"Girl, what is wrong? Hush, child." As he stood unnerved, her screams continued dinning in his numb ears, rasping painfully on the indrawings as well as the outpourings of her heaving breath. At last they grew monotonous, threatening to cross the border from terror into madness; at that, Conan turned and flung himself away past the fires, out into wider darkness.
What vile devilment ruled here? By all the gods, how could Phang Loon so easily snatch what was dearest to him and defile it, or crush it to nothing? Was it real, or was it all drug-crazed illusion? How, by blessed Crom, how could he live on after this? Better that he should die; his soul
was already dead, entombed in this cold clay breast! Only lotus drove him on, keeping his guts pumping, his dead limbs twitching beneath him…
Before him in the darkness loomed the dim outline of another door; he staggered forward through it without stopping.
As the oiled portal slammed first open, then shut behind him, he noted absently that he was in an oblong room, yellow-lit by lamps in wall brackets and scented foully by smoking censers in shallow alcoves. The sole furniture of the place, its ornament and, Crom grant, its death-snare, was a tall black frame carved in figures of twining serpents: a full-length wardrobe mirror. Unhesitatingly Conan heaved himself up before it and peered deep within.
Horror upon horror: the ultimate, soul-chilling evil! For beyond the glass there slouched a foul, decrepit, lifeless thing… its tunic a funeral cerement, its flesh more tattered than the shroud's rotting fabric, the only hint of life on its sagging bones the thriving purulence of decay. Not only was it loathsome, unspeakable―without a doubt it was he himself, as proven by the hand he stretched forth to test the solidity of the glass barrier: the withered, putrefying hand so faithfully reflected by the deformed claw which the framed abomination stretched out to him!
Here, then, was why Sariya had screamed so, even to the point of losing her poor mind. Conan prayed fervently that the girl had not recognized him as himself, her lover and rescuer―because she could scarcely fail to recognize him also as a monster, a hideous perversion cloaked and enfolded by death, able to bring only death and despair to those hapless ones it embraced.
Standing before the mirror, paralyzed with self-loathing, he traced with crumbling fingers the myriad proofs of his dissolution: the countless rips and gashes in his face and scalp where slack, unhealing skin peeled away from grisly bone; the grinning scar across his neck, gnawed and eroded so monstrously by decay that his head threatened to topple forward at any moment over exposed vertebrae and lank strings of sinew; the slashed, collapsed ruin of his torso, draped loosely by leather and torn fabric like a staved-in coffin matted with cobwebs; the knotted twigs of his arms, and his blighted trunks of legs, one weak and wasted, the other bulging and sagging with the weight of corruption, ready to burst and spew forth its noxious essence…
True! It was all utterly true and real to his sight and his horridly
fascinated touch. Phang Loon had poisoned him; instead of soothing his wounds with a palliating drug, the warlord had befouled and polluted him from the start. Foolishly he had consented to besmear himself with decay's potent essence; he had been made to wallow in a sorcerous death that denied him true, blissful extinction. Now he was transformed, doomed to exist as a monster or as Phang Loon's slave, until this rotting, miserable corpse finally crumbled into fragments too small to twitch and suffer…
"And yet I hold the cure, wretch." The voice was firm, resounding from the room's far end, where Phang Loon stood flanked by the burly, competent Sool. "The horror you see is but a final phase of the drug, a condition which can be arrested, even reversed, by further medicament."
Sool, at his lord's gesture, held forth a lotion-pot considerably larger than the one Conan had been sampling from. "What confronts you is but your true nature, from which all delusion has been purged by the lotus, scoured away as if by cleansing acid! This privilege I have bestowed on you, that you may see the hollowness of self and the virtue of submission to a greater will." As the warlord spoke, he strolled forward with his servant around the side of the mirror.
"Remember, slave: your former complacence, the blindness you so crave, is something only I can restore to you. If you want peace, if you want to don once more the garment of illusion"―he swept a hand toward the level flagstones underfoot―"you need only fall to the floor and beg for it. Henceforth I rule you, and I shall provide for you. Be assured, fool, I will turn your petty hate and resentment against those who are really to blame for your miserable state: our rebel foes, and their collaborators in your own ranks. Submit to me, wretched one, and enjoy the blessings of peace."
