Conan and the Shaman's Curse (25 page)

The unseen choir hissed in a chanting crescendo, their voices piercing his eardrums like needles. Blood seeped from his nose, so hot that he smelled the scorching of his nostrils and upper lip. Tendons thick as cords rippled along his arm as he laboured to relax his grip.

Sajara was shouting at him, but her words were drowned in a sea of wailing voices. She grasped his face in her hands, snatching them away, grimacing and shaking her fingers.

Conan mustered his last surge of strength, expelling hot breath from his lungs. At the same instant, Sajara grabbed a head-sized chunk of rock and brought it down on Conan’s vibrating hand.

The atnalga flew from his nerveless fingers, rattling against the wall before it lay still. The hideous howling ceased at once. Conan felt the heat subsiding quickly, though twinges of pain tingled from his hand to his sweat-drenched head. He rose, limbs still shaking, breathing laboured. “Crom,” he said thickly, licking the dried smear of blood from his lips. “Y’Taba was wrong.”

“Oh, Conan! If you are not the chosen one, what are we to do? The gods have turned away from us. We have failed!” Tears ran from her eyes.

“Not while we still live,” he said fiercely, a measure of his strength returning. “By Crom, a Cimmerian never gives up.” He rubbed at the lump of flesh swelling on the back of his hand, flexing the fingers slowly, his teeth clenched.

“But without the atnalga we are doomed.” Sajara suddenly turned her tear-stricken face toward Conan, as if the meaning of his words had only just struck her. “You... you would still help us, Conan?” she fixed her pleading gaze on him.

He nodded. “We shall yet deliver this blasted atnalga to Y’Taba, though I see no use for a demon-haunted relic that bites the hand of its wielder! Y’Taba made a bargain with me and I shall keep it, by Crom—as will he. But with or without that thrice-accursed black blade, your people will not fall to the damned Kezati, not even if I must hew a hundred vulture-necks myself.”

“What befell Kulunga, I wonder?” Sajara mused, wiping at her eyes.

She was regarding the skeleton in either morbid fascination or reverent awe, Conan could not say which. “May-hap he escaped the monstrous beast below and holed up in this tower, only to starve. There are a thousand nameless graves such as this, in all comers of the world, marked by the bones of heroes who sought to restore past glories of their peoples.” The Cimmerian spoke absently as he stood beside Sajara, running a hand along the opaline throne and studying it with a practised eye. “Opal, or I’m a Pict,” he murmured. The sight of it tickled at his memory.

With a rasp, the bony occupant slumped forward, tumbling out of the throne with a crash. Sajara sprang backward, gripping a wall in wide-eyed terror. Conan, in spite of his numbness, leapt a foot into the air and landed in a crouch beside the rubble. He snatched up his fallen sword and held it at ready.

The skull, which was half again as large as a normal man’s, thumped onto the stone and came to rest near Sajara’s feet. But otherwise the bones lay in an unmoving jumble at the foot of the throne.

Conan gawked at the likenesses engraved in the smooth, iridescent stone. Sculpted in painstaking detail were the twin faces of a two-headed elephant, adorned with resplendent collars and fringed caps. Huge eyes stared outward at Conan; tusks curved upward, framing a coiled, upraised trunk. The sight lit a lantern in a dim comer of the Cimmerian’s memory. “Vendhyan!” he exclaimed. He had seen it before while adventuring in that land of glittering jewels and ancient gods. He knew the thing represented an obscure god, though he could not recall its name. But in that instant he mentally assembled all the clues about the island which had thus far stumped him. Like tom pieces of a treasure map, they fit together. He even recalled the name of the goddess whose macabre image loomed above the doorway in the outer wall.

“Kahli,” he said grimly. “Jhaora was the high priestess of Kahli whom King Orissa banished from Vendhya.”

Sajara looked at Conan in utter befuddlement. “I do not understand, Conan. Vendhyan... Kahli... King Orissa?” Her tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar words. “What— or who—are they?”

“You remember the glimpse you had of the devilish goddess whose graven effigy broods on the outer wall?” Sajara nodded, shuddering at the memory of that glance. “Well, years ago I was traipsing through the two-millenia-old ruins of Maharastra, a once-glorious city of Vendhya.”

“Vendhya?”

