At first he followed a clearly marked trail, for the steeds of the Hyperboreans had left a track in the muddy soil. He pushed the grey stallion hard, for he wanted to make the best possible time. There was the slimmest of chances that, with luck and the favour of Crom, his savage god, he could catch up with the white-skinned kidnappers before they reached their keep of Pohiola.
Soon the trail of the Hyperborean horses faded out on stony soil. But there was little chance to lose the trail, for now and again he passed a sign that his son's abductors had left to guide him; the imprint of a hand, white against rock or soil. Betimes it was seared into the dry, scrubby grass of a hummock like a pattern of frost left by a blast of preternatural cold.
Witchcraft! He growled, deep in his throat, and his napehairs prickled. His own homeland, Cimmeria, lay to the northwest. His primitive folk knew of the White Hand, dread symbol of the Witchmen of Hyperborea. He shivered at the thought that his son was their captive.
But he rode on, over the dreary plains with pools of cold black water and scrubby patches of bracken cut by meandering streamlets and dotted by hummocks of dry grass. Hour after hour he rode steadily, as the world darkened around him towards night. One by one the stars came out, though they were faint and few, for a haze overhung the sky. When at length the moon emerged, it masked its cold face behind a lacy veil of vapor.
Toward dawn he could ride no more. Stiff and aching, he climbed down and tied a bag of grain to the muzzle of his grey. He built a small fire with dry bracken, stretched out with his head pillowed on his saddle, and fell into a heavy sleep.
For three days he rode ever deeper into this dreary wasteland, skirting the swamp borders of the Great Salt Marsh. This sprawling bog may have been the remnant of a vast inland sea that had rolled over all this land ages ago, perhaps before the dawn of civilisation. The ground was becoming treacherous, and the deeper he rode into the Border Kingdom, the worse the footing became. The big grey wound through the bogs, head down, testing each hummock for soundness. The pools of cold, muddy water became more numerous. Soon Conan was riding through a treeless swamp.
Twilight came, plunging the bogland in gloom. The grey stallion shied nervously, as his hooves came out of the sucking mud with a smacking sound. Bats swooped and chittered in the dusk. A mottled, clay-coloured viper, thick as a man's arm, slithered noiselessly over a mould-covered log.
As the darkness thickened, Conan set his jaw and drove the grey forward. He meant to keep going all night again and to rest toward midday if he must.
Ahead, the path branched. Conan leaned from the saddle to study the bracken. A smooth stone lay exposed by the incessant rains. Upon that stone he glimpsed again a weird white blazon in the shape of an open hand. He tugged the stallion's head around and drove it into the pathway marked by the White Hand.
Suddenly, the muddy heather was alive with men. They were filthy, gaunt, and naked save for twists of greasy rag about their loins. Long, matted hair lay in a tangle about snarling faces.
Conan roared a deep-chested challenge and pulled the stallion up. He ripped the broadsword clear of its scabbard.
The beast-men were all about him now, grabbing at boots and stirrups, pulling at the skirt of his mail, seizing handfuls of mane to drag the horse down. But the grey's hoofs slashed out. One caught the foremost man in the face and cracked his skull. Pulped brains splattered amidst flying blood. Another caught a big-chested man on the shoulder, shattering his arm.
Conan's blade whistled, making heads jump from spurting necks, knocking brutish figures flying. Five he slew; a sixth he clove from pate to jaw. But the steel bit deep in tough bone. As the corpse fell back, the sword was wrenched out of Conan's grip. He sprang after it, splashing, and the yelping herd of beastlike men were all over him. Feral eyes gleamed; talonlike fingers raked his arms. They dragged him down, muffling him beneath the weight of sheer numbers. One brought a club of knotted wood down on Conan's temple. The world exploded, and Conan forgot all about fighting.
V
A Phantom From The Past
Out of the dim and swirling mists, the rounded knoll of a hill loomed up before them on the stone-paved way. Worn and weary from days and nights of travel, Conn blinked bleary eyes at it.
