The Hour of the Dragon
mighty blows of naked steel, and grasp the red gem with passion-taut
fingers. But he gripped himself with iron control, and crouched down in
the shadow of the stone balustrade. A glance showed him that a stair led
down into the hall from the gallery, hugging the wall and half hidden in
the shadows. He glared into the dimness of the vast place, seeking other
priests or votaries, but saw only the group about the altar.
In that great emptiness the voice of the man beside the altar sounded
hollow and ghostly:
'... And so the word came southward. The night wind whispered it, the
ravens croaked of it as they flew, and the grim bats told it to the owls
and the serpents that lurk in hoary ruins. Werewolf and vampire knew,
and the ebon-bodied demons that prowl by night. The sleeping Night of
the World stirred and shook its heavy mane, and there began a throbbing
of drums in deep darkness, and the echoes of far weird cries frightened
men who walked by dusk. For the Heart of Ahriman had come again into the
world to fulfill its cryptic destiny.
'Ask me not how I, Thutothmes of Khemi and the Night, heard the word
before Thoth-Amon who calls himself prince of all wizards. There are
secrets not meet for such ears even as yours, and Thoth-Amon is not the
only lord of the Black Ring.
'I knew, and I went to meet the Heart which came southward. It was like
a magnet which drew me, unerringly. From death to death it came, riding
on a river of human blood. Blood feeds it, blood draws it. Its power is
greatest when there is blood on the hands that grasp it, when it is
wrested by slaughter from its holder. Wherever it gleams, blood is spilt
and kingdoms totter, and the forces of nature are put in turmoil.
'And here I stand, the master of the Heart, and have summoned you to
come secretly, who are faithful to me, to share in the black kingdom
that shall be. Tonight you shall witness the breaking of Thoth-Amon's
chains which enslave us, and the birth of empire.
'Who am I, even I, Thutothmes, to know what powers lurk and dream in
those crimson deeps? It holds secrets forgotten for three thousand
years. But I shall learn. These shall tell me!'
He waved his hand toward the silent shapes that lined the hall.
'See how they sleep, staring through their carven masks! Kings, queens,
generals, priests, wizards, the dynasties and the nobility of Stygia for
ten thousand years! The touch of the heart will awaken them from their
long slumber. Long, long the Heart throbbed and pulsed in ancient
Stygia. Here was its home in the centuries before it journeyed to
Acheron. The ancients knew its full power, and they will tell me when by
its magic I restore them to life to labor for me.
'I will rouse them, will waken them, will learn their forgotten wisdom,
the knowledge locked in those withered skulls. By the lore of the dead
we shall enslave the living! Aye, kings and generals and wizards of old
shall be our helpers and our slaves. Who shall stand before us?
'Look! This dried, shriveled thing on the altar was once Thothmekri, a
high priest of Set, who died three thousand years ago. He was an adept
of the Black Ring. He knew of the Heart. He will tell us of its powers.'
Lifting the great jewel, the speaker laid it on the withered breast of
the mummy, and lifted his hand as he began an incantation. But the
incantation was never finished. With his hand lifted and his lips parted
he froze, glaring past his acolytes, and they wheeled to stare in the
direction in which he was looking.
Through the black arch of a door four gaunt, black-robed shapes had
filed into the great hall. Their faces were dim yellow ovals in the
shadow of their hoods.
'Who are you?' ejaculated Thutothmes in a voice as pregnant with danger
as the hiss of a cobra. 'Are you mad, to invade the holy shrine of Set?'
The tallest of the strangers spoke, and his voice was toneless as a
Khitan temple bell.
'We follow Conan of Aquilonia.'
'He is not here,' answered Thutothmes, shaking back his mantle from his
right hand with a curious menacing gesture, like a panther unsheathing
his talons.
'You lie. He is in this temple. We tracked him from a corpse behind the
bronze door of the outer portal through a maze of corridors. We were
following his devious trail when we became aware of this conclave. We go
now to take it up again. But first give us the Heart of Ahriman.'
'Death is the portion of madmen,' murmured Thutothmes, moving nearer the
speaker. His priests closed in on cat-like feet, but the strangers did
not appear to heed.
'Who can look upon it without desire?' said the Khitan. 'In Khitai we
have heard of it. It will give us power over the people which cast us
out. Glory and wonder dream in its crimson deeps. Give it to us, before
we slay you.'
A fierce cry rang out as a priest leaped with a flicker of steel. Before
he could strike, a scaly staff licked out and touched his breast, and he
fell as a dead man falls. In an instant the mummies were staring down on
a scene of blood and horror. Curved knives flashed and crimsoned, snaky
staffs licked in and out, and whenever they touched a man, that man
screamed and died.
At the first stroke Conan had bounded up and was racing down the stairs.
He caught only glimpses of that brief, fiendish fight--saw men swaying,
locked in battle and streaming blood; saw one Khitan, fairly hacked to
pieces, yet still on his feet and dealing death, when Thutothmes smote
him on the breast with his open empty hand, and he dropped dead, though
naked steel had not been enough to destroy his uncanny vitality.
By the time Conan's hurtling feet left the stair, the fight was all but
over. Three of the Khitans were down, slashed and cut to ribbons and
disemboweled, but of the Stygians only Thutothmes remained on his feet.
