‘Only a man sleeping on a dais, and a shadow that engulfed him,’ answered Conan.
The effect of his words on the other was horrifying. With an awful scream the man turned and rushed from the chamber. In his blind haste he caromed from the side of the door, righted himself, and fled through the adjoining chambers, still screaming at the top of his voice. Amazed, Conan stared after him, the girl trembling as she clutched the giant’s arm. They could no longer see the flying figure, but they still heard his frightful screams, dwindling in the distance, and echoing as from vaulted roofs. Suddenly one cry, louder than the others, rose and broke short, followed by blank silence.
‘Crom!’
Conan wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a hand that was not entirely steady.
‘Surely this is a city of the mad! Let’s get out of here, before we meet other madmen!’
‘It is all a nightmare!’ whimpered Natala. ‘We are dead and damned! We died out on the desert and are in hell! We are disembodied spirits – ow!’ Her yelp was induced by a resounding spank from Conan’s open hand.
‘You’re no spirit when a pat makes you yell like that,’ he commented, with the grim humor which frequently manifested itself at inopportune times. ‘We are alive, though we may not be if we loiter in this devil-haunted pile. Come!’
They had traversed but a single chamber when again they stopped short. Some one or something was approaching. They faced the doorway whence the sounds came, waiting for they knew not what. Conan’s nostrils widened, and his eyes narrowed. He caught the faint scent of the perfume he had noticed earlier in the night. A figure framed itself in the doorway. Conan swore under his breath; Natala’s red lips opened wide.
It was a woman who stood there staring at them in wonder. She was tall, lithe, shaped like a goddess; clad in a narrow girdle crusted with jewels. A burnished mass of night-black hair set off the whiteness of her ivory body. Her dark eyes, shaded by long dusky lashes, were deep with sensuous mystery. Conan caught his breath at her beauty, and Natala stared with dilated eyes. The Cimmerian had never seen such a woman; her facial outline was Stygian, but she was not dusky-skinned like the Stygian women he had known; her limbs were like alabaster.
But when she spoke, in a deep rich musical voice, it was in the Stygian tongue.
‘Who are you? What do you in Xuthal? Who is that girl?’
‘Who are you?’ bluntly countered Conan, who quickly wearied of answering questions.
‘I am Thalis the Stygian,’ she replied. ‘Are you mad, to come here?’
‘I’ve been thinking I must be,’ he growled. ‘By Crom, if I am sane, I’m out of place here, because these people are all maniacs. We stagger in from the desert, dying of thirst and hunger, and we come upon a dead man who tries to stab me in the back. We enter a palace rich and luxuriant, yet apparently empty. We find a meal set, but with no feasters. Then we see a shadow devour a sleeping man—’ He watched her narrowly and saw her change color slightly. ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ she demanded, apparently regaining control of herself.
‘I was just waiting for you to run through the rooms howling like a wild woman,’ he answered. ‘The man I told about the shadow did.’
She shrugged her slim ivory shoulders. ‘That was the screams I heard, then. Well, to every man his fate, and it’s foolish to squeal like a rat in a trap. When Thog wants me, he will come for me.’
‘Who is Thog?’ demanded Conan suspiciously.
She gave him a long appraising stare that brought color to Natala’s face and made her bite her small red lip.
‘Sit down on that divan and I will tell you,’ she said. ‘But first tell me your names.’
‘I am Conan, a Cimmerian, and this is Natala, a daughter of Brythunia,’ he answered. ‘We are refugees of an army destroyed on the borders of Kush. But I am not desirous of sitting down, where black shadows might steal up on my back.’
With a light musical laugh, she seated herself, stretching out her supple limbs with studied abandon.
‘Be at ease,’ she advised. ‘If Thog wishes you, he will take you, wherever you are. That man you mentioned, who screamed and ran – did you not hear him give one great cry, and then fall silent? In his frenzy, he must have run full into that which he sought to escape. No man can avoid his fate.’
Conan grunted non-committally, but he sat down on the edge of a couch, his saber across his knees, his eyes wandering suspiciously about the chamber. Natala nestled against him, clutching him jealously, her legs tucked up under her. She eyed the stranger woman with suspicion and resentment. She felt small and dust-stained and insignificant before this glamorous beauty, and she could not mistake the look in the dark eyes which feasted on every detail of the bronzed giant’s physique.
