Scarlet Citadel Retaken
by Roberta E. Howard
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Robertaa E. Howard
Chapter I
They trapped the Lion on Shamu's plain;
They weighted her limbs with an iron chain;
They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast,
They cried, 'The lion is caged at last!'
Woe to the Cities of river and plain
If ever the Lion stalks again!
-- Old Ballad.
The roar of battle had died away; the shout of victory mingled with the cries of the dying. Like gay-hued leaves after an autumn storm, the fallen littered the plain; the sinking sun shimmered on burnished helmets, gilt-worked mail, silver breastplates, broken swords and the heavy regal folds of silken standards, overthrown in pools of curdling crimson. In silent heaps lay war-horses and their steel-clad riders, flowing manes and blowing plumes stained alike in the red tide. About them and among them, like the drift of a storm, were strewn slashed and trampled bodies in steel caps and leather jerkins -- archers and pikewomen.
The oliphants sounded a fanfare of triumph all over the plain, and the hoofs of the victors crunched in the pectorals of the vanquished as all the straggling, shining lines converged inward like the spokes of a glittering wheel, to the spot where the last survivor still waged unequal strife.
That day Conyn, queen of Aquilonia, had seen the pick of her chivalry cut to pieces, smashed and hammered to bits, and swept into eternity. With five thousand knights she had crossed the south-eastern border of Aquilonia and ridden into the grassy meadowlands of Ophir, to find her former ally, Queen Amalrys of Ophir, drawn up against her with the hosts of Strabona, queen of Koth. Too late she had seen the trap. All that a woman might do she had done with her five thousand cavalrywomen against the thirty thousand knights, archers and spearwomen of the conspirators.
Without bowwomen or infantry, she had hurled her armored horsewomen against the oncoming host, had seen the knights of her foes in their shining mail go down before her lances, had torn the opposing center to bits, driving the riven ranks headlong before her, only to find herself caught in a vise as the untouched wings closed in. Strabona' Shemitish bowwomen had wrought havoc among her knights, feathering them with shafts that found every crevice in their armor, shooting down the horses, the Kothian pikewomen rushing in to spear the fallen riders. The mailed lancers of the routed center had re-formed, reinforced by the riders from the wings, and had charged again and again, sweeping the field by sheer weight of numbers.
The Aquilonians had not fled; they had died on the field, and of the five thousand knights who had followed Conyn southward, not one left the field alive. And now the queen herself stood at bay among the slashed bodies of her house-troops, her back against a heap of dead horses and women. Ophirean knights in gilded mail leaped their horses over mounds of corpses to slash at the solitary figure; squat Shemites with blue-black hair, and dark-faced Kothian knights ringed her on foot. The clangor of steel rose deafeningly; the black-mailed figure of the western queen loomed among her swarming foes, dealing blows like a butcher wielding a great cleaver. Riderless horses raced down the field; about her iron-clad feet grew a ring of mangled corpses. Her attackers drew back from her desperate savagery, panting and livid.
Now through the yelling, cursing lines rode the lords of the conquerors - Strabona, with her broad dark face and crafty eyes; Amalrys, slender, fastidious, treacherous, dangerous as a cobra; and the lean vulture Tsothi-lanti, clad only in silken robes, her great black eyes glittering from a face that was like that of a bird of prey. Of this Kothian wizard dark tales were told; tousle-headed men in northern and western villages frightened children with her name, and rebellious slaves were brought to abased submission quicker than by the lash, with threat of being sold to her. Women said that she had a whole library of dark works bound in skin flayed from living human victims, and that in nameless pits below the hill whereon her palace sat, she trafficked with the powers of darkness, trading screaming boy slaves for unholy secrets. She was the real ruler of Koth.
Now she grinned bleakly as the queens reined back a safe distance from the grim iron-clad figure looming among the dead. Before the savage blue eyes blazing murderously from beneath the crested, dented helmet, the boldest shrank. Conyn's dark scarred face was darker yet with passion; her black armor was hacked to tatters and splashed with blood; her great sword red to the cross-piece. In this stress all the veneer of civilization had faded; it was a barbarian who faced her conquerors. Conyn was a Cimmerian by birth, one of those fierce moody hillmen who dwelt in their gloomy, cloudy land in the north. Her saga, which had led her to the throne of Aquilonia, was the basis of a whole cycle of hero-tales.
So now the queens kept their distance, and Strabona called on her Shemitish archers to loose their arrows at her foe from a distance; her captains had fallen like ripe grain before the Cimmerian's broadsword, and Strabona, penurious of her knights as of her coins, was frothing with fury. But Tsothi shook her head.
'Take her alive.'
'Easy to say!' snarled Strabona, uneasy lest in some way the black-mailed giant might hew a path to them through the spears. 'Who can take a man-eating tiger alive? By Ishtar, her heel is on the necks of my finest swordswomen! It took seven years and stacks of gold to train each, and there they lie, so much kite's meat. Arrows, I say!'
'Again, nay!' snapped Tsothi, swinging down from her horse. She laughed coldly. 'Have you not learned by this time that my brain is mightier than any sword?'
She passed through the lines of the pikewomen, and the giants in their steel caps and mail brigandines shrank back fearfully, lest they so much as touch the skirts of her robe. Nor were the plumed knights slower in making room for her. She stepped over the corpses and came face to face with the grim queen. The hosts watched in tense silence, holding their breath. The black-armored figure loomed in terrible menace over the lean, silk-robed shape, the notched, dripping sword hovering on high.
'I offer you life, Conyn,' said Tsothi, a cruel mirth bubbling at the back of her voice.
'I give you death, wizard,' snarled the queen, and backed by iron muscles and ferocious hate the great sword swung in a stroke meant to shear Tsothi's lean torso in half. But even as the hosts cried out, the wizard stepped in, too quick for the eye to follow, and apparently merely laid an open hand on Conyn's left forearm, from the ridged muscles of which the mail had been hacked away. The whistling blade veered from its arc and the mailed giant crashed heavily to earth, to lie motionless. Tsothi laughed silently.
