The Flame Knife

TWO: The Black Country

Dusk mantled the serrated skyline when Conan's guide halted. Ahead, the rigged terrain was broken by a deep canyon. Beyond the canyon rose a forbidding array of black crags and frowning cliffs, a wild, haglike chaos of broken black rock.

"There begins Drujistan," said the Kushafi. "Beyond that gorge, the Gorge of Ghosts, begins the country of horror and death. I go no farther."

Conan nodded, his eyes picking out a trail that looped down rugged slopes into the canyon. It was a fading trace of the ancient road they had been following for many miles, but it looked as though it had often been used of late.

Conan glanced around. With him were Tubal, Hattusas, the guide … and Nanaia the girl. She had insisted on coming because, she said, she feared to be separated from Conan among all these wild foreigners, whose speech she could not understand. She had proved a good traveling companion, tough and uncomplaining, though of volatile and fiery disposition.

The Kushafi said: "The trail is well-traveled, as you see. By it the demons of the black mountains come and go. But men who follow it do not return."

Tubal jeered. "What need demons with a trail? They fly with wings like bats!"

"When they take the shape of men they walk like men," said the Kushafi. He pointed to the jutting ledge over which the trail wound. "At the foot of that slope we found the man you called a Khitan. Doubtless his brother demons quarreled with him and cast him down."

"Doubtless he tripped and fell," grunted Conan. "Khitans of the desert are unused to climbing, their legs being bowed and weakened by a life in the saddle. Such a one would easily stumble on a narrow trail."

"If he was a man, perhaps," said the Kushafi. "But … Asura!"

All but Conan jumped, and the Kushafi snatched at his bow, glaring wildly. Out over the crags, from the south, rolled an incredible sound … a strident, braying roar, which vibrated among the mountains.

"The voice of the demons!" cried the Kushafi, jerking the rein so that his horse squealed and reared. "In the name of Asura, let us be gone! It's madness to remain!"

"Go back to your village if you're afraid," said Conan. "I'm going on." In truth, the hint of the supernatural made the Cimmerian's nape prickle too, but before his followers he did not wish to admit this.

"Without your men? It is madness! At least send back for your followers."

Conan's eyes narrowed like those of a hunting wolf. "Not this time. For scouting and spying, the fewer the better. I think I'll have a look at this land of demons; I could use a mountain stronghold." To Nanaia he said: "You had better go back, girl."

She began to weep. "Do not send me away, Conan! The wild mountaineers will ravish me."

He glanced down her long, well-muscled figure. "Anyone who tried it would have a task. Well, come on then, and do not say I didn't warn you."

The guide wheeled his pony and kicked it into a run, calling back: "Balash will weep for you! There will be woe in Kushaf! Me! Ahaif. His lamentations died away amidst the clatter of hoofs on stone as the Kushafi, flogging his pony, topped a ridge and vanished.

"Run, son of a noseless dam!" yelled Tubal. "Well brand your devils and drag them to Kushaf by their tails!" But he fell silent the instant the victim was out of hearing.

Conan spoke to Hattusas: "Have you ever heard a sound like that?"

The lithe Zamorian nodded. "Yes, in the mountains of the devil worshipers."

Conan lifted his reins without comment. He, too, had heard the roar of the ten-foot bronze trumpets that blared over the bare black mountains of forbidden Pathenia, in the hands of shaven-headed priests of Erlik.

Tubal snorted like a rhinoceros. He had not heard those trumpets, and he thrust his horse in ahead of Hattusas so as to be next to Conan as they rode down the steep slopes in the purple dusk. He said roughly: "Now that we have been lured into this country of devils by treacherous Kushafi dogs who will undoubtedly steal back and cut your throat while you sleep, what have you planned?"

It might have been an old hound growling at his master for patting another dog.

Conan bent his head and spat to hide a grin. "We'll camp in the canyon tonight. The horses are too tired for struggling through these gulches in the dark. Tomorrow we shall explore. I think the Hidden Ones have a camp in that country across the gorge. The hills hereabouts are but thinly settled. Kushaf is the nearest village, and it's a hard day's ride away. Wandering clans stay out of these parts for fear of the Kushafis, and Balash's men are too superstitious to explore across the gorge. The Hidden Ones, over there, could come and go without being seen. I know not just what we shall do; our destiny is on the knees of the gods."

