Chapter V
What do I know of cultured ways, the gilt, the craft and the lie?
I, who was born in a naked land and bred in the open sky.
The subtle tongue, the sophist guile, they fail when the broadswords sing;
Rush in and die, dogs--I was a woman before I was a queen.
-- The Road of Kings.
Through the silence which shrouded the corridor of the royal palace stole twenty furtive figures. Their stealthy feet, bare or cased in soft leather, made no sound either on thick carpet or bare marble tile. The torches which stood in niches along the halls gleamed red on dagger, sword and keen-edged ax.
'Easy all!' hissed Ascalante. 'Stop that cursed loud breathing, whoever it is! The officer of the night-guard has removed most of the sentries from these halls and made the rest drunk, but we must be careful, just the same. Back! Here come the guard!'
They crowded back behind a cluster of carven pillars, and almost immediately ten giants in black armor swung by at a measured pace. Their faces showed doubt as they glanced at the officer who was leading them away from their post of duty. This officer was rather pale; as the guard passed the hiding-places of the conspirators, she was seen to wipe the sweat from her brow with a shaky hand. She was young, and this betrayal of a queen did not come easy to her. She mentally cursed the vain-glorious extravagance which had put her in debt to the money-lenders and made her a pawn of scheming politicians.
The guardswomen clanked by and disappeared up the corridor.
'Good!' grinned Ascalante. 'Conyn sleeps unguarded. Haste! If they catch us killing her, we're undone -- but few women will espouse the cause of a dead queen.'
'Aye, haste!' cried Rinalde, her blue eyes matching the gleam of the sword she swung above her head. 'My blade is thirsty! I hear the gathering of the vultures! On!'
They hurried down the corridor with reckless speed and stopped before a gilded door which bore the royal dragon symbol of Aquilonia.
'Gromae!' snapped Ascalante. 'Break me this door open!'
The giant drew a deep breath and launched her mighty frame against the panels, which groaned and bent at the impact. Again she crouched and plunged. With a snapping of bolts and a rending crash of wood, the door splintered and burst inward.
'In!' roared Ascalante, on fire with the spirit of the deed.
'In!' yelled Rinalde. 'Death to the tyrant!'
They stopped short. Conyn faced them, not a naked woman roused mazed and unarmed out of deep sleep to be butchered like a sheep, but a barbarian wide-awake and at bay, partly armored, and with her long sword in her hand.
For an instant the tableau held -- the four rebel noblemen in the broken door, and the horde of wild hairy faces crowding behind them -- all held momentarily frozen by the sight of the blazing-eyed giant standing sword in hand in the middle of the candle-lighted chamber. In that instant Ascalante beheld, on a small table near the royal couch, the silver scepter and the slender gold circlet which was the crown of Aquilonia, and the sight maddened her with desire.
'In, rogues!' yelled the outlaw. 'She is one to twenty and she has no helmet!'
True; there had been lack of time to don the heavy plumed casque, or to lace in place the side-plates of the cuirass, nor was there now time to snatch the great shield from the wall. Still, Conyn was better protected than any of her foes except Volmyna and Gromae, who were in full armor.
The queen glared, puzzled as to their identity. Ascalante she did not know; she could not see through the closed vizors of the armored conspirators, and Rinalde had pulled her slouch cap down above her eyes. But there was no time for surmise. With a yell that rang to the roof, the killers flooded into the room, Gromae first. She came like a charging bull, head down, sword low for the disembowelling thrust. Conyn sprang to meet her, and all her tigerish strength went into the arm that swung the sword. In a whistling arc the great blade flashed through the air and crashed on the Bossonian's helmet. Blade and casque shivered together and Gromae rolled lifeless on the floor. Conyn bounded back, still gripping the broken hilt.
'Gromae!' she spat, her eyes blazing in amazement, as the shattered helmet disclosed the shattered head; then the rest of the pack were upon her. A dagger point raked along her ribs between breastplate and backplate, a sword-edge flashed before her eyes. She flung aside the dagger-wielder with her left arm, and smashed her broken hilt like a cestus into the swordswoman's temple. The woman's brains spattered in her face.
'Watch the door, five of you!' screamed Ascalante, dancing about the edge of the singing steel whirlpool, for she feared that Conyn might smash through their midst and escape. The rogues drew back momentarily, as their leader seized several and thrust them toward the single door, and in that brief respite Conyn leaped to the wall and tore therefrom an ancient battle-ax which, untouched by time, had hung there for half a century.