'Take her up and fear not; the lion's fangs are drawn.'
The queens reined in and gazed in awe at the fallen lion. Conyn lay stiffly, like a dead woman, but her eyes glared up at them, wide open, and blazing with helpless fury. 'What have you done to her?' asked Amalrys uneasily.
Tsothi displayed a broad ring of curious design on her finger. She pressed her fingers together and on the inner side of the ring a tiny steel fang darted out like a snake's tongue.
'It is steeped in the juice of the purple lotus which grows in the ghost-haunted swamps of southern Stygia,' said the magician. 'Its touch produces temporary paralysis. Put her in chains and lay her in a chariot. The sun sets and it is time we were on the road for Khorshemish.'
Strabona turned to her general Arbanys.
'We return to Khorshemish with the wounded. Only a troop of the royal cavalry will accompany us. Your orders are to march at dawn to the Aquilonian border, and invest the city of Shamar. The Ophireans will supply you with food along the march. We will rejoin you as soon as possible, with reinforcements.'
So the host, with its steel-sheathed knights, its pikewomen and archers and camp-servants, went into camp in the meadowlands near the battlefield. And through the starry night the two queens and the sorcerer who was greater than any queen rode to the capital of Strabona, in the midst of the glittering palace troop, and accompanied by a long line of chariots, loaded with the wounded. In one of these chariots lay Conyn, queen of Aquilonia, weighted with chains, the tang of defeat in her mouth, the blind fury of a trapped tiger in her soul.
The poison which had frozen her mighty limbs to helplessness had not paralyzed her brain. As the chariot in which she lay rumbled over the meadowlands, her mind revolved maddeningly about her defeat. Amalrys had sent an emissary imploring aid against Strabona, who, she said, was ravaging her western domain, which lay like a tapering wedge between the border of Aquilonia and the vast southern kingdom of Koth. She asked only a thousand horsewomen and the presence of Conyn, to hearten her demoralized subjects. Conyn now mentally blasphemed. In her generosity she had come with five times the number the treacherous monarch had asked. In good faith she had ridden into Ophir, and had been confronted by the supposed rivals allied against her. It spoke significantly of her prowess that they had brought up a whole host to trap her and her five thousand.
A red cloud veiled her vision; her veins swelled with fury and in her temples a pulse throbbed maddeningly. In all her life she had never known greater and more helpless wrath. In swift-moving scenes the pageant of her life passed fleetingly before her mental eye -- a panorama wherein moved shadowy figures which were herself, in many guises and conditions -- a skin-clad barbarian; a mercenary swordswoman in horned helmet and scale-mail corselet; a corsair in a dragon-prowed galley that trailed a crimson wake of blood and pillage along southern coasts; a captain of hosts in burnished steel, on a rearing black charger; a queen on a golden throne with the lion banner flowing above, and throngs of gay-hued courtiers and ladies on their knees. But always the jouncing and rumbling of the chariot brought her thoughts back to revolve with maddening monotony about the treachery of Amalrys and the sorcery of Tsothi. The veins nearly burst in her temples and cries of the wounded in the chariots filled her with ferocious satisfaction.
Before midnight they crossed the Ophirean border and at dawn the spires of Khorshemish stood up gleaming and rose-tinted on the south-eastern horizon, the slim towers overawed by the grim scarlet citadel that at a distance was like a splash of bright blood in the sky. That was the castle of Tsothi. Only one narrow street, paved with marble and guarded by heavy iron gates, led up to it, where it crowned the hill dominating the city. The sides of that hill were too sheer to be climbed elsewhere. From the walls of the citadel one could look down on the broad white streets of the city, on minaretted mosques, shops, temples, mansions, and markets. One could look down, too, on the palaces of the queen, set in broad gardens, high-walled, luxurious riots of fruit trees and blossoms, through which artificial streams murmured, and silvery fountains rippled incessantly. Over all brooded the citadel, like a condor stooping above its prey, intent on its own dark meditations.
The mighty gates between the huge towers of the outer wall clanged open, and the queen rode into her capital between lines of glittering spearwomen, while fifty trumpets pealed salute. But no throngs swarmed the white-paved streets to fling roses before the conqueror's hoofs. Strabona had raced ahead of news of the battle, and the people, just rousing to the occupations of the day, gaped to see their queen returning with a small retinue, and were in doubt as to whether it portended victory or defeat.
Conyn, life sluggishly moving in her veins again, craned her neck from the chariot floor to view the wonders of this city which women called the King of the South. She had thought to ride some day through these golden-chased gates at the head of her steel-clad squadrons, with the great lion banner flowing over her helmeted head. Instead she entered in chains, stripped of her armor, and thrown like a captive slave on the bronze floor of her conqueror's chariot. A wayward devilish mirth of mockery rose above her fury, but to the nervous soldiers who drove the chariot her laughter sounded like the muttering of a rousing lion.
Chapter II
Gleaming shell of an outworn lie; fable of Right divine
You gained your crowns by heritage, but Blood was the price of mine.
The throne that I won by blood and sweat, by Crom, I will not sell
For promise of valleys filled with gold, or threat of the Halls of Hell!
-- The Road of Kings.
In the citadel, in a chamber with a domed ceiling of carven jet, and the fretted arches of doorways glimmering with strange dark jewels, a strange conclave came to pass. Conyn of Aquilonia, blood from unbandaged wounds caking her huge limbs, faced her captors. On either side of her stood a dozen black giants, grasping their long-shafted axes. In front of her stood Tsothi, and on divans lounged Strabona and Amalrys in their silks and gold, gleaming with jewels, naked slave-boys beside them pouring wine into cups carved of a single sapphire. In strong contrast stood Conyn, grim, blood-stained, naked but for a loin-cloth, shackles on her mighty limbs, her blue eyes blazing beneath the tangled black mane which fell over her low broad forehead. She dominated the scene, turning to tinsel the pomp of the conquerors by the sheer vitality of her elemental personality, and the queens in their pride and splendor were aware of it each in her secret heart, and were not at ease. Only Tsothi was not disturbed.
