Part 16 (1/2)
”More!” he cried ”Offer !” A red ive you a broken back! Did Shukeli send you here to , whitehis thick neck to peer into Conan's savage eyes ”I know you fro a free people, before the Stygians took me and sold me into the north Do you not remember the sack of Abombi, when your sea-wolves swara you slew a chief and a chief fled from you It was my brother who died; it was I who fled I demand of you a blood-price, Aold pieces,” growled Conan
The red eyes glittered, the white teeth flashed wolfishly in the torchlight
”Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black old can never pay for blood The price I ask is your head!”
The last as aConan tensed, unconsciously straining against his shackles in his abhorrence of dying like a sheep; then he was frozen by a greater horror Over the black's shoulder he saw a vague horrific for in the darkness
”Tsotha will never know!” laughed the black fiendishly, too engrossed in his gloating triu else, too drunk with hate to know that Death swayed behind his shoulder ”He will not come into the vaults until the demons have torn your bones from their chains I will have your head, As like ebon colureat black ht And at that instant the titanic shadow behind hie-shaped head smote with an impact that re-echoed down the tunnels Not a sound caony With the thud of the stroke, Conan saw the life go out of the wide black eyes with the suddenness of a candle blown out The blow knocked the great black body clear across the corridor and horribly the gigantic sinuous shape whipped around it in glistening coils that hid it fro of bones ca made his heart leap madly The sword and the keys had flown frole on the stone and the keys lay al's feet
He tried to bend to them, but the chain was too short; al99of his heart, he slipped one foot fro his foot up, he grasped the the yell of ferocious exultation that rose instinctively to his lips
An instant's fuht up the fallen sword and glared about Only eed a led, tattered object that only faintly resembled a human body Conan turned to the open door A few quick strides brought hihter shrilled through the vaults, and the grille shot hoh the bars peered a face like a fiendishly oyle Shukeli the eunuch, who had followed his stolen keys Surely he did not, in his gloating, see the sword in the prisoner's hand With a terrible curse Conan struck as a cobra strikes; the great blade hissed between the bars and Shukeli's laughter broke in a death-screa to his killer, and cru vainly at his spilling entrails
Conan snarled in savage satisfaction; but he was still a prisoner His keys were futile against the bolt which could be worked only from the outside His experienced touch told him the bars were hard as the sword; an attempt to hew his way to freedom would only splinter his one weapon Yet he found dents on those adas, and wondered with an involuntary shudder what naardless, there was but one thing for hi the torch from the niche, he set off down the corridor, sword in hand He saw no sign of the serpent or its victireat smear of blood on the stone floor
Darkness stalked on noiseless feet about hi torch On either hand he saw dark openings, but he kept to thethe floor ahead of him carefully, lest he fall into so piteously Another of Tsotha's victi aside, followed the sound down a srew nearer as he advanced, and lifting his torch hecloser, he halted in sudden horror at the amorphic bulk which sprawled before hiested an octopus, but its malformed tentacles were too short for its size, and its substance was a quaking, jelly-like stuff whichthis loathso-like head, and he was frozen with nauseated horror to realize that the sound of weeping was coed to an aboreat unstable eyes of thebulk toward hi his sword The creature ht be composed of terrestrial matter, but it shook his very soul to look upon it, and he doubted the power of man-made weapons to har and100floundering after hihter The unered his reason It was exactly such laughter as he had heard bubble obscenely from the fat lips of the salacious woirls were stripped naked on the public auction block By what hellish arts had Tsotha brought this unnatural being into life? Conan felt vaguely that he had looked on blaspheainst the eternal laws of nature
He ran toward the main corridor, but before he reached it he crossed a sort of small square chamber, where two tunnels crossed As he reached this chaly aware of some small squat bulk on the floor ahead of hiht or swerve aside, his foot struck so that squalled shrilly, and he was precipitated headlong, the torch flying frouished as it struck the stone floor
Half stunned by his fall, Conan rose and groped in the darkness His sense of direction was confused, and he was unable to decide in which direction lay the main corridor He did not look for the torch, as he had no s of the tunnels, and he chose one at rando he traversed it in utter darkness, he never knew, but suddenly his barbarian's instinct of near peril halted hi he had had when standing on the brink of great precipices in the darkness Dropping to all fours, he edged forward, and presently his outflung hand encountered the edge of a well, into which the tunnel floor dropped abruptly As far down as he could reach the sides fell away sheerly, dank and slimy to his touch He stretched out an are with the point of his sword He could leap across it, then, but there was no point in that He had taken the wrong tunnel and the ht this, he felt a faintfrom the well, stirred his black mane Conan's skin crawled He tried to tell himself that this well connected somehoith the outer world, but his instincts told hi unnatural He was not merely inside the hill; he was below it, far below the level of the city streets How then could an outer wind find its way into the pits and blow up frohostly wind, like dru of Aquilonia
He rose to his feet and backed away, and as he did so floated up out of the well What it was, Conan did not know He could see nothing in the darkness, but he distinctly felt a presence an invisible, intangible intelligence which hovered , he fled the way he had come Far ahead he saw a tiny red spark He headed for it, and long before he thought to have reached it, he caro into a solid wall, and saw the spark at his feet It was his torch, the fla coal Carefully he took it up and blew upon it, fanning it into flah as the tiny blaze leaped up He was back in the chamber where the tunnels crossed, and his sense of direction came back
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He located the tunnel by which he had left the main corridor, and even as he started toward it, his torch flaain he felt a presence, and he lifted his torch, glaring about
He saw nothing; yet he sensed, so that hovered in the air, dripping sli obscenities that he could not hear but was in so viciously with his sword and it felt as if he were cleaving cobwebs A cold horror shook hi breath on his naked back as he ran
But when he caer aware of any presence, visible or invisible Down it he went, ed and taloned fiends to leap at him from the darkness The tunnels were not silent From the bowels of the earth in all directions ca in a sane world There were titterings, squeals of de howls, and once the unhter of a hyena ended awfully in hu blasphemy He heard the pad of stealthy feet, and in the limpses of shadowy forms, monstrous and abnormal in outline
It was as if he had wandered into hell a hell of Tsotha-lanti's reat corridor, though he distinctly heard the greedy sucking-in of slavering lips, and felt the burning glare of hungry eyes And presently he knehy A slithering sound behind him electrified hi out his torch Down the corridor he heard the great serpent crawling, sluggish fro whimpered in fear and slunk away in the darkness Evidently the round and the other ave it room
To Conan the serpent was the least horror of them; he al, tittering obscenity, and the dripping,that came out of the well At least it was of earthlydeath, but it threatened only physical extinction, whereas these other horrors menaced mind and soul as well
After it had passed on down the corridor he followed, at what he hoped was a safe distance, blowing his torch into flaone far when he heard a low moan that seemed to emanate from the black entrance of a tunnel near by Caution warned hih the torch that was now little , yet what he sahat he had least expected He was looking into a broad cell, and a space of this was caged off with closely set bars extending fro, set firure, which, as he approached, he saas either a man, or the exact likeness of a man, twined and bound about with the tendrils of a thick vine which seeh the solid stone of the floor It was
102covered with strangely pointed leaves and crimson blossoms not the satiny red of natural petals, but a livid, unnatural cri, pliant branches wound about theflesh with lustful avid kisses One great blosso drooled froony, and the eyes looked full at Conan But there was no light of intelligence in thelassy, the eyes of an idiot
Now the great cri lips The liuish; the tendrils of the plant quivered as if in ecstasy, vibrating their full snaky lengths Waves of changing hues surged over therew deeper, more venomous