‘What year is this?’ he asked, speaking in Kothian.
‘Today is the tenth of the month Yuluk, of the year of the Gazelle,’ answered Conan.
‘Yagkoolan Ishtar!’ murmured the stranger. ‘Ten years!’ he drew a hand across his brow, shaking his head as if to clear his brain from cobwebs. ‘All is dim yet. After a ten-year emptiness, the mind can not be expected to begin functioning clearly at once. Who are you?’
‘Conan, once of Cimmeria. Now king of Aquilonia.’
The other’s eyes showed surprise.
‘Indeed? And Namedides?’
‘I strangled him on his throne the night I took the royal city,’ answered Conan.
A certain naivete in the king’s reply twitched the stranger’s lips.
‘Pardon, your majesty. I should have thanked you for the service you have done me. I am like a man woken suddenly from sleep deeper than death and shot with nightmares of agony more fierce than hell, but I understand that you delivered me. Tell me – why did you cut the stem of the plant Yothga instead of tearing it up by the roots?’
‘Because I learned long ago to avoid touching with my flesh that which I do not understand,’ answered the Cimmerian.
‘Well for you,’ said the stranger. ‘Had you been able to tear it up, you might have found things clinging to the roots against which not even your sword would prevail. Yothga’s roots are set in hell.’
‘But who are you?’ demanded Conan.
‘Men call me Pelias.’
‘What!’ cried the king. Telias the sorcerer, Tsothalanti’s rival, who vanished from the earth ten years ago?’
‘Not entirely from the earth,’ answered Pelias with a wry smile. ‘Tsotha preferred to keep me alive, in shackles more grim than rusted iron. He pent me in here with this devil flower whose seeds drifted down through the black cosmos from Yag the Accursed, and found fertile field only in the maggotwrithing corruption that seethes on the floors of hell.
‘I could not remember my sorcery and the words and symbols of my power, with that cursed thing gripping me and drinking my soul with its loathsome caresses. It sucked the contents of my mind day and night, leaving my brain as empty as a broken wine-jug. Ten years! Ishtar preserve us!’
Conan found no reply, but stood holding the stump of the torch, and trailing his great sword. Surely the man was mad yet there was no madness in the strange dark eyes that rested so calmly on him.
‘Tell me, is the black wizard in Khorshemish? But no – you need not reply. My powers begin to wake, and I sense in your mind a great battle and a king trapped by treachery. And I see Tsothalanti riding hard for the Tybor with Strabonus and the king of Ophir. So much the better. My art is too frail from the long slumber to face Tsotha yet. I need time to recruit my strength, to assemble my powers. Let us go forth from these pits.’
Conan jangled his keys discouragedly.
‘The grille to the outer door is made fast by a bolt which can only be worked from outside. Is there no other exit from these tunnels?’
‘Only one which neither of us would care to use, seeing that it goes down and not up,’ laughed Pelias. ‘But no matter. Let us see to the grille.’
He moved toward the corridor with uncertain steps, as of long-unused limbs, which gradually became more sure. As he followed, Conan said uneasily, ‘There is a cursed big snake creeping about this tunnel. Let us be wary lest we step into his mouth.’
‘I remember him of old,’ answered Pelias grimly, ‘the more as I was forced to watch while ten of my acolytes were fed to him. He is Satha, the Old One, chiefest of Tsotha’s pets.’
‘Did Tsotha dig these pits for no other reason than to house his cursed monstrosities?’ asked Conan.
‘He did not dig them. When the city was founded three thousand years ago there were ruins of an earlier city on and about this hill. King Khossus V, the founder, built his palace on the hill, and digging cellars beneath it, came upon a walled-up doorway, which he broke into and discovered the pits, which were about as we see them now. But his grand vizier came to such a grisly end in them that Khossus in a fright walled up the entrance again. He said the vizier fell into a well – but he had the cellars filled in, and later abandoned the palace itself, and built himself another in the suburbs, from which he fled in panic on discovering some black mold scattered on the marble floor of his chamber one morning.