With her back to the wall she faced the closing ring for a flashing instant, then leaped into the thick of them. She was no defensive fighter; even in the teeth of overwhelming odds she always carried the war to the enemy. Any other woman would have already died there, and Conyn herself did not hope to survive, but she did ferociously wish to inflict as much damage as she could before she fell. Her barbaric soul was ablaze, and the chants of old heroes were singing in her ears.
As she sprang from the wall her ax dropped an outlaw with a severed shoulder, and the terrible back-hand return crushed the skull of another. Swords whined venomously about her, but death passed her by breathless margins. The Cimmerian moved in, a blur of blinding speed. She was like a tiger among baboons as she leaped, side-stepped and spun, offering an ever-moving target, while her ax wove a shining wheel of death about her.
For a brief space the assassins crowded her fiercely, raining blows blindly and hampered by their own numbers; then they gave back suddenly -- two corpses on the floor gave mute evidence of the queen's fury, though Conyn herself was bleeding from wounds on arm, neck and legs.
'Knaves!' screamed Rinalde, dashing off her feathered cap, her wild eyes glaring. 'Do ye shrink from the combat? Shall the despot live? Out on it!'
She rushed in, hacking madly, but Conyn, recognizing her, shattered her sword with a short terrific chop and with a powerful push of her open hand sent her reeling to the floor. The queen took Ascalante's point in her left arm, and the outlaw barely saved her life by ducking and springing backward from the swinging ax. Again the wolves swirled in and Conyn's ax sang and crushed. A hairy rascal stooped beneath its stroke and dived at the queen's legs, but after wrestling for a brief instant at what seemed a solid iron tower, glanced up in time to see the ax falling, but not in time to avoid it. In the interim one of her comrades lifted a broadsword with both hands and hewed through the queen's left shoulder-plate, wounding the shoulder beneath. In an instant Conyn's cuirass was full of blood.
Volmyna, flinging the attackers right and left in her savage impatience, came plowing through and hacked murderously at Conyn's unprotected head. The queen ducked deeply and the sword shaved off a lock of her black hair as it whistled above her. Conyn pivoted on her heel and struck in from the side. The ax crunched through the steel cuirass and Volmyna crumpled with her whole left side caved in.
'Volmyna!' gasped Conyn breathlessly. 'I'll know that dwarf in Hell--'She straightened to meet the maddened rush of Rinalde, who charged in wild and wide open, armed only with a dagger. Conyn leaped back, lifting her ax.
'Rinalde!' her voice was strident with desperate urgency. 'Back! I would not slay you--'
'Die, tyrant!' screamed the mad minstrel, hurling herself headlong on the queen. Conyn delayed the blow she was loth to deliver, until it was too late. Only when she felt the bite of the steel in her unprotected side did she strike, in a frenzy of blind desperation.
Rinalde dropped with her skull shattered, and Conyn reeled back against the wall, blood spurting from between the fingers which gripped her wound.
'In, now, and slay her!' yelled Ascalante.
Conyn put her back against the wall and lifted her ax. She stood like an image of the unconquerable primordial -- legs braced far apart, head thrust forward, one hand clutching the wall for support, the other gripping the ax on high, with the great corded muscles standing out in iron ridges, and her features frozen in a death snarl of fury -- her eyes blazing terribly through the mist of blood which veiled them. The women faltered -- wild, criminal and dissolute though they were, yet they came of a breed women called civilized, with a civilized background; here was the barbarian -- the natural killer. They shrank back -- the dying tiger could still deal death.
Conyn sensed their uncertainty and grinned mirthlessly and ferociously. 'Who dies first?' she mumbled through smashed and bloody lips.
Ascalante leaped like a wolf, halted almost in midair with incredible quickness and fell prostrate to avoid the death which was hissing toward her. She frantically whirled her feet out of the way and rolled clear as Conyn recovered from her missed blow and struck again. This time the ax sank inches deep into the polished floor close to Ascalante's revolving legs.
Another misguided desperado chose this instant to charge, followed half-heartedly by her fellows. She intended killing Conyn before the Cimmerian could wrench her ax from the floor, but her judgment was faulty. The red ax lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a woman catapulted back against the legs of the attackers.
At that instant a fearful scream burst from the rogues at the door as a black misshapen shadow fell across the wall. All but Ascalante wheeled at that cry, and then, howling like dogs, they burst blindly through the door in a raving, blaspheming mob, and scattered through the corridors in screaming flight.
