Conan and The Gods of The Mountains Page 6

  Valeria knew something of saltwater crocodiles, having once anchored in a river mouth where they swarmed. She had never been so far from the sea in a land where the rivers also spawned them, but she judged this beast to be much like its seafaring cousins. It would be swift in the water, slow on land, tenacious of life, and slow of wits. Doubtless it was cudgeling those wits for some new way of dealing with her, now that its first lunge had failed.

  She could be long gone from the riverbank and any danger from the crocodile if she was ready to abandon Conan to whatever fate had befallen him. Or that he has fallen into, she surmised, seeing as the very earth itself seemed to have swallowed him.

  This thought made her next leap cautious, and she thanked Mitra when she landed on solid ground. Then she kicked off her boots. Blisters or no, she had a better feel for any surface under her—ship's deck or jungle riverbank—when she was unshod. .

  She drew dagger to match sword and studied her opponent. It was impossible for her to seek safety at the price of leaving Conan. Not impossible in the sense of against nature, as it would have been impossible for her to grow wings and fly—but against her nature and all she had lived by since before she was a woman.

  She and the Cimmerian were battle-bound, as surely as by any tie of blood or by oath sworn before a score of priests of as many gods. She would return to serving in a barber's house, or even dance in taverns, before she broke such a bond as she had with Conan.

  That he desired her was an annoyance, as a fly buzzing about her head might have been. But one did not strike oneself on the head with a hammer to swat such a fly!

  The crocodile hissed again and lumbered forward. Valeria shifted on nimble feet so that she could watch the whole riverbank as well as her immediate foe. The one thing she dreaded most was another crocodile. The first one would most likely be off gorging itself on the sow, but where there were two of the monsters, there could be three.

  She saw no sign of another reptile, but she did see a shallow depression in the ground where the leaf mold and tangled dead vines seemed to sag. If that place had swallowed Conan, perhaps it might be persuaded to swallow the crocodile.

  Then the monster lunged forward with a speed that startled her. Surprise did not slow her, or make her forget that no creature's brain can be far from its eyes.

  As the crocodile lunged, Valeria leaped, and more. She twisted in midair, with the grace that had caused more than a few to throw silver, even gold her way in years past. She came down astride the crocodile's spiny back, just behind the massive neck.

  Before the crocodile realized that its prey was no longer in sight, Valeria struck. Her dagger drove hard into the scaly hide, seeking a chink, sinking in deep enough to hold her. Then she lifted her sword, reversed the blade, and drove it deep into the crocodile's right eye.

  The sword was awkward for stabbing, and nowhere else on the beast would its point have gained entrance. Striking where it did, it reached the crocodile's life.

  The hiss turned into a screaming bellow as Valeria leaped free of the creature, as desperately as ever she had leaped from shark-infested water into a boat. The crocodile's tail thrashed wildly, splintering bushes and scoring the bark of stout trees. The legs spasmed, claws frenziedly spraying earth and leaves all over Valeria. Then it gave a final lurch, rolled over, and slammed its head down in the depression Valerian had noted before.

  In an uncanny silence, the earth gaped. With a tearing of vines and a snapping of roots, the crocodile upended. For a moment, its tail waved again, as if in its final convulsion the beast was bidding farewell to its slayer. Then the crocodile vanished.

  This time the hole did not. Whatever device or spell had closed it previously seemed to be exhausted. It gaped the width of a man's height at Valeria's feet. She looked down into twilight, then into a darkness as complete as the deepest abyss of the sea.

  She swallowed. She could not drive out of her thoughts the notion that not even Conan could have survived such a fall… or that if he had, the crocodile might have finished what the fall began.

  She would never know, however, save by going down herself and finding the Cimmerian, or his body. She refused to contemplate what she would face if he were alive but helpless from hurts taken in the fall.

  "Conan," she muttered, "my life might have been simpler had you never left Cimmeria."

  Yes, and doubtless shorter as well.

