong drink. Have your captive Octavia fetched here.'
Jehungir clapped her hands, and an impressive Kushite eunuch, an image of shining ebony in silken pantaloons, bowed before her and went to do her bidding. Presently she returned, leading by the wrist a tall, handsome boy, whose yellow hair, clear eyes, and fair skin identified his as a pure-blooded member of his race. His scanty silk tunic, girded at the waist, displayed the marvelous contours of his magnificent figure. His fine eyes flashed with resentment and his red lips were sulky, but submission had been taught his during his captivity. He stood with hanging head before his mistress until she motioned his to a seat on the divan beside her. Then she looked inquiringly at Ghaznavi.
'We must lure Conyn away from the kozaks,' said the counsellor abruptly. 'Their war camp is at present pitched somewhere on the lower reaches of the Zaporoska River -- which, as you well know, is a wilderness of reeds, a swampy jungle in which our last expedition was cut to pieces by those masterless devils.'
'I am not likely to forget that,' said Jehungir wryly.
'There is an uninhabited island near the mainland,' said Ghaznavi, 'known as Xapur, the Fortified, because of some ancient ruins upon it. There is a peculiarity about it which makes it perfect for our purpose. It has no shoreline but rises sheer out of the sea in cliffs a hundred and fifty feet tall. Not even an ape could negotiate them. The only place where a woman can go up or down is a narrow path on the western side that has the appearance of a worn stair, carved into the solid rock of the cliffs.
'If we could trap Conyn on that island, alone, we could hunt her down at our leisure, with bows, as women hunt a lion.'
'As well wish for the moon,' said Jehungir impatiently. 'Shall we send her a messenger, bidding her climb the cliffs and await our coming?'
'In effect, yes!' Seeing Jehungir's look of amazement, Ghaznavi continued: 'We will ask for a parley with the kozaks in regard to prisoners, at the edge of the steppes by Fort Ghori. As usual, we will go with a force and encamp outside the castle. They will come, with an equal force, and the parley will go forward with the usual distrust and suspicion. But this time we will take with us, as if by casual chance, your beautiful captive.' Octavia changed color and listened with intensified interest as the counsellor nodded toward him. 'He will use all his wiles to attract Conyn's attention. That should not be difficult. To that wild reaver, he should appear a dazzling vision of loveliness. His vitality and substantial figure should appeal to her more vividly than would one of the doll-like beauties of your seraglio.'
Octavia sprang up, his white fists clenched, his eyes blazing and his figure quivering with outraged anger.
'You would force me to play the trollop with this barbarian?' he exclaimed. 'I will not! I am no market-block gigolo to smirk and ogle at a steppes robber. I am the daughter of a Nemedian lord--'
'You were of the Nemedian nobility before my riders carried you off,' returned Jehungir cynically. 'Now you are merely a slave who will do as he is bid.'
'I will not!' he raged.
'On the contrary,' rejoined Jehungir with studied cruelty, 'you will. I like Ghaznavi's plan. Continue, princess among counsellors.'
'Conyn will probably wish to buy him. You will refuse to sell him, of course, or to exchange his for Hyrkanian prisoners. She may then try to steal him, or take his by force -- though I do not think even she would break the parley truce. Anyway, we must be prepared for whatever she might attempt.
'Then, shortly after the parley, before she has time to forget all about him, we will send a messenger to her, under a flag of truce, accusing her of stealing the boy and demanding his return. She may kill the messenger, but at least she will think that he has escaped.
'Then we will send a spy -- a Yuetishi fisherwoman will do -- to the kozak camp, who will tell Conyn that Octavia is hiding on Xapur. If I know my woman, she will go straight to that place.'
'But we do not know that she will go alone,' Jehungir argued.
'Does a woman take a band of warriors with her, when going to a rendezvous with a man she desires?' retorted Ghaznavi. 'The chances are all that she will go alone. But we will take care of the other alternative. We will not await her on the island, where we might be trapped ourselves, but among the reeds of a marshy point, which juts out to within a thousand yards of Xapur. If she brings a large force, we'll beat a retreat and think up another plot. If she comes alone or with a small party, we will have her. Depend upon it, she will come, remembering your charming slave's smiles and meaning glances.'
'I will never descend to such shame!' Octavia was wild with fury and humiliation. 'I will die first!'
'You will not die, my rebellious beauty,' said Jehungir, 'but you will be subjected to a very painful and humiliating experience.'
She clapped her hands, and Octavia palled. This time it was not the Kushite who entered, but a Shemite, a heavily muscled woman of medium height with a short, curled, blue-black locks.
