The People of the Black Circle
Then there came a period of blind impulse and movement, when the atom
that was she mingled and merged with myriad other atoms of spawning life
in the yeasty morass of existence, molded by formative forces until she
emerged again a conscious individual, whirling down an endless spiral of
lives.
In a mist of terror she relived all her former existences, recognized
and _was_ again all the bodies that had carried her ego throughout the
changing ages. She bruised her feet again over the long, weary road of
life that stretched out behind her into the immemorial past. Back beyond
the dimmest dawns of Time she crouched shuddering in primordial jungles,
hunted by slavering beasts of prey. Skin-clad, she waded thigh-deep in
rice swamps, battling with squawking water-fowl for the precious grains.
She labored with the oxen to drag the pointed stick through the stubborn
soil, and she crouched endlessly over looms in peasant huts.
She saw walled cities burst into flame, and fled screaming before the
slayers. She reeled naked and bleeding over burning sands, dragged at
the slaver's stirrup, and she knew the grip of hot, fierce hands on her
writhing flesh, the shame and agony of brutal lust. She screamed under
the bite of the lash, and moaned on the rack; mad with terror she fought
against the hands that forced her head inexorably down on the bloody
block.
She knew the agonies of childbirth, and the bitterness of love betrayed.
She suffered all the woes and wrongs and brutalities that man has
inflicted on woman throughout the eons; and she endured all the spite
and malice of women for woman. And like the flick of a fiery whip
throughout was the consciousness she retained of her Devi-ship. She was
all the women she had ever been, yet in her knowing she was Yasmina.
This consciousness was not lost in the throes of reincarnation. At one
and the same time she was a naked slave-wench groveling under the whip,
and the proud Devi of Vendhya. And she suffered not only as the
slave-girl suffered, but as Yasmina, to whose pride the whip was like a
white-hot brand.
Life merged into life in flying chaos, each with its burden of woe and
shame and agony, until she dimly heard her own voice screaming
unbearably, like one long-drawn cry of suffering echoing down the ages.
Then she awakened on the velvet-covered dais in the mystic room.
In a ghostly gray light she saw again the dais and the cryptic robed
figure seated upon it. The hooded head was bent, the high shoulders
faintly etched against the uncertain dimness. She could make out no
details clearly, but the hood, where the velvet cap had been, stirred a
formless uneasiness in her. As she stared, there stole over her a
nameless fear that froze her tongue to her palate--a feeling that it was
not the Master who sat so silently on that black dais.
Then the figure moved and rose upright, towering above her. It stooped
over her and the long arms in their wide black sleeves bent about her.
She fought against them in speechless fright, surprized by their lean
hardness. The hooded head bent down toward her averted face. And she
screamed, and screamed again in poignant fear and loathing. Bony arms
gripped her lithe body, and from that hood looked forth a countenance of
death and decay--features like rotting parchment on a moldering skull.
She screamed again, and then, as those champing, grinning jaws bent
toward her lips, she lost consciousness....
9 The Castle of the Wizards
The sun had risen over the white Himelian peaks. At the foot of a long
slope a group of horsemen halted and stared upward. High above them a
stone tower poised on the pitch of the mountainside. Beyond and above
that gleamed the walls of a greater keep, near the line where the snow
began that capped Yimsha's pinnacle. There was a touch of unreality
about the whole--purple slopes pitching up to that fantastic castle,
toy-like with distance, and above it the white glistening peak
shouldering the cold blue.
'We'll leave the horses here,' grunted Conan. 'That treacherous slope is
safer for a man on foot. Besides, they're done.'
He swung down from the black stallion which stood with wide-braced legs
and drooping head. They had pushed hard throughout the night, gnawing at
scraps from saddle-bags, and pausing only to give the horses the rests
they had to have.
'That first tower is held by the acolytes of the Black Seers,' said
Conan. 'Or so men say; watch-dogs for their masters--lesser sorcerers.
They won't sit sucking their thumbs as we climb this slope.'
Kerim Shah glanced up the mountain, then back the way they had come;
they were already far up Yimsha's side, and a vast expanse of lesser
peaks and crags spread out beneath them. Among these labyrinths the
Turanian sought in vain for a movement of color that would betray men.
Evidently the pursuing Afghulis had lost their chief's trail in the
night.
'Let us go, then.' They tied the weary horses in a clump of tamarisk and
without further comment turned up the slope. There was no cover. It was
a naked incline, strewn with boulders not big enough to conceal a man.
But they did conceal something else.
The party had not gone fifty steps when a snarling shape burst from
behind a rock. It was one of the gaunt savage dogs that infested the
hill villages, and its eyes glared redly, its jaws dripped foam. Conan
was leading, but it did not attack him. It dashed past him and leaped at
Kerim Shah. The Turanian leaped aside, and the great dog flung itself
upon the Irakzai behind him. The man yelled and threw up his arm, which
was torn by the brute's fangs as it bore him backward, and the next
instant half a dozen tulwars were hacking at the beast. Yet not until it
was literally dismembered did the hideous creature cease its efforts to
seize and rend its attackers.