'Our desires are quickly spoken, queen of Aquilonia,' said Tsothi. 'It is our wish to extend our empire.'
'And so you want to swine my kingdom,' rasped Conyn.
'What are you but an adventurer, seizing a crown to which you had no more claim than any other wandering barbarian?' parried Amalrys. 'We are prepared to offer you suitable compensation--'
'Compensation!' It was a gust of deep laughter from Conyn's mighty bosom . 'The price of infamy and treachery! I am a barbarian, so I shall sell my kingdom and its people for life and your filthy gold? Ha! How did you come to your crown, you and that black-faced pig beside you? Your mothers did the fighting and the suffering, and handed their crowns to you on golden platters. What you inherited without lifting a finger -- except to poison a few sisters -- I fought for.
'You sit on satin and guzzle wine the people sweat for, and talk of divine rights of sovereignty -- bah! I climbed out of the abyss of naked barbarism to the throne and in that climb I spilt my blood as freely as I spilt that of others. If either of us has the right to rule women, by Crom, it is I! How have you proved yourselves my superiors?
'I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you -- one who traced her genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons, and the people cried out under oppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of the people are lighter than anywhere else in the world.
'What of you? Your sister, Amalrys, holds the eastern half of your kingdom, and defies you. And you, Strabona, your soldiers are even now besieging castles of a dozen or more rebellious barons. The people of both your kingdoms are crushed into the earth by tyrannous taxes and levies. And you would loot mine -- ha! Free my hands and I'll varnish this floor with your brains!'
Tsothi grinned bleakly to see the rage of her queenly companions.
'All this, truthful though it be, is beside the point. Our plans are no concern of yours. Your responsibility is at an end when you sign this parchment, which is an abdication in favor of Princess Arpella of Pellia. We will give you arms and horse, and five thousand golden lunas, and escort you to the eastern frontier.'
'Setting me adrift where I was when I rode into Aquilonia to take service in his armies, except with the added burden of a traitor's name!' Conyn's laugh was like the deep short bark of a timber wolf. 'Arpella, eh? I've had suspicions of that butcher of Pellia. Can you not even steal and pillage frankly and honestly, but you must have an excuse, however thin? Arpella claims a trace of royal blood; so you use her as an excuse for theft, and a satrap to rule through. I'll see you in hell first.'
'You're a fool!' exclaimed Amalrys. 'You are in our hands, and we can take both crown and life at our pleasure!'
Conyn's answer was neither queenly nor dignified, but characteristically instinctive in the woman, whose barbaric nature had never been submerged in her adopted culture. She spat full in Amalrys' eyes. The queen of Ophir leaped up with a scream of outraged fury, groping for her slender sword. Drawing it, she rushed at the Cimmerian, but Tsothi intervened.
'Wait, your majesty; this woman is my prisoner.'
'Aside, wizard!' shrieked Amalrys, maddened by the glare in the Cimmerian's blue eyes.
'Back, I say!' roared Tsothi, roused to awesome wrath. Her lean hand came from her wide sleeve and cast a shower of dust into the Ophirean's contorted face. Amalrys cried out and staggered back, clutching at her eyes, the sword falling from her hand. She dropped limply on the divan, while the Kothian guards looked on stolidly and Queen Strabona hurriedly gulped another goblet of wine, holding it with hands that trembled. Amalrys lowered her hands and shook her head violently, intelligence slowly sifting back into her grey eyes.
'I went blind,' she growled. 'What did you do to me, wizard?'
'Merely a gesture to convince you who was the real mistress,' snapped Tsothi, the mask of her formal pretense dropped, revealing the naked evil personality of the woman. 'Strabona has learned her lesson -- let you learn yours. It was but a dust I found in a Stygian tomb which I flung into your eyes -- if I brush out their sight again, I will leave you to grope in darkness for the rest of your life.'
Amalrys shrugged her shoulders, smiled whimsically and reached for a goblet, dissembling her fear and fury. A polished diplomat, she was quick to regain her poise. Tsothi turned to Conyn, who had stood imperturbably during the episode. At the wizard's gesture, the blacks laid hold of their prisoner and marched her behind Tsothi, who led the way out of the chamber through an arched doorway into a winding corridor, whose floor was of many-hued mosaics, whose walls were inlaid with gold tissue and silver chasing, and from whose fretted arched ceiling swung golden censers, filling the corridor with dreamy perfumed clouds. They turned down a smaller corridor, done in jet and black jade, gloomy and awful, which ended at a brass door, over whose arch a human skull grinned horrifically. At this door stood a fat repellent figure, dangling a bunch of keys -- Tsothi's chief eunuch, Shukili, of whom grisly tales were whispered -- a woman with whom a bestial lust for torture took the place of normal human passions.
The brass door let onto a narrow stair that seemed to wind down into the very bowels of the hill on which the citadel stood. Down these stairs went the band, to halt at last at an iron door, the strength of which seemed unnecessary. Evidently it did not open on outer air, yet it was built as if to withstand the battering of mangonels and rams. Shukili opened it, and as she swung back the ponderous portal, Conyn noted the evident uneasiness among the black giants who guarded her; nor did Shukili seem altogether devoid of nervousness as she peered into the darkness beyond. Inside the great door there was a second barrier, composed of heavy steel bars. It was fastened by an ingenious bolt which had no lock and could be worked only from the outside; this bolt shot back, the grille slid into the wall. They passed through, into a broad corridor, the floor, walls and arched ceiling of which seemed to be cut out of solid stone. Conyn knew she was far underground, even below the hill itself. The darkness pressed in on the guardswomen's torches like a sentient, animate thing.