  The voice in her mind was not altogether Conan's, but close enough to make her start.

  So be it. She had been a climber from childhood, and once a sailor had said of her that she had eyes in her fingers and toes. That would help. So would a stout length of vine, or several lengths bound and braided to support her weight.

  The dead vines were too rotted for such work, but there was no shortage of live ones. Valeria had her vine rope before the sun-dappling of the river had greatly changed. She finished her labors by tying a slipknot in one end of the rope, slinging her boots by their laces about her neck, and making a sword-thong of vine.

  The vine would not serve well for either rope or thong as would good Shemite leather, but Valeria was no stranger to making-do. For the climb, she would use the thong to bind her sword across her back, but once on solid ground, the weapon would come into service.

  She had finished all the work she could do in the gods' own daylight, on a jungle riverbank that now seemed a pleasant vantage compared to the blackness at her feet. The rest of her duty lay below.

  She breathed deeply until she was as calm as could be hoped. Then she lowered her feet over the edge of the hole and began her downward climb.

  FOUR

  Conan's fall began with ill fortune, which swiftly changed for the better. Had it been otherwise, the stories of many men and not a few realms would have been vastly altered.

  He was no spell-smeller, or he might have sensed the magic binding the ground at the mouth of the pit. Then again, perhaps not. It was old earth-magic, and the names of those who discovered it had been lost to human memory long before Atlantis was even built, let alone before the oceans swallowed it.

  The art had not been lost, however. The sorcery known to the builders of Xuchotl partook of it. Nor was the doomed city the only creation to which they had turned their magical arts. Deep within the jungle they also built and wrought mighty works, at a time when the Black Kingdoms were but bands of feuding tribesmen.

  It was one of these leavings that Conan had en-countered. The earth gaped beneath his feet, he plunged down into darkness briefly lit from above, then continued his plunge in darkness deeper yet as the pit closed above him.

  Thrice he struck earthen walls that yet seemed too solid and smooth to be altogether natural. These blows slowed his fall somewhat, but also drove the breath from his lungs. He had just regained it when he struck for a final time, where the wall of the pit had crumbled under the inexorable thrust of the roots of some forest giant. The blow took him across the chest and would have cracked, or even crushed the ribs of any lesser man.

  With the Cimmerian, it drove out the barely regained breath and tossed him like a child's ball into the mouth of a tunnel entering the other side of the pit. He struck, half slid and half bounced ten paces, then lay there while earth quivered, rumbled, and fell from the mouth of the tunnel.

  He would gladly have lain until his breath returned, but instinct told him that the mouth of the tunnel was only precariously bound by whatever magic ruled here. Lying thus in momentary comfort could end in swift and final burial.

  Iron fingers seemed to clutch his chest as he crawled, but the sound of still-falling earth drove him onward. He was sweating with more than his exertions when at last silence fell again, broken only by his harsh breathing.

  Probing his ribs with his fingers, he found nothing broken, although he would wager the price of a good inn that he would have the mother and father of all bruises by morning. His breathing had slowed, and cautiously he sat up.

  Then a rumble and a series of thuds sou
nded from the mouth of the tunnel. They rose to a crescendo, but faded as swiftly as they came. Something large had followed him into the pit and plummeted all the way to its distant bottom, as he had not.

  He told himself that the sound was too heavy to be Valeria. That kept the ill-luck thought from his mind that she would surely follow him down if she bested the crocodile. She had that loyalty to a battle comrade that defies common sense, and that Conan himself also lived by.

  The mouth of the tunnel was now two-thirds blocked by fallen earth—and Conan was thunderstruck to realize that he could see this. He was no longer in utter darkness worthy of the deepest slave-pits of Stygia.

  He turned and looked down the tunnel. It sloped away into shadow but was clearly visible for some fifty paces or more. At the very edge of the Cimmerian's vision, the walls seemed to turn from earth into stone, and carved stone at that.

