Conan Of The Isles

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THIEVES OF PTAHUACAN

Conan's captive led him by winding ways into the more sordid sections of the ancient city. Here, homeless derelicts and filthy beggars lounged in crumbling doorways. Raddled whores leaned from windows to compete for the trade of an occasional passerby.

As he penetrated the slum area, Conan began to realize the unthinkable age of the city. Here the stone steps and ramps were worn into sloping saddles by the tread of countless generations. The very stone of the walls was worn slick by the brushing of millions of shoulders. Ages of wind and rain had eroded much of the stone into porous, crumbling ruin. Long abandoned and tenanted only by vermin, many structures had collapsed. Whole blocks of houses lay in mouldering ruins in this, the most ancient sector of the city. Grass grew between tilted paving stones, while weedy trees sprouted amidst the tangles of long-overgrown gardens and courtyards. If the sight of a feather-robed priest-wizard in these shabby streets was unusual, none of the inhabitants gave evidence of this fact. For, as Conan passed with the weasel-faced little thief in tow, hardly one raised curious eyes. It seemed to be the custom in these parts of Ptahuacan ostentatiously to ignore the doings of others, probably as a means of self-preservation. Doubtless this was the thieves' quarter, where lawlessness flourished.

Only when they neared the headquarters of the thieves did Conan realize that his progress had been under surveillance all the time. As they passed down a crooked alley between walls that leaned awry, two burly figures, armed with cudgels, appeared in front of them, while another pair closed in from behind. They were all big and stout for Antillians and naked except for soiled, apronlike garments of patched leather. Fixing Conan with cold, somber black eyes, they advanced from either end of the alley toward the place where he stood with his captive.

Conan let go the thief in order to put a hand on the sword hilt under his robe. The little thief moved away a pace, then turned to spew a volley of abuse, too fast for Conan to follow.

'He grabbed me after I lifted some gold dust from Hatupep's stall,' cried the thief. 'I know not what in Hell's name he wants, but—’

'Ease off, Itzra,' growled one of the bullies. 'We'll find out what he wants.' Advancing on swift feet, he lifted his copper-bound cudgel.

Conan laughed and threw back his feathered robe and cowl. His broadsword hissed from its scabbard, The bullies stopped as if they had run into an invisible wall - but not, it seemed, from simple fear.

'Lords of Hell - iron, or I'm a blind man!' gasped one of them.

Another muttered an expletive and peered more closely at Conan, observing with wonder his height, his unshorn mane and beard, and his smouldering blue eyes.

'Gods of death, what is he?' the fellow swore. 'No such man has ever been seen in all Antillia! ‘

With his back against the wall, Conan barked a laugh, swinging his blade from side to side to menace all five hoodlums.

'One who stole this robe from its owner, friend, and no spy for your rulers, if that is what you think!' he rumbled. 'Moreover, one who would see your chief on business, to profit of both. And I will see him, whether you like or not!'

He held his sword level so that the daylight flashed from its blade. The four guards and the cutpurse gave back, eyeing him with growing alarm. Strangely, his sword seemed to arouse more interest than he himself did. Conan guessed that for some reason - perhaps lack of ores in this island chain - ferrous metals were virtually unknown here, although legendary tales of the iron and steel of ancient Atlantis had been handed down through the generations.

'Now,' he grunted, 'will you take me to your leader, or would you rather fight?'

They were happy to oblige.

The local underworld lordling was an enormously fat man named Metemphoc. His face was a bulging mass of lardlike flesh in which a pair of cold black eyes glittered like fragments of polished obsidian. His mouth was a thin-lipped gash across his round, brown face; his nose, a mere blob between his swollen cheeks.

His headquarters was a series of abandoned cellars beneath the ruined houses at the end of a filthy alley. The walls of stained, crumbling plaster were hung with gorgeous tapestries of strange design, and on the cement floors were scattered elaborately woven mats and the tanned skins of beasts of many kinds. Silver thuribles filled the air with rich incense. The quiet luxury and gilded splendor of Metemphoc's apartment contrasted vividly with the squalor of the exterior.

Like a fat toad, Metemphoc lay wrapped in gorgeous brocade amidst a nest of cushions as he listened to Conan's tale. His face impassive and his black eyes coldly glittering, he uttered no word until Conan had finished his account. Then a long, suspenseful moment stretched on while Metemphoc examined Conan from head to foot, paying almost as much heed to the sword that lay across the Cimmerian's knees as to the man who held it.