"Warlord…" Speaking in a voice that seemed to bubble out of the front of its riven throat, the thing before the mirror swung around to face its tormentor. "Phang Loon… as you say, you have stripped me of everything.
You have taken my freedom, my rank, my love, my very flesh and life."
Croaking, the undead horror that had been a man shuffled slowly forward.
"How much of it is true, and how much your fiendish illusion, I know not; but I know that my loss is real. You have left me only pain." The abomination shambled nearer, satrap and servant neither flinching nor falling back before it. "Pain is now all I possess; I will not let you take that from me too!"
"Very well then; you do not choose to submit." As the rotting thing
loomed close within reach, Phang Loon turned away in brisk impatience.
"As I told you, my method is infallible. Sool, end him!"
The servant's instant rush bore Conan over backward in his drugged, infirm state. The pain that slammed through him as he struck the floor nearly made him regret his bold pronouncements. Yet he was surprised to find his ravaged body not only holding together under the impact, but responding with willed and instinctive motions of defense. His good knee found the Venji's crotch in a thudding thrust; unfortunately, it found it heavily wrapped and padded. His forearm smote the attacker's neck and chest with a force that would have weakened a less massive opponent.
But the Venji was obviously a trained wrestler. His weight remained atop Conan, bearing down remorselessly to control and weaken his victim.
His thick hands clenched like iron, gripping and throttling the neck it should have been easy for him to rend apart, head from rotting shoulders.
Apparently Conan's frame retained more cohesiveness than Phang Loon's mirror had shown. A shame, Conan thought, since it was his real, un-illusory life that was ebbing now, being choked slowly out of him by Sool's relentless grip.
His numb spirit rallying briefly, Conan thrashed and strained sideways; but his strength was too depleted by drug and ordeal to avail against this taut, fit killer. Though his flesh did not tear like rotted parchment, still it pained hideously. He heaved upward to throw off the Venji's weight and felt his weak leg give way with a sickening twist. In desperation he reached out to gouge at his strangler's eyes; but the frantic clawing, he saw through his own dimming orbs, did not even disturb the fierce smile set in his killer's face.
No strength, no voice left for a final curse, no weapon… but wait; scrabbling, fumbling with dying fingers in the sweaty crevice between his belly and Sool's, he managed to find his pouch, and in it, the near-empty jar of ointment. Withdrawing it, he smashed it blindly on the flagstones, feeling its glass stopper fall away among shattered fragments. Then he groped upward with the thick, jagged-edged base and jammed it into the Venji's face.
Against the sweaty, muscular skin he ground and twisted it, upon the cheekbone, just at the point of the clenched smile. He kept on and on, twitching in eternity; the repetitive action was all that remained in a dwindling, blackening universe. Oblivion… was.
Then remotely, miraculously, the grip on his throat began to loosen. Air seeped back into his lungs, charging his blood like liquid fire. His whole body pumped, straining to draw in more breath.
Returning vision showed him his adversary's face, slackening now in
an idle, pensive expression. The smile remained, but with a new, beatific aspect. Clearly there was no pain from the gashed, blood-oozing crater that gaped now in Sool's face like a third, lopsided eye. Smears of lotus ointment mingled with the Venji's blood to provide ever headier sensations, reflected in his widening pupils. The world was lost to him; when Conan pried off his thick hands and eased out from beneath his bulk, the wrestler remained stooping on all fours, gaping in wonderment at the riddle of the blank stone floor.
Phang Loon stood watching with abstracted interest, making no move to interfere, so it was easy: Step across the torturer's broad back and reach down, one hand under the shoulder and behind the sweaty neck, the other across the chest to clasp his own clenched forearm. Conan's shoulders convulsed, and the Venji's neck gave with a thick snap. The torturer flopped to the floor, drowning at last in his lotus dream.
