Scarlet Citadel Retaken

  Chapter III

  The Lion strode through the Halls of Hell;

  Across her path grim shadows fell

  Of many a mowing, nameless shape

  Monsters with dripping jaws agape.

  The darkness shuddered with scream and yell

  When the Lion stalked through the Halls of Hell.

  -- Old Ballad.

  Queen Conyn tested the ring in the wall and the chain that bound her. Her limbs were free, but she knew that her shackles were beyond even her iron strength. The links of the chain were as thick as her thumb and were fastened to a band of steel about her waist, a band broad as her hand and half an inch thick. The sheer weight of her shackles would have slain a lesser woman with exhaustion. The locks that held band and chain were massive affairs that a sledge-hammer could hardly have dinted. As for the ring, evidently it went clear through the wall and was clinched on the other side.

  Conyn cursed and panic surged through her as she glared into the darkness that pressed against the half-circle of light. All the superstitious dread of the barbarian slept in her soul, untouched by civilized logic. Her primitive imagination peopled the subterranean darkness with grisly shapes. Besides, her reason told her that she had not been placed there merely for confinement. Her captors had no reason to spare her. She had been placed in these pits for a definite doom. She cursed herself for her refusal of their offer, even while her stubborn womanhood revolted at the thought, and she knew that were she taken forth and given another chance, her reply would be the same. She would not sell her subjects to the butcher. And yet it had been with no thought of anyone's gain but her own that she had seized the kingdom originally. Thus subtly does the instinct of sovereign responsibility enter even a red-handed plunderer sometimes.

  Conyn thought of Tsothi's last abominable threat, and groaned in sick fury, knowing it was no idle boast. Women and men were to the wizard no more than the writhing insect is to the scientist. Soft white hands that had caressed her, red lips that had been pressed to hers, dainty white chest s that had quivered to her hot fierce kisses, to be stripped of their delicate skin, white as ivory and pink as young petals -- from Conyn's lips burst a yell so frightful and inhuman in its mad fury that a listener would have stared in horror to know that it came from a human throat.

  The shuddering echoes made her start and brought back her own situation vividly to the queen. She glared fearsomely at the outer gloom, and thought of the grisly tales she had heard of Tsothi's necromantic cruelty, and it was with an icy sensation down her spine that she realized that these must be the very Halls of Horror named in shuddering legendry, the tunnels and dungeons wherein Tsothi performed horrible experiments with beings human, bestial, and, it was whispered, demoniac, tampering blasphemously with the naked basic elements of life itself. Rumor said that the mad poet Rinaldo had visited these pits, and been shown horrors by the wizard, and that the nameless monstrosities of which she hinted in her awful poem, The Song of the Pit, were no mere fantasies of a disordered brain. That brain had crashed to dust beneath Conyn's battle-axe on the night the queen had fought for her life with the assassins the mad rhymer had led into the betrayed palace, but the shuddersome words of that grisly song still rang in the queen's ears as she stood there in her chains.

  Even with the thought the Cimmerian was frozen by a soft rustling sound, blood-freezing in its implication. She tensed in an attitude of listening, painful in its intensity. An icy hand stroked her spine. It was the unmistakable sound of pliant scales slithering softly over stone. Cold sweat beaded her skin, as beyond the ring of dim light she saw a vague and colossal form, awful even in its indistinctness. It reared upright, swaying slightly, and yellow eyes burned icily on her from the shadows. Slowly a huge, hideous, wedge-shaped head took form before her dilated eyes, and from the darkness oozed, in flowing scaly coils, the ultimate horror of reptilian development.

  It was a snake that dwarfed all Conyn's previous ideas of snakes. Eighty feet it stretched from its pointed tail to its triangular head, which was bigger than that of a horse. In the dim light its scales glistened coldly, white as hoar-frost. Surely this reptile was one born and grown in darkness, yet its eyes were full of evil and sure sight. It looped its titan coils in front of the captive, and the great head on the arching neck swayed a matter of inches from her face. Its forked tongue almost brushed her lips as it darted in and out, and its fetid odor made her senses reel with nausea. The great yellow eyes burned into hers, and Conyn gave back the glare of a trapped wolf. She fought against the mad impulse to grasp the great arching neck in her tearing hands. Strong beyond the comprehension of civilized woman, she had broken the neck of a python in a fiendish battle on the Stygian coast, in her corsair days. But this reptile was venomous; she saw the great fangs, a foot long, curved like scimitars. From them dripped a colorless liquid that she instinctively knew was death. She might conceivably crush that wedge-shaped skull with a desperate clenched fist, but she knew that at her first hint of movement, the monster would strike like lightning.

