Young Thongor (29 page)

The basement was piled with crates, bales and barrels. Thongor did not waste time looking them over; he prowled through the darkness of the room, every sense at the alert, the great broadsword naked in his hand. Soon he encountered a stone stair against the further wall, and followed it up to the next floor on silent feet. Pushing through a heavy hanging of purple cloth, he found himself in a room so weirdly furnished that at first all he could do was blink and stare and blink again as he stood in the doorway.

The walls were of smooth stone faced with gray plaster and lined with shelves of dark wood. Along these were stacked and piled a jumble of curious things. Bottles and jars and flasks filled with colored liquids and nameless powders, bundles of dry withered leaves and grotesquely shaped roots, little cloth bags tied with a drawstring and filled, perhaps, with strange drugs and deadly powders.

And books—more of these than Thongor had ever seen before. Huge, thick, ponderous tomes made of crinkled sheets of rough parchment, crudely bound in heavy leather or carved wood or painted ivory panels.

This, he knew, must be the magical workshop of Athmar Phong. A massive desk of oily black wood, carved all over with grinning devil-masks stood to one end of the room, its top littered with hieroglyphic charts and curious instruments of brass and crystal. A man’s skull of browned bone stood as a paperweight on one corner of the desk, and rubies were set in the sockets of the skull-like eyes. They glinted with malign, small lights that seemed to follow his movement as he crossed the room.

A monstrous, stuffed dragon-hawk, a winged and terrible flying dragon, hung from wires suspended from the rafters. In a globe filled with milky fluid, a human brain floated.

Thongor noticed that this room was well lit, although he could not discover the source of the illumination. Gazing about, he could see no windows, nor were there any lamps, candles or torches to be seen: nevertheless the chamber was bathed in a harsh, gray, sterile light that leached most of the color out of things. A prickle of unease crawled down his spine, and, as he could not see the black mirror the priest had sent him here to fetch, he hastily quitted the silent room and pushed through a velvet-hung doorway into an adjoining chamber.

Whereas the first room had been cold and grim and workmanlike, with its harsh gray illumination and bare stone floors, this second chamber was a nest of silken luxury. The air reeked with heavy perfumes from a fat silver incense-lamp on a low tabouret of sleek blond wood inlaid with small panels of delicate ivory, exquisitely sculptured with shockingly detailed pornographic tableaus. A long, low divan lay along the further wall—and there, languorously coiled amidst a nest of bright-colored fat cushions, a young girl of breathtaking loveliness watched him from dark almond eyes.

The shock of discovering that the room was occupied by another stunned Thongor for an instant—but no longer. The hair-trigger reflexes of a barbarian warrior took over. The keen point of the great broadsword came up and hovered a half-inch from the base of the girl’s throat.

“One sound—one word—!” Thongor growled.

The girl smiled slightly and continued to regard him from under thick, sooty lashes. Thongor looked her over curiously. She could have been eighteen, but no older, for her sleek, soft body was as slim and graceful as a young panther. A thin sheet of green silk was drawn partly across her white body, leaving bare one arm and one long, slender leg, with a silver disc upon the tip of each of her young breasts. Her long, thick hair was fire-red with gold gleams shot through the silken tresses. Thongor had never seen a redheaded girl before, but he knew that some of the slave women in the harems of the Southland kings used color dyes, which may have explained the dazzling shade of her tresses, which were woven into one thick braid with strands of glowing pearls.

Her face was filled with fresh young beauty. Dark, tip-tilted eyes under thick black lashes, a full-lipped, warmly crimson mouth; and soft delicate skin of flawless pallor.

“Thank the Gods you have come!” the girl breathed in a low, quiet voice, deep and husky. She writhed a little on the silk divan, and the thin covering of green silk slipped awry a trifle, revealing the naked curve of her thigh and slim hip. Slowly, so as not to trigger him into action, the girl lifted into view her slim, bare arms: they were bound at the wrist with manacles made of small gold chains.

“Who are you, lass? The wizard’s concubine?” he demanded roughly, still holding the great sword at her warm throat.

