The Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard [best ebook reader for laptop txt] 📗
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The street broadened, and Conan was aware that he was getting into the
part of the city dedicated to the temples. The great structures reared
their black bulks against the dim stars, grim, indescribably menacing
in the flare of the few torches. And suddenly he heard a low scream
from—a woman on the other side of the street and somewhat ahead of
him-a naked courtezan wearing the tall plumed head-dress of her class.
She was shrinking back against the wall, staring across at something
he could not yet see. At her cry the few people on the street halted
suddenly as if frozen. At the same instant Conan was aware of a
sinister slithering ahead of him. Then about the dark comer of the
building he was approaching poked a hideous, wedge-shaped head, and
after it flowed coil after coil of rippling, darkly glistening trunk.
The Cimmerian recoiled, remembering tales he had heard-serpents were
sacred to Set, god of Stygia, who men said was himself a serpent.
Monsters such as this were kept in the temples of Set, and when they
hungered, were allowed to crawl forth into the streets to take what
prey they wished. Their ghastly feasts were considered a sacrifice to
the scaly god.
The Stygians within Conan’s sight fell to their knees, men and women,
and passively awaited their fate. One the great serpent would select,
would lap in scaly coils, crush to a red pulp and swallow as a rat-snake swallows a mouse. The others would live. That was the will of
the gods.
But it was not Conan’s will. The python glided toward him, its
attention probably attracted by the fact that he was the only human in
sight still standing erect. Gripping his great knife under his mantle,
Conan hoped the slimy brute would pass him by. But it halted before
him and reared up horrifically in the flickering torchlight, its
forked tongue flickering in and out, its cold eyes glittering with the
ancient cruelty of the serpent-folk. Its neck arched, but before it
could dart, Conan whipped his knife from under his mantle and struck
like a flicker of lightning. The broad blade split that wedge-shaped
head and sheared deep into the thick neck.
Conan wrenched his knife free and sprang clear as the great body
knotted and looped and Whipped terrifically in its death throes. In
the moment that he stood staring in morbid fascination, the only sound
was the thud and swish of the snake’s tail against the stones.
Then from the shocked votaries burst a terrible cry: “Blasphemer! He
has slain the sacred son of Set! Slay him! Slay! Slay!”
Stones whizzed about him and the crazed Stygians rushed at him,
shrieking hysterically, while from all sides others emerged from their
houses and took up the cry. With a curse Conan wheeled and darted into
the black mouth of an alley. He heard the patter of bare feet on the
flags behind him as he ran more by feel than by sight, and the walls
resounded to the vengeful yells of the pursuers. Then his left hand
found a break in the wall, and he turned sharply into another,
narrower alley. On both sides rose sheer black stone walls. High above
him he could see a thin line of stars. These giant walls, he knew,
were the walls of temples. He heard, behind him, the pack sweep past
the dark mouth in full cry. Their shouts grew distant, faded away.
They had missed the smaller alley and run straight on in the
blackness. He too kept straight ahead, though the thought of
encountering another of Set’s “sons” in the darkness brought a shudder
from him.
Then somewhere ahead of him he caught a moving glow, like that of a
crawling glow-worm. He halted, flattened himself against the wall and
gripped his knife. He knew what it was: a man approaching with a
torch. Now it was so close he could make out the dark hand that
gripped it, and the dim oval of a dark face. A few more steps and the
man would certainly see him. He sank into a tigerish crouch-the torch
halted. A door was briefly etched in the glow, while the torch-bearer
fumbled with it. Then it opened, the tall figure vanished through it,
and darkness closed again on the alley. There was a sinister
suggestion of furtiveness about that slinking figure, entering the
alley-door in darkness; a priest, perhaps returning from some dark
errand.
But Conan groped toward the door. If one man came up that alley with a
torch, others might come at any time. To retreat the way he had come
might mean to run full into the mob from which he was fleeing. At any
moment they might return, find the narrower alley and come howling
down it. He felt hemmed in by those sheer, unscalable walls, desirous
of escape, even if escape meant invading some unknown building.
The heavy bronze door was not locked. It opened under his fingers and
he peered through the crack. He was looking into a great square
chamber of massive black stone. A torch smoldered in a niche in the
wall. The chamber was empty. He glided through the lacquered door and
closed it behind him.
His sandaled feet made no sound as he crossed the black marble floor.
A teak door stood partly open, and gliding through this, knife in
hand, he came out into a great, dim, shadowy place whose lofty ceiling
was only a hint of darkness high above him, toward which the black
walls swept upward. On all sides black-arched doorways opened into the
great still hall. It was lit by curious bronze lamps that gave a dim
weird light. On the other side of the great hall a broad black marble
stairway, without a railing, marched upward to lose itself in gloom,
and above him on all sides dun galleries hung like black stone ledges.