  It was not because of any logical reasoning process that Conyn remained motionless, since reason might have told her -- since she was doomed anyway -- to goad the snake into striking and get it over with; it was the blind black instinct of self-preservation that held her rigid as a statue blasted out of iron. Now the great barrel reared up and the head was poised high above her own, as the monster investigated the torch. A drop of venom fell on her naked thigh, and the feel of it was like a white-hot dagger driven into her flesh. Red jets of agony shot through Conyn's brain, yet she held herself immovable; not by the twitching of a muscle or the flicker of an eyelash did she betray the pain of the hurt that left a scar she bore to the day of her death.

  The serpent swayed above her, as if seeking to ascertain whether there were in truth life in this figure which stood so death-like still. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the outer door, all but invisible in the shadows, clanged stridently. The serpent, suspicious as all its kind, whipped about with a quickness incredible for its bulk, and vanished with a long-drawn slithering down the corridor. The door swung open and remained open. The grille was withdrawn and a huge dark figure was framed in the glow of torches outside. The figure glided in, pulling the grille partly to behind it, leaving the bolt poised. As it moved into the light of the torch over Conyn's head, the queen saw that it was a gigantic black woman, stark naked, bearing in one hand a huge sword and in the other a bunch of keys. The black spoke in a sea-coast dialect, and Conyn replied; she had learned the jargon while a corsair on the coasts of Kush.

  'Long have I wished to meet you, Amra,' the black gave Conyn the name Amra, the Lion -- by which the Cimmerian had been known to the Kushites in her piratical days. The slave's woolly skull split in an animal-like grin, showing white tusks, but her eyes glinted redly in the torchlight. 'I have dared much for this meeting! Look! The keys to your chains! I stole them from Shukili. What will you give me for them?'

  She dangled the keys in front of Conyn's eyes.

  'Ten thousand golden lunas,' answered the queen quickly, new hope surging fiercely in her breast.

  'Not enough!' cried the black, a ferocious exultation shining on her ebon countenance. 'Not enough for the risks I take. Tsothi's pets might come out of the dark and eat me, and if Shukili finds out I stole her keys, she'll hang me up by my - well, what will you give me?'

  'Fifteen thousand lunas and a palace in Poitain,' offered the queen.

  The black yelled and stamped in a frenzy of barbaric gratification. 'More!' she cried. 'Offer me more! What will you give me?'

  'You black bitch!' A red mist of fury swept across Conyn's eyes. 'Were I free I'd give you a broken back! Did Shukili send you here to mock me?'

  'Shukili knows nothing of my coming, white woman,' answered the black, craning her thick neck to peer into Conyn's savage eyes. 'I know you from of old, since the days when I was a chief among a free people, before the Stygians took me and sold me into the north. Do you n
ot remember the sack of Abombi, when your sea-wolves swarmed in? Before the palace of Queen Ajaga you slew a chief and a chief fled from you. It was my sister who died; it was I who fled. I demand of you a blood-price, Amra!'

  'Free me and I'll pay you your weight in gold pieces,' growled Conyn.

  The red eyes glittered, the white teeth flashed wolfishly in the torchlight. 'Aye, you white bitch, you are like all your race; but to a black woman gold can never pay for blood. The price I ask is -- your head!'

  The last word was a maniacal shriek that sent the echoes shivering. Conyn tensed, unconsciously straining against her shackles in her abhorrence of dying like a sheep; then she was frozen by a greater horror. Over the black's shoulder she saw a vague horrific form swaying in the darkness.

  'Tsothi will never know!' laughed the black fiendishly, too engrossed in her gloating triumph to take heed of anything else, too drunk with hate to know that Death swayed behind her shoulder. 'She will not come into the vaults until the demons have torn your bones from their chains. I will have your head, Amra!'

