Conan whirled and ran, the wind of his motion causing his torch to flare up to a bright golden flame. Behind him came the relentless clicking of colossal claws on the stone, closer and ever closer.
Before he realized it, Conan had crossed the main intersection of the tunnels; the one he had first come upon after entering the subterranean system. Too late he decided that his best chance for escape would have been to go back to the trapdoor, burst out, and—if the priests were still in the naos—to confront them openly. The next best alternative would have been to turn to the right and take the downward-sloping tunnel, on the chance that it would issue into the outer world beyond the bounds of wall-girt Yezud.
He started to turn back. But it was too late for that; the four glowing eyes, reflecting the saffron light of the torch, had already reached the main crossing and blocked his way. He was trapped in this branch of the tunnel.
Conan continued his flight up the rising slope. At the top he came to a massive door, which he felt certain was the temple door through which the sheep had been admitted. Shaking with apprehension, he set down his hammer, fumbled for the Clavis of Gazrik, and applied it to the keyhole. When he uttered the spell, he heard the lock clank, and pushed on the knob. But the door would not yield. Then Conan remembered that this door was also closed by a heavy bolt on the outside.
Remembering how he had used the silver arrow on his way into the temple, Conan aimed the arrow to the height where he supposed this bolt to be and repeated:
“Kapinin achilir genishi!”
more loudly. When nothing happened, he shouted the phrase with the full power of his huge lungs.
Instead of the sound of the bolt’s motion, the next thing that Conan noticed was that the silver arrow was growing hot in his fingers. When it became too hot to hold, he dropped it. As he did so, it glowed, briefly, dull red; as it struck the floor, it softened and melted into an amorphous puddle, which quickly cooled and solidified. Then Conan remembered Parvez’s words, that the Clavis of Gazrik would move a door bolt
if
it were not too heavy. He had evidently overtaxed the powers of the talisman and ruined it. It served him right, he thought, for using magic.
Conan pulled out his hammer and gave the door a furious blow. The portal boomed but remained immobile. Conan could see where he had dented the tough ironwood, without affecting the door’s security. With such hard wood, it would take him an hour with hammer and chisel to force his way through the barrier.
He would have struck again, in a frenzy of desperation, but clickings behind him warned him to turn. As he did so, he found that the colossal spider—a living duplicate of the statue in the temple, save that this creature was covered with stiff hairs as long as a man’s fingers—was upon him. Reflections of the flame of his torch danced in the four great round eyes across the creature’s front.
Below these eyes, a pair of hairy, jointed appendages extended forward like arms. As these organs reached out for Conan, he smote one of them with his hammer, feeling the horny integument yield as it cracked. The spider recoiled a step, folding its injured limb beneath its hairy body.
Then the monster advanced again. It reared up on its six hindmost legs and spread the first pair, together with the uninjured palm, to seize its prey. Conan felt like a fly caught in a web, awaiting its fate.
Below the palps he could see the spider’s fangs, a pair of curved, shiny, sharp-pointed organs like the horns of a bull, curving out and then inwards, so that the points almost met. They, too, now spread horizontally to pierce Conan’s body from opposite sides; green venom dripped from their hollow points. Between and below the fangs, the jointed mouth parts worked hungrily.
For a heartbeat the pair confronted each other, Conan with his hammer raised to deliver one last crushing blow before he died, the spider with its monstrous, hairy appendages spread to grip the man in a last embrace.
From behind Zath, Conan heard Rudabeh’s voice, raised in shrill tones of terror: “Nial! Dearest! I have—”
At this anguished cry, the spider backed away from Conan. It turned, so that one of its lateral eyes flashed briefly in the torchlight. Its great sac of an abdomen brushed against the wall of the narrow space, and Zath started toward the voice. Conan heard one frightful shriek; then silence, save for the diminishing click of horny claws on stone. At that instant, Conan’s torch went out.
With a yell of fury, Conan started to run after the spider in total darkness, but he missed his direction and crashed into the wall of the tunnel. Getting shakily to his feet, he pulled the second torch from his belt. He cursed like a madman. The rag at the end of the first torch still glowed a dull red, like a lump of lava spat from a volcano.