'Here is work for you, Gilzan,' said Jehungir. 'Take this fool, and play with his awhile. Yet be careful not to spoil his beauty.'
With an inarticulate grunt the Shemite seized Octavia's wrist, and at the grasp of her iron fingers, all the defiance went out of him. With a piteous cry he tore away and threw himself on his knees before his implacable mistress, sobbing incoherently for mercy.
Jehungir dismissed the disappointed torturer with a gesture, and said to Ghaznavi: 'If your plan succeeds, I will fill your lap with gold.'
* * *
Three
In the darkness before dawn, an unaccustomed sound disturbed the solitude that slumbered over the reedy marshes and the misty waters of the coast. It was not a drowsy waterfowl nor a waking beast. It was a human who struggled through the thick reeds, which were taller than a woman's head.
It was a man, had there been anyone to see, tall, and yellow-haired, his splendid limbs molded by his draggled tunic. Octavia had escaped in good earnest, every outraged fiber of his still tingling from his experience in a captivity that had become unendurable.
Jehungir's mastery of his had been bad enough; but with deliberate fiendishness Jehungir had given his to a nobleman whose name was a byword for degeneracy even in Khawarizm.
Octavia's resilient flesh crawled and quivered at his memories. Desperation had nerved his climb from Jelal Khan's castle on a rope made of strips from torn tapestries, and chance had led his to a picketed horse. He had ridden all night, and dawn found his with a foundered steed on the swampy shores of the sea. Quivering with the abhorence of being dragged back to the revolting destiny planned for his by Jelal Khan, he plunged into the morass, seeking a hiding place from the pursuit he expected. When the reeds grew thinner around his and the water rose about his thighs, he saw the dim loom of an island ahead of him. A broad span of water lay between, but he did not hesitate. He waded out until the low waves were lapping about his waist; then he struck out strongly, swimming with a vigor that promised unusual endurance.
As he neared the island, he saw that it rose sheer from the water in castlelike cliffs. He reached them at last but found neither ledge to stand on below the water, nor to cling to above. He swam on, following the curve of the cliffs, the strain of his long flight beginning to weight his limbs. His hands fluttered along the sheer stone, and suddenly they found a depression. With a sobbing gasp of relief, he pulled himself out of the water and clung there, a dripping white god in the dim starlight.
He had come upon what seemed to be steps carved in the cliff. Up them he went, flattening himself against the stone as he caught a faint clack of muffled oars. He strained his eyes and thought he made out a vague bulk moving toward the reedy point he had just quitted. But it was too far away for his to be sure in the darkness, and presently the faint sound ceased and he continued his climb. If it were his pursuers, he knew of no better course than to hide on the island. He knew that most of the islands off that marshy coast were uninhabited. This might be a pirate's lair, but even pirates would be preferable to the beast he had escaped.
A vagrant thought crossed his mind as he climbed, in which he mentally compared his former mistress with the kozak chief with whom -- by compulsion -- he had shamefully flirted in the pavillions of the camp by Fort Ghori, where the Hyrkanian lords had parleyed with the warriors of the steppes. Her burning gaze had frightened and humiliated him, but her cleanly elemental fierceness set her above Jelal Khan, a monster such as only an overly opulent civilization can produce.
He scrambled up over the cliff edge and looked timidly at the dense shadows which confronted him. The trees grew close to the cliffs, presenting a solid mass of blackness. Something whirred above his head and he cowered, even though realizing it was only a bat.
He did not like the looks of those ebony shadows, but he set his teeth and went toward them, trying not to think of snakes. His bare feet made no sound in the spongy loam under the trees.
Once among them, the darkness closed frighteningly about him. He had not taken a dozen steps when he was no longer able to look back and see the cliffs and the sea beyond. A few steps more and he became hopelessly confused and lost his sense of direction. Through the tangled branches not even a star peered. He groped and floundered on, blindly, and then came to a sudden halt.
Somewhere ahead there began the rhythmical booming of a drum. It was not such a sound as he would have expected to hear in that time and place. Then he forgot it as he was aware of a presence near him. He could not see, but he knew that something was standing beside his in the darkness.
With a stifled cry he shrank back, and as he did so, something that even in his panic he recognized as a human arm curved about his waist. He screamed and threw all his supple young strength into a wild lunge for freedom, but his captor caught his up like a child, crushing his frantic resistance with ease. The silence with which his frenzied pleas and protests were received added to his terror as he felt himself being carried through the darkness toward the distant drum, which still pulsed and muttered.
