Young Thongor (28 page)

Thongor—for it was he—waved away this cloud of words with a grunt of surly acknowledgement. “I know all this, priest. And I also know why you come to me, an outlander, with your offer—because the self-respecting thieves of Zangabal have already re jected you! By Gorm the Father of Stars—even the cunning thieves of Zangabal dare not steal from this Ptarthan mage! But I must do it or starve, so save your breath. But I still ask: what if this Athmar Phong has left a demon to guard his house while he is absent? I have fought beasts and men before now, but no warrior can pit naked steel against hell-spawn and live!”

The priest narrowed thoughtful eyes. “There is some truth in what you say, barbarian. Athmar Phong
is
reputed to hold a familiar spirit or elemental bound to his service. That is why we of the temple are willing to entrust to your hands a rare amulet which is one of our treasures.”

He dipped one bony, bejeweled hand into his crimson robes and brought forth a small object of curious workmanship which he set gently on the tabletop between them, moving to one side the empty wine bottle and the remains of the meal of broiled
bouphar
-steak with which he had somewhat appeased the ravenous appetite of his surly guest.

The thing was as long as a man’s middle finger and made of colorless crystal. It glittered in the orange light of the candelabra. Thongor picked it up gingerly, turning it so it caught the light. He scrutinized the amulet but could make nothing of it. The surface of the lucent crystal was engraved with a pattern of tiny heiroglyphs in some unknown language. He grunted sourly. A simple barbarian, bred in the savage wilderness of the frozen north, far from the perfumed cities of silk-clad men, he had a healthy warrior’s contempt for all this foul, sly witchery. Still, there was an odd glitter to the thing: and his fingers tingled with the faint currents of some uncanny force locked within the very structure of the crystal…

“What does this gewgaw do?” he rumbled mistrustfully.

“This amulet is called the Shield of Cathloda,” the priest told him in a severe tone. “It is a rare protective amulet which diverts and absorbs the attack of magical forces, and it was made a thousand years ago in Zaar the Black City far to the east. It can re-channel or cancel anything up to ninth-order forces. Fear not; even if Athmar Phong has left magical traps or a guardian familiar of some kind, you will walk safely and unharmed.”

Thongor studied the crystal cylinder for a few moments. Then he stood up, slipping the amulet into his pocket-pouch and drawing an immense hooded black cloak about his brawny shoulders. “Very well, priest,” he growled. “I will chance it for your gold…although something tells me it is a bargain I will yet live to regret—
if
I live!”

2.

Black Catacombs

The priest then led Thongor from the veiled antechamber and into the central nave of the colossal temple. At this hour of night there were no worshippers in the vast gloomy domed chamber, which murmured with whispering echoes.

At the far end of the hall, which was lined with titanic pillars of pale marble that loomed up into the shadow-thronged darkness of the vault above like stone sequoias, stood towering idols hewn from seven kinds of stone: the Seven Gods they worshipped here in Zangabal on the Gulf. Thongor eyed them grimly, unimpressed. The winged colossi, bearing mystic attributes and symbols in their many arms, tridents, stylized thunderbolts, crowns, swords and less-recognizable accoutrements, glared down at him, their stone faces shining in the dim gleam of coiling blue flames which glided heavenwards from a vast bronze bowl on the alabaster altar. The superstitions of the barbarian were bred deep in him, stamped in blood, brain and bone: but he knew them not, these alien gods of the tropic, jungle-clad Southlands: he swore only in the name of Father Gorm, the grim God-King of the dark northern wastes of ice and snow.

The priest led him around to the rear of the sevenfold dais where the stone colossi reared up. There he touched a hidden catch. A panel of thick marble sank from view, soundless and sudden as a feat of magic, revealing the yawning mouth of a black cav ern. Thongor growled, nape-hairs bristling at the thought of entering the ominous portal.

“This hidden route will carry you to the house of Athmar Phong,” the priest said smoothly. “You will follow the yellow symbols only: they are shaped like the Yan Hu glyph—you know the characters of our Southland language, do you not?”

