Red Nails
woman and direct her to bandage Valeria's leg. The pirate followed the
woman into an adjoining chamber, already beginning to limp slightly.
* * * * *
Warily the two Tecuhltli led Conan along the hall beyond the bronze
door, and through chamber after chamber shimmering in the green fire.
They saw no one, heard no sound. After they crossed the Great Hall which
bisected the city from north to south, their caution was increased by
the realization of their nearness to enemy territory. But chambers and
halls lay empty to their wary gaze, and they came at last along a broad
dim hallway and halted before a bronze door similar to the Eagle Door of
Tecuhltli. Gingerly they tried it, and it opened silently under their
fingers. Awed, they stared into the green-lit chambers beyond. For fifty
years no Tecuhltli had entered those halls save as a prisoner going to a
hideous doom. To go to Xotalanc had been the ultimate horror that could
befall a man of the western castle. The terror of it had stalked through
their dreams since earliest childhood. To Yanath and Topal that bronze
door was like the portal of hell.
They cringed back, unreasoning horror in their eyes, and Conan pushed
past them and strode into Xotalanc.
Timidly they followed him. As each man set foot over the threshold he
stared and glared wildly about him. But only their quick, hurried
breathing disturbed the silence.
They had come into a square guardroom, like that behind the Eagle Door
of Tecuhltli, and, similarly, a hall ran away from it to a broad chamber
that was a counterpart of Olmec's throne room.
Conan glanced down the hall with its rugs and divans and hangings, and
stood listening intently. He heard no noise, and the rooms had an empty
feel. He did not believe there were any Xotalancas left alive in
Xuchotl.
"Come on," he muttered, and started down the hall.
He had not gone far when he was aware that only Yanath was following
him. He wheeled back to see Topal standing in an attitude of horror, one
arm out as if to fend off some threatening peril, his distended eyes
fixed with hypnotic intensity on something protruding from behind a
divan.
"What the devil?" Then Conan saw what Topal was staring at, and he felt
a faint twitching of the skin between his giant shoulders. A monstrous
head protruded from behind the divan, a reptilian head, broad as the
head of a crocodile, with down-curving fangs that projected over the
lower jaw. But there was an unnatural limpness about the thing, and the
hideous eyes were glazed.
Conan peered behind the couch. It was a great serpent which lay there
limp in death, but such a serpent as he had never seen in his
wanderings. The reek and chill of the deep black earth were about it,
and its color was an indeterminable hue which changed with each new
angle from which he surveyed it. A great wound in the neck showed what
had caused its death.
"It is the Crawler!" whispered Yanath.
"It's the thing I slashed on the stair," grunted Conan. "After it
trailed us to the Eagle Door, it dragged itself here to die. How could
the Xotalancas control such a brute?"
The Tecuhltli shivered and shook their heads.
"They brought it up from the black tunnels _below_ the catacombs. They
discovered secrets unknown to Tecuhltli."
"Well, it's dead, and if they'd had any more of them, they'd have
brought them along when they came to Tecuhltli. Come on."
They crowded close at his heels as he strode down the hall and thrust on
the silver-worked door at the other end.
"If we don't find anybody on this floor," he said, "we'll descend into
the lower floors. We'll explore Xotalanc from the roof to the catacombs.
If Xotalanc is like Tecuhltli, all the rooms and halls in this tier will
be lighted--what the devil!"
They had come into the broad throne chamber, so similar to that one in
Tecuhltli. There were the same jade dais and ivory seat, the same
divans, rugs and hangings on the walls. No black, red-scarred column
stood behind the throne-dais, but evidences of the grim feud were not
lacking.
Ranged along the wall behind the dais were rows of glass-covered
shelves. And on those shelves hundreds of human heads, perfectly
preserved, stared at the startled watchers with emotionless eyes, as
they had stared for only the gods knew how many months and years.
* * * * *
Topal muttered a curse, but Yanath stood silent, the mad light growing
in his wide eyes. Conan frowned, knowing that Tlazitlan sanity was hung
on a hair-trigger.
Suddenly Yanath pointed to the ghastly relics with a twitching finger.
"There is my brother's head!" he murmured. "And there is my father's
younger brother! And there beyond them is my sister's eldest son!"
Suddenly he began to weep, dry-eyed, with harsh, loud sobs that shook
his frame. He did not take his eyes from the heads. His sobs grew
shriller, changed to frightful, high-pitched laughter, and that in turn
became an unbearable screaming. Yanath was stark mad.
Conan laid a hand on his shoulder, and as if the touch had released all
the frenzy in his soul, Yanath screamed and whirled, striking at the
Cimmerian with his sword. Conan parried the blow, and Topal tried to
catch Yanath's arm. But the madman avoided him and with froth flying
from his lips, he drove his sword deep into Topal's body. Topal sank
down with a groan, and Yanath whirled for an instant like a crazy
dervish; then he ran at the shelves and began hacking at the glass with
his sword, screeching blasphemously.
Conan sprang at him from behind, trying to catch him unaware and disarm
him, but the madman wheeled and lunged at him, screaming like a lost
soul. Realizing that the warrior was hopelessly insane, the Cimmerian
side-stepped, and as the maniac went past, he swung a cut that severed
the shoulder-bone and breast, and dropped the man dead beside his dying
victim.