  She braced her knotted legs like ebon columns and swung up the massive sword in both hands, her great black muscles rolling and cracking in the torchlight. And at that instant the titanic shadow behind her darted down and out, and the wedge-shaped head smote with an impact that re-echoed down the tunnels. Not a sound came from the thick blubbery lips that flew wide in fleeting agony. With the thud of the stroke, Conyn saw the life go out of the wide black eyes with the suddenness of a candle blown out. The blow knocked the great black body clear across the corridor and horribly the gigantic sinuous shape whipped around it in glistening coils that hid it from view, and the snap and splintering of bones came plainly to Conyn's ears. Then something made her heart leap madly. The sword and the keys had flown from the black's hands to crash and jangle on the stone -- and the keys lay almost at the queen's feet.

  She tried to bend to them, but the chain was too short; almost suffocated by the mad pounding of her heart, she slipped one foot from its sandal, and gripped them with her toes; drawing her foot up, she grasped them fiercely, barely stifling the yell of ferocious exultation that rose instinctively to her lips.

  An instant's fumbling with the huge locks and she was free. She caught up the fallen sword and glared about. Only empty darkness met her eyes, into which the serpent had dragged a mangled, tattered object that only faintly resembled a human body. Conyn turned to the open door. A few quick strides brought her to the threshold -- a squeal of high-pitched laughter shrilled through the vaults, and the grille shot home under her very fingers, the bolt crashed down. Through the bars peered a face like a fiendishly mocking carven gargoyle -- Shukili the eunuch, who had followed her stolen keys. Surely she did not, in her gloating, see the sword in the prisoner's hand. With a terrible curse Conyn struck as a cobra strikes; the great blade hissed between the bars and Shukili's laughter broke in a death-scream. The fat eunuch bent at the middle, as if bowing to her killer, and crumpled like tallow, her pudgy hands clutching vainly at her spilling entrails.

  Conyn snarled in savage satisfaction; but she was still a prisoner. Her keys were futile against the bolt which could be worked only from the outside. Her experienced touch told her the bars were hard as the sword; an attempt to hew her way to freedom would only splinter her one weapon. Yet she found dents on those adamantine bars, like the marks of incredible fangs, and wondered with an involuntary shudder what nameless monsters had so terribly assailed the barriers. Regardless, there was but one thing for her to do, and that was to seek some other outlet. Taking the torch from the niche, she set off down the corridor, sword in hand. She saw no sign of the serpent or its victim, only a great smear of blood on the stone floor.

  Darkness stalked on noiseless feet about her, scarcely driven back by her flickering torch. On either hand she saw dark openings, but she kept to the main corridor, watching the floor ahead of her carefully, lest she fall into some pit. And suddenly she heard the sound of a man, weeping piteously. Another of Tsothi's victims, she thought, cursing the wizard anew, and turning aside, followed the sound down a smaller tunnel, dank and damp.

  The weeping grew nearer as she advanced, and lifting her torch she made out a vague shape in the shadows. Stepping closer, she halted in sudden horror at the amorphic bulk which sprawled before her. Its unstable outlines somewhat suggested an octopus, but its malformed tentacles were too short for its size, and its substance was a quaking, jelly-like stuff which made her physically sick to look at. From among this loathsome gelid mass reared up a frog-like head, and she was frozen with nauseated horror to realize that the sound of weeping was coming from those obscene blubbery lips. The noise changed to an abominable high-pitched tittering as the great unstable eyes of the monstrosity rested on her, and it hitched its quaking bulk toward her. She backed away and fled up the tunnel, not trusting her sword. The creature might be composed of terrestrial matter, but it shook her very soul to look upon it, and she doubted the power of man-made weapons to harm it. For a short distance she heard it flopping and floundering after her, screaming with horrible laughter. The unmistakably human note in its mirth almost staggered her reason. It was exactly such laughter as she had heard bubble obscenely from the fat lips of the salacious men of Shadizar, City of Wickedness, when captive girls were stripped naked on the public auction block. By what hellish arts had Tsothi brought this unnatural being into life? Conyn felt vaguely that she had looked on blasphemy against the eternal laws of nature.

  She ran toward the main corridor, but before she reached it she crossed a sort of small square chamber, where two tunnels crossed. As she reached this chamber, she was flashingly aware of some small squat bulk on the floor ahead of her; then before she could check her flight or swerve aside, her foot struck something yielding that squalled shrilly, and she was precipitated headlong, the torch flying from her hand and being extinguished as it struck the stone floor. Half stunned by her fall, Conyn rose and groped in the darkness. Her sense of direction was confused, and she was unable to decide in which direction lay the main corridor. She did not look for the torch, as she had no means of rekindling it. Her groping hands found the openings of the tunnels, and she chose one at random. How long she traversed it in utter darkness, she never knew, but suddenly her barbarian's instinct of near peril halted her short.

