“What do you mean?” Conan asked.
The wizard tugged at a dangling gray mustache and peered toward the palace, sparkling still even now that direct sunlight was gone. “I do not think the Karpash Mountain folk are fishermen. And even if they were, would you fish in a place where that was?”
“But … here it is,” Malak protested. “You cannot deny your eyes.”
“I can deny any of my senses,” Akiro replied mildly, “except those of the mind. As for the boat, perhaps someone knew we were coming.”
With a gasp the small thief dropped the boat and fishing lines as if they were serpents. He stepped back from them quickly, wiping his palms on his leather jerkin. “The Stygian knows we are coming? Banba’s Buttocks!”
“We make a cold camp just the same,” Conan said, stepping down from his saddle. “If he does not know we are here, there is no point to telling him with a fire.”
“We must cross now,” Jehnna said. “Now. The key is there, I tell you.”
“It will still be there in the morning,” the Cimmerian replied. With clear reluctance she took her eyes from the palace for the first time since reaching the beach, her jaw firming determinedly, but he went on before she could speak. “I have as much reason not to delay as have you, Jehnna. We will cross with the dawn.”
“The thief is right, child,” Bombatta said. He gestured to the lake, its waters blackening as sunlight failed. “Did the boat tip over in that, you could drown before I found you. I cannot risk that.”
Jehnna lapsed into sulky silence, and Conan turned his attentions to Malak. “You can go, if you wish. Neither of us reckoned with this Amon-Rama knowing about us. Consider the jewels yours.”
“Jewels?” Bombatta echoed, but the two friends ignored him.
Malak took a step toward his horse, then stopped. “Conan, I … . If we had a chance, Cimmerian, but he knows we’re coming. Balor’s Glaring Eye! You heard Akiro.”
“I heard,” Conan said.
“You are staying?” Malak asked, and Conan nodded. The wiry man sighed. “I cannot travel in these mountains in the night,” he muttered. “I will leave in the morning.”
“Now that that is settled,” Akiro said, climbing from his horse with a groan, “I am hungry.” He dug his fists into the small of his back and stretched. “There is dried lamb in the packs. And figs.”
A heavy, solemn air hung over everyone as they set about making camp. The crater had the effect of making each of them grow silent and introspective, all save Jehnna, and she was rapt with the approach to a part of her destiny.
Soon the horses were hobbled, the dried meat and fruit had been consumed, and full night was on them. Jehnna wrapped herself in her blankets, and Zula, to everyone’s surprise, sat crosslegged beside the slender girl, crooning soothingly while she fell asleep. Bombatta glowered jealously, but the black woman’s fierce glare whenever one of the men came close to Jehnna was enough to make even him keep his distance.
As the full moon rose higher the darkness lessened, for it seemed as if the crater in some fashion trapped and held that canescent glow. The air took on a thick pearlescence of unearthly paleness, where faces could be dimly yet distinctly seen. Conan and Akiro sat alone amid the blanket-swathed mounds that marked where the others slept. They sat, and stared across the dark waters at the palace, shining yet illumining nothing, as a diamond on black velvet shone by holding every glimmer of light.
“This place presses in on me,” the Cimmerian said finally. “I cannot like it.”
“It is not a place to be liked, except by sorcerers,” Akiro replied. He moved his hands before him as if caressing the pale light. “I can sense the flow of power from the very rocks. This is a place where bonds are loosed, and the ties that hold the ordinary whole are undone. Here barriers are weak, and names may summon the dead.”
Conan shivered, and told himself there was a chill in the air. “I will be glad to be gone from it, back to Shadizar with the things Taramis seeks.”
Suddenly a shriek tore the night, and Jehnna twisted in her blankets, staring with unseeing eyes as she screamed. “No! No! Stop!”
Bombatta leaped from his sleep with tulwar in hand, while Malak cursed and struggled with his blankets, a dagger in each fist. Zula hugged the slender girl to her breast and murmured softly.
Suddenly Jehnna threw her arms about the black woman. Sobs convulsed her. “It was horrible,” she wept hoarsely. “Horrible!”