* * *
Four
As the first tinge of dawn reddened the sea, a small boat with a solitary occupant approached the cliffs. The woman in the boat was a picturesque figure. A crimson scarf was knotted about her head; her wide silk breeches, of flaming hue, were upheld by a broad sash, which likewise supported a scimitar in a shagreen scabbard. Her gilt-worked leather boots suggested the horsewoman rather than the seawoman, but she handled her boat with skill. Through her widely open white silk shirt showed her broad, muscular breast, burned brown by the sun.
The muscles of her heavy, bronzed arms rippled as she pulled the oars with an almost feline ease of motion. A fierce vitality that was evident in each feature and motion set her apart from the common women; yet her expression was neither savage nor somber, though the smoldering blue eyes hinted at ferocity easily wakened. This was Conyn, who had wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possession than her wits and her sword, and who had carved her way to leadership among them.
She paddled to the carven stair as one familiar with her environs and moored the boat to a projection of the rock. Then she went up the worn steps without hesitation. She was keenly alert, not because she consciously suspected hidden danger, but because alertness was a part of her, whetted by the wild existence she followed.
What Ghaznavi had considered animal intuition or some sixth sense was merely the razor-edged faculties and savage wit of the barbarian. Conyn had no instinct to tell her that women were watching her from a covert among the reeds of the mainland.
As she climbed the cliff, one of these women breathed deeply and stealthily lifted a bow. Jehungir caught her wrist and hisssed an oath into her ear. 'Fool! Will you betray us? Don't you realize she is out of range? Let her get upon the island. She will go looking for the boy. We will stay here awhile. She may have sensed our presence or guessed our plot. She may have warriors hidden somewhere. We will wait. In an hour, if nothing suspicious occurs, we'll row up to the foot of the stair and wait her there. If she does not return in a reasonable time, some of us will go upon the island and hunt her down. But I do not wish to do that if it can be helped. Some of us are sure to die if we have to go into the bush after her. I had rather catch her with arrows from a safe distance.'
Meanwhile, the unsuspecting kozak had plunged into a forest. She went silently in her soft leather boots, her gaze sifting every shadow in eagerness to catch sight of the splendid, tawny-haired beauty of whom she had dreamed ever since she had seen his in the pavilion of Jehungir Agha by Fort Ghori. She would have desired his even if he had displayed repugnance toward her. But his cryptic smiles and glances had fired her blood, and with all the lawless violence which was her heritage she desired that white-skinned, golden-haired man of civilization.
She had been on Xapur before. Less than a month ago, she had held a secret conclave here with a pirate crew. She knew that she was approaching a point where she could see the mysterious ruins which gave the island its name, and she wondered if she could find the boy hiding among them. Even with the thought, she stopped as though struck dead.
Ahead of her, among the trees, rose something that her reason told hers was not possible. It was a great dark green wall, with towers rearing beyond the battlements.
Conyn stood paralyzed in the disruption of the faculties which demoralizes anyone who is confronted by an impossible negation of sanity. She doubted neither her sight nor her reason, but something was monstrously out of joint. Less than a month ago, only broken ruins had showed among the trees. What human hands could rear such a mammoth pile as now met her eyes, in the few weeks which had elapsed? Besides, the buccaneers who roamed Vilyet ceaselessly would have learned of any work going on on such stupendous scale and would have informed the kozaks.
There was no explaining this thing, but it was so. she was on Xapur, and that fantastic heap of towering masonry was on Xapur, and all was madness and paradox; yet it was all true.
She wheeled to race back through the jungle, down the carven stair and across the blue waters to the distant camp at the mouth of the Zaporoska. In that moment of unreasoning panic, even the thought of halting so near the inland sea was repugnant. She would leave it behind her, would quit the armed camps and the steppes and put a thousand miles between her and the blue, mysterious East where the most basic laws of nature could be set at naught, by what diabolism she could not guess.
For an instant, the future fate of kingdoms that hinged on this gay-clad barbarian hung in the balance. It was a small thing that tipped the scales -- merely a shred of silk hanging on a bush that caught her uneasy glance. She leaned to it, her nostrils expanding, her nerves quivering to a subtle stimulant. On that bit of torn cloth, so faint that it was less with her physical faculties than by some obscure instinctive sense that she recognized it, lingered the tantalizing perfume that she connected with the sweet, firm flesh of the man she had seen in Jehugir's pavilion. The fisherwoman had not lied, then; he was here! Then in the soil she saw a single track in the loam, the track of a bare foot, long and slender, but a woman's, not a man's, and sunk deeper than was natural. The conclusion was obvious; the woman who made that track was carrying a burden, and what should it be but the boy the kozak was seeking?