As they came down into the canyon, they saw that the trail led across the rock-strewn floor and into the mouth of a deep, narrow gorge, which debouched into the canyon from the south. The south wall of the canyon was higher than the north and more sheer. It swept up in a sullen rampart of solid black rock, broken at intervals by narrow gorge mouths. Conan rode into the gulch into which the trail wound and followed it to the first bend. He found that this bend was but the first of a succession of kinks. The ravine, running between sheer walls of rock, writhed and twisted like the track of a serpent and was already filled with darkness.

"This is our road tomorrow," said Conan. His men nodded silently as he led them back to the main canyon, where some light still lingered. The clang of their horses' hoofs on the flint seemed loud in the sullen silence.

A few score of paces west of the trail ravine, another, narrower gulch opened into the canyon. Its rocky floor showed no sign of any trail, and it narrowed so rapidly that Conan thought it ended in a blind alley.

Halfway between these ravine mouths, near the north wall, a tiny spring bubbled up in a natural basin of age-hollowed rock. Behind it, in a cavelike niche in the cliff, dry wiry grass grew sparsely. There they tethered the weary horses.

They camped at the spring, eating dried meat and not risking a fire, which might be seen by hostile eyes.

Conan divided his party into two watches. Tubal he placed on guard west of the camp, near the mouth of the narrower ravine, while Hattusas had his station close to the mouth of the eastern ravine. Any hostile band coming up or down the canyon, or entering it from either ravine, would have to pass these vigilant sentries.

Darkness came swiftly in the canyon, seeming to flow in waves down the black slopes and ooze out of the mouths of the ravines. Stars blinked out, cold, white, and impersonal. Above the invaders brooded the great dusky bulks of the broken mountains. Conan fell asleep wondering idly what grim spectacles they had witnessed since the beginning of time.

The razor-keen perceptions of the barbarian had never been dulled by Conan's years of contact with civilization. As Tubal approached him to lay a hand on his shoulder, Conan awoke and rose to a crouch, sword in hand, before the Shemite even had a chance to touch him.

"What is it?" muttered Conan.

Tubal squatted beside him, gigantic shoulders bulking dimly in the gloom. Back in the shadow of the cliffs, the unseen horses moved restlessly. Conan knew that peril was in the air even before Tubal spoke:

"Hattusas is slain and the girl is gone! Death is creeping upon us in the dark!"

"What?"

"Hattusas lies near the mouth of the ravine with his throat cut. I heard the sound of a rolling pebble from the mouth of the eastern ravine and stole thither without rousing you, and lo, there lay Hattusas in his blood. He must have died silently and suddenly. I saw no one and heard no further sound in the ravine. Then I hastened back to you and found Nanaia gone. The devils of the hills have slain one and snatched away the other without a sound. I sense that Death still skulks here. This is indeed the Gorge of Ghosts!"

Conan crouched silently on one knee, straining eyes and ears into the darkness.

That the keen-sensed Zamorian should have died and Nanaia been spirited away without the sound of a struggle smacked of the diabolical.

"Who can fight devils, Conan? Let us mount and ride …"

"Listen!"

Somewhere a bare foot scuffed the rock floor. Conan rose, peering into the gloom. Men were moving out there in the darkness. Shadows detached themselves from the black background and slunk forward. Conan drew a dagger with his left hand. Tubal crouched beside him, gripping his Ilbarsi knife, silent and deadly as a wolf at bay.

The dim-seen line moved in slowly, widening as it came. Conan and the Shemite fell back a few paces to have the rock wall at their backs and keep themselves from being surrounded.

The rush came suddenly, bare feet slapping softly over the rocky floor, steel glinting dully in the dim starlight Conan could make out but few details of their assailants … only the bulks of them, and the shimmer of steel. He struck and parried by instinct and feel as much as by sight.

He killed the first man to come within sword reach. Tubal sounded a deep yell at the discovery that his foes were human after all and exploded in a burst of berserk ferocity. The sweep of his heavy, three-foot knife was devastating. Side by side, with the wall at their backs, the two companions were safe from attack on rear or flank.

Steel rang sharp on steel and blue sparks flew. There rose the ugly butcher-shop sound of blades cleaving flesh and bone. Men screamed or gasped death gurgles from severed throats. For a few moments a huddled knot writhed and milled near the rock wall. The work was too swift and blind and desperate to allow consecutive thought. But the advantage lay with the men at bay. They could see as well as their attackers; man for man they were stronger; and they knew that when they struck their steel would flesh itself only in hostile bodies. The others were handicapped by their numbers; for, the knowledge that they might kill a companion with a blind stroke must have tempered their frenzy.

