The Sword of Skelos (7 page)

“Next day I reconnoitered, and made my plan. That night without too much difficulty I entered Zul’s keep. There I found Ajhindar attacked by the awful creatures of Hisarr Zul; he had stolen their very
souls
from them, enclosing them in mirrors and breaking the mirrors. They were dull, vacant-eyed creatures of the wizard’s will; stupid watchdogs with swords. I recognized Ajhindar; he had helped me the previous night. Though it were wiser to leave him to keep those ‘men’ busy whilst I went for the amulet, I… rescued him. We carved several of those creatures nicely, and my judgment is that we did them a great service!

“When Ajhindar and I exchanged names and he discovered that I too was after the Eye, he shocked me by attacking without warning. Only his slipping in the blood of one of those dead soulless horrors saved me from succumbing to the first stroke of his surprise attack! We had been conversing; we had saved each other’s life, and we were friends, blood-brothers!” Conan shook his head and rode for a time in a brooding silence, grim-faced.

“He slipped, as I said. He fell against a door. A hidden chamber sprang open in that door, and two vipers came slithering out on the instant. They bit him again and again, all in seconds—in the face.”

Khassek asked, “This is all?”

“No, it isn’t all. He had tried to kill me yet again. Now, though he knew he must die in seconds, he tried again; he hurled those damned vipers at me! My sword was out by then, and a stroke of my blade sundered them both in air. Then I could only watch Ajhindar swell, and blacken, and die. He told me a little of the Eye, trying to recruit me to complete his mission: to fetch the amulet to Iranistan. And he died. Khassek, I was doubly saddened. I
liked
that man, respected his ability and his honor. And he had tried to slay me without warning, at a stroke. Now he had died in no decent way, but stupidly and hideously.”

“Ajhindar deserved better,” Khassek said.

“I went for the Eye. The two Zamboulans were in that chamber afore me. She had it: Isparana. Quite a woman, Isparana! Karamek her partner engaged me while she fled, and by the time I had disposed of him she was through a door and had closed and barred it against me.”

“By now,” Khassek said thoughtfully, “several of Hisarr’s soulless minions were dead, and Ajhindar, and Karamek. All, one way or another, by your hand or because of you.”

“Aye,” Conan said without concern. “I whirled from that door and made for a window—and fell into the trap Hisarr had set for anyone coming
in
by that window! I was locked there, in iron jaws. I broke my sword and several nails trying to get free. I could not. I could only wait for him to come. He did, all gloating, and told me I must fetch back the Eye from Isparana, for him. Huh! I’d have agreed to dance all week or fly to Khitai and bring him a dragon and the emperor’s beard, to get out of his keep and avoid going to prison! But he was too smart for that. By means of some powder he made me unconscious. When I awoke, he had… taken my
soul
! He showed it me, a little me in a mirror. If it was broken, he said, I’d be soulless forever—like that once-men that served him.

“After that I agreed, and went after Isparana— for Hisarr Zul.”

Khassek heard the sound and glanced over to see Conan grinding his teeth until his jawline showed white.

“You have you… your soul back, Conan?”

“Aye. It was returned to me less than a fortnight ago, by the queen of Khauran.”

“Khauran! Is that where you have been whilst I searched Shadizar! But why did you come back, with such a friend in Khauran?”

“She’s dead,” Conan said, and rode again in silence for a time. “I saved her and Khauran from a sorcerous plot to deliver it up to Koth,” he muttered at last, “and in the doing of it I… condemned her.”

Khassek said nothing, but only rode. What adventures this northish youth had had! Into what plots he fell or thrust himself—and from them bloodily extricated himself! Ajhindar was dead. Karamek was dead. And Khauran’s queen… and doubtless some other participants in that “sorcerous plot” the Cimmerian had alluded to so briefly. Khassek also knew that Hisarr Zul was dead. He wondered about this Isparana

“Tell on, Conan. So you set off after Isparana.”

“Aye. Alone, on the desert, with a single horse. I was a fool, and I was lucky. At the first oasis where I stopped, two men attacked me.”

“That was lucky?”

“Aye… that way I gained their horses and supplies. Else the desert would have killed a foolish boy of Cimmeria, surely.”

“Oh,” Khassek said quietly. “And those two…”

“Dead.”