“Aye,” he nodded curtly.

“Then follow only the yellow Yan Hu, and it will lead you to the pits under the magician’s house. Let me caution you not to stray from the path thus delineated, for other characters mark other routes, such as for example, the Shan Yom glyph, marked in red, which leads to the waterfront. You will come up beneath the house, and will thus avoid the many magical traps or defenses the Ptarthan wizard has doubtless set over his walls, his doors and his windows.”

Despite the soothing words of the gaunt priest, the brawny young warrior still hesitated at the threshold of the black tunnel’s mouth.

“What are these cursed caverns—how did they come to be here?” he demanded. “Since I bear your crystal toy, why should I not take my chances with the front gates and walk the streets under the open skies like a man? I am no skulking
unza
, to slink through your stinking sewers!”

The priest answered smoothly: “These cavernous passageways are very old; indeed, their origins are lost in the dim mists of the ancient past. But the chronicles of our temple tell that at the end of the Thousand-Year War with the fall of Nemedis in the east, the children of Nemedis came thither to found the nine cities of the west. It was Yaklar of the House of Ruz who was lord of the founding of Zangabal, and it is written that the hidden ways were here even before the walls of the city were first raised. More than this we know not, but by means of this secret the temple is mighty in Zangabal, and even the Sark in his mighty palace is not beyond the reach of our eyes and ears, for the tunnels extend even under the royal precinct. But come, barbarian, you must linger no more: night passes swift-winged, and you must accomplish the theft of the black mirror before dawn or be surprised in the midst of the task by the returning of Athmar Phong.”

The gaunt priest stood by the open portal until the grim-faced young warrior had vanished in the darkness of the tunnels; then he released the secret spring and closed the hidden door again. He stood for a moment, fingering his lean jaw with bony fingers. With luck, the mirror would be in his possession before the first hour of morning, and with it—
power
! Power to bend even the strong will of Athmar Phong to his bidding. Power to command the secret of the mirror itself, by which he saw a clear path from this place to a higher…to the throne of Zangabal itself! He smiled a slow, evil smile at the thought.

And, as for the barbarian—well, why should he squander even a portion of the gold his wiles had wrung from temple-worshippers? The youth could be disposed of without loss: he was not even a member of the Thieves’ Guild, which was a stroke of good fortune, as the Guild took a disquieting degree of interest in the disappearance of its members. But no one would even miss the Outlander.

His hand went to the small glass phial concealed in a secret pocket of his robes. There was enough powder of that deadly narcotic called Rose-of-Dreams within the small phial to destroy a dozen such as Thongor of Valkarth.

* * * *

Thongor strode through the darkness, his strange gold eyes questing about distrustfully and one hand at the hilt of his mighty broadsword. The cavernous passage was black as the depths of his savage northlander hell, and it reeked of dead things long unburied.

Dangling stalactites hung from the arched roof overhead, glistening wetly in the dim, faint light. The very presence of the hanging spears of stone denoted the awesome and incredible age of this network of secret passages beneath Zangabal, for Thongor understood that such were slowly built up over weary aeons of sluggish, calcareous drippings. He would almost have assumed the passages to be the work of nature from such evidence, but the walls and floors of the tunnels clearly showed the handiwork of the builder. For although obscured by centuries of neglect and decay, the ancient marks of stone-working tools were still visible along his path. He wondered grimly what unknown people of earth’s remotest dawn had built these subterranean ways, and for what mysterious purpose. Often he had heard whispered myths of the pre-human Dragon Kings of lost and boreal Hyperborea, buried countless ages ago under the fathomless snows of the ultimate polar north. Legend told that the mystery-race of lost Hyperborea, sprung from the gliding serpent and not the jungle ape, as were the races of men, had ruled all of old Lemuria before the creation of Phondath the Firstborn, the Father of All Men. Could it have been the shadowy Hyperboreans who cut these passages through the depths of the world?

