Kull: Exile of Atlantis (24 page)

EMERALD INTERLUDE

Years stretched into centuries, centuries became ages. The green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible. Thrones toppled and the silver trumpets fell silent forever. The races of men passed as smoke drifts from the breast of a summer. The roaring jade green seas engulfed the lands and all mountains sank, even the highest mountain of Lemuria.

ORCHIDS OF DEATH

A man thrust aside the trailing vines and stared. A heavy beard masked his face and mire slimed his boots. Above and about him hung the thick tropic jungle in breathless and exotic brooding. Orchids flamed and breathed about him.

Wonder was in his wide eyes. He gazed between shattered granite columns upon a crumbling marble floor. Vines twined thickly, like green serpents, among these columns and trailed their sinuous length across the floor. A curious idol, long fallen from a broken pedestal, lay upon the floor and stared up with red, unblinking eyes. The man noted the character of this corroded thing and a strong shudder shook him. He glanced unbelievingly again at the other thing which lay on the marble floor, and shrugged his shoulders.

He entered the shrine. He gazed at the carvings on the bases of the sullen columns, wondering at their unholy and indescribable appearance. Over all the scent of the orchids hung like a heavy fog.

This small, rankly grown, swampy island was once the pinnacle of a great mountain, mused the man, and he wondered what strange people had reared up this fane–and left that monstrous thing lying before the fallen idol. He thought of the fame which his discoveries should bring him–of the acclaim of mighty universities and powerful scientific societies.

He bent above the skeleton on the floor, noting the inhumanly long finger bones, the curious formation of the feet; the deep cavern-like eye-sockets, the jutting frontal bone, the general appearance of the great domed skull, which differed so horribly from mankind as he knew it.

What long dead artizan had shaped the thing with such incredible skill? He bent closer, noting the rounded ball-and-socket of the joints, the slight depressions on flat surfaces where muscles had been attached. And he started as the stupendous truth was borne on him.

This was no work of human art–that skeleton had once been clothed in flesh and had walked and spoken and lived. And this was impossible, his reeling brain told him, for the bones were of solid gold.

The orchids nodded in the shadows of the trees. The shrine lay in purple and black shade. The man brooded above the bones and wondered. How could he know of an elder world sorcery great enough to serve undying hate, by lending that hate a concrete substance, impervious to Time’s destructions?

The man laid his hand on the golden skull. A sudden deathly shriek broke the silence. The man in the shrine reeled up, screaming, took a single staggering step and then fell headlong, to lie with writhing limbs on the vine-crossed marble floor.

The orchids showered down on him in a sensuous rain and his blind, clutching hands tore them into exotic fragments as he died. Silence fell and an adder crawled sluggishly from within the golden skull.

The Black City
(Unfinished Fragment)

The Black City
(Unfinished Fragment)

The cold eyes of Kull, king of Valusia, clouded with perplexity as they rested on the man who had so abruptly entered the royal presence and who now stood before the king, trembling with passion. Kull sighed; he knew the barbarians who served him, for was not he himself an Atlantean by birth? Brule, the Spear-slayer, bursting rudely into the king’s chamber, had torn from his harness every emblem given him by Valusia and now stood bare of any sign to show that he was allied to the empire. And Kull knew the meaning of this gesture.

“Kull!” barked the Pict, pale with fury. “I will have justice!”

Again Kull sighed. There were times when peace and quiet were things to be desired and in Kamula he thought he had found them. Dreamy Kamula–even as he waited for the raging Pict to continue his tirade, Kull’s thoughts drifted away and back along the lazy, dreamy days that had passed since his coming to this mountain city, this metropolis of pleasure, whose marble and lapis-lazuli palaces were built, tier upon gleaming tier, about the dome shaped hill that formed the city’s center.

“My people have been allies of the empire for a thousand years!” The Pict made a swift, passionate gesture with his clenched fist. “Now, is it that one of my warriors can be snatched from under my nose, in the very palace of the king?”

Kull straightened with a start.

“What madness is this? What warrior? Who seized him?”

“That’s for you to discover,” growled the Pict. “One moment he was there, lounging against a marble column–the next–zut! He was gone with only a foul stench and a frightful scream for clue.”

“Perhaps a jealous husband–” mused Kull.

Brule broke in rudely: “Grogar never looked at any woman–even of his own race. These Kamulians hate we Picts. I have read it in their looks.”

Kull smiled. “You dream, Brule; these people are too indolent and pleasure loving to hate anyone. They love, they sing, they compose lyrics–I suppose you think Grogar was snatched away by the poet Taligaro, or the singing woman Zareta, or prince Mandara?”

“I care not!” snarled Brule. “But I tell you this, Kull, Grogar has spilt his blood like water for the empire, and he is my best chief of mounted bowmen. I will find him, alive or dead, if I have to tear Kamula apart, stone by stone! By Valka, I will feed this city to the flames and quench the flames in blood–”

Kull had risen from his chair.