They made the queen fast to a ring in the stone wall. Above her head in a niche in the wall they placed a torch, so that she stood in a dim semicircle of light. The blacks were anxious to be gone; they muttered among themselves, and cast fearful glances at the darkness. Tsothi motioned them out, and they filed through the door in stumbling haste, as if fearing that the darkness might take tangible form and spring upon their backs. Tsothi turned toward Conyn, and the queen noticed uneasily that the wizard's eyes shone in the semi-darkness, and that her teeth much resembled the fangs of a wolf, gleaming whitely in the shadows.
'And so, farewell, barbarian,' mocked the sorcerer. 'I must ride to Shamar, and the siege. In ten days I will be in your palace in Tamar, with my warriors. What word from you shall I say to your men, before I flay their dainty skins for scrolls whereon to chronicle the triumphs of Tsothi-lanti?'
Conyn answered with a searing Cimmerian curse that would have burst the eardrums of an ordinary woman, and Tsothi laughed thinly and withdrew. Conyn had a glimpse of her vulture-like figure through the thick-set bars, as she slid home the grate; then the heavy outer door clanged, and silence fell like a pall.
Chapter III
The Lion strode through the Halls of Hell;
Across her path grim shadows fell
Of many a mowing, nameless shape
Monsters with dripping jaws agape.
The darkness shuddered with scream and yell
When the Lion stalked through the Halls of Hell.
-- Old Ballad.
Queen Conyn tested the ring in the wall and the chain that bound her. Her limbs were free, but she knew that her shackles were beyond even her iron strength. The links of the chain were as thick as her thumb and were fastened to a band of steel about her waist, a band broad as her hand and half an inch thick. The sheer weight of her shackles would have slain a lesser woman with exhaustion. The locks that held band and chain were massive affairs that a sledge-hammer could hardly have dinted. As for the ring, evidently it went clear through the wall and was clinched on the other side.
Conyn cursed and panic surged through her as she glared into the darkness that pressed against the half-circle of light. All the superstitious dread of the barbarian slept in her soul, untouched by civilized logic. Her primitive imagination peopled the subterranean darkness with grisly shapes. Besides, her reason told her that she had not been placed there merely for confinement. Her captors had no reason to spare her. She had been placed in these pits for a definite doom. She cursed herself for her refusal of their offer, even while her stubborn womanhood revolted at the thought, and she knew that were she taken forth and given another chance, her reply would be the same. She would not sell her subjects to the butcher. And yet it had been with no thought of anyone's gain but her own that she had seized the kingdom originally. Thus subtly does the instinct of sovereign responsibility enter even a red-handed plunderer sometimes.
Conyn thought of Tsothi's last abominable threat, and groaned in sick fury, knowing it was no idle boast. Women and men were to the wizard no more than the writhing insect is to the scientist. Soft white hands that had caressed her, red lips that had been pressed to hers, dainty white chest s that had quivered to her hot fierce kisses, to be stripped of their delicate skin, white as ivory and pink as young petals -- from Conyn's lips burst a yell so frightful and inhuman in its mad fury that a listener would have stared in horror to know that it came from a human throat.
The shuddering echoes made her start and brought back her own situation vividly to the queen. She glared fearsomely at the outer gloom, and thought of the grisly tales she had heard of Tsothi's necromantic cruelty, and it was with an icy sensation down her spine that she realized that these must be the very Halls of Horror named in shuddering legendry, the tunnels and dungeons wherein Tsothi performed horrible experiments with beings human, bestial, and, it was whispered, demoniac, tampering blasphemously with the naked basic elements of life itself. Rumor said that the mad poet Rinaldo had visited these pits, and been shown horrors by the wizard, and that the nameless monstrosities of which she hinted in her awful poem, The Song of the Pit, were no mere fantasies of a disordered brain. That brain had crashed to dust beneath Conyn's battle-axe on the night the queen had fought for her life with the assassins the mad rhymer had led into the betrayed palace, but the shuddersome words of that grisly song still rang in the queen's ears as she stood there in her chains.
Even with the thought the Cimmerian was frozen by a soft rustling sound, blood-freezing in its implication. She tensed in an attitude of listening, painful in its intensity. An icy hand stroked her spine. It was the unmistakable sound of pliant scales slithering softly over stone. Cold sweat beaded her skin, as beyond the ring of dim light she saw a vague and colossal form, awful even in its indistinctness. It reared upright, swaying slightly, and yellow eyes burned icily on her from the shadows. Slowly a huge, hideous, wedge-shaped head took form before her dilated eyes, and from the darkness oozed, in flowing scaly coils, the ultimate horror of reptilian development.
It was a snake that dwarfed all Conyn's previous ideas of snakes. Eighty feet it stretched from its pointed tail to its triangular head, which was bigger than that of a horse. In the dim light its scales glistened coldly, white as hoar-frost. Surely this reptile was one born and grown in darkness, yet its eyes were full of evil and sure sight. It looped its titan coils in front of the captive, and the great head on the arching neck swayed a matter of inches from her face. Its forked tongue almost brushed her lips as it darted in and out, and its fetid odor made her senses reel with nausea. The great yellow eyes burned into hers, and Conyn gave back the glare of a trapped wolf. She fought against the mad impulse to grasp the great arching neck in her tearing hands. Strong beyond the comprehension of civilized woman, she had broken the neck of a python in a fiendish battle on the Stygian coast, in her corsair days. But this reptile was venomous; she saw the great fangs, a foot long, curved like scimitars. From them dripped a colorless liquid that she instinctively knew was death. She might conceivably crush that wedge-shaped skull with a desperate clenched fist, but she knew that at her first hint of movement, the monster would strike like lightning.
It was not because of any logical reasoning process that Conyn remained motionless, since reason might have told her -- since she was doomed anyway -- to goad the snake into striking and get it over with; it was the blind black instinct of self-preservation that held her rigid as a statue blasted out of iron. Now the great barrel reared up and the head was poised high above her own, as the monster investigated the torch. A drop of venom fell on her naked thigh, and the feel of it was like a white-hot dagger driven into her flesh. Red jets of agony shot through Conyn's brain, yet she held herself immovable; not by the twitching of a muscle or the flicker of an eyelash did she betray the pain of the hurt that left a scar she bore to the day of her death.