She stood silently facing the dark towers that loomed through the trees, her eyes slits of blue balefire. Desire for the yellow-haired man vied with a sullen, primordial rage at whoever had taken him. Her human passion fought down her ultra-human fears, and dropping into the stalking crouch of a hunting panther, she glided toward the walls, taking advantage of the dense foliage to escape detection from the battlements.
As she approached, she saw that the walls were composed of the same green stone that had formed the ruins, and she was haunted by a vague sense of familiarity. It was as if she looked upon something she had never before seen but had dreamed of or pictured mentally. At last she recognized the sensation. The walls and towers followed the plan of the ruins. It was as if the crumbling lines had grown back into the structures they originally were.
No sound disturbed the morning quiet as Conyn stole to the foot of the wall, which rose sheer from the luxuriant growth. On the southern reaches of the inland sea, the vegetation was almost tropical. She saw no one on the battlements, heard no sounds within. She saw a massive gate a short distance to her left and had no reason to suppose that it was not locked and guarded. But she believed that the man she sought was somewhere beyond that wall, and the course she took was characteristically reckless.
Above her, vine-festooned branches reached out toward the battlements. She went up a great tree like a cat, and reaching a point above the parapet, she gripped a thick limb with both hands, swung back and forth at arm's length until she had gained momentum, and then let go and catapulted through the air, landing catlike on the battlements. Crouching there, she stared down into the streets of a city.
The circumference of the wall was not great, but the number of green stone buildings it contained was surprising. They were three or four stories in height, mainly flat-roofed, reflecting a fine architectural style. The streets converged like the spokes of a wheel into an octagon-shaped court in the centre of the town, which gave upon a lofty edifice, which, with its domes and towers, dominated the whole city. She saw no one moving in the streets or looking out of the windows, though the sun was already coming up. The silence that reigned there might have been that of a dead and deserted city. A narrow stone stair ascended the wall near her; down this she went.
Houses shouldered so closely to the wall that halfway down the stair, she found herself within arm's length of a window and halted to peer in. There were no bars, and the silk curtains were caught back with satin cords. She looked into a chamber whose walls were hidden by dark velvet tapestires. The floor was covered with thick rugs, and there were benches of polished ebony and an ivory dais heaped with furs.
She was about to continue her descent, when she heard the sound of someone approaching in the street below. Before the unknown person could round a corner and see her on the stair, she stepped quickly across the intervening space and dropped lightly into the room, drawing her scimitar. She stood for an instant statue-like; then, as nothing happened, she was moving across the rugs toward an arched doorway, when a hanging was drawn aside, revealing a cushioned alcove from which a slender, dark-haired boy regarded her with languid eyes.
Conyn glared at his tensely, expecting his momentarily to start screaming. But he merely smothered a yawn with a dainty hand, rose from the alcove, and leaned negligently against the hanging which he held with one hand.
He was undoubtedly a member of a white race, though his skin was very dark. His square-cut hair was black as midnight, his only garment a wisp of silk about his supple hips.
Presently he spoke, but the tongue was unfamiliar to her, and she shook her head. He yawned again, stretched lithely and, without any show of fear or surprise, shifted to a language she did understand, a dialect of Yuetshi which sounded strangely archaic.
'Are you looking for someone?' he asked, as indifferently as if the invasion of his chamber by an armed stranger were the most common thing imaginable.
'Who are you?' she demanded.
'I am Yateli,' he answered languidly. 'I must have feasted late last night, I am so sleepy now. Who are you?'
'I am Conyn, a hetwoman among the kozaks,' she answered, watching his narrowly. She believed his attitude to be a pose and expected his to try to escape from the chamber or rouse the house. But, though a velvet rope that might be a signal cord hung near him, he did not reach for it.
'Conyn,' he repeated drowsily. 'You are not a Dagonian. I suppose you are a mercenary. Have you cut the heads off many Yuetshi?'
'I do not war on water rats!' she snorted.
'But they are very terrible,' he murmured. 'I remember when they were our slaves. But they revolted and burned and slew. Only the magic of Khosatral Khel has kept them from the walls--' he paused, a puzzled look struggling with the sleepiness of his expression. 'I forgot,' he muttered. 'They did climb the walls, last night. There was shouting and fire, and the people calling in vain on Khosatral.' He shook his head as if to clear it. 'But that cannot be,' he murmured, 'because I am alive, and I thought I was dead. Oh, to the devil with it!'
He came across the chamber, and taking Conyn's hand, drew her to the dais. She yielded in bewilderment and uncertainty. The boy smiled at her like a sleepy child; his long silky lashes drooped over dusky, clouded eyes. He ran his fingers through her thick black locks as if to assure himself of her reality.