Kerim Shah bound up the wounded warrior's gashed arm, looked at him
narrowly, and then turned away without a word. He rejoined Conan, and
they renewed the climb in silence.
Presently Kerim Shah said: 'Strange to find a village dog in this
place.'
'There's no offal here,' grunted Conan.
Both turned their heads to glance back at the wounded warrior toiling
after them among his companions. Sweat glistened on his dark face and
his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Then both
looked again at the stone tower squatting above them.
A slumberous quiet lay over the uplands. The tower showed no sign of
life, nor did the strange pyramidal structure beyond it. But the men who
toiled upward went with the tenseness of men walking on the edge of a
crater. Kerim Shah had unslung the powerful Turanian bow that killed at
five hundred paces, and the Irakzai looked to their own lighter and less
lethal bows.
But they were not within bow-shot of the tower when something shot down
out of the sky without warning. It passed so close to Conan that he felt
the wind of rushing wings, but it was an Irakzai who staggered and fell,
blood jetting from a severed jugular. A hawk with wings like burnished
steel shot up again, blood dripping from the scimitar-beak, to reel
against the sky as Kerim Shah's bowstring twanged. It dropped like a
plummet, but no man saw where it struck the earth.
Conan bent over the victim of the attack, but the man was already dead.
No one spoke; useless to comment on the fact that never before had a
hawk been known to swoop on a man. Red rage began to vie with fatalistic
lethargy in the wild souls of the Irakzai. Hairy fingers nocked arrows
and men glared vengefully at the tower whose very silence mocked them.
But the next attack came swiftly. They all saw it--a white puffball of
smoke that tumbled over the tower-rim and came drifting and rolling down
the slope toward them. Others followed it. They seemed harmless, mere
woolly globes of cloudy foam, but Conan stepped aside to avoid contact
with the first. Behind him one of the Irakzai reached out and thrust his
sword into the unstable mass. Instantly a sharp report shook the
mountainside. There was a burst of blinding flame, and then the puffball
had vanished, and the too-curious warrior remained only a heap of
charred and blackened bones. The crisped hand still gripped the ivory
sword-hilt, but the blade was gone--melted and destroyed by that awful
heat. Yet men standing almost within reach of the victim had not
suffered except to be dazzled and half blinded by the sudden flare.
'Steel touches it off,' grunted Conan. 'Look out--here they come!'
The slope above them was almost covered by the billowing spheres. Kerim
Shah bent his bow and sent a shaft into the mass, and those touched by
the arrow burst like bubbles in spurting flame. His men followed his
example and for the next few minutes it was as if a thunderstorm raged
on the mountain slope, with bolts of lightning striking and bursting in
showers of flame. When the barrage ceased, only a few arrows were left
in the quivers of the archers.
They pushed on grimly, over soil charred and blackened, where the naked
rock had in places been turned to lava by the explosion of those
diabolical bombs.
Now they were almost within arrow-flight of the silent tower, and they
spread their line, nerves taut, ready for any horror that might descend
upon them.
On the tower appeared a single figure, lifting a ten-foot bronze horn.
Its strident bellow roared out across the echoing slopes, like the blare
of trumpets on Judgment Day. And it began to be fearfully answered. The
ground trembled under the feet of the invaders, and rumblings and
grindings welled up from the subterranean depths.
The Irakzai screamed, reeling like drunken men on the shuddering slope,
and Conan, eyes glaring, charged recklessly up the incline, knife in
hand, straight at the door that showed in the tower-wall. Above him the
great horn roared and bellowed in brutish mockery. And then Kerim Shah
drew a shaft to his ear and loosed.
Only a Turanian could have made that shot. The bellowing of the horn
ceased suddenly, and a high, thin scream shrilled in its place. The
green-robed figure on the tower staggered, clutching at the long shaft
which quivered in its bosom, and then pitched across the parapet. The
great horn tumbled upon the battlement and hung precariously, and
another robed figure rushed to seize it, shrieking in horror. Again the
Turanian bow twanged, and again it was answered by a death-howl. The
second acolyte, in falling, struck the horn with his elbow and knocked
it clattering over the parapet to shatter on the rocks far below.
At such headlong speed had Conan covered the ground that before the
clattering echoes of that fall had died away, he was hacking at the
door. Warned by his savage instinct, he gave back suddenly as a tide of
molten lead splashed down from above. But the next instant he was back
again, attacking the panels with redoubled fury. He was galvanized by
the fact that his enemies had resorted to earthly weapons. The sorcery
of the acolytes was limited. Their necromantic resources might well be
exhausted.
Kerim Shah was hurrying up the slope, his hill-men behind him in a
straggling crescent. They loosed as they ran, their arrows splintering
against the walls or arching over the parapet.
The heavy teak portal gave way beneath the Cimmerian's assault, and he
peered inside warily, expecting anything. He was looking into a circular
chamber from which a stair wound upward. On the opposite side of the
chamber a door gaped open, revealing the outer slope--and the backs of
half a dozen green-robed figures in full retreat.
Conan yelled, took a step into the tower, and then native caution jerked
him back, just as a great block of stone fell crashing to the floor
where his foot had been an instant before. Shouting to his followers, he