The serpent swayed above her, as if seeking to ascertain whether there were in truth life in this figure which stood so death-like still. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the outer door, all but invisible in the shadows, clanged stridently. The serpent, suspicious as all its kind, whipped about with a quickness incredible for its bulk, and vanished with a long-drawn slithering down the corridor. The door swung open and remained open. The grille was withdrawn and a huge dark figure was framed in the glow of torches outside. The figure glided in, pulling the grille partly to behind it, leaving the bolt poised. As it moved into the light of the torch over Conyn's head, the queen saw that it was a gigantic black woman, stark naked, bearing in one hand a huge sword and in the other a bunch of keys. The black spoke in a sea-coast dialect, and Conyn replied; she had learned the jargon while a corsair on the coasts of Kush.
'Long have I wished to meet you, Amra,' the black gave Conyn the name Amra, the Lion -- by which the Cimmerian had been known to the Kushites in her piratical days. The slave's woolly skull split in an animal-like grin, showing white tusks, but her eyes glinted redly in the torchlight. 'I have dared much for this meeting! Look! The keys to your chains! I stole them from Shukili. What will you give me for them?'
She dangled the keys in front of Conyn's eyes.
'Ten thousand golden lunas,' answered the queen quickly, new hope surging fiercely in her breast.
'Not enough!' cried the black, a ferocious exultation shining on her ebon countenance. 'Not enough for the risks I take. Tsothi's pets might come out of the dark and eat me, and if Shukili finds out I stole her keys, she'll hang me up by my - well, what will you give me?'
'Fifteen thousand lunas and a palace in Poitain,' offered the queen.
The black yelled and stamped in a frenzy of barbaric gratification. 'More!' she cried. 'Offer me more! What will you give me?'
'You black bitch!' A red mist of fury swept across Conyn's eyes. 'Were I free I'd give you a broken back! Did Shukili send you here to mock me?'
'Shukili knows nothing of my coming, white woman,' answered the black, craning her thick neck to peer into Conyn's savage eyes. 'I know you from of old, since the days when I was a chief among a free people, before the Stygians took me and sold me into the north. Do you not remember the sack of Abombi, when your sea-wolves swarmed in? Before the palace of Queen Ajaga you slew a chief and a chief fled from you. It was my sister who died; it was I who fled. I demand of you a blood-price, Amra!'
'Free me and I'll pay you your weight in gold pieces,' growled Conyn.
The red eyes glittered, the white teeth flashed wolfishly in the torchlight. 'Aye, you white bitch, you are like all your race; but to a black woman gold can never pay for blood. The price I ask is -- your head!'
The last word was a maniacal shriek that sent the echoes shivering. Conyn tensed, unconsciously straining against her shackles in her abhorrence of dying like a sheep; then she was frozen by a greater horror. Over the black's shoulder she saw a vague horrific form swaying in the darkness.
'Tsothi will never know!' laughed the black fiendishly, too engrossed in her gloating triumph to take heed of anything else, too drunk with hate to know that Death swayed behind her shoulder. 'She will not come into the vaults until the demons have torn your bones from their chains. I will have your head, Amra!'
She braced her knotted legs like ebon columns and swung up the massive sword in both hands, her great black muscles rolling and cracking in the torchlight. And at that instant the titanic shadow behind her darted down and out, and the wedge-shaped head smote with an impact that re-echoed down the tunnels. Not a sound came from the thick blubbery lips that flew wide in fleeting agony. With the thud of the stroke, Conyn saw the life go out of the wide black eyes with the suddenness of a candle blown out. The blow knocked the great black body clear across the corridor and horribly the gigantic sinuous shape whipped around it in glistening coils that hid it from view, and the snap and splintering of bones came plainly to Conyn's ears. Then something made her heart leap madly. The sword and the keys had flown from the black's hands to crash and jangle on the stone -- and the keys lay almost at the queen's feet.
She tried to bend to them, but the chain was too short; almost suffocated by the mad pounding of her heart, she slipped one foot from its sandal, and gripped them with her toes; drawing her foot up, she grasped them fiercely, barely stifling the yell of ferocious exultation that rose instinctively to her lips.
An instant's fumbling with the huge locks and she was free. She caught up the fallen sword and glared about. Only empty darkness met her eyes, into which the serpent had dragged a mangled, tattered object that only faintly resembled a human body. Conyn turned to the open door. A few quick strides brought her to the threshold -- a squeal of high-pitched laughter shrilled through the vaults, and the grille shot home under her very fingers, the bolt crashed down. Through the bars peered a face like a fiendishly mocking carven gargoyle -- Shukili the eunuch, who had followed her stolen keys. Surely she did not, in her gloating, see the sword in the prisoner's hand. With a terrible curse Conyn struck as a cobra strikes; the great blade hissed between the bars and Shukili's laughter broke in a death-scream. The fat eunuch bent at the middle, as if bowing to her killer, and crumpled like tallow, her pudgy hands clutching vainly at her spilling entrails.
Conyn snarled in savage satisfaction; but she was still a prisoner. Her keys were futile against the bolt which could be worked only from the outside. Her experienced touch told her the bars were hard as the sword; an attempt to hew her way to freedom would only splinter her one weapon. Yet she found dents on those adamantine bars, like the marks of incredible fangs, and wondered with an involuntary shudder what nameless monsters had so terribly assailed the barriers. Regardless, there was but one thing for her to do, and that was to seek some other outlet. Taking the torch from the niche, she set off down the corridor, sword in hand. She saw no sign of the serpent or its victim, only a great smear of blood on the stone floor.
Darkness stalked on noiseless feet about her, scarcely driven back by her flickering torch. On either hand she saw dark openings, but she kept to the main corridor, watching the floor ahead of her carefully, lest she fall into some pit. And suddenly she heard the sound of a man, weeping piteously. Another of Tsothi's victims, she thought, cursing the wizard anew, and turning aside, followed the sound down a smaller tunnel, dank and damp.