Conan stepped clear and started for the room's far door. An oath from Phang Loon drew his attention; the warlord was moving to block his path, and so Conan veered forward to meet him in grinning anticipation. He must not have appeared entirely decrepit to his captor either; for Phang Loon faltered, groped at his belt for a sword and, finding none, retreated.
He ran to a side-wall and reached high to jerk at a concealed cord. A loud chime, bell-like and shriller than any of the death-gongs, broadcast the alarm. Conan continued for the exit, knowing he could not hope to catch the nimble lordling.
The door stood half-open; lunging through, Conan found himself at last in a proper corridor that stretched away on two sides, lit yellow by wall-lamps and containing a series of doors and archways. Hearing footsteps slapping toward him from one direction, he loped away in the other and turned through the widest arch. It led into an unlighted storeroom heaped high with crates and bundles.
Even in the dimness, hobbling the length of the room, Conan recognized the contents as Turanian military stores―the ones needed, and missed so sorely of late, by his fellow-troopers. Likely these goods had been diverted by Phang Loon for his own use, or for sale on the black market. A
shame, truly; if there were more time, Conan would forage among the crates for a weapon. But he lacked the strength for a search, much less for a fight; his many sore wounds were tightening painfully for want of lotus, and the undamaged parts of his body wobbled with fatigue. Though he no longer saw a shambling monstrosity when he gazed down at himself, his ragged, blood-caked form was gruesome enough in the gloom.
Now another door loomed in front of him; before he could touch it, it opened, and a body blundered through into his arms.
The servant wore the tunic of a Venji Imperial; lacking any weapon, he yet struggled desperately. Conan, overriding his own pain and weariness, stifled the smaller man's yells, crushing him against the door-jamb; whether he broke the fellow's neck or merely stunned him, he was not sure. Closing the door, he dragged the slack body along with him and dumped it behind a pile of broken baskets.
This cavernous room, damp with smells of manure and fodder, must be the stable; good, then, it communicated with the outer gate! Seeing no more guards coming in the light of the single dim lamp, Conan limped ahead across the straw-covered cobblestones. He passed stalls whose snufflings told him that they contained horses, listless and ill-sounding in the noisome heat. Coming between rows of larger, heavier-timbered stalls, he heard more ponderous shiftings inside and smelled the riper stench of elephants. He slowed lest these more intelligent creatures smell the blood that seeped wetly from his neck, or otherwise take alarm and reveal his presence.
Yet he knew that, weak and tormented as he was, he could not stagger much further. Might it not be wiser to hide in a heap of straw―and there try to bear silently the pangs and cravings he could already feel crowding in to fill the vacuum left by the lotus? Or else, he might goad one of these mighty animals in its pen and be stamped to death; better that than to let Phang Loon retake him. He doubted whether the warlord would be as charitable now about letting him die a drugged, painless death.
All at once he heard shouts behind him, along with the scraping of the storeroom door. Stumbling aside out of open view, he availed himself of the only shelter at hand―by lying down on his back and rolling under the heavy half-door to one of the elephant stalls.
As luck would have it, the pen was occupied. His roll brought up him
against a titanic hind leg, stumplike and stiff-bristled in the dimness. By its owner's prompt, irritable shifting, Conan knew his presence was ill-regarded. The beast was quite obviously male, probably a war steed; now it shuffled back and sideward toward the intruder, threatening to squash him like a flea against the sturdy timber wall. Conan had no choice but to edge forward toward the monster's trunk and tusks.
After all, he reasoned, the beast was trained to obey men as well as kill them; it might not fear a lone man whom it could clearly see. With any luck, if he could keep the brute from trumpeting or crushing him, the very danger of this hiding-place might keep the guards from seeking him here.
Squeezing past the great foreleg an instant before it scraped the timber wall, Conan crept forward into the corner of the pen. The end wall was of irregular mortared stone, and he felt safer in its angle; still, he could not repress a shudder as the great, leathery mask of the face swung toward him―high, scalloped ears outflaring, bronze-pointed tusks curving wide, the massive trunk snaking down to sniff his face. Its wet, pliant tip brushed his brow and chin, then snuffled down along his trunk to his legs, searching perhaps for weapons or edible offerings. Finding none, it writhed back up and smote his shoulder roughly, insistently.
