Conan The Indomitable (6 page)

The Harskeel shifted on its saddle, eliciting a creak from the stiff
leather. “No sign of them?”

“Nay, m’lord.”

“Could they have survived the drop? Is the water deep enough to ensure
that?”

The man shook his head.
“Can’t say, m’lord.”

The Harskeel nodded at the two men behind the speaker, gesturing with a
small jerk of its head, pointing into the pit with its nose. They understood.
Before the speaker could gather his wits, the other two stepped forward and
shoved him. He stumbled and pitched over the edge of the pit, screaming. Came a
splash; then, after a moment, a curse.

“Hmm,” the Harskeel said. “It seems as if they could have
survived such a fall.
Very well.
They are likely alive
then. We shall construct ladders and torches. They are down there, and so shall
we go likewise.”

The men looked nervous at this suggestion, but the Harskeel did not care. It
felt certain. This Conan was the one to supply the ingredient to lift the
spell. Oh, to be two again!

“Be quick about it,” the Harskeel ordered.

An hour later a makeshift ladder was lowered into the cave. Leaving a single
man to watch the horses, the Harskeel and its remaining troops descended into
the pit.

The blind followers were persistent but not nearly as fleet of foot as Conan
and Elashi. While the Cimmerian and the desert woman had not lost their
pursuers, they had gained a considerable lead as they ran through the twists
and turns of the cavern’s corridors. Thus far they had been fortunate not to
have fled down a dead end or into a tube that narrowed so much as to forbid
passage.

With the last turning, however, their luck seemed to expire. At the end of
the corridor were two passages; the one on the right narrowed almost
immediately, so that they would have to crawl down it. The passage to the left
was larger, but a thundering waterfall obscured one wall of that tunnel, and
the water gathered in what appeared to be deep pools beneath the cascade,
blocking the path. Recalling Elashi’s swimming abilities, it did not look to be
a promising route.

“We had better go back to the last turning,” Elashi said, voicing
Conan’s thought.

“Too late,” he said. “Even now the floor vibrates with their
footsteps.” He unsheathed his sword. “It appears we must take our
stand here.”

Elashi nodded and drew her sword. She and Conan stood side by side, waiting
for the white beasts.

“This way,”
came
a man’s voice over the
sound of the cataract.

Conan spun around. He saw no one.

“Here,” came the voice again.

Squinting into the left-hand corridor, Conan was startled to see a man’s
hand emerge from the near side of the waterfall. The hand beckoned.
“Hurry!” the voice said.

Conan and Elashi glanced at each other. They had little to lose. Even so,
the big Cimmerian approached the roaring water cautiously, finding that the
deep pool in the center of the corridor was bounded by a shallow ledge. Once he
attained the spot where he had seen the hand, Conan leaped through, his blade
held ready to strike.

Behind the waterfall, which was wide but shallower than it had appeared, a
short, thick-set man stood, illuminated by the green glow of the ubiquitous
wall fungus. Old he was, perhaps fifty, with a gray beard and long, matted gray
hair under a limp hat. His clothes were soggy cloth breeches and shirt, and
crude sandals, and he held a long dagger at the ready. Behind the man lay a
high corridor, winding away for a long distance.

Elashi splashed through behind Conan, water spraying from her form. As soon
as she looked up, the older man gestured with his head down the corridor. Conan
needed no prompting to understand. They followed the stranger away from the
waterfall.

Around two turns of the corridor, the man stopped. “
Them
Blind Whites can’t hear us through the noise of the waterfall, and they can’t
smell nothin’ past the water, neither. They won’t come this way.”

“We thank you for your aid,” Conan said.

“Tull, I’m called,” the old man said.

“Well met, and timely, Tull.
I’m Conan, of
Cimmeria, and this is Elashi, of Khauran.” The Cimmerian paused, then
asked, “What is this place, friend?”

“That’ll take some time for the tellin’.”

Conan looked around. “It seems that we have little else.”

“I have a hiding place not far from here,” Tull said.
“Suppose we go there and I’ll explain what I know.”

Conan and Elashi nodded. Tull moved off, and they followed.

