Kull Exile Of Atlantis

The Cat and the Skull

The Cat and the Skull

King Kull went with Tu, chief councillor of the throne, to see the talking cat of Delcardes, for though a cat may look at a king, it is not given every king to look at a cat like Delcardes’. So Kull forgot the death-threat of Thulsa Doom the necromancer and went to Delcardes.

Kull was skeptical and Tu was wary and suspicious without knowing why, but years of counter-plot and intrigue had soured him. He swore testily that a talking cat was a snare and a fraud, a swindle and a delusion and maintained that should such a thing exist, it was a direct insult to the gods, who ordained that only man should enjoy the power of speech.

But Kull knew that in the old times beasts had talked to men for he had heard the legends, handed down from his barbarian ancestors. So he was skeptical but open to conviction.

Delcardes helped the conviction. She lounged with supple ease upon her silk couch, herself like a great beautiful feline, and looked at Kull from under long drooping lashes, which lended unimaginable charm to her narrow, piquantly slanted eyes.

Her lips were full and red and usually, as at present, curved in a faint enigmatical smile and her silken garments and ornaments of gold and gems hid little of her glorious figure.

But Kull was not interested in women. He ruled Valusia but for all that he was an Atlantean and a ferocious savage in the eyes of his subjects. War and conquest held his attention, together with keeping his feet on the ever rocking throne of the ancient empire, and the task of learning the ways, customs and thoughts of the people he ruled–and the threats of Thulsa Doom.

To Kull, Delcardes was a mysterious and queenly figure, alluring, yet surrounded by a haze of ancient wisdom and womanly magic.

To Tu, chief councillor, she was a woman and therefore the latent base of intrigue and danger.

To Ka-nu, Pictish ambassador and Kull’s closest adviser, she was an eager child, parading under the effect of her show-acting; but Ka-nu was not there when Kull came to see the talking cat.

The cat lolled on a silken cushion, on a couch of her own and surveyed the king with inscrutable eyes. Her name was Saremes and she had a slave who stood behind her, ready to do her bidding, a lanky man who kept the lower part of his face half concealed by a thin veil which fell to his chest.

“King Kull,” said Delcardes, “I crave a boon of you–before Saremes begins to speak–when I must be silent.”

“You may speak,” Kull answered.

The girl smiled eagerly, and clasped her hands.

“Let me marry Kulra Thoom of Zarfhaana!”

Tu broke in as Kull was about to speak.

“My lord, this matter has been thrashed out at lengths before! I thought there was some purpose in requesting this visit! This–this girl has a strain of royal blood in her and it is against the custom of Valusia that royal women should marry foreigners of lower rank.”

“But the king can rule otherwise,” pouted Delcardes.

“My lord,” said Tu, spreading his hands as one in the last stages of nervous irritation, “if she marries thus it is like to cause war and rebellion and discord for the next hundred years.”

He was about to plunge into a dissertation on rank, genealogy and history but Kull interrupted, his short stock of patience exhausted:

“Valka and Hotath! Am I an old woman or a priest to be bedevilled with such affairs? Settle it between yourselves and vex me no more with questions of mating! By Valka, in Atlantis men and women marry whom they please and none else.”

Delcardes pouted a little, made a face at Tu who scowled back, then smiled sunnily and turned on her couch with a lissome movement.

“Talk to Saremes, Kull, she will grow jealous of me.”

Kull eyed the cat uncertainly. Her fur was long, silky and grey, her eyes slanting and mysterious.

“She is very young, Kull, yet she is very old,” said Delcardes. “She is a cat of the Old Race who lived to be thousands of years old. Ask her her age, Kull.”

“How many years have you seen, Saremes?” asked Kull idly.

“Valusia was young when I was old,” the cat answered in a clear though curiously timbred voice.

Kull started violently.

“Valka and Hotath!” he swore. “She talks!”

Delcardes laughed softly in pure enjoyment but the expression of the cat never altered.

“I talk, I think, I know, I am,” she said. “I have been the ally of queens and the councillor of kings ages before even the white beaches of Atlantis knew your feet, Kull of Valusia. I saw the ancestors of the Valusians ride out of the far east to trample down the Old Race and I was here when the Old Race came up out of the oceans so many eons ago that the mind of man reels when seeking to measure them. Older am I than Thulsa Doom, whom few men have ever seen.

“I have seen empires rise and kingdoms fall and kings ride in on their steeds and out on their shields. Aye, I have been a goddess in my time and strange were the neophytes who bowed before me and terrible were the rites which were performed in my worship to pleasure me. For of eld beings exalted my kind; beings as strange as their deeds.”

“Can you read the stars and foretell events?” Kull’s barbarian mind leaped at once to material ideas.

“Aye; the books of the past and the future are open to me and I tell man what is good for him to know.”

“Then tell me,” said Kull, “where I misplaced the secret letter from Kanu yesterday.”

“You thrust it into the bottom of your dagger scabbard and then instantly forgot it,” the cat replied.

Kull started, snatched out his dagger and shook the sheath. A thin strip of folded parchment tumbled out.

“Valka and Hotath!” he swore. “Saremes, you are a witch of cats! Mark ye, Tu!”

But Tu’s lips were pressed in a straight disapproving line and he eyed Delcardes darkly.

She returned his stare guilelessly and he turned to Kull in irritation.

“My lord, consider! This is all mummery of some sort.”

“Tu, none saw me hide that letter for I myself had forgotten.”

“Lord king, any spy might–”

“Spy? Be not a greater fool than you were born, Tu. Shall a cat set spies to watch me hide letters?”

