It was a faint noise that brought her out of her reflections. She was on her feet with her sword in her hand before she realized what it was that had disturbed her. Conan had not returned, and she knew it was not him she had heard.
The sound had come from somewhere beyond a door that stood opposite from the one by which the Cimmerian gone. Soundlessly on her soft leather footgear she glided to the door and looked through. It opened on a gallery that ran along a wall above a hall. She crept to the heavy balustrades and peered between them.
A man was stealing along the hall.
The unexpected shock of seeing a stranger in a deserted city almost brought a startled oath to Valeria’s lips. Crouching down behind the stone balustrades, with every nerve tingling, she glared at the stealthy figure.
The man in no way resembled the figures depicted on the freize. He was slightly above middle height, very dark skinned, though not negroid. He was naked but for a scanty loin-cloth that only partially covered his muscular hips, and a broad leather girdle about his lean waist. His long black hair hung in lank strands about his shoulders. He was gaunt, but knots and cords of muscles stood out on his arms and legs. There was no symmetry of contour; he was built with an economy that was almost repellant.
Yet it was not so much his physical appearance that impressed the woman who watched him, as his attitude. He slunk along the hall in a semi-crouch, darting glances to right and left. She saw the cruel curved blade in his right hand shake with the intensity of whatever emotion it was that made him tremble as he stole along. He was afraid – was shaking in the grip of some frightful terror. That he feared some imminent peril was evident. When he turned his head she caught the blaze of wild eyes among the lank hair. On his tiptoes he glided across the hall and vanished through an open door, first halting and casting a fiercely questioning look about him. A moment she heard a choking cry and then silence again.
Who was the fellow? What did he fear in this empty city? Plagued by these and similar questions, Valeria acted on impulse. She glided along the gallery until she came to a door which she believed opened into a room over the one in which the dark-skinned stranger had vanished. To her pleasure she came upon a gallery similar to the one she had just quitted, and a stair led down into the chamber.
This chamber was not as well lighted as some of the others. A trick of the skylight above caused a corner of the chamber to remain in shadow. Valeria’s eyes widened. The man she had seen was still in the chamber.
He lay face down on a dark crimson carpet on the floor. His body was limp, his arms spread wide. His wide-tipped sword lay near his hand.
She wondered why he should lie there so motionless. Then her eyes narrowed as she stared down at the rug on which he lay. Beneath and about him the carpet showed a slightly different color – a deeper, brighter crimson –
Shivering slightly she crouched down closer behind the balustrade. Suddenly another figure entered the silent play. He was a man similar to the first, and he came in by a door opposite that through which the other had entered. His eyes widened at the sight of the man on the floor, and he spoke something in a staccato voice. The other did not move.
The man stepped quickly across the floor, gripped the shoulder of the prostrate figure and turned him over. A choking cry escaped him as the head fell back limply, disclosing a throat that had been severed from ear to ear.
The man let the corpse fall back into the puddle of blood on the carpet, and sprang to his feet, shaking like a leaf. His face was a mask of fear. But before he could move, he halted, frozen.
Over in the shadowy corner a ghostly light began to glow and grow. Valeria felt her hair stir as she watched it. For dimly visible in its glow there floated a human skull – a skull with blazing green eyes. It hung there like a disembodied head, growing more and more distinct.
The man stood like an image, staring fixedly at the apparition. The thing moved out from the wall and as it emerged from the shadows it became visible as a man-like figure whose torso and limbs, stark naked, shone whitely, like the hue of bleached skulls. The bare skull on its shoulders still glowed with the lurid light, and the man confronting it seemed unable to take his eyes from it. He stood motionless, his sword dangling from his fingers, on his face an expression like that on the face of a man in a mesmeristic trance.
The horror moved toward him, and suddenly he dropped his sword and fell on his knees, covering his eyes with his hands, dumbly awaiting the stroke of the blade that now gleamed in the apparition’s hand, as it reared above him like Death triumphant over mankind.
