Young Thongor (20 page)

The sun burned high above like molten gold in a cauldron of searing brass. They were hot and dusty, but he urged them on, with brief and infrequent rest stops.

“Do your people, the Pjanthan, dwell nearby?” he asked her.

“No. Many leagues to the west.”

“How is it, then, that you are roaming these hills alone, so far from your tribe?” he asked.

“I am searching for a youth who is…lost,” she said.

“A brother?”

She shook her head. “My lover. Him who…was to have been my mate.” There was a note of somber sorrow that haunted her low, hesitant voice.

“And your people would not assist in your search? They would permit a mere lass to stray so far, in so hostile a land, all by herself?” He grunted and spat. “Mine are a savage people, too, and no soft-gutted city-dwellers. But rather than permit a maiden to venture alone into peril we would sacrifice half the fighting strength of the clan!”

She moistened her lips hesitantly.

“They…they fear to penetrate the borders of this region,” she said in low tones. And she explained that it was under a bad omen; she used a term which Thongor understood as—
taboo
.

He said nothing. His people, too, knew the terrors of the dark ness and the curse of all omens. The Black Hawk people of Valkarth were not immune to the strength of the taboo…but never would the stalwart heroes of the North have permitted shadowy terrors to come between them and the protection of their womenfolk. Privately, he decided that these Pjanthan were either weaklings, or fools—or both.

But he did not want to offend her.

Frequently that morning as he strode along beside her
kroter
his lambent gaze strayed to her bare brown thighs, rounded calves and slender, tapering ankles…to the proud lift of her naked young breasts, her sleek, flat abdomen, the rondure of her little rump. And, whenever she thought he was not looking, the girl’s huge, dark eyes took in the swelling arch of the boy’s deep chest, his flat belly. His long, powerful arms.

It was nearly noon when they came upon the white, grinning skull mounted on a black pole, set up like a silent warning directly in their path.

4

The Shadow of Shan Chan Thuu

Zoroma shrieked as the naked white skull loomed up in their path. The
kroter
shied nervously and Thongor growled an oath and sprang to catch the bridle before the beast could panic into flight. The girl sat shuddering, her terrified eyes fixed on the grisly emblem of warning that grinned at them from atop the black pole.

Thongor examined it narrowly.

“We passed such a thing in a jungle clearing last evening,” he said. “I thought it a warning sign reared by the Beastmen, but the hairy folk of the jungles would not be here in these harsh hills. Do you know what this thing means, girl?”

“It bears the sign of Omm,” she said weakly. “The emblem of Shan Chan Thuu!”

“And what might Omm and Shan Chan Thuu be?” he growled.

Her face pale, her dark eyes haunted by fear, she shuddered, for all the baking heat of the dusty hills. It was as if a clammy, crawling wind blew against her naked spine.

“Have you never heard of Omm?” she asked faintly. “Indeed, you are strangers to the jungles of Kovia…”

“I told you our accustomed territory lay to the north, in the wilderness of Chush,” he said impatiently. “Come—out with it, girl!”

“Omm is a legend in this land…an age-old city that dates back to the dark days of Time’s Dawn…when the children of Nemedis first came into this realm out of the Ultimate East, to lay the foundations of the Nine Cities.” Her voice fell to a whisper, and there was something in her tone, a crawling note of cold menace and elder evil, that lifted his nape hairs and roughed the skin of his forearms with the thrill of premonition.

“No one knows where the Lost City of Omm lifts its eon-crumbled towers, but legend whispers that it is the cradle of an evil deviltry…a lore of science-magic foul with the slime of chaos, and black with the horror of man’s cruelty,” she whispered. “Such is the unholy legend of Omm.”

“And what of Shan Chan Thuu?” he pressed. “Is it some black god of the Pit?”

She shuddered. “Perhaps that is what he is, after all…but he was mortal once, an ancient devil-wizard out of Omm who came into this land and raised his own black citadel among these very hills, wherein to pursue unmolested by his sorcerous brethren his strange worship and his stranger arts. That was two hundred years ago, men say…”

“And he lives yet?” Thongor demanded, incredulously, though a brief memory of Zazamanc in the ancient city of Ithomaar stirred in his mind.

The girl shrugged slim, bare shoulders, tawny, pink-tipped breasts lifting. “They say he prolonged his life beyond the limitations of mortal flesh…that he bartered his soul to chaos for some vast magical price—“

“—
The Emerald Flame!
” a voice gasped behind them.

Thongor turned to see that his lieutenant, Chelim, had heard the girl’s fable.

“Have you never heard of it, lad?” Chelim grunted, his shaven pate gleaming with perspiration, his powerful muscled arms gray with rock dust. “A fabulous jewelled treasure—I’ve heard the same tale as the wench relates—the old Omnian sold his immortal part to possess it! They say ‘tis a wealth of gems of a kind unknown to men—the ransom of a dozen emperors! And the old wizard long since dead!”

A speculative gleam shone in the fierce eyes of the young barbarian. “Gems, eh? And this death’s head means we are approaching his fortress, or whatever it is? It is supposed to warn men away from his treasure house?”

The girl nodded. Thongor and the burly Chelim exchanged glances.

“What do you think, Chelim?” the youth growled. “Will the men let old fables fright them from a treasure like this?”

White teeth flashed in the bald giant’s tanned face. “Not Jorn’s Raiders, lad! They’d dare the horrors of the Pit itself for a handful of gold!”

The girl watched them but said nothing.

“Where is this place?” Thongor asked.

She pointed. “Directly in our path, but—”

He waited. “But—what?”

