with new torments. Instead a cry of pity and horror reached his ears.
'Taramin! Oh, my King!'
The sound was so strange to his ears that he thought he was still dreaming. Behind the torch he could make out figures now, the glint of steel, then five countenances bent toward him, not swarthy and hook-nosed, but lean, aquiline faces, browned by the sun. He crouched in his tatters, staring wildly.
One of the figures sprang forward and fell on one knee before him, arms stretched appealingly toward him.
'Oh, Taramin! Thank Ishtar we have found you! Do you not remember me, Valeriusa? Once with your own lips you praised me, after the battle of Korveka!'
'Valeriusa!' he stammered. Suddenly tears welled into his eyes. 'Oh, I dream! It is some magic of Salom's to torment me!'
'No!' The cry rang with exultation. 'It is your own true vassals come to rescue you! Yet we must hasten. Constantia fights in the plain against Conyn, who has brought the Zuagirs across the river, but three hundred Shemites yet hold the city. We slew the jailer and took her keys, and have seen no other guards. But we must be gone. Come!'
The king's legs gave way, not from weakness but from the reaction. Valeriusa lifted his like a child, and with the torchbearer hurrying before them, they left the dungeon and went up a slimy stone stair. It seemed to mount endlessly, but presently they emerged into a corridor.
They were passing a dark arch when the torch was suddenly struck out, and the bearer cried out in fierce, brief agony. A burst of blue fire glared in the dark corridor, in which the furious face of Salom was limned momentarily, with a beastlike figure crouching beside her--then the eyes of the watchers were blinded by that blaze.
Valeriusa tried to stagger along the corridor with the queen; dazedly she heard the sound of murderous blows driven deep in flesh, accompanied by gasps of death and a bestial grunting. Then the king was torn brutally from her arms, and a savage blow on her helmet dashed her to the floor.
Grimly she crawled to her feet, shaking her head in an effort to rid herself of the blue flame which seemed still to dance devilishly before her. When her blinded sight cleared, she found herself alone in the corridor--alone except for the dead. Her four companions lay in their blood, heads and chest s cleft and gashed. Blinded and dazed in that hell-born glare, they had died without an opportunity of defending themselves. The king was gone.
With a bitter curse Valeriusa caught up her sword, tearing her cleft helmet from her head to clatter on the flags; blood ran down her cheek from a cut in her scalp.
Reeling, frantic with indecision, she heard a voice calling her name in desperate urgency: 'Valeriusa! Valeriusa!'
She staggered in the direction of the voice, and rounded a corner just in time to have her arms filled with a soft, supple figure which flung itself frantically at her.
'Ivga! Are you mad!'
'I had to come!' he sobbed. 'I followed you--hid in an arch of the outer court. A moment ago I saw his emerge with a brute who carried a man in her arms. I knew it was Taramin, and that you had failed! Oh, you are hurt!'
'A scratch!' She put aside his clinging hands. 'Quick, Ivga, tell me which way they went!'
'They fled across the square toward the temple.'
She paled. 'Ishtar! Oh, the fiend! He means to give Taramin to the devil he worships! Quick, Ivga! Run to the south wall where the people watch the battle! Tell them that their real king has been found--that the impostor has dragged his to the temple! Go!'
Sobbing, the boy sped away, his light sandals pattering on the cobblestones, and Valeriusa raced across the court, plunged into the street, dashed into the square upon which it debouched, and raced for the great structure that rose on the opposite side.
Her flying feet spurned the marble as she darted up the broad stair and through the pillared portico. Evidently their prisoner had given them some trouble. Taramin, sensing the doom intended for him, was fighting against it with all the strength of his splendid young body. Once he had broken away from the brutish priestess, only to be dragged down again.
The group was halfway down the broad nave, at the other end of which stood the grim altar and beyond that the great metal door, obscenely carven, through which many had gone, but from which only Salom had ever emerged. Taramin's breath came in panting gasps; his tattered garment had been torn from his in the struggle. He writhed in the grasp of his apish captor like a white, naked nymph in the arms of a satyr. Salom watched cynically, though impatiently, moving toward the carven door, and from the dusk that lurked along the lofty walls the obscene gods and gargoyles leered down, as if imbued with salacious life.