“The wizard’s slave,” she sighed. Then, before he could speak, she continued in a rush of words: “Athmar Phong stole me from my people when I was eleven; for seven hideous years I have been his helpless slave, the subject of every vile whim and loathsome fancy that came into his black, putrid heart!” Her shallow young breasts rose and fell, straining the green silk of her covering taut with every breath.

“For seven years I have dreamed and prayed that someone would come to free me from this hideous bondage, and at last
you
have come to break my chains and set me free!”

Heedless of his lifted sword, the girl slid from the couch and knelt before Thongor, the heart-shaped oval of her face lifted to him, tears trembling on her sooty lashes.

“Free me…free me, warrior…and I will gladly be
your
slave!” she whispered.

Thongor was young, and he had been without a woman since leaving Tarakus a year before, so it was not surprising that the blood rose hotly within him. Growling a calming word or two, he sheathed his sword and bent to snap the slender golden chains that bound the wrists of the helpless girl. Then he lifted her from her knees in his strong arms. She curled languorously against him, her slim arms sliding around his waist, her naked legs smooth and soft against his bare thighs. The pulse thundered in his temples as he felt the resilient warmth of her breasts pressing against his bare chest through the thin silk covering that was all she wore. She lifted her soft, trembling mouth to his lips. Another instant and he might well have forgotten the dangers of this place, and the perilous mission that had brought him…another instant and he might have lost himself in the warm softness of her…

But even as her panting kiss seared his mouth, even as his brawny arms encircled her slim hips, one sly hand slipped into his pocket-pouch—and the girl sprang halfway across the room and turned to laugh mockingly at him—with the Shield of Cathloda clenched between her slim, white fingers.

4.

Spawn of Hell

For a moment he stood frozen with shock, his senses still tingling with the warmth and softness of her slim, young body. She stood across the room, her lips parted—and laughed.

But it was not the soft laughter of a young girl. Peal after ringing peal boomed and roared from her soft, warm lips—and even as he stared uncomprehendingly, dazed with the swiftness of the change, hellish fires blazed up in her almond eyes. They flamed like pits of burning sulfur. And now that she laughed, her lips were drawn back, revealing hideous yellow tusks, like those in the black, blubbery, bristling jaws of the savage Lemurian jungle boar.

She began to…
change
.

Her limbs blurred, then grew transparent as smoke, then remolded themselves. A ghastly parrot-beak thrust from the warm oval of the girl’s face. Blazing orbs of yellow fire seethed with hellish mockery beneath her arched brows. Her hands became scaly bird-claws, armed with ferocious talons.

“Fool of a mortal,” the bird-demon croaked in a ringing metallic voice, “I knew of your presence within the house of my master from the first moment you set foot herein, and I chose a form that would lull your suspicions—”

Thongor struck.

The girl-thing had fooled him for a few moments—but now the fighting instincts of a northland warrior turned him into a battling engine of destruction. One hand flashed out, scooped up the fat, round, silver incense-lamp and hurled it straight as an arrow into the demon’s half-transformed face. The thud of heavy silver against flesh was audible the length of the room. The monster, its body still a hideous blend of exquisite human female and grisly bird-thing, staggered back from the impact.

The silver lamp broke open, and glowing pink coals splattered the half-changed body of the demon guardian. In an instant, the disarranged piece of green silk the devil still wore went up in a flash of flame. Blazing coals dribbled down between the white, soft breasts of the girl-like torso, raising terrible weals and blisters. The parrot-beak gaped open, screeching with agony and fury.

Thongor had not paused, as would a civilized man of the southern cities, to use reason; instinct alone told him that if the demon still wore flesh, that flesh could feel pain. He followed the flying brazier with the small tabouret on which it had stood. This he hurled like a powerful catapult straight at the ghastly scaled claw that clutched the protective talisman. The blunt edge of the wooden tabouret caught the slim girl’s wrist, which had only partly changed into a demon’s claw. The bone snapped with the sound of a dry branch cracking. The claw sagged limply as the demon howled—and the amulet fell.

