Conan The Hero (17 page)

Drawing himself up to a sitting position, he took from his pouch the jar of lotus ointment. He repeated the applications that had brought him this far, treating his neck and thigh, smearing the salve also around his ear-holes in the hope of offsetting the damage done by the clamor of the gongs. This time the balm produced no noticeable sensation; his mind remained slack and jaded, with barely enough will to drive his nerveless body forward. Yet when he crawled to his feet, he found that his leg would again haltingly support him. He limped ahead, not bothering to stop and try the door at his back.

The limits of the room were invisible in smoky gloom. The fumes seemed to rise from the floor, from pans or braziers whose reddish glow faintly illumined the spreading, billowing columns. They must find some outlet in the darkness above, he reasoned, else the air of the place would be unbreathable; but even so, his nostrils tingled with the pungency of burning wood and of more aromatic substances laid over it. Not lotus, Conan judged—at least, not lotus alone.

He made for the nearest group of braziers, thinking he saw some object in their midst. As he came near, tears blurred his sight; his head clogged and grew near-opaque with fumes. Yet, by stooping through the leaning smoke-columns and fanning his hands to clear the air before his face, he was able to advance between the fires. He confronted the grotesque thing that stood limned by their glow: a body broken on a bamboo rack.

The male figure, once splendid, now lay torn and gashed by patient, exhaustive torture; no shred of costume or uniform was left to clothe his violated dignity. Death had been inflicted by a means Conan had seen used before by Hwong warriors against their Turanian captives: in preparation, a leg-thick joint of thungee thorn-tree was straightened by a soaking in brine. Lashed behind the sloping rack, it was made fast to the victim by means of a braided yoke across his chin. As the thorn limb dried slowly, resuming its natural curve, its daggery hide was forced forward into the sufferer’s spine; meanwhile his head was drawn steadily backward until, with any luck, he strangled or his neck snapped.

The drying of this spiky limb had been speeded by the heat of the braziers, Conan guessed—if indeed the torture had been carried out here. Still, the end could not have been quick in coming.

Viewing the stretched, distorted corpse, Conan realized abruptly that the dark obscurity of its outline might not be due alone to the faintness of the brazier’s glow. Leaning closer, he saw that the smudged, blood-crusted skin was neither yellow nor desert-dusky but of a rarer, blacker hue. From where he stood, the victim’s face was invisible, bent back sharply over rim of the rack; full of foreboding, Conan shuffled stiffly around the makeshift frame. The inverted features, though swollen and distended, confirmed his deepest fear, leaving no room for doubt: The man was Juma.

Unbelievingly, Conan extended a hand to brush the skin of his dead friend’s, cheek. It was dusty-dry, as unnaturally warm as the brazier-smoke billowing all around.

Reeling backward, choking suddenly on bitter smoke and bitterer wrath, Conan blundered away from the horrid scene. He lurched blindly, stumbling against red-hot firetrays without noticing the pain, shambling off into darkness with scorched, streaming eyes. But the flash of murderous anger he felt was quickly drowned by despair; what could he do, alone and weaponless in the unguessed expanse of this prison?

He must, he told himself, have lain in his stupor for hours. During that time Phang Loon had seized Juma—perhaps because of Conan’s own thoughtless questions—and brought him here, to suffer the most agonizing death conceivable. Unless, of course, the warlord had lied to him in the first chamber, having already trapped the Kushite, already slain him…

But then, what of it? He had no means of retaliation in any case. If he cried out now, shouted his defiance to the unseen watchers who surely lurked above, what could it possibly accomplish? What would it seem but a plea for mercy, a laughable admission of weakness? Never that!

Instead Conan clenched the sorrow within his breast, determined to dull its pain and save it along with the last vestiges of his strength.

Regaining his vision, yet still disoriented in the darkness, he cast about to find his friend’s body once again. Here, just ahead, was a group of smoking braziers; but were these the same ones? He doubted it; the color of their faint, vaporous flames was not reddish but yellow, and their fumes spicier, almost cloying. Yet some dim object did lurk in their midst… Gripped by curiosity, Conan shielded his face against heat and smoke and ventured forward.

The figure limned by the flickering yellow light was not a dead man, but a living one. Dressed in a loose-sleeved robe of embroidered gold silk, a white silken loin-wrap, delicately pointed slippers, and a loose silk cap, he reclined at ease—but on bed ill-suited to his finery: it was a grimy cot of rough bamboo, stretched with the coarsest canvas. Fumes shrouded the figure’s head, seeping from a long, narrow-bowled pipe whose stem lingered near his lips; through this smaller cloud of smoke a familiar, aquiline face could be seen.