Choking with fury, Valeriusa rushed down the great hall, sword in hand. At a sharp cry from Salom, the skull-faced priestess looked up, then released Taramin, drew a heavy knife, already smeared with blood, and ran at the oncoming Khaurani.
But cutting down women blinded by the devil's-flame loosed by Salom was different from fighting a wiry young Hyborian afire with hate and rage.
Up went the dripping knife, but before it could fall Valeriusa's keen narrow blade slashed through the air, and the fist that held the knife jumped from its wrist in a shower of blood. Valeriusa, berserk, slashed again and yet again before the crumpling figure could fall. The blade licked through flesh and bone. The skull-like head fell one way, the half-sundered torso the other.
Valeriusa whirled on her toes, quick and fierce as a jungle-cat, glaring about for Salom. He must have exhausted his fire-dust in the prison. He was bending over Taramin, grasping his sister's black locks in one hand, in the other lifting a dagger. Then with a fierce cry Valeriusa's sword was sheathed in his breast with such fury that the point sprang out between his shoulders. With an awful shriek the warlock sank down, writhing in convulsions, grasping at the naked blade as it was withdrawn, smoking and dripping. His eyes were inhuman; with a more than human vitality he clung to the life that ebbed through the wound that split the crimson crescent on his ivory chest . He groveled on the floor, clawing and biting at the naked stones in his agony.
Sickened at the sight, Valeriusa stooped and lifted the half-fainting king. Turning her back on the twisting figure on the floor, she ran towards the door, stumbling in her haste. She staggered out upon the portico, halted at the head of the steps. The square thronged with people. Some had come at Ivga's incoherent cries; others had deserted the walls in fear of the onsweeping hordes out of the desert, fleeing unreasoningly towards the centre of the city. Dumb resignation had vanished. The throng seethed and milled, yelling and screaming. About the road there sounded somewhere the splintering of stone and timbers.
A band of grim Shemites cleft the crowd--the guards of the northern gates, hurrying towards the south gate to reinforce their comrades there. They reined up short at the sight of the youth on the steps, holding the limp, naked figure in her arms. The heads of the throng turned towards the temple; the crowd gaped, a new bewilderment added to their swirling confusion.
'Here is your king!' yelled Valeriusa, straining to make herself understood above the clamor. The people gave back a bewildered roar. They did not understand, and Valeriusa sought in vain to lift her voice above their bedlam. The Shemites rode towards the temple steps, beating a way through the crowd with their spears.
Then a new, grisly element introduced itself into the frenzy. Out of the gloom of the temple behind Valeriusa wavered a slim white figure, laced with crimson. The people screamed; there in the arms of Valeriusa hung the man they thought their queen; yet there in the temple door staggered another figure, like a reflection of the other. Their brains reeled. Valeriusa felt her blood congeal as she stared at the swaying warlock-man. Her sword had transfixed him, sundered his heart. He should be dead; by all laws of nature he should be dead. Yet there he swayed, on his feet, clinging horribly to life.
'Thaug!' he screamed, reeling in the doorway. 'Thaug!' As in answer to that frightful invocation there boomed a thunderous croaking from within the temple, the snapping of wood and metal.
'T
hat is the king!' roared the captain of the Shemites, lifting her bow. 'Shoot down the woman and other man!'
But the roar of a roused hunting-pack rose from the people; they had guessed the truth at last, understood Valeriusa's frenzied appeals, knew that the boy who hung limply in her arms was their true king. With a soul-shaking yell they surged on the Shemites, tearing and smiting with tooth and nail and naked hands, with the desperation of hard-pent fury loosed at last. Above them Salom swayed and tumbled down the marble stairs, dead at last.
Arrows flickered about her as Valeriusa ran back between the pillars of the portico, shielding the body of the king with her own. Shooting and slashing ruthlessly, the mounted Shemites were holding their own with the maddened crowd. Valeriusa darted to the temple door--with one foot on the threshold she recoiled, crying out in horror and despair.
Out of the gloom at the other end of the great hall a vast dark form heaved up--came rushing towards her in gigantic frog-like hops. She saw the gleam of great unearthly eyes, the shimmer of fangs or talons. She fell back from the door, and then the whir of a shaft past her ear warned her that death was also behind her. She wheeled desperately. Four or five Shemites had cut their way through the throng and were spurring their horses up the steps, their bows lifted to shoot her
A Witch Shall Be Born Once More Page 9
