El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (91 page)

They fell back, black Sudanese, lean Arabs, and squat Mongols, dragging their dead from before the door, and lifted the great ram again. Lal Singh and the Kurds shook the sweat and blood out of their eyes and took a fresh grip on their blood-slippery swords. Gordon remembered the window, and stepped to the ledge. Another ladder had been propped against the wall, and this time many men gripped its base firmly. A score were swarming up it. Gordon gripped the long knife, waiting for them to come within reach. He drew a long breath and lifted his head to catch, for the last time, the breath of night-wind that brought him the tang of snow-freshened peaks. And with his head lifted he stood motionless, staring out over the crowd.

The torches in the courtyard and the square accentuated the darkness beyond, but he made out a dark mass moving down the street. It was
men, many men, marching quietly in compact formation. Who could it be? Reinforcements, of course; more of the Hidden Ones returning from some raid. But why did they come so quietly?

The men on the ladder were only a few rungs away, climbing in grim silence, while the crowd below yelled and hooted. All eyes in that mob were turned upward toward the balcony window. No one saw the men who came on so silently and with such grim intent. Only a few yards separated them now from the backs of the crowd in the square — and suddenly, stunningly, a crash of musketry ripped the night apart. Fire fringed that black mass. A storm of lead tore through the crowd outside the gate.

Men went down in rows and files. Every man in the courtyard jerked around, struck dumb. The battering at the door ceased suddenly. But hell burst loose in the square. Fired at point-blank range that volley had torn lanes through the close-packed throng, and the survivors, wheeling in stupefied amazement, got a wild glimpse of fierce, stranger faces glaring over muzzles that almost touched them. Even as they turned those muzzles blazed death in their faces, and screaming like damned souls, those who still lived gave way and surged blindly into the gate, sweeping all before them. Men went down, trampled in the rush, and the ladder rocked, toppled and crashed in that dark tide of frantic humanity. The crowd in the court, ignorant of what was happening, was swept along by the stampede, and lashed into an equal panic. All swept toward the portico, screaming and clawing in a heaving mass. Behind them came of men in an irresistible wave, sending up a war-cry to the stars that brought the hot blood surging to Gordon’s brain.

“The Ghilzai!”
he roared, stunned by the miracle.

They came into the courtyard headlong, rifles blazing at point-blank range, and their volleys mowed men down like ripe grain. In an instant the courtyard was littered with writhing shapes. Men swarming over the wall toppled down with lead in their backs, and the invaders fell on the howling, fear-mad crowd jammed in the portico. They plunged knives into straining backs, flailed at the tossing heads with steel-shod rifle butts.

The guilt of a thousand abominable crimes stained the men of Shalizahr, but retribution had struck at last, like lightning from the hills. It was less fight than massacre. The sudden, unexpected blow broke and scattered the Hidden Ones like birds before a storm. They made no attempt to rally. They fled away over the wall by the scores, jammed and fought their way into the palace in a maddened crush, and before they could close the doors, the blood-mad tribesmen were in after them. To Gordon, staring down into the courtyard where a few torches smoked and smoldered on the ground, it was if a tornado had stormed across the court, littering it with corpses, and swept on into the palace. In the halls and chambers below raved the sounds of slaughter, yells,
shots, stamp of swift feet, impact of blows, and the thud of heavy bodies taking the floor.

Out in the hall the Sudani had thrown down the ram and fled down the stair, the Arabs and Mongols pelting after them, all crazy with panic. They did not heed Konstantine’s blows and curses, but swept him along with them. At the head of the stair he extricated himself, yelling and blaspheming like a madman. One glance into the hall below was enough for him. In that bedlam downstairs he recognized the end of his ambitions. And a kind of madness seized the Cossack. He turned and ran back toward the broken door, a heavy saber in his hand.

“Come out, Gordon!” he yelled frenziedly, his eyes blazing insanely. “Come out, if you call yourself a man! I’m beaten, but I’ll take you to hell with me! Damn you, come out!”

The fire of fighting that burned in Gordon’s veins was no less furious than Konstantine’s madness. He threw off Lal Singh’s restraining hand, tore aside the broken door and rushed into the hall, gripping the Khyber knife. He came like a gust of storm-wind, plunging in under the lifted sword with a berserk fury that swept away all caution. With all the impetuous of his headlong rush behind the lunge, his long knife drove to the haft in the Cossack’s body, and then the heavy saber hilt, wielded with the convulsive strength of a dying man, crashed down on his head, and blackness fell over him like an ebony curtain.