“A dream,” Bombatta said, sheathing his blade hastily. He knelt beside the girl and tried to take her from Zula, but she clung even more tightly. “Only a dream, child,” he said softly. “Nothing more. Go back to sleep.”
Zula glared at him over the girl she held. “Dreams are important. Dreams can tell the future. She must speak of it.”
“I agree,” Akiro said. “There are often portents in dreams. Speak, Jehnna.”
“It was only a dream,” Bombatta growled. “Who can say what she might dream in this evil place.”
“Speak,” Akiro said again to the girl.
Saying the words softly within Zula’s comforting arms, Jehnna began. Her dark eyes were still wide with terror. “I was an infant, barely able to walk by myself. I woke and saw my nurse asleep, and I slipped from the nursery. I wanted my mother. Down many corridors I ran, until I came to the room where I knew my mother slept, and my father. Their bed lay in the middle of the floor, and sheer hangings from the ceiling surrounded it. I could see them there, sleeping. And another figure, as well, like a boy. It crouched at the head of the bed, looking down at my mother and my father. The dim light of the lamps gleamed strangely on the figure’s hands. One hand raised, and I saw … I saw it held a dagger. The dagger fell, and my father made a strange sound, groaning as if he were hurt. My mother woke, then. She screamed a name, and another dagger slashed. There was blood everywhere. I ran. I wanted to scream, but it was as if I had no tongue. All I could do was run and run and run and—”
Zula gave her a fierce shake, then hugged her even closer. “It is all right, Jehnna. You are safe, now. Safe.”
“The name,” Akiro prompted. “What was the name?”
Jehnna peeked hesitantly out of the circle of Zula’s arms. “Taramis,” she whispered. “It was Taramis. Oh, why would I dream this? Why?”
No one made a sound until Bombatta said, “A dream of madness. A foul dream brought on by this foul place. Even my sleep is troubled by things that never were.”
“So it seems,” Akiro said at last. “You will see to her?” he asked Zula.
The ebon woman nodded, and stroked Jehnna’s hair as she began again the soft crooning that had brought sleep before. Bombatta sat on the other side of the girl, as if he, too, would guard her sleep this time. The two warriors, man and woman, stared at each other unblinkingly.
In company with Akiro Conan walked slowly to the water’s edge, its black sheen undisturbed by the smallest ripple. “When Jehnna was barely old enough to walk,” the Cimmerian said slowly, “Taramis was perhaps sixteen. Just barely the age to be invested with her brother’s titles and estates.”
“Perhaps it was just a dream.”
“Perhaps,” Conan said. “Perhaps.”
Amon-Rama peered into the crimson depths of the Heart of Ahriman, frowning at the sleeping figures. None remained awake on the far side of the night-shrouded lake. Last to slumber had been the yellow-skinned wizard, peering into the sky and attempting—this brought a momentary sneer to the Stygian’s hawk nosed face—attempting to touch the powers cupped in the crater. The wizard had retired long after the others breathed deep and slow beneath their blankets. But now even he slept. On the morn they would come, and … .
His frown deepened to a scowl. On the morn. Long had he waited, and now there were but hours more to wait, yet he itched with impatience. Naught could go wrong at so late a moment. So why did he feel as if ants crawled on his skin?
He released his concentration from the Heart, and the glow faded, leaving
only a gem more scarlet than rubies. He would not spend a night so. There would be an end to it.
Swiftly he strode from the mirrored chamber, through crystal halls whose smallest golden ornament would have been a delight to kings, up to the top of the tallest glittering spire of the palace. From that towering height he looked once toward the far shore, as if his unaided eyes could pierce the unnaturally pale night, then produced from beneath his hooded vermilion robes a black chalk compounded from the burned bones of murdered men and the life’s breath of virgins.
In quick strokes he scribed a pentagram, leaving one break so it would be safe for him to enter. In each point of the star he drew two symbols, one the same and one different in each of the five. The like symbols would add their warding to the protective power of the pentagram. The other five would summon. Holding his robes carefully so as to smudge no part of the pattern—there could be disaster in that!—he stepped within, and completed the last segment of the unholy diagram.