“A kingdom far east and south of Cimmeria—at least a year’s journey on foot, were one hardy enough to attempt it. Anyway, the face of that ten-armed she-devil was chiselled on a gigantic stone that lay among those ruins of Maharastra. At the time I was forced to travel in the company of a treacherous Vendhyan wizard, and I half-listened to his account of the legend behind that cruel goddess’s face.

“Maharastra had once been the capital of Vendhya. The city’s founder was King Orissa, first true king of Vendhya. He had vanquished many foes in his day. Only one rival was known to have survived: the high priestess of Kahli. She claimed kinship with a race called pan-kur, the spawn of a human woman raped by a demon. The priestess was powerful, holding sway over thousands of worshippers who revelled in degenerate rites. She had built a small empire that spread like blood from a slit throat, staining the southern coast of Vendhya. All feared to oppose the priestess, for Kahli was the most bloodthirsty goddess in the Vendhyan pantheon. Her long-forbidden rites had been a red blasphemy. The abominations that took place in Kahli’s temples were recorded once in crumbling scrolls which that Vendhyan wizard had read. He related a few of them to me, but thankfully I remember them not. According to the wizard, the most ghastly rites were unreadable; some scrolls had been soiled by the vomit of their scribes.” He paused, rubbing his chin and dragging his recollection of the tale from the dark recesses in his mind. “The priestess’s army of zealots once sacked a city ruled by Orissa’s brother, whom they sacrificed to Kahli. This”—he tapped the opal chair with his sword-point—“is surely the famous opaline throne of Orissa. Treasure-seekers and plunderers all over the world still swap tales of its whereabouts or sell false maps which supposedly reveal its location.” He made a wry face, remembering that as a once-naive youth, he had wasted a dinar or two on those shams.

Conan ran a hand over one of the elephant’s ears. “She must have taken this with her... Orissa eventually drove her out of Vendhya. Angered by the grotesque butchery of his brother, he appealed to the priests of mighty Ihndra, the god whose icon you see graven hereupon.

“By inciting a holy war, Orissa closed his powerful fist around the priestess’s realm and crushed it, though she somehow slipped through his fingers with a few devout followers. No one knew what became of her—until now. Doubtless she hired mercenaries and ships, fleeing to the safety of the seas... perhaps hoping to build a new base of power.”

Sajara gazed thoughtfully at the throne. “When Y’Taba spoke of Jhaora, did her name not bring this tale to your mind?”

He shook his head. “Her name was stricken from all writings and banned by Orissa. It was death to utter it. For years he searched for her, seeking vindication for his brother’s murder. He died a bitter greybeard on that vain quest.”

“What now, Conan?” Sajara asked, gesturing at the ebony blade lying upon the floor. “How shall we bring the atnalga to the village?”

“In one of these chests,” he replied, clearing away the rubble that buried one of the smaller trunks. He was curious to learn of their contents anyway... without arousing too much suspicion. On the island, Jhaora would have had no way of spending the loot from her empire that she had surely taken with her. Conan was of a mind to haul it away with him when he left this island. And now he was reasonably certain where the mainland lay.

Jhaora could not have strayed too far from the coast of Vendhya. Vessels of those times were ill-suited for long voyages. Further, the Vendhyans had never been a people noted for their seamanship.

And he would not return empty-handed. Not if these chests contained even a tithe of the wealth rumoured to have been in the priestess’s possession. Licking his lips, Conan slid the point of his sword under the bronze hasp and gently worked it loose. The lid was wedged in tightly, probably warped by prolonged contact with rain and sun. He pried it off with his blade, standing aside and as far back from the thing as he could. The absence of locks often indicated the presence of insidious traps.

In this case, however, it simply indicated the lack of valuable contents. Conan frowned as he leaned over the mildewy mass of tomes stacked in the trunk. The humidity had all but destroyed them. He peered at the cover of one and withdrew it carefully, as it seemed ready to crumble between his fingers. He squinted at the ghosts of characters with which it was haunted. Conan had gathered the general sort of knowledge that accumulates in the memories of those who travel the length and breadth of many lands. He had acquired skill at the speaking and reading of so many tongues that many a chair-bound scholar would have been amazed by Conan’s abilities. To thief, warrior, mercenary, or adventurer, the difference between life and death can lie in the meaning of a single syllable or a simple rune.