Slowly, through the soft darkness that surrounded him, Gordon groped his way back to consciousness. Hearing came before sight, for before he could see anything but the blind, pulsing waves of darkness, he could hear voices, mumbling, indistinct and meaningless. Then a dim glow began, high up, like a star seen from a black pit. It grew, expanded, became the mellow light shed softly from a bronze lamp. Then he knew who he was and remembered something of what had happened. He was aware of a dull and terrible hurt in his head, and knew that it was bandaged. He began to understand the voices, to understand the blurred, wavering visions that met his eyes.

He was lying on a couch, and dimly he saw Azizun crouching beside him. Her eyes looked unnaturally great and dark in her pale face. From time to time she placed a fresh pad of dampened cloth on his head. Other faces floated behind hers. Bearded faces. He recognized them: Yusuf ibn Suleiman; Lal Singh; Yar Ali Khan; Baber Khan.

Lal Singh was speaking and by a tremendous effort of will, Gordon made himself understand what the Sikh was saying: “I still do not understand how you arrived here when you did. El Borak said you could not reach Khor before nightfall, and that it would be dawn before you could return to Shalizar —”

“I met the Ghilzai about half-way between the Gorge of Ghosts and Khor,” answered Afridi.

“The men I sent to guide El Borak returned to Khor before dawn,” said Baber Khan. “They told me they had heard the voice of the
djinn
, and that El Borak intended plunging on into
Ghulistan
. First I beat them with an ox-goad for allowing him to go on without them. Then I mounted every able bodied man in Khor and brought them in all haste. Devils or men, had I known he intended invading this country I would never have let him leave Khor unless I accompanied him with all my swords.

“We left our horses in the Gorge of Ghosts. Yar Ali Khan led us through the secret door in the cliff-wall, and we rushed the guard in the cleft and cut his head off before he knew we were near. It was night when we reached the Stair. It was unguarded. We climbed the cliffs and came on quietly. The dogs did not see us until we loosed a volley into their backs.”

Gordon forced his lips apart and murmured: “Baber Khan!”

Instantly the bearded faces clustered close about him, dark eyes gleaming with both hope and anxiety.

“Sahib!
You know us! You can speak!”

“How did the fight go?” Gordon whispered. Strange how hard it was to whisper.

“There was no fight,
sahib
. The dogs fled before us. The halls are choked with their bodies. Those who live have fled, taking the body of their accursed Shaykh with them. The Cossack lies dead in an upper hall. We hold Shalizahr. You are lying in an inner chamber. I have sent men to get horses and ride for a
hakim
. We will have a
Feringhi
doctor for you if we have to bring one from Kabul. The cult of the Hidden Ones is shattered. The few who yet live have fled into the mountains.”

“The women in the city —” Gordon muttered. “They are slaves, stolen from Persia and India —”

“We have collected them under guard in the seraglio,” said Lal Singh. “Not one has been harmed. Later we will arrange to send them back to their homes.”

“Good!” Gordon sank back, and the shadows began to close about him. “You have saved your head, Baber Khan. The Amir will pardon you for this night’s work. The three-bladed dagger is broken —”

His voice sank into silence, and Azizun cried out, throwing her arms about him.

Yar Ali Khan clutched his beard in agony.

“Allah! He is dying!”

Lal Singh, his hand on Gordon’s hard wrist, shook his head.

“Nay, he sleeps. His skull is broken, but it is not written that the blow of a hilt should slay El Borak. He will live, to fulfill the destiny the gods have given him.”

“Feel the edge, dog, and move not!” The hissing voice was no less menacing than the razor-edged blade that was pressed just beneath Kirby O’Donnell’s chin. The American lay still, staring up into the dim ring of bearded faces, vague as phantoms in the dull glow of a waning electric torch. He had fancied himself safe in the guarded palace of his friend Orkhan Bahadur but anything, he reflected, could happen in Shahrazar the Forbidden. Had these men who came so silently by night discovered the real identity of the man who called himself Ali el Ghazi, a Kurdish wanderer? Their next words set his mind at rest on that score.