Conan touched the ends together and blew frantic breaths until the second torch flared up. Dropping the exhausted torch, Conan ran down the ramp in pursuit of Zath.
At the main crossing, he slowed as his torch illumined something sprawled on the floor of the tunnel—something that was not the putrid remains of a cow or a sheep. Dreading what he knew he would find, he approached Rudabeh’s body. She looked as if she slept; but when he knelt and pressed an ear to her breast, he could detect no heartbeat.
He leaned his torch against the tunnel wall to free both hands and examined her more closely. She wore the gauzy, fluttery garments that the dancing girls appeared in when they sang in chorus. He ripped away these obscuring filaments and turned over her finely-formed torso. On one shoulder and in the middle of her back he found a pair of puncture wounds, each surrounded by an area of blackened flesh where the injected spider’s venom had taken effect.
He called: “Rudabeh! My love! Speak!” He chafed her hands and rhythmically pressed her ribs in hope of starting her breathing. Nothing had any effect.
Hot tears ran down Conan’s rugged countenance—the first he had shed in many years. He angrily wiped them away, but still they flowed. Those who knew Conan as a man of iron, hard, merciless, and self-seeking, would have been astonished to see him weeping in that charnel house, heedless of his own safety.
The girl must, he thought, have braved these stinking tunnels, after the priests had gone, to warn him of his peril. To have another lay down life to save his was a unique event in Conan’s experience, and the knowledge of her sacrifice filled him with pity, shame, and self-loathing.
T
hen rage surged like molten iron through his veins, and he picked up his torch and hammer, glaring about. The spider, he thought, must have dropped its burden when the light of Conan’s torch alarmed it, and then retreated to that part of the tunnel where he first had met the brute.
With a yell of uncontrolled fury, Conan ran headlong down the tunnel branch where he had first encountered Zath, his torch flaring up with the fetid wind of his motion. He must have run a quarter of a league, shouting: “Zath! Show yourself and fight!” But no sign of the giant arachnid did he see.
Breathing heavily, he gave up the chase. If Zath were in this branch of the tunnel, he would surely have by now overtaken it in its lumbering flight. Perhaps it was hiding in one of the many cross passages and side chambers, but to explore them all would require days.
He retraced his steps until he found himself back at the main crossing. Now cold to the touch, Rudabeh lay where he had left her. He would not abandon her in this stinking hellhole for Zath to consume, because he had a barbarian’s superstitious fear of failing to bury the body of one of his kith and kin.
Such a person’s ghost, he had learned as a boy, would haunt him in revenge for his neglect. Since he had few friends and no kinsmen in civilized lands, he had not felt compelled to bury any of the many corpses that he had seen in late years. Besides, Rudabeh had been the one human being whom he had truly loved and who had loved him in return since he had left his bleak homeland, and he would not desert her now. He would somehow get her out of the tunnels to some lonely place, where he would dig a grave, with his bare hands if need be, and lay her in it. He would pile rocks on the grave against wolves and hyenas, place a single wildflower atop the stones, and go his way.
He picked up the girl’s body, slung it over one massive shoulder, and started back along the tunnel that led to the trapdoor. Surely, he thought, the priests would have retired by this late hour, leaving the naos deserted. At the end of the corridor he set down the cold corpse, climbed the steps, and listened against the underside of the trapdoor.
To his surprise, the sound of voices filtered through to him. He made out the deep tones of the High Priest, the higher ones of Mirzes, and a third voice he did not know. Feridun’s leonine roar came through to him:
“Zath curse your eyeballs, Darius! You promised us fair weather for the three days of the festival; instead of which, you allowed our guests to depart in a downpour! Where is the skill at commanding the spirits of the air whereof you have boasted? If you cannot do better than that, we shall have to give the task of weather magic to another.”
Darius mumbled something apologetic, but then Mirzes the new Vicar spoke: “I suspect, Holiness, that Darius did it a-purpose, to diminish your repute and thus further his own political designs.”
“Naught of the sort!” protested Darius. “I have never …” Then all three spoke at once, so that Conan could no longer distinguish words.