Valeria acted according to her wayward impulse. With one lithe movement she was over the balustrade and dropped to the floor behind the figure. It wheeled like a cat at the pad of her soft boot on the floor, and even as it turned her keen blade lashed down, severing shoulder and breast bone. The apparition cried out gurglingly and went down, and as it fell, the phosphorescent skull rolled clear revealing a lank-haired head and a dark face now contorted in the convulsion of death. Beneath the horrific masquerade there was a human being, a man similar to the one kneeling supinely on the floor.
The latter looked up at the sound of the blow and cry, and now he glared in wild-eyed amazement at the white-skinned woman who stood over the corpse with a dripping sword in her hand.
He staggered up, yammering as if the surprize had almost unseated his reason. She was amazed to realize that she understood him. He was gibbering in the Stygian tongue, though in a dialect unfamiliar to her.
“Who are you? Whence do you come? What do you in Xuchotl?” Then rushing on, without waiting for her to reply. “But you are a friend – a friend or a goddess! Goddess or devil, it makes no difference! You have slain the Living Skull! It was but a man after all! We thought it was a demon
they
conjured out of the catacombs below the city! Listen!”
He stiffened again, straining his ears with painful intensity; the girl heard nothing.
“We must hasten,” he whispered. “They are all around us here. Perhaps even now we may be surrounded by them. They may be creeping upon us even now!”
He seized her wrist in a convulsive grasp she found it hard to break.
“Who do you mean by ‘they’?” she demanded.
He stared at her uncomprehendingly for a moment, as a man stares when confronted in a stranger by ignorance of something common-place to himself.
“They?” he repeated vaguely. “Why, the people of Xecalanc! The folk of the man you killed! They who dwell by the northern gate.”
“You mean to say men live in this city?” she exclaimed, dumfounded.
“Aye! Aye!” he was writhing in the impatience of apprehension. “Come! Come quick! We must return to Tecuhltli!”
“Where the hell is that?” she demanded bewilderedly.
“The region by the south gate!” He had her wrist again and was urging her to follow him. Great beads of perspiration dripped from his dark forehead. His eyes blazed with pure terror.
“Wait a minute,” she growled, flinging off his hands. “Keep your fingers off me, or I’ll split your skull! What’s all this about? Who are you are? Where would you take me?”
He shuddered, casting glances to all sides, and speaking so fast and in such fear that his words were jerky and all but incoherent.
“My name is Techotl. I am of the Tecuhltli. This man who lies with his throat cut and I came into the Disputed Region to try and ambush some of the Xecalanc. But we became separated and I returned here to find him with his gullet slit. The dog who wore the skull must have done it. But perhaps he was not alone. Others may be stealing from Xecalanc! The gods themselves shudder when they hear what these demons have done to captives!”
He shook as with an ague, and his dark skin grew ashy at the thought. Valeria stared at him with a frown of bewilderment. She sensed intelligence behind this rigamarole, but it was meaningless to her.
“Come!” he begged, reaching for her hand and then recoiling as he remembered her warning. “You are a stranger. How you came here I do not know, but if you were a goddess come to aid us of Tecuhltli you would know all that transpires in Xuchotl. You must be from beyond the great forest. But you are our friend, or you would not have slain the dog who wore the glowing skull. Come quickly, before the Xecalanc fall on us and slay us!”
“But I can’t go,” she answered. “I have a friend somewhere nearby –”
The flaring of his eyes cut her short as he stared past her with a ghastly expression. She wheeled just as four men rushed through the doors of the chamber, converging on the pair in the center of the room.
They were like the others she had seen – the same knotted muscles standing out on otherwise gaunt limbs, the same lank blue black hair, the same mad glare in the staring eyes. They were armed and clad like the man who called himself Techotl, but on the breast of each was painted a white skull.
There were no challenges or war-cries. Like blood-mad tigers the men of Xecalanc sprang at the throats of their enemies. Techotl met them with the fury of desperation, parried the stroke of a curved blade and grappling with the wielder, bore him to the floor where they rolled and wrestled in murderous silence.
The other three swarmed on Valeria, their weird eyes red with the murder-lust.
She killed the first who came in reach, her long straight blade beating down his curved sword and splitting his skull. She stepped aside to avoid the stroke of another, even as she turned the blade of the third with her sword. Her eyes danced and her lips smiled without mercy. Again she was Valeria of the Red Brotherhood and the hum of her steel was like a bridal song in her ears.