She bit her lip. “Nothing…”

* * * *

After a brief consultation with his warriors, Thongor led the march forward. Some of the men had demurred: that scrawny little thief, Fulvio, whined that it was not wise to disturb the bones of dead wizards, for life clings long about the dust of those sorcerers who have sworn the awful Vow to Chaos. But Thongor laughed and mocked their fears.

“I have faced and fought gods, ghosts and devils—men, magicians and monsters, before now,” he grunted. “And never yet have I found a thing that cannot be killed!”

And so the bandits rode on, ignoring the grisly warning that grinned down at them from the black stake, the ominous crimson symbol coiled between its bony brows.

And Zoroma rode with them. But now she was silent, and her face was tense and haunted. For all the hot moonlight, it seemed to her that they rode through gathering shades of darkness, as if a dread shadow lay over all this dead, dry land.

The shadow of Shan Chan Thuu.

5

Black Citadel

As the long shadows of late afternoon stretched across the rocky hills of Kovia, they came within sight of the ruined tower. It had been built atop a round knoll and it thrust high up above the surrounding barrens. Gaunt and stark and ominous was that dead citadel, the only sign of man in all this waste.

Thongor studied it with narrowed eyes, thoughtfully. It was odd, he thought, that the transition from lush, steaming jungles to this harsh and barren land should be so abrupt. One moment they were cutting a path through sweltering underbrush—the next their boot heels crunched in dry soil where not a single blade of grass grew. He had not even glimpsed a mold or lichen, such as one might find underneath boulders or on the shadowed base of rocky cliffs, even in the most desert-like of wildernesses.

It was more than odd—it was uncanny.

It was as if that black citadel that thrust its broken walls up into the dim gloaming were the centre of some cosmic contagion that had cast its evil blight over all this land about, draining the life and the vigor from every living thing. Not one single sign of life had they seen since leaving camp the night before. Not so much as a crawling scorpion, carrier hawk or a venomous serpent.

All of this land was a land of death…

From this distance, the citadel was a black, featureless mass—a clotted cluster of shadows, of which no details could be discerned. But it was evident that the structure was of far greater antiquity than the legends hinted, for the extent of decay was extraordinary: Thongor could see fallen columns, shattered architraves and entire sections of wall that had collapsed into moldering ruin. Surely, the passage of a mere century or two could not account for so extensive a degree of ruin. It would take millennia—perhaps even eons—for a stone structure to crumble like this, particularly in a desert wilderness, whose aridity should preserve worked stone, not hasten its decay.

The rocky eminence whereupon the black citadel stood was in the exact centre of a vast bowl-like depression, a disc-shaped valley, like some enormous crater. The floor of this crater was a stretch of desiccated sand—dead as the surface of the moon.

They rode across the breadth of this huge depression, the hooves of their
kroters
crunching and squeaking in the crystalline sand. Thongor stooped and picked up a handful of the strange stuff. It was not sand at all, but rock—stone that had been subjected to some weird force that had sapped the hardness of the mineral until at length it crumbled into this coarse substance.

Under the pressure of his fingers, the sand crystals crushed to fine powder, like dry wood ash.
What uncanny force had leached the solid strength from living stone?

They rode on.

As they drew nearer, it became easier to make out the details of the structure. And they became aware of its true size—distance, a trick of perspective, or perhaps the absence of any nearby object large enough to measure it against, had somehow concealed the truth of its proportions.

It was the largest stone edifice that Thongor or his warriors had ever seen. It may well have been the most enormous man-made structure on Earth at that time. Indeed, it would have dwarfed even the pyramids of Egypt, or the mighty Sphinx itself, had those relics of ancient Atlantis been built in the age of Thongor, the dim Pleistocene.

* * * *

The colossal stone wreck was one of incredibly detailed and curiously unfamiliar architecture. The eye became lost in a maze of balconies, towers, colonnades and buttresses. The mind was baffled and confused among the mad profusion of wall and arch and wing and extension. It was not so much one building as a cluster of buildings, all built together in a man-made mountain of stonework. The nature—the origin—the uses—of the citadel were impossible to make out.

It was like nothing else on Earth.

The extent of the decay was incredible. The outer walls, which were as much as twenty paces thick, and built of solid stone, had crumbled and lay fallen, scattering the slopes of the high place with enormous cubes of broken stone, each weighing several tons. Minarets were toppled and square turrets leaned crazily or strewed the earth with rubble. The whole outer surface of the enigmatic ruin was worn and pitted, as if bathed for countless centuries in the glare of some intolerable radiation. From the rough, porous condition of the outer walls, Thongor got the feeling that solid
inches
of stone had melted into powder, sifting down from the face of the structure.

As they approached nearer, they became aware of yet a further element of mystery. They felt an uncanny sensation of being close to some enormous and living—
thing
.

It was hard to say precisely what there was about the shadowy citadel that gave them the feeling that it was, somehow, alive. Like a titanic idol, hewn from a solid mountain of dead black stone, carved by the denizens of some unthinkably remote eon, it squatted, brooding, amid all that dreary waste of death and desolation.

There exuded from the dark structure an aura of cold menace. The black openings of windows gaped like the eye-sockets of a skull. The cold wind of fear blew from the towering colossus, like a chill and fetid breath from the mouth of the Pit itself.

The men muttered among themselves, signing their breasts with the names of half a hundred gods and totems and protective spirits. Thongor alone remained impassive. He had looked death and horror in the face often enough—and he had laughed!

* * * *

When all the west was a welter of crimson vapor where Aedir the Sun lord lay expiring in scarlet and gold, they reached the summit, and colossal portals loomed before them like the yawning jaws of a dead behemoth.

Within they found a vast, echoing hall whose roof, supported by stone columns like marble sequoia, was lost in clotted shadow far above. Galleries and antechambers in incredible number branched away from this central hall. All was a murmuring emptiness of dim shadows and whispering echoes.