Conan’s sword-hilt smashed into the guard’s face, crumpling the thin metal of the mask, the blow so powerful that blood jetted from the eye-slits. The man howled and fell back and as he did, Conan plucked the mace from his grip. A whirling blow of the weapon smashed the guard’s head and without
pause, Conan crushed another’s side even as he ran his blade through the ribs of a third. The mob fell back in consternation and he spun and rushed for the gateway.
The guards gathered their nerve and pursued, but he was already at the gale. He did not go through though. Instead, he put his sword in his teeth and dropped the mace as he grasped the control lever and heaved. His muscles bulged as the lever groaned forward and the gate shut before him. Then he stooped, snatched up the mace and swung it in a terrific, horizontal circle. The iron lever, as thick as a man’s wrist, snapped off at the floor and whizzed end over end through the air until it slammed into the bronze side of the hollow idol with a dull clang.
The guards stood gaping, unable to understand what had just happened. Then there was a commotion behind them and Omia appeared. Just behind her was Abbadas.
“What is this? Where―” Then she saw the Cimmerian grinning at her.
“You never raised bulls before, did you?” he taunted. “You’d have been more careful if you had. All cattlemen know that the best breeding stock is the most dangerous!”
“Where are those women?” Abbadas shouted.
“What care you?” Conan demanded. “You’ll not live to touch them!” With the final word, he hurled the mace straight for Abbadas. He had never cared for the mace as a weapon and had taken it only so he could destroy the door control. With a squawk, Abbadas dodged in a move so swift that a tumbler might have envied it Two men behind him went down with their faces pulped.
“Kill him!” Abbadas howled.
“No!” countered the queen. “I want him alive!”
But the object of their attention was not listening to them. With a fleet-footed spring, Conan dashed for the nearest ladder. With his sword between his teeth again, he sprang straight up and his hands grasped a rung fifteen feet from the floor. Instantly, he was swarming upward with the agility of a monkey. Below him, he heard the twang of a crossbow, and a quarrel whispered past his head to carom off a bronze plate. Omia squalled something. Apparently the shot had been made against her orders.
The ladder ended at a catwalk and he vaulted onto it. Close behind him climbed the guards. The ladder was bolted too firmly for him to dislodge it, and he had nothing to hurl down. He knew that he could stand where he was and lop their heads off all day as they reached the catwalk, but he was a clear target for archers, at least some of whom were following the orders of Abbadas.
“Come down!” Omia called, “You will not be harmed!” Ignoring her, Abbadas signaled to a pair of women who bore crossbows, and the strings twanged simultaneously. One fired a barb-headed quarrel, the other a wicked lead pellet that could crush a skull. The Cimmerian avoided both, but narrowly. Omia turned upon Abbadas. “You will die for this, traitor!”
“I think not,” the man said. He stepped to Omia and seemed to embrace her tenderly. “Your timid rule is at an end, my queen. It is time for us to abandon the past and rejoin the real world.”
“You are mad!” she cried, squirming in his arms. “We will all die! Janagar will be no more! You must not― Guards!” The last word was torn from her throat in horror as she saw the blade Abbadas held before her eyes. Then, so slowly that it might have been an act of love, he drew the keen edge across her throat. She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came forth save a great effusion of blood. She could grow no paler, but life left her eyes and she collapsed in a small heap at the feet of her murderer. The guards stood about, unable to absorb what had transpired.
“You will obey me now,” Abbadas calmly announced to them. “I am the new king of Janagar. My first order to you as king is to slay that… where is he?” His gaze followed the direction of his own pointing finger, but the catwalk above was empty except for a guard who had just reached the top of the ladder When he saw the queen of Janagar die, Conan did not tarry. He had known many a throne to change hands with even less ceremony, and be knew that the new monarch was less tenderhearted than the last. At least, this one had no interest in keeping him alive. Quietly, the Cimmerian ran to the end of the catwalk and sprang upon its railing. Sheathing his sword, he jumped to another catwalk above, grasping a railing support and pulling himself over with the ease of one raised among cliffs and crags. No
mountain goat was as surefooted and agile as a Cimmerian.