  She had the same feeling she had had when standing on the brink of great precipices in the darkness. Dropping to all fours, she edged forward, and presently her outflung hand encountered the edge of a well, into which the tunnel floor dropped abruptly. As far down as she could reach the sides fell away sheerly, dank and slimy to her touch. She stretched out an arm in the darkness and could barely touch the opposite edge with the point of her sword. She could leap across it, then, but there was no point in that. She had taken the wrong tunnel and the main corridor lay somewhere behind her.

  Even as she thought this, she felt a faint movement of air; a shadowy wind, rising from the well, stirred her black mane. Conyn's skin crawled. She tried to tell herself that this well connected somehow with the outer world, but her instincts told her it was a thing unnatural. She was not merely inside the hill; she was below it, far below the level of the city streets. How then could an outer wind find its way into the pits and blow up from below? A faint throbbing pulsed on that ghostly wind, like drums beating, far, far below. A strong shudder shook the queen of Aquilonia.

  She rose to her feet and backed away, and as she did something floated up out of the well. What it was, Conyn did not know. She could see nothing in the darkness, but she distinctly felt a presence -- an invisible, intangible intelligence which hovered malignly near her. Turning, she fled the way she had come. Far ahead she saw a tiny red spark. She headed for it, and long before she thought to have reached it, she caromed headlong into a solid wall, and saw the spark at her feet. It was her torch, the flame extinguished, but the end a glowing coal. Carefully she took it up and blew upon it, fanning it into flame again. She
gave a sigh as the tiny blaze leaped up. She was back in the chamber where the tunnels crossed, and her sense of direction came back.

  She located the tunnel by which she had left the main corridor, and even as she started toward it, her torch flame flickered wildly as if blown upon by unseen lips. Again she felt a presence, and she lifted her torch, glaring about.

  She saw nothing; yet she sensed, somehow, an invisible, bodiless thing that hovered in the air, dripping slimily and mouthing obscenities that she could not hear but was in some instinctive way aware of. She swung viciously with her sword and it felt as if she were cleaving cobwebs. A cold horror shook her then, and she fled down the tunnel, feeling a foul burning breath on her naked back as she ran.

  But when she came out into the broad corridor, she was no longer aware of any presence, visible or invisible. Down it she went, momentarily expecting fanged and taloned fiends to leap at her from the darkness. The tunnels were not silent. From the bowels of the earth in all directions came sounds that did not belong in a sane world. There were titterings, squeals of demoniac mirth, long shuddering howls, and once the unmistakable squalling laughter of a hyena ended awfully in human words of shrieking blasphemy. She heard the pad of stealthy feet, and in the mouths of the tunnels caught glimpses of shadowy forms, monstrous and abnormal in outline.

  It was as if she had wandered into hell -- a hell of Tsothi-lanti's making. But the shadowy things did not come into the great corridor, though she distinctly heard the greedy sucking-in of slavering lips, and felt the burning glare of hungry eyes. And presently she knew why. A slithering sound behind her electrified her, and she leaped to the darkness of a near-by tunnel, shaking out her torch. Down the corridor she heard the great serpent crawling, sluggish from its recent grisly meal. From her very side something whimpered in fear and slunk away in the darkness. Evidently the main corridor was the great snake's hunting-ground and the other monsters gave it room.

  To Conyn the serpent was the least horror of them; she almost felt a kinship with it when she remembered the weeping, tittering obscenity, and the dripping, mouthing thing that came out of the well. At least it was of earthly matter; it was a crawling death, but it threatened only physical extinction, whereas these other horrors menaced mind and soul as well.

