Suddenly, the land was flooded with light. The round, silver eye of the rising moon glared down upon the broad plains, bathing the racing figure of the giant barbarian with her gaze and drawing lines of pale silver fire along the rippling sinews of the lions as they loped at his heels, washing their short, silken fur with her ghostly radiance.
Coan’s wary eye caught the moonfire on rippling fur ahead to his left, and he knew that the encirclement was nearly complete. As he braced himself to meet the charge, however, he was astounded to see the same lioness veer off and halt.
In two strides he was past her. As he went, he saw that the young lioness on his right had also stopped short. She squatted motionless on the grass with tail twitching and lashing. A curious sound, half roar and half wail, came from her fanged jaws. |
Conan dared to slow his run and glance bad. To his utter astonishment, he saw that the entire pride had halted as if at some invisible barrier. They stood in a snarling line with fangs gleaming like silver in the moonlight. Earth shaking roars of baffled rage came from their throats.
Conan’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and his scowling brows knotted in puzzlement. What had halted the pride at the very moment when they had made sure of their prey?
What unseen force had annulled the fury of the chase? He stood for a moment facing them, sword in hand, wondering if they would resume their charge. But the lions stayed where they were, growling and roaring
from foam-dripping jaws.
Then Conan observed a curious thing. The place where the lions had halted seemed to mark a line of demarcation across the plain. On the further side grew thick, long, lush grasses. At the invisible boundary, however, the grass became thin, stubby, and ill nourished, with broad patches of bare earth. Although Conan could not clearly distinguish colors by moonlight alone, it seemed to him that the grasses on the hither side of the line lacked the normal green color of growing things. Instead, the grasses around his feet seemed dry and gray, as if leached of all vitality.
To either side, in the bright moonlight, he could see the region of dead grasses curve away into the distance, as if he stood alone in a vast circle of death.
3. The Black Citadel
Although he still ached with weariness, the brief pause had given Conan the strength to continue his progress.
Since he did not know the nature of the invisible line that had halted the lions, he could not tell how long this mysterious influence would continue to hold them at bay.
Therefore he preferred to put as much distance between the pride and himself as possible.
Soon he saw a dark mass take form out of the dimness ahead of him. He went forward even more warily than before, sword in hand and eyes searching the hazy immensities of this domain. The moonlight was still brilliant, but its radiance became obscure with distance as if veiled by some thickening haze. So, at first, Conan could make nothing of the black, featureless mass that lifted out of the plain before him, save for its size and its stillness. Like some colossal idol of primitive devil worship, hewn from a mountain of black stone by some unknown beings in time’s dawn, the dark mass squatted motionless amid the dead gray grass. As Conan came nearer, details emerged from the dark, featureless blur.
He saw that it was a tremendous edifice, which lay partly in ruins on the plains of Kusha colossal structure erected by unknown hands for some nameless purpose. It looked like a castle or fortress of some sort, but of an architectural type that Conan had never seen. Made of dense black stone, it rose in a complex facade of pillars and terraces and battlements, whose alignment seemed oddly awry. It baffled the view. The eye followed mind-twisting curves that seemed subtly wrong, weirdly distorted. The huge structure gave the impression of a chaotic lack of order, as if its builders had not been quite sane.
Conan wrenched his gaze from the vertiginous curves of this misshapen mass of masonry, merely to look upon which made him dizzy. He thought he could at last perceive why the beasts of the veldt avoided this crumbling pile. It somehow exuded an aura of menace and horror. Perhaps, during the millennia that the black citadel had squatted on the plains, the animals had come to dread it and to avoid its shadowy precincts, until such habits of avoidance were now instinctive.
The moon dimmed suddenly as high-piled storm clouds again darkened her ageless face. Distant thunder grumbled, and Conan’s searching gaze caught the sulfurous flicker of lightning among the boiling masses of cloud. One of .those quick, tempestuous thunderstorms of the savanna was about to break.
Conan hesitated. On the one hand, curiosity and a desire for shelter from the coming storm drew him to the ‘ crumbled stronghold. On the other, his barbarian’s mind held a deep-rooted aversion to the supernatural. Toward earthly, mortal dangers he was fearless to the point of rashness, but otherworldly perils could send the tendrils of panic quivering along his nerves. And something about this mysterious structure hinted at the supernatural. He could feel its menace in the deepest layers of his consciousness.
A louder nimble of thunder decided him. Taking an iron grip on his nerves, he strode confidently into the dark portal, naked steel in hand, and vanished within.
4. The Serpent Men
Conan prowled the length of the high-vaulted hall, finding nothing that lived. Dust and dead leaves littered the black pave. Moldering rubbish was heaped in the comers and around the bases of towering stone columns. However old this pile of masonry was, evidently no living thing had dwelt therein for centuries.
The hall, revealed by another brief appearance of ,the moon, was two stories high. A balustrated balcony ran around the second floor. Curious to probe deeper into the mystery of this enigmatic structure which squatted here on the plain many leagues from any other stone building, Conan roamed the corridors, which wound as sinuously as a serpent’s track.
He poked into dusty chambers whose original purpose he could not even guess.
The castle was of staggering size, even to one who had seen the temple of the spider-god at Yezud in Zamora and the palace of King Yfldiz at Aghrapur in Turan. A good part of itone whole wing, in facthad fallen into a featureless mass of tumbled black blocks, but the part that remained more or less intact was still the largest building that Conan had seen. Its antiquity was beyond guessing. The black onyx of which it was wrought was unlike any stone that Conan had seen in this part of the world. It must have been brought across immense distanceswhy, Conan could not imagine.
Some features of the bizarre architecture of the structure reminded Conan of ancient tombs in accursed Zamora.
Others suggested forbidden temples that he had glimpsed in far Hyrkania during his mercenary service with the Turanians.
But whether the black castle had been erected primarily as a tomb, a fortress, a palace, or a temple, or some combination of these, he could not tell.
Then, too, there was a disturbing alienage about the castle that made him obscurely uneasy. Even as the facades seemed to have been built according to the canons of some alien geometry, so the interior contained baffling features. The steps of the stairways, for example, were much broader and shallower than was required for human feet. The doorways were too tall and too narrow, so that Conan had to turn sideways to get through them.
The walls were sculptured in low relief with coiling, geometrical arabesques of baffling, hypnotic complexity.