"All right so far," grunted Conan, parrying a ferocious slash.
"Hasten, then, for I cannot hold them much longer."
Conan plunged in with fresh ferocity. Now it was the Anaki whose attention was devoted to parrying the Cimmerian"s sword, which beat on his blade like a hammer on an anvil. The sheer strength and fury of the barbarian began to tell. Othbaal paled under his swarthy skin. His breath came in gasps as he gave ground. Blood streamed from gashes on arms, thigh, and neck. Conan bled, too, but there was no slackening in the headlong fury of his attack.
Othbaal was close to the tapestried wall when suddenly he sprang aside as Conan lunged. Carried off-balance by his wasted thrust, the Cimmerian plunged forward and his sword point clashed against the stone beneath the tapestries. At the same instant, Othbaal slashed at his foe"s head with all his waning power.
But Conan"s sword of Stygian steel, instead of snapping like a lesser blade, bent and sprang straight again. The falling scimitar bit through Conan"s helmet into the scalp beneath. Before Othbaal could recover his balance, Conan"s heavy blade sheared upward through steel links and hip bone to grate into the spinal column.
The Anaki reeled and fell with a choking cry, his entrails spilling out on the floor. His fingers clawed briefly at the nap of the heavy carpet, then went limp.
Conan, blind with blood and sweat, was driving his sword in silent frenzy again and again into the form at his feet, too drunken with fury to realize that his antagonist was dead, until Fafouz called:
"Cease, Conan! They"ve stopped their attack to bring up a heavier ram, and we can run for it."
"How?" said Conan, dazedly raking the blood from his eyes, for he was still dizzy from the stroke that had cloven his helmet. He tore off the riven, blood-filled headpiece and threw it aside, exposing his square-cut black mane. A crimson torrent descended into his face, blinding him anew. He stooped and tore a strip from Othbaal"s kilt to bind up his head.
"That door!" said Farouz, pointing. "Rufia fled that way, the s.l.u.t! If you"re ready, we"ll run."
Conan saw an inconspicuous little door to one side of the couch. It had been concealed by draperies, but Rufia in her flight had disarranged these and left the door open behind her.
The Hyrkanian took from his girdle the ring that he had pulled from the finger of the black slayer, Keluka. He ran across the floor, dropped the ring near Othbaal"s body, and continued on toward the small door.
Conan followed him, though he had to crouch and almost turn sideways to get through the door.
They emerged into another corridor. Farouz led Conan by a roundabout route, turning and twisting through a maze of pa.s.sages, until Conan was hopelessly lost. By this means they avoided the main body of household retainers, gathered in the corridor outside the princ.i.p.al entrance to the room where they had slain Othbaal. Once they aroused feminine screams from a room they pa.s.sed, but Farouz kept on. Presently they reached the secret panel, entered it, and groped in darkness until they emerged once more into the silent grove.
Conan stopped to get his breath and retie his bandage. Farouz said: "How is your wound, brother?"
"A scratch only. Why did you drop that ring?"
"To blind the avengers of blood. Tarim! All that trouble, and the strumpet got away."
Conan grinned wryly in the darkness. Rufia evidently did not regard Farouz as a rescuer. The brief picture that Conan had obtained, in the second before he closed with Othbaal, stuck in his mind. Such a woman, he thought, would suit him very well.
Within the ma.s.sive wall of the inner city, a stupendous event was coming to pa.s.s. Under the shadows of the balconies stole a veiled and hooded figure. For the first time in three years, a woman was walking the streets of Asgalun.
Knowing her peril, she trembled with fear not wholly inspired by the lurking shadows. The stones hurt her feet in her tattered velvet slippers; for three years the cobblers of Asgalun had been forbidden to make street shoes for women. King Akhlrom had decreed that the women of Pelishtia should be shut up like reptiles in cages.
Rufia, the red-haired Ophirean, favorite of Othbaal, had wielded more power than any woman in Pelishtia save Zeriti, the king"s witch-mistress. And now, as she stole through the night, an outcast, the thought that burned her like a white-hot brand was the realization that the fruits of all her scheming had been spilt in a second by the sword of one of Othbaal"s enemies.
Rufia came of a race of women accustomed to swaying thrones with their beauty and wit. She scarcely remembered her native Ophir from which she had been stolen by Kothian slavers. The Argossean magnate who had bought her and raised her for his household had fallen in battle with the Shemites, and as a supple girl of fourteen Rufia had pa.s.sed into the hands of a prince of Stygia, a languorous, effeminate youth whom she came to twist around her pink fingers. Then, after some years, had come the raid of a band of wandering freebooters from the half-mythical lands beyond the Sea of Vilayet, upon the prince"s pleasure island on the upper Styx, with slaughter, fire, and plunder, crashing walls and shrieks of death, and a red-haired girl screaming in the arms of a tall Hyrkanian chieftain.
