* * *
Five
Along the dark, silent tunnel Conyn groped, momentarily dreading a fall into some unseen pit; but at last her feet struck steps again, and she went up them until she came to a door on which her fumbling fingers found a metal catch. She came out into a dim and lofty room of enormous proportions. Fantastic columns marched about the mottled walls, upholding a ceiling, which, at once translucent and dusky, seemed like a cloudy midnight sky, giving an illusion of impossible height. If any light filtered in from the outside, it was curiously altered.
In a brooding twilight, Conyn moved across the bare green floor. The great room was circular, pierced on one side by the great, bronze valves of a giant door. Opposite this, on a dais against the wall, up to which led broad curving steps, there stood a throne of copper, and when Conyn saw what was coiled on this throne, she retreated hastily, lifting her scimitar.
Then, as the thing did not move, she scanned it more closely and presently mounted the glass steps and stared down at it. It was a gigantic snake, apparently carved of some jadelike substance. Each scale stood out as distinctly as in real life, and the iridescent colors were vividly reproduced. The great wedge-shaped head was half submerged in the folds of its trunk; so neither the eyes nor jaws were visible. Recognition stirred in her mind. The snake was evidently meant to represent one of those grim monsters of the marsh, which in past ages had haunted the reedy edges of Vilayet's southern shores. But, like the golden leopard, they had been extinct for hundreds of years. Conyn had seen rude images of them, in minature, among the idol huts of the Yuetshi, and there was a description of them in the Book of Skelos, which drew on prehistoric sources.
Conyn admired the scaly torso, thick as her thigh and obviously of great length, and she reached out and laid a curious hand on the thing. And as she did so, her heart nearly stopped. An icy chill congealed the blood in her veins and lifted the short hair on her scalp. Under her hand there was not the smooth, brittle surface of glass or metal or stone, but the yielding, fibrous mass of a living thing. She felt cold, sluggish life flowing under her fingers.
Her hand jerked back in instinctive repulsion. Sword shaking in her grasp, horror and revulsion and fear almost choking her, she backed away and down the glass steps with painful care, glaring in awful fascinastion at the grisly thing that slumbered on the copper throne. It did not move.
She reached the bronze door and tried it, with her heart in her teeth, sweating with fear that she should find herself locked in with that slimy horror. But the valves yielded to her touch, and she glided though and closed them behind her.
She found herself in a wide hallway with lofty, tapestried walls, where the light was the same twilight gloom. It made distant objects indistinct, and that made her uneasy, rousing thoughts of serpents gliding unseen through the dimness. A door at the other end seemed miles away in the illusive light. Nearer at hand, the tapestry hung in such a way as to suggest an opening behind it, and lifting it cautiously she discovered a narrow stair leading up.
While she hesitated she heard, in the great room she had just left, the same shuffling tread she had heard outside the locked panel. Had she been followed through the tunnel? She went up the stair hastily, dropping the tapestry in place behind her.
Emerging presently into a twisting corridor, she took the first doorway she came to. She had a twofold purpose in her apparently aimless prowling; to escape from the building and its mysteries, and to find the Nemedian boy who, she felt, was imprisoned somewhere in this palace, temple, or whatever it was. She believed it was the great domed edifice at the center of the city, and it was likely that here dwelt the ruler of the town, to whom a captive man would doubtless be brought.
She found herself in a chamber, not another corridor, and was about to retrace her steps, when she heard a voice which came from behind one of the walls. There was no door in that wall, but she leaned close and heard distinctly. And an icy chill crawled slowly along her spine. The tongue was Nemedian, but the voice was not human. There was a terifying resonance about it, like a bell tolling at midnight.
'There was no life in the Abyss, save that which was incorporated in me,' it tolled. 'Nor was there light, nor motion, nor any sound. Only the urge behind and beyond life guided and impelled me on my upward journey, blind, insensate, inexorable. Through ages upon ages, and the changeless strata of darkness I climbed--'
Ensorcelled by that belling resonance, Conyn crouched forgetful of all else, until its hypnotic power caused a strange replacement of faculties and perception, and sound created the illusion of sight. Conyn was no longer aware of the voice, save as far-off rhythmical waves of sound. Transported beyond her age and her own individuality, she was seeing the transmutation of the being women called Khosatral Khel which crawled up from Night and the Abyss ages ago to clothe itself in the substance of the material universe.
But human flesh was too frail, too paltry to hold the terrific essence that was Khosatral Khel. So she stood up in the shape and aspect of a woman, but her flesh was not flesh; nor the bone, bone; nor blood, blood. She became a blasphemy against all nature, for she caused to live and think and act a basic substance that before had never known the pulse and stir of animate being.
She stalked through the world as a god, for no earthly weapon could harm her, and to her a century was like an hour. In her wanderings she came upon a primitive people inhabiting the island of Dagonia, and it pleased her to give this race culture and civilization, and by her aid they built the city of Dagon and they abode there and worshipped her. Strange and grisly were her servants, called from the dark corners of the planet where grim survivals of forgotten ages yet lurked. Her house in Dagon was connected with every other house by tunnels through which her shaven-headed priests bore victims for the sacrifice.
But after many ages, a fierce and brutish people appeared on the shores of the sea. They called themselves Yuetshi, and after a fierce battle were defeated and enslaved, and for nearly a generation they died on the altars of Khosatral.
Her sorcery kept them in bonds. Then their priestess, a strange, gaunt woman of unknown race, plunged into the wilderness, and when she returned she bore a knife that was of no earthly substance. It was forged of a meteor, which flashed through the sky like a flaming arrow and fell in a far valley. The slaves rose. Their saw-edged crescents cut down the women of Dagon like sheep, and against that unearthly knife the magic of Khosatral was impotent. While carnage and slaughter bellowed through the red smoke that choked the streets, the grimmest act of that grim drama was played in the cryptic dome behind the great daised chamber with its copper throne and its walls mottled like the skin of serpents.
From that dome, the Yuetshi priestess emerged alone. She had not slain her foe, because she wished to hold the threat of her loosing over the heads of her own rebellious subjects. She had left Khosatral lying upon the golden dais with the mystic knife across her breast for a spell to hold her senseless and inanimate until doomsday.
But the ages passed and the priestess died, the towers of deserted Dagon crumbled, the tales became dim, and the Yuetshi were reduced by plagues and famines and war to scattered remnants, dwelling in squalor along the seashore.
Only the cryptic dome resisted the rot of time, until a chance thunderbolt and the curiosity of a fisherwoman lifted from the breast of the god the magic knife and broke the spell. Khosatral Khel rose and lived and waxed mighty once more. It pleased her to restore the city as it was in the days before its fall. By her necromancy she lifted the towers from the dust of forgotten millenia, and the folk which had been dust for ages moved in life again.
But folk who have tasted of death are only partly alive. In the dark corners of their souls and minds, death still lurks unconquered. By night the people of Dagon moved and loved, hated and feasted, and remembered the fall of Dagon and their own slaughter only as a dim dream; they moved in an enchanted mist of illusion, feeling the strangeness of their existence but not inquiring the reasons ther
efor. With the coming of day, they sank into deep sleep, to be roused again only by the coming of night, which is akin to death.
All this rolled in a terrible panorama before Conyn's consciousness as she crouched beside the tapestried wall. Her reason stasggered. All certainty and sanity were swept away, leaving a shadowy universe through which stole hooded figures of grisly potentialities. Through the belling of the voice, which was like a tolling of triumph over the ordered laws of a sane planet, a human sound anchored Conyn's mind from its flight through spheres of madness. It was the hysterical sobbing of a man.
Involuntarily she sprung up.