  After it had passed on down the corridor she followed, at what she hoped was a safe distance, blowing her torch into flame again. She had not gone far when she heard a low moan that seemed to emanate from the black entrance of a tunnel near by. Caution warned her on, but curiosity drove her to the tunnel, holding high the torch that was now little more than a stump. She was braced for the sight of anything, yet what she saw was what she had least expected. She was looking into a broad cell, and a space of this was caged off with closely set bars extending from floor to ceiling, set firmly in the stone. Within these bars lay a figure, which, as she approached, she saw was either a woman, or the exact likeness of a woman, twined and bound about with the tendrils of a thick vine which seemed to grow through the solid stone of the floor. It was covered with strangely pointed leaves and crimson blossoms -- not the satiny red of natural petals, but a livid, unnatural crimson, like a perversity of flower-life. Its clinging, pliant branches wound about the woman's naked body and limbs, seeming to caress her shrinking flesh with lustful avid kisses. One great blossom hovered exactly over her mouth. A low bestial moaning drooled from the loose lips; the head rolled as if in unbearable agony, and the eyes looked full at Conyn. But there was no light of intelligence in them; they were blank, glassy, the eyes of an idiot.

  Now the great crimson blossom dipped and pressed its petals over the writhing lips. The limbs of the wretch twisted in anguish; the tendrils of the plant quivered as if in ecstasy, vibrating their full snaky lengths. Waves of changing hues surged over them; their color grew deeper, more venomous.

  Conyn did not understand what she saw, but she knew that she looked on Horror of some kind. Woman or demon, the suffering of the captive touched Conyn's wayward and impulsive heart. She sought for entrance and found a grille-like door in the bars, fastened with a heavy lock, for which she found a key among the keys she carried, and entered. Instantly the petals of the livid blossoms spread like the hood of a cobra, the tendrils reared menacingly and the whole plant shook and swayed toward her. Here was no blind growth of natural vegetation. Conyn sensed a malignant intelligence; the plant could see her, and she felt its hate emanate from it in almost tangible waves. Stepping warily nearer, she marked the root-stem, a repulsively supple stalk thicker than her thigh, and even as the long tendrils arched toward her with a rattle of leaves and hiss, she swung her sword and cut through the stem with a single stroke.

  Instantly the wretch in its clutches was thrown violently aside as the great vine lashed and knotted like a beheaded serpent, rolling into a huge irregular ball. The tendrils thrashed and writhed, the leaves shook and rattled like castanets, and the petals opened and closed convulsively; then the whole length straightened out limply, the vivid colors paled and dimmed, a reeking white liquid oozed from the severed stump.

  Conyn stared, spellbound; then a sound brought her round, sword lifted. The freed woman was on her feet, surveying her. Conyn gaped in wonder. No longer were the eyes in the worn face expressionless. Dark and meditative, they were alive with intelligence, and the expression of imbecility had dropped from the face like a mask. The head was narrow and well-formed, with a high splendid forehead. The whole build of the woman was aristocratic, evident no less in her tall slender frame than in her small trim feet and hands. Her first words were strange and startling.

  'What year is this?' she asked, speaking Kothic.

  'Today is the tenth day of the month Yuluk, of the year of the Gazelle,' answered Conyn.

  'Yagkoolan Ishtar!' murmured the stranger. 'Ten years!' She drew a hand across her brow, shaking her head as if to clear her brain of cobwebs. 'All is dim yet. After a ten-year emptiness, the mind can not be expected to begin functioning clearly at once. Who are you?'

  'Conyn, once of Cimmeria. Now queen of Aquilonia.'

  The other's eyes showed surprize.

  'Indeed? And Namidides?'

  'I strangled her on her throne the night I took the royal city,' answered Conyn.

  A certain naivete in the queen's reply twitched the stranger's lips.

  'Pardon, your majesty. I should have thanked you for the service you have done me. I am like a woman woken suddenly from sleep deeper than death and shot with nightstallions of agony more fierce than hell, but I understand that you delivered me. Tell me -- why did you cut the stem of the plant Yothga instead of tearing it up by the roots?'

  'Because I learned long ago to avoid touching with my flesh that which I do not understand,' answered the Cimmerian.

  'Well for you,' said the stranger. 'Had you been able to tear it up, you might have found things clinging to the roots against which not even your sword would prevail. Yothga's roots are set in hell.'

  'But who are you?' demanded Conyn.

  'Women called me Peliay.'

  'What!' cried the queen. 'Peliay the sorcerer, Tsothi-lanti's rival, who vanished from the earth ten years ago?'

  'Not entirely from the earth,' answered Peliay with a wry smile. 'Tsothi preferred to keep me alive, in shackles more grim than rusted iron. She pent me in here with this devil-flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggot-writhing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell.