Conan bent over Topal, seeing that the man was at his last gasp. It was
useless to seek to stanch the blood gushing from the horrible wound.
"You're done for, Topal," grunted Conan. "Any word you want to send to
your people?"
"Bend closer," gasped Topal, and Conan complied--and an instant later
caught the man's wrist as Topal struck at his breast with a dagger.
"Crom!" swore Conan. "Are you mad, too?"
"Olmec ordered it!" gasped the dying man. "I know not why. As we lifted
the wounded upon the couches he whispered to me, bidding me to slay you
as we returned to Tecuhltli----" And with the name of his clan on his
lips, Topal died.
Conan scowled down at him in puzzlement. This whole affair had an aspect
of lunacy. Was Olmec mad, too? Were all the Tecuhltli madder than he had
realized? With a shrug of his shoulders he strode down the hall and out
of the bronze door, leaving the dead Tecuhltli lying before the staring
dead eyes of their kinsmen's heads.
Conan needed no guide back through the labyrinth they had traversed. His
primitive instinct of direction led him unerringly along the route they
had come. He traversed it as warily as he had before, his sword in his
hand, and his eyes fiercely searching each shadowed nook and corner; for
it was his former allies he feared now, not the ghosts of the slain
Xotalancas.
He had crossed the Great Hall and entered the chambers beyond when he
heard something moving ahead of him--something which gasped and panted,
and moved with a strange, floundering, scrambling noise. A moment later
Conan saw a man crawling over the flaming floor toward him--a man whose
progress left a broad bloody smear on the smoldering surface. It was
Techotl and his eyes were already glazing; from a deep gash in his
breast blood gushed steadily between the fingers of his clutching hand.
With the other he clawed and hitched himself along.
"Conan," he cried chokingly, "Conan! Olmec has taken the yellow-haired
woman!"
"So that's why he told Topal to kill me!" murmured Conan, dropping to
his knee beside the man, who his experienced eye told him was dying.
"Olmec isn't so mad as I thought."
Techotl's groping fingers plucked at Conan's arm. In the cold, loveless
and altogether hideous life of the Tecuhltli his admiration and
affection for the invaders from the outer world formed a warm, human
oasis, constituted a tie that connected him with a more natural humanity
that was totally lacking in his fellows, whose only emotions were hate,
lust and the urge of sadistic cruelty.
"I sought to oppose him," gurgled Techotl, blood bubbling frothily to
his lips. "But he struck me down. He thought he had slain me, but I
crawled away. Ah, Set, how far I have crawled in my own blood! Beware,
Conan! Olmec may have set an ambush for your return! Slay Olmec! He is a
beast. Take Valeria and flee! Fear not to traverse the forest. Olmec and
Tascela lied about the dragons. They slew each other years ago, all save
the strongest. For a dozen years there has been only one dragon. If you
have slain him, there is naught in the forest to harm you. He was the
god Olmec worshipped; and Olmec fed human sacrifices to him, the very
old and the very young, bound and hurled from the wall. Hasten! Olmec
has taken Valeria to the Chamber of the----"
His head slumped down and he was dead before it came to rest on the
floor.
* * * * *
Conan sprang up, his eyes like live coals. So that was Olmec's game,
having first used the strangers to destroy his foes! He should have
known that something of the sort would be going on in that black-bearded
degenerate's mind.
The Cimmerian started toward Tecuhltli with reckless speed. Rapidly he
reckoned the numbers of his former allies. Only twenty-one, counting
Olmec, had survived that fiendish battle in the throne room. Three had
died since, which left seventeen enemies with which to reckon. In his
rage Conan felt capable of accounting for the whole clan single-handed.
But the innate craft of the wilderness rose to guide his berserk rage.
He remembered Techotl's warning of an ambush. It was quite probable that
the prince would make such provisions, on the chance that Topal might
have failed to carry out his order. Olmec would be expecting him to
return by the same route he had followed in going to Xotalanc.
Conan glanced up at a skylight under which he was passing and caught the
blurred glimmer of stars. They had not yet begun to pale for dawn. The
events of the night had been crowded into a comparatively short space of
time.
He turned aside from his direct course and descended a winding staircase
to the floor below. He did not know where the door was to be found that
let into the castle on that level, but he knew he could find it. How he
was to force the locks he did not know; he believed that the doors of
Tecuhltli would all be locked and bolted, if for no other reason than
the habits of half a century. But there was nothing else but to attempt
it.
Sword in hand, he hurried noiselessly on through a maze of green-lit or
shadowy rooms and halls. He knew he must be near Tecuhltli, when a sound
brought him up short. He recognized it for what it was--a human being
trying to cry out through a stifling gag. It came from somewhere ahead
of him, and to the left. In those deathly-still chambers a small sound
carried a long way.
Conan turned aside and went seeking after the sound, which continued to
be repeated. Presently he was glaring through a doorway upon a weird
scene. In the room into which he was looking a low rack-like frame of
iron lay on the floor, and a giant figure was bound prostrate upon it.
His head rested on a bed of iron spikes, which were already
crimson-pointed with blood where they had pierced his scalp. A peculiar
harness-like contrivance was fastened about his head, though in such a