Conan shook his lion head. "No, Prospero, he"s beyond my reach. A great poet is greater than any king. His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I shall die and be forgotten, but Rinaldo"s songs will live for ever.
"No, Prospero," the king continued, a somber look of doubt shadowing his eyes, "there is something hidden, some undercurrent of which we are not aware. I sense it as in my youth I sensed the tiger hidden in the tall gra.s.s. There is a nameless unrest throughout the kingdom. I am like a hunter who crouches by his small fire amid the forest, and hears stealthy feet padding in the darkness, and almost sees the glimmer of burning eyes. If I could but come to grips with something tangible, that I could cleave with my sword! I tell you, it"s not by chance that the Picts have of late so fiercely a.s.sailed the frontiers, so that the Bossonians have called for aid to beat them back. I should have ridden with the troops."
"Publius feared a plot to trap and slay you beyond the frontier," replied Prospero, smoothing his silken surcoat over his shining mail, and admiring his tall lithe figure in a silver mirror.
"That"s why he urged you to remain in the city. These doubts are born of your barbarian instincts. Let the people snarl! The mercenaries are ours, and the Black Dragons, and every rogue in Poitain swears by you. Your only danger is a.s.sa.s.sination, and that"s impossible, with men of the imperial troops guarding you day and night. What are you working at there?"
"A map," Conan answered with pride. "The maps of the court show well the countries of south, east and west, but in the north they are vague and faulty. I am adding the northern lands myself.
Here is Cimmeria, where I was born. And "
"Asgard and Vanaheim," Prospero scanned the map. "By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous."
Conan grinned savagely, involuntarily touching the scars on his dark face. "You had known otherwise, had you spent your youth on the northern frontiers of Cimmeria! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest of Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the23.borders."
"What manner of men are these northern folk?" asked Prospero.
"Tall and fair and blue-eyed. Their G.o.d is Ymir, the frost-giant, and each tribe has its own king.
They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night."
"Then I think you are like them," laughed Prospero. "You laugh greatly, drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal dirges."
"Perhaps it"s the land they live in," answered the king. "A gloomier land never was all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys."
"Little wonder men grow moody there," quoth Prospero with a shrug of his shoulders, thinking of the smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers of Poitain, Aquilonia"s southernmost province.
"They have no hope here or hereafter," answered Conan. "Their G.o.ds are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead. Mitra!
The ways of the aesir were more to my liking."
"Well," grinned Prospero, "the dark hills of Cimmeria are far behind you. And now I go. I"ll quaff a goblet of white Nemedian wine for you at Numa"s court."
"Good," grunted the king, "but kiss Numa"s dancing-girls for yourself only, lest you involve the states!"
His gusty laughter followed Prospero out of the chamber.
Under the caverned pyramids great Set coils asleep; Among the shadows of the tombs his dusky people creep.
I speak the Word from the hidden gulfs that never knew the sun .
Send me a servant for my hate, oh scaled and shining One!24.
The sun was setting, etching the green and hazy blue of the forest in brief gold. The waning beams glinted on the thick golden chain which Dion of Attalus twisted continually in his pudgy hand as he sat in the flaming riot of blossoms and flower-trees which was his garden. He shifted his fat body on his marble seat and glanced furtively about, as if in quest of a lurking enemy. He sat within a circular grove of slender trees, whose interlapping branches cast a thick shade over him. Near at hand a fountain tinkled silverly, and other unseen fountains in various parts of the great garden whispered an everlasting symphony.
Dion was alone except for the great dusky figure which lounged on a marble bench close at hand, watching the baron with deep somber eyes. Dion gave little thought to Thoth-amon. He vaguely knew that he was a slave in whom Ascalante reposed much trust, but like so many rich men, Dion paid scant heed to men below his own station in life.
"You need not be so nervous," said Thoth. "The plot can not fail."
"Ascalante can make mistakes as well as another," snapped Dion, sweating at the mere thought of failure.
"Not he," grinned the Stygian savagely, "else I had not been his slave, but his master."
"What talk is this?" peevishly returned Dion, with only half a mind on the conversation.
Thoth-amon"s eyes narrowed. For all his iron-self-control, he was near bursting with long pent- up shame, hate and rage, ready to take any sort of a desperate chance. What he did not reckon on was the fact that Dion saw him, not as a human being with a brain and a wit, but simply a slave, and as such, a creature beneath notice.
"Listen to me," said Thoth. "You will be king. But you little know the mind of Ascalante. You can not trust him, once Conan is slain. I can help you. If you will protect me when you come to power, I will aid you.
"Listen, my lord. I was a great sorcerer in the south. Men spoke of Thoth-amon as they spoke of Rammon. King Ctesphon of Stygia gave me great honor, casting down the magicians from the high places to exalt me above them. They hated me, but they feared me, for I controlled beings from outside which came at my call and did my bidding. By Set, mine enemy knew not the hour when he might awake at midnight to feel the taloned fingers of a nameless horror at his throat! I did dark and terrible magic with the Serpent Ring of Set, which I found in a nighted tomb a league beneath the earth, forgotten before the first man crawled out of the slimy sea.25.
"But a thief stole the Ring and my power was broken. The magicians rose up to slay me, and I fled. Disguised as a camel-driver, I was travelling in a caravan in the land of Koth, when Ascalante"s reavers fell upon us. All in the caravan were slain except myself; I saved my life by revealing my ident.i.ty to Ascalante and swearing to serve him. Bitter has been that bondage!
"To hold me fast, he wrote of me in a ma.n.u.script, and sealed it and gave it into the hands of a hermit who dwells on the southern borders of Koth. I dare not strike a dagger into him while he sleeps, or betray him to his enemies, for then the hermit would open the ma.n.u.script and read thus Ascalante instructed him. And he would speak a word in Stygia "
Again Thoth shuddered and an ashen hue tinged his dusky skin.