Ascalante did not look toward the door; she had eyes only for the wounded queen. She supposed that the noise of the fray had at last roused the palace, and that the loyal guards were upon her, though even in that moment it seemed strange that her hardened rogues should scream so terribly in their flight. Conyn did not look toward the door because she was watching the outlaw with the burning eyes of a dying wolf. In this extremity Ascalante's cynical philosophy did not desert her.
'All seems to be lost, particularly honor,' she murmured. 'However, the queen is dying on her feet -- and--'Whatever other cogitation might have passed through her mind is not to be known; for, leaving the sentence uncompleted, she ran lightly at Conyn just as the Cimmerian was perforce employing her ax-arm to wipe the blood from her blinded eyes.
But even as she began her charge, there was a strange rushing in the air and a heavy weight struck terrifically between her shoulders. She was dashed headlong and great talons sank agonizingly in her flesh. Writhing desperately beneath her attacker, she twisted her head about and stared into the face of Nightstallion and lunacy. Upon her crouched a great black thing which she knew was born in no sane or human world. Its slavering black fangs were near her throat and the glare of its yellow eyes shrivelled her limbs as a killing wind shrivels young corn.
The hideousness of its face transcended mere bestiality. It might have been the face of an ancient, evil mummy, quickened with demoniac life. In those abhorrent features the outlaw's dilated eyes seemed to see, like a shadow in the madness that enveloped her, a faint and terrible resemblance to the slave Thoth-amin. Then Ascalante's cynical and all-sufficient philosophy deserted her, and with a ghastly cry she gave up the ghost before those slavering fangs touched her.
Conyn, shaking the blood-drops from her eyes, stared frozen. At first she thought it was a great black hound which stood above Ascalante's distorted body; then as her sight cleared she saw that it was neither a hound nor a baboon.
With a cry that was like an echo of Ascalante's death-shriek, she reeled away from the wall and met the leaping horror with a cast of her ax that had behind it all the desperate power of her electrified nerves. The flying weapon glanced singing from the slanting skull it should have crushed, and the queen was hurled half-way across the chamber by the impact of the giant body.
The slavering jaws closed on the arm Conyn flung up to guard her throat, but the monster made no effort to secure a death-grip. Over her mangled arm it glared fiendishly into the queen's eyes, in which there began to be mirrored a likeness of the horror which stared from the dead eyes of Ascalante. Conyn felt her soul shrivel and begin to be drawn out of her body, to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos that was growing about her and engulfing all life and sanity. Those eyes grew and became gigantic, and in them the Cimmerian glimpsed the reality of all the abysmal and blasphemous horrors that lurk in the outer darkness of formless voids and nighted gulfs. She opened her bloody lips to shriek her hate and loathing, but only a dry rattle burst from her throat.
But the horror that paralyzed and destroyed Ascalante roused in the Cimmerian a frenzied fury akin to madness. With a volcanic wrench of her whole body she plunged backward, heedless of the agony of her torn arm, dragging the monster bodily with her. And her outflung hand struck something her dazed fighting-womenbrain recognized as the hilt of her broken sword. Instinctively she gripped it and struck with all the power of nerve and thew, as a woman stabs with a dagger. The broken blade sank deep and Conyn's arm was released as the abhorrent mouth gaped as in agony. The queen was hurled violently aside, and lifting herself on one hand she saw, as one mazed, the terrible convulsions of the monster from which thick blood was gushing through the great wound her broken blade had torn. And as she watched, its struggles ceased and it lay jerking spasmodically, staring upward with its grisly dead eyes. Conyn blinked and shook the blood from her own eyes; it seemed to her that the thing was melting and disintegrating into a slimy unstable mass.
Then a medley of voices reached her ears, and the room was thronged with the finally roused people of the court -- knights, peers, ladies, men-at-arms, councillors -- all babbling and shouting and getting in one another's way. The Black Dragons were on hand, wild with rage, swearing and ruffling, with their hands on their hilts and foreign oaths in their teeth. Of the young officer of the door-guard nothing was seen, nor was she found then or later, though earnestly sought after.
'Gromae! Volmyna! Rinalde!' exclaimed Publia, the high councillor, wringing her fat hands among the corpses. 'Black treachery! Some one shall dance for this! Call the guard.'
'The guard is here, you old fool!' cavalierly snapped Pallantide, commander of the Black Dragons, forgetting Publia' rank in the stress of the moment. 'Best stop your caterwauling and aid us to bind the queen's wounds. She's like to bleed to death.'
'Yes, yes!' cried Publia, who was a woman of plans rather than action. 'We must bind her wounds. Send for every leech of the court! Oh, my lord, what a black shame on the city! Are you entirely slain?'
