The Conan Chronology, page 664
But the strength of the serpent god was colossal, like the force that holds mountains erect and sustains the planet in its course. It hurled against its adversary the cold breath of fear, cowardice, and self-doubt. These were the weapons of the Abyss. With them, Damballah sapped the manhood of heroes, poisoned patriots with the venom of treachery, and drank the souls of nations and empires.
The cold intelligence of that transmundane being knew that it would in time destroy the earth and quench the fires of the very sun. Now it hurled that invincible vampiric force against a single mortal man. No living thing, however brave, could stand against the leeching power that drains the strength of suns.
Conan's mind darkened, his consciousness faded, but his sheer instinct for survival kept him fighting with every ounce of power his soul possessed. He fought on against the darkness that sucked him down into the abyss of nothingness, while the red moon leered down and King Nenaunir laughed.
XII
Death in the Night
Suddenly the deathly cold that numbed Conan's body lessened. The crushing pressure on his body lightened.
The exhaustion that clouded his brain faded before a surge of fresh vigor.
He came slowly to himself. He was lying on his back at the bottom of the marble bowl, staring up at friendly, twinkling stars. The moon, once again a disk of lucid silver, poured its light down upon him.
An uproar brought him to his feet, only to sink dizzily back to his knees. His full strength had not yet returned. When he could bring himself erect once more, he saw an amazing sight.
A few paces from the edge of the marble bowl lay Nenaunir, struck down in his hour of triumph. Beside him, gleaming in the moonlight, lay the poniard that Murzio had given to Conan, and which Conan had dropped in his struggle with the demon-god. Beyond, struggling in the clutches of terror-smitten blacks, stood the assassin.
It was Prince Conn, disheveled and panting. The boy glared like a beast of prey from under tousled hair. Freed from his chains by Conan's last effort, the lad had not fled as ordered. He had, instead, picked up the fallen dagger and flung himself across the square to where Nenaunir stood, eyes ablaze with blood-lust and triumph. All present were engrossed by the cosmic struggle in the black marble bowl, and none but Thoth-Amon had seen Conan's son make his suicidal charge, against the entranced wizard-king of Zembabwei.
Thoth-Amon had stayed his hand for a fatal instant of hesitation, while jealousy struggled with prudence. That second was enough; the dagger was buried in Nenaunir's heart, and the vicar of Damballah lay sprawled in his blood. The spell that sustained Damballah on the earthly plane was broken in time to rescue Conan's withering soul from extinction. Above the bowl of sacrifice, the serpent form dissolved again into formless vapor, and Conan lived.
Before the blacks who seized Conn could make up their minds whether to slay him on the spot, a howling horde of black warriors erupted from the side streets and attacked the worshipers of Damballah from all sides. The dense, orderly lines of Nenaunir's men melted into chaos, while noncombatants raced madly for safety. Leaderless, the partisans of Nenaunir, easily distinguishable by their plumed headdresses, went down by scores.
A brazen trumpet rang over the plaza, and the tramp of booted feet sounded. Conan grinned; his Aquilonians had come. He staggered through the wrack of combat and gasped out orders to his men. He saw Mbega, followed by a hundred partisans, dropping from the roof of one of the low buildings beside the square and racing into the fray with spear and axe and war-club.
Then the square resounded with a clatter of dropped spears as hundreds of Nenaunir's men threw away their weapons and groveled on the pavement, begging for mercy. Mbega rushed from group to group to stop the general slaughter.
Conan stood on half-numb legs. He staggered as Conn rushed across the square and threw himself into his father's arms. Conan hugged him briefly, spoke a gruff word of comfort, and looked around for Thoth-Amon.
The Stygian sorcerer was not to be seen. Presently a wyvern spread its batlike wings and soared out from the top of one of the towers. A swarthy man in a green robe sat astride the winged reptile. The monster circled the doomed city once, then flew off into the south. No eye but Conan's marked it in its flight. And as he watched, his brows grew together in a thoughtful scowl. South lay nothing but countless leagues of jungle, and the terminus of the continent itself, where a nameless beach fronted an unknown sea. That southernmost point of land was the edge of the known world, as far as anyone could say. Thoth-Amon had lost his final ally; he was alone, now, having lost even the favour of his merciless god. He could flee no further, Conan grimly knew. There was no place left for him to go.
