Conan the Buccaneer

Chapter Fifteen: THE BLACK LABYRINTH

As she left the disciplinary chamber, Chabela hesitated. Never having been in this part of the palace, she did not know which way to go. She was, however, fiercely determined to avoid recapture at any cost.

Peering down the empty, stone-lined corridor, she decided that she must be in the crypts rumored to lie beneath the palace of the Amazon queen. These chambers, she understood, were jealously guarded against intruders; she might well, therefore, run into a guard at any moment. Choosing a corridor that seemed to slope upward, she set out at a rapid pace.

The silence was complete, save for the distant drip of water and occasional y the scuttle of tiny claws. At long intervals, a torch of oil-soaked wood, set in a bracket of greened bronze, illumined the corridor with a fitful yellow light But so far apart were these torches that between them the darkness thickened almost to utter blackness. In these dark stretches, Chabela glimpsed a pair of eyes like ruby chips at ground level, as scurrying rodents paused to stare at her.

In the sinister silence, the naked girl glided like a white phantom through the gloom, her nerves stretched taut with terror. She felt the pressure of unseen eyes … or was it only her own nerves?

The corridor curved and angled and forked. Forced to guess which way to take, Chabela soon realized that she was lost and wandering at random. She could no doubt retrace her steps, but that would only bring her back into Nzinga's dreaded clutches. There was nothing to do but keep on, praying to Mitra to lead her back into the open air.

After more wanderings, Chabela saw that she had reached the dungeon area. On either hand stood copper-barred cell doors. In the gloom of the cells behind lay half-seen captive things, some of which moaned or sobbed but most of which were silent.

The girl peered into the first few cells she passed, but the sights she glimpsed were so repulsive that thereafter she averted her eyes and kept them on the path before her. Some of the prisoners were emaciated to skeletons, as by years of starvation. Some stared blankly from mad eyes out of matted hair. Bodies were scabrous with sores and coated with filth. Some had died, and the scavenger rats had stripped the scrawny flesh from their bones, leaving only skeletons.

Turning a curve in the corridor, Chabela was astonished to come upon a cell containing Conan the Cimmerian.

His massive body sprawled on thick straw in one of the cells. She stopped dead, wondering if she had gone mad or if it was truly the burly buccaneer who lay therein.

It was indeed the Cimmerian. At first she thought him dead, he lay so still.

Then, as her eyes became accustomed to the gloom of the cell, she observed the rise and fall of his mighty chest. He was evidently unconscious.

Hesitantly she called his name, but this elicited nothing but a snore from the recumbent barbarian. She tested the cell door; it was securely locked.

Chabela lingered, wondering what to do. At any moment, Nzinga's guards might come clanking around the curve of the corridor and find her. The wise course would be to press on … yet she could not abandon to his fate the redoubtable buccaneer who had rescued her from the Nameless Isle.

Again she called his name in a desperate whisper. Then her eyes lighted upon an earthenware jug, standing against the wall. A probing finger discovered that it contained cold water. It must be the water that was doled out daily to the wretches in the cells.

Chabela hoisted the pot in her arms and brought it to Conan's cell. Luckily, the unconscious Cimmerian had been flung into the cell in such a way that his upturned face lay near the bars.

The Zingaran girl therefore was able to pour the contents of the jug through the bars and on the sleeping Cimmerian's face. Coughing, sputtering, and growling, Conan came back to a groggy awareness. With a groan, he heaved himself up to a sitting posture glaring blearily about.

"What in Ymir's frozen hells …" he grumbled. Then his dull gaze fastened itself on the pale, frightened face of the naked Zingaran princess, and he came fully awake.

"You? What in Crom's name is happening, girl?" he growled. Staring about with a puzzled expression, he continued: "Where in the eleven scarlet hells are we? What's been going on? My skull feels as if all the demons of the Pit had been kicking it around…"

In low, terse words, the girl described her recent misadventures. Conan's lionlike gaze narrowed as he reflectively rubbed a stubbled jaw.

"So Nzinga drugged me, did she? I might have expected it, curse her jealous black heart! She didn't want me awake lest I interfere with the punishment she planned for you. She must have decided that my quarters in the harem were not secure enough and bade her servants bear me down here for safekeeping." He fingered the straw on which he had lain and gave a low rumble of laughter. "This straw is luxury by her ideas. It looks as if she meant to keep me on as her fancy man, to service her after she'd gotten rid of you."

"What can we do, Captain Conan?" asked Chabela, almost in a whimper. The ordeal had nearly exhausted her considerable store of courage.

"Do?" Conan grunted and spat. "Make a break for it! Stand clear of the door."

"What do you? I have no key …"

"To hell with keys!" he snarled, setting his huge hands on one of the bars.

"These bars are of soft copper and have been here for ages. Corrosion has bitten into them; and, if it has gone far enough, I need no keys. Stand back, now!"

