Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza (24 page)

He plunged inside as another blast of magical lightning tore at the cave mouth. Stone cracked and crumbled, dust poured out, and looking behind him, Grolin saw the cave mouth collapsing.

Part of the roof followed, but he shrugged that off and ran on through the darkness. His eyes could penetrate it now like a cat’s, and soon he saw a skull looming up.

What part of the skull was the true Soul of Thanza, he had never thought to ask. But the mouth turned out to be large enough to allow a man to enter the skull. Grolin dashed up and flung himself into the mouth.

He landed on the open chest—or rather, on what lay inside the chest. He had no clear sight of it, before light poured out of it, as if it were a crucible of molten metal, and something plastered itself across his chest.

For a moment Grolin knew pain as if his Soul was tearing through his body from chest to back, taking his life with it. He had a brief thought, that in old tales creations like the Soul of Thanza could reject and destroy unworthy suitors.

Then the pain vanished. So did the light. He was in darkness again but not as great as before. The skull was gone, crumbled into pebbles, and dust was heaped all about him. Several new cracks gaped in the rock, revealing the sky outside. Through one such opening, he could see black smoke spiralling into the air.

That had to be more enemies. But there was an old enemy to deal with first, and his now being in the vulnerable flesh would make the task easy.

The Death Lord of Thanza focused his mind on the rockfall behind him. He imagined pressing on it, with a battering ram swung by giants. He imagined the ram striking the stones—

The rockfall erupted outward. More of the ceiling rock fell, but it also went flying, reduced to fragments. Sharp-edged bits of rock scoured the slope.

Lysinka’s band was too far below to be touched.

The sorcerer was not. He sensed what was coming, and attempted to raise shields of lightning and invisible force, the last and most potent spells at his command. If they failed, he was doomed to death or at least to flight.

The shields might have sufficed, if they had been raised in time, but shards of rock tore into the sorcerer’s flesh too quickly. Pain distracted him from completing the spells. He reeled until a larger rock fragment split his skull and ended pain, spells, and life all at once.

Within what had been a cave, now largely open to the sky, the Death Lord of Thanza laughed.

None who heard that laugh ever forgot it—or wittingly spoke of it to others.

XV

About the time Grolin’s men were taking their positions for the attack on Lysinka and Klarnides, Conan began to smell the 'serpents’ nest. It was as putrid a reek of carrion as ever, now mingled with other stenches that might be brooding eggs or the gods alone knew what other foulness.

The Cimmerian felt certain that no sorcerer could be in or near the nest. None could have endured the stench. He himself had long since wrapped a spare head cloth over his nose and mouth, and found himself envying his skeletal comrades their lack of a sense of smell.

Soon Conan found himself also envying their lack of flesh. They could wedge their limbs into cracks that would have scraped the Cimmerian as fleshless as his comrades. They could grip with a ferocity that would have raised blisters on living fingers. They could survive falls that would have shattered living limbs.

Two of the skeleton warriors took violent falls.

They lay helpless and twitching for a moment, then crumbled into dust so fine that even the slight currents of air within the caves scattered their remains.

Each time one fell, his comrades halted, held their weapons point down, raised their heads, and gave vent to an indescribable moan. The first time he heard it, Conan wanted to make a similar sound, from the sheer horror of this song of the skeletons.

He remained silent. A warrior was a warrior, however he died or whatever his form. His life had most likely been hard, his death probably worse. Conan would not refuse him death honours. Indeed, the second time Conan joined the dirge—although the leader said afterward that the Cimmerian had the worst voice, living or dead, that the other had ever heard.

Conan feared that if the rattle and crash of the climbing skeletons had not warned the serpents, the dirge would have. But as the stench grew stronger, he heard no movement above. Either the serpents were asleep, gorged on recent meals, or perhaps they shared the poor hearing of their smaller, crawling kin.

Before much longer, the advancing warriors began to find scraps of offal and bits of bone on the floor of their tunnel. Then they came to loose scales, patches of discarded skin, and even the best part of one complete skeleton, from its size a new hatchling.

