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.
He was pa.s.sing Conan"s hiding place when some instinct brought him about in a flash, teeth bared in a startled snarl, spear whipping up for a cast or a thrust Even as he turned, Conan was upon him with the instant uncoiling of steel-spring muscles. As the javelin leaped to a level, the scimitar lashed down. The Khitan dropped like an ox, his round skull split like a ripe melon.
Conan froze to immobility, glaring along the pa.s.sage. As he heard no sound to indicate the presence of any other guard, he risked a low whistle which brought Tubal headlong into the cleft The Shemite grunted at the sight of the dead man.
Conan stooped and pushed back the Khitan"s upper lip, showing the canine teeth filed to points. "Another son of Erlik, the Yellow G.o.d of Death. There is no telling how many more may be in this defile. We"ll drag him behind these rocks."
Beyond the bend, the long, deep defile ran empty to the next kink. As they advanced without opposition, Conan became sure that the Khitan was the only sentry in the cleft.
The moonlight in the narrow gash above them was paling into dawn when they came into the open at last. Here the defile broke into a chaos of shattered rock. The single gorge became half a dozen, threading between isolated crags and split-off rocks, as a river splits into separate streams at its delta. Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone stood up like gaunt ghosts in the pale predawn light.
Threading their way among these grim sentinels, the adventurers presently looked out upon a level, rock-strewn floor that stretched three hundred paces to the foot of a cliff. The trail they had followed, grooved by many feet in the weathered stone, crossed the level and twisted a tortuous way up the cliff on ramps cut in the rock.
But what lay on top of the cliffs they could not guess. To right and left, the solid wall veered away, flanked by broken pinnacles.
"What now, Conan?" In the gray light, the Shemite looked like a mountain goblin surprised out of his cave by dawn.
"I think we must be close to-listen!"
Over the cliffs rolled the blaring reverberation they had heard the night before, but now much nearer: the strident roar of the giant trumpet.
"Have we been seen?" wondered Tubal, fingering his knife.
Conan shrugged. "Whether we have or not, we must see ourselves before we try to climb that cliff. Here!"
He indicated a weathered crag, which rose like a tower among its lesser fellows. The comrades went up it swiftly, keeping its bulk between them and the opposite cliffs. The summit was higher than the cliffs. Then they lay behind a spur of rock, staring through the rosy haze of the rising dawn.
"Pteor!" swore Tubal.
From their vantage point, the opposite cliffs a.s.sumed their real nature as one side of a gigantic mesalike block, which rose sheer from the surrounding level, four to five hundred feet high. Its vertical sides seemed unscalable, save where the trail had been cut into the stone.
East, north, and west it was girdled by crumbling crags, separated from the plateau by the level canyon floor, which varied in width from three hundred paces to half a mile. On the south, the plateau ab.u.t.ted on a gigantic bare mountain, whose gaunt peaks dominated the surrounding pinnacles.
But the watchers gave but little attention to this topographical formation. Conan had expected, at the end of the b.l.o.o.d.y trail, to find some sort of rendezvous: a cl.u.s.ter of horsehide tents, a cavern, perhaps even a village of mud and stone nestling on a hillside.
Instead, they were looking at a city, whose domes and towers glistened in the rosy dawn like a magical city of sorcerers stolen from some fabled land and set down in this wilderness.
"The city of the demons!" cried Tubal. "It is enchantment and sorcery!"
He snapped his fingers to ward off evil spells.
The plateau was oval, about a mile and a half long from north to south and somewhat less than a mile from east to west. The city stood near its southern end, etched against the dark mountain behind it. A large edifice, whose purple dome was shot with gold, gleamed in the dawn. It dominated the flat-topped stone houses and cl.u.s.tering trees.
The Cimmerian blood in Conan"s veins responded to the somber aspect of the scene, the contrast of the gloomy black crags with the ma.s.ses of green and the sheens of color in the city. The city awoke forebodings of evil. The gleam of its purple, gold-traced dome was somehow sinister. The black, crumbling crags formed a fitting setting for it.
It was like a city of ancient, demonic mystery, rising with an evil glitter amidst ruin and decay.
"This must be the stronghold of the Hidden Ones," muttered Conan.
"Who"d have thought to find a city like this in an uninhabited country?"
"Not even we can fight a whole city/" grunted Tubal.
Conan fell silent while he studied the distant view. The city was not so large as it had looked at first glance. It was compact but unwalled; a parapet around the edge of the plateau furnished its defense. The two and three-storey houses stood among surprising groves and gardens-surprising because the plateau looked like solid rock without soil for growing things. He reached a decision and said:
"Tubal, go back to our camp in the Gorge of Ghosts. Take the horses and ride to Kushaf. Tell Balash I need all his swords, and bring the kozaki and the Kushafis through the cleft and halt them among these defiles until you get a signal from me, or know I"m dead."
"Pteor devour Balash! What of you?"
"I go into the city."
"You are mad!"
"Worry not, my friend. It is the only way I can get Nanaia out alive.
Then we can make plans for attacking the city. If I live and am at liberty, I shall meet you here; otherwise, you and Balash follow your own judgment."
"What do you want with this nest of fiends?"
Conan"s eyes narrowed. "I want a base for empire. We cannot stay in Iranistan nor yet return to Turan. In my hands, who knows what might not be made of this impregnable place? Now get along."
"Balash loves me not. He"ll spit in my beard, and then I"ll kill him and his dogs will slay me."
"He"ll do no such thing."
"He will not come."
"He would come through h.e.l.l if I sent for him."
"His men will not come; they fear devils."