Conan thought of bursting into the naos, laying Rudabeh’s body on the offering chest, chiseling out the Eyes of Zath, and fleeing. This was obviously impractical while the chamber was occupied. A wild idea crossed his mind, of pushing up the trapdoor and confronting the priests with the body. But Conan had no sword, and the priests had only to shout to bring the Brythunian guards on the run.
He quickly abandoned this suicidal idea. If the priests discovered, as they surely would, that Rudabeh had been in collusion with Conan, they might not bury her properly, either. Nor could he pry out the Eyes with one hand while fighting off Catigern’s mercenaries with the other. There was nothing for it but to manage the burial himself and come back later for the jewels, when the naos was vacant.
With a heavy sigh he descended, picked up the body, and set forth. At the main crossing he continued straight on, down the slope of the central passage. Where the tunnel branched, he followed what seemed to be the main corridor.
THE CHILDREN OF ZATH
S
uddenly, the tunnel opened out into a vast cavern, where stalactites hung from the roof over stalagmites that reared up from the floor to meet them. Directly before Conan, half a dozen stone steps led down to the floor of the cavern, so that he had a clear view across to the further wall. The feeble light of his torch could not throw its amber beams so far; but in the midst of the distant blackness appeared an opening to the outer world. Through this aperture Conan sighted a patch of night sky, in which a star glimmered. Evidently the rain clouds of the previous day had rolled away.
Within the cave entrance, below the actual aperture, was another patch of dim luminescence. Conan’s keen vision identified this as a circular pool of water, reflecting the night sky outside and blocking the entrance to the cave. The strange odor which he had sensed before his encounter with Zath assailed his nostrils with nauseating intensity.
All about the floor of the cave, the flickering orange light showed large, lumpish things scattered here and there among the stalagmites, like giant mushrooms of mottled gray-and-brown coloring. As Conan began to descend the steps, intending to pick his way among these obstacles to the exit, motion caught his eye. When he looked more closely, he saw that one of the supposed fungi was coming to life. It unfolded jointed legs, raised its body from the ground, and turned four gleaming eyes on Conan.
The thing was a duplicate, in miniature, of Zath, although its dimensions were only half those of the original spider god. Still, it was larger than the giant spider that Conan had fought in the Tower of the Elephant years before. One such monster could easily kill Conan, and there must be hundreds in the cavern.
The first spider to awaken started toward Conan, while on all sides other giant spiders were coming to life and rising to their clawed feet. Within a few heartbeats of Conan’s first appearance in the cave, the monster arachnids were streaming toward him. The click of their claws on the stone rose to a continuous rattle. Wherever Conan looked, quartets of gleaming eyes caught the light of his torch.
Conan whirled and ran back up the long slope of the tunnel, while his hearing told him that the entire swarm was crowding into the tunnel behind him and racing after him, like a jointed-legged flood. On, on he went. At first, to judge from the diminishing sounds behind him, he gained on his pursuers. But, heavily burdened, he was forced to slow down, while his heart labored and his breath came in gasps. Then the castanet-like sound of hundreds of horny claws on the stone came closer. These, he realized, must be the Children of Zath of whom the High Priest had spoken.
Ever the rough walls of the tunnel fled past. Without the body, Conan was sure he could outrun the spiders; but it inevitably slowed him down. Still, he would not abandon it. He had the feeling of being in a nightmare, where one runs and runs through darkness while an unseen menace comes ever closer behind. He feared that he must have taken a wrong fork and would be lost forever in this maze.
When he was almost in despair, he found himself at the main crossing. He kept straight on and soon reached the stair to the trapdoor.
At the end of the tunnel, Conan climbed the steps and listened. He heard no sound from above—no talking, shuffling, or other indication of human activity. Perhaps the accursed priests had gone to bed at last. In these hours between midnight and morning, all in the temple, save the Brythunian guards on night duty, should be sound asleep. Conan did not know how he could escape unnoticed from the temple with Rudabeh’s body; but, with the clatter of claws of the Children of Zath coming closer, he had no time to concoct a clever scheme.
With the fist that held the torch, he pushed against the trapdoor. The square of planking failed to move. With a silent curse, Conan wondered if someone had noticed that the bolt had been shot back and replaced it.