Tu sighed. As he grew older it was becoming increasingly difficult to refrain from showing exasperation toward kings.

“My lord, give thought to the humans who may be behind the cat!”

“Lord Tu,” said Delcardes in a tone of gentle reproach, “you put me to shame and you offend Saremes.”

Kull felt vaguely angered at Tu.

“At least, Tu,” said he, “the cat talks; that you cannot deny.”

“There is some trickery,” Tu stubbornly maintained. “Man talks; beasts may not.”

“Not so,” said Kull, himself convinced of the reality of the talking cat and anxious to prove the rightness of his belief. “A lion talked to Kambra and birds have spoken to the old men of the sea-mountain tribes, telling them where game was hidden.

“None denies that beasts talk among themselves. Many a night have I lain on the slopes of the forest covered hills or out on the grassy savannahs and have heard the tigers roaring to one another across the star-light. Then why should some beast not learn the speech of man? There have been times when I could almost understand the roaring of the tigers. The tiger is my totem and is tambu to me save in self defense,” he added irrelevantly.

Tu squirmed. This talk of totem and tambu was good enough in a savage chief, but to hear such remarks from the king of Valusia irked him extremely.

“My lord,” said he, “a cat is not a tiger.”

“Very true,” said Kull, “and this one is wiser than all tigers.”

“That is naught but truth,” said Saremes calmly.

“Lord Chancellor, would you believe then, if I told you what was at this moment transpiring at the royal treasury?”

“No!” Tu snarled. “Clever spies may learn anything as I have found.”

“No man can be convinced when he will not,” said Saremes imperturbably, quoting a very old Valusian saying. “Yet know, lord Tu, that a surplus of twenty gold tals has been discovered and a courier is even now hastening through the streets to tell you of it. Ah,” as a step sounded in the corridor without, “even now he comes.”

A slim courtier, clad in the gay garments of the royal treasury, entered, bowing deeply, and craved permission to speak. Kull having granted it, he said:

“Mighty king and lord Tu, a surplus of twenty tals of gold has been found in the royal monies.”

Delcardes laughed and clapped her hands delightedly but Tu merely scowled.

“When was this discovered?”

“A scant half hour ago.”

“How many have been told of it?”

“None, my lord. Only I and the Royal Treasurer have known until just now when I told you, my lord.”

“Humph!” Tu waved him aside sourly. “Begone. I will see about this matter later.”

“Delcardes,” said Kull, “this cat is yours, is she not?”

“Lord king,” answered the girl, “no one owns Saremes. She only bestows on me the honor of her presence; she is a guest. As for the rest she is her own mistress and has been for a thousand years.”

“I would that I might keep her in the palace,” said Kull.

“Saremes,” said Delcardes deferentially, “the king would have you as his guest.”

“I will go with the king of Valusia,” said the cat with dignity, “and remain in the royal palace until such time as it shall pleasure me to go elsewhere. For I am a great traveller, Kull, and it pleases me at times to go out over the world-path and walk the streets of cities where in ages gone I have roamed forests, and to tread the sands of deserts where long ago I trod imperial streets.”

So Saremes the talking cat came to the royal palace of Valusia. Her slave accompanied her and she was given a spacious chamber, lined with fine couches and silken pillows. The best viands of the royal table were placed before her daily and all the household of the king did homage to her except Tu who grumbled to see a cat exalted, even a talking cat. Saremes treated him with amused contempt but admitted Kull into a level of dignified equality.

She quite often came into his throne chamber, borne on a silken cushion by her slave who must always accompany her, no matter where she went.

At other times Kull came into her chamber and they talked into the dim hours of dawn and many were the tales she told him and ancient the wisdom that she imparted. Kull listened with interest and attention for it was evident that this cat was wiser far than many of his councillors, and had gained more antique wisdom than all of them together. Her words were pithy and oracular and she refused to prophesy beyond minor affairs taking place in the every day life of the palace, and kingdom, save that she warned him against Thulsa Doom who had sent a threat to Kull.

“For,” said she, “I who have lived more years than you shall live minutes, know that man is better without knowledge of things to come, for what is to be will be, and man can neither avert not hasten. It is better to go in the dark when the road must pass a lion and there is no other road.”

“Yet,” said Kull, “if what must be is to be–a thing which I doubt–and a man be told what things shall come to pass and his arm weakened or strengthened thereby, then was not that too, foreordained?”

“If he was ordained to be told,” said Saremes, adding to Kull’s perplexity and doubt. “However, not all of life’s roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.”

“Then,” said Kull dubiously, “all things are not destined, if there be more than one road for a man to follow. And how can events then be prophesied truly?”

“Life has many roads, Kull,” answered Saremes. “I stand at the cross-roads of the world and I know what lies down each road. Still, not even the gods know what road a man will take, whether the right hand or the left hand, when he comes to the dividing of the ways, and once started upon a road he cannot retrace his steps.”

“Then, in Valka’s name,” said Kull, “why not point out to me the perils or the advantages of each road as it comes and aid me in choosing?”

“Because there are bounds set upon the powers of such as I,” the cat replied, “lest we hinder the workings of the alchemy of the gods. We may not brush the veil entirely aside for human eyes, lest the gods take our power from us and lest we do harm to man. For though there are many roads at each cross-roads, still a man must take one of those and sometimes one is no better than another. So Hope flickers her lamp along one road and man follows, though that road may be the foulest of all.”

Then she continued, seeing Kull found it difficult to understand.

“You see, lord king, that our powers must have limits, else we might grow too powerful and threaten the gods. So a mystic spell is laid upon us and while we may open the books of the past, we may but grant flying glances of the future, through the mist that veils it.”