Conan had been wrong, earlier. The last battle was not here among the topless towers of forbidden Zembabwei. It would be fought on a nameless beach at the World's Edge.
Hugging Conn to him, soothing his hysterical tears, Conan staggered out of the altar-bowl and stood, deeply wearied but smiling, to await the approach of Pallantides and Trocero. Before dawn reddened the eastern sky, a king would return to his throne and the last followers of the prophet and vicar of Damballah would perish. Conan would crown Mbega with his own hands; then the army must rest here in Zembabwei a while and lick its wounds, until it was restored to full fighting vigor after the long trek through swamp and jungle.
Then south—south to the World's Edge—and the final battle with Thoth-Amon.
Conan grinned, deep chest expanding, drinking in the fresh night air, feeling the blood surge through his mighty frame and the vigor well up in him again.
Crom, but it felt good to be alive!
Shadows in the Skull
L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter
I
Visions in Smoke
A wisp of green smoke crawled from the bed of glowing coals whereon Rimush, the royal soothsayer of Zembabwei, had cast the throbbing heart of an ibis, the blood of a bull ape, and the forked tongue of an adder.
The coals shed a wavering crimson glow. This dim light turned the grim, heavy features of Conan, king of Aquilonia, into a brooding copper mask. As for the black visage of his companion, Mbega, the newly crowned king of the jungle city, the ruddy, flickering luminance transformed his features into the face of a primitive idol of polished ebony.
There was no sound in the dank, stone-walled chamber, save for the hiss and crackle of the coals and the mumblings of the gaunt old Shemitish conjurer. Rimush huddled in his worn, patched astrologer's robe, embroidered with the mystic symbols of his craft, above the brazier. The firelight gave his aged head the semblance of a white-bearded skull wherein only the deep-set eyes lived and moved.
Conan stirred restlessly. He disliked all meddling with magic and divination and witchery. His simple faith was long since given to the grim, barbaric god of his distant northern home: Crom, who made few demands upon his followers but who breathed into them the strength to slay their enemies.
'Enough of this mummery!' he growled to Mbega. 'Give me a legion of your warriors and I'll comb the jungles for Thoth-Amon myself, without wizardry!'
The giant black warningly touched Conan's shoulder, nodding at the aged astrologer. The soothsayer convulsively stiffened, champing his jaws. The whorl of green vapor climbed, eddied, and formed an arabesque the colour of jade. Beads of foam appeared at the corners of Rimush's mouth.
'Any moment, now,' grunted Mbega.
A whisper came from the old Shemite, in which words gradually became audible: 'South…south…beating wings in the jungle night… to the great waterfall… then east, to the Land Of No Return… to the great mountains… to the Great Stone Skull…'
The whisper was cut off short as the soothsayer stiffened as if stabbed.
'You will find him at the end of the world, where the serpent-folk ruled of old, ere the coming of men,' said the Shemite in a clear voice. Then he crumpled, sprawling lifelessly at the foot of the smouldering brazier.
'Crom!' growled Conan, the flesh on his corded forearms creeping.
Mbega knelt and fumbled at the old man's breast. After a moment he stood up, brow wrinkled.
'What's wrong?' demanded Conan, glimpsing a somber fear in the black monarch whom he had helped to raise to sole rulership after Zembabwei had for centuries been ruled by pairs of twins.
'Dead,' said Mbega slowly. 'As if struck by lightning—or as if bitten by a deadly serpent.'
Pallantides was as near to open defiance of his lord as he had ever come in his many years of service to the king of Aquilonia. The old soldier cursed luridly as he struggled to rise from the silken couch whereon he lay with his left leg swathed in bandages.