  'I could not remember my sorcery and the words and symbols of my power, with that cursed thing gripping me and drinking my soul with its loathsome caresses. It sucked the contents of my mind day and night, leaving my brain as empty as a broken wine-jug. Ten years! Ishtar preserve us!'

  Conyn found no reply, but stood holding the stump of the torch, and trailing her great sword. Surely the woman was mad -- yet there was no madness in the dark eyes that rested so calmly on her.

  'Tell me, is
the black wizard in Khorshemish? But no -- you need not reply. My powers begin to wake, and I sense in your mind a great battle and a queen trapped by treachery. And I see Tsothi-lanti riding hard for the Tybor with Strabona and the queen of Ophir. So much the better. My art is too frail from the long slumber to face Tsothi yet. I need time to recruit my strength, to assemble my powers. Let us go forth from these pits.'

  Conyn jangled her keys discouragedly.

  'The grille to the outer door is made fast by a bolt which can be worked only from the outside. Is there no other exit from these tunnels?'

  'Only one, which neither of us would care to use, seeing that it goes down and not up,' laughed Peliay. 'But no matter. Let us see to the grille.'

  She moved toward the corridor with uncertain steps, as of long-unused limbs, which gradually became more sure. As she followed Conyn remarked uneasily, 'There is a cursed big snake creeping about this tunnel. Let us be wary lest we step into her mouth.'

  'I remember her of old,' answered Peliay grimly, 'the more as I was forced to watch while ten of my acolytes were fed to her. She is Satha, the Old One, chiefest of Tsothi's pets.'

  'Did Tsothi dig these pits for no other reason than to house her cursed monstrosities?' asked Conyn.

  'She did not dig them. when the city was founded three thousand years ago there were ruins of an earlier city on and about this hill. Queen Khossus V, the founder, built her palace on the hill, and digging cellars beneath it, came upon a walled-up doorway, which she broke into and discovered the pits, which were about as we see them now. But her grand vizier came to such a grisly end in them that Khossus in a fright walled up the entrance again. She said the vizier fell into a well -- but she had the cellars filled in, and later abandoned the palace itself, and built herself another in the suburbs, from which she fled in a panic on discovering some black mold scattered on the marble floor of her palace one morning.

  'She then departed with her whole court to the eastern corner of the kingdom and built a new city. The palace on the hill was not used and fell into ruins. When Akkutho I revived the lost glories of Khorshemish, she built a fortress there. It remained for Tsothi-lanti to rear the scarlet citadel and open the way to the pits again. Whatever fate overtook the grand vizier of Khossus, Tsothi avoided it. She fell into no well, though she did descend into a well she found, and came out with a strange expression which has not since left her eyes.

  'I have seen that well, but I do not care to seek in it for wisdom. I am a sorcerer, and older than women reckon, but I am human. As for Tsothi -- women say that a dancing--girl of Shadizar slept too near the pre-human ruins on Dagoth Hill and woke in the grip of a black demon; from that unholy union was spawned an accursed hybrid women call Tsothi-lanti--'

  Conyn cried out sharply and recoiled, thrusting her companion back. Before them rose the great shimmering white form of Satha, an ageless hate in its eyes. Conyn tensed herself for one mad berserker onslaught -- to thrust the glowing fagot into that fiendish countenance and throw her life into the ripping sword-stroke. But the snake was not looking at her. It was glaring over her shoulder at the woman called Peliay, who stood with her arms folded, smiling. And in the great cold yellow eyes slowly the hate died out in a glitter of pure fear -- the only time Conyn ever saw such an expression in a reptile's eyes. With a swirling rush like the sweep of a strong wind, the great snake was gone.

  'What did she see to frighten her?' asked Conyn, eyeing her companion uneasily.

  'The scaled people see what escapes the mortal eye,' answered Peliay, cryptically. 'You see my fleshly guise; she saw my naked soul.'

  An icy trickle disturbed Conyn's spine, and she wondered if, after all, Peliay were a woman, or merely another demon of the pits in a mask of humanity. She contemplated the advisability of driving her sword through her companion's back without further hesitation. But while she pondered, they came to the steel grille, etched blackly in the torches beyond, and the body of Shukili, still slumped against the bars in a curdled welter of crimson.

  Peliay laughed, and her laugh was not pleasant to hear.