Thongor dove across the room. His flying body crashed against the tender girl-legs of the monster and sent it reeling back against the further wall, while he scooped out one hand to catch the talisman. Luckily the fragile crystal thing had fallen on thick, soft carpets—had the floor been of bare stone, like the workshop through which he had recently passed, his only hope of escaping from this den of hell alive would have smashed to a thousand tiny shards.

Swift as he was, the demon was swifter. Even as he went crashing back against the wall, it—
changed
. The body crumbled into a coiling length of smoking stuff, and one arm snaked out, inhumanly long, to snatch the fallen amulet almost out of Thongor’s very fingers. The young warrior came to his feet in a rush, steel singing as he tore his sword from its scabbard.

The demon melted before him, reassembling itself across the room. Only the hand which grasped the all-important amulet had remained solid on this plane as the demon moved. Thongor took a swipe at it, but missed. Now he lunged for the monster, swinging up the mighty broadsword, deep chest thundering forth his primitive challenge. The great sword swung glittering up and came hissing down to clang against the scaled, reptilian body of the demon, by now fully transformed to its normal appearance on the earth-plane.

It was like swinging at a wall of solid steel. The shock travelled up Thongor’s arms to the shoulders, numbing and paralyzing even his mighty thews. The demon’s breast was solid as iron. It was astonishing that the blade of the sword did not shiver to fragments from the impact. But they had wrought well, those wonder-smiths of age-old Nemedis from which the ancient sword had come: potent spells and powerful runes had filled the crystalline structure of the great steel sword with terrific power. The blade held, although nicked: but the ringing shock numbed Thongor to the shoulder and the great sword fell from his nerveless fingers to clang like a struck bell against the stone floor that lay beneath the carpets.

His arms temporarily helpless, Thongor lashed out with a booted foot. Howling with harsh mockery, the great yellow beak of the demon was open, and Thongor’s foot crashed into its mouth, crushing the beak to gory ruin. Green hell-blood spurted from the crushed face of the devil, and again it went reeling back against the wall.

Thongor began to understand the limitations of the thing. It had complete control over its body and could doubtless transform itself to the likeness of any creature in earth, hell or heaven, but it was slow of thought. Anticipating a blow from the great Valkarthan broadsword, it had increased the density of the matter of which its breast was composed until it reached the hardness of solid metal—but had not thought to extend the same protection to the rest of its body.

Thus, if the young barbarian could keep it off balance, he might yet defeat the creature, or at least wrest the powerful talisman from its clutches. He dove after the monster as it fell squealing to the floor, its face a bubbling, gory wreck. He landed squarely upon it, both boots crashing down in its groin with crippling weight.

It was naked now, the green silk covering of its girl-guise burnt away by the scattering coals, and sexless as a stone to the eye, at least, but still vulnerable to such a brutal blow. He came crashing down with both feet and heard it voice a shrill shriek of bestial agony. Alien organs crunched and popped under his weight, and more of the green gore splattered from pulped flesh.

But it availed him little. For a second only it squalled and flopped in pain—then it hardened its body to the density of steel all over. He could feel it happening even as he grappled with the wriggling thing. They were both on their feet in a moment, battling lustily. Thongor swung balled fists into the thing’s gut and groin, but only tore the skin from his brawny knuckles and numbed his hands again. He shouldered it with terrific force, hoping to break free, and for a moment he took the monster-thing by surprise and shoved it off balance. He heard bird-clawed feet rip through the soft carpeting and squeak against naked stone as it fought to regain its balance.

Then two great hands like twin iron vices closed about his throat and
squeezed
. Blood roared in Thongor’s ears like pounding surf. A red haze thickened before his eyes, obscuring his vision. Dimly he could see the snarling visage of the demon’s beaked face—now repaired and whole—screeching into his own. But the crushing and intolerable pressure on his throat sent needles of unbearable torment lancing through and through his brain like thrusts of pure, blinding flame.