Kull felt somehow that the argument of Saremes was rather flimsy and illogical, smacking of witch-craft and mummery, but with Saremes’ cold, oblique eyes gazing unwinkingly at him, he was not prone to offer any objections, even had he thought of any.

“Now,” said the cat, “I will draw aside the veil for an instant to your own good–let Delcardes marry Kulra Thoom.”

Kull rose with an impatient twitch of his mighty shoulders.

“I will have naught to do with a woman’s mating. Let Tu attend to it.”

Yet Kull slept on the thought and as Saremes wove the advice craftily into her philosophizing and moralizing in days to come, Kull weakened.

A strange sight it was, indeed, to see Kull, his chin resting on his great fist, leaning forward and drinking in the distinct intonations of the cat Saremes as she lay curled on her silken cushion, or stretched languidly at full length–as she talked of mysterious and fascinating subjects, her eyes glinting strangely and her lips scarcely moving, or not at all, while the slave Kuthulos stood behind her like a statue, motionless and speechless.

Kull highly valued her opinions and he was prone to ask her advice–which she gave warily or not at all–on matters of state. Still, Kull found that what she advised usually coincided with his private wishes and he began to wonder if she were not a mind reader also.

Kuthulos irked him with his gauntness, his motionlessness and his silence but Saremes would have none other to attend her. Kull strove to pierce the veil that masked the man’s features, but though it seemed thin enough, he could tell nothing of the face beneath and out of courtesy to Saremes, never asked Kuthulos to unveil.

Kull came to the chamber of Saremes one day and she looked at him with enigmatical eyes. The masked slave stood statue like behind her.

“Kull,” said she, “again I will tear the veil for you; Brule, the Pictish Spear-slayer, warrior of Ka-nu and your friend, has just been haled beneath the surface of the Forbidden Lake by a grisly monster.”

Kull sprang up, cursing in rage and alarm.

“Ha, Brule? Valka’s name, what was he doing about the Forbidden Lake?”

“He was swimming there. Hasten, you may yet save him, even though he be borne to the Enchanted Land which lies below the Lake.”

Kull whirled toward the door. He was startled but not so much as he would have been had the swimmer been someone else, for he knew the reckless irreverence of the Pict, chief among Valusia’s most powerful allies.

He started to shout for guards when Saremes’ voice stayed him:

“Nay, my lord. You had best go alone. Not even your command might make men accompany you into the waters of that grim lake and by the custom of Valusia, it is death for any man to enter there save the king.”

“Aye, I will go alone,” said Kull, “and thus save Brule from the anger of the people, should he chance to escape the monsters; inform Ka-nu!”

Kull, discouraging respectful inquiries with wordless snarls, mounted his great stallion and rode out of Valusia at full speed. He rode alone and he ordered none to follow him. That which he had to do, he could do alone, and he did not wish anyone to see when he brought Brule or Brule’s corpse out of the Forbidden Lake. He cursed the reckless inconsideration of the Pict and he cursed the tambu which hung over the Lake, the violation of which might cause rebellion among the Valusians.

Twilight was stealing down from the mountains of Zalgara when Kull halted his horse on the shores of the lake that lay amid a great lonely forest. There was certainly nothing forbidding in its appearance, for its waters spread blue and placid from beach to wide white beach and the tiny islands rising above its bosom seemed like gems of emerald and jade. A faint shimmering mist rose from it, enhancing the air of lazy unreality which lay about the regions of the lake. Kull listened intently for a moment and it seemed to him as though faint and far away music breathed up through the sapphire waters.

He cursed impatiently, wondering if he were beginning to be bewitched, and flung aside all garments and ornaments except his girdle, loin clout and sword. He waded out into the shimmery blueness until it lapped his thighs, then knowing that the depth swiftly increased, he drew a deep breath and dived.

As he swam down through the sapphire glimmer, he had time to reflect that this was probably a fool’s errand. He might have taken time to find from Saremes just where Brule had been swimming when attacked and whether he was destined to rescue the warrior or not. Still, he thought that the cat might not have told him, and even if she had assured him of failure, he would have attempted what he was now doing, anyway. So there was truth in Saremes’ saying that men were better untold then.

As for the location of the lake-battle, the monster might have dragged Brule anywhere. He intended to explore the lake bed until–

Even as he ruminated thus, a shadow flashed by him, a vague shimmer in the jade and sapphire shimmer of the lake. He was aware that other shadows swept by him on all sides, but he could not make out their form.

Far beneath him he began to see the glimmer of the lake bottom which seemed to glow with a strange radiance. Now the shadows were all about him; they wove a serpentine about and in front of him, an ever-changing thousand-hued glittering web of color. The water here burned topaz and the things wavered and scintillated in its faery splendor. Like the shades and shadows of colors they were, vague and unreal, yet opaque and gleaming.

However, Kull, deciding that they had no intention of attacking him, gave them no more attention but directed his gaze on the lake floor, which his feet just then struck, lightly. He started, and could have sworn that he had landed on a living creature for he felt a rhythmic movement beneath his bare feet. The faint glow was evident there at the bottom of the lake–as far as he could see stretching away on all sides until it faded into the lambent sapphire shadows, the lake floor was one solid level of fire, that faded and glowed with unceasing regularity. Kull bent closer–the floor was covered by a sort of short moss-like substance which shone like white flame. It was as if the lake bed were covered with myriads of fire-flies which raised and lowered their wings together. And this moss throbbed beneath his feet like a living thing.

