“Aye, lad—and those columns, see how they’re cracked and split and pitted? I’ve seen the sides of mountains that looked younger…well, the old legend must be wrong; the sorcerer must have found this place as it is, and made it his dwelling, rather than building it himself.”
“I think you’re right,” the youth grunted. “No one man—wizard or no—could build anything this big. It is a task that would require a nation.” He paused, fingering the hilt of his sword. “I have heard that in the ages before the Father of the Gods created the first men, this world was ruled by wily and malignant creatures known as the Dragon Kings of Hyperborea…and that they entered in the land of Lemuria when all their land was lost beneath the eternal snows of the boreal pole.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the same tale…You think this is some ungodly palace or temple or shrine left over from the fall of the Hyperboreans?”
Thongor nodded. “I do. For I have seen many of the kingdoms of man, and looked upon his cities, yet never till this hour have I seen this fashion of building…not in my homeland, or among the shadowy foothills of Mommur, or in Kathool or Thurdis or Zangabal, or even old Tarakus, the Pirate City or any of the cities of the Dakshina. This is, must be, a survival of some forgotten age before the coming of man.”
Chelim’s face was stolid. “Gorm alone knows what pre-human deviltry these ancient walls have looked upon…or what shadowy forces may linger within, waiting for the chance to spring to life again.”
Thongor uttered a rude expletive. “Keep this in mind, friend. I’ve seen much that the world affords in the way of dangers—ghosts and monsters and dark gods—but never have I encountered anything that could do me physical harm and which could not itself be destroyed!”
Chelim grinned. “Aye, there is that! Sharp steel is a mighty remedy against things in the night.”
The leader of the men Thongor had dispatched to explore the farthest reaches of the hall came up to them then, and their conversation ended.
“Well, Thad Novis, what’s it like at the other end?” Thongor asked.
The grizzled old Thurdan paused to catch his breath from the long hike. “Just more of the same, Thongor: galleries leading off in every direction, chambers opening into halls and corridors—this temple, or whatever it may be, is like a city, a whole city under one roof!”
They ate what few scraps were left, finished the ale, and bedded down for the night in the echoing vastness of the central hall, save for those whom Thongor designated as sentries of the first watch.
That night the first of them died.
6
The Thing that Walks in the Night
Deafening, filled with unendurable agony and horror, the scream rang out through the gloomy castle.
Wakened suddenly from fitful, uneasy slumbers, the bandits sprang up, cursing, snatching up their weapons, staring about for the enemy that had struck abruptly and without warning—but there was nothing to be seen.
Thongor, who had taken a small antechamber off the central hall for his bedchamber, appeared naked in the doorway, Sarkozan, his broadsword, glittering in his hand. Sentries peered about with wide eyes and white faces, but nothing untoward was to be seen. Yet something had happened—they could not all have dreamed that horrible shriek.
At Thongor’s command, a head count was taken, and one man was found to be missing. It was a fat, red-faced rogue called Kovor. He had bedded down with the main body of the men, who lay in a ragged circle around the huge bonfire they had built against the night chills. Now his pallet was empty.
One of the bandits suggested Kovor might have stepped outside to answer a call of nature. Thongor dispatched searchers to investigate, but they found nothing.
Urging the sentries to be wary, Thongor bade his men to return to their interrupted slumbers, and withdrew into his little room again. But hardly a single warrior of the band so much as closed his eyes through all the rest of that fear-haunted night.
At dawn, the men refreshed themselves with water from the small quantity they had dipped out of the running stream the night before, when they had camped in the hills. Then the young barbarian organized them into search parties and carefully directed the exploration of the central portion of the monstrous edifice.
In case anyone became lost in the maze of suites and corridors and chambers, he commanded them to scratch the symbol of an arrow on the sill of every portal through which they passed, pointing back the way they had come, so that in any eventuality they should be able to find their way back to the central hall. They trooped out, under search leaders designated by Chelim.