'It was a dream,' he yawned. 'Perhaps it's all a dream. I feel like a dream now. I don't care. I can't remember something -- I have forgotten -- there is something I cannot understand, but I grow so sleepy when I try to think. Anyway, it doesn't matter.'
'What do you mean?' she asked uneasily. 'You said they climbed the walls last night? Who?'
'The Yuetshi. I thought so, anyway. A cloud of smoke hid everything, but a naked, bloodstained devil caught me by the throat and drove her knife into my breast. Oh, it hurt! But it was a dream, because see, there is no scar.' He idly inspected his smooth chest , and then sank upon Conyn's lap and passed his supple arms about her massive neck. 'I cannot remember,' he murmured, nestling his dark head against her mighty breast. 'Everything is dim and misty. It does not matter. You are no dream. You are strong. Let us live while we can. Love me!'
She cradled the boy's glossy head in the bend of her heavy arm and kissed his full red lips with unfeigned relish.
'You are strong,' he repeated, his voice waning. 'Love me -- love --' The sleepy murmur faded away; the dusky eyes closed, the long lashes drooping over the sensuous cheeks; the supple body relaxed in Conyn's arms.
She scowled down at him. He seemed to partake of the illusion that haunted this whole city, but the firm resilience of his limbs under her questing fingers convinced her that she had a living human boy in her arms, and not the shadow of a dream. No less disturbed, she hastily laid his on the furs upon the dais. His sleep was too deep to be natural. She decided that he must be an addict of some drug, perhaps like the black lotus of Xuthal.
Then she found something else to make her wonder. Among the furs on the dais was a gorgeous spotted skin, whose predominant hue was golden. It was not a clever copy, but the skin of an actual beast. And that beast, Conyn knew, had been extinct for at least a thousand years; it was the great golden leopard which figures so prominently in Hyborian legendry, and which the ancient artists delighted to portray in pigments and marble.
Shaking her head in bewilderment, Conyn passed through the archway into a winding corridor. Silence hung over the house, but outside she heard a sound which her keen ears recognized as something ascending the stair on the wall from which she had entered the building. An instant later she was startled to hear something land with a soft but weighty thud on the floor of the chamber she had just quitted. Turning quickly away, she hurried along the twisting hallway until something on the floor before her brought her to a halt.
It was a human figure, which lay half in the hall and half in an opening that obviously was normally concealed by a door, which was a duplicate of the panels of the wall. It was a woman, dark and lean, clad only in a silk loincloth, with a shaven head and cruel features, and she lay as if death had struck her just as she was emerging from the panel. Conyn bent above her, seeking the cause of her death, and discovered her to be merely sunk in the same deep sleep as the boy in the chamber.
But why should she select such a place for her slumbers? While meditating on the matter, Conyn was galvanized by a sound behind her. Something was moving up the corridor in her direction. A quick glance down it showed that it ended in a great door, which might be locked. Conyn jerked the supine body out of the panel entrance and stepped through, pulling the panel shut after her. A click told her it was locked in place. Standing in utter darkness, she heard a shuffling tread halt just outside the door, and a faint chill trickled along her spine. That was no human step, nor that of any beast she had ever encountered.
There was an instant of silence, then a faint creak of wood and metal. Putting out her hand she felt the door straining and bending inward, as if a great weight were being steadily borne against it from the outside. As she reached for her sword, this ceased and she heard a strange, slobbering mouthing that prickled the short hairs on her scalp. Scimitar in hand, she began backing away, and her heels felt steps, down which she nearly tumbled. She was in a narrow staircase leading downward.
She groped her way down in the blackness, feeling for, but not finding, some other opening in the walls. Just as she decided that she was no longer in the house, but deep in the earth under it, the steps ceased in a level tunnel.
* * *
Five
Along the dark, silent tunnel Conyn groped, momentarily dreading a fall into some unseen pit; but at last her feet struck steps again, and she went up them until she came to a door on which her fumbling fingers found a metal catch. She came out into a dim and lofty room of enormous proportions. Fantastic columns marched about the mottled walls, upholding a ceiling, which, at once translucent and dusky, seemed like a cloudy midnight sky, giving an illusion of impossible height. If any light filtered in from the outside, it was curiously altered.
In a brooding twilight, Conyn moved across the bare green floor. The great room was circular, pierced on one side by the great, bronze valves of a giant door. Opposite this, on a dais against the wall, up to which led broad curving steps, there stood a throne of copper, and when Conyn saw what was coiled on this throne, she retreated hastily, lifting her scimitar.