He rushed at the remaining Khitan, his empty hand lifted like a weapon,
and that hand was black as that of a negro. But before he could strike,
the staff in the tall Khitan's hand licked out, seeming to elongate
itself as the yellow man thrust. The point touched the bosom of
Thutothmes and he staggered; again and yet again the staff licked out,
and Thutothmes reeled and fell dead, his features blotted out in a rush
of blackness that made the whole of him the same hue as his enchanted
hand.
The Khitan turned toward the jewel that burned on the breast of the
mummy, but Conan was before him.
In a tense stillness the two faced each other, amid that shambles, with
the carven mummies staring down upon them.
'Far have I followed you, oh king of Aquilonia,' said the Khitan calmly.
'Down the long river, and over the mountains, across Poitain and Zingara
and through the hills of Argos and down the coast. Not easily did we
pick up your trail from Tarantia, for the priests of Asura are crafty.
We lost it in Zingara, but we found your helmet in the forest below the
border hills, where you had fought with the ghouls of the forests.
Almost we lost the trail again tonight among these labyrinths.'
Conan reflected that he had been fortunate in returning from the
vampire's chamber by another route than that by which he had been led to
it. Otherwise he would have run full into these yellow fiends instead
of sighting them from afar as they smelled out his spoor like human
bloodhounds, with whatever uncanny gift was theirs.
The Khitan shook his head slightly, as if reading his mind.
'That is meaningless; the long trail ends here.'
'Why have you hounded me?' demanded Conan, poised to move in any
direction with the celerity of a hair-trigger.
'It was a debt to pay,' answered the Khitan. 'To you who are about to
die, I will not withhold knowledge. We were vassals of the king of
Aquilonia, Valerius. Long we served him, but of that service we are free
now--my brothers by death, and I by the fulfilment of obligation. I
shall return to Aquilonia with two hearts; for myself the Heart of
Ahriman; for Valerius the heart of Conan. A kiss of the staff that was
cut from the living Tree of Death--'
The staff licked out like the dart of a viper, but the slash of Conan's
knife was quicker. The staff fell in writhing halves, there was another
flicker of the keen steel like a jet of lightning, and the head of the
Khitan rolled to the floor.
Conan wheeled and extended his hand toward the jewel--then he shrank
back, his hair bristling, his blood congealing icily.
For no longer a withered brown thing lay on the altar. The jewel
shimmered on the full, arching breast of a naked, living man who lay
among the moldering bandages. Living? Conan could not decide. The eyes
were like dark murky glass under which shone inhuman somber fires.
Slowly the man rose, taking the jewel in his hand. He towered beside the
altar, dusky, naked, with a face like a carven image. Mutely he extended
his hand toward Conan, with the jewel throbbing like a living heart
within it. Conan took it, with an eery sensation of receiving gifts from
the hand of the dead. He somehow realized that the proper incantations
had not been made--the conjurement had not been completed--life had not
been fully restored to his corpse.
'Who are you?' demanded the Cimmerian.
The answer came in a toneless monotone, like the dripping of water from
stalactites in subterranean caverns. 'I was Thothmekri; I am dead.'
'Well, lead me out of this accursed temple, will you?' Conan requested,
his flesh crawling.
With measured, mechanical steps the dead man moved toward a black arch.
Conan followed him. A glance back showed him once again the vast,
shadowy hall with its tiers of sarcophagi, the dead men sprawled about
the altar; the head of the Khitan he had slain stared sightless up at
the sweeping shadows.
The glow of the jewel illuminated the black tunnels like an ensorceled
lamp, dripping golden fire. Once Conan caught a glimpse of ivory flesh
in the shadows, believed he saw the vampire that was Akivasha shrinking
back from the glow of the jewel; and with her, other less human shapes
scuttled or shambled into the darkness.
The dead man strode straight on, looking neither to right nor left, his
pace as changeless as the tramp of doom. Cold sweat gathered thick on
Conan's flesh. Icy doubts assailed him. How could he know that this
terrible figure out of the past was leading him to freedom? But he knew
that, left to himself, he could never untangle this bewitched maze of
corridors and tunnels. He followed his awful guide through blackness
that loomed before and behind them and was filled with skulking shapes
of horror and lunacy that cringed from the blinding glow of the Heart.
Then the bronze doorway was before him, and Conan felt the night wind
blowing across the desert, and saw the stars, and the starlit desert
across which streamed the great black shadow of the pyramid. Thothmekri
pointed silently into the desert, and then turned and stalked
soundlessly back in the darkness. Conan stared after that silent figure
that receded into the blackness on soundless, inexorable feet as one
that moves to a known and inevitable doom, or returns to everlasting
sleep.
With a curse the Cimmerian leaped from the doorway and fled into the
desert as if pursued by demons. He did not look back toward the pyramid,
or toward the black towers of Khemi looming dimly across the sands. He
headed southward toward the coast, and he ran as a man runs in
ungovernable panic. The violent exertion shook his brain free of black
cobwebs; the clean desert wind blew the nightmares from his soul and his
revulsion changed to a wild tide of exultation before the desert gave
way to a tangle of swampy growth through which he saw the black water
lying before him, and the _Venturer_ at anchor.
He plunged through the undergrowth, hip-deep in the marshes; dived