Conan the Wanderer Part 18

"Hattusas lies near the mouth of the ravine with his throat cut. I heard the sound of a rolling pebble from the mouth of the eastern ravine and stole thither without rousing you, and lo, there lay Hattusas in his blood. He must have died silently and suddenly. I saw no one and heard no further sound in the ravine. Then I hastened back to you and found Nanaia gone. The devils of the hills have slain one and s.n.a.t.c.hed away the other without a sound. I sense that Death still skulks here. This is indeed the Gorge of Ghosts!"

Conan crouched silently on one knee, straining eyes and ears into the darkness. That the keen-sensed Zamorian should have died and Nanaia been spirited away without the sound of a struggle smacked of the diabolical.

"Who can fight devils, Conan? Let us mount and ride-"

"Listen!"

Somewhere a bare foot scuffed the rock floor. Conan rose, peering into the gloom. Men were moving out there in the darkness. Shadows detached themselves from the black background and slunk forward. Conan drew a dagger with his left hand. Tubal crouched beside him, gripping his Ilbarsi knife, silent and deadly as a wolf at bay.

The dim-seen line moved in slowly, widening as it came. Conan and the Shemite fell back a few paces to have the rock wall at their backs and keep themselves from being surrounded.

The rush came suddenly, bare feet slapping softly over the rocky floor, steel glinting dully in the dim starlight Conan could make out but few details of their a.s.sailants -only the bulks of them, and the shimmer of steel. He struck and parried by instinct and feel as much as by sight.

He killed the first man to come within sword reach. Tubal sounded a deep yell at the discovery that his foes were human after all and exploded in a burst of berserk ferocity. The sweep of his heavy, three-foot knife was devastating. Side by side, with the wall at their backs, the two companions were safe from attack on Tear or flank.

Steel rang sharp on steel and blue sparks flew. There rose the ugly butcher-shop sound of blades cleaving flesh and bone. Men screamed or gasped death gurgles from severed throats. For a few moments a huddled knot writhed and milled near the rock wall. The work was too swift and blind and desperate to allow consecutive thought. But the advantage lay with the men at bay. They could see as well as their attackers; man for man they were stronger; and they knew that when they struck their steel would flesh itself only in hostile bodies. The others were handicapped by their numbers; for, the knowledge that they might kill a companion with a blind stroke must have tempered their frenzy.

Conan ducked a sword before he realized he had seen it swinging. His return stroke grated against mail; instead of hacking through it he slashed at an unprotected thigh and brought the man down. As he engaged the next man, the fallen one dragged himself forward and drove a knife at Conan's body, but Conan's own mail stopped it, and the dagger in Conan's left hand found the man's throat. Men spurted their blood on him as they died.

Then the rush ebbed. The attackers melted away like phantoms into the darkness, which was becoming less absolute. The eastern rim of the canyon was lined with a faint silvery fire that marked the moonrise.

Tubal gave tongue like a wolf and charged after the retreating figures, the foam of blood l.u.s.t flecking his beard. He stumbled over a corpse and stabbed savagely downward before he realized it was a dead man.

Then Conan grabbed his arm. He almost dragged the mighty Cimmerian off his feet as he plunged and snorted like a la.s.soed bull.

"Wait, fool!" snarled Conan. "Do you want to ran into a trap?"

Tubal subsided to a wolfish wariness. Together they glided after the vague figures, which disappeared into the mouth of the eastern ravine.

There the pursuers halted, peering warily into the black depths.

Somewhere far down it, a dislodged pebble rattled on the stone. Conan tensed like a suspicious panther.

"The dogs still flee," muttered Tubal. "Shall we follow?"

Conan shook his head. With Nanaia a captive, he could not afford to throw his life away by a mad rush into the well of blackness, where ambushes might make any step a march of death. They fell back to the camp and the frightened horses, which were frantic with the stench of fresh-spilt blood.

"When the moon rises high enough to flood the canyon with light," said Tubal, "they will shoot us with arrows from the ravine."

"We must take the chance," grunted Conan. "Maybe they are poor shots."

They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence as the moonlight, weird and ghostly, grew in the canyon, and boulder, ledge, and wall took shape. No sound disturbed the brooding quiet. Then, by the waxing light, Conan investigated the four dead men left behind by the attackers. As he peered from face to bearded face, Tubal exclaimed:

"Devil-worshipers! Sabateans!"

"No wonder they could creep like cats," muttered Conan. In Shem he had learned of the uncanny stealth of the people of that ancient and abominable cult, which worshiped the Golden Peac.o.c.k in the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea. "What are they doing here? Their homeland is in Shem. Let's see-Ha!"

Conan opened the man's robe. There on the linen jerkin that covered the Sabatean's thick chest appeared the emblem of a hand gripping a flame-shaped dagger. Tubal ripped the tunics from the other three corpses. Each displayed the fist and knife. He said:

"What sort of cult is this of the Hidden Ones, that draws men from Shem and Khitai, thousands of miles asunder?"

"That's what I mean to find out," answered Conan. They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence. Then Tubal rose and said:

"What now?"