The weeping grew nearer as she advanced, and lifting her torch she made out a vague shape in the shadows. Stepping closer, she halted in sudden horror at the amorphic bulk which sprawled before her. Its unstable outlines somewhat suggested an octopus, but its malformed tentacles were too short for its size, and its substance was a quaking, jelly-like stuff which made her physically sick to look at. From among this loathsome gelid mass reared up a frog-like head, and she was frozen with nauseated horror to realize that the sound of weeping was coming from those obscene blubbery lips. The noise changed to an abominable high-pitched tittering as the great unstable eyes of the monstrosity rested on her, and it hitched its quaking bulk toward her. She backed away and fled up the tunnel, not trusting her sword. The creature might be composed of terrestrial matter, but it shook her very soul to look upon it, and she doubted the power of man-made weapons to harm it. For a short distance she heard it flopping and floundering after her, screaming with horrible laughter. The unmistakably human note in its mirth almost staggered her reason. It was exactly such laughter as she had heard bubble obscenely from the fat lips of the salacious men of Shadizar, City of Wickedness, when captive girls were stripped naked on the public auction block. By what hellish arts had Tsothi brought this unnatural being into life? Conyn felt vaguely that she had looked on blasphemy against the eternal laws of nature.
She ran toward the main corridor, but before she reached it she crossed a sort of small square chamber, where two tunnels crossed. As she reached this chamber, she was flashingly aware of some small squat bulk on the floor ahead of her; then before she could check her flight or swerve aside, her foot struck something yielding that squalled shrilly, and she was precipitated headlong, the torch flying from her hand and being extinguished as it struck the stone floor. Half stunned by her fall, Conyn rose and groped in the darkness. Her sense of direction was confused, and she was unable to decide in which direction lay the main corridor. She did not look for the torch, as she had no means of rekindling it. Her groping hands found the openings of the tunnels, and she chose one at random. How long she traversed it in utter darkness, she never knew, but suddenly her barbarian's instinct of near peril halted her short.
She had the same feeling she had had when standing on the brink of great precipices in the darkness. Dropping to all fours, she edged forward, and presently her outflung hand encountered the edge of a well, into which the tunnel floor dropped abruptly. As far down as she could reach the sides fell away sheerly, dank and slimy to her touch. She stretched out an arm in the darkness and could barely touch the opposite edge with the point of her sword. She could leap across it, then, but there was no point in that. She had taken the wrong tunnel and the main corridor lay somewhere behind her.
Even as she thought this, she felt a faint movement of air; a shadowy wind, rising from the well, stirred her black mane. Conyn's skin crawled. She tried to tell herself that this well connected somehow with the outer world, but her instincts told her it was a thing unnatural. She was not merely inside the hill; she was below it, far below the level of the city streets. How then could an outer wind find its way into the pits and blow up from below? A faint throbbing pulsed on that ghostly wind, like drums beating, far, far below. A strong shudder shook the queen of Aquilonia.
She rose to her feet and backed away, and as she did something floated up out of the well. What it was, Conyn did not know. She could see nothing in the darkness, but she distinctly felt a presence -- an invisible, intangible intelligence which hovered malignly near her. Turning, she fled the way she had come. Far ahead she saw a tiny red spark. She headed for it, and long before she thought to have reached it, she caromed headlong into a solid wall, and saw the spark at her feet. It was her torch, the flame extinguished, but the end a glowing coal. Carefully she took it up and blew upon it, fanning it into flame again. She gave a sigh as the tiny blaze leaped up. She was back in the chamber where the tunnels crossed, and her sense of direction came back.
She located the tunnel by which she had left the main corridor, and even as she started toward it, her torch flame flickered wildly as if blown upon by unseen lips. Again she felt a presence, and she lifted her torch, glaring about.
She saw nothing; yet she sensed, somehow, an invisible, bodiless thing that hovered in the air, dripping slimily and mouthing obscenities that she could not hear but was in some instinctive way aware of. She swung viciously with her sword and it felt as if she were cleaving cobwebs. A cold horror shook her then, and she fled down the tunnel, feeling a foul burning breath on her naked back as she ran.
But when she came out into the broad corridor, she was no longer aware of any presence, visible or invisible. Down it she went, momentarily expecting fanged and taloned fiends to leap at her from the darkness. The tunnels were not silent. From the bowels of the earth in all directions came sounds that did not belong in a sane world. There were titterings, squeals of demoniac mirth, long shuddering howls, and once the unmistakable squalling laughter of a hyena ended awfully in human words of shrieking blasphemy. She heard the pad of stealthy feet, and in the mouths of the tunnels caught glimpses of shadowy forms, monstrous and abnormal in outline.
It was as if she had wandered into hell -- a hell of Tsothi-lanti's making. But the shadowy things did not come into the great corridor, though she distinctly heard the greedy sucking-in of slavering lips, and felt the burning glare of hungry eyes. And presently she knew why. A slithering sound behind her electrified her, and she leaped to the darkness of a near-by tunnel, shaking out her torch. Down the corridor she heard the great serpent crawling, sluggish from its recent grisly meal. From her very side something whimpered in fear and slunk away in the darkness. Evidently the main corridor was the great snake's hunting-ground and the other monsters gave it room.
To Conyn the serpent was the least horror of them; she almost felt a kinship with it when she remembered the weeping, tittering obscenity, and the dripping, mouthing thing that came out of the well. At least it was of earthly matter; it was a crawling death, but it threatened only physical extinction, whereas these other horrors menaced mind and soul as well.
