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SHADOWS IN ZAMBOULA
By Robert E. Howard
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was first published in Weird Tales November 1935. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
1 A Drum Begins
'Peril hides in the house of Aram Baksh!'
The speaker's voice quivered with earnestness and his lean, black-nailedfingers clawed at Conan's mightily muscled arm as he croaked hiswarning. He was a wiry, sun-burnt man with a straggling black beard, andhis ragged garments proclaimed him a nomad. He looked smaller and meanerthan ever in contrast to the giant Cimmerian with his black brows, broadchest, and powerful limbs. They stood in a corner of the Sword-Makers'Bazar, and on either side of them flowed past the many-tongued,many-colored stream of the Zamboula streets, which is exotic, hybrid,flamboyant and clamorous.
Conan pulled his eyes back from following a bold-eyed, red-lippedGhanara whose short skirt bared her brown thigh at each insolent step,and frowned down at his importunate companion.
'What do you mean by peril?' he demanded.
The desert man glanced furtively over his shoulder before replying, andlowered his voice.
'Who can say? But desert men and travelers _have_ slept in the house ofAram Baksh, and never been seen or heard of again. What became of them?_He_ swore they rose and went their way--and it is true that no citizenof the city has ever disappeared from his house. But no one saw thetravelers again, and men say that goods and equipment recognized astheirs have been seen in the bazars. If Aram did not sell them, afterdoing away with their owners, how came they here?'
'I have no goods,' growled the Cimmerian, touching the shagreen-boundhilt of the broadsword that hung at his hip. 'I have even sold myhorse.'
'But it is not always rich strangers who vanish by night from the houseof Aram Baksh!' chattered the Zuagir. 'Nay, poor desert men have sleptthere--because his score is less than that of the other taverns--andhave been seen no more. Once a chief of the Zuagirs whose son had thusvanished complained to the satrap, Jungir Khan, who ordered the housesearched by soldiers.'
'And they found a cellar full of corpses?' asked Conan in good-humoredderision.
'Nay! They found naught! And drove the chief from the city with threatsand curses! But--' he drew closer to Conan and shivered--'something elsewas found! At the edge of the desert, beyond the houses, there is aclump of palm trees, and within that grove there is a pit. And withinthat pit have been found human bones, charred and blackened! Not once,but many times!'
'Which proves what?' grunted the Cimmerian.
'Aram Baksh is a demon! Nay, in this accursed city which Stygians builtand which Hyrkanians rule--where white, brown and black folk mingletogether to produce hybrids of all unholy hues and breeds--who can tellwho is a man, and who a demon in disguise? Aram Baksh is a demon in theform of a man! At night he assumes his true guise and carries his guestsoff into the desert where his fellow demons from the waste meet inconclave.'
'Why does he always carry off strangers?' asked Conan skeptically.
'The people of the city would not suffer him to slay their people, butthey care naught for the strangers who fall into his hands. Conan, youare of the West, and know not the secrets of this ancient land. But,since the beginning of happenings, the demons of the desert haveworshipped Yog, the Lord of the Empty Abodes, with fire--fire thatdevours human victims.
'Be warned! You have dwelt for many moons in the tents of the Zuagirs,and you are our brother! Go not to the house of Aram Baksh!'
'Get out of sight!' Conan said suddenly. 'Yonder comes a squad of thecity-watch. If they see you they may remember a horse that was stolenfrom the satrap's stable--'
The Zuagir gasped, and moved convulsively. He ducked between a booth anda stone horse-trough, pausing only long enough to chatter: 'Be warned,my brother! There are demons in the house of Aram Baksh!' Then he darteddown a narrow alley and was gone.
Conan shifted his broad sword-belt to his liking, and calmly returnedthe searching stares directed at him by the squad of watchmen as theyswung past. They eyed him curiously and suspiciously, for he was a manwho stood out even in such a motley throng as crowded the windingstreets of Zamboula. His blue eyes and alien features distinguished himfrom the Eastern swarms, and the straight sword at his hip added pointto the racial difference.