Conan shivered; he was in a temple of some Stygian god, if not Set
himself, then someone only less grim. And the shrine did not lack an
occupant. In the midst of the great hall stood a black stone altar,
massive, somber, without carvings or ornament, and upon it coiled one
of the great sacred serpents, its iridescent scales shimmering in the
lamplight. It did not move, and Conan remembered stories that the
priests kept these creatures drugged part of the time. The Cimmerian
took an uncertain step out from the door, then shrank back suddenly,
not into the room he had just quitted, but into a velvet-curtained
recess. He had heard a soft step somewhere near by.
From one of the black arches emerged a tall, powerful figure in
sandals and silken loincloth, with a wide mantle trailing from his
shoulders. But face and head were hidden by a monstrous mask, a half-bestial, half-human countenance, from the crest of which floated a
mass of ostrich plumes.
In certain ceremonies the Stygian priests went masked. Conan hoped the
man would not discover him, but some instinct warned the Stygian. He
turned abruptly from his destination, which apparently was the stair,
and stepped straight to the recess. As he jerked aside the velvet
hanging, a hand darted from the shadows, crushed the cry in his throat
and jerked him headlong into the alcove, and the knife impaled him.
Conan’s next move was the obvious one suggested by logic. He lifted
off the grinning mask and drew it over his own head. The fisherman’s
mantle he flung over the body of the priest, which he concealed behind
the hangings, and drew the priestly mantle about his own brawny
shoulders. Fate had given him a disguise. All Khemi might well be
searching now for the blasphemer who dared defend himself against a
sacred snake; but who would dream of looking for him under the mask of
a priest?
He strode boldly from the alcove and headed for one of the arched
doorways at random; but he had not taken a dozen strides When he
wheeled again, all his senses edged for peril.
A band of masked figures filed down the stair, appareled exactly as he
was. He hesitated, caught in the open, and stood still, trusting to
his disguise, though cold sweat gathered on his forehead and the backs
of his hands. No word was spoken. Like phantoms they descended into
the great hall and moved past him toward a black arch. The leader
carried an ebon staff Which supported a grinning white skull, and
Conan knew it was one of the ritualistic processions so inexplicable
to a foreigner, but which played a strong-and often sinister-part in
the Stygian religion. The last figure turned his head slightly toward
the motionless Cimmerian, as if expecting him to follow. Not to do
what was obviously expected of him would rouse instant suspicion.
Conan fell in behind the last man and suited his gait to their
measured pace.
They traversed a long, dark, vaulted corridor in which, Conan noticed
uneasily, the skull on the staff glowed phosphorescently. He felt a
surge of unreasoning, wild animal panic that urged him to rip out his
knife and slash right and left at these uncanny figures, to flee madly
from this grim, dark temple. But he held himself in check, fighting
down the dim monstrous intuitions that rose in the back of his mind
and peopled the gloom with shadowy shapes of horror; and presently he
barely stifled a sigh of relief as they filed through a great double-valved door which was three times higher than a man, and emerged into
the starlight.
Conan wondered if he dared fade into some dark alley; but hesitated,
uncertain, and down the long dark street they padded silently, while
such folk as they met turned their heads away and fled from them. The
procession kept far out from the walls; to turn and bolt into any of
the alleys they passed would be too conspicuous. While he mentally
fumed and cursed, they came to a low-arched gateway in the southern
wall, and through this they filed. Ahead of them and about them lay
clusters of low, flat-topped mud houses, and palm-groves, shadowy in
the starlight. Now if ever, thought Conan, was his time to escape his
silent companions.
But the moment the gate was left behind them those companions were no
longer silent. They began to mutter excitedly among themselves. The
measured, ritualistic gait was abandoned, the staff with its skull was
tucked unceremoniously under the leader’s arm, and the whole group
broke ranks and hurried onward. And Conan hurried with them. For in
the low murmur of speech he had caught a word that galvanized him. The
word was: “Tuttothmes!”
Chapter 18: “I Am the Woman Who Never Died”
CONAN STARED WITH burning interest at his masked companions. One of
them was Thutothmes, or else the destination of the band was a
rendezvous with the man he sought. And he knew what the destination
was, when beyond the palms he glimpsed a black triangular bulk looming
against the shadowy sky.
They passed through the belt of huts and groves, and if any man saw
them he was careful not to show himself. The huts were dark. Behind
them the black towers of Khemi rose gloomily against the stars that
were mirrored in the waters of the harbor; ahead of them the desert
stretched away in dim darkness; somewhere a jackal yapped. The quick-passing sandals of the silent neophytes made no noise in the sand.
They might have been ghosts, moving toward that colossal pyramid that
rose out of the murk of the desert. There was no sound over all
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