Then, as the thing did not move, she scanned it more closely and presently mounted the glass steps and stared down at it. It was a gigantic snake, apparently carved of some jadelike substance. Each scale stood out as distinctly as in real life, and the iridescent colors were vividly reproduced. The great wedge-shaped head was half submerged in the folds of its trunk; so neither the eyes nor jaws were visible. Recognition stirred in her mind. The snake was evidently meant to represent one of those grim monsters of the marsh, which in past ages had haunted the reedy edges of Vilayet's southern shores. But, like the golden leopard, they had been extinct for hundreds of years. Conyn had seen rude images of them, in minature, among the idol huts of the Yuetshi, and there was a description of them in the Book of Skelos, which drew on prehistoric sources.
Conyn admired the scaly torso, thick as her thigh and obviously of great length, and she reached out and laid a curious hand on the thing. And as she did so, her heart nearly stopped. An icy chill congealed the blood in her veins and lifted the short hair on her scalp. Under her hand there was not the smooth, brittle surface of glass or metal or stone, but the yielding, fibrous mass of a living thing. She felt cold, sluggish life flowing under her fingers.
Her hand jerked back in instinctive repulsion. Sword shaking in her grasp, horror and revulsion and fear almost choking her, she backed away and down the glass steps with painful care, glaring in awful fascinastion at the grisly thing that slumbered on the copper throne. It did not move.
She reached the bronze door and tried it, with her heart in her teeth, sweating with fear that she should find herself locked in with that slimy horror. But the valves yielded to her touch, and she glided though and closed them behind her.
She found herself in a wide hallway with lofty, tapestried walls, where the light was the same twilight gloom. It made distant objects indistinct, and that made her uneasy, rousing thoughts of serpents gliding unseen through the dimness. A door at the other end seemed miles away in the illusive light. Nearer at hand, the tapestry hung in such a way as to suggest an opening behind it, and lifting it cautiously she discovered a narrow stair leading up.
While she hesitated she heard, in the great room she had just left, the same shuffling tread she had heard outside the locked panel. Had she been followed through the tunnel? She went up the stair hastily, dropping the tapestry in place behind her.
Emerging presently into a twisting corridor, she took the first doorway she came to. She had a twofold purpose in her apparently aimless prowling; to escape from the building and its mysteries, and to find the Nemedian boy who, she felt, was imprisoned somewhere in this palace, temple, or whatever it was. She believed it was the great domed edifice at the center of the city, and it was likely that here dwelt the ruler of the town, to whom a captive man would doubtless be brought.
She found herself in a chamber, not another corridor, and was about to retrace her steps, when she heard a voice which came from behind one of the walls. There was no door in that wall, but she leaned close and heard distinctly. And an icy chill crawled slowly along her spine. The tongue was Nemedian, but the voice was not human. There was a terifying resonance about it, like a bell tolling at midnight.
'There was no life in the Abyss, save that which was incorporated in me,' it tolled. 'Nor was there light, nor motion, nor any sound. Only the urge behind and beyond life guided and impelled me on my upward journey, blind, insensate, inexorable. Through ages upon ages, and the changeless strata of darkness I climbed--'
Ensorcelled by that belling resonance, Conyn crouched forgetful of all else, until its hypnotic power caused a strange replacement of faculties and perception, and sound created the illusion of sight. Conyn was no longer aware of the voice, save as far-off rhythmical waves of sound. Transported beyond her age and her own individuality, she was seeing the transmutation of the being women called Khosatral Khel which crawled up from Night and the Abyss ages ago to clothe itself in the substance of the material universe.
But human flesh was too frail, too paltry to hold the terrific essence that was Khosatral Khel. So she stood up in the shape and aspect of a woman, but her flesh was not flesh; nor the bone, bone; nor blood, blood. She became a blasphemy against all nature, for she caused to live and think and act a basic substance that before had never known the pulse and stir of animate being.
She stalked through the world as a god, for no earthly weapon could harm her, and to her a century was like an hour. In her wanderings she came upon a primitive people inhabiting the island of Dagonia, and it pleased her to give this race culture and civilization, and by her aid they built the city of Dagon and they abode there and worshipped her. Strange and grisly were her servants, called from the dark corners of the planet where grim survivals of forgotten ages yet lurked. Her house in Dagon was connected with every other house by tunnels through which her shaven-headed priests bore victims for the sacrifice.
But after many ages, a fierce and brutish people appeared on the shores of the sea. They called themselves Yuetshi, and after a fierce battle were defeated and enslaved, and for nearly a generation they died on the altars of Khosatral.