‘What is this place, and who are these people?’ demanded Conan.
‘This city is called Xuthal; it is very ancient. It is built over an oasis, which the founders of Xuthal found in their wanderings. They came from the east, so long ago that not even their descendants remember the age.’
‘Surely there are not many of them; these palaces seem empty.’
‘No; and yet more than you might think. The city is really one great palace, with every building inside the walls closely connected with the others. You might walk among these chambers for hours and see no one. At other times, you would meet hundreds of the inhabitants.’
‘How is that?’ Conan inquired uneasily; this savored too strongly of sorcery for comfort.
‘Much of the time these people lie in sleep. Their dream-life is as important – and to them as real – as their waking life. You have heard of the black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages they have cultivated it, until, instead of death, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of their time. Their lives are vague, erratic, and without plan. They dream, they wake, drink, love, eat and dream again. They seldom finish anything they begin, but leave it half completed and sink back again into the slumber of the black lotus. That meal you found – doubtless one awoke, felt the urge of hunger, prepared the meal for himself, then forgot about it and wandered away to dream again.’
‘Where do they get their food?’ interrupted Conan. ‘I saw no fields or vineyards outside the city. Have they orchards and cattle-pens within the walls?’
She shook her head. ‘They manufacture their own food out of the primal elements. They are wonderful scientists, when they are not drugged with their dream-flower. Their ancestors were mental giants, who built this marvelous city in the desert, and though the race became slaves to their curious passions, some of their wonderful knowledge still remains. Have you wondered about these lights? They are jewels, fused with radium. You rub them with your thumb to make them glow, and rub them again, the opposite way, to extinguish them. That is but a single example of their science. But much they have forgotten. They take little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in death-like sleep.’
‘Then the dead man at the gate—’ began Conan.
‘Was doubtless slumbering. Sleepers of the lotus are like the dead. Animation is apparently suspended. It is impossible to detect the slightest sign of life. The spirit has left the body and is roaming at will through other, exotic worlds. The man at the gate was a good example of the irresponsibility of these people’s lives. He was guarding the gate, where custom decrees a watch be kept, though no enemy has ever advanced across the desert. In other parts of the city you would find other guards, generally sleeping as soundly as the man at the gate.’
Conan mulled over this for a space.
‘Where are the people now?’
‘Scattered in different parts of the city; lying on couches, on silken divans, in cushion-littered alcoves, on fur-covered daises; all wrapt in the shining veil of dreams.’
Conan felt the skin twitch between his massive shoulders. It was not soothing to think of hundreds of people lying cold and still throughout the
tapestried palaces, their glassy eyes turned unseeingly upward. He remembered something else.
‘What of the thing that stole through the chambers and carried away the man on the dais?’
A shudder twitched her ivory limbs.
‘That was Thog, the Ancient, the god of Xuthal, who dwells in the sunken dome in the center of the city. He has always dwelt in Xuthal. Whether he came here with the ancient founders, or was here when they built the city, none knows. But the people of Xuthal worship him. Mostly he sleeps below the city, but sometimes at irregular intervals he grows hungry, and then he steals through the secret corridors and the dim-lit chambers, seeking prey. Then none is safe.’
Natala moaned with terror and clasped Conan’s mighty neck as if to resist an effort to drag her from her protector’s side.
‘Crom!’ he ejaculated aghast. ‘You mean to tell me these people lie down calmly and sleep, with this demon crawling among them?’
‘It is only occasionally that he is hungry,’ she repeated. ‘A god must have his sacrifices. When I was a child in Stygia the people lived under the shadow of the priests. None ever knew when he or she would be seized and dragged to the altar. What difference whether the priests give a victim to the gods, or the god comes for his own victim?’
‘Such is not the custom of my people,’ Conan growled, ‘nor of Natala’s either. The Hyborians do not sacrifice humans to their god, Mitra, and as for my people – by Crom, I’d like to see a priest try to drag a Cimmerian to the altar! There’d be blood spilt, but not as the priest intended.’
