Conan The Hero (16 page)

The room beyond was much like the first, though darker and less well-kept. Three or four lamps guttered low in corners, revealing the fact that some of the furniture and ornaments were broken or overturned. The place looked littered too, and the air bore a musty smell distasteful even to Conan’s lotus-perfumed nostrils. Again no windows; but he thought he saw another door in the far wall, visible through long, sagging rents in an embroidered screen. After glancing around to be sure no peril was near, Conan stepped forward for a better view.

Behind him sounded a thud, which was the signal for a cacophony. Conan spun awkwardly on his numb leg to see that the entry door had slammed shut. The cause of this he searched dazedly for in the dim light, and finally saw: a forest monkey attired in glittering ornaments, capering at the top of the sill. No, there were two of the creatures. No four… no, a dozen and more, the fact borne to him all too clearly by their spreading, derisive chorus of chatters and shrieks. Spiderlike, they scampered up and down the walls, even, impossibly, through the air overhead.

The room, Conan realized, was traversed from wall to wall by thin wires, stretched just out of reach but serving as ideal perches and runways for the agile apes. They swung and cavorted along them, but with less playful energy and more purpose, seemingly, than their tree-dwelling brothers: for each of these monkeys was outfitted in a small gold helmet and breastplate, and from each tiny waist swung a gleaming finger-long crescent of steel. These were monkey-warriors, Conan saw; the slamming of the door behind him had been the first stroke of an ambush. As he watched, three of the fighters lowered themselves nimbly down the wall beside the door, turned to him, and advanced, unhooking their doll-sized scimitars and fanning out widely as they came.

Kicking would have been the best defense against these grounded arboreans, but Conan knew it was beyond the power of his wounded leg. He caught himself starting to back away from them; then realizing the indignity of it, he shifted his balance and hobbled stiffly forward. Weaponless, he bent to seize the centermost monkey, but the beast was elusive, sidestepping and slashing his arm viciously with its razored sword. As Conan lunged after the tiny warrior, its companions closed in from either side to hack and scrape at him with their own short, sharp blades. Finally, Conan laid hold of the first creature’s middle and snatched it up, intending to hurl it against the wall. But the beast kept fighting, snarling at him with its little hairy devil-face, flicking its gleaming sword at his eyes and finally sinking its small, sharp fangs into his wrist.

Then at once a heavy, screeching, clinging weight struck Conan’s shoulders—a whole horde of armored monkeys, dropping onto him in unison from the overhead wires. The floor attack had been nothing more than a ploy to distract him from this aerial maneuver, he realized in furious panic. Now he spun and staggered madly, thrusting and shaking off the hairy vermin while trying vainly to keep his face and loins clear of their needle-like fangs and tiny, gouging blades.

Seizing one squawking creature by the neck, he flailed wildly with it, flagellating his own back and managing to drive off most of the clinging assassins. He gave up his rush for the entry door and staggered back into the center of the room, away from the thickest swarm of shrieking, dangling attackers. Flinging aside the limp corpse of his monkey-flail, he tore and battered savagely at the two or three jabbering fiends who still clung to his neck and trunk. But other vermin were quick to pursue him; the overhead wires were strung low enough that, swinging down by leg, arm, or tail, the monkeys could deliver flying saber-slashes to his head and shoulders, and even use his reeling body as a springboard for return leaps. The sluggishness of Conan’s leg made it too dangerous to stoop low; he feared falling prone, to be overrun or dragged about the floor by his teeming foes.

There came at last the moment when no more of the beasts clung to him, and the flying attacks subsided. Conan could not tell whether he was badly hurt, for he sensed no pain, only the tickle of blood flowing from many small wounds. His leg was rotten timber beneath him; he dragged it hurriedly across the floor, taking care not to slip in pools of monkey blood and offal. He was vaguely certain that the hairy fiends were regrouping overhead for another attack. And with the thought came the event, but in an unexpected form.