Because she came of a race whose women were rulers of men, Rufia neither perished nor became a whimpering toy. When Mazdak enlisted his band under Akhirom in Anakia, as part of Akhirom"s plan to seize Pelishtia from his hated brother, Rufia had gone along.
She had not liked Mazdak. The sardonic adventurer was coldly masterful in his relations with women, keeping a large harem and letting none command or persuade him in the slightest. Because Rufia could endure no rival, she had not been displeased when Mazdak had gambled her away to his rival Othbaal.
The Anaki was more to her taste. Despite a streak of cruelty and treachery, the man was strong, vital, and intelligent. Best of all, he could be managed. He only needed a spur to his ambition, and Rufia supplied that. She had started him up the shining rungs of the ladder-and now he had been slain by a pair of masked murderers who had sprung from nowhere.
Engrossed in her bitter thoughts, she looked up with a start as a tall, hooded figure stepped from the shadows of an overhanging balcony and confronted her. Only his eyes burned at her, almost luminous in the starlight. She cowered back with a low cry.
"A woman on the streets of Asgalun!" The voice was hollow and ghostly.
"Is this not against the king"s commands?"
"I walk not the streets by choice, lord," she answered. "My master has been slain, and I fled from his murderers."
The stranger bent his hooded head and stood statue-like. Rufia watched him nervously. There was something gloomy and portentous about him. He seemed less like a man pondering the tale of a chance-met slave-girl than a somber prophet weighing the doom of a sinful people. At last he lifted his head.
"Come," said he. "I will find a place for you."
Without pausing to see if she obeyed, he stalked away up the street.
Rufia hurried after him. She could not walk the streets all night, for any officer of the king would strike off her head for violating the edict of King Akhirom. This stranger might be leading her into worse slavery, but she had no choice.
Several times she tried to speak, but his grim silence struck her silent in turn. His unnatural aloofness frightened her. Once she was startled to see furtive forms stealing after them.
"Men follow us!" she exclaimed.
"Heed them not," answered the man in his weird voice.
Nothing was said until they reached a small arched gate in a lofty wall. The stranger halted and called out. He was answered from within.
The gate opened, revealing a black mute holding a torch. In its light, the height of the robed stranger was inhumanly exaggerated.
"But this-this is a gate of the Great Palace!" stammered Rufia.
For answer, the man threw back his hood, revealing a long pale oval of a face, in which burned those strange, luminous eyes.
Rufia screamed and fell to her knees. "King Akhirom!"
"Aye, King Akhirom, O faithless and sinful one!" The hollow voice rolled out like a bell. "Vain and foolish woman, who ignores the command of the Great King, the King of Kings, the King of the World, which is the word of the G.o.ds! Who treads the street in sin, and sets aside the mandates of the Good King! Seize her!"
The following shadows closed in, becoming a squad of Negro mutes. As their fingers seized her flesh, Rufia fainted.
The Ophirean regained consciousness in a windowless chamber whose arched doors were bolted with bars of gold. She stared wildly about for her captor and shrank down to see him standing above her, stroking his pointed, graying beard while his terrible eyes burned into her soul.
"O Lion of Shem!" she gasped, struggling to her knees. "Mercy!"
As she spoke, she knew the futility of the plea. She was crouching before the man whose name was a curse in the mouths of the Pelishtim; who, claiming divine guidance, had ordered all dogs killed, all vines cut down, all grapes and honey dumped into the river; who had banned all wine, beer, and games of chance; who believed that to disobey his most trivial command was the blackest sin conceivable. He roamed the streets at night in disguise to see that his orders were obeyed.
Rufia"s flesh crawled as he stared at her with unblinking eyes.
"Blasphemer!" he whispered. "Daughter of evil! O Pteor!" he cried, flinging up his arms. "What punishment shall be devised for this demon?
What agony terrible enough, what degradation vile enough to render justice? The G.o.ds grant me wisdom!"
Rufia rose to her knees and pointed at Akhirom"s face. "Why call on the G.o.ds?" she shrieked. "Call on Akhirom! You are a G.o.d!"
He stopped, reeled, and cried out incoherently. Then he straightened and looked down at her. Her face was white, her eyes staring. To her natural acting ability was added the terror of her position.
"What do you see, woman?" he asked.
"A G.o.d has revealed himself to me! In your face, shining like the sun!