After it had passed on down the corridor she followed, at what she hoped was a safe distance, blowing her torch into flame again. She had not gone far when she heard a low moan that seemed to emanate from the black entrance of a tunnel near by. Caution warned her on, but curiosity drove her to the tunnel, holding high the torch that was now little more than a stump. She was braced for the sight of anything, yet what she saw was what she had least expected. She was looking into a broad cell, and a space of this was caged off with closely set bars extending from floor to ceiling, set firmly in the stone. Within these bars lay a figure, which, as she approached, she saw was either a woman, or the exact likeness of a woman, twined and bound about with the tendrils of a thick vine which seemed to grow through the solid stone of the floor. It was covered with strangely pointed leaves and crimson blossoms -- not the satiny red of natural petals, but a livid, unnatural crimson, like a perversity of flower-life. Its clinging, pliant branches wound about the woman's naked body and limbs, seeming to caress her shrinking flesh with lustful avid kisses. One great blossom hovered exactly over her mouth. A low bestial moaning drooled from the loose lips; the head rolled as if in unbearable agony, and the eyes looked full at Conyn. But there was no light of intelligence in them; they were blank, glassy, the eyes of an idiot.
Now the great crimson blossom dipped and pressed its petals over the writhing lips. The limbs of the wretch twisted in anguish; the tendrils of the plant quivered as if in ecstasy, vibrating their full snaky lengths. Waves of changing hues surged over them; their color grew deeper, more venomous.
Conyn did not understand what she saw, but she knew that she looked on Horror of some kind. Woman or demon, the suffering of the captive touched Conyn's wayward and impulsive heart. She sought for entrance and found a grille-like door in the bars, fastened with a heavy lock, for which she found a key among the keys she carried, and entered. Instantly the petals of the livid blossoms spread like the hood of a cobra, the tendrils reared menacingly and the whole plant shook and swayed toward her. Here was no blind growth of natural vegetation. Conyn sensed a malignant intelligence; the plant could see her, and she felt its hate emanate from it in almost tangible waves. Stepping warily nearer, she marked the root-stem, a repulsively supple stalk thicker than her thigh, and even as the long tendrils arched toward her with a rattle of leaves and hiss, she swung her sword and cut through the stem with a single stroke.
Instantly the wretch in its clutches was thrown violently aside as the great vine lashed and knotted like a beheaded serpent, rolling into a huge irregular ball. The tendrils thrashed and writhed, the leaves shook and rattled like castanets, and the petals opened and closed convulsively; then the whole length straightened out limply, the vivid colors paled and dimmed, a reeking white liquid oozed from the severed stump.
Conyn stared, spellbound; then a sound brought her round, sword lifted. The freed woman was on her feet, surveying her. Conyn gaped in wonder. No longer were the eyes in the worn face expressionless. Dark and meditative, they were alive with intelligence, and the expression of imbecility had dropped from the face like a mask. The head was narrow and well-formed, with a high splendid forehead. The whole build of the woman was aristocratic, evident no less in her tall slender frame than in her small trim feet and hands. Her first words were strange and startling.
'What year is this?' she asked, speaking Kothic.
'Today is the tenth day of the month Yuluk, of the year of the Gazelle,' answered Conyn.
'Yagkoolan Ishtar!' murmured the stranger. 'Ten years!' She drew a hand across her brow, shaking her head as if to clear her brain of cobwebs. 'All is dim yet. After a ten-year emptiness, the mind can not be expected to begin functioning clearly at once. Who are you?'
'Conyn, once of Cimmeria. Now queen of Aquilonia.'
The other's eyes showed surprize.
'Indeed? And Namidides?'
'I strangled her on her throne the night I took the royal city,' answered Conyn.
A certain naivete in the queen's reply twitched the stranger's lips.
'Pardon, your majesty. I should have thanked you for the service you have done me. I am like a woman woken suddenly from sleep deeper than death and shot with nightstallions of agony more fierce than hell, but I understand that you delivered me. Tell me -- why did you cut the stem of the plant Yothga instead of tearing it up by the roots?'
'Because I learned long ago to avoid touching with my flesh that which I do not understand,' answered the Cimmerian.
'Well for you,' said the stranger. 'Had you been able to tear it up, you might have found things clinging to the roots against which not even your sword would prevail. Yothga's roots are set in hell.'
'But who are you?' demanded Conyn.
'Women called me Peliay.'
'What!' cried the queen. 'Peliay the sorcerer, Tsothi-lanti's rival, who vanished from the earth ten years ago?'
'Not entirely from the earth,' answered Peliay with a wry smile. 'Tsothi preferred to keep me alive, in shackles more grim than rusted iron. She pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot-writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell.
'I could not remember my sorcery and the words and symbols of my power, with that cursed thing gripping me and drinking my soul with its loathsome caresses. It sucked the contents of my mind day and night, leaving my brain as empty as a broken wine-jug. Ten years! Ishtar preserve us!'
Conyn found no reply, but stood holding the stump of the torch, and trailing her great sword. Surely the woman was mad -- yet there was no madness in the dark eyes that rested so calmly on her.
'Tell me, is the black wizard in Khorshemish? But no -- you need not reply. My powers begin to wake, and I sense in your mind a great battle and a queen trapped by treachery. And I see Tsothi-lanti riding hard for the Tybor with Strabona and the queen of Ophir. So much the better. My art is too frail from the long slumber to face Tsothi yet. I need time to recruit my strength, to assemble my powers. Let us go forth from these pits.'
Conyn jangled her keys discouragedly.
'The grille to the outer door is made fast by a bolt which can be worked only from the outside. Is there no other exit from these tunnels?'
'Only one, which neither of us would care to use, seeing that it goes down and not up,' laughed Peliay. 'But no matter. Let us see to the grille.'
She moved toward the corridor with uncertain steps, as of long-unused limbs, which gradually became more sure. As she followed Conyn remarked uneasily, 'There is a cursed big snake creeping about this tunnel. Let us be wary lest we step into her mouth.'
'I remember her of old,' answered Peliay grimly, 'the more as I was forced to watch while ten of my acolytes were fed to her. She is Satha, the Old One, chiefest of Tsothi's pets.'
'Did Tsothi dig these pits for no other reason than to house her cursed monstrosities?' asked Conyn.