Shrugging, he put such questions aside. It would be futile to puzzle over such mysteries, since he had no answer to the riddle. He strode forward, his black leather boots crushing the mold and pooled slime which covered the stony floor.

And then he came to the branching of the tunnel. One offshoot led away to his left, but it was marked with the Shan Yom symbol painted on the wall in strange pigments that glowed with cold, crimson fires. The other passage, to his right, was emblazoned with the phosphorescent yellow glyph of Yan Hu. He took the right hand way.

Cold water dripped from the roof above, slow drops splashing in black pools, beslimed and foul. Small sounds came to his ears as he strode forward: the squeak and scurry, the rattle of tiny claws rasping over wet stone; the tunnels were a-swarm with
unza
, the hideous, naked scavenger-rodents of Lemuria. He could see the gemlike wink and glitter of small, red eyes from the black mouths of side-tunnels as he moved forward. He ignored the scrabbling rats, but his hand tightened on the hilt of his broadsword: the
unza
were eaters-of-flesh, and where they slithered thick could also be found larger and more dangerous creatures.

Once a black serpent slid across his path and he recoiled, choking back a curse. But the viper glided on, ignoring him even as he ignored the rats. Then the foaming torrent of a subterranean river cut across his path. He crossed it by means of a narrow, arched bridge of stone. Icy spray splattered him from the black waters as they rushed by beneath his heels, and his feet slipped on the treacherous slimy mold with which the stone arch was crusted, but he plodded forward grimly.

He sullenly cursed the ironies of fate that had cast him up on this shore. Nine years had passed since he had found his way down across that mighty mountainous spine of the Lemurian continent, the Mountains of Mommur, from the frigid wastes of his homeland. Since then, in his wanderings in these Southlands, he had been an assassin, a wandering adventurer, a thief—the last profession ending on the slave-galleys of Shembis from which he had escaped, leading a slave-mutiny and stealing the very galley on which he had toiled under the overseer’s singing whip.

Thence he had sailed south to Tarakus, the pirate city that lay at the foot of the Gulf of Patanga, where it mingled with the wind-lashed waters of the Yashengzeb Chun, the Southern Sea. The youth had brawled and battled his way to power in the red, roaring Kingdom of Corsairs: as one of the proud Captains of Tarakus he had swaggered through the narrow, spray-swept streets of the little seaport draped in costly brocade, emeralds and rubies blazing about his corded throat, and the wealth of a dozen fat merchant ships piled in the basement of his great stone house. But, alas, his hot Valkarthan temper had been his doom, and he had slain the Pirate King in a duel still legendary among the wild rogues of the Corsair Kingdom. He had fled with half the Tarakan navy at his heels—of his golden treasure-trove, he bore off only the rags on his back and the mighty broadsword of his kingly sire. Thus, during the year past, he had fought his way through the jungles of the Southland to the quays and docks of Zangabal, hoping to enter the Sark’s service as a mercenary swordsman. But, that failing, he had fallen back on his old profession of thievery, and thus had come to the present perilous impasse—serving a black-hearted priest by robbing a dangerous and potent magician.

Suddenly a black wall swung up before his very face, and Thongor jerked his attention away from his wandering memories. His underground journey was over, and the house of Athmar Phong lay before him.

3.

Soft Lips

Thongor ran his hands lightly, questing, over the wall of black stone that confronted him. The marked path ended here, that much was certain: behind this wall, then, must lie the pits below the house of the Ptarthan mage. But how to pass the wall?

Growling a curse on that smirking priest, who had not forewarned him of this barrier, he fumbled about in the dark and at last—more by happy accident than by careful plan—his fingers found the hidden spring and depressed it. The smooth wall of black stone sank soundlessly into the earth and the warrior stepped forward into a gloom-drenched room cut from smooth, heavy stone.

He did not, as of yet, seek to close the opening thus made. One could never be certain how swiftly one wanted to leave the house of a wizard, and a smart thief never closed a door behind him if he could help it.