  'By the ivory hips of Ishtar, who is our doorman? Lo, it is no less than the noble Shukili, who hanged my young women by their feet and skinned them with squeals of laughter! Do you sleep, Shukili? Why do you lie so stiffly, with your fat belly sunk in like a dressed pig's?'

  'She is dead,' muttered Conyn, ill at ease to hear these wild words.

  'Dead or alive,' laughed Peliay, 'she shall open the door for us.'

  She clapped her hands sharply and cried, 'Rise, Shukili! Rise from hell and rise from the bloody floor and open the door for your masters! Rise, I say!'

  An awful groan reverberated through the vaults. Conyn's hair stood on end and she felt clammy sweat bead her hide. For the body of Shukili stirred and moved, with infantile gropings of the fat hands. The laughter of Peliay was merciless as a flint hatchet, as the form of the eunuch reeled upright, clutching at the bars of the grille. Conyn, glaring at her, felt her blood turn to ice, and the marrow of her bones to water; for Shukili's wide-open eyes were glassy and empty, and from the great gash in her belly her entrails hung limply to the floor. The eunuch's feet stumbled among her entrails as she worked the bolt, moving like a brainless automaton. When she had first stirred, Conyn had thought that by some incredible chance the eunuch was alive; but the woman was dead -- had been dead for hours.

  Peliay sauntered through the opened grille, and Conyn crowded through behind her, sweat pouring from her body, shrinking away from the awful shape that slumped on sagging legs against the grate it held open. Peliay passed on without a backward glance, and Conyn followed her, in the grip of nightstallion and nausea. She had not taken half a dozen strides when a sodden thud brought her round. Shukili's corpse lay limply at the foot of the grille.

  'Her task is done, and hell gapes for her again,' remarked Peliay pleasantly; politely affecting not to notice the strong shudder which shook Conyn's mighty frame.

  She led the way up the long stairs, and through the brass skull-crowned door at the top. Conyn gripped her sword, expecting a rush of slaves, but silence gripped the citadel. They passed through the black corridor and came into that in which the censers swung, billowing forth their everlasting incense. Still they saw no one.

  'The slaves and soldiers are quartered in another part of the citadel,' remarked Peliay. 'Tonight, their mistress being away, they doubtless lie drunk on wine or lotus-juice.'

  Conyn glanced through an arched, golden-silled window that let out upon a broad balcony, and swore in surprize to see the dark-blue star-flecked sky. It had been shortly after sunrise when she was thrown into the pits. Now it was past midnight. She could scarcely realize she had been so long underground. She was suddenly aware of thirst and a ravenous appetite. Peliay led the way into a gold--domed chamber, floored with silver, its lapis-lazuli walls pierced by the fretted arches of many doors.

  With a sigh Peliay sank onto a silken divan.

  'Gold and silks again,' she sighed. 'Tsothi affects to be above the pleasures of the flesh, but she is half devil. I am human, despite my black arts. I love ease and good cheer -- that's how Tsothi trapped me. She caught me helpless with drink. Wine is a curse -- by the ivory chest of Ishtar, even as I speak of it, the traitor is here! Friend, please pour me a goblet -- hold! I forgot that you are a queen. I will pour.'

  'The devil with that,' growled Conyn, filling a crystal goblet and proffering it to Peliay. Then, lifting the jug, she drank deeply from the mouth, echoing Peliay' sigh of satisfaction.

  'The dog knows good wine,' said Conyn, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. 'But by Crom, Peliay, are we to sit here until her soldiers awake and cut our throats?'

  'No fear,' answered Peliay. 'Would you like to see how fortune holds with Strabona?'

  Blue fire burned in Conyn's eyes, and she gripped her sword until her knuckles showed blue. 'Oh, to be at sword-points with her!' she rumbled.

  Peliay lifted a great s
himmering globe from an ebony table.

  'Tsothi's crystal. A childish toy, but useful when there is lack of time for higher science. Look in, your majesty.'

  She laid it on the table before Conyn's eyes. The queen looked into cloudy depths which deepened and expanded. Slowly images crystallized out of mist and shadows. She was looking on a familiar landscape. Broad plains ran to a wide winding river, beyond which the level lands ran up quickly into a maze of low hills. On the northern bank of the river stood a walled town, guarded by a moat connected at each end with the river.

  'By Crom!' ejaculated Conyn. 'It's Shamar! The dogs besiege it!'