Slowly at first, then with greater force, he began to chant, until he howled the words at the night. Yet he heard no word he spoke. Such words were not meant for men. His ear could not hear them. Only with long years of painful practice could he speak them. In that place where bonds were broken, Amon-Rama invoked spirits of change and dissolution.
Bit by bit the paleness of the night seem to gather around him, thickening, swirling, enfolding, hiding him as in a pillar of smoke. And that smoke grew and shaped, changed. Wings stretched forth in a span four times the height of a man. Massive talons scraped at the adamantine crystal of the towertop. Within the scribed lines of power stood a gigantic bird, a fierce-beaked eagle, but all of smoke that swirled and roiled within.
The great wings beat—there was no sound, as if they did not beat at the air of this world—and the monstrous form rose into the night. Swiftly the vaporous creature flew, until it circled far above the black sand beach. Ethereal pinions folded, and the bird-shape swooped.
Unerring it struck, straight at the slender form of the girl. Huge wings smote doward to brake; no flutter of air disturbed the blankets of the black woman or the scar-faced man sleeping on either side. Talons closed firmly about her slender body, but she did not wake, nor give any sign that she felt any other than deep, normal sleep.
Upward the smoky creature flew, then, wings seeming to sweep the breadth of the sky as they hurtled it back across the raven lake to the coruscant spire. As it lowered toward that vitric tower, the bird-form dissolved once more to a pillar of smoke, a pillar that touched down within the pentagram, swirled, and dissipated to reveal Amon-Rama bearing Jehnna in his red-robed arms.
Carefully he scrubbed out a section of the diagram with his foot, then stepped out. The rest he could dispose of later. Now there was a matter more important. The lifeless-eyed necromancer smiled thinly—it touched no more than his lips—down at the lovely face she turned up to him in her unbroken sleep. A matter infinitely more important.
Crystalline stairs that chimed beneath his hurried tread carried him down into the palace. To the chamber of mirrors, he hastened, and beyond, to a room like no other in that sparkling faceted structure, nor like any other to be found on the face of the earth.
Elsewhere in that crystal palace was there always light and brightness, without need of lamp or sun. Here was darkness. The walls seemed tapestried with blackest shadow, if walls there were, or ceiling or floor, for the chamber appeared to extend in all directions infinitely, and no spark of light in it save two. Brightness framed the doorway that gave entrance from the chamber of mirrors, but that brightness failed abruptly at the very door. No pool of light stretched from it. The second light was indeed a pool, a soft glow without apparent source that surrounded a huge bed piled high with silken cushions. On that bed Amon-Rama laid his slight burden.
He looked down at her, no expression in his flat black eyes, then slowly traced one hand along the line from slim ankle to rounded thigh to tiny waist to swelling breast. Normal vices had been burned out of him by his thaumaturgies long years ago, but others remained, others that gave him dark pleasures. And, he thought, as he had not the same use for the girl as that foolish woman, Taramis, there was no reason for him not to indulge himself in them. But when his sport with the others was done. Now that the girl, the One, was finally in his grasp, his impatience was gone. Now was a time for preparations.
“Hear me now!” he called, his voice rolling into vast distances. “No door, no window, no crack nor opening to air. So do I say it, so must it be!”
The crystal palace tolled brazenly like a great bell, and it was so. The palace was sealed.
“Let us see first how they deal with that,” he murmured.
With a final glance at Jehnna’s unmoving form, he made his way from the place. When he had shut the door behind him, only the one pool of light remained, and Jehnna floated in the midst of infinite dark.
xii
Eerily pearlescent darkness still filled the crater when Conan woke, but he did not need a paling of the sky to the east to tell him that dawn approached. To cross the lake at dawn they must be awake before dawn, therefore he had awakened in good time. It was a useful trick he had, though he would admit that too much wine could befuddle it.
Tossing aside his blankets, he sheathed the bared broadsword that had lain by him through the night and rose, stretching. He frowned as his eye fell on Jehnna’s empty blankets. Swiftly he scanned the slope of the crater above their camp. The horses stood with heads down, sleeping. Nothing moved.