“Babrak!” With elation almost matching his despair of a moment before, Conan stepped haltingly forward. “Glad I am to see you, my friend! At least you are alive… did Phang Loon’s men drag you here too?” Unable to kneel on his injured leg, Conan stooped down awkwardly in front of his reclining friend. “Babrak, know you: They have murdered Juma! Or given him to the Hwong to kill, it makes no difference; I’ll have their living guts for it, either way! He died cruelly—his body lies over yonder, have you seen it? Babrak, fellow, are you in your senses?”

To Conan’s queries the young Turanian responded only with vacuous looks and vacant, open-mouthed half smiles. His face, sheened faintly in the firelight by perspiration, wore a lax, uncharacteristic expression. His eyes had dilated to deep brown voids, eerily unfocused. His only positive act was to touch his parted lips at intervals with the pipe’s ivory mouthpiece and draw between them a visible, twining torrent of gray smoke.

“Come, lad—you are drugged even more hopelessly than I! You have learned to crave lotus, in dishonor to your faith!” Hovering before his friend’s cot, Conan tried to make a jest of it. “We should never have given you to that fancy tavern-trollop; like as not she was Phang Loon’s aging mother!” His laugh barked hollow, lacking true spirit and eliciting no reaction from Babrak. “But never mind, lad, this stupor will pass. We will get you away from here, out of those unmanly clothes and out of the clutches of the drug, somehow! Come, help me escape this hellish place and avenge Juma!” He extended a hand to the supine youth.

Babrak’s face signaled no comprehension. That the Turanian even saw his friend was evidenced by one thing and one thing only: In response to Conan’s beckoning hand, the reclining one drew the pipe out of his mouth, so slowly that a trail of smoke braided visibly from its yellowed, cracked tip to his moist lips. In languid generosity he held forth the lotus pipe, offering it to Conan.

From this gesture Conan recoiled, stricken with horror. Rather than snarling in rebuke or dashing the pipe out of his friend’s hand, he stumbled off between the fires. He must restrain his anger, he told himself; if he really meant to bring Babrak out of this place, it would have to be done gently. Though Crom knew, he could barely drag himself through this maze; burdened by another drugged victim, his hope of survival would be scant.

A deeper sorrow clenched his gut. True, he had watched others fall beneath the spell of the lotus, but never one so dear to him as Babrak! And never had he seen any escape who lay so deep in its grip as the waif of Tarim seemed to have sunk overnight. Surely, ‘twould be better to come back for him later at the head of an armored troop… or perhaps, just take the added price of his loss out of Phang Loon’s entrails! In truth, the lad might be deader to him now than Juma was. And he himself might already be facing the same forlorn death.

His despair had set him wandering off in the smoky dark, and long moments passed before he resolved to turn and try dragging the youth bodily from his cot of stupor. But the drifting smokes continued to play strange tricks; the billows floating nearest did not look like the ones he had most recently left. The transparent flames shooting from the beds of the braziers seemed too tall and ghostly, their color too pallidly, spectrally blue. Conan edged nearer to find out.

The shape reposing among these sultry fires tantalized his gaze. And although an eerie intuition told him what to expect, he had to press into the domain of the hot, choking smoke to be sure. Only then, through blinking, tear-rimmed eyes could he affirm that Phang Loon’s third captive was his lover Sariya.

She lay on the padded satin of an exquisitely carved and painted couch, contoured long and low for sleep and for less passive relaxations. Her attire in the braziers’ suffocating heat was well-suited to either pastime: a glossy silk ribbon of skirt, whose disarray succeeded in covering only her navel; a trifling shoulder-cape which, although perfectly arranged, concealed nothing at all; ear-bangles, chest-bangles, ankle bracelets, and a pair of tight jeweled slippers, which appeared only to imprison and constrict her shapely feet rather than clothing them.

She yet lived and desired, as the lazy sinuousness of her movements showed. Whether she lay in the grip of narcotics or of more native ecstacies was uncertain, for she languished like a harem-slave awaiting her pasha, her eyes distractedly roving the drifting vapors overhead. Her slim hands idly stroked and plucked the velvet couch and the softer velvet of her own skin, which shone lushly agleam with perspiration in the dim blue glare.

