"Nay, my lord, nay! Do not slay him yet. I have a use for him!"
"What manner of use, shaman?" asked the Kagan, his face still twisted with fury. He re-sheathed the dagger.
The shaman squatted beside the inert Cimmerian. He took the black-haired head in his hands and stroked it lovingly. "I have certain rites to perform, rites that require a strong victim, one who will not die easily. This foreigner should last far longer than any of your other prisoners."
"Give him to the shaman, my lord!" hissed the Vendhyan woman.
In a display of false modesty, she had wrapped herself in a cloth-of-gold hanging. "He is a treacherous beast who betrayed your trust, after you raised him from slavery to high rank and showered him with favours. He deserves the most degraded of deaths."
"Very well, Lakhme," said the Kagan. "Take him, shaman. I wish never to lay eyes upon him again."
Danaqan gave a high-pitched call and two of his minions came in. Between them they carried a yoke of thick wood. They placed the yoke behind the Cimmerian's muscular neck and stretched out his arms upon the wooden limbs. His wrists were made fast to its ends with iron manacles, and a heavy wooden U was fastened in place to encircle his neck.
Conan began to regain use of his legs, but his tongue was still paralysed. The shaman's henchmen grasped the yoke and hauled him to his feet. Bartatua thrust his face within a few inches of Conan's own.
"I would have made you a great general, Conan," he said. "In time, when I came into my empire, I might have made you a king under me. Now I see that I was foolish in trusting a man of alien blood. I should have left you a slave. Better for you as well had you remained a slave. You might have lived longer that way, and your death surely would have been more pleasant."
Conan sought to speak, to tell Bartatua of the treachery of his shaman and his concubine. All he could manage was an inarticulate growl.
"Take him from my sight!" shouted the Kagan in disgust.
The group of shamans grasped the yoke by both ends and half-dragged Conan from the tent. Warriors looked up curiously as the Cimmerian was driven through the camp, helped along by lashes from Danaqan's riding whip. His mind still reeled with confusion under the influence of Lakhme's drug. Rage and hatred surged through him at each new indignity.
A final shove from Danaqan sent Conan to his knees. He knew that they were no longer within the camp. He managed to raise his head slightly within the confines of the yoke. Before him was a rough stake set into the ground, and somewhere near a great fire was burning.
"Enjoy these hours of oblivion," said Danaqan. "I want you fully aware for your death. When the moon is past its zenith, we begin our ritual. Never has even the strongest of my victims kept his sanity until death!"
Conan fell forward and the black wings of unconsciousness closed over him.
He awoke to vicious pain in his shoulders and wrists. There was fiendish music playing somewhere. He opened his eyes and saw bizarre forms whirling about a fire that burned with unnatural colours. They moved so swiftly and with such lizard-like suppleness that he could not quite make out what they were doing.
He saw Danaqan, and the youth in women's clothing. He also saw Lakhme. The Vendhyan woman was nude, and she seemed to be the focus of the hellish rite. He was not certain whether it was the after-effects of the drug affecting his vision, but some of the things she was doing were not only obscene, but looked to be physically impossible.
At last the music slowed and the frenzied participants began to encircle Conan. The Cimmerian hung by his wrists from the crossbar of his yoke. Its neck piece had been removed and the bar hauled to the top of the stake, and Conan dangled by his wrists from his manacles. He tried to close his fingers but found that his hands were numb.
From the circle around him, Danaqan stepped forth, and beside him was Lakhme. The shaman's wrinkled hide and the Vendhyan woman's alabaster skin were glossy with unguents and sweat. Both were streaked with blood, but Conan could not guess its origin, nor did he wish to.
"Are you awake now, foreigner?" Danaqan demanded, cackling lewdly.
"He is conscious," said the concubine. "He is ready to play his part hi our rite." Her smile belonged on the face of nothing in human guise.
Conan took stock of himself. He had as yet suffered no severe damage. His armour and other clothing had been removed, and he wore only his loincloth. He calculated that a perfectly timed kick of his feet would
snap the neck of both woman and shaman, only to find that his ankles were bound to the stake.