“There he is!” shouted someone, and Conan dodged, knowing that crossbow bolts would soon follow. He took a run along the catwalk and sprang outward into empty space. He grasped a dangling chain and swung to a large platform crowded with gears and levers, doubtless a part of the controls of the idol’s arms and other mobile features. He went to a comer of the platform and looked for a place to go next, balancing himself on the lip of the void, a hundred feet up. He had no fear of heights, an attribute the pursuing guards did not share, for they came with cautious deliberation.
But come they did. They were swarming up the ladders and catwalks, and in no great time, they would be upon the platform with him. He knew that even the greatest fighter must bow to superior numbers. Then he saw something above him. From his platform, a wobbly ladder of bars connected by a pair of cables stretched like a strand of spiderweb up into the darkness beyond. There, too far from the torchlight for him to make out any details, was a purple glow. In its center was a man-shape, and it seemed to be beckoning him.
Three bolts slammed into the platform beneath his feet With no better prospects, he ventured out onto the uncertain ladder. He found it to be much like climbing the rigging of a ship, although no ship ever had a ladder so long. Bulls and quarrels sailed past him, but shooting from such an angle was a difficult task even for a good archer, and he suspected that these seldom got to practice their art at extreme range. He reflected that had there been pursuing Hyrkanians below him, he would by now bristle with arrows like a target at a village fair.
He could not tell where in the idol he was. The gloom enveloped the upper terminus of the ladder like a black shroud. But he could discern the faintly glowing shape of the homunculus. As much as he detested sorcery, the thing did not seem to be especially hostile, which could not be said of the people below.
Then his dark-adjusted eyes made out the bulk of another platform above him. It was only a lesser darkness in the gloom, but at least it proved that the ladder ended somewhere. No more than a score of rungs remained between himself and the platform when the ladder began to shake. Looking back, he could just make out the forms of masked guards upon the platform below as one of their number, braver than the others, ventured upon the ladder’s uncertain footing.
A great metallic booming thundered through the hollow idol, accompanied by clashings and rattlings of metal. Far below him, they were striving to open the gate whose mechanism the Cimmerian had ruined. He laughed as he scrambled up the last rungs and gained the relatively more secure footing of the platform. By his calculation, if Achilea and the others had run at top speed and had not become lost in the city, they ought now to be at or near the opal-studded main gate of Janagar. His laugh cut off in the middle as the small platform lurched beneath his feet with a groan of tortured metal. His own weight and that of the guards upon me ladder below him had combined to tear the ancient, rickety structure loose from its moorings.
There came another lurch and a sound of corroded rivets snapping. The platform tilted, and the men on the ladder shouted in consternation. Conan looked about him for some means of escape. Could he fight his way back down the ladder,clearing it before the platform tore wholly from its feeble supports?
The prospect seemed as unlikely as his chances of survival among the overwhelming odds below. Where had the damned homunculus gone?
Then he saw the purple glow again. The
curved bronze wall before him, from which the platform was being torn at that very moment, featured a long, horizontal slit, and through this slit shone the light.
Even as he looked, the tiny man-shape appeared in the slit and beckoned to him. He dashed for it as more rivets popped and the platform began to tear itself away from the wall with a metallic shriek that blended with the screams of the guards upon the ladder below.
The slit was barely wide enough to admit his head, but at the loss of some skin and hair, Conan thrust it somewhat apart as his hands gripped the lower edge and he Cried to pull his body through. The slanting platform gave his feet little purchase, then none at all as, with a final screech of rending metal, it fell away completely, leaving his legs kicking futilely against empty air. The screams of the guards on the
ladder dwindled to silence as the Cimmerian struggled against the unyielding metal.