With a sigh, Metemphoc rubbed fat jowls with pudgy fingers, whereon sparkled a king's ransom in gem-studded rings. He laughed throatily and called for wine and meat. The suspense broke.

'By the gods of stealth, big man!' he chuckled, 'old Metemphoc has never heard such a tale in all his poor, sick days; therefore it must be true! Aye, with that barbarous mane and uncouth face fur, and those uncanny sky-colored eyes - and, ahem, an accent such as these tired old ears can barely understand - this fat old man has no choice but to believe that you do, forsooth, hail from an unknown land to the east. Notwithstanding that our beloved masters, the holy priesthood - ha! - inform us that naught lies thither but a wild waste of waters, with never a speck of land.'

They amicably toasted each other. Conan gulped thirstily at a sweet, pungent wine such as he had never tasted. Doubtless, he thought, this drink was fermented, not from grapes, but from some unfamiliar local fruit.

He felt quite at home. By pure instinct, he and the toad-like master thief understood each other. Although born thousands of leagues apart and of alien cultures, they spoke the same lawless language in their hearts.

While they drank, food was brought and set out on the low table between them. Conan dug hungrily into the repast. Besides the Antillian foods with which he had already become familiar, there were nuts and berries of a dozen kinds. The repast ended with a curious, large,, prickly fruit with a spray of sword-shaped leaves growing from its top. Metemphoc cut it into ring-shaped, yellow-green slices. Conan found the taste startling at first but not bad after a few bites.

Meanwhile they carried on a desultory conversation between mouthfuls. Metemphoc said: 'Aye, I know of that strange ship, full of barbarous foreigners, which our Sea Guard captured a few days past. That is one reason I was willing to believe your tale.'

'Are my men still alive, and if so where?' grunted Conan.

'They live, or did last night. They are in a dungeon below the Anteroom of the Gods - that gay citadel that stands on the edge of the Square of the Great Pyramid.'

Conan reflected that the wily underworld princeling seemed willing to give him the information he sought, frankly enough; but almost visibly his cold, clever, mind was searching for a mode to make a profit from the stranger. He did not trouble to conceal this from Conan, who fully grasped the thoughts that raced behind the impassive fagade of the man's fat face.

'What will be their fate?'

'They are held for sacrifice, in the temple atop the Great Pyramid.'

‘Eh?' Conan made a sudden movement, spilling some of his wine.

'Why, yes. They will be given to the demon-god Xotli, in accordance with the rituals that have come down from ancient Atlantis...'

Conan's nape hairs bristled as Metemphoc explained, with unruffled aplomb, the customs of the local priesthood. Before the fall of Atlantis, the priests of Xotli had been a powerful faction, who worshipped their demon-god with awful rites of blood and terror. When the High Gods had destroyed Atlantis for its sins, the priests of Xotli and their slaves had fled from the sinking land in a mighty fleet of flying ships powered by the mysterious force called vril.

Conan had heard vague rumors of these Atlantean sky ships. He understood that, with the passage of centuries, the ships had worn out, or their supply of power had failed; and the secret of their manufacture had been lost in the ages of barbarism and bloodshed that followed the Cataclysm. Therefore no such ships existed in Hyborian times.

The priests of Xotli, continued Metemphoc, had ventured southwest from the doomed continent. They made a landfall in the little-known island chain they called Antillia. This consisted of seven large islands in the Western Ocean between Atlantis and a much larger continent, sometimes called Mayapan, still farther west. When the Atlanteans landed, they found the islands in the possession of a race of small, brown, slant-eyed savages, similar to the people of Mayapan. They easily conquered these natives and reduced them to the same slavery as the servants they had brought with them. In the millennia since the Cataclysm, the blood of the Atlanteans and of the aboriginal Antillians had mingled, until today the islands were inhabited by a single, mixed race.

Since the original conquest of Antillia and the construction of great Ptahuacan, the Xotlian priesthood, under the hereditary Hierarch of the Sacred Mysteries of Xotli, had ruled with an iron hand, despite occasional outbursts of rebellion on the part of their subjects. The hierarchs had kept the masses under control by telling the people that all lands - even Mayapan - had sunk with Atlantis, and the world was naught but a waste of wind-tossed waters, stretching from Antillia in all directions to the rim of the world, where sea met sky and the stars rose out of the foam of the endless seas.