"Let us begin, then," said the shaman in high glee. "The gods are waiting."
An acolyte handed the old man a curved knife with a hideously serrated edge and he reached high with it, waving the blade suggestively before Conan's eyes as the woman hooked her fingers into his loincloth. Then the hellish scene before the Cimmerian halted suddenly, as if a spell of paralysis had been laid upon all present.
Conan saw that instead of a right eye, the shaman now wore the hawk-feathered fletching of a Hyrkanian arrow. At the back of his skull protruded the red-stained head and shaft of the arrow, studded for most of its length with bits of brain and scalp and tiny white bits of bone. Silently the old fiend collapsed in a heap. A panicked screeching arose as the woman-clothed youth threw himself upon the corpse, wailing in crazed grief.
Another shaman spun and fell in a rattling heap, an arrow in his chest. The youth in women's dress looked up at Conan with a glare of maniacal ferocity and snatched up the knife from the shaman's relaxing fingers. He sprang at Conan with the weapon raised high, foam flecking the corners of his screaming mouth, but before he could strike, something described a glittering silver arc across his throat. The youth's eyes went wide as his hand flew to his neck, but he could not prevent the flow of blood that fountained for two yards, splashing the corpses that were beginning to fill the area illuminated by the fire.
The youth staggered away and collapsed as a horse brushed the stake and its rider shook the blood from his curved sword. "Always in the midst of trouble eh, Conan?" said Rustuf. The Kozak sheathed his blade and cut Conan's ankle bonds with a dagger. The Cimmerian
saw Fawd, mounted on a fleet mare, thrust his lance between the shoulders of a fleeing shaman.
"Did you get the Vendhyan woman?" Conan managed to choke out.
"Be still," said Rustuf. He took a heavy hatchet from his saddle and chopped through the chain that bound one of the Cimmerian's wrists. "We are still in great danger, Conan. No, I did not slay her, and it is very bloody-minded of you to be thinking solely of vengeance in your position." He chopped through the other chain and caught Conan before he could fall.
"Of course," the Kozak went on, "had she been about to do to me what she was going to do to you, I might want to hack her pretty form in twain as well. But no, she slipped away, supple as a serpent."
Fawd came back, leading a large stallion that Conan recognized as his favourite horse. The two helped him to mount, and Rustuf tied his reins around his wrist. His hands were still too numb to grasp them.
"We must ride like the wind now," Rustuf said. "If we are swift enough, we might gain sufficient distance on the Kagan's pursuit to get away. We go north-west."
"Why north-west.?" Conan asked, the words painful
in his throat.
"Because the sky was red and black in that direction this evening," answered the Kozak. "I know the signs. There is the very grandfather of dust storms brewing there. If it does not kill us, the storm might hide us and wipe out our tracks."
Fawd rode up to them, a string of remounts at his left hand. Conan ignored the agony in his arms and kicked his mount to a gallop. "I will not forget this, my friends. Now, let's ride!"
XI
Ishkala brooded in her tent. Two nights earlier they had arrived at their destination in the featureless Steppe of Famine. The mixed column of horsemen, now some two thousand strong, had been following a tiny stream, one barely adequate to water the mounts each evening. The land
was so flat, so utterly without points of reference, that the mind reeled and grew disoriented. Only the sun, moon and stars provided any sense of direction.
Blindly, they had followed the directions of the Turanian mage, Khondemir, and unerringly he had guided them to this place, the City of Mounds. This was the sacred burial ground of the Ashkuz, where the clan chiefs and Kagans had their funeral mounds. The sides of her tent were rolled up for the sake of ventilation, and she studied the eerie scene around her with dread. This was an uncanny place.
A high, earthen rampart enclosed a burial ground many acres in extent. The entire area was filled with the mounds. Some were as tall as a man, but many were three or four times that height. A few were immense, towering to crests eighty or more feet above the level of the steppe.
