All across the gallery the toast was reciprocated, though not the libation, except by a few who unintentionally splattered their draughts as they raised them high. Conan heard his name and Juma’s given back in a scattered murmur by scores of throats; in all, the crowd’s reaction to their emperor’s speech seemed tolerant. Yildiz, in his personable, plain-spoken way, had evidently won over some of his listeners and soothed others’ fears of civil turmoil. In the babble of comment exchanged by the audience, Conan sensed for the first time a note of acceptance and relief.
“And now,” His Resplendency was saying, “if the heroes will come forward so that we may honor them in person…” Signaled by Sempronius, Conan and Juma arose and stepped to the gate of their railed enclosure. “The good General Abolhassan bears tokens of our favor—but what is this, a miracle?”
Conan had been watching the scowling general march forward, aglitter with gold trim and weaponry, holding before him a tasseled pillow to which a pair of gleaming trinkets were pinned. But Yildiz’s sudden exclamation diverted the Cimmerian’s attention; looking to the center of the dais, he saw with surprise an odd, unnatural agitation in the leaves of the potted jungle tree. It moved squirmingly, shudderingly, its limbs and glossy foliage shifting in a restlessness no earthly wind could have induced. An agony of sudden growth it seemed to be, massive and impossibly accelerated; in the time it took Conan’s jaw to sag in wonder, the tree nearly doubled its height and width, jostling and overshadowing Yildiz and his concubines as it swelled greedily into the sunrays streaming down from the overhead vents.
The growth looked eerily natural, except for its uncanny speed; Conan could see branches extruding at the ends like blind, questing worms, and baby-green foliage exploding from fresh buds along the way. Yet there was a devious directionality to it; as the Cimmerian watched, frozen in his tracks, long shoots propagated out and downward from the thickening shoulders of the tree’s main limbs. Widening in a parody of long, grasping fingers, these branches managed to seize sudden hold of Emperor Yildiz and one of his quailing concubines. It happened impossibly fast, before the gaping monarch could even flinch; the second maiden escaped only by throwing herself flat on the floor. Squirming and wriggling, using all her skills as a harem-dancer, she managed to evade the fronds and tendrils that groped forth to ensnare her.
The clutching growth was lightning-swift and deceptive; in the space of a single, startled breath, Yildiz and his houri were hoisted clear of the floor to hang helpless, struggling in the tree’s twining grip. New tendrils snaked forth to enfold their necks and faces; yet once they had been snared, the darting urgency of the first growth was gone—transferred outward, it seemed; for the tree still grew on all sides, expanding ever faster.
So it went; one moment the wild-eyed harem wench was clawing past Conan, to pelt away on bare feet; the next, nearly all the guards along the front of the dais were entangled with grasping branches, their weapons half-drawn, their orders and military decorum forgotten in a clawing struggle for survival. That same moment Abolhassan threw aside his spangled pillow and drew his saber, to hack furiously at fast-spreading limbs; Conan, for reasons he scarcely paused to examine, found himself advancing with sword drawn, stalking toward the tree’s center and its slowly strangling victims.
By the time he had taken two steps he was embattled, greedy tendrils snaking down at him from the ever-thickening mass overhead. He hacked them off with the skill of an old jungle hand, plying his gold-hilted sword like an oversized brush knife. Yet the silent, insidious creepers also snaked down behind him, entwining his neck and shoulders in their rough, leafy clutch before he could twist free. Their grip was surprisingly tight, and Conan soon felt the reach of his sword-arm dangerously hampered. Struggling vainly against the tough, constricting foliage, he watched supple vines race the length of his extended sword-arm, there to branch upward toward new fronds threading down from above.
Of a sudden, a blade flickered near the corner of his eye, and heavy chopping noises sounded about his ears, together with gasps and curses.
“Blast this weed, ‘tis an abomination under Ito, a sending of the fierce jungle itself!” Juma’s gruff voice panted in his ear.
Feeling the tight, dragging restraint on his body suddenly loosen, Conan tore free, muttering half-choked thanks at the Kushite.
To his surprise, as he shook off the last of the clinging fronds, he blundered up against Irilya; she stood close beside Juma, slashing at the tree’s leafy overburden with a hook-headed pike she must have retrieved from one of the dangling guards.
