Conan of Cimmeria Part 5

Sa.s.san was pulling at the various ornaments and projections on the portal. They heard him cry out in triumph as it moved under his hands.

Then his cry changed to a scream as the door, a ton of bronze, swayed outward and fell crashing, squashing the Iranistani like an insect. He was completely hidden by the great metal slab, from beneath which oozed streams of crimson.

Zyras shrugged. "I said he was a fool. Ostorio must have found some way to swing the door without releasing it from its hinges."

One less knife in the back to watch for, thought Conan. "Those hinges are false," he said, examining the mechanism at close range. "Ho! The door is rising back up again!"

The hinges were, as Conan had said, fakes. The door was actually mounted on a pair of swivels at the lower corners so that it could fall outward like a drawbridge. From each upper corner of the door a chain ran diagonally up, to disappear into a hole near the upper corner of the door-frame. Now, with a distant grinding sound, the chains had tautened and had started to pull the door back up into its former position.

Conan s.n.a.t.c.hed up the lance that Sa.s.san had dropped. Placing the b.u.t.t in a hollow in the carvings of the inner surface of the door, he wedged the point into the corner of the door frame. The grinding sound ceased and the door stopped moving in a nine-tenths open position.

"That was clever, Conan," said Zyras. "As the G.o.d has now had his toll, the way should be open."

He stepped up on to the inner surface of the door and strode into the temple. Conan followed. They paused on the threshold and peered into the shadowy interior as they might have peered into a serpent's lair.

Silence held the ancient temple, broken only by the soft scuff of their boots.

They entered cautiously, blinking in the half-gloom. In the dimness, a blaze of crimson like the glow of a sunset smote their eyes. They saw the G.o.d, a thing of gold crusted with flaming gems.

The statue, a little bigger than life size, was in the form of a dwarfish man standing upright on great splay feet on a block of basalt.

The statue faced the entrance, and on each side of it stood a great carven chair of dense black wood, inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl in a style unlike that of any living nation.

To the left of the statue, a few feet from the base of the pedestal, the floor of the temple was cleft from wall to wall by a chasm some fifteen feet wide. At some time, probably before the temple had been built, an earthquake had split the rock. Into that black abyss, ages ago, screaming victims had doubtless been hurled by hideous priests as sacrifices to the G.o.d. The walls were lofty and fantastically carved, the roof dim and shadowy above.

But the attention of the men was fixed on the idol. Though a brutish and repellant monstrosity, it represented wealth that made Conan's brain swim.

"Crom and Ymir!" breathed Conan. "One could buy a kingdom with those rubies!"

"Too much to share with a lout of a barbarian," panted Zyras.

These words, spoken half-unconsciously between the Corinthian's clenched teeth, warned Conan. He ducked just as Zyras' sword whistled towards his neck; the blade sliced a fold from his headdress. Cursing his own carelessness, Conan leaped back and drew his scimitar.

Zyras came on in a rush and Conan met him. Back and forth they fought before the leering idol, feet scuffing on the rock, blades rasping and ringing. Conan was larger than the Corinthian, but Zyras was strong, agile, and experienced, full of deadly tricks. Again and again Conan dodged death by a hair's breadth.

Then Conan's foot slipped on the smooth floor and his blade wavered.

Zyras threw all his strength and speed into a lunge that would have driven his saber through Conan. But the Cimmerian was not so off balance as he looked. With the suppleness of a panther, he twisted his powerful body aside so that the long blade pa.s.sed under his right armpit, plowing through his loose khilat. For an instant, the blade caught in the cloth. Zyras stabbed with the dagger in his left hand.

The blade sank into Conan's right arm, and at the same time the knife in Conan's left drove through Zyras' mail shirt, snapping the links, and plunged between Zyras' ribs. Zyras screamed, gurgled, reeled back, and fell limply.

Conan dropped his weapons and knelt, ripping a strip of cloth from his robe for a bandage, to add to those he already wore. He bound up the wound, tying knots with fingers and teeth, and glanced at the bloodstained G.o.d leering down at him. Its gargoyle face seemed to gloat. Conan shivered as the superst.i.tious fears of the barbarian ran down his spine.

Then he braced himself. The red G.o.d was his, but the problem was, how to get the thing away? If it were solid it would be much too heavy to move, but a tap of the b.u.t.t of his knife a.s.sured him that it was hollow. He was pacing about, his head full of schemes for knocking one of the carven thrones apart to make a sledge, levering the G.o.d off its base, and hauling it out of the temple by means of the extra horses and the chains that worked the falling front door, when a voice made him whirl.

"Stand where you are!" It was a shout of triumph in the Kezankian dialect of Zamoria.

Conan saw two men in the doorway, each aiming at him a heavy double-curved bow of the Hyrkanian type. One was tall, lean, and red-bearded.

"Keraspa!" said Conan, reaching for the sword and the knife he had dropped.

The other man was a powerful fellow who seemed familiar.

"Stand back!" said the Kezankian chief. "You thought I had run away to my village, did you not? Well, I followed you all night, with the only one of my men not wounded." His glance appraised the idol. "Had I known the temple contained such treasure I should have looted it long ago, despite the superst.i.tions of my people. Rustum, pick up his sword and dagger."