The leader shook his head at Conan’s questioning look.

“There is no blood in any of this. Not strong, not fresh, not at all.”

Conan laughed. “Then I suppose I’m spending this day as a vampire after all!”

“Better than our becoming vampires on you, or so you said,” the leader replied.

“I do not unsay it either,” Conan said. Then he halted, raising both hand and sword.

From ahead, he heard the scrape of scales on rock. Conan knew from much bloody experience the sound of a large serpent moving. They had come to the lower end of the nests.

He looked back, and every skeleton raised a weapon, two if they had them. They knew the meaning of his look: from here onward it would be a fight every pace of the way.

Conan kept the lead, advancing alone for a few paces. Even shod in boots, he could tread lighter and more quietly than the skeleton warriors. From what he remembered of serpents, their poor hearing was balanced by a keen ability to sense vibrations in the ground about them.

Moments after Conan began his stalking advance, the serpents became agitated. He heard hisses, louder scrapings, the flapping of wings, and the thump of flailing serpentine bodies.

He rounded the bend, both weapons in hand, to see a pair of the serpents entwined. They wriggled and writhed, flailed at each other with their wings and tails, and butted each other with their heads, mouths closed.

Conan could not tell if the serpents were mating, fighting, or merely having a friendly wrestling bout. What encouraged the Cimmerian was the fact that the serpents had all their attention on each other, with none to spare for whatever might come upon them from below.

Conan’s stalk turned into a run. As his boots thumped on the rock, the serpents sensed his approach—but too late. One fanged head reared up, but Conan struck it from its neck before it could so much as open its mouth.

The other serpent coiled itself to strike. It would have done better to uncoil itself and flee, Conan thought. It was a poor sentry, human or animal, who neglected his duty and then allowed himself to be killed before he could warn his comrades.

Conan swiftly dealt that fate to the second serpent. He hacked at a wing to provoke the serpent into striking, then thrust at the gaping mouth with his dagger. The dagger pierced the lower jaw;-the snake writhed and dripped venom. Conan slashed deep into its body just above the first pair of wings.

The Cimmerian did not quite sever the serpent’s spine on the first slash, and he had to jerk his dagger free of the head to keep the venom from splattering his skin. Another backhanded gift from death to his comrades, he realized—their bones would not absorb the venom.

But the snake was half-mad with pain and struck wildly. It hammered its head into the wall so hard that for a moment it lay half-stunned. That was all the time Conan needed to slash again, this time wielding the sword with both hands. The spine parted under the battered blade, and the snake’s writhings were now the last spasms before death embraced it.

Conan retrieved his dagger, discovering that its point was soaked in the snake’s ichor, and signalled to his comrades. They came forward at a run, scrambling over the piled bodies of the serpents and spreading out beyond as the tunnel widened.

The Cimmerian held up his dagger and gestured at the skeleton on his back.

“Shall we try it?”

The leader looked at the greenish ichor, which was turning black upon exposure to the air. A human face would have shown doubt, distaste, and also scepticism about the Cimmerian.

“You knew they had this in their veins, and you still led us up here?”

Conan was briefly surprised to hear the leader speaking without being joined hand-to-hand with his comrades. Then he remembered hearing other skeleton warriors calling briefly to each other or cursing as they climbed.

It seemed that with time and activity, each individual skeleton warrior was recovering the powers of speech. Conan rejoiced. This would make commanding them easier, and improve the odds when battle was joined. A skeleton in danger could summon help; one seeing danger to a comrade could shout a warning.

Not that the skeletal voices would ever be pleasing to the ear. The leader’s voice periodically broke into sounds that resembled stones scraping on one another, loud enough to set the Cimmerian’s teeth on edge. But the leader had asked a question, and deserved an answer.

“I described the serpents to you, my friend,” Conan said. “They are certainly everything I said they were. And I do not know what is blood to you and what is not.”

The leader’s eye-sockets held Conan’s eyes for a moment. Then he shook his head.