They found what was left of fat Kovor an hour later. A runner was sent back to fetch Thongor and the girl.
“We could smell it before there was anything to see,” panted the wild-eyed bandit as he guided the chieftain through the maze of dusty chambers. “Then we found—this!”
Zoroma moaned, covered her eyes and turned away.
Even Thongor, toughened as he was, felt his belly writhe and heart sicken within him as he peered beyond the portals of the room of horror. It was a huge, square room, unadorned, its floor one solid piece of unbroken stone. The only element of decoration was a square design cut in the exact center of the floor.
Floor, walls and ceiling were splattered with gouts of blood and gobbets of raw flesh. The stone chamber stank like a slaughterhouse. Kovor had, literally, been torn apart. No fragment could be found that was any larger than a man’s thumbnail. His sword, dented and broken, lay in one corner. His reeking gore flecked and dribbled the interior of the hollow stone cube like a ghastly scarlet dew.
Chelim, who had also been summoned, came up and stood at Thongor’s shoulder, a grim, sickly look on his ugly face. “What kind of thing could have done anything like…this?” he muttered. “There isn’t even enough of him left to bury and say a couple of words over…”
“Fat, puffing, complaining old Kovor…” Thongor said slowly.
There was not much else that a man could say.
* * * *
All that day they searched the endless rooms of the vast citadel, but nowhere did they find any sign of recent habitation. If the ancient Omnian sorcerer had, in truth, made the unearthly castle his habitation, they had yet to come upon the place wherein he had dwelt. There would be books, bits of furniture, athanors and crucibles and aludels and the other apparatus of the magical sciences.
That night, ferociously hungry, they again settled down to sleep, but terror haunted the dreams of every man, and they started awake at the slightest sound.
Toward morning, the second man died.
Thongor staggered to his feet, kicking aside his cloak, cursing vilely, knuckling the sleep from his bleared eyes, grabbing up his naked broadsword. From her pallet across the chamber, Zoroma stared, white-faced.
“Not—another one,” she whimpered.
But it was so. The echoes of the mad scream still sounded through the vastness of the gloomy structure.
The second victim was discovered to be one Orovar, a stolid, close-mouthed Pelormian who had few friends among Thongor’s troop. They did not find his bloody remnants, although they searched all the next day. But he was missing, that was certain.
Thongor questioned his sentries closely. He had put the fear of death into them the evening before, threatening to disembowel any man who slept on sentry duty. But he knew the men were so frightened they would not have dared to fall asleep, not if they had gone a week without rest. Only one of the sentries had heard or seen anything in the least suspicious. None of them had noticed Orovar creep stealthily from his pallet, but one hesitantly said he thought he had seen something—something tall and black and thin—walking silently in the night. He had thought it was a trick of the eyes, of his overstrained nerves, or just a curious shadow cast by the flickering of the flames. But now he was no longer so certain.
Something that walked in the night. Something tall and black and thin. Something that—killed.
That next morning
, Chelim drew Thongor aside, leaving the old Thurdan veteran, Thad Novis, to organize the search parties.
“What do you say, lad—shall we leave this place before it takes us one by one?” he asked.
Thongor’s strange gold eyes were inscrutable. “Is that what you advise, Chelim?”
The huge Zangabali shrugged, the golden hoops in his ears glinting in the morning light. “You are the chieftain,” he grunted. “But we have no food or water left, and are not likely to find any in this accursed ruin. And the men are very frightened and are beginning to whisper among themselves. All the jewelled treasure in the world will not tempt them to stay much longer in this devil-haunted mausoleum. Thus far you have held them here because they admire and trust you; but before too much longer their fears will get the better of them and they will begin slipping away, by ones and twos, into the hills.”
Thongor folded his arms upon his chest, and bent his head, brooding on the stone paving. At length he lifted his black mane and looked at Chelim.
“You can leave if you like. But if I go from this place now, without finding the solution to this mystery, it will haunt me for all the rest of my days,” he said.