  Over all played a subtle light that at one moment seemed sapphire-hued, at the next, as crimson as a fine ruby. Trying to follow the changes of color made Conan dizzy, and in time he ceased his efforts. The light was magic, no doubt, and he was uneasy in the presence of magic. But he would be a cursed deal uneasier in total darkness, and that light might give him a way out of here without Valeria's risking her neck to climb down to him!

  Now, if he had some way to tell her that…

  Valeria knew that the air had to be cooler this deep in the earth. It only seemed hotter, as though she were climbing down the throat of a volcano toward the molten rock bubbling far below, ready to turn her to ashes should her grip fail for a moment.

  "By Erlik's thews!" she muttered. "Forget what you've learned about not letting your fancies run wild, you silly wench, and you will fall."

  It was not a fancy that sweat covered every bit of exposed skin, turning into slimy mud where earth had fallen on her from the walls. Her loincloth clung to her, as sodden as a jellyfish, and even her boots seemed to have become heavier with the dampness of the air in this pit.

  Truth was, she had never climbed so long and with such precarious holds for hands and feet. Compared to this climb, the time she had raced a shipmate from bow to stern over the masthead on a wager was a child's game. It did not-help, either, that her life had not been at stake in that race.

  Groping feet touched a flatter surface. A ledge? Something besides the wall of the pit, anyway… but test it first before putting full weight on it, let alone undoing the rope from its moorings above.

  "Hooaaa!" The voice seemed more a specter's than a man's as it floated up from below like smoke. Valeria's feet groped for purchase on the ledge, until at last she found a spot whereupon to stand. She left the vine rope in place, though, as she stared downward.

  The mouth of the pit was now so far above her that its light barely let her count the fingers of a hand held in front of her face. Beneath, all was blackness. Or was it? From well below, on the far side of the pit, a dim glow seemed to battle the darkness, like distant fireflies on a moonless night.

  Except that no firefly ever blinked in those hues of blue and red—no natural firefly, at least. But the laws of nature might not bind whatever lived down here.

  Valeria shuddered. She had no more taste for magic than the Cimmerian did, if the truth were known, and for much the same reasons. Magic made honest war skills useless, and made its users more often than not as twisted as the street of her native village in Aquilonia! Tascela was the worst sorceress she had seen, which made her thank the gods that she had not seen some of the wizards Conan said he had fought.

  There would be time to fret over whether Conan had been spinning tales when she knew that the voice below was his… and when she had rejoined him.

  "The sea frees us," she called. It was a password of the Red Brotherhood. Only Conan in this jungle was likely to know the reply.

  "The land binds us," came the reply. Valeria's knees quivered with relief, but she did not move otherwise.

  "Conan! Where are you?"

  "In a tunnel, beyond where you see the light. I—"

  A clod of earth bounced off Valeria's head and spun away into the abyss. She looked up. Was it her fancy, or was the hole above smaller, the light from it dimmer?

  The light was surely fading; her hand was now only a blurred, fingerless shape. The glow from below was holding steady, but it could not take the place of the trickle of daylight from overhead.

  "Conan! Something's happening to the light. I'll try to climb down until I'm opposite you, then throw my rope across. How wide is the pit where you are?"

  "Wide enough that your pet crocodile didn't stick in its gullet when you sent it down to join me," the reply came. "Best you move quickly, though, if the light's going."

  She heard hints of more danger than that in his voice, and was briefly angry at his hiding the truth from her. Reason replaced anger and told her that he might not know all the truth himself. If he did, he would tell it to woman, king, or god!

  The rope was near its end when Valeria found a foothold on a huge curving root opposite the mouth of the tunnel. At least she felt the bark under her feet; the light from above was almost gone. Then Conan's head and massive shoulders nearly blocked the light from the tunnel below. She saw now that the mouth of the tunnel was heaped with freshly fallen earth, and understood what Conan feared.

  She had not been so desperate for silence since her brief days as a cutpurse. Even the faint hiss as the slipknot loosened and the rope came free seemed to batter her ears like thunder. The end of the rope flew past her, down into the pit; then she gripped her end and began hauling it in.