The man stared at the brazen hawk's head that formed the pommel of Conan's scimitar.

"Wait!" he cried. "This is he who saved me from torture in Arenjun! I know this blade!"

"Be silent!" snarled the chief. "The thief dies!"

"Nay! He saved my life! What have I ever had from you but hard tasks and scanty pay? I renounce my allegiance, you dog!"

Rustum stepped forward, raising Conan's sword, but then Keraspa turned and released his arrow. The missile thudded into Rustum's body. The tribesman shrieked and staggered back under the impact, across the floor of the temple, and over the edge of the chasm. His screams came up, fainter and fainter, until they could no longer be heard.

Quick as a striking snake, before the unarmed Conan could spring upon him, Keraspa whipped another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. Conan had taken one step in a tigerish rush that would have thrown him upon the chief anyway when, without the slightest warning, the ruby-crusted G.o.d stepped down from its pedestal with a heavy metallic sound and took one long stride towards Keraspa.

With a frightful scream, the chief released his arrow at the animated statue. The arrow struck the G.o.d's shoulder and bounced high, turning over and over, and the idol's long arms shot out and caught the chief by an arm and a leg.

Scream after scream came from the foaming lips of Keraspa as the G.o.d turned and moved ponderously towards the chasm. The sight had frozen Conan with horror, and now the idol blocked his way to the exit; either to the right or the left his path would take him within reach of one of those ape-long arms. And the G.o.d, for all its ma.s.s, moved as quickly as a man.

The red G.o.d neared the chasm and raised Keraspa high over its head to hurl him into the depths. Conan saw Keraspa's mouth open in the midst of his foam-dabbled beard, shrieking madly. When Keraspa had been disposed of, no doubt the statue would take care of him. The ancient priests did not have to throw the G.o.d's victims into the gulf; the image took care of that detail himself.

As the G.o.d swayed back on its golden heels to throw the chief, Conan, groping behind him, felt the wood of one of the thrones. These had no doubt been occupied by the high priests or other functionaries of the cult in the ancient days. Conan turned, grasped the ma.s.sive chair by its back, and lifted it. With muscles cracking under the strain, he whirled the throne over his head and struck the G.o.d's golden back between the shoulders, just as Keraspa's body, still screaming, was cast into the abyss.

The wood of the throne splintered under the impact with a rending crash. The blow caught the deity moving forward with the impulse that it had given Keraspa and overbalanced it. For the fraction of a second the monstrosity tottered on the edge of the chasm, long golden arms lashing the air; and then it, too, toppled into the gulf.

Conan dropped the remains of the throne to peer over the edge of the abyss. Keraspa's screams had ceased. Conan fancied that he heard a distant sound such as the idol might have made in striking the side of the cliff and bouncing off, far below, but he could not be sure. There was no final crash or thump; only silence.

Conan drew his muscular forearm across his forehead and grinned wryly.

The curse of the bloodstained G.o.d was ended, and the G.o.d with it. For all the wealth that had gone into the chasm with the idol, the Cimmerian was not sorry to have bought his life at that price. And there were other treasures.

He gathered up his sword and Rustum's bow, and went out into the morning sunshine to pick a horse.

The Frost Giant's Daughter --------------------------.

Fed up with civilization and its magic, Conan rides back to his native Cimmeria. After a month or two of wenching and drinking, however, he grows restless enough to join his old friends, the AEsir, in a raid into Vanaheim.

The clangor of sword and ax had died away; the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak, pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads, drawn back in their death throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in a last invocation to Ymir the frost giant, G.o.d of a warrior race.

Across the reddened drifts and the mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In all that utter desolation, they alone moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. In the brooding silence, they stood face to face.

Both were tall men, built as powerfully as tigers. Their shields were gone, their corselets battered and dented. Blood dried on their mail; their swords were stained red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes.

One was beardless and black-maned; the locks and beard of the other were as red as the blood on the sunlit snow.

"Man," said the latter, "tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere's band to fall before the sword of Heimdul."

"Not in Vanaheim," growled the black-haired warrior, "but in Valhalla shall you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria!"

Heimdul roared and leaped, his sword flashing in a deadly arc. As the singing blade crashed on his helmet, shivering into bits of blue fire, Conan staggered, and his vision was filled with red sparks. But, as he reeled, he thrust with all the power of his broad shoulders behind the blade. The sharp point tore through bra.s.s scales and bones and heart, and the red-haired warrior died at Conan's feet.

The Cimmerian stood upright, trailing his sword, a sudden sick weariness a.s.sailing him. The glare of the sun on the snow cut his eyes like a knife, and the sky seemed shrunken and strangely apart. He turned away from the trampled expanse, where yellow-bearded warriors lay locked with red-haired slayers in the embrace of death. A few steps he took, and the glare of the snow fields was suddenly dimmed. A rushing wave of blindness engulfed him, and he sank down into the snow, supporting himself on one mailed arm and seeking to shake the blindness out of his eyes as a lion might shake his mane.