Atop many of the mounds were standards bearing the skulls of beasts and men and varying numbers and colours of horses' tails. From many depended banners of bright silk, most of them ancient and rotted. These standards were not fashioned of wood, such as those carried by the nomads on their migrations, but of imperishable bronze. Everywhere were the skeletons of men and horses. In some places skeletal warriors, still helmed and armoured, sat upon equally skeletal steeds, ready for some ghostly battle, bound to stakes or frameworks to keep the semblance of life.
"Awesome, is it not?" said a voice near her side. She looked up to see the wizard, Khondemir.
"It is an evil place," she said. "Raised by live savages to the memory of dead savages. I would be away from here."
"Ah, but our work here is not yet finished." The day before she had seen the mage walking about the City of Mounds, making some sort of sketch. That evening he had released two more of his messenger birds. "Now is a time of waiting, while I prepare my spells that shall save our beautiful city of Sogaria."
"I wish you well, then," she said. "I would be away from here as soon as possible." She looked at the huge mound before her tent. "Did the savages truly build this place?"
"They did," he assured her. "While the nomads have little liking for manual labour, they are capable of prodigies to do honour to their dead chiefs. When one of the greatest of them dies, they will import many slaves to do most of the work. Last night I communed with the spirits of this place and learned much of its history. The City of Mounds is old, even more ancient than the Ashkuz themselves dream."
He gestured broadly, taking in the whole of the necropolis. "What we see here are the most recent tombs, most of them less than two thousand years old. But mounds far more ancient once stood here, only to subside back into the earth in the fullness of time. This place is richly imbued with magical force. It is a nexus of powers that no ordinary human can feel, but one readily detectable by a sorcerer of high ability."
She shivered, but not because of the cutting steppe wind. "I have no love for such things."
"When last the tribe rebuilt the rampart," he went on as if she had not spoken, "its people raided the border towns for months, taking all the slaves they could catch. That was more than a hundred and fifty years ago. They gathered more than twenty thousand and began driving them here. More than half of them died of hunger and thirst on the trek. Many died in rebuilding the earthen wall with only the crudest of tools. When the work was done, all of the survivors were slain as a sacrifice and to preserve the secret of this place."
"I can believe it," she said. "The savages are inhuman to all who do not belong to their nation."
He smiled thinly. "They are no more merciful toward themselves." He pointed to a mound a hundred paces distant. It was three times the height of a tall man. "That is the resting place of a mighty Kagan. When he was slain in a far war, his body was preserved with herbs and embalming and brought to this place, along with tribesmen and slaves to do the labour. The mound was raised and consecrated, and the Kagan's body laid therein. When the obsequies were over, his wives and concubines were strangled and placed in the mound with him, along with fifty of his horses.
"Last of all came fifty young warriors, all of them volunteers. A framework was built for each man and his horse. The horse was slain and then transfixed through the body from tail to neck with a wooden stake. This stake was placed across the framework so that the horse's hooves dangled a few inches from the ground. Then the youth was strangled and likewise impaled, the stake holding him upright and its lower end fitted into a socket in the stake running lengthwise through the horse. Then horse and man were harnessed and armed to stand guard for eternity. This was done to fifty young men of good family. Is this not the mark of a mighty race of conquerors?"
"I think you admire them, wizard!" she said scornfully.
"Indeed I do," he said. "Once my people, the Turanians, were such a race, savage and ruthless, holding only contempt for lesser breeds. In time, though, they became weak, absorbed by the softness of the civilizations they conquered. Yes, these Hyrkanians are crude, but they have the virtues of the uncivilized. They respect only strength: the power of arms and the power of magic. Their way with enemies is to crush them utterly. They honour their dead with blood sacrifice and think nothing of slaying other peoples by the thousands, simply to be rid of them. Such a people, with proper leadership, can shake the earth."
"Then let us hope," said Ishkala, "that they never have that leadership."
That night Ishkala grew restless. There were faint sounds from the camp around her. The nearby Sogarian Red Eagles were subdued, conversing in quiet voices by their small fires. Their spirits were oppressed by the eerie surroundings, the ghastly mounted skeletons, and the brooding mounds of the Kagans.
