Conan Of The Isles

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN A DAY OF BLOOD AND FIRE

Under the blazing noonday sun, the line of silent men shuffled slowly toward the mighty pyramid of black-and-scarlet stone. In the fierce heat, Sigurd felt the trickle of sweat down his face and torso.

He had never thought that his end would come in such a scene of barbaric grandeur. On some burning deck, slippery with the blood of the fallen, perhaps - or in the rubble-choked alleys of a seaport under sack, where the flames of burning temples painted the skies with crimson. Or perchance in a desperate duel with some swaggering freebooter in red, roaring Tortage - the cold kiss of a blade against his flesh, the steel sliding in between his ribs, a swart, bearded face grinning into his as red mists rose to drown his vision. But nothing like this!

He gazed about the sunbaked square. On all four sides of this forum rose tiers of stone benches, and on these benches sat thousands of the richer classes among the Antillians, brave in gold and jade and feathers. The common folk, mainly clad in simple loincloths, stood about the square between the benches and the base of the pyramid. The Antillians stood or sat in tense silence absorbed in the somber spectacle taking place on top of the pyramid.

At the base of the pyramid., the priesthood of Ptahuacan stood in swaying ranks. Their voices rose like distant waves in a slow, antiphonal song, punctuated by the rumble of huge drums bound in human hide, which thumped and throbbed like the beating of a gigantic heart. The drummers sat in a bay in the side of the pyramid. The vertical walls of this recess were covered with white plaster, on which were painted bright-colored likenesses of the gods and demons of this exotic land.

Sigurd looked up. High above the throng, silhouetted in black against the azure sky, the hierarch, wrapped in his robe of gleaming emerald feathers and gesticulating skywards with gaunt, bare brown arms, sat on a lofty throne to one side of the platform atop the pyramid. The throne glittered blindingly with gems and mother-of-pearl.

On the platform before the throne stood an altar of shiny black stone. The small temple on the pyramid faced the hierarch's throne across the altar. Around the altar, a sacrificial priest and several assistants were at work. Otherwise stripped to loincloth and sandals, the sacrificer wore a fantastically plumed headdress, whose golden bangles splintered the sunrays into dazzling wheels of light and which hid his head.

At this instant, a slave woman was undergoing the ancient Atlantean rite. While the assistants, gripping her bare brown limbs, held her supine upon the altar, the obsidian blade flashed in the sun as it descended. A moment later, the sacrificer's hand held aloft a dripping heart.

Sigurd's jaw dropped; for, even as he watched, the Feaster on the Pyramid came into view. It materialized out of empty air.

A shadow dimmed the sun. A cold gloom fell over the square. The air bit with the chill of interstellar space. Hovering over the ziggurat, the Demon of Darkness took shape.

Behind him, Sigurd heard a mutter of prayers from the pirates, who were not otherwise a notably pious crew.

Above the pyramid., the Thing solidified and thickened, like darkness with weight and shape, or like a shadow with substance and form. From it a cold, fetid wind blew unceasingly. It looked like a black cloud that had taken the shape of some amorphous sea creature. Its roiling center was fringed with lazily unfolding veils of shadow-stuff. It seethed and swirled like the legendary Maelstrom, supposed to gyrate somewhere off the Arctic coasts of Sigurd's Vanaheitn.

Rapt with fascination and dread, Sigurd watched the Thing. It held his gaze with hypnotic fixity, as the cold eye of the serpent was fabled to fascinate the passing bird.

With a chill of horror, the old seafarer realized that this thing of darkness fed upon the life-force released from the bodies of the sacrificial victims. Somehow it drank up and put to use the vitality released by the knives of the red-armed priests. He watched as the high priest fed it, lifting heart after heart toward the smoky cloud.

Then, too, Sigurd realized the meaning of the cryptic symbolism of the ancient Atlanteans. Their emblem of the Black Kraken, which the simple thought to represent a mere giant devilfish, actually depicted this pulsing, growing, black cloud of terror. He remembered the symbol of the Black Kraken that had adorned the prow of the green Antillian galley, which they had destroyed on their way to this accursed isle. The Black Kraken was Xotli, the Demon of Darkness, whereof the old myths whispered!