With the crepitation of the Children’s claws coming closer, Conan was not about to let a mere bolt stop him now. If a good push would not dislodge it, he could break through the trap with his hammer, although he would have preferred not to do so because of the noise.
He stepped back down to the tunnel floor and set down Rudabeh’s body. Then he leaned his torch against the tunnel wall. Again he mounted the steps, put both hands against the underside of the trap, and gave a terrific heave.
The trap rose against resistance, as if someone had placed a heavy weight upon it. Then suddenly the resistance ceased; there was a sharp cry, the thump of a falling body, and the trap flew open.
As Conan leaped out into the gloom, a stream of oil struck him and cascaded over his clothing. By the wavering light of the eternal flame in its bowl, he saw a priest, whom he recognized as Mirzes, the Vicar, sprawled on the floor and beginning to rise. Beside him lay a large pitcher on its side, and a pool of oil spread out from it across the marble.
In a flash, Conan understood. When Rudabeh had disappeared instead of reporting back to the Vicar, Mirzes had doubtless searched for her. Failing to find her, he had undertaken the task of refilling the reservoir himself. He had been standing on the trapdoor and directing the stream of bitumen into his pitcher when Conan’s sudden emergence had thrown him off the planking.
Mirzes started to scramble up, crying: “Who—what—Nial! What in the seven hells—” But then his feet slipped on the oily surface, and he fell again.
Conan leaped out on the floor and turned toward Mirzes, but his feet skidded also. He staggered and recovered.
“Help!” croaked Mirzes. “Guards!”
Slipping and scrambling, Conan reached Mirzes just as the priest regained his feet. As Mirzes opened his mouth to cry another alarm, Conan whipped his fist up against the Vicar’s chin with a meaty smack, hurling the slight priest back on the mosaic floor unconscious.
Standing over his victim, Conan thought of finishing him off with a skull-cracking blow of his hammer. But with the hammer in his hand, he drew back from his bloodthirsty resolution. To slay a man while that man was asleep or otherwise helpless went against his notions of honor. He thought of cutting Mirzes’s turban into lengths to bind and gag the priest.
But it was more urgent to recover his torch and Rudabeh’s body and to bolt the trapdoor, before the Children of Zath swarmed up into the naos. Conan started back toward the recess in the wall, aware that the faucet had remained open and that the abundant stream of bitumen continued to pour down into the tunnel. He must quickly turn off the valve; once the flow was stopped and the trap securely bolted, he could turn his attention back to Mirzes.
After that, Conan thought, he would try to pry out the Eyes from the spider idol. To escape from the temple, he would pound on the front door and shout for help. When the Brythunians unlocked and opened the doors, Conan would cry: “Murder! Robbery! Help the Vicar!” When the guards rushed in, he would slip past them and out.
Conan had taken but two steps toward the trapdoor when, with a thunderous belching sound, a mass of flame and smoke erupted out of the square opening in the floor. The oil had come in contact with Conan’s torch in the tunnel. Conan made one desperate effort to reach the faucet, but the flames drove him back with singed hair and eyebrows, frantically beating out a small fire started in his oil-soaked clothing.
Realizing at last that he could do nothing more for Rudabeh’s body, he sprang to the statue and began fumbling for tools, to extract at least one Eye before the conflagration drove him forth. Smoke rolled out, thicker and thicker, until it set Conan to coughing and prevented him from even seeing clearly enough to work on the jewels in the statue.
Stubbornly, he continued to try to place a drill in the proper position. He got in one stroke of his hammer and was pleased to see the point of the drill bite into the lead. But the smoke so afflicted him with coughing that he could only clutch at the nearest stone spider-leg, gasping and retching.
Then the light in the naos brightened, and through the billowing smoke Conan saw that a wall hanging was going up in flame. From outside the naos he heard cries of “Fire! Fire!”
The smoke momentarily lifted; and Conan, glancing toward the flaming recess with the trapdoor, saw a sight that wrung a shudder from him. A colossal gray-and-brown spider was hoisting itself out of the trapdoor. Its massive bulk scraped against the sides of the opening as it forced its hairy body through the aperture, like some demon rising from a flaming hell. Zath had escaped its tunnel-prison at last.
