Black Tears

FOUR: The Deathless Queen.

Vardanes of Zamora halted at the crest of the hills and stared down at a sight so strange that it struck him dumb. For five days, since the botched ambush against the Zuagirs had rebounded upon the Turanians, he had ridden like a madman, scarcely daring to snatch an hour or two of rest for himself and his mare. A terror so great that it robbed the very manhood from within him goaded him on.

Well did he know the vengeance of the desert outlaws. His imagination was filled with sickening scenes of the price the grim avengers would exact from his body if ever he fell into their hands. Thus, when he saw that the ambush had failed, he had galloped straight out into the desert. He knew that devil, Conan, would flay the traitor's name from Boghra Khan and then would come howling on his heels with a bloodthirsty mob of Zuagirs. Nor would they easily give up the quest of their treacherous former comrade.

His one slim chance had been to head out into the trackless reaches of Shan-e-Sorkh. Although Vardanes was a city-bred Zamorian of culture and sophistication, the fortunes of his age had flung him in with the desert outlaws, and he knew them well. He knew they dreaded the very name of the Red Waste and that their savage imaginations peopled it with every monster and devil ever dreamed of. Why the desert tribesmen feared the Red Waste so terribly he neither knew nor cared, so long as their fear would keep them from following him very far into that deadly desert.

But they had not turned back. His lead on them was so slight that, day after day, he could see the clouds of dust raised by the Zuagir horsemen behind him.

He pressed ahead with every moment, eating and drinking in the saddle and pushing his mount to the verge of exhaustion in order to widen that narrow gap.

After five days, he knew not whether they were still on his track; but soon it mattered little. He had exhausted the food and water for himself and his mare and pressed on in the faint hope of finding a water hole in this endless waste.

His horse, caked with dry mud where desert dust had stuck to lathered sides, staggered forward like a dead thing driven by a sorcerer's will. Now it was near to death. Seven times this day it had fallen, and only the lash of the whip had driven it to its feet again. Since it could no longer support his weight, Vardanes walked, leading it by its rein.

The Red Waste had taken a fearful toll of Vardanes himself. Once handsome as a laughing young god, he was now a gaunt, sunblackened skeleton. Bloodshot eyes glared through matted, stringy locks. Through cracked, swollen lips he mumbled mindless prayers to Ishtar, Set, Mitra, and a score of other deities. As he and his trembling steed lurched to the crest of yet another row of dunes, he looked down and saw a lush green valley, dotted with clumps of emerald-green date palms.

Amid this fertile vale lay a small, walled city of stone. Bulging domes and squat guard towers rose above a stuccoed wall, wherein was set a great gate whose polished bronzen hinges redly reflected the sun.

A city in this scorching waste? A lush valley of cool, green trees and soft lawns and limped lotus pools, in the heart of this bleak wilderness? Impossible!

Vardanes shuddered, shut his eyes, and licked his cracked lips. It must be a mirage, or a phantom of his disordered wits! Yet a shard of half-forgotten lore, gleaned from his youthful studies long ago, came back to him. It was a fragment of legend called Akhlat the Accursed.

He strove to recover that thread of memory. It had been in an old Stygian book, which his Shemite tutor kept locked in a sandalwood chest. Even as a bright-eyed lad, Vardanes had been blessed or cursed with greed, curiosity, and nimble fingers. One dark night, he had picked that lock and pored with mingled awe and loathing through the portentous pages of that dark grimoire of elder necromancy.

Penned in a spidery hand on pages of dragon parchment, the text described strange rites and ceremonies. The pages crawled with cryptic hieroglyphs from elder kingdoms of sorcerous evil, like Acheron and Lemuria, which had flourished and fallen in time's dawn.

Among the pentacle-crowded pages had been fragments of some dark liturgy designed to draw down undying demon-things from dark realms beyond the stars, from the chaos that ancient mages said reigned beyond the borders of the cosmos.

One of these liturgies contained cryptic references to 'devil-cursed and demon-haunted' Akhlat in the Red Waste, where power-mad sorcerers of yore called down to this earthly sphere a Demon from Beyond, to their unending sorrow …

Akhlat, where the Undying One rules with a hand of horror to this very day . . . doomed, accursed Akhlat, which the very gods spurned, transforming all the realm round about into a burning waste …"

Vardanes was still sitting in the sand by the head of his panting mare when grim-faced warriors seized him and bore him down from the ring of stony hills that encircled the city … down into the garden valley of date palms and lotus pools … down to the gates of Akhlat the Accursed.