The People of the Black Circle
the Wazulis take orders from Yar Afzal, or from a low-bred cur?'
The man cringed before his invincible chief, and Yar Afzal, striding up
to him, seized him by the throat and choked him until his face was
turning black. Then he hurled the man savagely against the ground and
stood over him with his tulwar in his hand.
'Is there any who questions my authority?' he roared, and his warriors
looked down sullenly as his bellicose glare swept their semicircle. Yar
Afzal grunted scornfully and sheathed his weapon with a gesture that was
the apex of insult. Then he kicked the fallen agitator with a
concentrated vindictiveness that brought howls from his victim.
'Get down the valley to the watchers on the heights and bring word if
they have seen anything,' commanded Yar Afzal, and the man went, shaking
with fear and grinding his teeth with fury.
Yar Afzal then seated himself ponderously on a stone, growling in his
beard. Conan stood near him, legs braced apart, thumbs hooked in his
girdle, narrowly watching the assembled warriors. They stared at him
sullenly, not daring to brave Yar Afzal's fury, but hating the foreigner
as only a hillman can hate.
'Now listen to me, you sons of nameless dogs, while I tell you what the
lord Conan and I have planned to fool the Kshatriyas.' The boom of Yar
Afzal's bull-like voice followed the discomfited warrior as he slunk
away from the assembly.
The man passed by the cluster of huts, where women who had seen his
defeat laughed at him and called stinging comments, and hastened on
along the trail that wound among spurs and rocks toward the valley head.
Just as he rounded the first turn that took him out of sight of the
village, he stopped short, gaping stupidly. He had not believed it
possible for a stranger to enter the valley of Khurum without being
detected by the hawk-eyed watchers along the heights; yet a man sat
cross-legged on a low ledge beside the path--a man in a camel-hair robe
and a green turban.
The Wazuli's mouth gaped for a yell, and his hand leaped to his
knife-hilt. But at that instant his eyes met those of the stranger and
the cry died in his throat, his fingers went limp. He stood like a
statue, his own eyes glazed and vacant.
For minutes the scene held motionless; then the man on the ledge drew a
cryptic symbol in the dust on the rock with his forefinger. The Wazuli
did not see him place anything within the compass of that emblem, but
presently something gleamed there--a round, shiny black ball that looked
like polished jade. The man in the green turban took this up and tossed
it to the Wazuli, who mechanically caught it.
'Carry this to Yar Afzal,' he said, and the Wazuli turned like an
automaton and went back along the path, holding the black jade ball in
his outstretched hand. He did not even turn his head to the renewed
jeers of the women as he passed the huts. He did not seem to hear.
The man on the ledge gazed after him with a cryptic smile. A girl's head
rose above the rim of the ledge and she looked at him with admiration
and a touch of fear that had not been present the night before.
'Why did you do that?' she asked.
He ran his fingers through her dark locks caressingly.
'Are you still dizzy from your flight on the horse-of-air, that you
doubt my wisdom?' he laughed. 'As long as Yar Afzal lives, Conan will
bide safe among the Wazuli fighting-men. Their knives are sharp, and
there are many of them. What I plot will be safer, even for me, than to
seek to slay him and take her from among them. It takes no wizard to
predict what the Wazulis will do, and what Conan will do, when my victim
hands the globe of Yezud to the chief of Khurum.'
* * * * *
Back before the hut, Yar Afzal halted in the midst of some tirade,
surprized and displeased to see the man he had sent up the valley,
pushing his way through the throng.
'I bade you go to the watchers!' the chief bellowed. 'You have not had
time to come from them.'
The other did not reply; he stood woodenly, staring vacantly into the
chief's face, his palm outstretched holding the jade ball. Conan,
looking over Yar Afzal's shoulder, murmured something and reached to
touch the chief's arm, but as he did so, Yar Afzal, in a paroxysm of
anger, struck the man with his clenched fist and felled him like an ox.
As he fell, the jade sphere rolled to Yar Afzal's foot, and the chief,
seeming to see it for the first time, bent and picked it up. The men,
staring perplexedly at their senseless comrade, saw their chief bend,
but they did not see what he picked up from the ground.
Yar Afzal straightened, glanced at the jade, and made a motion to thrust
it into his girdle.
'Carry that fool to his hut,' he growled. 'He has the look of a
lotus-eater. He returned me a blank stare. I--_aie!_'
In his right hand, moving toward his girdle, he had suddenly felt
movement where movement should not be. His voice died away as he stood
and glared at nothing; and inside his clenched right hand he felt the
quivering of _change_, of _motion_, of _life_. He no longer held a
smooth shining sphere in his fingers. And he dared not look; his tongue
clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not open his hand. His
astonished warriors saw Yar Afzal's eyes distend, the color ebb from his
face. Then suddenly a bellow of agony burst from his bearded lips; he
swayed and fell as if struck by lightning, his right arm tossed out in
front of him. Face down he lay, and from between his opening fingers
crawled a spider--a hideous, black, hairy-legged monster whose body
shone like black jade. The men yelled and gave back suddenly, and the
creature scuttled into a crevice of the rocks and disappeared.
The warriors started up, glaring wildly, and a voice rose above their
clamor, a far-carrying voice of command which came from none knew where.