Out it came, swiveling about on its jointed legs, and sighted Conan. As the scuttling horror started for its prey, the Cimmerian ran for the front door, putting away his tools as he went. He seized the bronzen door handles and tried to thrust open the doors, but they were still locked. A glance behind showed that the spider was close upon him.
Then a key clicked in the lock and the doors opened. Conan found himself facing the startled countenances of two Brythunians; one of whom held a large key. Others crowded behind the mercenaries. Smoke had already seeped out the cracks around these doors, alerting the people of the temple.
Conan staggered, coughing, out of the naos and into a scene of wild confusion. Priests of Zath, visiting priests from Arenjun, acolytes, dancing girls, mercenaries, and slaves ran in all directions. Priests bawled commands.
Through the smoke loomed Zath in the doorway. At the sight, everyone in the vestibule broke into mad flight for the nearest exit. The small door in the outer valves was jammed with several fugitives trying to get through it at once.
Forcing his way to the door by sheer strength, Conan seized the handles of the main door, wrenched them around, and pushed the groaning valves open. Those clustered against the door boiled out, falling, tripping over one another, and scrambling up to run. Conan glimpsed a pair of acolytes hustling the former Vicar out of the temple, while Harpagus stared about in childlike wonder.
C
onan bounded down the front steps two at a time. Halfway down he turned to snatch a look back. Thick smoke poured out of the open portal. Overhead the night was clear and star-dusted, while a half moon stood high in the eastern sky.
In the open front portal stood two figures. One was the giant spider; its long hairs had been mostly singed off, but it seemed otherwise uninjured. The other, almost within arm’s length of the monster, was the lean, hawk-nosed figure of High Priest Feridun, in his white robe and black turban. The priest was making passes with his hands and chanting some rigmarole.
With its forelegs raised as if to seize Feridun, Zath paused. The priest continued his incantation, raising his voice to a shout and frantically gesturing, so that his long white beard lashed the smoky night air. The two grotesque figures were silhouetted against the lurid glare of the fire behind them. The spider retreated a step, back toward the naos; then another step. The priest’s fabled control over animals could even force this monster to immolate itself in the blaze.
Then Feridun got a lungful of smoke and went into a spell of coughing. Instantly, the spider, no longer constrained by its master’s voice, darted forward. Its great jointed limbs enfolded the priest, who screamed once.
A burly figure in mail dashed past Conan up the steps, waving a sword. From the flowing red hair Conan recognized Captain Catigern. Reaching the top, the Brythunian took a cut at the spider’s body, opening a gash from which a dark fluid seeped. Zath, who had issued from the portal and now stood on the topmost step, dropped the priest’s body and turned upon its new adversary. As it spread its appendages, Catigern backed away, swinging his sword right and left. The spider followed, keeping just beyond reach of the blade.
“Hold on, Catigern!” shouted Conan between coughs. He had sighted, lying on the steps, a halberd belonging to one of the guards on duty at the main entrance. The Brythunian had dropped it when he fled.
Pounding up the steps, Conan snatched up the pole-arm. Coming up on the side of Zath, he swung the halberd high over his head and, with every ounce of power that he possessed, brought it whistling down on the forward segment of the monster.
The axe blade sank deeply into the spider’s leathery flesh, and such was the force of the stroke that the shaft broke off midway from butt to head. Ponderously, Zath turned toward Conan. Running in from the other side, Catigern drove his sword in deeply above the base of the second leg and wrenched it out.
Zath began to turn back toward the Brythunian, but it moved more and more slowly. Before it completed its turn, its legs gave way, dropping its body to the marble steps, which became fouled with the dark ichor that dripped from its wounds. Its sprawling legs continued to twitch, but these movements slowly dwindled. Zath was dead.
Catigern seized Conan around the shoulders in a fierce hug. “Thank all the gods you came along! Any time you want a lieutenancy in my company, do but ask.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Conan, coughing.
Another Brythunian approached. “Captain, the priest Dinak wants our help in fighting the fire.”
Seeing the spider dead, Yezudites began crowding back into the square before the temple. The citizens boiled out of their houses, some in nightwear and some in hastily donned work garments. The priests dashed about, organizing firefighting. Thick, oily smoke continued to roll out the doors of the temple.