“In truth, neither do I. It has been long since our bodies perished. Even in those days, many who knew the secrets of the magic that sent us to fight the Death Lord of Thanza had perished, leaving not even a bone.

“We will not thank you for leading us here if we find no strong blood. But on my word of honour—you and your friends will not be harmed.”

“Except by the Death Lord, if he has returned and no strong blood strengthens you.”

“I was not going to say that, Cimmerian, but as you have said it yourself—”

Then a cacophony of hisses, scrapings, thudding, and the clash of weapons made it impossible for either skeleton or living warrior to make himself heard: Plainly enough, the battle had been joined.

Conan and the leader ran past the dead serpents, the leader nearly stumbling over one out-flung wing. They turned the bend in the tunnel to see daylight ahead.

The daylight, however, was half-blocked by a mass of fighting serpents and their skeleton opponents. One serpent was already pouring ichor on to the rock from three wounds. A hatchling was writhing with a broken spine, as a skeleton warrior trampled it underfoot.

But another skeleton warrior was gone, flung against the wall so hard that his skull had shattered. He was already half turned to dust. Another skeleton was struggling savagely in the coils of a particularly large serpent that was trying to grip his skull.

Conan saw smears of the serpentine ichor on several of the fighting skeletons. But that proved little. Clearly they needed only one dose of “strong blood” to animate them.

The Cimmerian and the leader advanced together on the enwrapped skeleton. The leader drew the serpent’s attention, making it release the skeleton’s skull to launch a strike. The leader dodged aside as nimbly as Conan himself could have, particularly on a floor no longer remotely dry.

Conan moved with more care, not wishing to test the effect of that ichor on his boots. At least it seemed not to corrode sword blades.

The serpent’s strike at the leader released part of its victim and tightened the remaining coils around the other.

Conan had just slashed at the coils when he heard something crack within them. The skeleton threw back its head, somehow managed to pull one arm free— then with terrifying strength tore one of the serpent’s wings out by the roots.

The display of raw strength made the Cimmerian rejoice at his comrades’ prowess—and be grateful that they were his comrades instead of his enemies. Leading them against the Death Lord would be an honour; fighting them would have been a quick death.

Conan’s second slash ended the serpent’s life, but too late for the skeleton warrior. As the coils writhed and spilled him out, he was already crumbling. Conan had barely time enough to notice the broken legs, when the last of the skeleton’s bones crumbled to powder.

The next moment, the powder was scattered and mixed with ordure and offal, as a writhing mass of serpents and skeleton warriors rolled over it. Conan hastily gave ground, using his ability to move backward as fast and precisely as he could move forward.

He kept on moving backward until he came up against a niche in the rock. Hastily he undid the dragon-hide straps holding the skeleton to his back, while leaving those that bound it together intact. He shoved the whole bundle into the niche, as far back as it would go.

The skeleton might have a rough passage, if some serpent tried to hide in that niche. But it would have a rougher time and a harsher fate if it had to ride put the battle on Conan’s back. It was also just heavy enough to slow the Cimmerian a trifle against foes who were as swift as any he’d ever fought and who gave no quarter—

“Behind you, Conan!” a grating voice cried.

Conan whirled, kicking with one foot and wielding sword and dagger more by instinct than by sight or design. His boot caught a serpent in the belly just below its first pair of wings. This diverted its strike, so that its fangs and teeth grated on the rocks. Conan stabbed with his dagger, the point nearly skittering off black scales before it penetrated.

The snake hissed and tried to turn to strike again, but the dagger slowed its movements. Conan brought his sword around, up and down across the back of the snake’s neck, just below a head the size of a newborn calf.

The head did not fall. Instead it flopped about in a fashion so gruesome that even the Cimmerian’s hardened stomach twitched. Then the writhing neck tossed the head straight into the niche where Conan had put the bundled skeleton.

The severed head vanished into the shadows with a hideous slithering and scraping of ichor-smeared scales against stone. Conan had no time to watch further, as he found himself in the middle of a triangle of three serpents, two half-grown and one a mere hatchling.