Slowly, with a scraping noise, the metal above him began to rise. Conan knew that even his great strength could not bend thick bronze. The section above him was hinged some how. From the noise it made, its mechanism had not been used in many years, perhaps not for eons. Painfully, he pulled his massive shoulders and chest through the opening. After that, the rest came easily. He slid through and came to rest, breathing heavily, upon a narrow, curving ledge. After a few deep breaths to restore his strength, he sat up carefully and surveyed his surroundings, At first, all he could see was that he was very high up, near the domed ceiling of the temple. The exterior of the idol was a great bulk below him. As he looked down over the ledge, it diminished with a perspective that was dizzying even to his senses. He examined the tapering slit through which he had emerged and the domelike section he had raised for the purpose, then laughed. He had come out through one of the idol’s eyes. The upper segment was a movable eyelid. Doubtless, in ages past, fires had burned within the head and the eyes would have been opened mechanically to suitably awesome effect.
He lay now upon one of the idol’s cheekbones, and his first order of business was to get down to the ground somehow without breaking his neck, and hopefully before those below who thirsted for his blood managed to reopen the gate. The booming as they pounded at the portal resounded through the vast temple like the sound of an unthinkably huge gong. The homunculus was nowhere in sight, but after the gloom inside the idol, the interior of the temple was to his eyes as bright as daylight, and the uncanny little thing would be difficult to see under such conditions.
Directly below him there was nothing but a sheer drop of fifty feet or more to the jutting breast of the goddess, and even should he accomplish the span uninjured, the bronze hemisphere was so smooth that he would just slide off to his death upon the bronze lap, like some sort of belated sacrifice to a deity whose worshipers had long since abandoned her temple.
The ridge of the nose jutted forth from the face too far for him to lean around, so Conan went in the opposite direction and saw that the ear offered some possibilities. Its hollow was large enough to hold him, and the elongated lobe terminated in a dangling ornament that reached almost to the The distance from the comer of the cheekbone to the ear was too great for him to clear in a single leap, but just above the ear, the hair of the goddess was formed by a mass of bronze rods that, looked as if they might support his weight. It was chancy, but his lire had seldom been free from risk. The sound of the pounding below changed, as if the gate were beginning to give way.
Conan did not hesitate. He crouched deeply, then sprang out and upward. His hands grasped two of the bronze rods and he felt one of them give. He released it and reached for another even as the first broke and fell away. The curling rod clattered against the shoulder of the goddess and rebounded away to the floor below. Swiftly, he swung from one bronze tress to another, never letting one bear his weight long enough to break off and send him spinning to the unyielding surfaces below. Then he was in the ear and planning his next move.
The earlobe was narrow enough for him to grasp and slide down until he reached the dangling ornament, as large and elaborate as a chandelier in a Nemedian palace. This he descended as easily as if it were an oak tree, and from its terminus, it was no more than a short drop to me shoulder below. The arm was smooth, but what appeared to be a great string of beads crossed the shoulder and slanted across the body to the opposite hip.
Gripping the ornate carvings and raised decorations of the beads, Conan began to descend the ornament. The first part was easy going, but after the swell of the breast, he had to grip even more tightly as his own weight pulled at his fingers and his toes could gain little purchase. The gentle mounding of the belly was less arduous and soon he passed above the navel, which looked like the mouth of a cavern.
When he reached the slope of the hip, be slid down its rondure to the top of a huge thigh, thence down to its inner jointure with the body. Before him were the crossed ankles, and these he scrambled over and at last he was off the idol proper and atop its pedestal. Unhesitatingly, he leapt from the pedestal and landed on the floor, his knees bent to take up the shock.
His exultation in his feat was cut short as with a mighty crash, the gate was smashed open a few paces behind him and the guards came pouring out. Fleet as a mountain stag, Conan sped for the great door of the temple, hoping that they had not thought to bring any of the crossbowmen to the front as they stormed out of the interior.
Once away, he had little fear of being overtaken. He had never lost a footrace, and surely the underground world produced few trained runners. He sprinted toward the door in long-legged strides, and he heard crossbows snapping behind him, but the bolts flew wide and struck the walls or glanced off the floor. The doorway beckoned like a promise of relief, for sunlight streamed through it and he knew that the mob behind him abhorred sunlight the way other people detested pestilence.