Now Kull began to swim upward again. Raised among the sea-mountains of ocean-girt Atlantis, he was like a sea-creature himself. As much at home in the water as any Lemurian, he could remain under the surface twice as long as the ordinary swimmer, but this lake was deep and he wished to conserve his strength.

He came to the top, filled his enormous chest with air and dived again. Again the shadows swept about him, almost dazzling his eyes with their ghostly gleams. He swam faster this time and having reached the bottom, he began to walk along it, as fast as the clinging substance about his limbs would allow, the while the fire-moss breathed and glowed and the color things flashed about him and monstrous, nightmare shadows fell across his shoulder upon the burning floor, flung by unseen beings.

The moss was littered by the skulls and the bones of men who had dared the Forbidden Lake and suddenly with a silent swirl of the waters, a thing rushed upon Kull. At first the king thought it to be a huge octopus for the body was that of an octopus, with long waving tentacles, but as it charged upon him he saw it had legs like a man and a hideous semi-human face leered at him from among the writhing snaky arms of the monster.

Kull braced his feet and as he felt the cruel tentacles whip about his limbs, he thrust his sword with cool accuracy into the midst of that demoniac face and the creature lumbered down and died at his feet with grisly soundless gibbering. Blood spread like a mist about him and Kull thrust strongly against the floor with his legs and shot upward.

He burst into the fast fading light and even as he did a great form came skimming across the water toward him–a water spider, but this one was larger than a horse and its great cold eyes gleamed hellishly. Kull, keeping himself afloat with his feet and one hand, raised his sword and as the spider rushed in, he cleft it half way through the body and it sank silently.

A slight noise made him turn and another, larger than the first was almost upon him. This one flung over the king’s arms and shoulders, great strands of clinging web that would have meant doom for any but a giant. But Kull burst the grim shackles as if they had been strings and seizing a leg of the thing as it towered above him, he thrust the monster through again and again till it weakened in his grasp and floated away, reddening the blue waters.

“Valka!” muttered the king, “I am not like to go without employment here. Yet these things be easy to slay–how could they have overcome Brule, who in all the Seven Kingdoms is second only to me in battle-might?”

But Kull was to find that grimmer spectres than these haunted the death-ridden abysses of Forbidden Lake. Again he dived and this time only the color-shadows and the bones of forgotten men met his glance. Again he rose for air and for the fourth time he dived.

He was not far from one of the islands and as he swam downward he wondered what strange things were hidden by the dense emerald foliage which cloaked these islands. Legend said that temples and shrines reared there that were never built by human hands and that on certain nights the lake beings came out of the deeps to enact eery rites there.

The rush came just as his feet struck the moss. It came from behind and Kull, warned by some primal instinct, whirled just in time to see a great form loom over him, a form neither man nor beast but horribly compounded of both–to feel gigantic fingers close on arm, and shoulder.

He struggled savagely but the thing held his sword arm helpless and its talons sank deeply into his left forearm. With a volcanic wrench he twisted about so that he could at least see his attacker. The thing was something like a monstrous shark but a long cruel horn curved like a saber jutted up from its snout and it had four arms, human in shape but inhuman in size and strength and in the crooked talons of the fingers.

With two arms the monster held Kull helpless and with the other two it bent his head back, to break his spine. But not even such a grim being as this might so easily conquer Kull of Atlantis. A wild rage surged up in him and the king of Valusia went berserk.

Bracing his feet against the yielding moss, he tore his left arm free with a heave and wrench of his great shoulders. With cat-like speed he sought to shift the sword from right hand to left, and failing in this, struck savagely at the monster with clenched fist. But the mocking sapphirean stuff about him foiled him, breaking the force of his blow. The shark-man lowered his snout but before he could strike upward Kull gripped the horn with his left hand and held fast.

Then followed a test of might and endurance. Kull, unable to move with any speed in the water, knew his only hope was to keep in close and wrestle with his foe in such manner as to counterbalance the monster’s quickness. He strove desperately to tear his sword arm loose and the shark-man was forced to grasp it will all four of his hands. Kull gripped the horn and dared not let go lest he be disembowelled with its terrible upward thrust, and the shark-man dared not release with a single hand the arm that held Kull’s long sword.

So they wrenched and wrestled and Kull saw that he was doomed if it went on in this manner. Already he was beginning to suffer for want of air. The gleam in the cold eyes of the shark-man told that he too recognized the fact that he had but to hold Kull below the surface until he drowned.

A desperate plight indeed, for any man. But Kull of Atlantis was no ordinary man. Trained from babyhood in a hard and bloody school, with steel muscles and dauntless brain bound together by the co-ordination that makes the superfighter, he added to this a courage which never faltered and a tigerish rage which on occasion swept him up to superhuman deeds.

So now, conscious of his swiftly approaching doom and goaded to frenzy by his helplessness, he decided upon action as desperate as his need. He released the monster’s horn, at the same time bending his body as far back as he could and gripping the nearest arm of the thing with the free hand.

Instantly the shark-man struck, his horn ploughing along Kull’s thigh and then–the luck of Atlantis!–wedging fast in Kull’s heavy girdle. And as he tore it free, Kull sent his mighty strength through the fingers that held the monster’s arm, and crushed clammy flesh and inhuman bone like rotten fruit between them.

The shark-man’s mouth gaped silently with the torment and he struck again wildly. Kull avoided the blow and losing their balance they went down together, half-buoyed by the jade surge in which they wallowed. And as they tossed there, Kull tore his sword arm from the weakening grip and striking upward, split the monster open.