“Rise from your couch, Ali el Ghazi,” muttered the leader of the men. “Rise slowly and place your hands behind you. This dagger has sent a Kurd to Hell before now.”

O’Donnell slowly obeyed the order, raging inwardly, but outwardly imperturbable. His keen edged scimitar and
kindhjal
lay almost within his grasp, but he knew that a move toward them would send four curved blades plunging into his heart, wielded by desperately taut nerves.

As he came to a sitting position, his wrists were gripped fiercely, and bound behind him. The edge still trembled against his throat. A single yell might bring aid, but he would never live to complete it. He thought he knew the leader of the gang — one Baber Khan, a renegade Gilzai who followed Orkhan Bahadur as a jackal follows a tiger.

“Not a word;” whispered the deadly voice. “Come with us.”

The American was hauled roughly to his feet and moved across the chamber among the close clump of his captors. A knife point bored into his ribs. The bare feet made no sound as they left the chamber and emerged into a broad hallway, flanked by thick columns. Somewhere a cresset glowed, lighting the place fitfully and dimly. Baber Khan had extinguished his electric torch. But in the light of the cresset O’Donnell saw the black mute Orkhan Bahadur had given him as a body guard — more a royal gesture than anything else, for Orkhan did not suppose that Ali el Ghazi had enemies in Shahrazar. The black man must have been dozing when the killers crept upon him, for he had had no chance to use his wide-tipped tulwar. His white eye-balls were rolled up, glimmering whitely in the torch-light. His black throat was cut from ear to ear.

The eldritch group saw no one as they stole down the weirdly lurid hallway. They might have been ghosts of some of the many men whose blood had stained that pillared hall since the days of Timur-il-leng, and the Tatar sultans. Silence lay over the palace, the silence of death-like slumber. They came to a stair which led downward, and down this they went, into swallowing gloom.
On a lower landing they halted, and O’Donnell felt himself forced to his haunches. He could see nothing, but he felt hairy silk-clad bodies pressing him close. A voice whispered so close to his ear that the hot breath burned him.

“None comes down this stair by night, Kurd; speak quickly!”

“Of what shall I speak?” demanded O’Donnell guardedly, for the knife was still at his neck. It was an eery experience, ringed by bodies and knives he could not see, with menacing voices whispering out of the gloom like disembodied spirits.

“I will refresh thy memory,” muttered the voice of Baber Khan. “A week ago we rode down the valley, with the riders of the Turkomans, behind Orkhan Bahadur, to take this city of Shahrazar from Shaibar Khan and his Uzbeks. Orkhan greatly desired this city, because somewhere in it he knew there was a great treasure — the treasure gathered long ago by Muhammad Shah, king of Khuwarezm. When the Mongols of Genghis Khan hunted the
Shah-im-shah
to his death across the world, his
emirs
bore to forgotten Shahrazar his great store of gold, silver and jewels. Here it remained hidden until Shaibar Khan discovered its hiding place. Then came we, with Orkhan Bahadur, and slew all the Uzbeks and took the city and set up Orkhan Bahadur as prince of Shahrazar.”

“All this is well known to me,” impatiently answered O’Donnell.

“Aye, for thou wert Shaibar Khan’s slave!”

“A lie!” exclaimed O’Donnell, starting with amazement. “The Khan was my enemy —”

“Soho!” hissed the voice venomously. “Be still, thou!” The wire-edge just touched the skin of his throat, and a tiny trickle of blood started. “In a chamber below the palace we found Shaibar Khan dead, and with him Yar Akbar the Afridi, likewise dead. But nowhere was the treasure to be found. Nor has Orkhan Bahadur found it, though he is lord of Shahrazar.

“Now it was known that certain men had the care of the treasure in their hands, to guard it and protect it with their lives. They were twelve in number, and were called the
emirs
of the Inner Chamber. Eleven of these men we found dead, and we knew them by reason of a gold emblem each wore on a gold chain about his neck — an oval of gold, with a Khuwarezm inscription — so!”

A glow dazzled O’Donnell; in it a great hairy hand snaked out of the dark and tore at the garments over his breast — wrenched out something that glimmered in the dull light. Breath hissed from between teeth in the dark about him. In the gnarled hand lay an oval of beaten gold, carved with a single cryptic character.