Outside, the scatter of voices spread through the stable. Running footsteps had passed the stall and could now be heard returning. Rays of a lantern flashed in beneath the stone door, and gruff Venji accents barked at one another.
"This is the stall where the noises came from."
"Yes, and look, the beast is restless!"
Restless because of your yammering, Conan felt like rasping at them.
Meanwhile he crouched stone-still in the corner, letting the elephant's massive proboscis continue its search. As the long, moist finger snuffled about his chest and collar, the creature snorted and twitched its ears, seeming excited by the scent of blood from his neck.
"We must take the elephant out and search the stall!"
"Yes, fetch a goad. But use it with care, this is a dangerous beast!"
Daring to glance left and right, Conan saw no exit to the adjoining
stalls. Before him, the elephant was sidling and swaying nervously; its eyes rolled back in its head, distracted by the commotion behind it. Pushed to the last limit of desperation, Conan crept out of his corner. He reached to his oozing neck and took a smear of slimy blood on his fingers. With it, on a flat stone in the wall, he drew a half-remembered pictogram, a three-lobed figure with two dangling tails, that could be formed by a single line: Snorting, the elephant followed his motion with its eyes and raised its trunk to the stone. Its sensitive nose-finger traced the shape accurately; then, to Conan's shock, it sucked in a great draft of air and trumpeted shatteringly.
The tearing noise shook the very fabric of the wall, driving Conan to his knees. Quivering with pain and shock, expecting to be seized and dashed against the stone, he struggled up… only to find the great beast kneeling, its trunk looped at one side to make a foothold for a passenger to mount.
Not pausing to question, Conan lurched forward, stepped up onto the trunk with his good leg and, aided by the uprising creature's trunk, dragged himself up onto the vast, hairy back.
Fortunately the elephant wore a studded collar, which also looped around its forehead in a sort of cap. Conan seized hold and soon had need of it, as the beast reared around in its stall and butted the door. The Venji Imperial who had begun to drag it open was now trying to close and bolt it again, but did not succeed; instead he was hurled across the stable with the force of the massive gate's swing, to fetch up limply against the far row of stalls. A
second guard, approaching and waving an elephant goad high as a sign of authority, quickly fell under the creature's trundling feet.
The elephant trumpeted again, moving forward and gathering speed; the next moment it passed through the half-open doors of the stable, sending one of the twin portals banging wide as it went. Behind them the place became a zoo of shrieks and crashes, its inmates lashed to frenzy by their fellow-prisoner's rebellion. Conan clung to the broad leather strap for his life; happily, in spite of the animal's frantic musth, its broad back provided its rider a fairly soft, level platform.
About them now lay the courtyard, aflare with torches and ascamper with men under a crescent moon. Most of the guards and servants who
had been drawn by the rogue's shrieks were now able to scatter out of its path; those who could not paid in the cheap token of their lives. A few ill-aimed arrows struck near Conan, none even sticking in the animal's thick hide. The only real obstacle ahead was the castle's drawbridge.
This opened between two flanking stone towers, a broad ramp of studded timbers crossing a ditch of unknown depth. In response to the alarms, the bridge was being raised; Conan heard chains clanking and saw men bending their backs to windlasses on the tower-tops. Heavily counterweighted, the ramp was clearly massive; as it yawned near, the helpless passenger saw it rise slowly to a height from which no lumbering pachyderm could leap. Instinct made him tug back on the heavy collar; but the elephant did not come to rein as a horse would. Instead it charged onward, straight toward the impossibly steep obstacle. Conan clenched both arms beneath the leather strapping as the elephant struck the bridge.
Momentum carried them upward, the mad brute's feet thundering on the wooden planks. At either side Conan heard the agonized stretching of chains and the stripping of ratchet-pawls. Then, inexorably, the angle of the ramp began to flatten. Wails and shrieks sounded as men were batted down or flung off the tower-tops by the fast-unwinding winches. The elephant strained upward along the creaking, rattling timbers and, just as the ramp thudded to earth underfoot, lunged forward onto solid roadway.
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