Somewhat louder were the villainous Turanians, encamping by themselves in a different sector of the City of Mounds. More adventurous or merely more irreverent, they did not seem to be so suggestible. A few of the hardier souls had had a go at breaking into some of the mounds in search of rich funeral goods, but soon gave up after a few hours of unaccustomed manual labour.
Ishkala rose from her pallet and dressed in her darkest robes, with a black veil wound about her head and face. She knew not what she sought, but she did not want to attract attention to herself. She extinguished her candle and pushed aside the curtain that served her for a door. The Sogarians did not look up from their fires or their conversations, and she slipped silently from their midst.
She was not certain why, but she wanted to find out what the Turanians were up to. Since leaving the city, nothing that had happened to her had made any sense. Why did the mage need her here for his magic-making? Why had they been joined by a thousand Turanian rogues?
Carefully she picked her way around the countless human bones that gleamed white in the moonlight. They were merely dry bones, she knew, but she avoided them as if they bore some defilement. She walked around the looming mounds and shuddered at their tall, skeletal standards. Her imagination peopled the uncanny scene with a ghostly horde of horsemen, Kagans and their hideous retinues of strangled concubines and their impaled horses and guards.
Preoccupied with her hyper-imaginative thoughts, Ishkala collided with a wooden framework and set a skeletal horse swaying as if with unnatural life. She barely suppressed a scream as the beast's skull shook at her, and she looked up to see a human skull leering from beneath a wide-spreading helmet of antique design.
She hurried past the dead sentry and circled the titanic mound he guarded, the final resting place of an Ushi-Kagan of generations past. Ahead she heard the raucous sounds of the Turanian encampment. Everywhere there flickered fires of brushwood and dried dung, gathered from the steppe. She had heard Jeku complain that at this rate, the Turanians would exhaust all the available fuel within a few days.
She skirted the Turanian camp, listening to the rough songs and brawling voices. Once she stumbled over something lying on the ground and found that it was a corpse. The dead man wore Turanian garb, and there was a gaping wound in his flank. A trail of blood glistened in the moonlight, revealing that he had been dragged thither and left. Evidently the Turanians did not c
onsider their late companion worth the trouble of burial.
Somewhere in the sprawling camp she hoped to find the command group. Perhaps she might overhear something of use. She had little faith in Khondemir's powers of magic and hoped that she might find evidence to persuade Jeku to abandon this mad venture and return to the city.
She saw a large and ornate tent a little apart from the others. Next to its entrance was a small shrine of Mitra, a lump of gummy incense smoking in its brass bowl. Before it burned a fire, and in the light of the fire sat a circle of men. All were Turanian, but these had the dress and aspect of high-born men, unlike the bulk of the force. Even so, they bore a general brutality of look and manner, suggesting that they were embittered exiles, or disinherited sons of the aristocracy.
"It will not be long now, my friends," said one. Ishkala recognized him as Bulamb, the leader who had greeted Khondemir when the two columns had met. "Soon the weary years of exile will be over and we will be great lords again, as is our right."
"I wish I had your sanguine confidence in the mage," said another. His beard was dyed crimson in the fashion of an obscure Mitran sect from northern Turan.
"Have you no faith, Rumal?" Bulamb asked him.
"I believe in Lord Mitra and in my right to the lordship of Sultanapur. The wizard showed signs of great power when first he raised his rebellion against the usurper, Yezdigerd." At mention of the hated name, all spat upon the ground. "But two years ago the insurrection failed and we fled to such refuge as we could find. I follow him because we have no other claimant to the throne, but I cannot share your confidence."
"You should show more spirit," Bulamb admonished. "Two years ago we were forced to act before we were ready. The revelations of a turncoat betrayed us, and Khondemir's carefully prepared spells came to naught. Great wizardry is as much a matter of timing as is that of a military campaign. Even so, the spell of pestilence by which he prevented the royal army from pursuing us saved our lives. Do any here deny that?" He glared about fiercely.
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