‘You are a barbarian,’ laughed Thalis, but with a glow in her luminous eyes. ‘Thog is very ancient and very terrible.’
‘These folk must be either fools or heroes,’ grunted Conan, ‘to lie down and dream their idiotic dreams, knowing they might awaken in his belly.’
She laughed. ‘They know nothing else. For untold generations Thog has preyed on them. He has been one of the factors which have reduced their numbers from thousands to hundreds. A few more generations and they will be extinct, and Thog must either fare forth into the world for new prey, or retire to the underworld whence he came so long ago.
‘They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of sight of these walls. There is an oasis a day’s march to the south – I have seen it on the old maps their ancestors drew on parchment – but no man of Xuthal has visited it for three generations, much less made any attempt to explore the fertile grasslands which the maps show lying another day’s march beyond it. They are a fast-fading race, drowned in lotus-dreams, stimulating their waking hours by means of the golden wine which heals wounds, prolongs life, and invigorates the most sated debauchee.
‘Yet they cling to life, and fear the deity they worship. You saw how one went mad at the knowledge that Thog was roving the palaces. I have seen the whole city screaming and tearing its hair, and running frenziedly out of the gates, to cower outside the walls and draw lots to see which would be bound and flung back through the arched doorways to satisfy Thog’s lust and hunger. Were they not all slumbering now, the word of his coming would send them raving and shrieking again through the outer gates.’
‘Oh, Conan!’ begged Natala hysterically. ‘Let us flee!’
‘In good time,’ muttered Conan, his eyes burning on Thalis’ ivory limbs. ‘What are you, a Stygian woman, doing here?’
‘I came here when a young girl,’ she answered, leaning lithely back against the velvet divan, and intertwining her slender fingers behind her dusky head. ‘I am the daughter of a king, no common woman, as you can see by my skin, which is as white as that of your little blond there. I was abducted by a rebel prince, who, with an army of Kushite bowmen, pushed southward into the wilderness, searching for a land he could make his own. He and all his warriors perished in the desert, but one, before he died, placed me on a camel and walked beside it until he dropped and died in his tracks. The beast wandered on, and I finally passed into delirium from thirst and hunger, and awakened in this city. They told me I had been seen from the walls, early in the dawn, lying senseless beside a dead camel. They went forth and brought me in and revived me with their wonderful golden wine. And only the sight of a woman would have led them to have ventured that far from their walls.
‘They were naturally much interested in me, especially the men. As I could not speak their language, they learned to speak mine. They are very quick and able of intellect; they learned my language long before I learned theirs. But they were more interested in me than in my language. I have been, and am, the only thing for which a man of them will forgo his lotus-dreams for a space.’
She laughed wickedly, flashing her audacious eyes meaningly at Conan.
‘Of course the women are jealous of me,’ she continued tranquilly. ‘They are handsome enough in their yellow-skinned way, but they are dreamy and uncertain as the men, and these latter like me not only for my beauty, but for my reality. I am no dream! Though I have dreamed the dreams of the lotus, I am a normal woman, with earthly emotions and desires. With such these moon-eyed yellow women can not compare.
‘That is why it would be better for you to cut that girl’s throat with your saber, before the men of Xuthal waken and catch her. They will put her through paces she never dreamed of! She is too soft to endure what I have thrived on. I am a daughter of Luxur, and before I had known fifteen summers I had been led through the temples of Derketo, the dusky goddess, and had been initiated into the mysteries. Not that my first years in Xuthal were years of unmodified pleasure! The people of Xuthal have forgotten more than the priestesses of Derketo ever dreamed. They live only for sensual joys. Dreaming or waking, their lives are filled with exotic ecstasies, beyond the ken of ordinary men.’
‘Damned degenerates!’ growled Conan.
‘It is all in the point of view,’ smiled Thalis lazily.
‘Well,’ he decided, ‘we’re merely wasting time. I can see this is no place for ordinary mortals. We’ll be gone before your morons awake, or Thog comes to devour us. I think the desert would be kinder.’
Natala, whose blood had curdled in her veins at Thalis’s words, fervently agreed. She could speak Stygian only brokenly, but she understood it well enough. Conan stood up, drawing her up beside him.