He fairly flew through the door and into the wide plaza beyond. He laughed with triumph as he did so, but the laughter died in his throat as he saw what lay before him. Achilea and her three remaining followers, who should have been mounted on their camels and riding away from the city by now, stood with heads downcast and faces dejected. Behind them were ranged about a score of men, some of them desert dwellers, others foreign warriors. Before these, next to Achilea, stood two men Conan recognized “I take it that you are Conan of Cimmeria?” said the tall, lean man who wore a purple turban. “I believe you know my friend, Vladig.” He gestured toward the man who stood beside him in red boots.
Vladig saluted him with a sardonic smile.
“I am Arsaces, a mage of Qum, in Iranistan. It is good that you and I meet at last, for we have much to talk about.” His hands were moving idly before his body, and Conan saw that he was pouring from one to the other a heap of glistening violet crystals.
Fourteen
A man in a padded silken jacket lined with tiny steel plates cook Conan’s sword and dirk. The Cimmerian, in the midst of his consternation, made a mental note of the man’s face, his accoutrements and the color of his armored jacket. He wanted to make sure to go for the right man when the time came to recover his weapons.
“Are you unharmed?” he asked Achilea, ignoring me wizard.
“You see us,” she said. “We are well, if not at liberty. Conan, did you truly shut that gate behind us?”
“Aye,” he admitted. “I wanted you to have a good head start. I thought you’d be away from the city by now.”
“As you can see,” she replied, “you need not have bothered.” Despite the chagrin in her voice, he saw a new glow in her eyes as she regarded him. “I would have forbidden you to do it, had I known.”
He smiled crookedly. “That is why I said nothing. I was in no mood for an argument.”
“My heroic friends,” Arsaces said quietly, “allow me to speak discourteously. You have had much time to converse together and can well afford to hold your tongues for a while. I, on the other hand, have business of vast importance in this place. You will come with me.” He signed to his retinue and the four
were hustled away, in a manner that Conan thought was becoming distressingly habitual. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a crowd of masked forms standing within the partly opened temple door. He thought he recognized Abbadas among them. He knew that they would come out at nightfall, but he saw no reason to apprise his latest captors of the fact.
“Where is Amram?” he muttered through the side of his mouth.
Achilea shrugged. “I did not see him after we left the temple. He is still in there, for aught I know.”
Conan shook his head in wonderment. The man was as slippery as a greased eel.
Achilea looked up, “A few days ago, I’d not have believed dial I would rejoice to see the sun again.
The prospect of a life underground cured that. Even captive, it is like bairn to me.”
“Quiet there!” Vladig said sternly.
“Be respectful of your betters, dog!” Achilea said with withering scorn. “Were you fit to kiss my feet, I would spit upon you.”
Vladig snarled and snatched at his hilt, but Arsaces spoke a single word, very quietly: “Vladig.”
Instantly the man calmed and turned his face from me prisoners. Conan and all four women chuckled at the man’s discomfiture. It was small enough recompense for days of unremitting humiliation.
As they made their way through the mazelike city, Conan began to take note of the buildings around them and he noticed dial something had changed. He nudged Achilea and jerked his chin upward, indicating the higher reaches of the buildings. These captors had not bound their hands, but he wanted to avoid obvious gestures. She looked upward and saw what he had seen.
When they had first come through the unthinkably ancient city, it had appeared as pristine as if it had never known occupants, Omia had told him that nocturnal maintenance crews had kept it that way since the inhabitants had abandoned it for their underground world. Now something had changed, The star, crescent and sunburst terminals atop many of the domes were gone, and the domes themselves had been damaged. Some had been partly smashed, as by sledgehammers, but others appeared to have been somehow melted. Their tops were gone, and stone, glass, ceramic and gilded bronze had been in some manner liquefied and had run down to congeal in glistening masses like hardened lava.
The Conan Compendium Page 519