The watchmen did not accost him, but swung on down the street, while thecrowd opened a lane for them. They were Pelishtim, squat, hook-nosed,with blue-black beards sweeping their mailed breasts--mercenaries hiredfor work the ruling Turanians considered beneath themselves, and no lesshated by the mongrel population for that reason.
Conan glanced at the sun, just beginning to dip behind the flat-toppedhouses on the western side of the bazar, and hitching once more at hisbelt, moved off in the direction of Aram Baksh's tavern.
With a hillman's stride he moved through the ever-shifting colors of thestreets, where the ragged tunics of whining beggars brushed against theermine-trimmed khalats of lordly merchants, and the pearl-sewn satin ofrich courtezans. Giant black slaves slouched along, jostlingblue-bearded wanderers from the Shemitish cities, ragged nomads from thesurrounding deserts, traders and adventurers from all the lands of theEast.
The native population was no less heterogenous. Here, centuries ago,the armies of Stygia had come, carving an empire out of the easterndesert. Zamboula was but a small trading-town then, lying amidst a ringof oases, and inhabited by descendants of nomads. The Stygians built itinto a city and settled it with their own people, and with Shemite andKushite slaves. The ceaseless caravans, threading the desert from eastto west and back again, brought riches and more mingling of races. Thencame the conquering Turanians, riding out of the East to thrust back theboundaries of Stygia, and now for a generation Zamboula had been Turan'swesternmost outpost, ruled by a Turanian satrap.
The babel of a myriad tongues smote on the Cimmerian's ears as therestless pattern of the Zamboula streets weaved about him--cleft now andthen by a squad of clattering horsemen, the tall, supple warriors ofTuran, with dark hawk-faces, clinking metal and curved swords. Thethrong scampered from under their horses' hoofs, for they were the lordsof Zamboula. But tall, somber Stygians, standing back in the shadows,glowered darkly, remembering their ancient glories. The hybridpopulation cared little whether the king who controlled their destiniesdwelt in dark Khemi or gleaming Aghrapur. Jungir Khan ruled Zamboula,and men whispered that Nafertari, the satrap's mistress, ruled JungirKhan; but the people went their way, flaunting their myriad colors inthe streets, bargaining, disputing, gambling, swilling, loving, as thepeople of Zamboula have done for all the centuries its towers andminarets have lifted over the sands of the Kharamun.
Bronze lanterns, carved with leering dragons, had been lighted in thestreets before Conan reached the house of Aram Baksh. The tavern was thelast occupied house on the street, which ran west. A wide garden,enclosed by a wall, where date-palms grew thick, separated it from thehouses farther east. To the west of the inn stood another grove ofpalms, through which the street, now become a road, wound out into thedesert. Across the road from the tavern stood a row of deserted huts,shaded by straggling palm trees, and occupied only by bats and jackals.As Conan came down the road he wondered why the beggars, so plentiful inZamboula, had not appropriated these empty houses for sleeping quarters.The lights ceased some distance behind him. Here were no lanterns,except the one hanging before the tavern gate: only the stars, the softdust of the road underfoot, and the rustle of the palm leaves in thedesert breeze.
Aram's
gate did not open upon the road, but upon the alley which ranbetween the tavern and the garden of the date-palms. Conan jerkedlustily at the rope which depended from the bell beside the lantern,augmenting its clamor by hammering on the iron-bound teakwork gate withthe hilt of his sword. A wicket opened in the gate and a black facepeered through.
'Open, blast you,' requested Conan. 'I'm a guest. I've paid Aram for aroom, and a room I'll have, by Crom!'
The black craned his neck to stare into the starlit road behind Conan;but he opened the gate without comment, and closed it again behind theCimmerian, locking and bolting it. The wall was unusually high; butthere were many thieves in Zamboula, and a house on the edge of thedesert might have to be defended against a nocturnal nomad raid. Conanstrode through a garden where great pale blossoms nodded in thestarlight, and entered the