‘If you’ll show us the nearest way out of this city,’ he grunted, ‘we’ll take ourselves off.’ But his gaze lingered on the Stygian’s sleek limbs and ivory breasts.
She did not miss his look, and she smiled enigmatically as she rose with the lithe ease of a great lazy cat.
‘Follow me,’ she directed and led the way, conscious of Conan’s eyes fixed on her supple figure and perfectly poised carriage. She did not go the way they had come, but before Conan’s suspicions could be roused, she halted in a wide ivory-cased chamber, and pointed to a tiny fountain which gurgled in the center of the ivory floor.
‘Don’t you want to wash your face, child?’ she asked Natala. ‘It is stained with dust, and there is dust in your hair.’
Natala colored resentfully at the suggestion of malice in the Stygian’s faintly mocking tone, but she complied, wondering miserably just how much havoc the desert sun and wind had wrought on her complexion – a feature for which women of her race were justly noted. She knelt beside the fountain, shook back her hair, slipped her tunic down to her waist, and began to lave not only her face, but her white arms and shoulders as well.
‘By Crom!’ grumbled Conan. ‘A woman will stop to consider her beauty, if the devil himself were on her heels. Haste, girl; you’ll be dusty again before we’ve got out of sight of this city. And Thalis, I’d take it kindly if you’d furnish us with a bit of food and drink.’
For answer Thalis leaned herself against him, slipping one white arm about his bronzed shoulders. Her sleek naked flank pressed against his thigh and the perfume of her foamy hair was in his nostrils.
‘Why dare the desert?’ she whispered ur
gently. ‘Stay here! I will teach you the ways of Xuthal. I will protect you. I will love you! You are a real man: I am sick of these moon-calves who sigh and dream and wake, and dream again. I am hungry for the hard, clean passion of a man from the earth. The blaze of your dynamic eyes makes my heart pound in my bosom, and the touch of your iron-thewed arm maddens me.
‘Stay here! I will make you king of Xuthal! I will show you all the ancient mysteries, and the exotic ways of pleasure! I—’ She had thrown both arms about his neck and was standing on tiptoe, her vibrant body shivering against his. Over her ivory shoulder he saw Natala, throwing back her damp tousled hair, stop short, her lovely eyes dilating, her red lips parting in a shocked O. With an embarrassed grunt, Conan disengaged Thalis’s clinging arms and put her aside with one massive arm. She threw a swift glance at the Brythunian girl and smiled enigmatically, seeming to nod her splendid head in mysterious cogitation.
Natala rose and jerked up her tunic, her eyes blazing, her lips pouting sulkily. Conan swore under his breath. He was no more monogamous in his nature than the average soldier of fortune, but there was an innate decency about him that was Natala’s best protection.
Thalis did not press her suit. Beckoning them with her slender hand to follow, she turned and walked across the chamber. There, close to the tapestried wall, she halted suddenly. Conan, watching her, wondered if she had heard the sounds that might be made by a nameless monster stealing through the midnight chambers, and his skin crawled at the thought.
‘What do you hear?’ he demanded.
‘Watch that doorway,’ she replied, pointing.
He wheeled, sword ready. Only the empty arch of the entrance met his gaze. Then behind him sounded a quick faint scuffling noise, a half-choked gasp. He whirled. Thalis and Natala had vanished. The tapestry was settling back in place, as if it had been lifted away from the wall. As he gaped bewilderedly, from behind that tapestried wall rang a muffled scream in the voice of the Brythunian girl.
2
When Conan turned, in compliance with Thalis’s request, to glare at the doorway opposite, Natala had been standing just behind him, close to the side of the Stygian. The instant the Cimmerian’s back was turned, Thalis, with a pantherish quickness almost incredible, clapped her hand over Natala’s mouth, stifling the cry she tried to give. Simultaneously the Stygian’s other arm was passed about the blond girl’s supple waist, and she was jerked back against the wall, which seemed to give way as Thalis’ shoulder pressed against it. A section of the wall swung inward, and through a slit that opened in the tapestry Thalis slid with her captive, just as Conan wheeled back.