7
Zoroma Vanishes
Thongor came awake suddenly. He could not tell precisely what had awakened him, but something was wrong. Those ultra-keen senses of the barbarian, which are dulled and vestigial in softer, city-bred men, triggered him to alertness. He lay motionless, pulses drumming, searching the gloom with keen eyes and listening ears. He had found it difficult enough to get to sleep, his belly growling with hunger and thirst raging in his throat like a small red demon, but eventually he had drifted off into a fitful, uneasy slumber. Now some faint signal, some vague premonition of danger, drove sleep from him.
Lifting himself on one elbow, he searched the darkness of the far corner of the room where Zoroma slept.
He had not touched her, although he wanted to, and although he sensed her own response to his manhood. Not since he had learned she mourned her lost lover. Although a barbarian, the boy was not without a certain rude chivalry in such matters. But he could not trust the more ruffian-like of his bandits to leave her unmolested—hence he had offered her the protection of his presence. Now his eyes searched the corner where her pallet lay.
And saw that it was—empty!
A tingling shock drove the last vestiges of sleep from him. He sprang to his feet, buckling his warrior’s harness about him, dragging on his boots loosely, not bothering to buckle them securely. His face was grim and impassive, and his eyes burned like fiery coals. If anything had happened to the girl—?
Out in the vastness and echoing silence of the central hall he found the sentries awake and alert, and he questioned them urgently. None had seen or heard anything unusual, and not one of them had noticed the girl as she had crept from the small side chamber she shared with the barbarian youth.
“Shall we rouse the men?” asked one of the guards.
Thongor considered briefly, then shook his head, tousling his coarse black mane. “Let them sleep if they can. The wench cannot have left more than a moment or two ago, and she cannot possibly have gone far. I shall search for her myself,” he growled.
Snatching up a burning brand from the fire, he strode off into the darkness. Some indefinable impulse led him in the direction of that dread room in which fat Kovor had met a terrible fate. He could not have explained his reasons for selecting this goal, but he had long since learned to trust his hunches, for the barbarian had a wilderness trained intuition, better developed than most.
The gigantic pile of masonry echoed about him, ringing with his rapid strides. He strode along, searching every shadow with alert eyes, scrutinizing the dusty paving for some trace of Zoroma’s small, bare feet. His cloak rustled behind him and his loose boots flopped. He bore the torch in one hand; the other held the hilt of his naked broadsword.
She had either taken another direction, or she had moved more rapidly than he had guessed likely, for it took him some ten minutes to reach the distant chamber wherein Kovor had so horribly died at the hands of the unseen opponent.
The enigmatic structure was as dark and silent as a tomb. And tomb-like was the noisome stench that hovered in the cold, dusty air. Thongor uttered a low growl, as might some prowling predator who detected the scrutiny of invisible eyes.
At length he came to the portal of the cube-shaped chamber and peered within. There was no sign of the vanished girl. The crusted flakes of Kovor’s gore, dried now to brown scabs, still clung to walls and ceiling and floor. But although Thongor searched every corner of the stone chamber, he found no token to suggest that Zoroma had come this way.
His brows knotted in bafflement. Every presentiment in his savage breast urged him that she had stood in this room but moments before, yet she was not here. His jungle-trained nostrils almost caught the warm, sweet odor of her tender flesh hovering on the stale fetor of the air. But his eyes found no evidence that she had come this way.
Baffled, he prowled on. But the endless rooms beyond were deep in the dust of millennia. No one had entered them in countless ages, that was obvious.
He doubled back and entered the room again. He stood motionless, searching with every sense for the slightest sign of some thing wrong. There was—something—about this room that obscurely bothered him, but he could not give a name to the vague unease that stirred his primitive soul.
It was an odd room, the walls totally devoid of any ornament, unlike most of the others, whose surfaces were sculpted with weird and alien geometrical designs in low relief. The only attempt at any sort of design was the shallow square cut in the exact centre of the floor.