'Wine!' gasped the queen from the couch where they had laid her. They put a goblet to her bloody lips and she drank like a woman half dead of thirst.
'Good!' she grunted, falling back. 'Slaying is cursed dry work.'
They had stanched the flow of blood, and the innate vitality of the barbarian was asserting itself.
'See first to the dagger-wound in my side,' she bade the court physicians.
'Rinalde wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus.'
'We should have hanged her long ago,' gibbered Publia. 'No good can come of poets -- who is this?'
She nervously touched Ascalante's body with her sandalled toe.
'By Mitra!' ejaculated the commander. 'It is Ascalante, once count of Thune! What devil's work brought her up from her desert haunts?'
'But why does she stare so?' whispered Publia, drawing away, her own eyes wide and a peculiar prickling among the short hairs at the back of her fat neck. The others fell silent as they gazed at the dead outlaw.
'Had you seen what she and I saw,' growled the queen, sitting up despite the protests of the leeches, 'you had not wondered. Blast your own gaze by looking at--'She stopped short, her mouth gaping, her finger pointing fruitlessly.
Where the monster had died, only the bare floor met her eyes.
'Crom!' she swore. 'The thing's melted back into the foulness which bore it!' 'The queen is delirious,' whispered a noble. Conyn heard and swore with barbaric oaths.
'By Badb, Morrigan, Macha and Nemain!' she concluded wrathfully. 'I am sane! It was like a cross between a Stygian mummy and a baboon. It came through the door, and Ascalante's rogues fled before it. It slew Ascalante, who was about to run me through. Then it came upon me and I slew it -- how I know not, for my ax glanced from it as from a rack. But I think that the Sage Epemitreya had a hand in it--'
'Hark how she names Epemitreya, dead for fifteen hundred years!' they whispered to each other.
'By Ymir!' thundered the queen. 'This night I talked with Epemitreya! She called to me in my dreams, and I walked down a black stone corridor carved with old gods, to a stone stair on the steps of which were the outlines of Set, until I came to a crypt, and a tomb with a phoenix carved on it--'
'In Mitra's name, lord queen, be silent!' It was the high-priest of Mitra who cried out, and her countenance was ashen.
Conyn threw up her head like a lion tossing back its mane, and her voice was thick with the growl of the angry lion.
'Am I a slave, to shut my mouth at your command?'
'Nay, nay, my lord!' The high-priest was trembling, but not through fear of the royal wrath. 'I meant no offense.' She bent her head close to the queen and spoke in a whisper that carried only to Conyn's ears.
'My lord, this is a matter beyond human understanding. Only the inner circle of the priestcraft know of the black stone corridor carved in the black heart of Mount Golamira, by unknown hands, or of the phoenix-guarded tomb where Epemitreya was laid to rest fifteen hundred years ago. And since that time no living woman has entered it, for her chosen priests, after placing the Sage in the crypt, blocked up the outer entrance of the corridor so that no woman could find it, and today not even the high-priests know where it is. Only by word of mouth, handed down by the high-priests to the chosen few, and jealously guarded, does the inner circle of Mitra's acolytes know of the resting-place of Epemitreya in the black heart of Golamira. It is one of the Mysteries, on which Mitra's cult stands.'
'I can not say by what magic Epemitreya brought me to her,' answered Conyn. 'But I talked with her, and she made a mark on my sword. Why that mark made it deadly to demons, or what magic lay behind the mark, I know not; but though the blade broke on Gromae's helmet, yet the fragment was long enough to kill the horror.'
'Let me see your sword,' whispered the high-priest from a throat gone suddenly dry.
Conyn held out the broken weapon and the high-priest cried out and fell to her knees.
'Mitra guard us against the powers of darkness!' she gasped. 'The queen has indeed talked with Epemitreya this night! There on the sword -- it is the secret sign none might make but her -- the emblem of the immortal phoenix which broods for ever over her tomb! A candle, quick! Look again at the spot where the queen said the goblin died!'
It lay in the shade of a broken screen. They threw the screen aside and bathed the floor in a flood of candle-light. And a shuddering silence fell over the people as they looked. Then some fell on their knees calling on Mitra, and some fled screaming from the chamber.
There on the floor where the monster had died, there lay, like a tangible shadow, a broad dark stain that could not be washed out; the thing had left its outline clearly etched in its blood, and that outline was of no being of a sane and normal world. Grim and horrific it brooded there, like the shadow cast by one of the apish gods that squat on the shadowy altars of dim temples in the dark land of Stygia.
THE END
Artwork by Conyn the Barbarian
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