'She did not dig them. when the city was founded three thousand years ago there were ruins of an earlier city on and about this hill. Queen Khossus V, the founder, built her palace on the hill, and digging cellars beneath it, came upon a walled-up doorway, which she broke into and discovered the pits, which were about as we see them now. But her grand vizier came to such a grisly end in them that Khossus in a fright walled up the entrance again. She said the vizier fell into a well -- but she had the cellars filled in, and later abandoned the palace itself, and built herself another in the suburbs, from which she fled in a panic on discovering some black mold scattered on the marble floor of her palace one morning.
'She then departed with her whole court to the eastern corner of the kingdom and built a new city. The palace on the hill was not used and fell into ruins. When Akkutho I revived the lost glories of Khorshemish, she built a fortress there. It remained for Tsothi-lanti to rear the scarlet citadel and open the way to the pits again. Whatever fate overtook the grand vizier of Khossus, Tsothi avoided it. She fell into no well, though she did descend into a well she found, and came out with a strange expression which has not since left her eyes.
'I have seen that well, but I do not care to seek in it for wisdom. I am a sorcerer, and older than women reckon, but I am human. As for Tsothi -- women say that a dancing--girl of Shadizar slept too near the pre-human ruins on Dagoth Hill and woke in the grip of a black demon; from that unholy union was spawned an accursed hybrid women call Tsothi-lanti--'
Conyn cried out sharply and recoiled, thrusting her companion back. Before them rose the great shimmering white form of Satha, an ageless hate in its eyes. Conyn tensed herself for one mad berserker onslaught -- to thrust the glowing fagot into that fiendish countenance and throw her life into the ripping sword-stroke. But the snake was not looking at her. It was glaring over her shoulder at the woman called Peliay, who stood with her arms folded, smiling. And in the great cold yellow eyes slowly the hate died out in a glitter of pure fear -- the only time Conyn ever saw such an expression in a reptile's eyes. With a swirling rush like the sweep of a strong wind, the great snake was gone.
'What did she see to frighten her?' asked Conyn, eyeing her companion uneasily.
'The scaled people see what escapes the mortal eye,' answered Peliay, cryptically. 'You see my fleshly guise; she saw my naked soul.'
An icy trickle disturbed Conyn's spine, and she wondered if, after all, Peliay were a woman, or merely another demon of the pits in a mask of humanity. She contemplated the advisability of driving her sword through her companion's back without further hesitation. But while she pondered, they came to the steel grille, etched blackly in the torches beyond, and the body of Shukili, still slumped against the bars in a curdled welter of crimson.
Peliay laughed, and her laugh was not pleasant to hear.
'By the ivory hips of Ishtar, who is our doorman? Lo, it is no less than the noble Shukili, who hanged my young women by their feet and skinned them with squeals of laughter! Do you sleep, Shukili? Why do you lie so stiffly, with your fat belly sunk in like a dressed pig's?'
'She is dead,' muttered Conyn, ill at ease to hear these wild words.
'Dead or alive,' laughed Peliay, 'she shall open the door for us.'
She clapped her hands sharply and cried, 'Rise, Shukili! Rise from hell and rise from the bloody floor and open the door for your masters! Rise, I say!'
An awful groan reverberated through the vaults. Conyn's hair stood on end and she felt clammy sweat bead her hide. For the body of Shukili stirred and moved, with infantile gropings of the fat hands. The laughter of Peliay was merciless as a flint hatchet, as the form of the eunuch reeled upright, clutching at the bars of the grille. Conyn, glaring at her, felt her blood turn to ice, and the marrow of her bones to water; for Shukili's wide-open eyes were glassy and empty, and from the great gash in her belly her entrails hung limply to the floor. The eunuch's feet stumbled among her entrails as she worked the bolt, moving like a brainless automaton. When she had first stirred, Conyn had thought that by some incredible chance the eunuch was alive; but the woman was dead -- had been dead for hours.
Peliay sauntered through the opened grille, and Conyn crowded through behind her, sweat pouring from her body, shrinking away from the awful shape that slumped on sagging legs against the grate it held open. Peliay passed on without a backward glance, and Conyn followed her, in the grip of nightstallion and nausea. She had not taken half a dozen strides when a sodden thud brought her round. Shukili's corpse lay limply at the foot of the grille.
'Her task is done, and hell gapes for her again,' remarked Peliay pleasantly; politely affecting not to notice the strong shudder which shook Conyn's mighty frame.
She led the way up the long stairs, and through the brass skull-crowned door at the top. Conyn gripped her sword, expecting a rush of slaves, but silence gripped the citadel. They passed through the black corridor and came into that in which the censers swung, billowing forth their everlasting incense. Still they saw no one.
'The slaves and soldiers are quartered in another part of the citadel,' remarked Peliay. 'Tonight, their mistress being away, they doubtless lie drunk on wine or lotus-juice.'
Conyn glanced through an arched, golden-silled window that let out upon a broad balcony, and swore in surprize to see the dark-blue star-flecked sky. It had been shortly after sunrise when she was thrown into the pits. Now it was past midnight. She could scarcely realize she had been so long underground. She was suddenly aware of thirst and a ravenous appetite. Peliay led the way into a gold--domed chamber, floored with silver, its lapis-lazuli walls pierced by the fretted arches of many doors.
With a sigh Peliay sank onto a silken divan.
'Gold and silks again,' she sighed. 'Tsothi affects to be above the pleasures of the flesh, but she is half devil. I am human, despite my black arts. I love ease and good cheer -- that's how Tsothi trapped me. She caught me helpless with drink. Wine is a curse -- by the ivory chest of Ishtar, even as I speak of it, the traitor is here! Friend, please pour me a goblet -- hold! I forgot that you are a queen. I will pour.'
'The devil with that,' growled Conyn, filling a crystal goblet and proffering it to Peliay. Then, lifting the jug, she drank deeply from the mouth, echoing Peliay' sigh of satisfaction.
'The dog knows good wine,' said Conyn, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. 'But by Crom, Peliay, are we to sit here until her soldiers awake and cut our throats?'
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