  The invaders had crossed the river; their pavilions stood in the narrow plain between the city and the hills. Their warriors swarmed about the walls, their mail gleaming palely under the moon. Arrows and stones rained on them from the towers and they staggered back, but came on again.

  Even as Conyn cursed, the scene changed. Tall spires and gleaming domes stood up in the mist, and she looked on her own capital of Tamar, where all was confusion. She saw the steel-clad knights of Poitain, her staunchest supporters, riding out of the gate, hooted and hissed by the multitude which swarmed the streets. She saw looting and rioting, and men-at-arms whose shields bore the insignia of Pellia, manning the towers and swaggering through the markets. Over all, like a fantasmal mirage, she saw the dark, triumphant face of Princess Arpella of Pellia. The images faded.

  'So!' raved Conyn. 'My people turn on me the moment my back is turned--'

  'Not entirely,' broke in Peliay. 'They have heard that you are dead. There is no one to protect them from outer enemies and civil war, they think. Naturally, they turn to the strongest noble, to avoid the horrors of anarchy. They do not trust the Poitanians, remembering former wars. But Arpella is on hand, and the strongest princess of the central provinces.'

  'When I come to Aquilonia again she will be but a headless corpse rotting on Traitor's Common,' Conyn ground her teeth.

  'Yet before you can reach your capital,' reminded Peliay, 'Strabona may be before you. At least her riders will be ravaging your kingdom.'

  'True!' Conyn paced the chamber like a caged lion. 'With the fastest horse I could not reach Shamar before midday. Even there I could do no good except to die with the people, when the town falls -- as fall it will in a few days at most. From Shamar to Tamar is five days' ride, even if you kill your horses on the road. Before I could reach my capital and raise an army, Strabona would be hammering at the gates; because raising an army is going to be hell -- all my damnable nobles will have scattered to their own cursed fiefs at the word of my death. And since the people have driven out Trocera of Poitain, there's none to keep Arpella's greedy hands off the crown -- and the crown-treasure. She'll hand the country over to Strabona, in return for a mock-throne -- and as soon as Strabona' back is turned, she'll stir up revolt. But the nobles won't support her, and it will only give Strabona excuse for annexing the kingdom openly. Oh Crom, Ymir, and Set! If I but had wings to fly like lightning to Tamar!'

  Peliay, who sat tapping the jade table-top with her finger-nails, halted suddenly, and rose as with a definite purpose, beckoning Conyn to follow. The queen complied, sunk in moody thoughts, and Peliay led the way out of the chamber and up a flight of marble, gold-worked stairs that let out on the pinnacle of the citadel, the roof of the tallest tower. It was night, and a strong wind was blowing through the star-filled skies, stirring Conyn's black mane. Far below them twinkled the lights of Khorshemish, seemingly farther away than the stars above them. Peliay seemed withdrawn and aloof here, one in cold unhuman greatness with the company of the stars.

  'There are creatures,' said Peliay, 'not alone of earth and sea, but of air and the far reaches of the skies as well, dwelling apart, unguessed of women. Yet to her who holds the Master-words and Signs and the Knowledge underlying all, they are not malignant nor inaccessible. Watch, and fear not.'

  She lifted her hands to the skies and sounded a long weird call that seemed to shudder endlessly out into space, dwindling and fading, yet never dying out, only receding farther and farther into some unreckoned cosmos. In the silence that followed, Conyn heard a sudden beat of wings in the stars, and recoiled as a huge bat-like creature alighted beside her. She saw its great calm eyes regarding her in the starlight; she saw the forty-foot spread of its giant wings. And she saw it was neither bat nor bird.

  'Mount and ride,' said Peliay. 'By dawn it will bring you to Tamar.'

  'By Crom!' muttered Conyn. 'Is this all a nightstallion from which I shall presently awaken in my palace at Tamar? What of you? I would not leave you alone among your enemies.'

  'Be at ease regarding me,' answered Peliay. 'At dawn the people of Khorshemish will know they have a new mistress. Doubt not what the gods have sent you. I will meet you in the plain by Shamar.'

  Doubtfully Conyn clambered upon the ridged back, gripping the arched neck, still convinced that she was in the grasp of a fantastic nightstallion. With a great rush and thunder of titan wings, the creature took the air, and the queen grew dizzy as she saw the lights of the city dwindle far below her.