“Of course.” And let someone else try calling you “boy”! He glanced over to see that his companion was giving him a look. “Don’t stare at me, Conan. You do tend to leave a bloody trail, you know.”

“Crom, god of Cimmeria,” Conan said while staring ahead, “breathes power to strive and slay into the soul of a Cimmerian, at birth. He takes no note of us after that. We are men.”

“You… strive, and slay.”

“Yes.” After a time of silence while the horses plodded on, Conan said, “I seldom seek trouble, Khassek. It stalks me, haunts me, seeks me out.” He sat up straighter and Khassek, looking across the few feet separating their horses, was treated to the sight of the swell of that mighty chest. “I do not flee it!” Conan said, to the universe.

“Sages in my land bid a man ‘Take the road that waits,’” Khassek said. “It is good advice. There is little else a brave man who is also sensible can do. You caught up to Isparana?”

“Aye, eventually,” Conan said dully, and did not say anything thereafter, for miles.

Khassek let his younger companion brood. The grass of the steppes was growing more and more sparse. They approached the great desert. Due south on it, Zamboula reared its walls and towers and domed palace just beyond the sand’s edge. South and east of Zamboula, Iranistan sprawled at the base of a great mountain range. It was very, very far. Khassek wondered, now they had taken the road that waited, where it would lead them. He thought perhaps that Conan was reflecting similarly.

“Far down on the desert,” Conan began abruptly, and Khassek physically jerked at sound of that voice from his left, “I came upon some soldiers from Samara. They were nice fellows, dully tracking a couple of thieves northward. The thieves were the two men who had also tried to rob me. I had most of their booty, with their horses—I hadn’t been able to deal with their camels.”

“Who can?” Khassek said, with a smile.

“Oh, I can now! At any rate, those good men also left me a few things of the booty of those they followed. And went on, warning me to stay out of a certain pass.”

“The Gorge of the Sand-lich!”

“Just so. Unfortunately, I saw Isparana, miles ahead, and knew that the pass would put me much closer to her than riding up one of those damned Dragon Hills and down and then up the next and the next. I took the Gorge of the Sand-lich.”

“And lived!”

“And lived, Khassek. It attacked. There was no fighting it, and my horses fled back the way we’d come. The very sands rose up. They formed a sort of figure, vaguely human, constantly amove with swirling sands —and it seized me. I was helpless as a child, and smothering. I heard a voice—its voice—it demanded to know if I were Hisarr Zul! Somehow that voice was speaking within my mind, and somehow I made reply: No, I told the monster, I was seeking to slay Hisarr Zul, as only I could.” Conan glanced at his companion. “A slight exaggeration, perfume procurer for the Queen of Koth.”

Khassek nodded without smiling.
So we both know how to lie
, he mused, and wondered if he might have had the presence of mind to lie when some sort of sand-demon was assiduously smothering him to death!

The sand-lich had released him then, Conan said, and told him its story: it was the eyeless ghost of Hisarr Zul’s brother, and it had died here ten years before, and over those years it had gained control of the very sands. Thus it had slain any who sought to follow the pass. Blindly seeking its killer, Hisarr, it attacked and slew every traveler. The ravine-like pass was strewn with bones and clothing and weapons. For years that long shortcut through the maddening Dragon Hills had been taken only by fools or those who had no knowledge of the moaning sand-horror that haunted it.

“Hisarr and his brother—he had been Tosya Zul, the Sand-lich—had for years studied the ancient learning; the arcane knowledge of long-dead wizards. They had learned secrets known to no others who abide among men; the demonic lore of formless horrors that abide lurking about the hills of the world and in the very blackness between the worlds, in dark caverns where men go not and even in the ever-shifting deserts baked by the sun to eternity. They sought power. As they brewed abominations in their house in Zamboula, the khan learned, and sent men to take them. They fled with sacks of wealth, but left their lore—so Tosya Zul thought. He had actually risked his life to hurry back and save Hisarr. They fled, leaving behind priceless treasures of awful knowledge. They fled into the night, like dogs—rich dogs!