‘He then departed with his whole court to the eastern corner of the kingdom and built a new city. The palace on the hill was not used and fell into ruins. When Akkutho I revived the lost glories of Khorshemish, he built a fortress there. It remained for Tsothalanti to rear the scarlet citadel and open the way to the pits again. Whatever fate overtook the grand vizier of Khossus, Tsotha avoided it. He fell into no well, though he did descend into a well he found, and came out with a strange expression which has not since left his eyes.
‘I have seen that well, but I do not care to seek in it for wisdom. I am a sorcerer, and older than men reckon, but I am human. As for Tsotha – men say that a dancing-girl of Shadizar slept too near the pre-human ruins on Dagoth Hill and woke in the grip of a black demon; from that unholy ruin was spawned an accursed hybrid men call Tsothalanti-‘
Conan cried out sharply and recoiled, thrusting his companion back. Before them rose the great shimmering white form of Satha, an ageless hate in its eyes. Conan tensed himself for one mad berserker onslaught – to thrust the glowing fagot into that fiendish countenance and throw his life into the ripping sword-stroke. But the snake was not looking at him. It was glaring over his shoulder at the man called Pelias, who stood with his arms folded, smiling. And in the great cold yellow eyes slowly the hate died out in a glitter of pure fear – the only time Conan ever saw such an expression in a reptile’s eyes. With a swirling rush like the sweep of a strong wind, the great snake was gone.
‘What did he see to frighten him?’ asked Conan, eyeing his companion uneasily.
‘The scaled people see what escapes the mortal eye,’ answered Pelias cryptically. ‘You see my fleshly guise; he saw my naked soul.’
An icy trickle disturbed Conan’s spine, and he wondered if, after all, Pelias were a man, or merely another demon of the pits in the mask of humanity. He contemplated the advisability of driving his sword through his companion’s back without further hesitation. But while he pondered, they came to the steel grille, etched blackly in the torches beyond, and the body of Shukeli, still slumped against the bars in a curdled welter of crimson.
Pelias laughed, and his laugh was not pleasant to hear.
‘By the ivory hips of Ishtar, who is our doorman? Lo, it is no less than the noble Shukeli himself, who hanged my young men by their feet and skinned them with squeals of laughter! Do you sleep, Shukeli? Why do you lie so stiffly, with your fat belly sunk in like a dressed pig’s?’
‘He is dead,’ muttered Conan, ill at ease to hear these wild words.
‘Dead or alive,’ laughed Pelias, ‘he shall open the door for us.’
He clapped his hands sharply and cried, ‘Rise, Shukeli! Rise from hell and rise from the bloody floor and open the door for your masters! Rise, I say!’
An awful groan reverberated through the vaults. Conan’s hair stood on end and he felt clammy sweat bead his hide. For the body of Shukeli stirred and moved, with infantile gropings of the fat hands. The laughter of Pelias was merciless as a flint hatchet, as the form of the eunuch reeled upright, clutching at the bars of the grille. Conan, glaring at him, felt his blood turn to ice, and the marrow of his bones to water; for Shukeli’s wideopen eyes were glassy and empty, and from the great gash in his belly his entrails hung limply to the floor. The eunuch’s feet stumbled among his entrails as he worked the bolt, moving like a brainless automaton. When he had first stirred, Conan had thought that by some incredible chance the eunuch was alive; but the man was dead – had been dead for hours.
Pelias sauntered through the opened grille, and Conan crowded through behind him, sweat pouring from his body, shrinking away from the awful shape that slumped on sagging legs against the grate it held open. Pelias passed on without a backward glance, and Conan followed him, in the grip of nightmare and nausea. He had not taken half a dozen strides when a sodden thud brought him round. Shukeli’s corpse lay limply at the foot of the grille.