Sigurd grimly squared his jaw, but within him his courage withered. Had he but guessed the secret hidden behind that grim symbolism, never would he have come so blithely hither on this rash voyage, to end atop a blood-soaked altar beneath a hovering, vampiric Thing from beyond.

One by one, the line of silent men dully shuffled forward. The steep stone stair that led up the side of the ziggurat grew nearer and nearer. Above, the hovering shape of darkness pulsed. It grew larger and larger, darker and darker.

Strangely, none of the sacrificial victims so much as tried to escape. They stood in line with heads bowed or thrown back to stare upwards, shuffling forward. A dull, drugged weariness hung over their spirits.

Not that a break for freedom would have accomplished anything. They were chained at neck and wrist with unbreakable glass bonds and guarded by lines of wary brown warriors with whips and glass-bladed pikes and swords. Lethargically, they moved like sheep to the slaughter.

Perhaps it was some psychic force exerted by the demon above, or some enchantment cast over them by the swaying chorus of priests, who stared up with glazed eyes and slack jaws at their demon-god. Whatever the reason, none sought to elude the bloody knife, which endlessly rose and fell beneath the shadow of the watchful cloud.

Body after body, its chest a gory hole and its limbs flopping, was dragged from the altar stone and dropped by acolytes into the dark mouth of a shaft, which opened to one side of the top of the pyramid. As this was done, a new sacrifice was siezed. Four priests took hold of his limbs. A fifth unlocked his bonds, while the sacrificer leaned over to dedicate the victim's life to Xotli. The knife-bearing arm rose and fell; the blood fountained; the heart was held up; another flopping corpse was dragged away to the mouth of the well.

At the head of the line of the pirates, Sigurd, as he slowly climbed the stair, did not regret being the first to go. Since Conan had gone, the responsibilities of command had fallen to him; and it behoved the chief to set an example of grim courage to his men.

At last came Sigurd's turn. The black vortex was terribly near. He could feel its cold radiance, and deep in his soul he sensed the probing gaze of its hidden eye, lusting for his life and manhood.

The masked priests confronted him. They were stripped to the waist; their lean, brown torsos were splashed with crimson. Their talon-like hands sank into his flesh as they dragged his ponderous bulk across the wet stone. Their eyes were glazed and dull, their look withdrawn.

Lying on his back and staring up at the hovering darkness, Sigurd heard the click as his manacles and neck-ring were unlocked. Hard claws clutched his wrists and ankles. Now the sacrificer came into view, his face masked by a carven devil's head, leering out of a mass of brilliant emerald feathers. The gaunt, bloodsoaked arm reached down to mark his hairy chest. Then the other hand rose into sight, clutching the haft of the glassy knife. The arm swung up against the ebon mass. It started down ...

Then it stopped. In a hissing puff, Sigurd expelled the breath he had unconsciously held.

The priest stood stiffly against the sky, his plumed head turned like that of a startled hawk. Strange sounds came up to Sigurd from below - sounds like the thunder of an enormous bell, tolling notes of doom. From his throne, the hierarch stopped his incantation to shout down a question. Then came a loud rustle, as if all the AntiUians had sucked in their breath at once. This was followed by an outburst of shrieks.

The sacrificial priest wavered, staring downward at something in the square below. Sigurd heard a deep, groaning, sonorous bellow - a sound like the grunt of a bull crocodile in one of the coastal rivers of Kush, but longer and louder.

The four priests holding Sigurd released his limbs to gawk at the spectacle below, snatching at one another's arms, pointing, and gabbling excitedly. As they did so, the pirates snapped out of their trancelike state. Whether this resulted from the sudden cessation of the hymns wafting up from below, or from the distraction of the archpriest's attention, or even from the wavering of the concentration of the black thing above, none could say. But, whatever the cause, the hypnotic spell that bound them was shattered.

Sigurd rolled off the sacrificial altar. Yasunga, white teeth flashing in his black face, swung his heavy manacles in a glittering curve, which caught the distracted sacrificer on the side of the head and hurled him, bleeding and unconscious., to the pavement.

Meanwhile Sigurd, thinking faster than he ever had in his life, hurled himself upon the priest who held the keys to the manacles. The northerner's hairy hands fastened upon the scrawny neck. As he bore the befeathered figure to the ground, his fingers dug into the priest's throat and shut off his windpipe.