“Hisarr had lied to his brother. In the Dragon Hills, Tosya discovered that Hisarr had brought some of the old writings with him. They quarreled. In the night, Hisarr slew him and burned out his eyes with white-hot coins, that he might not be able to see his way to the next world. And Hisarr went on up to Arenjun. There he perfected his means of stealing men’s souls, as I learned to my dismay—worse than dismay! He would use that to gain control of certain officials, you see, thereby soon controlling a city. And then a country, all through the blackmail of the souls in his possession. After that…” Conan shrugged. “Another country, I suppose, and then another, perhaps. For ten years the Sand-lich that had been Tosya Zul knew agony, and slew all who sought to pass him by. Jackals had eaten his flesh, and though he was dead he knew, and felt! The lich lamented his decade of anguish, dead and yet not dead, and even stated itself that I must realize it could no longer be sane. Oh I realized it, all right!”

“You stood and talked thus with… sand? You saw this dead wizard?”

“I saw an ever-shifting pillar of sand. The voice spoke inside my head. It told me the means of regaining my own soul: I must prevent the mirror’s being broken, for that condemned me forever. Yet I must cause it to be broken—by the wearer of a crown. It said that there is power in all those who rule, power that not even they themselves know. First, though, I had to regain the mirror. For you see I had little doubt but that Hisarr Zul would prove treacherous, once I had returned the amulet to him. I did not believe that he would return my soul to me, and let me go. The Sand-lich told me how I might free those soulless creatures of his brother.”

Khassek looked at the Cimmerian, and saw that his profile had become the stern-visaged statue of a grim stone god while he laid out that horrid means of giving those un-men rest, and on the instant Khassek knew that Conan had done it: the head of the wizard must be severed, and the skull stuffed up with earth, and its ears and nostrils, and that head must then be consumed, utterly, by flame.

“Ah. And the keep of Hisarr Zul burned, and all in it. That was your work, Conan?”

“It was,” the narrow-eyed statue said. “The flame spread from his head, once the very bone was reduced to calc and ash.”

“How did you best him?”

“The lich of Tosya told me several means of accomplishing that, and all but one were too horrible to contemplate. I—”

“Tell me,” the Iranistani said, with gooseflesh on his arms, “those several means that were too horrible even for you to use against one so horrible as Hisarr Zul!”

“I remember them,” Conan said, dull-voiced. “I will never forget. Upon the death of his brother, the lich told me, he would at last be freed of his life-in-death, able to depart the gorge and go to… wherever such evil souls go, at death. He told me what I must do, and I asked for another way, and another. Though he flew into rage after rage, I reminded him that I was his means of gaining freedom; of destroying Hisarr Zul.” And Conan quietly, dully recounted those means: Hisarr Zul could be slain by strangulation with the hair of a virgin slain with bronze, and made woman in death after the hair was removed. Upon hearing that, Conan said, he felt his stomach lurch—as Khassek’s did now. What an abomination! Or the waters of the Zarkheba River would slay Hisarr, for they flowed with venom; the problem was that the Zarkheba was far, far away in southwestern Kush. Or he could be slain by iron forged in Stygia over a fire of bones, for from that dark and sorcery-haunted land of leering demons and mages had come most of the spells learned by the two wizards.

“Gods and blood of the gods!” Khassek said, with a shudder he did not seek to conceal.

“Aye. Finally he told me also that Hisarr might be bested by turning his own magicks back on him. That I saw as impossible—but that is what I did, in the end.”

“How?”

“I will not tell you,” Conan said calmly, and Khassek did not ask again.

Conan was bereft of steeds and supplies. Tosya Zul solved that problem—to him; he had no care for the Cimmerian save as his weapon against his brother. A sandstorm rose. It lifted Conan up; he was blown and carried by it many miles south, to an oasis. For that oasis the lich thought Hisarr Zul was making; Conan knew that it was Isparana who approached, for now he was ahead of her, in the path of her and her camels.

“The wizard had given me a harmless copy of the amulet. I was able to make the exchange without her knowledge. Then… well, due to this and that—she is some woman indeed, Khassek, and good with a sword too, treacherous as… as Hisarr! Due to this and that as I was saying, we were overtaken by a caravan. It was from Khawarizm, and they were slavers. Soon Isparana and I were heading north again as traveling companions—in coffle.”

“You have been enslaved, amid all else?”

“Aye,” Conan said calmly. “Not without slaying several of their caravan guards, I assure you!”

More corpses in his wake
, Khassek thought, and said nothing.

“It was that damned Isparana who laid me low! She tried to escape, then. They caught her. They put us both in coffle. And northward we both marched, chained. Each of us had an amulet—she did not see mine, and did not know that hers was not real, valueless to the Khan of Zamboula.”