On sudden impulse, he squatted down and peered closely at the crack in the stone floor, holding the crackling torch closer.
A muffled exclamation escaped his lips.
Earlier, when he had scrutinized the room following the strange doom of Kovor, the cracks that formed a perfect square in the floor of the chamber had been thickly packed with dust. Now that dust was gone.
His strange gold eyes narrowing in thoughtful surmise, the young barbarian studied the square design cut in the solid stone of the floor. Could it be a trapdoor, leading to unknown regions below?
They had not, in days of searching, found that portion of the black citadel wherein Shan Chan Thuu had made his magical laboratory. Could it not lie in unexplored crypts hollowed out of the heart of the hill?
He inserted the tip of Sarkozan in the crack and probed and pried. Was it only his imagination—or had the stone block shifted ever so slightly?
Now he wedged the blade of his small dagger in the other side of the crack, and played both steel blades against each other for leverage. The stone slab creaked—groaned. Working with infinite care, wary of snapping either of the steel blades, he slowly wedged the sword and dagger deeper into the knife-thin crevice, and began to work the slab loose.
When he had pried the stone slab up at one end so that he could get a grip with his fingers, he released the broadsword and closed his hands over the lip of the slab—and threw all the steely strength of his mighty thews into one tremendous effort.
With a harsh rasp of stone against stone, the slab lifted slowly. And Thongor stared down into a weird and wonderful world.
8
The Crypt of the Sorcerer
From the mouth of the black opening a green glare flickered. It bathed his impassive features in a lambent jade luminance. By that elusive radiance the youth perceived a flight of worn and ancient stone steps that descended from the level of the secret door.
Sheathing his dagger but keeping the great Valkarthan broadsword bare in his hand, the young barbarian stepped through the trapdoor and lowered himself until his booted feet touched the topmost step of the ancient stone stair. He descended cautiously, eyes roving from side to side, alert for the slightest sign of danger.
Beneath the floor of the citadel he found an immense cavity hollowed from t
he stone of the hill whereon the edifice was reared. At the foot of the stair he found the stone floor bed splattered with a ghastly crimson. His jaws tightened grimly. The gore must be the remnants of Orovar of Pelorm, who had vanished on the night following the disappearance of Kovor. But what, then, of Zoroma? Did the tattered remains of her young body bedew some far corner of the crypt? Perhaps—and perhaps not.
He recalled that, as yet, the ghastly scream that had twice rung out to signal the demise of two of his band had not yet sounded the death knell of the jungle girl.
He prowled through the crypt without finding anything of further note. Here and there portions of the stone floor were encrusted with a noisome, scaly residue that suggested the dried blood of earlier victims. He searched on, seeking the source of the curious flickering green light that dimly illuminated the recesses of the enormous vault.
In the far wall he found a dark opening and strode in warily, finding a gloomy passage of ancient stone. Cautious as a jungle cat, he padded through the dark passage, which soon widened into a vaulted chamber even more enormous than the one he had quit.
Huddled in one corner, Zoroma lifted dulled eyes and tear-wet cheeks to him.
“Gorm! Are you unharmed, girl?” he burst out, surprise and relief mingled in his tones. Woefully, she nodded.
He strode over to the corner where she sat huddled. “How did you come to this dismal place?” he asked.
She shook her head mutely. “I…I know not. It was like a dream. I seemed to hear a voice that called my name…a voice that seemed to come from a great distance. And I followed it, like one entranced…followed it to the room where your man, Kovor, died.”
“And found the trapdoor in the floor?”
She nodded listlessly. “It stood open, and a dim green light beat up from the opening in the floor…still the far, faint voice called, and it seemed in my dream that I could not resist the urgency in that voice…it drew me on…down the stone stair…to this place, where I found…I found…” Her words died in a choked sob. Bare shoulders shook as thick waves of her shining black hair fell across her tear-stained face. And it was then that, peering about, he saw that this corner too was scaled with the dry crust of long-shed gore.
Young Thongor Page 15