The crest of the knoll was crowned with a mighty keep, a rude castle built of huge, cyclopean blocks of unmortared stone. Ghostly in the dim starlight, indistinctly seen through the crawling film of mist, it looked like an apparition. Squat towers rose at either end of the massive edifice, wreathed in coiling fog. Toward the frowning portal of the looming keep they rode. As it grew nearer, Conn saw the great portcullis slowly lifting. The half-starved boy repressed a shudder. The rise of the spiked grille of rusty iron was like the slow yawn of a gigantic monster.
Through the vast portal they rode, into an enormous hall weirdly lit with the flickering light of torches. The portcullis came down behind them, to ring against the stone pave like the knell of doom.
Cold white hands plucked the boy from the saddle and tossed him into a corner. He crouched against the dank wall of stone, staring around him. Bit by bit, the features of the vast, echoing hall began to emerge from the gloom. The keep was one tremendous hall. The roof, whose rafters were lost in the darkness, loomed far above his head. The only visible furniture was a rude wooden bench or two, a couple of stools, and a long trestle table. On the table lay a wooden platter laden with cold scraps of greasy meat and a sodden lump of coarse black bread. The boy eyed this garbage hungrily. As if sensing his thoughts, the old woman muttered a command. One of the men took the platter from the table and set it down beside Conn.
His hands were numb, for they had bound his wrists to the saddle horn during the days and nights of riding. The man cut the thong that bound his wrists and slipped a length of chain about his neck, padlocking the other end to a rusty iron ring in the wall above his head. Conn fell on the remnants of the meal as the man watched silently.
The Witchman had removed his ivory mask, so that Conn could see his face. It was pale and bony and bore an expression of inhuman serenity. Conn did not like the thin, colorless lips or the cold glitter of the green eyes but was too hungry, cold, and miserable to care what his captors looked like. Another man came over with a few pieces of dirty sackcloth draped over his arm. He tossed these down beside the chained lad; then both men left him alone. After he had eaten all there was, Conn scraped together some of the filthy straw wherewith the floor of the immense, echoing hall was strewn. He piled the sacking upon this, curled up, and fell asleep at once.
The dull sound of a gong awoke him. In this gloomy pile of stone, the light of day never pierced, so Conn had lost all sense of time.
He looked up, rubbing his eyes. A low, circular stone dais rose in the centre of the hall; upon this the witch was seated tailor-fashion. A great copper bowl of glowing coals had been set before her, shedding a wavering light the colour of blood upon her face.
Conn studied her narrowly. She was old. Her face was worn with a thousand furrows, and her grey hair dangled loosely about the expressionless mask of her features. But life burned strongly within those eyes of emerald flame, and their uncanny gaze was fixed upon nothingness.
At the foot of the dais one of the black-clad men crouched, striking a padded mallet against a small gong in the shape of a human skull. The dull ringing of the gong echoed eerily.
The Witchmen entered the room in single file. They had donned their ivory masks and pulled the tight black cowls up to cover their silky hair. One led a naked, shaggy-headed man. Conn remembered that while crossing the endless swamps days before, the death-worshipers had taken this man captive. They had tied a noose about his neck and made him either trot along behind their horses or fall and be dragged. The man was deformed, witless, and filthy. His mouth hung open and his eyes gleamed with fear.
An uncanny ritual now took place. Two Witchmen knelt and secured the captive's feet with a thong suspended from a rafter. Then they slowly drew the naked man up u
ntil he hung head-downward above the copper bowl of simmering coals. The man writhed and screamed to no avail.
Then they cut his throat from ear to ear.
The victim wriggled and flopped, then slowly went limp. Conn watched, eyes wide with horror. Blood gushed down upon the coals and exploded in a cloud of smoke. A nauseous stench arose.
All this time, the witch stared sightlessly ahead. Conn observed that she was swaying from side to side, humming a tuneless air. The black-clad men stood motionless about the dais. The coals crackled and snapped. The corpse hung dripping. The thin, eerie moan of the witch's song droned on, punctuated by the monotonous rhythm of the gong. Conn stared with helpless fascination.
