The People of the Black Circle
that not even the legendary tulwar of Amir Khurum could shatter that
invisible curtain.
In a few words he explained the matter to Kerim Shah, and the Turanian
shrugged his shoulders. 'Well, if our exit is barred, we must find
another. In the meanwhile our way lies forward, does it not?'
With a grunt the Cimmerian turned and strode across the chamber to the
opposite door, with a feeling of treading on the threshold of doom. As
he lifted his knife to shatter the door, it swung silently open as if of
its own accord. He strode into the great hall, flanked with tall glassy
columns. A hundred feet from the door began the broad jade-green steps
of a stair that tapered toward the top like the side of a pyramid. What
lay beyond that stair he could not tell. But between him and its
shimmering foot stood a curious altar of gleaming black jade. Four great
golden serpents twined their tails about this altar and reared their
wedge-shaped heads in the air, facing the four quarters of the compass
like the enchanted guardians of a fabled treasure. But on the altar,
between the arching necks, stood only a crystal globe filled with a
cloudy smoke-like substance, in which floated four golden pomegranates.
The sight stirred some dim recollection in his mind; then Conan heeded
the altar no longer, for on the lower steps of the stair stood four
black-robed figures. He had not seen them come. They were simply there,
tall, gaunt, their vulture-heads nodding in unison, their feet and hands
hidden by their flowing garments.
One lifted his arm and the sleeve fell away revealing his hand--and it
was not a hand at all. Conan halted in mid-stride, compelled against his
will. He had encountered a force differing subtly from Khemsa's
mesmerism, and he could not advance, though he felt it in his power to
retreat if he wished. His companions had likewise halted, and they
seemed even more helpless than he, unable to move in either direction.
The seer whose arm was lifted beckoned to one of the Irakzai, and the
man moved toward him like one in a trance, eyes staring and fixed, blade
hanging in limp fingers. As he pushed past Conan, the Cimmerian threw an
arm across his breast to arrest him. Conan was so much stronger than the
Irakzai that in ordinary circumstances he could have broken his spine
between his hands. But now the muscular arm was brushed aside like straw
and the Irakzai moved toward the stair, treading jerkily and
mechanically. He reached the steps and knelt stiffly, proffering his
blade and bending his head. The Seer took the sword. It flashed as he
swung it up and down. The Irakzai's head tumbled from his shoulders and
thudded heavily on the black marble floor. An arch of blood jetted from
the severed arteries and the body slumped over and lay with arms spread
wide.
Again a malformed hand lifted and beckoned, and another Irakzai
stumbled stiffly to his doom. The ghastly drama was re-enacted and
another headless form lay beside the first.
As the third tribesman clumped his way past Conan to his death, the
Cimmerian, his veins bulging in his temples with his efforts to break
past the unseen barrier that held him, was suddenly aware of allied
forces, unseen, but waking into life about him. This realization came
without warning, but so powerfully that he could not doubt his instinct.
His left hand slid involuntarily under his Bakhariot belt and closed on
the Stygian girdle. And as he gripped it he felt new strength flood his
numbed limbs; the will to live was a pulsing white-hot fire, matched by
the intensity of his burning rage.
The third Irakzai was a decapitated corpse, and the hideous finger was
lifting again when Conan felt the bursting of the invisible barrier. A
fierce, involuntary cry burst from his lips as he leaped with the
explosive suddenness of pent-up ferocity. His left hand gripped the
sorcerer's girdle as a drowning man grips a floating log, and the long
knife was a sheen of light in his right. The men on the steps did not
move. They watched calmly, cynically; if they felt surprise they did not
show it. Conan did not allow himself to think what might chance when he
came within knife-reach of them. His blood was pounding in his temples,
a mist of crimson swam before his sight. He was afire with the urge to
kill--to drive his knife deep into flesh and bone, and twist the blade
in blood and entrails.
Another dozen strides would carry him to the steps where the sneering
demons stood. He drew his breath deep, his fury rising redly as his
charge gathered momentum. He was hurtling past the altar with its golden
serpents when like a levin-flash there shot across his mind again as
vividly as if spoken in his external ear, the cryptic words of Khemsa:
'_Break the crystal ball!_'
His reaction was almost without his own volition. Execution followed
impulse so spontaneously that the greatest sorcerer of the age would not
have had time to read his mind and prevent his action. Wheeling like a
cat from his headlong charge, he brought his knife crashing down upon
the crystal. Instantly the air vibrated with a peal of terror, whether
from the stairs, the altar, or the crystal itself he could not tell.
Hisses filled his ears as the golden serpents, suddenly vibrant with
hideous life, writhed and smote at him. But he was fired to the speed of
a maddened tiger. A whirl of steel sheared through the hideous trunks
that waved toward him, and he smote the crystal sphere again and yet
again. And the globe burst with a noise like a thunderclap, raining
fiery shards on the black marble, and the gold pomegranates, as if
released from captivity, shot upward toward the lofty roof and were
gone.