Conan ducked a sword before he realized he had seen it swinging. His return stroke grated against mail; instead of hacking through it he slashed at an unprotected thigh and brought the man down. As he engaged the next man, the fallen one dragged himself forward and drove a knife at Conan's body, but Conan's own mail stopped it, and the dagger in Conan's left hand found the man's throat. Men spurted their blood on him as they died.

Then the rush ebbed. The attackers melted away like phantoms into the darkness, which was becoming less absolute. The eastern rim of the canyon was lined with a faint silvery fire that marked the moonrise.

Tubal gave tongue like a wolf and charged after the retreating figures, the foam of blood lust flecking his beard. He stumbled over a corpse and stabbed savagely downward before he realized it was a dead man. Then Conan grabbed his arm. He almost dragged the mighty Cimmerian off his feet as he plunged and snorted like a lassoed bull.

"Wait, fool " snarled Conan. "Do you want to run into a trap?"

Tubal subsided to a wolfish wariness. Together they glided after the vague figures, which disappeared into the mouth of the eastern ravine. There the pursuers halted, peering warily into the black depths. Somewhere far down it, a dislodged pebble rattled on the stone. Conan tensed like a suspicious panther.

"The dogs still flee," muttered Tubal. "Shall we follow?"

Conan shook his head. With Nanaia a captive, he could not afford to throw his life away by a mad rush into the well of blackness, where ambushes might make any step a march of death. They fell back to the camp and the frightened horses, which were frantic with the stench of fresh-spilt blood.

"When the moon rises high enough to flood the canyon with light," said Tubal, "they will shoot us with arrows from the ravine."

"We must take the chance," grunted Conan. "Maybe they are poor shots."

They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence as the moonlight, weird and ghostly, grew in the canyon, and boulder, ledge, and wall took shape. No sound disturbed the brooding quiet. Then, by the waxing light, Conan investigated the four dead men left behind by the attackers. As he peered from face to bearded face, Tubal exclaimed:

"Devil-worshipers! Sabateans!"

"No wonder they could creep like cats," muttered Conan. In Shem he had learned of the uncanny stealth of the people of that ancient and abominable cult, which worshiped the Golden Peacock in the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea. "What are they doing here? Their homeland is in Shem. Let's see … Ha!"

Conan opened the man's robe. There on the linen jerkin that covered the Sabatean's thick chest appeared the emblem of a hand gripping a flame-shaped dagger. Tubal ripped the tunics from the other three corpses. Each displayed the fist and knife. He said:

"What sort of cult is this of the Hidden Ones, that draws men from Shem and Khitai, thousands of miles asunder?"

"That's what I mean to find out," answered Conan. They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence. Then Tubal rose and said:

"What now?"

Conan pointed to dark splotches on the bare rock floor, which the moonlight now made visible. "We can follow that trail."

Tubal wiped and sheathed his knife, while Conan wound around his waist a coil of thin, strong rope with a three-pointed iron hook at one end. He had found such a rope useful in his days as a thief. The moon had risen higher, drawing a silver thread along the middle of the ravine.

Through the moonlight, they approached the mouth of the ravine. No bowstring twanged; no javelin sighed through the night air; no furtive figures flitted among the shadows. The blood drops speckled the rocky floor; the Sabateans must have carried grim wounds away with them.

They pushed up the ravine, afoot, because Conan believed their foes were also afoot. Besides, the gulch was so narrow and rugged that a horseman would be at a disadvantage in a fight.

At each bend they expected an ambush, but the trail of blood drops led on, and no figures barred their way. The blood spots were not so thick now, but they were enough to mark the way.

Conan quickened his pace, hoping to overtake the Sabateans. Even though the latter had a long start, their wounds and their prisoner would slow them down.

He thought Nanaia must still be alive, or they would have come upon her corpse.

The ravine pitched upward, narrowing, then widened, descended, bent, and came out into another canyon running east and west. This was a few hundred feet wide.

The bloody trail ran straight across to the sheer south wall and ceased.

Tubal grunted. "The Kushafi dogs spoke truth. The trail stops at a cliff that only a bird could fly over."

Conan halted, puzzled. They had lost the trace of the ancient road in the Gorge of Ghosts, but this was undoubtedly the way the Sabateans had come. He raised his eyes up the wall, which rose straight for hundreds of feet. Above him, at a height of fifteen feet, jutted a narrow ledge, a mere outcropping a few feet wide and four or five paces long. It seemed to offer no solution, but halfway up to the ledge he saw a dull smear on the rock of the wall.

