Authors: Poul Anderson
Daris returned, in a scrunch of sand beneath bare feet. He glanced up. Her form was tall and shadowy above him. 'Hunh,' he grunted. 'At last. Where's Falco?'
'He decided he would stay off by himself for a while and think over what we talked about,' she replied.
'Talked? I hope you had a good romp.'
'What?' She settled down opposite him. Dim firelight glimmered in eyeballs. 'What do you mean?'
'What do you suppose?' he retorted. 'Oh, I know, I have no claim on you. Do as you please.'
'Conan!' He had never heard such shock in her before, nor seen it on her. She sat upright, both hands lifted as if to ward off a blow. 'You don't imagine – How could you?'
'Do you suppose I am blind? He's a pretty boy, whereas I have been dull company of late. I tell you, I don't mind. Eat. I am going to my rest.'
'But I love you!' Daris nearly sobbed. She caught hold of herself. After a few heartbeats she said quietly but steadily, looking straight at him. 'Hear me. By Mitra I swear, nothing untoward has happened, unless you count a single brief kiss at the end. Falco and I talked, simply talked. He was sick for that Senufer woman in Khemi.'
'For Nehekba, you mean,' Conan sneered. 'The more fool he.'
'I did not repeat our idea to him, that the two are the same. That would have driven him from me. No, I got him to talk about himself, no hard task for me. After he had spilled out his sorrow, it I weighted him much less, and I could lead him back to such fancies of the future as belong to a healthy lad. He is not free of her by any means, but his spirit has returned to him. I think he will sleep well, tonight and be able to fight tomorrow if need be. That is all, Conan, I all that went on... though my own thoughts did not end there.' I
'I must take your word, of course,' he said with studied indifference.
She regarded him in a kind of horror. 'Conan, what has been happening? What sorcery has been at work? It is not like you to be this surly, yes, nasty. Nor was it like Falco to wallow in self-pity till he was almost useless. Have demons of the desert possessed you?'
Her mind racing ahead, she did not see his resentment increase. 'No,' she mused, while her gaze sought the stars, 'not that, when you both kept plodding loyally onward. But a black spell could have played on weaknesses – his infatuation; your vexation by a country never meant for your race, and... yes... even more, no doubt, your yearning for Bêlit. Re-echoing such moods, the spell could worsen them beyond what nature would have allowed.' Her look returned to him. Eagerness entered her tone. 'If I am right, it cannot be an actual binding laid on you. Falco has cast if off him, with my help. Let me next help you, my beloved!'
'Why should you trouble?' Conan snapped. 'I am surly, nasty, and weak, remember?'
He saw in the gloom how she flinched, and all at once wanted to take her in his arms and tell her he was sorry. Before he could speak, pride responded to him. The daughter of Ausar rose to her feet under the stars and said, 'We will talk more of this whenever you feel ready. First seek the rest that you desire. Good night.' She took her sleeping bag and walked off into the dark.
Conan lay long awake, trying to puzzle out what he should have done. They could have argued rights and wrongs till dawn, when he needed his sleep against the morrow. Women!
The noonday sun made heaven a furnace, the land beneath a bed of coals. Air wavered until dunes at a distance looked uneasy as flames; but there went no ghost of a breeze. Sounds of hoof-beats, creaking harness, jingling metal vanished into an infinity of silence, like raindrops vanishing into an eternal drought.
Conan slitted his eyes and strove to observe what lay ahead. Glare, mirage, and distance turned the sight unreal, a bad dream. Drifts of sand were piled nearly to the top of what remained of outer walls. Where these had crumbled, he descried buildings within, black stone masses, equally ruinous; yet somehow the shapes kept a hint of the inhuman, too low and narrow for the length, sides slanting at curious angles up to roofs grotesquely decorated. Legend said that most of the city had been underground; it whispered that those vaults and passages were to this day inhabited. A number of monoliths and twisted columns were standing, whether isolated or in groups. At the middle of the city loomed the form of a dolmen, a prehistoric tomb, but built of polished ebon slabs so huge that no man could tell how they had been raised into place.
There, Conan recalled from Parasan's words, was where the Ax of Varanghi awaited him. Despite his ill humour, despite the primitive fears that surged beneath a hard-held determination, hit pulse leaped. He drew sword and swung it on high for an oriflamme. 'Onward!' he trumpeted, and spurred his horse to a canter.