A mad screaming, bestial and ghastly, was echoing through the great
hall. On the steps writhed four black-robed figures, twisting in
convulsions, froth dripping from their livid mouths. Then with one
frenzied crescendo of inhuman ululation they stiffened and lay still,
and Conan knew that they were dead. He stared down at the altar and the
crystal shards. Four headless golden serpents still coiled about the
altar, but no alien life now animated the dully gleaming metal.
Kerim Shah was rising slowly from his knees, whither he had been dashed
by some unseen force. He shook his head to clear the ringing from his
ears.
'Did you hear that crash when you struck? It was as if a thousand
crystal panels shattered all over the castle as that globe burst. Were
the souls of the wizards imprisoned in those golden balls?--Ha!'
Conan wheeled as Kerim Shah drew his sword and pointed.
Another figure stood at the head of the stair. His robe, too, was black,
but of richly embroidered velvet, and there was a velvet cap on his
head. His face was calm, and not unhandsome.
'Who the devil are you?' demanded Conan, staring up at him, knife in
hand.
'I am the Master of Yimsha!' His voice was like the chime of a temple
bell, but a note of cruel mirth ran through it.
'Where is Yasmina?' demanded Kerim Shah.
The Master laughed down at him.
'What is that to you, dead man? Have you so quickly forgotten my
strength, once lent to you, that you come armed against me, you poor
fool? I think I will take your heart, Kerim Shah!'
He held out his hand as if to receive something, and the Turanian cried
out sharply like a man in mortal agony. He reeled drunkenly, and then,
with a splintering of bones, a rending of flesh and muscle and a
snapping of mail-links, his breast burst outward with a shower of blood,
and through the ghastly aperture something red and dripping shot through
the air into the Master's outstretched hand, as a bit of steel leaps to
the magnet. The Turanian slumped to the floor and lay motionless, and
the Master laughed and hurled the object to fall before Conan's feet--a
still-quivering human heart.
With a roar and a curse Conan charged the stair. From Khemsa's girdle he
felt strength and deathless hate flow into him to combat the terrible
emanation of power that met him on the steps. The air filled with a
shimmering steely haze through which he plunged like a swimmer, head
lowered, left arm bent about his face, knife gripped low in his right
hand. His half-blinded eyes, glaring over the crook of his elbow, made
out the hated shape of the Seer before and above him, the outline
wavering as a reflection wavers in disturbed water.
He was racked and torn by forces beyond his comprehension, but he felt
a driving power outside and beyond his own lifting him inexorably upward
and onward, despite the wizard's strength and his own agony.
Now he had reached the head of the stairs, and the Master's face floated
in the steely haze before him, and a strange fear shadowed the
inscrutable eyes. Conan waded through the mist as through a surf, and
his knife lunged upward like a live thing. The keen point ripped the
Master's robe as he sprang back with a low cry. Then before Conan's
gaze, the wizard vanished--simply disappeared like a burst bubble, and
something long and undulating darted up one of the smaller stairs that
led up to left and right from the landing.
Conan charged after it, up the left-hand stair, uncertain as to just
what he had seen whip up those steps, but in a berserk mood that drowned
the nausea and horror whispering at the back of his consciousness.
He plunged out into a broad corridor whose uncarpeted floor and
untapestried walls were of polished jade, and something long and swift
whisked down the corridor ahead of him, and into a curtained door. From
within the chamber rose a scream of urgent terror. The sound lent wings
to Conan's flying feet and he hurtled through the curtains and headlong
into the chamber within.
A frightful scene met his glare. Yasmina cowered on the farther edge of
a velvet-covered dais, screaming her loathing and horror, an arm lifted
as if to ward off attack, while before her swayed the hideous head of a
giant serpent, shining neck arching up from dark-gleaming coils. With a
choked cry Conan threw his knife.
Instantly the monster whirled and was upon him like the rush of wind
through tall grass. The long knife quivered in its neck, point and a
foot of blade showing on one side, and the hilt and a hand's-breadth of
steel on the other, but it only seemed to madden the giant reptile. The
great head towered above the man who faced it, and then darted down, the
venom-dripping jaws gaping wide. But Conan had plucked a dagger from his
girdle and he stabbed upward as the head dipped down. The point tore
through the lower jaw and transfixed the upper, pinning them together.
The next instant the great trunk had looped itself about the Cimmerian
as the snake, unable to use its fangs, employed its remaining form of
attack.
Conan's left arm was pinioned among the bone-crushing folds, but his
right was free. Bracing his feet to keep upright, he stretched forth his
hand, gripped the hilt of the long knife jutting from the serpent's
neck, and tore it free in a shower of blood. As if divining his purpose
with more than bestial intelligence, the snake writhed and knotted,
seeking to cast its loops about his right arm. But with the speed of
light the long knife rose and fell, shearing halfway through the
reptile's giant trunk.
Before he could strike again, the great pliant loops fell from him and
the monster dragged itself across the floor, gushing blood from its
ghastly wounds. Conan sprang after it, knife lifted, but his vicious
swipe cut empty air as the serpent writhed away from him and struck its
blunt nose against a paneled screen of sandalwood. One of the panels
gave inward and the long, bleeding barrel whipped through it and was
gone.
Conan instantly attacked the screen. A few blows rent it apart and he
glared into the dim alcove beyond. No horrific shape coiled there; there