All her womanly warmth, all her loving frankness and freshness were lost in this bizarre tableau. Yet Conan’s male desires were stirred; he had to remind himself to hail her with words, not stumble forward and try to address her earthier cravings with his drugged, battered body.

“Sariya! So the fiend has fetched you here as well—doubtless on my account!” His voice rasped hoarse with passion and with more debilitating emotions. “Come, girl, we will fight our way out of this place and return to our little hut. ‘Tis a night of sore tragedy, but the best can yet be saved, I swear to you.”

The woman heard his voice, that was plain; her self-caresses promptly ceased. Yet, instead of a thrill of recognition, her lovely face showed confusion as her almond eyes flicked aside to penetrate the drifting smoke. Her rubied, moistened lips pouted nervously, as if in apprehension. Then her eyes found the speaker and widened in a gaze of fear.

“Sariya, girl, ‘tis I, Conan! Come, let us escape from here! I need your soft shoulder as my crutch.”

Croaking the words hoarsely, he reached for her. Yet he clutched only emptiness as she shrank away to the far corner of her couch. Trying pathetically to cover her nakedness with slim red-nailed hands, she regarded him wild-eyed, with her painted mouth agape, her supple throat convulsing in a shrill, terrified scream.

“Girl, what is wrong? Hush, child.” As he stood unnerved, her screams continued dinning in his numb ears, rasping painfully on the indrawings as well as the outpourings of her heaving breath. At last they grew monotonous, threatening to cross the border from terror into madness; at that, Conan turned and flung himself away past the fires, out into wider darkness.

What vile devilment ruled here? By all the gods, how could Phang Loon so easily snatch what was dearest to him and defile it, or crush it to nothing? Was it real, or was it all drug-crazed illusion? How, by blessed Crom, how could he live on after this? Better that he should die; his soul was already dead, entombed in this cold clay breast! Only lotus drove him on, keeping his guts pumping, his dead limbs twitching beneath him… Before him in the darkness loomed the dim outline of another door; he staggered forward through it without stopping.

As the oiled portal slammed first open, then shut behind him, he noted absently that he was in an oblong room, yellow-lit by lamps in wall brackets and scented foully by smoking censers in shallow alcoves. The sole furniture of the place, its ornament and, Crom grant, its death-snare, was a tall black frame carved in figures of twining serpents: a full-length wardrobe mirror. Unhesitatingly Conan heaved himself up before it and peered deep within.

Horror upon horror: the ultimate, soul-chilling evil! For beyond the glass there slouched a foul, decrepit, lifeless thing… its tunic a funeral cerement, its flesh more tattered than the shroud’s rotting fabric, the only hint of life on its sagging bones the thriving purulence of decay. Not only was it loathsome, unspeakable—without a doubt it was
he
himself, as proven by the hand he stretched forth to test the solidity of the glass barrier: the withered, putrefying hand so faithfully reflected by the deformed claw which the framed abomination stretched out to him!

Here, then, was why Sariya had screamed so, even to the point of losing her poor mind. Conan prayed fervently that the girl had not recognized him as himself, her lover and rescuer—because she could scarcely fail to recognize him also as a monster, a hideous perversion cloaked and enfolded by death, able to bring only death and despair to those hapless ones it embraced.

Standing before the mirror, paralyzed with self-loathing, he traced with crumbling fingers the myriad proofs of his dissolution: the countless rips and gashes in his face and scalp where slack, unhealing skin peeled away from grisly bone; the grinning scar across his neck, gnawed and eroded so monstrously by decay that his head threatened to topple forward at any moment over exposed vertebrae and lank strings of sinew; the slashed, collapsed ruin of his torso, draped loosely by leather and torn fabric like a staved-in coffin matted with cobwebs; the knotted twigs of his arms, and his blighted trunks of legs, one weak and wasted, the other bulging and sagging with the weight of corruption, ready to burst and spew forth its noxious essence…

True! It was all utterly true and real to his sight and his horridly fascinated touch. Phang Loon had poisoned him; instead of soothing his wounds with a palliating drug, the warlord had befouled and polluted him from the start. Foolishly he had consented to besmear himself with decay’s potent essence; he had been made to wallow in a sorcerous death that denied him true, blissful extinction. Now he was transformed, doomed to exist as a monster or as Phang Loon’s slave, until this rotting, miserable corpse finally crumbled into fragments too small to twitch and suffer…