The whole battle had consumed only a very brief time but to Kull, as he swam upward, his head singing and a great weight seeming to press his ribs, it seemed like hours. He saw dimly that the lake floor shelved suddenly upward close at hand and knew that it sloped to an island, the water became alive about him and he felt himself lapped from shoulder to heel in gigantic coils which even steel muscles could not break. His consciousness was fading–he felt himself borne along at terrific speed–there was a sound as of many bells–then suddenly he was above water and his tortured lungs were drinking in great draughts of air. He was whirling along through utter darkness and he had time only to take a long breath before he was again swept under.

Again light glowed about him and he saw the fire-moss throbbing far below. He was in the grasp of a great serpent who had flung a few lengths of sinuous body about him like huge cables and was now bearing him to what destination Valka alone knew.

Kull did not struggle, reserving his strength. If the snake did not keep him so long under water that he died, there would no doubt be a chance of battle in the creature’s lair or wherever he was being taken. As it was, Kull’s limbs were pinioned so close that he could no more free an arm than he could have flown.

The serpent, racing through the blue deeps so swiftly, was the largest Kull had ever seen–a good two hundred feet of jade and golden scales–vividly and wonderfully colored. Its eyes, when they turned toward Kull, were like icy fire if such a thing can be. Even then Kull’s imaginative soul was struck with the bizarreness of the scene; that great green and gold form flying through the burning topaz of the lake, while the shadow-colors weaved dazzlingly about it.

The fire gemmed floor sloped upward again–either for an island or the lake shore–and a great cavern suddenly appeared before them. The snake glided into this–the fire-moss ceased and Kull found himself partly above the surface in unlighted darkness. He was borne along in this manner for what seemed a very long time, then the monster dived again.

Again they came up into light, but such light as Kull had never before seen. A luminous glow shimmered duskily over the face of the waters which lay dark and still. And Kull knew that he was in the Enchanted Domain under the bottom of Forbidden Lake for this was no earthly radiance; it was a black light, blacker than any darkness yet it lit the unholy waters so that he could see the dusky glimmer of them and his own dark reflection in them. The coils suddenly loosed from his limbs and he struck out for a vast bulk that loomed in the shadows in front of him.

Swimming strongly he approached, and saw that it was a great city. On a great level of black stone, it towered up and up until its sombre spires were lost in the blackness above the unhallowed light, which, black also, was yet of a different hue. Huge square-built massive buildings of mighty basaltic like blocks fronted him as he clambered out of the clammy waters and strode up the steps which were cut into the stone, like steps in a wharf, and between the buildings columns rose gigantically.

No gleam of earthly light lessened the grimness of this inhuman city but from its walls and towers the black light flowed out over the waters in vast throbbing waves.

Kull was aware that in a wide space before him, where the buildings swept away on each side, a huge concourse of beings confronted him. He blinked, striving to accustom his eyes to the strange illumination. The beings came closer and a whisper ran among them like the waving of grass in the night wind. They were light and shadowy, glimmering against the blackness of their city and their eyes were eery and luminous.

Then the king saw that one of their number stood in front of the rest. This one was much like a man and his bearded face was high and noble but a frown hovered over his magnificent brows.

“You come like the herald of all your race,” said this lake-man suddenly, “bloody and bearing a red sword.”

Kull laughed angrily for this smacked of injustice.

“Valka and Hotath!” said the king. “Most of this blood is mine own and was let by things of your cursed lake.”

“Death and ruin follow the course of your race,” said the lake-man sombrely. “Do we not know? Aye, we reigned in the Lake of blue waters before man-kind was even a dream of the gods.”

“None molests you–” began Kull.

“They fear to. In the old days men of the earth sought to invade our dark kingdom. And we slew them and there was war between the sons of men and the people of the lakes. And we came forth and spread terror among the earthlings for we knew that they bore only death for us and that they yielded only to slaying. And we wove spells and charms and burst their brains and shattered their souls with our magic so they begged for peace and it was so. The men of earth laid a tambu on this lake so that no man may come here save the king of Valusia. That was thousands of years ago. No man has ever come into the Enchanted Land and gone forth, save as a corpse floating up through the still waters of the upper lake. King of Valusia or whoever you be, you are doomed.”

Kull snarled in defiance.

“I sought not your cursed kingdom. I seek Brule the Spear-slayer whom you dragged down.”

“You lie,” the lake-man answered. “No man has dared this lake for over a hundred years. You come seeking treasure or to ravish and slay like all your bloody-handed kind. You die!”

And Kull felt the whisperings of magic charms about him; they filled the air and took physical form, floating in the shimmering light like wispy spider-webs, clutching at him with vague tentacles. But Kull swore impatiently and swept them aside and out of existence with his bare hand. For against the fierce elemental logic of the savage, the magic of decadency had no force.

“You are young and strong,” said the lake-king. “The rot of civilization has not yet entered your soul and our charms may not harm you, because you do not understand them. Then we must try other things.”

And the lake-beings about him drew daggers and moved upon Kull. Then the king laughed and set his back against a column, gripping his sword hilt until the muscles stood out on his right arm in great ridges.

“This is a game I understand, ghosts,” he laughed.

They halted.

“Seek not to evade your doom,” said the king of the lake, “for we are immortal and may not be slain by mortal arms.”

“You lie, now,” answered Kull with the craft of the barbarian, “for by your own words you feared the death my kind brought among you. You may live forever but steel can slay you. Take thought among yourselves. You are soft and weak and unskilled in arms; you bear your blades unfamiliarly. I was born and bred to slaying. You will slay me for there are thousands of you and I but one, yet your charms have failed and many of you shall die before I fall. I will slaughter you by the scores and the hundreds. Take thought, men of the lake, is my slaying worth the lives it will cost you?”