"Men knew me not in Aquilonia," he said. "But should my enemies in Stygia learn my whereabouts, not the width of half a world between us would suffice to save me from such a doom as would blast the soul of a bronze statue. Only a king with castles and hosts of swordsmen could protect me. So I have told you my secret, and urge that you make a pact with me. I can aid you with my wisdom, and you can protect me. And some day I will find the Ring ".
"Ring? Ring?" Thoth had underestimated the man"s utter egoism. Dion had not even been listening to the slave"s words, so completely engrossed was he in his own thoughts, but the final word stirred a ripple in his self-centeredness.
"Ring?" he repeated. "That makes me remember my ring of good fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard far to the south, and that it would bring me luck. I paid him enough, Mitra knows. By the G.o.ds, I need all the luck I can have, what with Volmana and Ascalante dragging me into their b.l.o.o.d.y plots I"ll see to the ring."
Thoth sprang up, blood mounting darkly to his face, while his eyes flamed with the stunned fury of a man who suddenly realizes the full depths of a fool"s swinish stupidity. Dion never heeded him. Lifting a secret lid in the marble seat, he fumbled for a moment among a heap of gewgaws of various kinds barbaric charms, bits of bones, pieces of tawdry jewelry luck- pieces and conjures which the man"s superst.i.tious nature had prompted him to collect.
"Ah, here it is!" He triumphantly lifted a ring of curious make. It was of a metal like copper, and was made in the form of a scaled serpent, coiled in three loops, with its tail in its mouth. Its eyes were yellow gems which glittered balefully. Thoth-amon cried out as if he had been struck, and Dion wheeled and gaped, his face suddenly bloodless. The slave"s eyes were blazing, his mouth wide, his huge dusky hands outstretched like talons.
"The Ring! By Set! The Ring!" he shrieked. "My Ring stolen from me "26.Steel glittered in the Stygian"s hand and with a heave of his great dusky shoulders he drove the dagger into the baron"s fat body. Dion"s high thin squeal broke in a strangled gurgle and his whole flabby frame collapsed like melted b.u.t.ter. A fool to the end, he died in mad terror, not knowing why. Flinging aside the crumpled corpse, already forgetful of it, Thoth grasped the ring in both hands, his dark eyes blazing with a fearful avidness.
"My Ring!" he whispered in terrible exultation. "My power!"
How long he crouched over the baleful thing, motionless as a statue, drinking the evil aura of it into his dark soul, not even the Stygian knew. When he shook himself from his revery and drew back his mind from the nighted abysses where it had been questing, the moon was rising, casting long shadows across the smooth marble back of the garden-seat, at the foot of which sprawled the darker shadow which had been the lord of Attalus.
"No more, Ascalante, no more!" whispered the Stygian, and his eyes burned red as a vampire"s in the gloom. Stooping, he cupped a handful of congealing blood from the sluggish pool in which his victim sprawled, and rubbed it in the copper serpent"s eyes until the yellow sparks were covered by a crimson mask.
"Blind your eyes, mystic serpent," he chanted in a blood-freezing whisper. "Blind your eyes to the moonlight and open them on darker gulfs! What do you see, oh serpent of Set? Whom do you call from the gulfs of the Night? Whose shadow falls on the waning Light? Call him to me, oh serpent of Set!"
Stroking the scales with a peculiar circular motion of his fingers, a motion which always carried the fingers back to their starting place, his voice sank still lower as he whispered dark names and grisly incantations forgotten the world over save in the grim hinterlands of dark Stygia, where monstrous shapes move in the dusk of the tombs.
There was a movement in the air about him, such a swirl as is made in water when some creature rises to the surface. A nameless, freezing wind blew on him briefly, as if from an opened Door. Thoth felt a presence at his back, but he did not look about. He kept his eyes fixed on the moonlit s.p.a.ce of marble, on which a tenuous shadow hovered. As he continued his whispered incantations, this shadow grew in size and clarity, until it stood out distinct and horrific. Its outline was not unlike that of a gigantic baboon, but no such baboon ever walked the earth, not even in Stygia. Still Thoth did not look, but drawing from his girdle a sandal of his master always carried in the dim hope that he might be able to put it to such use he cast it behind him.27.
"Know it well, slave of the Ring!" he exclaimed. "Find him who wore it and destroy him! Look into his eyes and blast his soul, before you tear out his throat! Kill him! Aye," in a blind burst of pa.s.sion, "and all with him!"
Etched on the moonlit wall Thoth saw the horror lower its misshapen head and take the scent like some hideous hound. Then the grisly head was thrown back and the thing wheeled and was gone like a wind through the trees. The Stygian flung up his arms in maddened exultation, and his teeth and eyes gleamed in the moonlight.
A soldier on guard without the walls yelled in startled horror as a great loping black shadow with flaming eyes cleared the wall and swept by him with a swirling rush of wind. But it was gone so swiftly that the bewildered warrior was left wondering whether it had been a dream or a hallucination.
When the world was young and men were weak, and the fiends of the night walked free,
I strove with Set by fire and steel and the juice of the upas-tree;
Now that I sleep in the mount"s black heart, and the ages take their toll,
Forget ye him who fought with the Snake to save the human soul?
Alone in the great sleeping-chamber with its high golden dome King Conan slumbered and dreamed. Through swirling gray mists he heard a curious call, faint and far, and though he did not understand it, it seemed not within his power to ignore it. Sword in hand he went through the gray mist, as a man might walk through clouds, and the voice grew more distinct as he proceeded until he understood the word it spoke it was his own name that was being called across the gulfs of s.p.a.ce or Time.