Setting one foot against a bar, Conan bent his shoulders and heaved on the bar he grasped, which was green with verdigris. All of the coiled, terrific strength of his back, shoulders, and brawny arms went into one titanic effort. His face darkened; his breath came hoarsely. Drops of sweat on his broad forehead glistened in the torchlight. His thews stood out in bronze relief, like woven metal cables.

Chabela drew in her breath and bit her lip.

With a faint scream, the bar pulled out of the lower socket in the door frame; the metal bent and yielded. Then, with a thunderous crack, the bar broke. The report was like the snapping of a great whip.

Conan dropped the bar with a muffled clang on the straw. He sagged against the wall, drinking in great lungfulls of air. Then he squeezed through the gap in the bars, turning sideways to do so, and stood in the corridor.

Chabela stared wide-eyed. "Never have I seen such strength!" she breathed.

Conan massaged his arms. "I shouldn't care to have to try that every day," he said with a grin. Then, peering along the corridor: "Which way? How do we get out of here? And who's been whipping you? Nzinga?"

She nodded and in quick, terse words outlined the events that had taken place since the incident in the dining chamber. Conan growled, his eyes kindling.

"A strange tale," he said, "and the strangest part of it is this magical apparition of a Stygian sorcerer … for such I take him to be. I have met his kind in my wanderings before. But I wonder who he is, who came to seize the Crown? You're sure it was not that skull-faced dog Menkara? He was skulking at Zarono's heels in Kordava."

Chabela shook her head, so that her black, glossy curls tossed. "Nay. I saw Menkara oft on the Wastrel and should know him at once. He is a gaunt, sad-looking fellow of medium size, who speaks in a dull, listless voice as if the world utterly wearied him. This man, albeit methinks of the same race, was very different: much taller, powerful, not unhandsome, with an air of vitality and command."

Only half heeding, Conan sent his glance roving the corridor. He intuitively felt the need for action. If they were ever to escape from the city of warrior women, it must be now, while Queen Nzinga lay unconscious. How much longer she would slumber under the power of the Stygian's green ray, he had no way of knowing.

Conan led the way off down the winding corridor. He paused to pull from its bracket a heavy torch. He hefted it with an appreciative grunt. At least, he had something to defend himself with. The torch was a club of a dense, glossy wood, the charred upper end of which had been wrapped round and round in bands of coarsely woven cloth, which in turn had been soaked in some viscous oil. The oil sent up a smoky, wavering yellow flame. One of Chabela's tasks as a slave had been to replace these torches as they burnt out around the palace and to re-wrap and rekindle those that had become exhausted.

An unexpected turn in the corridor brought Conan and the princess face to face with a squad of woman soldiers. They were big, strapping females, with strong arms, flat pendulous breasts, and broad-cheeked, slit-eyed faces. They wore crude breastplates of leather, to which squares of bronze were tied by thongs, and kilts of leathern straps similarly studded. They carried throwing-spears and short, bronze-bladed swords.

"Seize them!" yelled a harsh voice, and Conan looked beyond the grim rank of Amazons to see Nzinga herself. The queen's handsome black face was distorted with fury. He grinned mirthlessly; there was no way out of this but to fight.

Conan was a barbarian from Cimmeria, and to him many of the ways of the South seemed soft, effeminate, and corrupt. But he was not without a certain rude chivalry of his own, and he did not like the idea of fighting and perhaps slaying women.

Still, when it was a question of either fighting or being recaptured, he fought.

He did not await attack but sprang among the Amazons with one great bound, striking right and left with the blazing torch. In a trice he had felled two of the hulking woman warriors, whom he laid out of action with cracked skulls. A snarling Amazon lunged at him with a short sword; he shoved the torch into her face. She fell back with a scream, beating at her woolly hair as it blazed up.

An assegai was thrust at his midriff; he knocked it out of its wielder's hand and sent it clanging against the wall. Moving with the speed of a pouncing panther, he swung the torch up for another blow … and froze.

Nzinga had circled around the melee of struggling warriors. Now she stood with one brawny arm around the naked Zingaran princess. Her free hand held a needle-pointed dagger against Chabela's throat.

''Throw down that torch, white dog, or your bitch will choke on her own blood!" the Amazon queen commanded in a cold, deadly voice.

Conan cursed luridly, but there was nothing else to do. The torch clattered to the flagstones.

The Amazons surrounded him. Thick cords of woven dried grass were wound around his wrists, back and forth. His arms were lashed to his sides with the same material. The metallurgy of the backward Amazon country was still not up to the manufacture of complex fetters and locks. The locks on the cell doors, Conan supposed, had been inherited from the original builders of the city.

"He is safe now, O Queen," boomed a woman warrior. "Why not put him to the sword at once?"

Nzinga looked over Conan's sweat-glistening torso appraisingly. "Nay," she said at last. "I have another doom in mind for the traitor. He who spurns my love shall not be indifferent to my hatred. Put them both in the slave pen until dawn. Then take both and cast them to the kulamtu trees!"

It seemed to Conan that, at the mention of that unfamiliar name, even the hardened, burly Amazons flinched. But what could be so terrible about a mere tree?