The creatures converged from all sides, swinging beneath the wires in a swiftly closing circle. This time the knives did not slash, dangling harmlessly at their owners’ waists. Instead, as the dozens of tiny manlike hands and feet found Conan, they clutched at his arms, at his hair, at the ragged bloody scruff of his tunic, and
lifted
. To his horror, he felt his sandals scuffing ineffectually on the flagstones, his weight shifting slowly upward. As more and more of the shrieking demons laid hold of him, the overhead wires sagged under his weight and theirs, enabling them to reach lower and lower on his anatomy—to his chest, his belt, the pleats of his tunic-waist. He was swung slowly horizontal, the tree-fiends drawing him relentlessly aloft to be better fought with or toyed with in their airy element.

Red wrath seized him, overwhelming even the lingering narcosis of the drug. He flailed out with all four limbs, screaming in the voice of a rabid forest ape himself, biting and rending as savagely as his tormentors and with more deadly effect. Shaken by his frenzy their hold on him faltered, then failed. Conan plummeted, twisting in air, to crash shoulder-first on a low table which collapsed partly under his weight. Around him pattered fallen or wounded monkeys, quick to scamper away from his snarling clutch.

Staggering, lurching, he hove himself to his feet. He lay hold of the broken table, lifted it and swung it wildly overhead. It reached high enough to strike the wires, grazing some monkeys and driving the rest back from its tremors. When a squad of sword-wielders flew at him, the table shielded Conan from their blades and knocked down two, who hit the floor chittering and running.

“There, you miserable tree-lice!” he raged, smiting the table against the thrumming wires like a plectrum against a harp. “Come at me now, you slinking cowards!” His adversaries responded by scolding and shrieking from a safe distance, pelting him spitefully with dung and fruit-pits.

Feeling his mad strength rapidly dissipating, Conan saw that there was no glory to be had from this fight. He turned abruptly, not giving his enemies a chance to change their minds, limped to the room’s far door, and pushed against it. Seeing it swing inward, he dropped the ruin of the heavy table and passed through. Once on the other side he leaned against the panel, gasping, and pressed it shut.

The room ahead was utterly unlike the previous one: oval-shaped, fitted out lavishly as some sort of gallery or music chamber with brass gongs and bells. No threat was evident, so he sank panting to the floor.

He hardly dared take stock of the damage done by the monkey-fight. He had no will to either, because his berserk rage seemed to have used up most of the unnatural vitality lent him by the lotus balm. His body tingled with the drug-dulled pain of a hundred gashes and of new injuries to his neck and shoulder, as well as his throbbing leg. Reaching into the pocket of his shredded tunic, unstoppering the ointment jar with shaking hands, he applied the pink salve to his mangled, blood-slimed chest and neck. Less sparingly this time he dabbed it on his tortured thigh. Its effect was not so blissful as before, but the pangs did subside. His heart pumped more steadily behind the wall of his ribs, and he was able to turn dim attention to the room before him.

Lamps hung down from the ceiling, lighting the gallery brightly but to no clear purpose; the only other furnishings hung likewise from the vaultings above. Gongs they were, cymbals, and other metal chimes: a dozen or more sizeable ones spaced in a regular pattern about the room. They hung from linkages of brass chain, some supported on pivots though their centers, others held from the edges in slings or padded brackets.

No two were alike. The centermost one was also the largest, broader even than the great instrument that had awakened him in the first chamber. This one had its edge scalloped in the form of flaring, radiating flames, so that it resembled a great golden sun around which all the lesser discs floated. It had one other noteworthy feature, a long bronze clapper suspended before it, apparently controlled by a slack chain angling down from an aperture in one wall. This striker might make a serviceable cudgel, Conan thought, if it could be pried loose from instrument’s harness.

Feeling no stirrings of pursuit against the door, he hauled himself to his feet and tugged at the handle. Though he had seen no sign of a latch, and heard none, it was now locked securely. Just as well, he told himself; whatever ordeal lay ahead, he would be better able to face it without any chattering pursuers from the last room. His survey of this one satisfied him that another door lay at its far end; he resolved to exit that way.

No sooner did he stride forward, however, than the great gong struck. The effect was unsettling; possibly the drug or the oval shape of the room intensified the sound, for it smote Conan’s ears tangibly and shook him to the very soles of his feet. The working of the clapper-chain, whether by automata or by someone outside the room, set the heavy disc swaying; a further blaring stroke sounded, then another, each action of the chain accentuating its motion until it moved in a ponderous arc from wall to wall.