“Take me to the place you last saw Grogar,” he said, and Brule ceased his tirade and led the way sullenly. They passed out of the chamber through an inner door and proceeded down a winding corridor, side by side, as different in appearance as two men could well be, yet alike in the litheness of movement, the keenness of eye, the intangible wildness that proclaimed the barbarian.

Kull was tall, broad shouldered and deep chested–massive yet lithe. His face was brown from sun and wind, his square cut black hair like a lion’s mane, his grey eyes cold as a sword gleaming through fathoms of ice.

Brule was typical of his race–of medium height, built with the savage economy of a panther, and of skin much darker than the king’s.

“We were in the Jeweled Room,” grunted the Pict, “Grogar, Manaro and I. Grogar was leaning against a half-column set into the wall when he shifted his weight full against the wall–and vanished before our eyes! A panel swung inward and he was gone–and we had but a glimpse of black darkness within, and a loathsome scent flowed momentarily outward. But Manaro, standing beside Grogar, whipped out his sword in that instant and thrust the good blade into the opening, so the panel could not wholly close. We thrust against it, but it did not yield and I hasted after you, leaving Manaro holding his sword in the crack.”

“And why did you tear off your Valusian emblems?” asked Kull.

“I was angry,” growled the Spear-slayer sullenly, avoiding Kull’s eye. The king nodded without reply. It was the natural, unreasoning action of an infuriated savage, to whom no natural enemy appears to be slashed and rent.

They entered the Jeweled Room, the further wall of which was set into the natural stone of the hill on which Kamula was built.

“Manaro swore he heard a whisper as of music,” grunted Brule. “And there he leans with his ear at the crack. Hola–Manaro!”

Kull frowned as he saw the tall Valusian did not change his posture or give any heed to the hail. He did in truth lean against the panel, one hand gripping the sword which held the secret doorway apart, one ear glued to the thin crack. Kull noted the almost material darkness of that thin strip of blackness–it seemed to him that beyond that unknown opening, the darkness must lurk like a living, sentient thing.

He strode forward impatiently and clapped the soldier heavily on the shoulder. And Manaro rocked away from the wall and fell stiffly to lie at Kull’s feet with horror glazed eyes staring blankly upward.

“Valka!” swore Brule. “He’s been stabbed–I was a fool to leave him here alone–”

The king shook his lion-like head. “There’s no blood on him–look at his face.” Brule looked and cursed. The dead Valusian’s features were set in a mask of horror–and the effect was distinctly one of
listening
.

Kull cautiously approached the crack in the wall and then beckoned Brule. From somewhere beyond that mysterious portal sounded a thin, wailing sound as of a ghostly piping. It was so dim as to barely be heard, but it held in its music all the hate and venom of a thousand demons. Kull shrugged his giant shoulders.

Untitled Fragment

Untitled Fragment

Three men sat at a table playing a game. Across the sill of an open window there whispered a faint breezing, blowing the filmy curtains about and bearing to the players the incense of roses and vines and growing green things.

Three men sat at a table–one was a king–one a prince of an ancient house–one was the chief of a terrible and barbaric nation.

“Score!” quoth Kull, king of Valusia, as he moved one of the ivory figures. “My wizard menaces your warrior, Brule.”

Brule nodded. He was not as large a man as the king, but he was firmly knit, compactly yet lithely built. Kull was the tiger, Brule was the leopard. Brule was a Pict and dark like all his race. Immobile features set off a fine head, powerful neck, heavy trim shoulders and a deep chest. These features, with the muscular legs and arms, were characteristics of the nation to which he belonged. But in one respect Brule differed from his tribesmen, for whereas their eyes were mostly hard scintillant brown or wicked black, his were a deep volcanic blue. Somewhere in his blood was a vagrant strain of Celt or of those scattered savages who lived in ice caves close to the Arctic circle.

“A wizard is a hard man to beat, Kull,” said this man. “In this game or in the real red game of battle–Well, there was once when my life hung on the balance of power between a Pictland wizard and me–he had his charms and I had a well forged blade–”

He paused to drink deeply from a crimson goblet which stood at his elbow.

“Tell us the tale, Brule,” urged the third player. Ronaro, prince of the great atl Volante house, was a slim elegant young man with a splendid head, fine dark eyes and a keen intellectual face. He was the patrician–the highest type of intelligent aristocracy any land has ever produced. These other two in a way were his antithesis. He was born in a palace; of the others, one had been born in a wattle hut, the other in a cave. Ronaro traced his descent back two thousand years, through a line of dukes, knights, princes, statesmen, poets and kings. Brule could trace his ancestors vaguely for a few hundred years and he named among them skin clad chiefs, painted and feathered warriors, shamans with bison skull masks and finger bone necklaces–one or two island kings who held court in mud huts, and a legendary hero or two, semi-deified for feats of personal strength or whole sale murder. Kull did not know who his own parents were.