Afterward each man there--who still lived--denied that he had shouted,
but all there heard it.
'Yar Afzal is dead! Kill the outlander!'
That shout focused their whirling minds as one. Doubt, bewilderment and
fear vanished in the uproaring surge of the blood-lust. A furious yell
rent the skies as the tribesmen responded instantly to the suggestion.
They came headlong across the open space, cloaks flapping, eyes blazing,
knives lifted.
Conan's action was as quick as theirs. As the voice shouted he sprang
for the hut door. But they were closer to him than he was to the door,
and with one foot on the sill he had to wheel and parry the swipe of a
yard-long blade. He split the man's skull--ducked another swinging knife
and gutted the wielder--felled a man with his left fist and stabbed
another in the belly--and heaved back mightily against the closed door
with his shoulders. Hacking blades were nicking chips out of the jambs
about his ears, but the door flew open under the impact of his
shoulders, and he went stumbling backward into the room. A bearded
tribesman, thrusting with all his fury as Conan sprang back, overreached
and pitched head-first through the doorway. Conan stopped, grasped the
slack of his garments and hauled him clear, and slammed the door in the
faces of the men who came surging into it. Bones snapped under the
impact, and the next instant Conan slammed the bolts into place and
whirled with desperate haste to meet the man who sprang from the floor
and tore into action like a madman.
Yasmina cowered in a corner, staring in horror as the two men fought
back and forth across the room, almost trampling her at times; the flash
and clangor of their blades filled the room, and outside the mob
clamored like a wolf-pack, hacking deafeningly at the bronze door with
their long knives, and dashing huge rocks against it. Somebody fetched a
tree trunk, and the door began to stagger under the thunderous assault.
Yasmina clasped her ears, staring wildly. Violence and fury within,
cataclysmic madness without. The stallion in his stall neighed and
reared, thundering with his heels against the walls. He wheeled and
launched his hoofs through the bars just as the tribesman, backing away
from Conan's murderous swipes, stumbled against them. His spine cracked
in three places like a rotten branch and he was hurled headlong against
the Cimmerian, bearing him backward so that they both crashed to the
beaten floor.
Yasmina cried out and ran forward; to her dazed sight it seemed that
both were slain. She reached them just as Conan threw aside the corpse
and rose. She caught his arm, trembling from head to foot.
'Oh, you live! I thought--I thought you were dead!'
He glanced down at her quickly, into the pale, upturned face and the
wide staring dark eyes.
'Why are you trembling?' he demanded. 'Why should you care if I live or
die?'
A vestige of her poise returned to her, and she drew away, making a
rather pitiful attempt at playing the Devi.
'You are preferable to those wolves howling without,' she answered,
gesturing toward the door, the stone sill of which was beginning to
splinter away.
'That won't hold long,' he muttered, then turned and went swiftly to the
stall of the stallion.
Yasmina clenched her hands and caught her breath as she saw him tear
aside the splintered bars and go into the stall with the maddened beast.
The stallion reared above him, neighing terribly, hoofs lifted, eyes and
teeth flashing and ears laid back, but Conan leaped and caught his mane
with a display of sheer strength that seemed impossible, and dragged the
beast down on his forelegs. The steed snorted and quivered, but stood
still while the man bridled him and clapped on the gold-worked saddle,
with the wide silver stirrups.
Wheeling the beast around in the stall, Conan called quickly to Yasmina,
and the girl came, sidling nervously past the stallion's heels. Conan
was working at the stone wall, talking swiftly as he worked.
'A secret door in the wall here, that not even the Wazuli know about.
Yar Afzal showed it to me once when he was drunk. It opens out into the
mouth of the ravine behind the hut. Ha!'
As he tugged at a projection that seemed casual, a whole section of the
wall slid back on oiled iron runners. Looking through, the girl saw a
narrow defile opening in a sheer stone cliff within a few feet of the
hut's back wall. Then Conan sprang into the saddle and hauled her up
before him. Behind them the great door groaned like a living thing and
crashed in, and a yell rang to the roof as the entrance was instantly
flooded with hairy faces and knives in hairy fists. And then the great
stallion went through the wall like a javelin from a catapult, and
thundered into the defile, running low, foam flying from the bit-rings.
That move came as an absolute surprize to the Wazulis. It was a
surprize, too, to those stealing down the ravine. It happened so
quickly--the hurricane-like charge of the great horse--that a man in a
green turban was unable to get out of the way. He went down under the
frantic hoofs, and a girl screamed. Conan got one glimpse of her as they
thundered by--a slim, dark girl in silk trousers and a jeweled
breast-band, flattening herself against the ravine wall. Then the black
horse and his riders were gone up the gorge like the spume blown before
a storm, and the men who came tumbling through the wall into the defile
after them met that which changed their yells of blood-lust to shrill
screams of fear and death.
6 The Mountain of the Black Seers
'Where now?' Yasmina was trying to sit erect on the rocking saddle-bow,
clutching her captor. She was conscious of a recognition of shame that
she should not find unpleasant the feel of his muscular flesh under her
fingers.
'To Afghulistan,' he answered. 'It's a perilous road, but the stallion
will carry us easily, unless we fall in with some of your friends, or my