John Silent nearly fell out of his saddle.
“What! You cut down a man from Baron Von Staler's gibbet? Name of the Devil, you will have both our necks in a noose!”
“You should not curse so hotly,” Solomon reproved mildly. “I know not this Baron Von Staler, but methinks he had hanged a man unjustly. The victim was only a boy and he had a good face.”
“And forsooth,” said John Silent angrily, “you must risk our lives by saving his worthless one, which was already doomed.”
“What else was there to do?” asked Kane with a touch of impatience. “I beg you, vex me no more on the subject but tell me whose castle it is that I see rising above the trees.”
“One which you may come to know much more thoroughly if we make not haste,” Silent answered grimly. “That is the keep of Baron Von Staler, whose gibbet you robbed, and who is the most powerful lord in the Black Forest. There goes the path which leads up the steep to his door; here is the road which we take – the one that leads us quickest and furtherest out of the good Baron's reach.”
“Methinks that is the castle which the peasants have spoken to me of,” mused Kane. “They call it an unsavory name – the Castle of the Devil. Come, let us look into the matter.”
“You mean go up to the castle?” cried Silent, staring.
“Aye, sir. The Baron will scarce refuse two wayfarers a lodging. More, we can ascertain what sort of a man he is. I would like to see this lord who hangs children.”
“And if you like him not?” asked Silent sarcastically.
Kane sighed. “It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives. I have a feeling that it will prove thus with the Baron.”
“Name of two devils!” swore Silent in amazement. “You speak as if you were a judge on a bench and Baron Von Staler bound helpless before you, instead of being as it is – you but one blade and the Baron surrounded by lusty men-at-arms.”
“The right is on my side,” said Kane somberly. “And right is mightier than a thousand men-at-arms. But why all this talk? I have not yet seen the Baron, and who am I to pass judgment unseen. Mayhap the Baron is a righteous man.”
Silent shook his head in wonder.
“You are either an inspired maniac, a fool, or the most courageous man in the world!” he laughed suddenly. “Lead on! 'Tis a wild venture that's like to end in death, but its insanity appeals to me and no man can say that John Silent fails to follow where another man leads!”
“Your speech is wild and Godless,” said Kane, “but I begin to like you.”
“It has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives.”
Death's Black Riders
(Fragment)
The hangman asked of the carrion crow,
but the raven made reply:
“Black ride the men who ride with Death
beneath the midnight sky,
“And black each steed and grey each skull
and strange each deathly eye.
“They have given their breath to grey old Death
and yet they cannot die.”
Solomon Kane reined his steed to a halt. No sound broke the death-like stillness of the dark forest which reared starkly about him; yet he sensed that Something was coming down the shadowy trail. It was a strange and ghastly place. The huge trees shouldered each other like taciturn giants, and their intertwining branches shut out the light; so that the white moonlight turned grey as it filtered through, and the trail which meandered among the trees seemed like a dim road through ghostland.
And down this trail, as Solomon Kane halted and drew his pistol, a horseman came flying. A great black horse, incredibly gigantic in the grey light, and on his back a giant of a rider, crouched close over the bow, a shapeless hat drawn low, a great black cloak flying from his shoulders.
Solomon Kane sought to rein aside to let this wild rider go past, but the trail was so narrow and the trees grew so thickly on either side, that he saw it was impossible unless the horseman stopped and gave him time to find an open space. And this the stranger seemed to have no intention of doing.
They swept on, horse and rider a single formless black object like some fabulous monster; now they were only a few strides from the puzzled Kane, and he caught the glint of two burning eyes shadowed by the hat drawn low and the cape held high about the rider's face. Then as he saw the gleam of a sword, he fired pointblank into that face. Then a blast of icy air engulfed him like the surge of a cold river, horse and man went down together, and the black horse and its rider swept over them.
Kane scrambled up, unhurt but wrathful, and examined his snorting, quivering steed, which had risen and stood with dilated nostrils. The horse, too, was unharmed. Kane could not understand it.
The Moon of Skulls
“The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky;
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten Seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die.”
CHESTERTON
I A MAN COMES SEEKING
A great black shadow lay across the land, cleaving the red flame of the sunset. To the man who toiled up the jungle trail it loomed like a symbol of death and horror, a menace brooding and terrible, like the shadow of a stealthy assassin flung upon some candle-lit wall.
Yet it was only the shadow of the great crag which reared up in front of him, the first outpost of the grim foothills which were his goal. He halted a moment at its foot, staring upward where it rose blackly limned against the dying sun. He could have sworn that he caught the hint of a movement at the top, as he stared, hand shielding his eyes, but the fading glare dazzled him and he could not be sure. Was it a man who darted to cover? A man, or –?
He shrugged his shoulders and fell to examining the rough trail which led up and over the brow of the crag. At first glance it seemed that only a mountain goat could scale it, but closer investigation showed numbers of fingerholds drilled into the solid rock. It would be a task to try his powers to the utmost but he had not come a thousand miles to turn back now.
He dropped the large pouch he wore at his shoulder, and laid down the clumsy musket, retaining only his long rapier, dagger, and one of his pistols. These he strapped behind him, and without a backward glance over the darkening trail he had come, he started the long ascent. He was a tall man, long-armed and iron-muscled, yet again and again he was forced to halt in his upward climb and rest for a moment, clinging like an ant to the precipitous face of the cliff. Night fell swiftly and the crag above him was a shadowy blur in which he was forced to feel with his fingers, blindly, for the holes which served him as precarious ladder. Below him, the night noises of the tropical jungle broke forth, yet it appeared to him that even these sounds were subdued and hushed as though the great black hills looming above threw a spell of silence and fear even over the jungle creatures.
On up he struggled, and now to make his way harder, the cliff bulged outward near its summit and the strain on nerve and muscle became heart-breaking. Time and again a hold slipped and he escaped falling by a hair's breadth. But every fiber in his lean hard body was perfectly co-ordinated, and his fingers were like steel talons with the grip of a vise. His progress grew slower and slower but on he went until at last he saw the cliff's brow splitting the stars a scant twenty feet above him.
And even as he looked, a vague bulk heaved into view, toppled on the edge and hurtled down toward him with a great rush of air about it. Flesh crawling, he flattened himself against the cliff's face and felt a heavy blow against his shoulder, only a glancing blow, but even so it nearly tore him from his hold, and as he fought desperately to right himself, he heard a reverberating crash among the rocks far below. Cold sweat beading his brow, he looked up. Who – or what – had shoved that boulder over the cliff edge? He was brave, as the bones on many a battlefield could testify, but the thought of dying like a sheep, helpless and with no chance of resistance, turned his blood cold.