'Do you believe this?’ said Conan.

Metemphoc chuckled. 'If a priest asked me, I should say yes. Most of the people believe, or at least lack the guts to question the teachings of their masters. But, between you and me, some of us know that Mayapan still stands; and now your coming has shown that land still exists on the other side of the waters, also.'

'Why do the priests proclaim this lie, when they know better?’

'It helps to keep their subjects under control. If they believe there is no other land they could flee to, they will despair of escaping from the iron rule of the priests of Xotli.'

'Tell me of this demon-god and his rites.!’

Metemphoc explained that Xotli, Lord of Terror, was a demon-god of the Elder Night. He appeared unto his worshippers as a rolling cloud of ebony darkness, a vortex of ultimate, boreal cold like that of the winds that blow between the stars. He drank the living souls of those slain upon his towering, pyramidal altars. To sustain the linkages between the Hierarch of the Mysteries in this world and the Demon of Darkness in the nighted depths of its unknown dimensions beyond the universe, the raw life-force of the victims was projected into the other worldly abyss.

Calmly, the fat master thief told how naked captives by the thousands were immolated atop the sky-reaching black-and-crimson ziggurat that Conan had glimpsed amidst the upper tiers of the ancient city. There, on the altars of Ultimate Night, the priest-wizards tore upen the breasts of the living victims, ripped out their hearts with knives of volcanic glass, and offered up the life-force thereof to the whirling cloud of vampyric darkness that formed above the pyramid and hung there for hours, feeding on the living force of human souls. The corpses they dropped down a shaft into some unknown pit or cavern.

Conan growled and his eyes flashed dangerous fires as he listened. The mere idea of human sacrifice did not especially shock him. He had seen too much bloodshed in the course of his long life, and such practices were not unknown among the nations of Conan's own world in the Hyborian Age. But that his own friends and followers should be offered up in such barbarous rites - that was something else!

He sloshed down a mouthful of the pungent wine. 'What then of the Red Shadows ?'

Then Conan learned that the population of Antillia had become so depleted by the constant sacrifices that the wizard-priests had been forced to travel far afield to secure an adequate supply of captives to slake the dark thirsts of Xotli. First they raided the shores of Mayapan; then, when the coastal natives of that barbarous sparsely peopled land scattered into their impenetrable forests, the priests had begun to reach out in other directions.

'The Red Shadows, as you call them,' said Metemphoc, 'are the spirit-servants of the Dark One. I had not known until now that the Hierarch (may his spirit be reborn in a tapeworm!) had been raiding the unknown lands to the east. Black Xotli must be hungry indeed! Our own sacrifices have grown so numerous of late that the city is half empty, as you have seen. Whole squares and streets are depleted of people. Thousands have fled to the hills or to the adjoining isles; but the rule of the priests extends thither, too, and they hunt them down. That is the reason for the Sea Guard, which seized your own vessel. It watches the harbors to intercept any who, doubting the word of the priests, essay to flee to some hoped-for land beyond the seas.’

Conan's gaunt, scarred hands opened and closed on emptiness, as if they clenched a human throat between them. 'Now I understand the Red Shadows,' he growled.

'From what I have seen of sorcery in my own world, I know that once a dark force from beyond has obtained a foothold in the world of men, it needs ever-growing numbers of sacrifices to sustain it. The demons of the Elder Dark are - I know not how to put it in your tongue - they are negative; not nothing, but less than nothing. Life-force streams in to fill the void of their false existence. But their vacuum can never be filled and needs ever more and more life-force to sustain their illusion of life. Do you understand me?'

'I do,' said Metemphoc. 'Go on.’

'Why, man, do you know that, unchecked, the servants of Black Xotli would ravage all the lands of this world until the very planet is empty of man ? Nay more, they would then seize upon all higher forms of animal life, to leave the world to the fishes and the worms. It was this whereof the shade of Epemitreus sought to warn me - this perverted form of worship that should have sunk with Atlantis, eight thousand years ago.'

'From what the ghost of your wise man said,' replied Metemphoc, 'it would seem that the gods have chosen you to stand between the world of living men and the Shadow of Evil. Only you can tip the balance between life for the world and death.'

‘Aye’ muttered Conan.