Her sword darted past a blade that sought to parry and sheathed six inches of its point in a leather-guarded midriff. The man gasped and went to his knees. His mate lunged in in ferocious silence, his eyes like a mad dog’s. He rained blow on blow in a whirlwind of steel, so furiously Valeria had no opportunity to strike back. She fell back coolly, parrying the wild blows, and watching her opportunity. He could not long keep up that whirlwind of flailing strokes. He would tire, would weaken and hesitate – and then her blade would slide smoothly into his heart. A side-long glance showed her Techotl crouching on the breast of his prostrate enemy, and striving to break the other’s hold on his wrist and drive home a dagger.
Sweat beaded the forehead of the man facing her and his eyes were red as coals. Smite as he would he could not break past or beat down her guard. She stepped back to draw him out – and felt her thighs locked in an iron grip. She had forgotten the wounded man on the floor.
Crouching on his knees he held her in an unbreakable grasp and his mate croaked in triumph and began working his way around to come at her from the left side. Valeria wrenched and tore savagely, but in vain. She could free herself of this clinging menace with a downward flick of her sword, but in that instant the curved blade of the taller man would crash through her skull. The wounded man hung on and began to worry at her thigh with his teeth like a beast.
She reached down with her left hand and gripped his long hair, forcing his head back so his white teeth and rolling eyes gleamed up at her. The tall Xecalanc cried out fiercely and leaped in, smiting hard. Awkwardly she parried the stroke, and it beat the flat of her blade down on her head so she saw sparks flash before her eyes, and staggered. Up went the sword again, with a low, beast-like cry of triumph – and then a giant form loomed behind the Xecalanc and steel flashed like an arc of blue lightning. The cry of the Xecalanc broke short and he went down like an ox beneath the pole-axe, his brains gushing from his skull that had been split to the throat.
“Conan!” gasped Valeria. In a gust of passion she turned on the Xecalanc who still grasped her, and whose long hair she still held in her left hand. “Dog of hell!” Her blade swished as it cut the air, and completed the upswinging arc with only a blur in the middle. The body slumped, spurting blood and she hurled the severed head across the room.
“What the devil’s going on here?” Conan bestrode the corpse of the man he had killed, broadsword in hand, glaring about him in amazement. Techotl was rising from the still figure of the last Xecalanc, shaking red drops from his dagger. The Tecuhltli was bleeding from a stab deep in the thigh.
He stared wildly at Conan, his eyes dilated.
“What is all this?” Conan demanded again. He had not yet recovered from his surprize at finding a savage battle going on in the midst of a city he had thought empty and uninhabited. Returning from an aimless exploration of the upper chambers, he had found Valeria gone, and had followed the unexpected sounds of strife. Coming into the room he had been astounded to see the girl engaging in a furious tussle with these strange and alien figures.
“Five dead Xecalanc!” exclaimed Techotl, his dilated eyes reflecting a ghastly joy. “Five dead! The gods be thanked!” He lifted quivering hands on high and then, with a fiendish convulsing of his dark features he spat on the corpses and kicked them, dancing in his ghoulish glee. His recent allies eyed him in amazement, and Conan asked, in Aquilonian: “Who is this madman?”
Valeria shrugged her shoulders.
“He says his name’s Techotl. From his babblings I gather that his people live at one end of this crazy city, and these others at the other end. Maybe we’d better go with him. He seems friendly.”
Techotl had ceased his dancing and he turned to them, triumph struggling with fear in his repellant countenance.
“Come away, now!” he chattered. “Come on! Come with me! My people will welcome you! Five dead dogs! Not in years have we slain so many of the devils at one time, without losing a man – nay, one man we lost, but we slew five! My people will honor you! But come! It is far to Techulthli. At any moment the Xecalancs may come on us in numbers too great even for your swords!”
“All right,” grunted Conan. “Lead the way.”
Techotl turned instantly and made off across the chamber, beckoning them to follow, which they did, having to move swiftly to keep on his heels.