  She was hauling vigorously when the rope suddenly went taut in her hands. Caught on another root, she thought. Then it began jerking up and down. Caught it was, but by something alive in the depths of the pit—and, she would wager, not by anything as innocent as a crocodile.

  Valeria would gladly have faced a score of crocodiles rather than what might even now be climbing from the depths. She did not let fingers or voice shake, however, to give any hint of her fear. She flung her end of the rope across the pit, saw Conan grip it firmly, then heaved with all her strength on the bight of the vines.

  For the longest moment of Valeria's life, it was an even contest which would break first—the vine or the grip of whatever lay below. Then, suddenly, the rope shot up like a flying fish. Valeria seized the free end and hastily bound it about her waist.

  The rope was covered with a foul ichor that might have oozed from a vast pustule, and now she heard slobbering and gulping noises from below. Not far below, either, and she would have to swing down to cross the pit. The root offered no foothold fit for a leap.

  "Conan!" she called.

  "I hear it, too. Jump, Valeria!"

  She would drop no farther if she missed her jump than if she swung down, then climbed. Not as far, indeed, for Conan was drawing in the rope until it stretched taut across the gap.

  Valeria braced herself, flexed her legs, pressed her hands hard against the wall, and thereby dislodged several more clods of earth. They fell into darkness, and it seemed that the slobbering and gulping grew louder yet.

  The pirate woman took the deepest breath of her life, as if enough oxygen in her body would float her over the nightmare gap. Then she leaped.

  She was in midair for only a heartbeat, but that was long enough for something to reach up from below and pat her. Its touch was as light as a kitten's, yet it burned like a hot iron.

  Then she was on the far side, clawing up over the tumbled earth, listening to the howl of a hunter balked of prey echo up and down the pit and into the tunnel. More earth fell from the walls and ceiling. Conan dragged her the rest of the way over the pile by one arm and her hair.

  In the process, her loincloth at last deserted her, and she was bare except for weapons and boots as she tumbled at the Cimmerian's feet. For once he seemed to ignore that state, dragging her upright.

  "Can you walk?"

  "I can run, to get away from that!"

&n
bsp; The howling in the tunnel had not diminished, and now Valeria heard another fierce sound joining it.

  The walls of the pit were shuddering, as she wanted to do, and she saw masses of earth the size of a man plunge past. She also heard them strike something not far below with an ugly, sodden sound.

  Then the roof of the tunnel mouth joined the shuddering, and neither Cimmerian nor Aquilonian needed any further warning. They scrambled down the tunnel, slowing only when they felt stone under their feet, not stopping until they heard the rumble of great masses of falling earth behind them.

  A mephitic breeze wafted from the mouth of the tunnel—or rather, from where the mouth of the tunnel had been. Whether the whole pit had collapsed, they could not say. But the way back was now blocked by a solid mass of earth that seemed to glare at them in defiance of any puny efforts they might make to shift it and escape.

  Not that Valeria had the slightest intention of returning by way of the pit, when its inhabitants might still be alive and hungry. Perhaps that wall of earth between her and them was not so dire a fate as she had thought—unless the pit creatures could carve a path through it, or they had kin somewhere in the tunnel beyond.

  As to the first, the best course was swift flight. As to the second, keen eyes and keen steel would have to be enough—that, and a prayer or two, if any god could hear them from these deeps.

  She pointed a bare arm down the tunnel. Conan nodded and fell in at the rear, for the moment the post of greater danger. Valeria recognized this, and also that Conan's eyes now roamed over her with concern for any hurts she might have taken.

  But there was hardly a price she would not have paid to be able to climb into a hot bath!

  Conan took the rear guard until they reached a place where the tunnel divided; there were no sounds of pursuit behind or of life ahead. That this was no natural tunnel was by now made plainer than ever by the remains of incredibly ancient tool marks and patches of stain and corrosion that might once have been bronze or iron.