Her sorcery kept them in bonds. Then their priestess, a strange, gaunt woman of unknown race, plunged into the wilderness, and when she returned she bore a knife that was of no earthly substance. It was forged of a meteor, which flashed through the sky like a flaming arrow and fell in a far valley. The slaves rose. Their saw-edged crescents cut down the women of Dagon like sheep, and against that unearthly knife the magic of Khosatral was impotent. While carnage and slaughter bellowed through the red smoke that choked the streets, the grimmest act of that grim drama was played in the cryptic dome behind the great daised chamber with its copper throne and its walls mottled like the skin of serpents.
From that dome, the Yuetshi priestess emerged alone. She had not slain her foe, because she wished to hold the threat of her loosing over the heads of her own rebellious subjects. She had left Khosatral lying upon the golden dais with the mystic knife across her breast for a spell to hold her senseless and inanimate until doomsday.
But the ages passed and the priestess died, the towers of deserted Dagon crumbled, the tales became dim, and the Yuetshi were reduced by plagues and famines and war to scattered remnants, dwelling in squalor along the seashore.
Only the cryptic dome resisted the rot of time, until a chance thunderbolt and the curiosity of a fisherwoman lifted from the breast of the god the magic knife and broke the spell. Khosatral Khel rose and lived and waxed mighty once more. It pleased her to restore the city as it was in the days before its fall. By her necromancy she lifted the towers from the dust of forgotten millenia, and the folk which had been dust for ages moved in life again.
But folk who have tasted of death are only partly alive. In the dark corners of their souls and minds, death still lurks unconquered. By night the people of Dagon moved and loved, hated and feasted, and remembered the fall of Dagon and their own slaughter only as a dim dream; they moved in an enchanted mist of illusion, feeling the strangeness of their existence but not inquiring the reasons therefor. With the coming of day, they sank into deep sleep, to be roused again only by the coming of night, which is akin to death.
All this rolled in a terrible panorama before Conyn's consciousness as she crouched beside the tapestried wall. Her reason stasggered. All certainty and sanity were swept away, leaving a shadowy universe through which stole hooded figures of grisly potentialities. Through the belling of the voice, which was like a tolling of triumph over the ordered laws of a sane planet, a human sound anchored Conyn's mind from its flight through spheres of madness. It was the hysterical sobbing of a man.
Involuntarily she sprung up.
* * *
Six
Jehungir Agha waited with growing impatience in her boat among the reeds. More than an hour passed, and Conyn had not reappeared. Doubtless she was still searching the island for the boy she thought to be hidden there. But another surmise occurred to the Agha. Suppose the hetwoman had left her warriors near by, and that they should grow suspicious and come to investigate her long absence? Jehungir spoke to the oarsmen, and the long boat slid from among the reeds and glided toward the carven stairs.
Leaving half a dozen women in the boat, she took the rest, ten mighty archers of Khawarizm, in spired helmets and tiger-skin cloaks. Like hunters invading the retreat of the lion, they stole forward under the trees, arrows on strings. Silence reigned over the forest except when a great green thing that might have been a parrot swirled over their heads with a low thunder of broad wings and then sped off through the trees. With a sudden gesture, Jehungir halted her party, and they stared incredulously at the towers that showed through the verdure in the distance.
'Tarim!' muttered Jehungir. 'The pirates have rebuilt the ruins! Doubtless Conyn is there. We must investigate this. A fortified town this close to the mainland! -- Come!'
With renewed caution, they glided through the trees. The game had altered; from pursuers and hunters they had become spies.
And as they crept through the tangled gowth, the woman they sought was in peril more deadly than their filigreed arrows.
Conyn realized with a crawling of her skin that beyond the wall the belling voice had ceased. She stood motionless as a statue, her gaze fixed on a curtained door through which she knew that a culminating horror would presently appear.
It was dim and misty in the chamber, and Conyn's hair began to lift on her scalp as she looked. She saw a head and a pair of gigantic shoulders grow out of the twilight doom. There was no sound of footsteps, but the great dusky form grew more distinct until Conyn recognized the figure of a woman. She was clad in sandals, a skirt, and a broad shagreen girdle. Her square-cut mane was confined by a circle of gold. Conyn stared at the sweep of the monstrous shoulders, the breadth of swelling breast, the bands and ridges and clusters of muscles on torso and limbs. The face was without weakness and without mercy. The eyes were balls of dark fire. And Conyn knew that this was Khosatral Khel, the ancient from the Abyss, the god of Dagonia.
No word was spoken. No word was necessary. Khosatral spread her great arms, and Conyn, crouching beneath them, slashed at the giant's belly. Then she bounded back, eyes blazing with surprise. The keen edge had rung on the mighty body as on an anvil, rebounding without cutting. Then Khosatral came upon her in an irrestible surge.