These writings were incomprehensible, though the characters that formed the words were unmistakably Vendhyan. He was loathe to abandon them, yet he deemed this neither the time nor the place to peruse the mouldy old manuscripts.

He picked up an arm bone and wedged the atnalga into it. Holding it as if it were an irate asp, he set the bizarre weapon atop the pile of books. The lid closed neatly over it, and he hefted the low-sided chest onto one of his brawny shoulders. It was heavy but manageable, though he doubted he could run far or fast while burdened with it.

Setting it down, he kicked aside some of the jagged chunks of rock that half-buried the other three trunks. Cracks in the floor spread from under these to the opposite wall, suggesting weighty contents that fired the Cimmerian’s imagination. He bent apart the latch securing the centre chest and lifted its lid, grinning at the golden coinage within. It was a haul that a year of piracy could not have matched. He groaned inwardly, frustrated by the presence of such a hoard when he had no means to haul it away. The winding ramp to this room had crumbled away, and he had no rope to fashion any sort of conveyance.

“Conan!” Sajara screamed, shrinking against the wall as she stared past his shoulder.

A shadow suddenly enveloped her; Conan instantly dropped to the floor as the rush of air came from behind him.

The chest saved his life.

Spiny forelegs seized the bronze bands and hardened wood, crushing the trunk like a bug. Green jaws snapped in the air a finger’s breadth from Conan’s neck, sunlight glinting wickedly on razor-like edges.

“Crom curse it!” he growled, crawling forward to clutch his dropped sword.

The gigantic stalker filled the room, easily thrice the size of the deadly predator they had faced before. Its antennae, tall as two men, swept backward from the top of the bulbous-eyed head, twitching. The spines on the monstrous forelegs jutted like rapiers, and three men of Conan’s size would scarcely have filled the thing’s segmented abdomen. Its carapace gleamed like emerald armour.

Bending down, the stalker shot out pincer-like legs toward the prone barbarian, who rolled for cover under the throne. The spines clacked against the opal, gouging chips from its edges and lifting it into the air, exposing Conan.

A loud crack sounded from between the stalker’s forelegs, and a shower of opal shards rained down from the throne’s ruined arms.

Dumbfounded by this display of strength, Conan looked at the puny blade in his hand and sprang from his crouch toward the doorway, grabbing the petrified Sajara. “Come on!” he shouted, pulling her with him.

The stalker tossed the wrecked throne. It struck the wall above the ramp, bouncing off and nearly squashing Conan, who avoided it by twisting in mid-leap. Lunging again with the speed of a lighting strike, the creature’s deadly legs struck, their spines raking the wall where Sajara had stood moments before.

They were cut off from the ramp. There was no other exit from the chamber.

Galvanized into action, Sajara followed Conan’s evasive moves. They began a shuffling, diving dance, avoiding attack after attack with desperate dodging and rolling. With uncanny precision, the stalker began to anticipate their manoeuvres, forcing them to change tactics. Time and again they leaped toward the exit, only to be driven back by the powerful swipe of those lethal spines.

Conan knew that they could not keep up the pace; the footing was poor and their foe seemed tireless. The slightest slip would result in a bloody death between the stalker’s snapping forelegs. To worsen matters, the cracks underfoot were spreading as the aged floor vibrated from the strain. A distant rattling filtered up to them, as if pieces were falling from the ceiling and crashing onto the fountain below. The clattering echoes brought cold sweat to Conan’s brow. If the floor gave way...

Better to fight than plunge to a horrible death. Conan knew that his own sword had been of little use against these things. The Cimmerian seized a desperate chance. Rolling forward, he groped for the hilt of the atnalga, snatching it from the wreckage of the smashed trunk. The warm tingle returned at once, but he risked the pain for a brief span, coming out of the forward roll on his feet and springing straight for the stalker.

As he had hoped, the beast’s tactics did not change. When it lowered its head to snap at him, his jump brought him up to the pair of shiny, sinister eyes. His powerful downward stroke drove the atnalga right between those orbs, razor-like edges parting fibrous green tissues as the blade sank to its hilt. As before, he felt his muscles clenching; in a moment they would refuse to let go of the thing in spite of the searing pain he felt.

With a surge of strength he wrenched his hand from the weapon’s grip, letting himself fall to the floor. A massive foreleg batted him across the room; he skidded, scattering chunks of rock and crashing into a wall.