Red Nails
captives we will burn and flay and quarter."
"But afterward?" pursued the other. "After we have slain them all? Will
it not seem strange, to have no foes to fight? All my life I have
fought and hated the Xotalancas. With the feud ended, what is left?"
Xatmec shrugged his shoulders. His thoughts had never gone beyond the
destruction of their foes. They could not go beyond that.
Suddenly both men stiffened at a noise outside the door.
"To the door, Xatmec!" hissed the last speaker. "I shall look through
the Eye----"
Xatmec, sword in hand, leaned against the bronze door, straining his ear
to hear through the metal. His mate looked into the mirror. He started
convulsively. Men were clustered thickly outside the door; grim,
dark-faced men with swords gripped in their teeth--_and their fingers
thrust into their ears_. One who wore a feathered head-dress had a set
of pipes which he set to his lips, and even as the Tecuhltli started to
shout a warning, the pipes began to skirl.
The cry died in the guard's throat as the thin, weird piping penetrated
the metal door and smote on his ears. Xatmec leaned frozen against the
door, as if paralyzed in that position. His face was that of a wooden
image, his expression one of horrified listening. The other guard,
farther removed from the source of the sound, yet sensed the horror of
what was taking place, the grisly threat that lay in that demoniac
fifing. He felt the weird strains plucking like unseen fingers at the
tissues of his brain, filling him with alien emotions and impulses of
madness. But with a soul-tearing effort he broke the spell, and shrieked
a warning in a voice he did not recognize as his own.
But even as he cried out, the music changed to an unbearable shrilling
that was like a knife in the ear-drums. Xatmec screamed in sudden agony,
and all the sanity went out of his face like a flame blown out in a
wind. Like a madman he ripped loose the chain, tore open the door and
rushed out into the hall, sword lifted before his mate could stop him. A
dozen blades struck him down, and over his mangled body the Xotalancas
surged into the guardroom, with a long-drawn, blood-mad yell that sent
the unwonted echoes reverberating.
His brain reeling from the shock of it all, the remaining guard leaped
to meet them with goring spear. The horror of the sorcery he had just
witnessed was submerged in the stunning realization that the enemy were
in Tecuhltli. And as his spearhead ripped through a dark-skinned belly
he knew no more, for a swinging sword crushed his skull, even as
wild-eyed warriors came pouring in from the chambers behind the
guardroom.
It was the yelling of men and the clanging of steel that brought Conan
bounding from his couch, wide awake and broadsword in hand. In an
instant he had reached the door and flung it open, and was glaring out
into the corridor just as Techotl rushed up it, eyes blazing madly.
"The Xotalancas!" he screamed, in a voice hardly human, "_They are
within the door!_"
Conan ran down the corridor, even as Valeria emerged from her chamber.
"What the devil is it?" she called.
"Techotl says the Xotalancas are in," he answered hurriedly. "That
racket sounds like it."
* * * * *
With the Tecuhltli on their heels they burst into the throne room and
were confronted by a scene beyond the most frantic dream of blood and
fury. Twenty men and women, their black hair streaming, and the white
skulls gleaming on their breasts, were locked in combat with the people
of Tecuhltli. The women on both sides fought as madly as the men, and
already the room and the hall beyond were strewn with corpses.
Olmec, naked but for a breech-clout, was fighting before his throne, and
as the adventurers entered, Tascela ran from an inner chamber with a
sword in her hand.
Xatmec and his mate were dead, so there was none to tell the Tecuhltli
how their foes had found their way into their citadel. Nor was there any
to say what had prompted that mad attempt. But the losses of the
Xotalancas had been greater, their position more desperate, than the
Tecuhltli had known. The maiming of their scaly ally, the destruction of
the Burning Skull, and the news, gasped by a dying man, that mysterious
white-skin allies had joined their enemies, had driven them to the
frenzy of desperation and the wild determination to die dealing death to
their ancient foes.
The Tecuhltli, recovering from the first stunning shock of the surprise
that had swept them back into the throne room and littered the floor
with their corpses, fought back with an equally desperate fury, while
the door-guards from the lower floors came racing to hurl themselves
into the fray. It was the death-fight of rabid wolves, blind, panting,
merciless. Back and forth it surged, from door to dais, blades
whickering and striking into flesh, blood spurting, feet stamping the
crimson floor where redder pools were forming. Ivory tables crashed
over, seats were splintered, velvet hangings torn down were stained red.
It was the bloody climax of a bloody half-century, and every man there
sensed it.
But the conclusion was inevitable. The Tecuhltli outnumbered the
invaders almost two to one, and they were heartened by that fact and by
the entrance into the mêlée of their light-skinned allies.
These crashed into the fray with the devastating effect of a hurricane
plowing through a grove of saplings. In sheer strength no three
Tlazitlans were a match for Conan, and in spite of his weight he was
quicker on his feet than any of them. He moved through the whirling,
eddying mass with the surety and destructiveness of a gray wolf amidst a
pack of alley curs, and he strode over a wake of crumpled figures.
Valeria fought beside him, her lips smiling and her eyes blazing. She
was stronger than the average man, and far quicker and more ferocious.