For Kull knew that beings who slay may be slain by steel and he was unafraid. A figure of threat and doom, bloody and terrible he loomed above them.

“Aye, consider,” he repeated. “Is it better that you should bring Brule to me and let us go, or that my corpse shall lie amid sword-torn heaps of your dead when the battle-shout is silent? Nay, there be Picts and Lemurians among my mercenaries who will follow my trail even into the Forbidden Lake and will drench the Enchanted Land with your gore if I die here. For they have their own tambus and they reck not of the tambus of the civilized races nor care they what may happen to Valusia but think only of me who am of barbarian blood like themselves.”

“The old world reels down the road to ruin and forgetfulness,” brooded the lake-king, “and we that were all powerful in by-gone days must brook to be bearded in our own kingdom by an arrogant savage. Swear that you will never set foot in Forbidden Lake again, and that you will never let the tambu be broken by others and you shall go free.”

“First bring the Spear-slayer to me.”

“No such man has ever come to this lake.”

“Nay? The cat Saremes told me–”

“Saremes? Aye, we knew her of old when she came swimming down through the green waters and abode for some centuries in the courts of the Enchanted Land; the wisdom of the ages is hers but I knew not that she spoke the speech of earthly men. Still, there is no such man here and I swear–”

“Swear not by gods or devils,” Kull broke in. “Give your word as a true man.”

“I give it,” said the lake-king and Kull believed for there was a majesty and a bearing about the being which made Kull feel strangely small and rude.

“And I,” said Kull, “give you my word–which has never been broken–that no man shall break the tambu or molest you in any way again.”

The lake-king replied with a stately inclination of his lordly head and a gesture of his hand.

“And I believe you, for you are different from any earthly man I ever knew. You are a real king and what is greater, a true man.”

Kull thanked him and sheathed his sword, turning toward the steps.

“Know ye how to gain the outer world, king of Valusia?”

“As to that,” answered Kull, “if I swim long enough I suppose I shall find the way. I know that the serpent brought me clear through at least one island and possibly many and that we swam in a cave for a long time.”

“You are bold,” said the lake-king, “but you might swim forever in the dark.”

He raised his hands and a behemoth swam to the foot of the steps.

“A grim steed,” said the lake-king, “but he will bear you safe to the very shore of the upper lake.”

“A moment,” said Kull. “Am I at present beneath an island or the mainland, or is this land in truth beneath the lake floor?”

“You are at the center of the universe as you are always. Time, place and space are illusions, having no existence save in the mind of man which must set limits and bounds in order to understand. There is only the underlying reality, of which all appearances are but outward manifestations, just as the upper lake is fed by the waters of this real one. Go now, king, for you are a true man even though you be the first wave of the rising tide of savagery which shall overwhelm the world ere it recedes.”

Kull listened respectfully, understanding little but realizing that this was high magic. He struck hands with the lake-king, shuddering a little at the feel of that which was flesh but not human flesh; then he looked once more at the great black buildings rearing silently and the murmuring moth-like forms among them, and he looked out over the shiny jet surface of the waters with the waves of black light crawling like spiders across it. And he turned and went down the stair to the water’s edge and sprang on the back of the behemoth.

Eons followed, of dark caves and rushing waters and the whisper of gigantic unseen monsters; sometimes above and sometimes below the surface, the behemoth bore the king and finally the fire-moss leaped up and they swept up through the blue of the burning water and Kull waded to land.

Kull’s stallion stood patiently where the king had left him and the moon was just rising over the lake, whereat Kull swore amazedly.

“A scant hour ago, by Valka, I dismounted here! I had thought that many hours and possibly days had passed since then.”

He mounted and rode toward the city of Valusia, reflecting that there might have been some meaning in the lake-king’s remarks about the illusion of time.

Kull was weary, angry and bewildered. The journey through the lake had cleansed him of the blood, but the motion of riding started the gash in his thigh to bleeding again, moreover the leg was stiff and irked him somewhat. Still, the main question that presented itself was that Saremes had lied to him and either through ignorance or through malicious forethought had come near to sending him to his death. For what reason?

Kull cursed, reflecting what Tu would say and the chancellor’s triumph. Still, even a talking cat might be innocently wrong but hereafter Kull determined to lay no weight to the words of such.

Kull rode into the silent silvery streets of the ancient city and the guard at the gate gaped at his appearance but wisely refrained from questioning.

He found the palace in an uproar. Swearing he stalked to his council chamber and thence to the chamber of the cat Saremes. The cat was there, curled imperturbably on her cushion, and grouped about the chamber, each striving to talk down the others, were Tu and the chief councillors. The slave Kuthulos was nowhere to be seen.

Kull was greeted by a wild acclamation of shouts and questions but he strode straight to Saremes’ cushion and glared at her.

“Saremes,” said the king, “you lied to me!”

The cat stared at him coldly, yawned and made no reply. Kull stood, nonplused and Tu seized his arm.

“Kull, where in Valka’s name have you been? Whence this blood?”

Kull jerked loose irritably.

“Leave be,” he snarled. “This cat sent me on a fool’s errand–where is Brule?”

“Kull!”

The king whirled and saw Brule stride through the door, his scanty garments stained by the dust of hard riding. The bronze features of the Pict were immobile but his dark eyes gleamed with relief.

“Name of seven devils!” said the warrior testily, to hide this emotion. “My riders have combed the hills and the forest for you–where have you been?”