To lessen the shattering intensity of the noise Conan moved further out into the open, where the sound seemed more diffuse. Now other gongs were in motion, set swaying ever wider by action of their own supporting chains. The movements must be man-powered, Conan realized, caused by slaves working the chains from outside the room. New tones began to sound—a pair of cymbals dashed together by flexing levers, and a cracked, discordant chime tolled by a dangling, rebounding leaden ball. But most of the gongs had no clappers; they were made simply to swing more and more violently until they clashed against the stone walls, or against one another. Conan cursed the unseen bell-ringers—silently, since cursing aloud would have added nothing to the growing din.

As more and more gongs began striking, the tumult in the room swiftly became intolerable. Conan moved through its midst with hands covering both ears. He gauged the sounds not by their loudness, but by which of his vital organs they seemed to pierce, and how deeply.

He gave up the notion of catching the scalloped sun-gong and prying loose its clapper; it was swinging and twisting too erratically, its jagged metal flames threatening to rip the flesh from his bones if he ventured too close. Now there seemed small chance even of reaching that part of the room, because the other chimes described wider and swifter arcs, making it unsafe to move injudiciously. Conan sidestepped one screaming, razor-edged disc, kept spinning by a ratcheted chain-lever, only to feel another, heavier gong smite his shoulder as it thrummed past at an angle. He staggered aside, then carefully timed a rush to get out from between them; but on the next swing they collided, making a brain-splitting clangor and sending both wildly spinning. Mercifully, it was not the razor wheel but the blunt chime that struck him again, knocking him sprawling.

The floor offered no protection; by some fiendish geometry of the chains, the height of the gongs’ sweeps varied. The instruments sometimes clattered or scraped across the flags, scything even into the remotest angles of floor and wall. Worse, the swinging chains tangled with the lamps overhead, sending them careening in long, flaring arcs. Besides raining down hot oil, their motions made it nearly impossible to judge the speed and direction of the gong-sweeps. The place became a hell of thunderous sound, swooping shadows, screaming, hurtling metal, and shattering collisions. Each new tolling warned of a deadly rush by one of the howling gongs; but there were never any certainties. Rules and trajectories, obscure at best, changed without warning.

Through it all Conan crept, huddling low for illusory safety, no longer daring or caring to shield his ears. Carefully he timed his snail-like progress, scuttling or diving aside when the mad ballistics of the place threatened to destroy him. Reaching the room’s center at last, he sidestepped a whirling gong whose tone dropped from a shriek to a moan as it grazed him. He heard a strident clanging and looked around—to see the sun-edged disc jerked sharply off its course by its rigid clapper-chain, spinning and hurtling toward him in a wide arc. Before he could move, it was upon him—and past him, its polished, oscillating face brushing him on three sides gently as a lover’s embrace before it spun away.

Vowing not to waste this god-given luck, he flung himself forward along the scraped, battered floor through a momentarily clear space. Panting, he advanced with redoubled pains, relying on sound as well as sight, trying to judge the speed and direction of each gong-stroke by the way it smote his throbbing ears and quivered in his guts. For every three lunges forward he gave back two, peering around desperately in the flaring, plummeting light, cowering in the meager cover of the room’s edge. Seeing at last the opportunity to dash for his goal, he balked without knowing why; an instant later, two careening gongs crashed together before him, lacerating the air where his body should have been. The collision altered the patterns, placing him instantly at risk; desperately he leaped to one of the reeling gongs, grabbed its chain, and clung there, spinning giddily with it to the far end of the room, where it dashed him breathless against the long-sought door.

Gasping, croaking, he scrabbled at the door-handle and dragged it open. Racing to avoid being demolished by a final gong-stroke, he flung himself through and collapsed on the other side.

He awoke to a silence that thundered in his ears like the mightiest cataract of the River Styx. Yet it was true silence, with no trace of the gonging and pealing he had left behind in the oval chamber. How long since that din had ceased, and how long he had lain huddled and stiff in near-darkness, his half-seen surroundings gave no hint. This room appeared to be one of dim smokes and eerie radiances; it might hold new perils, but he hardly cared.