He bent to prod Akiro and Malak. “Wake,” he said quietly. “Jehnna is gone. Up with you.”
Leaving then—Malak spluttering and cursing, Akiro muttering direly about his age and need for sleep—Conan strode to where Bombatta and Zula slept, one to either side of the empty blankets where Jehnna had been. He glared at the scar-faced warrior, snoring in a low buzz, and planted his booted foot in the man’s ribs.
With a startled yelp Bombatta came awake. A heartbeat later he was snarling to his feet, hand darting to his tulwar. “I will kill you, thief! I—”
“Jehnna is gone,” Conan said with grim coldness. “You all but tie her to you, then let her disappear. She could be dead!”
Bombatta’s fury vanished with the first words. He stared at her blankets as if struck in the head.
“The horses are all here,” Malak called.
The ebon-armored man shook himself. “Of course they are!” he roared. “Jehnna would not ride away from her destiny.”
“Destiny!” Zula sneered. “You call it her destiny. Why can she not choose her own destiny?”
“If you have done something with her,” Bombatta grated, and the black woman bristled back.
“I? I would never harm her! It is you who think she is a plaything, to be used as you see fit!”
The scars stood out as white lines across the big warrior’s face. “You diseased she-jackal! I will carve you—”
“Fight later!” Conan snapped. “Now we must find Jehnna!”
Tension between the two lessened, but did not disappear. Bombatta sheathed his half-bared tulwar with a growl deep in his throat, and Zula’s lip curled angrily as she lowered the staff she held in both hands.
Akiro had knelt by Jehnna’s blankets and begun running his hands over them. Now his lips moved silently, and his eyes closed. When he opened them again only dead-white spheres showed. Malak gagged loudly and turned away.
“The girl was taken by a bird,” the old man announced.
“Old fool,” Bombatta muttered, but Akiro continued as if he had not spoken.
“A great bird, a bird of smoke that moved without sound. It carried her in its talons.” His eyelids dropped, and opened on normal black eyes.
“A fool?” Conan said to Bombatta. “You are the fool. And me. We should have expected the Stygian to do something.”
“Where did this bird take her?” Zula asked.
Akiro pointed across the lake to the crystal palace. “There, o
f course.”
“Then we must follow,” she said.
Conan nodded wordless agreement. As one he and Bombatta ran to the hide boat, wrestled it to the water.
“But it may be ensorceled,” Malak protested. “Akiro said so.”
“We must take the chance,” Conan replied. He stood knee deep in the water beside the narrow vessel. “In! Quickly!”
In a quick scramble they filled the boat, Zula in the middle between Akiro and Malak, Conan and Bombatta on the ends. Paddles in the big men’s hands dug furiously at the water, and the slim boat knifed away from the shore.
“Sigyn’s Bowl!!” Malak howled abruptly. “I forgot! I am leaving this morning! Turn back!”
Conan did not slow the steady work of his powerful arms and shoulders. “Swim,” he said curtly.
The small thief looked at the liquid beneath them and shuddered. “Water is for drinking,” he muttered, “when there is no wine.”
With neither wind nor wave to hinder and two strong men working the paddles, the hide boat all but flew over the lake. Ripples from its passage spread incredibly far, for no other thing disturbed that glassy surface. The crystal palace loomed before them. Along its border with the water there was a landing, perfectly ordinary except that it, too, seemed carved from a single huge gem. The sun topped the crater’s rim as they reached the palace, and the vast structure became a riot of scintillation.
Conan held the boat close to the strange landing while the others clambered out. When he was on the glittering stone as well, he lifted the hide boat from the water. A thief did not last long in Shadizar who failed to plan for his exits and escapes. For now the lake was still, but he would not risk something sweeping the craft away, not until he knew of some other means of leaving that unnatural palace.
The boat secured, he turned his attention to the palace. Smooth, sparkling walls met his eyes. Far to the right and left were the ends of crystal colonnades with tall, fluted columns of pellucid stone. Above rose featureless, vitreous expanses of sheer wall topped by faceted domes and glittering spires stretching toward the sky.