The stinking smoke hung in a greasy pall above the dais, eddying to and fro as if to the touch of invisible hands. Then the white-faced boy repressed a start.
'Crom!' he gasped.
The roiling cloud of smoke was taking on the shape of a man: a large, broad-shouldered, powerful man, draped in some Eastern robe whose cowl was thrust back to reveal a shaven pate and a grim, hawklike face.
The illusion was uncanny. The witch droned on. Her rasping song rose and fell like a cold wind moaning through the timbers of a gibbet.
Now colour flushed through the man-shaped phantom: the folds of the robe darkened to a shade of green and the stolid visage became a swarthy, ruddy brown, like the face of a Shemite or a Stygian. Frozen with fear, the boy searched the translucent phantom with wide eyes. The illusion had a face he dimly remembered seeing, or hearing described—those aloof, aquiline features, that grim, lipless mouth. Where the eyes should have been were two sparks of emerald fire.
The lips moved, and the distant echo of a voice resounded through the shadowy hall.
'Hail, O Louhi!' said the phantom. And the witch answered:
'Greetings, Thoth-Amon.'
Then, in truth, did the chilly claws of fear close around Conn's heart, for he knew he was in the grip of no casual kidnapper: He was in the clutches of the most deadly and tenacious foe of his race, the earth's mightiest black magician, the Stygian sorcerer who had long ago sworn by his evil gods to bring Conan the Cimmerian down to a terrible death and to crush Aquilonia into the mire.
VI
Beyond Skull Gate
Toward sunrise, Conan struggled groggily to consciousness. His head ached abominably, and blood from a torn scalp had dried down his face. But he still lived.
As for the shaggy beast-men of the swamp country, there was no sign of them. They had fled into the night, bearing off their dead and their loot. Groaning he sat up, nursing his throbbing head in his hands. He was naked save for boots and a ragged clout. Horse, mail, provision, and weapons had been stripped from him. Had the beast-men left him for dead? Perhaps; and only the thickness of his skull had kept the Cimmerian from that ending.
Legend whispered that the beast-men were the degenerate spawn of generations of escaped criminals and runaway slaves who had fled hither for sanctuary. Centuries of inbreeding had debased them to little above the level of animals. Odd, then, that they had left his body untouched; for men reduced to their primitive level often developed a lust for human flesh. Not until Conan had staggered to his feet did he discover what had driven the beast-man away.
Seared into muddy grasses, near where he had been struck down, was the imprint of the White Hand.
There was naught else to do but go on afoot. Fashioning a rude cudgel from the branch of a twisted tree, the burly Cimmerian struck out for the northeast, following the trail blazoned for him by the White Hand.
As a savage boy in his wintry homeland, he had learned how to live off the land. As king of proud Aquilonia, it had been many years since last he had been forced to hunt and kill to live. Now he was glad old skills died hard. With stones hurled from a rude sling improvised from a strip of cloth ripped from his clout, he brought down marsh birds. Lacking the means to make fire in these sodden bogs, he plucked the fowl and devoured them raw. With the cudgel, swung with all the iron strength of massive thews, he beat off wild dogs that attacked him. With sharpened sticks he probed for frogs and crayfish in muddy pools. And ever he kept moving north and east.
After an endless time, he came to the edge of the Border Kingdom. The entrance to Hyperborea was marked by a curious monument calculated to strike fear into the hearts of men. Under a lowering sky, hills rose in a grim rampart. The trail wound through a narrow pass between two rounded knolls. Embedded in the nearer flank of one hill was a weird marker. It shone grey-white through the gloom and damp of Hyperborea. As he came near enough to make it out, he stopped short and stood, massive arms folded.