Conan pointed to dark splotches on the bare rock floor, which the moonlight now made visible. "We can follow that trail."

Tubal wiped and sheathed his knife, while Conan wound around his waist a coil of thin, strong rope with a three-pointed iron hook at one end.

He had found such a rope useful in his days as a thief. The moon had risen higher, drawing a silver thread along the middle of the ravine.

Through the moonlight, they approached the mouth of the ravine. No bowstring tw.a.n.ged; no javelin sighed through the night air; no furtive figures flitted among the shadows. The blood drops speckled the rocky floor; the Sabateans must have carried grim wounds away with them.

They pushed up the ravine, afoot, because Conan believed their foes were also afoot Besides, the gulch was so narrow and rugged that a horseman would be at a disadvantage in a fight.

At each bend they expected an ambush, but the trail of blood drops led on, and no figures barred their way. The blood spots were not so thick now, but they were enough to mark the way.

Conan quickened his pace, hoping to overtake the Sabateans. Even though the latter had a long start, their wounds and their prisoner would slow them down. He thought Nanaia must still be alive, or they would have come upon her corpse.

The ravine pitched upward, narrowing, then widened, descended, bent, and came out into another canyon running east and west. This was a few hundred feet wide. The b.l.o.o.d.y trail ran straight across to the sheer south wall and ceased.

Tubal grunted. "The Kushafi dogs spoke truth. The trail stops at a cliff that only a bird could fly over."

Conan halted, puzzled. They had lost the trace of the ancient road in the Gorge of Ghosts, but this was undoubtedly the way the Sabateans had come. He raised his eyes up the wall, which rose straight for hundreds of feet Above him, at a height of fifteen feet, jutted a narrow ledge, a mere outcropping a few feet wide and four or five paces long. It seemed to offer no solution, but halfway up to the ledge he saw a dull smear on the rock of the wall.

Uncoiling his rope, Conan whirled the weighted end and sent it soaring upward. The hook bit into the rim of the ledge and held. Conan went up it, clinging to the thin, smooth strand, as swiftly as most men would have climbed a ladder. As he pa.s.sed the smear on the stone he confirmed his belief that it was dried blood, such as might have been made by a wounded man climbing or being hauled up to the ledge.

Tubal, below, fidgeted and tried to get a better view of the ledge, as if fearing it were peopled with unseen a.s.sa.s.sins. But the shelf lay bare when Conan pulled himself over the edge.

The first thing he saw was a heavy bronze ring set in the stone above the ledge, out of sight from below. The metal was polished by usage.

More blood was smeared along the rim of the ledge. The drops led across the ledge to the sheer wall, which showed much weathering at that point Conan saw something else: the blurred print of b.l.o.o.d.y fingers on the rock of the wall. He studied the cracks in the rock, then laid his hand over the b.l.o.o.d.y hand print and pushed. A section of the wall swung smoothly inward. He was staring into the door of a narrow tunnel, dimly lit by the moon somewhere at the far end.

Wary as a stalking leopard, he stepped into it. At once he heard a startled yelp from Tubal, to whose view it seemed that he had melted into solid rock. Conan emerged head and shoulders to exhort his follower to silence and then continued his investigation.

The tunnel was short; moonlight poured into it from the other end, where it opened into a cleft. The cleft ran straight for a hundred feet and made an abrupt bend, like a knife-cut through solid rock. The door through which he had entered was an irregular slab of rock hung on heavy, oiled bronze hinges. It fitted perfectly into its aperture, its irregular shape making the cracks appear to be merely natural seams in the cliff.

A rope ladder of heavy rawhide was coiled just inside the tunnel mouth.

Conan returned to the ledge outside with this, made it fast to the bronze ring, and let it down. While Tubal swung up in a frenzy of impatience, Conan drew up his own rope and coiled it around his waist again.

Tubal swore strange Shemitic oaths as he grasped the mystery of the vanishing trail. He asked: "But why was not the door bolted on the inside?"

"Probably men are coming and going constantly, and a man might be in a hurry to get through from the outside without having to shout to be let in. There was little chance of its being discovered; I should not have found it but for the blood marks."

Tubal was for plunging instantly into the cleft, but Conan had become wary. He had seen no sign of a sentry but did not think a people so ingenious in hiding the entrance to their country would leave it unguarded.

He hauled up the ladder, coiled it back on its shelf, and closed the door, plunging that end of the tunnel into darkness. Commanding the unwilling Tubal to wait for him, he went down the tunnel and into the cleft.

From the bottom of the cleft, an irregular knife-edge of starlit sky was visible, hundreds of feet overhead. Enough moonlight found its way into the cleft to serve Conan's catlike eyes.

He had not reached the bend when a scuff of feet beyond it reached him.

He had scarcely concealed himself behind a broken outcrop of rock, split away from the side wall, when the sentry came. He came in the leisurely manner of one who performs a perfunctory task, confident of his own security. He was a squat Khitan with a face like a copper mask.

He swung along with the wide roll of a horseman, trailing a javelin.