“Woman, what are you doing here?” Conan demanded of her, even as he raised his sword to prune back new, probing tendrils of the demon tree.
“What? Why, rescuing you, you thankless clout!” Her bill-hook slashed perilously close to his face as it chopped down an insinuating frond. “Why, where should I be?”
“You… uh…“Conan was about to order her off to safety, but a glance around the hall showed him that safety did not exist.
Everywhere, even among the frenzied crowds clawing toward the archways, the devilish fronds and creepers plucked and insinuated themselves freely. From its puny original size the tree had burgeoned impossibly wide, filling the entire Court of Protocols; its height beneath the spacious dome was unguessable, except by the leaf-filtered dimness of jungle light trickling down from above. Many of the onlookers, especially those in favored places on or near the dais, already depended from the tree’s crooked limbs, furiously battling or slowly strangling. Vine-swathed, they resembled frantic insects wrapped in spider-silk or strange, writhing fruit.
Whether such a death was worse than a fatal trampling in the exits, Conan was no judge. So, slashing tirelessly at the menacing vines, he turned to Irilya and Juma. “Come, stay together then, and follow me! We will fell this sorcerous tree like a worm-eaten forest snag!”
The task did not promise to be an easy one, for the tree’s trunk had grown almost in proportion to its girth. Its planting-pot had long since shattered to fragments; now the massive overhead limbs radiated from a knotty labyrinth above a rough, pot-bellied trunk. Thick, gnarled roots plunged downward into the very stones of the palace, clenching its foundation like talons and forcing up long ridges of inlaid tile that mapped their tortuous windings beneath the floor. Hard as thick-knotted cables, the roots seemed almost to pulsate with the strength of their grip on the stony substrate.
“Ah well, at least we jungle hands are better at hewing shrubbery than city or desert troops!” So saying, Conan protected the others’ backs as they slashed at the tough vines enwrapping Yildiz and his houri, suspended close before the trunk. Soon the latter’s faces hung visible once again, blue and fish-mouthed with strangulation, yet thirstily gasping in air.
Then Conan and Juma attacked the trunk of the tree, swinging sharp-bladed axes dropped by the ill-fated household guards. They alternated strokes in swift, expert rhythm, hacking through the tough outer bark and its oozing green underlayer, then deep into the tree’s damp, pale flesh. In unspoken agreement they concentrated on the widest part of the trunk: the swollen, sinister belly. From its gravid fullness they sent thick chunks of wood flying with tireless blows. They trusted to Irilya to chop and slash away encroaching vines with her bill-hook, which she plied at their backs with desperate energy.
“Watch beneath—beware the roots!” Conan heard Juma grunt between ax-strokes.
He looked down to see the tree, in diligent self-defense, sending up pale, hairy tendrils from beneath the shattered floor-tiles. These grew swiftly, threading snakily up over the men’s ankles. Yet Conan scarcely shifted his footing as Irilya desperately alternated her chopping above and below, slicing perilously close to his feet with her halberd. Instead, in silent accord with Juma, he leaned harder into his ax-strokes, hewing rhythmically at the great trunk, whose bulbous belly now echoed thuddingly with each blow.
“Hollow, by Crom!” Conan exclaimed, prying out blackened splinters of wood from the heart of the trunk with a twist of his ax. “And, faugh, smell that stench! Can it be rotten already?”
“Look, there is treasure within!” Kneeling before the splintered cavern their axes had opened, Juma pointed to gems glittering from the interior darkness like winking eyes.
“No, do not reach inside!” Irilya, shoving the Kushite’s hand away, thrust her hooked weapon into the fecund aperture and probed there, raking forth the sizeable lump of riches it contained.
“Why, ‘tis a human skull, thick with silver and gems!” Juma exclaimed. He started to reach for it, but jerked back his hand as Conan’s ax hurtled down. The blow smashed the sinister ornament into flying fragments of silver, gem, and bone.
“‘Twas the emblem of Mojurna, leader of the Hwong rebels,” Conan said to the others’ questioning stares as he disentangled his ankles from the suddenly brittle rootlets. “I should have guessed that this accursed tree was Mojurna’s, sent to wreak vengeance on the Emperor Yildiz and the whole court!”
At mention of the emperor, they turned back to him where he hung enwrapped with his concubine. Both were semiconscious, their labored breaths constricted as in a python’s hug, yet still alive; it was Juma who drew his dagger and undertook the task of cutting them free and easing them to the floor.