Her sword was like a living thing in her hand. Where Conan beat down
opposition by the sheer weight and power of his blows, breaking spears,
splitting skulls and cleaving bosoms to the breast-bone, Valeria brought
into action a finesse of sword-play that dazzled and bewildered her
antagonists before it slew them. Again and again a warrior, heaving high
his heavy blade, found her point in his jugular before he could strike.
Conan, towering above the field, strode through the welter smiting right
and left, but Valeria moved like an illusive phantom, constantly
shifting, and thrusting and slashing as she shifted. Swords missed her
again and again as the wielders flailed the empty air and died with her
point in their hearts or throats, and her mocking laughter in their
ears.
Neither sex nor condition was considered by the maddened combatants. The
five women of the Xotalancas were down with their throats cut before
Conan and Valeria entered the fray, and when a man or woman went down
under the stamping feet, there was always a knife ready for the helpless
throat, or a sandaled foot eager to crush the prostrate skull.
From wall to wall, from door to door rolled the waves of combat,
spilling over into adjoining chambers. And presently only Tecuhltli and
their white-skinned allies stood upright in the great throne room. The
survivors stared bleakly and blankly at each other, like survivors after
Judgment Day or the destruction of the world. On legs wide-braced, hands
gripping notched and dripping swords, blood trickling down their arms,
they stared at one another across the mangled corpses of friends and
foes. They had no breath left to shout, but a bestial mad howling rose
from their lips. It was not a human cry of triumph. It was the howling
of a rabid wolf-pack stalking among the bodies of its victims.
Conan caught Valeria's arm and turned her about.
"You've got a stab in the calf of your leg," he growled.
She glanced down, for the first time aware of a stinging in the muscles
of her leg. Some dying man on the floor had fleshed his dagger with his
last effort.
"You look like a butcher yourself," she laughed.
He shook a red shower from his hands.
"Not mine. Oh, a scratch here and there. Nothing to bother about. But
that calf ought to be bandaged."
* * * * *
Olmec came through the litter, looking like a ghoul with his naked
massive shoulders splashed with blood, and his black beard dabbled in
crimson. His eyes were red, like the reflection of flame on black water.
"We have won!" he croaked dazedly. "The feud is ended! The dogs of
Xotalanc lie dead! Oh, for a captive to flay alive! Yet it is good to
look upon their dead faces. Twenty dead dogs! Twenty red nails for the
black column!"
"You'd best see to your wounded," grunted Conan, turning away from him.
"Here, girl, let me see that leg."
"Wait a minute!" she shook him off impatiently. The fire of fighting
still burned brightly in her soul. "How do we know these are all of
them? These might have come on a raid of their own."
"They would not split the clan on a foray like this," said Olmec,
shaking his head, and regaining some of his ordinary intelligence.
Without his purple robe the man seemed less like a prince than some
repellent beast of prey. "I will stake my head upon it that we have
slain them all. There were less of them than I dreamed, and they must
have been desperate. But how came they in Tecuhltli?"
Tascela came forward, wiping her sword on her naked thigh, and holding
in her other hand an object she had taken from the body of the feathered
leader of the Xotalancas.
"The pipes of madness," she said. "A warrior tells me that Xatmec opened
the door to the Xotalancas and was cut down as they stormed into the
guardroom. This warrior came to the guardroom from the inner hall just
in time to see it happen and to hear the last of a weird strain of music
which froze his very soul. Tolkemec used to talk of these pipes, which
the Xuchotlans swore were hidden somewhere in the catacombs with the
bones of the ancient wizard who used them in his lifetime. Somehow the
dogs of Xotalanc found them and learned their secret."
"Somebody ought to go to Xotalanc and see if any remain alive," said
Conan. "I'll go if somebody will guide me."
Olmec glanced at the remnants of his people. There were only twenty left
alive, and of these several lay groaning on the floor. Tascela was the
only one of the Tecuhltli who had escaped without a wound. The princess
was untouched, though she had fought as savagely as any.
"Who will go with Conan to Xotalanc?" asked Olmec.
Techotl limped forward. The wound in his thigh had started bleeding
afresh, and he had another gash across his ribs.
"I will go!"
"No, you won't," vetoed Conan. "And you're not going either, Valeria. In
a little while that leg will be getting stiff."
"I will go," volunteered a warrior, who was knotting a bandage about a
slashed forearm.
"Very well, Yanath. Go with the Cimmerian. And you, too, Topal." Olmec
indicated another man whose injuries were slight. "But first aid us to
lift the badly wounded on these couches where we may bandage their
hurts."
This was done quickly. As they stooped to pick up a woman who had been
stunned by a war-club, Olmec's beard brushed Topal's ear. Conan thought
the prince muttered something to the warrior, but he could not be sure.
A few moments later he was leading his companions down the hall.
Conan glanced back as he went out the door, at that shambles where the
dead lay on the smoldering floor, blood-stained dark limbs knotted in
attitudes of fierce muscular effort, dark faces frozen in masks of hate,
glassy eyes glaring up at the green fire-jewels which bathed the ghastly
scene in a dusky emerald witch-light. Among the dead the living moved
aimlessly, like people moving in a trance. Conan heard Olmec call a