“You force me, against will and prudence, to play my masterstroke, dog of a Cimmerian!”
The shadowy coils about him darkened until he stood cloaked in utter gloom. Through this cloak of shadow, Thoth-Amon’s eyes burned like glittering stars of dark fire. A chill passed over Conan as the Stygian uttered an enigmatic command in an unknown, guttural tongue. The human throat was never shaped to speak aloud that uncanny, bestial speech. The alien words re-echoed back and forth across the shadowy immensity of the arena.
AH eyes were drawn to the huge open portal at the farther end of the arena. Now something hulking and monstrous and unthinkable stirred to wakefulness beyond that yawning gulf of darkness. And Thoth-Amon laughed.
ELEVEN: From the Black Gate
It came forth slowly from the abyss of darkness. At first Conan could not make it out, for it seemed but an extension of the darkness. But it was no insubstantial shadow, for the earth trembled beneath its ponderous tread.
“Crom!” muttered Conan between his teeth. His companions shrank back after one horrific glimpse of the moving shape.
“Gods, help us!” groaned Diviatix, “It is the living prototype of the Black Sphinx above! Earth was never meant to bear the weight of such a hell-spawned abomination . Think of the ages the accursed thing has dwelt here in the bowels of the black underworld! Now may the Lords of Light aid us, for not even the Heart of Ahriman can give me power over the Black Beast, the very child of Chaos itself!”
Conan raked the corpse-strewn benches with his eyes. None lived there; even Thoth-Amon had fled the coming forth of the beast that his prayers had roused from its aeons of slumber.
“Back up the stair behind us!” Conan barked. “Give me that torch, Trocero! Stir yourselves, for the beast is upon us!”
They raced back the way they had come, up the broad stairway and along the lofty corridor that they had traversed before. As they ran, Conan looked about for narrow passages through which the black beast could not pursue them—but found none. This vast hall would not delay the beast in the slightest; indeed, it might have been hewn from the rock for the monster’s convenience.
Their only hope of escape lay at the further end, where they might or might not find a narrow exit. Sword in hand and boot heels thudding, the king of Aquilonia ran down the immense hallway, breathing a prayer to the cold, indifferent gods of his northern homeland.
The camp had been crudely fortified with an embankment of baggage and sand, behind which crouched the spearmen of Gunderland, the knights of Aquilonia and Poitain, and the Bossonian archers. Whenever the swirling horde of Stygians came too close, the archers on signal rose and sent a volley of clothyard shafts whistling across the sands, now littered with corpses. The Bossonian longbows outranged the shorter weapons borne by the mounted Stygian archers. When the heavy Aquilonian shafts struck home, they pierced through mail and cloth and flesh to the vitals.
Pallantides, however, did not deceive himself about the desperate plight of his host. In the east the faint glow of false morning paled the stars. It would fade, but then the real dawn would arise. Without their horses, the Aquilonians could not defeat the mobile, mounted, and overwhelmingly more numerous Stygians. For the men to try to come to grips with their foes by toiling through the sand after them on foot would merely earn them all a quick demise.
The Aquilonians could hold their present position as long as their supplies held out, for the Stygians had no heavily armored men to break through the perimeter. But, with dawn, the Stygians would acquire a mighty ally: the desert sun. Even with the most careful rationing, the existing supplies of water would soon be drunk up, and men could not be sent down to the banks of the Bakhr to fetch more in the face of the foe.
Nor would the arrows of the Bossonians last forever. At the present rate, their quivers would be exhausted in an hour or two. The Stygians had only to keep circling the trapped army, showering its camp with their light but deadly shafts, and by the end of the day the Aquilonian force would be reduced to helplessness.
But the Stygians, it seemed, had other ideas. Unit by unit, the mounted archers drew off toward the Black Sphinx. They became mere bobbing black dots against the faintly paling sky and then disappeared behind the dunes.
When all had vanished from around the camp, Pallantides sent a soldier noted for his fleetness of foot out to scout. Stripped to shoes and breechclout, the man climbed the highest dune between the camp and the monument and ran back to report:
“Nay, general they be not retreating. They be all gathered around that great ugly black statue, and their general’s standing up on the rump of the critter, giving ’em a speech. Methinks they’re getting ready for a grand charge; I seen what looks like a company of armored horsemen in that black mail they wear.”
Pallantides turned to where his men, relaxing for the first time in hours, were eating hasty bites of cold breakfast.
“We can stop some with our shafts and some with our pikes,” he told Cenwulf and Amric, “but there are plenty more to take the place of these. We shall put our knights in the front rank, using their lances as pikes, since their armor is the best…”
But even as he spoke he heard the hollowness of his own words and knew their chances were few.
And where was Conan?
TWELVE: The Black Beast Slays
Stone grated. The mighty portal swung open in the breast of the Black Sphinx. Upon the threshold towered Conan of Cimmeria, the light from the torch in his hand winking on his tunic of chain mail and flashing on the mirror surface of his naked sword. Behind him crowded Prince Conn, Count Trocero, and the druid Diviatix, who still bore the Heart of Ahriman in his fist.
Outside, the stars had dimmed in the east and the sky had visibly lightened. The colossal, doglike forelimbs of the stony monster stretched away at slightly diverging angles from the body, each forepaw being twice the height of a man. Beyond them lay the dunes, sparsely spotted with camel-thorn and tufts of dry grass.
Nothing moved in the angle between the forelimbs of the statue or in the visible desert beyond. From another direction, however, came the sounds of a large armed host: the creak of saddles, the clink of weapons, the nickering and stamping of horses, the grunts and bubblings of camels, the murmur of men. Over all these noises sounded the voice of the Stygian general, giving his units their orders and exhorting them to be valiant and destroy the filthy foreign worshipers of unclean gods. His harsh, guttural voice resounded through the lightening gloom.
Conan cocked an ear back towards the portal. “It’s after us,” he breathed, as the ground trembled to the tread of the hyena-headed monster. “Thoth-Amon must have summoned the whole damned Stygian army. If we run for the camp, and they see us, ’twill be the last…”
The vibrations grew stronger. From the unseen host gathered around the rear of the Black Sphinx came trumpet calls and the rumble of kettle drums. The Stygians were on the move.
“Follow me,” murmured Conan, thrusting his torch, which now bore only a small, smoky flame, into the sand to extinguish it.
The king led his comrades along the path between the diverging forelimbs of the statue. Behind them, a moving shape of darkness appeared in the opening in the sphinx’s breast. At the mouth of the great shaft that led down to immemorial crypts appeared a shape of living horror, leering and slavering. Huge as half a hundred lions, it peered into the darkness and sniffed the pre-dawn air.