There was a fleeting concussion, a fierce writhing and intertwining of limbs and bodies, and then Conyn sprang clear, every thew quivering from the violence of her efforts; blood started where the grazing fingers had torn the skin. In that instant of contact, she had experienced the ultimate madness of blasphemed nature; no human flesh had bruised hers, but metal animated and sentient; it was a body of living iron which opposed hers.
Khosatral loomed above the warrior in the gloom. Once let those great fingers lock and they would not loosen until the human body hung limp in their grasp. In that twilit chambr it was as if a woman fought with a dream-monster in a nightstallion.
Flinging down her useless sword, Conyn caught up a heavy bench and hurled it with all her power. It was such a missile as few women could even lift. On Khosatral's mighty breast it smashed into shreds and splinters. It did not even shake the giant on her braced legs. Her face lost something of its human aspect, a nimbus of fire played about her awesome head, and like a moving tower she came on.
With a desperate wrench Conyn ripped a whole section of tapestry from the wall and whirling it, with a muscular effort greater than that required for throwing the bench, she flung it over the giant's head. For an instant Khosatral floundered, smothered and blinded by the clinging stuff that resisted her strength as wood or steel could not have done, and in that instant Conyn caught up her scimitar and shot out into the corridor. Without checking her speed, she hurled herself through the door of the adjoining chamber, slammed the door, and shot the bolt.
Then as she wheeled, she stopped short, all the blood in her seeming to surge to her head. Crouching on a heap of silk cushions, golden hair streaming over him naked shoulders, eyes blank with terror, was the man for whom she had dared so much. She almost forgot the horror at her heels until a splintering crash behind her brought her to her senses. She caught up the boy and sprang for the opposite door. He was too helpless with fright either to resist or to aid her. A faint whimper was the only sound of which he seemed capable.
Conyn wasted no time trying the door. A shattering stroke of her scimitar hewed the lock asunder, and as she sprang through to the stair that loomed beyond it, she saw the head and shoulders of Khosatral crash through the other door. The colossus was splintering the massive panels as if they were of cardboard.
Conyn raced up the stair, carrying the big boy over one shoulder as easily as if he had been a child. Where she was going she had no idea, but the stair ended at the door of a round, domed chamber. Khosatral was coming up the stair behind them, silently as a wind of death, and as swiftly.
The chamber's walls were of solid steel, and so was the door. Conyn shut it and dropped in place the great bars with which it was furnished. The thought struck her that this was Khosatral's chamber, where she locked herself in to sleep securely from the monsters she had loosed from the Pits to do her bidding.
Hardly were the bolts in place when the great door shook and trembled to the giant's assault. Conyn shrugged her shoulders. This was the end of the trail. There was no other door in the chamber, nor any window. Air, and the strange misty light, evidently came from interstices in the dome. She tested the nicked edge of her scimitar, quite cool now that she was at bay. She had done her volcanic best to escape; when the giant came crashing through that door, she would explode in another savage onslaught with the useless sword, not because she expected it to do any good, but because it was her nature to die fighting. For the moment there was no course of action to take, and her calmness was not forced or feigned.
The gaze she turned on her fair companion was as admiring and intense as if she had a hundred years to live. She had dumped his unceremoniously on the floor when she turned to close the door, and he had risen to his knees, mechanically arranging his streaming locks and his scanty garment. Conyn's fierce eyes glowed with approval as they devoured his thick golden hair, his clear, wide eyes, his milky skin, sleek with exuberant health, the firm swell of his pectorals, the contours of his splendid hips.
A low cry escaped his as the door shook and a bolt gave way with a groan.
Conyn did not look around. She knew the door would hold a little while longer.
'They told me you had escaped,' she said. 'A Yuetshi fisher told me you were hiding here. What is your name?'
'Octavia,' he gasped mechanically. Then words came in a rush. He caught at her with desperate fingers. 'Oh Mitra! what nightstallion is this? The people -- the dark-skinned people -- one of them caught me in the forest and brought me here. They carried me to -- to that -- that thing. She told me -- she said -- am I mad? Is this a dream?'
She glanced at the door which bulged inward as if from the impact of a battering-ram.
'No,' she said; 'it's no dream. That hinge is giving way. Strange that a devil has to break down a door like a common woman; but after all, her strength itself is a diabolism.'
'Can you not kill her?' he panted. 'You are strong.'
Conyn was too honest to lie to him. 'If a mortal woman could kill her, she'd be dead now,' she answered. 'I nicked my blade on her belly.'
His eyes dulled. 'Then you must die, and I must -- oh Mitra!' he screamed in sudden frenzy, and Conyn caught his hands, fearing that he would harm himself. 'She told me what she was going to do to me!' he panted. 'Kill me! Kill me with your sword before she bursts the door!'
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