His men lifted a ragged cheer and followed. They too felt qualms, but they were all volunteers; if nothing else, the honour of their clans forbade them to be daunted.
As the troop advanced, a wind sprang up. It whined across illimitable wastes, it plucked at garments and sucked at throats and lungs. Dust devils whirled. Grit scudded; Conan crunched it between his teeth.
Faster than he thought should be possible, haze boiled over the horizon and across the sky. The sun reddened, dimmed, vanished. Driving darkness hid his goal. The storm lacerated his skin and well-nigh choked off his breath, before he drew a flap of his burnoose around for a veil. His horse stumbled, whinnying in pain. He rowelled the animal savagely and pushed on. If nothing else, he thought amidst the shrill howling, the hiss of dust and sand in flight, his party must find shelter till the weather died down: and where was that but in Pteion?
Blurred vastness appeared to right and left, pieces of the city wall. He flogged his horse to go in between. Though he got some relief beyond, with those ancient defences for a windbreak, the air was still acrid and murky, and the red-black gloom was thicker still. Ahead, he vaguely made out one or two of the buildings he had seen from afar. A look over his shoulder revealed the nearest of his followers. Those farther back were lost to sight, but doubtless each man kept in view the ones immediately before him. Wind yelled. No – that screech was something different! Conan twisted round in his saddle and saw what came out of the night suddenly laid on this ground, move toward him in attack.
XVII
Quest of the Ax
At first it seemed a troop of human soldiers advanced in a strangely stiff formation from the inner city. The question flashed through him how they could have arrived this fast, when the closest well-populated region in Stygia was remoter than Thuran. He reined in and signalled his men to draw nigh, dismount, secure their animals, prepare for combat. The highlanders had no cavalry tradition. He kept his own stirrups, and gestured Falco to do the same. Theirs were trained war-horses captured from the enemy. A couple of skilled horseback fighters ought to count for much, when yonder force had nobody riding.
Again a horn screamed, like none that Conan had ever heard before. Overtones ripped at his nerves. The noise did not come from the foe, but from above. The barbarian glanced up. Though scudding dust choked off vision within yards, he thought he glimpsed a deeper darkness in motion there, as if great wings wheeled and soared.
The strangers came onward. Now Conan saw their front ranks I more clearly. He stiffened. Terror stabbed him. Daris, also still in the saddle, stifled a scream. Falco called on his gods. The Taians wailed.
Those were not living men, they were dried corpses. Some bore archaic helmets and cuirasses over blackened skin, most wore only cerements gone ragged during millennia. In many, bones jutted through desiccated flesh. The sunken faces were unstirring, empty of expression; what eyes remained were dull, tearless, unwinking; I breasts drew no breath, hearts did not beat behind ribs. Legs moved puppet-like. The company was armed with shortswords of antique shape or spears whose heads flared in the same fashion, hundred or more. The shuffle of their feet was the single sound they made.
'Ghosts, ghosts,' Daris moaned. 'The tombs of Pteion have yielded their dead to go against us.'
Aye, thought Conan fleetingly, in this unnatural gloom all sun-shunning horrors could come forth. But who had raised it before raising them? How could anyone in Stygia have known the Taian plan? A second shock pierced him as he remembered what he had earlier chosen to forget, the eagle outside Ausar's tent.
Tyris the guide screamed. 'Mitra, forgive me that I entered this unholy place!' Conan heard an answering babble among the warriors. He glanced back, saw them assembled but in an array that wavered. At any instant, somebody would bolt. Then blind panic would seize the rest and stampede them forth to perish in the desert.
The horn above the storm laughed.
Conan never knew whether sheer desperation drove out his own fear, or the smouldering anger of his journey burst into flame. Battle fury took hold of him. He spurred forward. 'Hai, Crom!' he roared. 'Varuna of the Lightning! Wakonga mutusi! Bêlit, Bêlit!'
A cadaver in the front line jerkily raised its spear and thrust at him. The point glanced off the chain mail beneath his slit kaftan, which he had donned this morning. He struck it aside. His mount pushed on at his behest, into the throng. He leaned over. The sword blazed in his hand. He felt steel hit, meet less resistance than from living muscle, and shear on through. A head flew free, struck the sand, rolled to a halt. Hideously, the body did not bleed or fall -but it tottered about, spear flailing, as might a decapitated insect.