'Head of Nergal, sire, I'll not have you larking off into the jungles alone without a company of stout Aquilonians at your back! Guts of Dagon, how can you trust these blacks not to break and run at the first flash of steel? Or not to roast and eat you the first time the provisions run short? If I cannot march with this damned leg I can at least ride—'
Conan caught the general of his host by the shoulder and thrust him back on the couch.
'Crom's blood, old friend, I like it none too well myself,' he growled. 'But what is, is; and what must be, must! My Aquilonians are worn out from hacking a road through leagues of stinking jungle. Half are out of action from wounds got in taking the city, and the other half from fever and dysentery. I can wait no longer. King Mbega offers me the pick of his troops. If I stay here in Zembabwei waiting for my own lads to get back on their feet, Thoth-Amon may have crept back to his Stygian lair by then—or perchance fled to Vendhya or Khitai, or the World's Edge, for aught I know! The old sorcerer hasn't lost all his magic, you know. So I can wait no longer!'
'But, sire, these black savages—'
'Are mighty warriors, Pallantides, and let none tell you otherwise!' Conan growled in irritation. 'I've lived amongst them, fought with them, and fought against them, until they call me 'the black king with a white skin.' None surpasses them in manhood; my old comrade Juma could take on three of your Aquilonian knights with his bare hands and come out of it grinning. Besides, there are the Amazons.'
Pallantides grunted, too wise to argue further. Two weeks before, a company of black women warriors had appeared at the gates of Great Zembabwei to represent Queen Nzinga at the enthronement of Mbega. They were led by Nzinga's daughter, a handsome, swaggering, full-breasted brown girl of twenty, lithe as a lioness and half a head taller than the tallest of the Aquilonians.
Pallantides knew that more than twenty years before, when Conan had been a Zingaran buccaneer, he had visited the country of the Amazons. There he had known Queen Nzinga—in all senses of the word. Pallantides also knew that Conan suspected the Amazonian princess (who bore the name Nzinga, like all the queens and heirs apparent of her line) of being his own daughter. So the general, wise in the ways of kings and knowing Conan's temper, held his tongue.
Hearing of Conan's plan for an expedition to the remotest regions of the unknown south, where the world came to an end, the younger Nzinga threw down her feather-tufted spear at Conan's feet, offering herself and her woman warriors as allies. Conan had readily accepted.
'But,' said Pallantides, trying another tack, 'it might be a thousand leagues ere you reach this land of no return, whereof the old astrologer told you. Even Mbega has no maps of that region, nor has any of his folk gone thither and returned to tell about it.'
Conan flashed a somber smile. 'Right enough, but we're not only marching. We shall ride the wyverns —myself, Conn, and the pick of Mbega's royal guard. When Thoth-Amon escaped on one of the brutes, not all were turned loose; enough of the flying devils were left behind in the topless towers to bear a score of us. We'll fly ahead on wyvern-back while Nzinga leads her war-women and Trocero commands a company of Mbega's regular spearmen on foot. We'll scout ahead for the best routes. When we sight this Great Stone Skull whereof the Shemite spoke, we'll turn back, await the arrival of our ground force, and strike at once from the sky and the jungle.'
Pallantides chewed his beard. 'You can't ride those winged devils.'
Conan grinned. 'I can try. I've ridden horses and camels and even, once, an elephant. So a mere dragon should not daunt me!'
II
A Flight of Dragons
Conan soon learned that there was much in what Pallantides had said. The giant pterodactyls, reared and trained by the warriors of Zembabwei, were not the most tractable steeds. They were bad-tempered, quarrelsome, and stupid. They had a dismaying tendency to forget their riders and swoop down to the surface of clearings and rivers in pursuit of prey. They also stank.
Conan had snorted indignantly when the grinning black beast-keepers had tied him securely to the high-backed saddle, a stout affair of tough leather stretched over a bamboo frame. But, on his first flight, his grisly mount abruptly tumbled into a headlong dive after a fleeing gazelle. Then Conan realised the need for the thongs that held him to his seat.