Wikkell ducked to avoid a crusty stalagtite dangling from the low ceiling. His
Blind White guide stopped, cocked his head to one side,
then
turned to the cyclops. The guide chattered.
His fellows were
returning, it seemed.
They approached from down the corridor and would
be upon them momentarily.

Wikkell smiled at that, revealing thick, wide-set teeth. This venture was
proving to be easier than he had anticipated. In a moment the Blind Whites
would appear—there they were now—and they would be bearing with them—

No one!

Where were the men?

The leader of the Whites shuffled his feet on the floor. There had been two
of them, he said, one a female, judging from her odor. But they had escaped.

“Escaped!”
Wikkell roared the word as if
it were a virulent curse.

That was so.
Vanished into solid rock.

“Men do not vanish into solid rock,” the cyclops said.

Either that or they walked on water, the leader of the group said. Perhaps
they were wizards.

“Show me. I will see this with my own eye.”

A waste of time, the leader said.

“It is my time to waste.” And, he thought to himself, if the
quarry has truly escaped, there will be considerably less time remaining to me
than heretofore.

The cyclops followed the Blind Whites down the corridor.

The bat alighted upon a rocky fold just ahead of Deek and used its teeth to
scratch at something on its left wing strut.

“W-w-what i-is t-t-the n-n-news-s-s?

Bad, the bat told the worm. The two men—one a female, so he had learned by
listening to that barbaric speech of the Whites—had escaped, vanished,
disappeared.

Deek considered that. It was bad that he did not have the man and woman in
his possession; on the other coil, it was good that One Eye did not have them
either. Perhaps this affair might be salvaged yet.

“I-i-is t-t-there a-a-another w-way t-to w-w-where
t-the m-m-men v-v-vanished-d-d?”
This was a long speech for Deek to
scratch out on the rock.

The bat indicated that this was so.

“S-sh-show m-me.”

In his chamber, Katamay Rey grew impatient, waiting for news of the man’s
capture. He rummaged through his collection of crystals, searching for the small
blue stone that he used for communication. He would call his cyclops and ask
about the delay. Where was that cursed stone?

In her chamber, Chuntha fumed, awaiting the report from her minion Deek.
What could be keeping him? She would give him another hour; then she would try
a dreamcast to contact the great white worm. The anticipation of receiving the
captive was high in her, and she was not one to suffer delay easily.

Tull’s hiding place proved to be a fungoid grotto reached by climbing up a
rough wall in a large cave. The narrow entrance to the grotto was covered by a
flap of hide that had been covered with crushed stone so that it blended into
the wall, rendering it almost invisible from the floor of the cave below.

Inside, the walls were caked thick with the glowing fungus; here the light
was concentrated and almost bright. The room contained a small table
constructed of various lengths of bone bound with gut strings, upon it rested a
cup made from an animal’s skull. There was also a pile of furs in one corner,
likely used for sleeping. Conan noted that these furs seemed very similar in
shape and color to the Blind Whites, as Tull had called them. Also, there were
smaller skins, birdlike but rat-colored, in the collection.

“This place is called the Grotterium Negrotus,” Tull said.
“The
Black
Caves
.
I have been here for nearly five years, best as I can
figure.”

“How did you come to be so?” Elashi asked.

“I fell through a hole in the ground above.”

“Sounds familiar,” she said.

“Who were those creatures that attacked us?” Conan asked.

“
Them’s
the Blind Whites. Mostly they side
with Rey.”

“Rey?”

“Aye.
There’s
two
rulers down here. One’s Katamay Rey, he’s a wizard what uses crystals and such
for his magic. The other’s Chuntha the witch. Her magic, well, it’s more
involved with, uh—” he glanced at Elashi—“uh, it’s more of a
personal
nature.”

“Personal nature?”
Elashi asked.

Tull made a sign with his hands, the meaning of which was unmistakable.
Conan grinned, and Elashi glared at him.

“Anyways, the two of ‘em have been at each other for as long as I been
here. According to what I heard, they been fightin’ each other for control of
the caves for hundreds of years. Got all the natives workin’ for
‘em.
Blind Whites, which you met, Webspinner Plants,
Bloodbats, Worms Gigantus, and the hunchbacked
cyclopes
.
They switch sides sometimes.”