Uncoiling his rope, Conan whirled the weighted end and sent it soaring upward.

The hook bit into the rim of the ledge and held. Conan went up it, clinging to the thin, smooth strand, as swiftly as most men would have climbed a ladder. As he passed the smear on the stone he confirmed his belief that it was dried blood, such as might have been made by a wounded man climbing or being hauled up to the ledge.

Tubal, below, fidgeted and tried to get a better view of the ledge, as if fearing it were peopled with unseen assassins. But the shelf lay bare when Conan pulled himself over the edge.

The first thing he saw was a heavy bronze ring set in the stone above the ledge, out of sight from below. The metal was polished by usage. More blood was smeared along the rim of the ledge. The drops led across the ledge to the sheer wall, which showed much weathering at that point Conan saw something else: the blurred print of bloody fingers on the rock of the wall. He studied the cracks in the rock, then laid his hand over the bloody hand print and pushed. A section of the wall swung smoothly inward. He was staring into the door of a narrow tunnel, dimly lit by the moon somewhere at the far end.

Wary as a stalking leopard, he stepped into it. At once he heard a startled yelp from Tubal, to whose view it seemed that he had melted into solid rock. Conan emerged head and shoulders to exhort his follower to silence and then continued his investigation.

The tunnel was short; moonlight poured into it from the other end, where it opened into a cleft. The cleft ran straight for a hundred feet and made an abrupt bend, like a knife-cut through solid rock. The door through which he had entered was an irregular slab of rock hung on heavy, oiled bronze hinges. It fitted perfectly into its aperture, its irregular shape making the cracks appear to be merely natural seams in the cliff.

A rope ladder of heavy rawhide was coiled just inside the tunnel mouth. Conan returned to the ledge outside with this, made it fast to the bronze ring, and let it down. While Tubal swung up in a frenzy of impatience, Conan drew up his own rope and coiled it around his waist again.

Tubal swore strange Shemitic oaths as he grasped the mystery of the vanishing trail. He asked: "But why was not the door bolted on the inside?"

"Probably men are coming and going constantly, and a man might be in a hurry to get through from the outside without having to shout to be let in. There was little chance of its being discovered; I should not have found it but for the blood marks."

Tubal was for plunging instantly into the cleft, but Conan had become wary. He had seen no sign of a sentry but did not think a people so ingenious in hiding the entrance to their country would leave it unguarded.

He hauled up the ladder, coiled it back on its shelf, and closed the door, plunging that end of the tunnel into darkness. Commanding the unwilling Tubal to wait for him, he went down the tunnel and into the cleft.

From the bottom of the cleft, an irregular knife-edge of starlit sky was visible, hundreds of feet overhead. Enough moonlight found its way into the cleft to serve Conan's catlike eyes.

He had not reached the bend when a scuff of feet beyond it reached him. He had scarcely concealed himself behind a broken outcrop of rock, split away from the side wall, when the sentry came. He came in the leisurely manner of one who performs a perfunctory task, confident of his own security. He was a squat Khitan with a face like a copper mask. He swung along with the wide roll of a horseman, trailing a javelin.

He was passing Conan's hiding place when some instinct brought him about in a flash, teeth bared in a startled snarl, spear whipping up for a cast or a thrust. Even as he turned, Conan was upon him with the instant uncoiling of steel-spring muscles. As the javelin leaped to a level, the scimitar lashed down. The Khitan dropped like an ox, his round skull split like a ripe melon.

Conan froze to immobility, glaring along the passage. As he heard no sound to indicate the presence of any other guard, he risked a low whistle which brought Tubal headlong into the cleft. The Shemite grunted at the sight of the dead man.

Conan stooped and pushed back the Khitan's upper lip, showing the canine teeth filed to points. "Another son of Erlik, the Yellow God of Death. There is no telling how many more may be in this defile. We'll drag him behind these rocks."

Beyond the bend, the long, deep defile ran empty to the next kink. As they advanced without opposition, Conan became sure that the Khitan was the only sentry in the cleft.

The moonlight in the narrow gash above them was paling into dawn when they came into the open at last. Here the defile broke into a chaos of shattered rock. The single gorge became half a dozen, threading between isolated crags and split-off rocks, as a river splits into separate streams at its delta. Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone stood up like gaunt ghosts in the pale predawn light.

Threading their way among these grim sentinels, the adventurers presently looked out upon a level, rock-strewn floor that stretched three hundred paces to the foot of a cliff. The trail they had followed, grooved by many feet in the weathered stone, crossed the level and twisted a tortuous way up the cliff on ramps cut in the rock. But what lay on top of the cliffs they could not guess.