Conan reared his charger. Hooves came down, crushed bone, smashed a form to shapelessness that writhed. He smote at a helmet. The impact clanged dully, split age-eaten metal, did not reach the skull but broke a fragile neck. That head lolled as the owner continued striking. Conan hewed off the sword arm.
Falco had plucked up heart and ridden into the fray. His sabre whirred. Daris, inexperienced in this sort of fighting, nonetheless kept her steed a-dance on the fringes and wielded a spear.
Yet the dead were not feeble. Slow, awkward, they felt no pain, lost no blood, could only be disabled by the shrewdest of blows. Gashes reddened the horses, surrounded by thrusters and stabbers. The riders began to take flesh wounds, and might at any moment receive worse. Meanwhile most of the deathling troop had rustled past them and fallen on the Taians.
'Break through!' Conan cried to Falco. In a right-and-left hail of sword-cuts, thunder of kicks and stampings, they did. The corpses they had fought did not pursue, but went on to join battle against the clansmen. Dismembered pieces jerked and squirmed at their rear.
Conan drew deep, shaken breaths through a fold of his burnoose. Shielding eyes with hands, he looked toward the combat. It raged loud and frightful, men sustained slashes and stabs, men fell dead and they moved no more. But the Taians held fast. War cries and panted clan chants defied hooting wind and sibilant red dust. He had shown them that a strong arm and an undaunted heart could meet even such as these.
'Shall we attack from behind?' Falco asked. Ardour burned in his eyes.
'No,' Conan decided. 'We would only be two more, and the outcome of that fight is odds-on at best. Also, we know not what further devilments the enemy has at his beck. Best we take this chance to seek the Ax. If Parasan spoke sooth, that is a weapon to use against hell itself.'
Daris drew nigh. 'It is fitting that the three of us go,' she said. Her look upon Conan pleaded, May I again be your comrade?
The Cimmerian shook his head. 'No, best you stay here and encourage the men. Some will see Falco and me leave, and wonder, and their will could break yet. If you abide, though, their princess, I descendant of Varanghi – do you understand?'
Pain tightened her lips, but she nodded. 'Yes. Mitra ward you.' I Unable to say more, she trotted off.
Conan stared after her for a second before he clipped, 'Let's begone,' and led the way on into the city. Sight and sound of the battle were soon lost.
Black walls lined a buried street. Though low and sloping, they gave added protection from the storm. One could see some more than on a moonlit night when demons may wander abroad. Swords unsheathed, Conan and Falco made for the giant dolmen by memory, observation, and sense of direction rather than vision.
'I have heard,' said the Ophirite, 'that after Pteion was abandoned by the living, it was used for several generations as a burial ground.'
Conan wondered momentarily what they had been like in life, those men whose dead bodies he had hacked asunder. Had they also laughed, loved, drunk deep, fared afar, begotten, sorrowed, wished for immortality? Were their liches mere machinery used by a sorcerer – Tothapis, surely Tothapis! - or were their souls still trapped within?
Ahead on his left, he saw a portal yawn wide. Carved in the stone above it, time-blurred by recognizable, was an out-sized human skull. Abruptly he halted and cursed. Figures were issuing thence.
They pullulated forth like maggots from rotting flesh till they formed a line three or four deep across the way. Conan's throat constricted, and a cold crawling passed over him. The naked, grey-skinned forms were manlike, in a skeletal fashion, but inhumanly long arms ended in great claws, and many squatted on all fours as jackals might while digging up a grave. Bestial too were the hairless heads, point-eared, muzzled, fanged, with eyes aglow like the eyes of owls. They leered, gibbered, let black tongues hang out, pawed the sand, crouched waiting.
'Ghouls,' Falco groaned. 'What mummies laid away through ages keep them fed?' The hand that drew a Sunsign trembled, the mouth that mumbled a prayer was dry. Thereafter he was able to ask, 'Sh – shall we retreat, try to find a different approach?'
Conan mastered his own dismay, squeezed it down into a solid lump of loathing. 'No,' he grated, 'this dump must be acrawl with different things just as bad. And we could easily get lost. There's no time to waste. We'll go on through.'
'I am afraid that a single bite or scratch from those carrion eaters – deadly infection -'