The Zembabwans carried stout teakwood clubs, fastened to a loop of the saddle, wherewith to beat the wyverns into obedience whenever their predatory instincts got the better of their training. Conan battered his flying dragon into groggy flight again. He would, he thought, prefer to take his chances afoot in the jungle, with the warriors of Nzinga and Mbega.
Still, there was no denying that the wyverns moved at a speed that left those on the ground far behind. While the black fighters hacked their way through the dense growth below, Conan and his scouting force ranged far ahead, spying out the best routes. Once they sighted a black army, posting itself for an ambush of the ground force. A simultaneous swoop of the wyverns close over the heads of the hostile spearmen sent them into headlong, screaming flight.
After a time, the jungle thinned out to parkland, and the ground force speeded up. Their progress was still snail-like compared to that of the wyvern squadron, which could travel at several times the speed of even a mounted man. And there were no horses in these parts. Conan was told that they were crossing a belt in which a wasting disease slew all horses. Now and then a cluster of black specks on the savanna indicated a herd of antelope, buffalo, or other grass-eaters.
Day after day, Conan soared far ahead of his army. Then he returned to meet his ground force: Nzinga's Amazons, Mbega's warriors under Count Trocero's command, and a train of women bearing food and supplies on their heads. From his height, they looked like a column of black ants. Unable by reason of age to keep up with the brisk marching pace of the warriors, Trocero most of the time was carried in a litter borne on the shoulders of four stalwart blacks.
Each day Conan fumed with impatience when he saw how little ground the force had covered since dawn, although he well knew that these folk were marching at a rate that even his tough Aquilonian veterans would have had a hard time to keep up with.
The moon had been full the night when Conan and his son had overthrown Mbega's usurping co-king Nenaunir, who had seized sole power for himself and imprisoned his twin brother. The moon had dwindled to a silver sliver when Conan and his little army had set out in pursuit of Thoth-Amon.
During this journey, the moon twice waxed to full and shrank again to a slim silver crescent. Now it was again broadening toward the full. To Conan's right, in the west, the haze-reddened sun was sinking toward the jagged peaks that fenced the horizon. In the east, to his left, the pallid moon, in her first quarter, stood well up in the sky.
Five hundred feet below where Conan sat his wyvern, the land was rolling and rough, cut up by many ravines and gullies. It was clad in golden dry grass with patches of scrubby, thorny herbage and trees, now mostly dry, brown, leafless, and deadlooking because the country was in its dry season. Ahead, the hummocks swelled to a range of hills. From the information croaked out by old Rimush before his mysterious death, and from the words of natives queried along the way, he should be approaching the giant waterfall of which Rimush had spoken.
Ere long, his heart leaped with fierce joy as he sighted the misty plume that rose from a cleft in the hills ahead. A few more beats of the reptile's ponderous wings brought him within sight of the white glitter of the fall itself. There a small river, winding out of the hills, plunged over an escarpment half as high as Conan's own altitude.
Conan wondered whether he ought to return to the ground force, now far behind. No, he thought; he would make a cast of a few leagues eastward, as he had been directed by the Shemitish astrologer, and then swing north again. He should be able to rejoin his troops before dark.
So Conan tugged on his reins and turned the flapping monster to the left. Behind him, Prince Conn and Mbega's guardsmen followed his lead.
Conan turned, the wind whipping his grey-shot mane across his face, and peered through watering eyes to where his son rode. Young Conn was grinning. His square-jawed face was eager and his fierce blue eyes were alive and sparkling. Conan, his hard face softening, growled an affectionate curse under his breath.
The lad was obviously having the time of his life. Since he had joined the expedition at Nebthu on the River Styx, he had been through desert warfare, a jungle trek, and the siege of Zembabwei. By now he ought to have learned a few things about the task of being a warrior-king. His experience on this hazardous march into the Far South could never have been gained from tutors or books. Conan decided that he had been right to ignore the advice of his councilors and bring his son on this expedition.