To right and left, the solid wall veered away, flanked by broken pinnacles.

"What now, Conan?" In the gray light, the Shemite looked like a mountain goblin surprised out of his cave by dawn.

"I think we must be close to … listen!"

Over the cliffs rolled the blaring reverberation they had heard the night before, but now much nearer: the strident roar of the giant trumpet.

"Have we been seen?" wondered Tubal, fingering his knife.

Conan shrugged. "Whether we have or not, we must see ourselves before we try to climb that cliff. Here!"

He indicated a weathered crag, which rose like a tower among its lesser fellows.

The comrades went up it swiftly, keeping its bulk between them and the opposite cliffs. The summit was higher than the cliffs. Then they lay behind a spur of rock, staring through the rosy haze of the rising dawn.

"Pteor!" swore Tubal.

From their vantage point, the opposite cliffs assumed their real nature as one side of a gigantic mesalike block, which rose sheer from the surrounding level, four to five hundred feet high. Its vertical sides seemed unscalable, save where the trail had been cut into the stone.

East, north, and west it was girdled by crumbling crags, separated from the plateau by the level canyon floor, which varied in width from three hundred paces to half a mile. On the south, the plateau abutted on a gigantic bare mountain, whose gaunt peaks dominated the surrounding pinnacles.

But the watchers gave but little attention to this topographical formation.

Conan had expected, at the end of the bloody trail, to find some sort of rendezvous: a cluster of horsehide tents, a cavern, perhaps even a village of mud and stone nestling on a hillside. Instead, they were looking at a city, whose domes and towers glistened in the rosy dawn like a magical city of sorcerers stolen from some fabled land and set down in this wilderness.

"The city of the demons!" cried Tubal. "It is enchantment and sorcery!" He snapped his fingers to ward off evil spells.

The plateau was oval, about a mile and a half long from north to south and somewhat less than a mile from east to west. The city stood near its southern end, etched against the dark mountain behind it. A large edifice, whose purple dome was shot with gold, gleamed in the dawn. It dominated the flat-topped stone houses and clustering trees.

The Cimmerian blood in Conan's veins responded to the somber aspect of the scene, the contrast of the gloomy black crags with the masses of green and the sheens of color in the city. The city awoke forebodings of evil. The gleam of its purple, gold-traced dome was somehow sinister. The black, crumbling crags formed a fitting setting for it. It was like a city of ancient, demonic mystery, rising with an evil glitter amidst ruin and decay.

"This must be the stronghold of the Hidden Ones," muttered Conan. "Who'd have thought to find a city like this in an uninhabited country?"

"Not even we can fight a whole city'' grunted Tubal.

Conan fell silent while he studied the distant view. The city was not so large as it had looked at first glance. It was compact but unwalled; a parapet around the edge of the plateau furnished its defense. The two and three-storey houses stood among surprising groves and gardens … surprising because the plateau looked like solid rock without soil for growing things. He reached a decision and said:

"Tubal, go back to our camp in the Gorge of Ghosts. Take the horses and ride to Kushaf. Tell Balash I need all his swords, and bring the kozaki and the Kushafis through the cleft and halt them among these defiles until you get a signal from me, or know I'm dead."

"Pteor devour Balash! What of you?"

"I go into the city."

"You are mad!"

"Worry not, my friend. It is the only way I can get Nanaia out alive. Then we can make plans for attacking the city. If I live and am at liberty, I shall meet you here; otherwise, you and Balash follow your own judgment."

"What do you want with this nest of fiends?"

Conan's eyes narrowed. "I want a base for empire. We cannot stay in Iranistan nor yet return to Turan. In my hands, who knows what might not be made of this impregnable place? Now get along."

"Balash loves me not. He'll spit in my beard, and then I'll kill him and his dogs will slay me."

"He'll do no such thing."

"He will not come."

"He would come through Hell if I sent for him."

"His men will not come; they fear devils."

"They'll come when you tell them the devils are but men."

Tubal tore his beard and voiced his real objection to leaving Conan. "The swine in that city will flay you alive!"

"Nay, I'll match guile with guile. I shall be a fugitive from the wrath of the king, an outlaw seeking sanctuary."

Tubal abandoned his argument Grumbling in his beard, the thick-necked Shemite clambered down the crag and vanished into the defile. When he was out of sight; Conan also descended and walked toward the cliffs.