“Searching the waters of Forbidden Lake for your worthless carcase,” answered Kull with grim enjoyment of the Pict’s perturbation.

“Forbidden Lake!” Brule exclaimed with the freedom of the savage. “Are you in your dotage? What would I be doing there? I accompanied Ka-nu yesterday to the Zarfhaanan border and returned to hear Tu ordering out all the army to search for you. My men have since then ridden in every direction except the Forbidden Lake where we never thought of going.”

“Saremes lied to me–” Kull began.

But he was drowned out by a chatter of scolding voices, the main theme being that a king should never ride off so unceremoniously, leaving the kingdom to take care of itself.

“Silence!” roared Kull, lifting his arms, his eyes blazing dangerously. “Valka and Hotath! Am I an urchin to be rated for truancy? Tu, tell me what has occurred.”

In the sudden silence which followed this royal outburst, Tu began:

“My lord, we have been duped from the beginning. This cat is, as I have maintained, a delusion and a dangerous fraud.”

“Yet–”

“My lord, have you never heard of men who could hurl their voice to a distance, making it appear that another spoke, or that invisible voices sounded?”

Kull flushed. “Aye, by Valka! Fool that I should have forgotten! An old wizard of Lemuria had that gift. Yet who spoke–”

“Kuthulos!” exclaimed Tu. “Fool am I not to have remembered Kuthulos, a slave, aye, but the greatest scholar and the wisest man in all the Seven Empires. Slave of that she-fiend Delcardes who even now writhes on the rack!”

Kull gave a sharp exclamation.

“Aye!” said Tu grimly. “When I entered and found that you had ridden away, none knew where, I suspected treachery and I sat me down and thought hard. And I remembered Kuthulos and his art of voice-throwing and of how the false cat had told you small things but never great prophecies, giving false arguments for reason of refraining.

“So I knew that Delcardes had sent you this cat and Kuthulos to befool you and gain your confidence and finally send you to your doom. So I sent for Delcardes and ordered her put to the torture so that she might confess all. She planned cunningly. Aye, Saremes must have her slave Kuthulos with her all the time–while he talked through her mouth and put strange ideas in your mind.”

“Then where is Kuthulos?” asked Kull.

“He had disappeared when I came to Saremes’ chamber, and–”

“Ho, Kull!” a cheery voice boomed from the door and a bearded elfish figure strode in, accompanied by a slim, frightened girlish shape.

“Ka-nu! Delcardes–so they did not torture you, after all!”

“Oh, my lord!” she ran to him and fell on her knees before him, clasping his feet. “Oh, Kull,” she wailed, “they accuse me of terrible things! I am guilty of deceiving you, my lord, but I meant no harm! I only wished to marry Kulra Thoom!”

Kull raised her to her feet, perplexed but pitying her evident terror and remorse.

“Kull,” said Ka-nu, “it is a good thing I returned when I did, else you and Tu had tossed the kingdom into the sea!”

Tu snarled wordlessly, always jealous of the Pictish ambassador, who was also Kull’s adviser.

“I returned to find the whole palace in an uproar, men rushing hither and yon and falling over one another in doing nothing. I sent Brule and his riders to look for you, and going to the torture chamber–naturally I went first to the torture chamber, since Tu was in charge–”

The chancellor winced.

“Going to the torture chamber–”

Ka-nu continued placidly, “I found them about to torture little Delcardes who wept and told all she had to tell but they did not believe her–she is only an inquisitive child, Kull, in spite of her beauty and all. So I brought her here.

“Now, Kull, Delcardes spoke truth when she said Saremes was her guest and that the cat was very ancient. True; she is a cat of the Old Race and wiser than other cats, going and coming as she pleases, but still a cat. Delcardes had spies in the palace to report to her such small things as the secret letter which you hid in your dagger sheath and the surplus in the treasury–the courtier who reported that was one of her spies and had discovered the surplus and told her before the royal treasurer knew. Her spies were your most loyal retainers and the things they told her harmed you not and aided her, whom they all love, for they knew she meant no harm.

“Her idea was to have Kuthulos, speaking through the mouth of Saremes, gain your confidence through small prophecies and facts which anyone might know, such as warning you against Thulsa Doom. Then, by constant urging you to let Kulra Thoom marry Delcardes, to accomplish what was Delcardes’ only desire.”

“Then Kuthulos turned traitor,” said Tu.

And at that moment there was a noise at the chamber door and guards entered haling between them a tall, gaunt form, his face masked by a veil, his arms bound.

“Kuthulos!”

“Aye, Kuthulos,” said Ka-nu, but he seemed not at ease and his eyes roved restlessly, “Kuthulos, no doubt, with his veil over his face to hide the workings of his mouth and neck muscles as he talked through Saremes.”

Kull eyed the silent figure which stood there like a statue. A silence fell over the group, as if a cold wind had passed over them. There was a tenseness in the atmosphere. Delcardes looked at the silent figure and her eyes widened as the guards told in terse sentences how the slave had been captured while trying to escape from the palace down a little used corridor.

Then silence fell again and more tensely as Kull stepped forward and reached forth a hand to tear the veil from the hidden face. Through the thin fabric Kull felt two eyes burn into his consciousness. None noticed Ka-nu clench his hands and tense himself as if for a terrific struggle.

Then as Kull’s hand almost touched the veil, a sudden sound broke the breathless silence–such a sound as a man might make by striking the floor with his forehead or elbow. The noise seemed to come from a wall and Kull, crossing the room with a stride, smote against a panel, from behind which the rapping sounded. A hidden door swung inward, revealing a dusty corridor, upon which lay the bound and gagged form of a man.