It was a skull, manlike in shape but many times larger than that of a man. The sight raised Conan's nape-hairs with primal awe and stirred to life shadowy myths of ogres and giants. But as he studied the vast shield of naked bone with narrowed eyes, a grim smile tugged at his lips. He had travelled far in his years of adventuring, and he recognised the grisly relic for the skull of a mammoth. The skulls of beasts of the elephant tribe bear a superficial resemblance to those of men, save, of course, for the curving tusks. In this case, the telltale tusks had been sawn away. Conan grinned and spat. He felt heartened; those who use trickery to inspire superstitious fear are not invulnerable.
Across the brow of the mammoth skull, enormous Hyperborean runes were painted.
In his travels, Conan had picked up a smattering of many tongues. With some difficulty he could read the warning written in those uncouth characters.
'The Gate of Hyperborea is the Gate of Death to those who come hither without leave,' ran the warning.
Conan grunted contemptuously, strode on through the pass, and found himself in a haunted land.
Beyond Skull Gate, the land fell away in a bleak plain broken by naked hills. Crumbling stones lay bare under a brooding sky. Conan went forward through clammy mists, every sense alert. But for all he could tell, naught lived or moved in all this shadowy land of unseen peril.
Few dwelt in this cold realm of fear, where the wintry sun shone but briefly. They who ruled here reigned from high-towered keeps of cyclopean stone. As for the common folk, a few miserable, terror-haunted serfs in clusters of dilapidated hovels eked out a drab life from the barren soil.
The gaunt grey wolves of the north roamed these desolate prairies in savage hunting bands, he knew; and the ferocious cave bear made its home in stony caves under the dripping skies. But little else could dwell in this inhospitable waste, save a rare band of reindeer, musk ox, or mammoth.
Conan came at length to the first of the stone-built keeps; this he knew to be Sigtona. In Asgard they whispered grim tales of its sadistic queen, rumoured to live on human blood. He skirted it widely, searching for the next mountainous citadel.
After an interminable time he espied the grim pile of Pohiola, lifting its crest of squat turrets against the stars. Naked, famished, filthy, and unarmed, the indomitable Cimmerian gazed upon the stronghold of the Witchmen with burning eyes. Somewhere within that fortress of dark stone, his elder son huddled. Somewhere within that lightless and labyrinthine edifice, perhaps, his doom awaited him. Well, he had crossed swords with Death ere this, and from that desperate contest had emerged the victor.
Head high, he went through the darkness to the portals of Pohiola.
VII
The Witch-Woman
The iron fangs of the portcullis hung above the stone-paved way that led to the great gate. The gate itself was a mighty door of black wood, studded with the heads of iron nails. These nails spelt out some protective rune in a tongue even the burly Cimmerian did not know. The door was open.
Conan strode within. The stone walls, he grimly noted, were twenty paces thick. He passed into the central hall of the great keep. It was deserted, save for an old woman with lank grey hair. She squatted atop a circular stone dais, staring into the flickering flames of a dish of red coals. This he knew for Louhi, priestess-queen of the Witchmen, who regarded her as the living ava
tar of their death-goddess. Boot heels ringing on the stone pave, the half-naked giant strode the breadth of the mighty hall and took a bold stance before the dais, arms folded upon his breast.
After a while, she shifted her cat-green glare from the simmering coals to his face, and Conan felt the impact of her gaze. She was old, lean, and withered, but he sensed an extraordinary personality behind that wrinkled mask.
'Thoth-Amon says I should slay you on the spot, or at very least load you with chains heavy enough to bind ten men,' she began. Her voice was throaty and metallic.
No flicker of emotion touched Conan's stern visage. 'Let me see my son,' he growled.
'Thoth-Amon says you are the most dangerous man in the world,' she continued calmly, as if he had not spoken.
'But I have always thought that Thoth-Amon was himself more dangerous than any other man living. It is odd. Are you really so dangerous?'
'I want to see my son,' he repeated.
You do not look so very dangerous to me,' she went on serenely. 'You are strong, yes, and you have great powers of endurance. I doubt not that you are brave enough, as mortal men count bravery. But you are only a man. I cannot understand what there could be about you that moves Thoth-Amon to fear,' she mused.
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