With the smashing of the jeweled skull, the hellish vitality of the jungle plant seemed to depart. Now Conan and Irilya saw leaves withering before their eyes, fluttering to the floor in what must soon become a deep carpet. Branches in far-flung corners of the court groaned and sagged low, laden heavily with their mortal harvest. The last humans free to move had fled the room some time before; for most of those in its toils, the tree’s death had come too late.
Conan and Irilya roved the place, cutting loose the lucky few—the guard-captain who had been saved by his helmet and breastplate, the courtesan fortunate enough to have donned heavy neck-clasps that morning.
As they went, Irilya pointed out many illustrious faces empurpled by choking death: diverse eunuchs, including both Sempronius and Euranthus, the fanatic high priest Tammuraz, a young, foppish aristocrat named Philander, and countless others known to her. General Abolhassan they found in a tangle of braid and armor not far from the tree’s trunk, dangling head downward, his tongue protruding almost as blackly as the loops of his disarrayed turban.
By the time they returned to the emperor’s side, he breathed steadily, his gaze slowly refocusing under Juma’s careful ministrations. He even ventured dry, rasping speech.
“What a horror! Our pageant ruined…” Yildiz rolled his eyes and lolled his bald-topped head weakly aside. “What of my little turtledove, is she all right?” His Resplendency squinted closely at the fleshy, heaving bosom of his houri. “Tarim bless her, she lives! But many have died, I fear.”
“Most of the court, Sire.” Irilya stooped low over him. Conan knelt close beside her, unsure of her intentions, and watchful lest her hand creep to her dagger. ” ‘Tis a day of great sorrow for our city,” she continued. To Conan’s surprise, he caught the gleam of tears in her eyes. “But the worst menace is past. We can survive all this, Sire, and your rule can be sustained peacefully, if only Your Resplendency will end our foreign campaigns and concentrate on improving things here at home.”
“Aye, Emperor,” Conan added gruffly. “Among the dead are those who plotted against you; now you can revamp your court. As for the war in Venjipur—well, that can still be won, but it must be run differently. The present command system is rotten with greed and misrule—”
As Conan had feared earlier, Irilya’s hand flew to her dagger, forcing him to clutch her wrist and restrain her.
But her lunge and her tearful glare of hatred, he found with surprise, were directed not at Yildiz but at himself. After a tense moment, their standoff was interrupted by an anguished croak from beneath.
“Venjipur! Tell me not of Venjipur,” the emperor moaned, waving a hand at the vast, wilting tree of death above them. “Was not this horrid doom another curse of their vile witchcraft, meant to strike me down in the peaceful heart of my empire? Venjipur! Oh, how I rue ever hearing the wretched name, and curse the greedy whim that made me wish to rule it! I relent—do you hear, O gods, I want no more of it!”
The survivors knelt distraught, staring at one another as their ruler’s oaths rasped out across the court. Meanwhile, from the entryways sounded thumps and hails as the outer world overcame its fear and ventured to return.
“There is smoke on the wind from the gulf.” Sitting beside Conan in the swaying howdah, Juma stated aloud what had been evident to both men for some time. ” ‘Tis not the season for burning rice husks, so there must fighting along the river delta. See, even our elephant knows something is amiss!”
The Kushite nodded toward the huge animal’s trunk, which curved aloft cobra-like, sampling the breeze in various aspects. In this matter of tasting the air, their lumbering steed was privileged to be at front of the column, free of the dust and stink of the four more elephants and five hundred border infantry tramping close behind.
To Juma’s observation Conan made no answer, merely flaring his own nostrils and thoughtfully scanning the hazy expanse of farm fields and jungle ridges ahead. This return to a land he despised as he would death itself, but which he had nevertheless found himself yearning for in recent weeks, stirred up poignant, indefinable feelings in his breast. Part of his emotion was the desire for his lover Sariya; yet he knew there was also more than that, and less.
“Ha!” Juma observed to nobody in particular. “Even I underestimated the perils of playing the hero game, it would seem. Now we are saddled with the job of calling off this war and extricating the Imperial legions, all with the aid of a mere token force! Do you think old Mojurna and his Hwong tribesmen will feel charitably inclined and let us all go home in peace?”