“Sounds like a wonderful place,” Elashi
said,
her voice full of irony. “Why do you stay here?”

“Can’t get out.
The worms ‘n’ the
cyclopes
, they close up the trap holes after a little while.
In five years I ain’t found a way out.”

Conan stared at Tull. To be trapped here for the rest of one’s life? That
was an unpleasant thought.

“I get by,” Tull continued. “Nobody’s found this place, and
the taste of the Whites and bats ain’t so bad once you get used to it.”

“Are there any other people here?”

Tull shook his head. “Now and again somebody drops in through one of
the traps. If Rey gets ‘em, he kills ‘em quick and that’s it for ‘em. If
Chuntha gets ‘em, the goin’ is more pleasant, judging from what I heard and
seen once, but almost as fast. Druther be caught by her ‘n’ him, but I avoid
‘em both.”

Conan digested this morsel of information. “I have no intention of
spending my days in this pit,” he said. “We shall have to find a way
out.”

“I been lookin’ for five years and ain’t found
it yet.

“Nonetheless, there must be a way.”

“You’ll want to be careful,” Tull said. “If the Whites know,
then Rey knows you’re down here and likely anything Rey
knows,
Chuntha will know, too. They’ll be lookin’ for you.”

Conan touched the handle of his sword. “Perhaps they might be sorry if
they find me,” he said.

Tull glanced at Conan’s sword, then at the big Cimmerian’s muscular frame.
“Aye, perhaps.
But likely you’ll be sorrier. One
cyclops would make two of you, and
there’s
hundreds of
‘em. And the big worms can sometimes squeeze the air out of a cyclops, one
against one.”

Conan and Elashi looked at each other.

“Better we should find a way out,” Elashi said.

Conan said nothing, but agreed silently. Witches, wizards, and hellish
cavern beasts held no attraction for him whatsoever. The sooner they left this
place, the better Conan would like it.

The size of the cave system impressed the Harskeel while at the same time
frightening its men. Their torches cast a fitful yellow glow that blended with
the fungal green light emitted from the dank walls. Finding Conan and the woman
might prove to be a more difficult task than first the Harskeel had imagined.
Well, it made no difference. Conan was the one; the Harskeel grew more
convinced of it every moment. Once it had the barbarian’s sword, the spell
reversing this accursed joining could be intoned. The words had long since been
committed to the Harskeel’s memory, burned in deeply as if placed there by a
red-hot iron brand. Ahead, the tracker uttered a short curse.

“What is it?” the Harskeel asked.

“Lost the sign agin, m’lord.
Looks like
somethin’ passed behind ‘em and wiped it away. See?”

The tracker held his torch close to the floor. The encrusted salts and slime
had been smoothed over, as if something wide and heavy had been dragged over
the surface in a side-to-side manner. There was a kind of pattern to the
smoothing, a widened “S” shape.

“Ever see a track like this before?” the Harskeel asked.

The tracker shook his head. “Can’t say’s I have, m’lord.
Not exactly.
Once, in the desert,
I seen
a pattern kinda like it.
Serpent track.
But there
ain’t
no
snakes this size.” He gestured at the
floor.

You hope, the Harskeel thought. And I hope so too. ‘Twould be difficult to
utilize Conan and his blade did they have to be extracted from the belly of a
monster serpent.

“We shall continue on down this tunnel,” the Harskeel said.

The Whites had moved ahead of Wikkell toward the waterfall cavern and so the
cyclops was alone when the call came from his master. All of a moment the air
to one side of the cave seemed to swirl with purple light; a low humming began
and increased in volume to that of a giant winged insect. Wikkell stopped,
realizing almost immediately the cause of the phenomenon.

From the purple haze came Rey’s voice. “HAVE YOU THE MAN I SEEK?”

Wikkell swallowed dryly and chose his words carefully. “Even now I am
on my way to collect him, Master. The Blind Whites have trapped him in a
corridor some distance away.”