They dragged him forth and standing him upright, unbound him.

“Kuthulos!” shrieked Delcardes.

Kull stared. The man’s face, now revealed, was thin, and kindly like a teacher of philosophy and morals.

“Yes, my lords and lady,” he said, “that man who wears my veil stole upon me through the secret door, struck me down and bound me. I lay there, hearing him send the king to what he thought was Kull’s death, but could do nothing.”

“Then who is he?” All eyes turned toward the veiled figure and stepped forward.

“Lord king, beware!” exclaimed the real Kuthulos. “He–”

Kull tore the veil away with one motion and recoiled with a gasp. Delcardes screamed and her knees gave way; the councillors pressed backward, faces white and the guard released their grasp and shrank horror-struck away.

The face of the man was a bare white skull, in whose eye sockets flamed livid fire!

“Thulsa Doom!”

“Aye, I guessed as much!” exclaimed Ka-nu.

“Aye, Thulsa Doom, fools!” the voice echoed cavernously and hollowly. “The greatest of all wizards and your eternal foe, Kull of Atlantis. You have won this tilt but, beware, there shall be others.”

He burst the bonds on his arms with a single contemptuous gesture and stalked toward the door, the throng giving back before him.

“You are a fool of no discernment, Kull,” said he, “else you had never mistaken that other fool, Kuthulos, for me, even with the veil and his garments.”

Kull saw that it was so, for though the twain were alike in height and general shape, the flesh of the skull-faced wizard was like that of a man long dead.

The king stood, not fearful like the others, but so amazed at the turn events had taken that he was speechless. Then even as he sprang forward, like a man waking from a dream, Brule charged with the silent ferocity of a tiger, his curved sword gleaming. And like a gleam of light it flashed into the ribs of Thulsa Doom, piercing him through and through so that the point stood out between his shoulders.

Brule regained his blade with a quick wrench as he leaped back, then, crouching to strike again were it necessary, he halted. Not a drop of blood oozed from the wound which in a living man had been mortal. The skull-faced one laughed.

“Ages ago I died as men die!” he taunted. “Nay, I shall pass to some other sphere when my time comes, not before. I bleed not for my veins are empty and I feel only a slight coldness which shall pass when the wound closes, as it is even now closing. Stand back, fool, your master goes but he shall come again to you and you shall scream and shrivel and die in that coming! Kull, I salute you!”

And while Brule hesitated, unnerved, and Kull halted in undecided amazement Thulsa Doom stepped through the door and vanished before their very eyes.

“At least, Kull,” said Ka-nu later, “you have won your first tilt with the skull-faced one, as he admitted. Next time we must be more wary, for he is a fiend incarnate–an owner of magic black and unholy. He hates you for he is a satellite of the great serpent whose power you broke; he has the gift of illusion and of invisibility, which only he possesses. He is grim and terrible.”

“I fear him not,” said Kull. “The next time I will be prepared and my answer shall be a sword thrust, even though he be unslayable, which thing I doubt. Brule did not find his vitals, which even a living dead man must have, that is all.”

Then turning to Tu, “Lord Tu, it would seem that the civilized races also have their tambus, since the blue lake is forbidden to all save myself.”

Tu answered testily, angry because Kull had given the happy Delcardes permission to marry whom she desired:

“My lord, that is no heathen tambu such as your tribe bows to; it is a matter of state-craft, to preserve peace between Valusia and the lake-beings who are magicians.”

“And we keep tambus so as not to offend unseen spirits of tigers and eagles,” said Kull. “And therein I see no difference.”

“At any rate,” said Tu, “you must beware of Thulsa Doom; for he vanished into another dimension and as long as he is there he is invisible and harmless to us, but he will come again.”

“Ah, Kull,” sighed the old rascal, Ka-nu, “mine is a hard life compared to yours; Brule and I were drunk in Zarfhaana and I fell down a flight of stairs, most damnably bruising my shins. And all the while you lounged in sinful ease on the silk of the kingship, Kull.”

Kull glared at him wordlessly and turned his back, giving his attention to the drowsing Saremes.

“She is not a wizard-beast, Kull,” said the Spear-slayer. “She is wise but she merely looks her wisdom and does not speak. Yet her eyes fascinate me with their antiquity. A mere cat, just the same.”

“Still, Brule,” said Kull, admiringly, stroking her silky fur, “still, she is a very ancient cat, very.”

The Screaming Skull of Silence

The Screaming Skull of Silence

–And a dozen death-blots blotched him

On jowl and shank and huckle,

And he knocked on his skull with his knuckle

And laughed–if you’d call it laughter–

At the billion facets of dying

In his outstart eye-balls shining.–

Men still name it The Day of the King’s Fear. For Kull, king of Valusia, was only a man after all. There was never a bolder man, but all things have their limits, even courage. Of course Kull had known apprehension and cold whispers of dread, sudden starts of horror and even the shadow of unknown terror. But these had been but starts and leapings in the shadows of the mind, caused mainly by surprize or some loathsome mystery or unnatural thing–more repugnance than real fear. So real fear in him was so rare a thing that men mark the day.

Yet there was a time that Kull knew Fear, stark, terrible and unreasoning, and his marrow weakened and his blood ran cold. So men speak of the time of Kull’s Fear and they do not speak in scorn nor does Kull feel any shame. No, for as it came about the thing rebounded to his undying glory.

Thus it came to be. Kull sat at ease on the throne of society, listening idly to the conversation of Tu, chief councillor, Ka-nu, ambassador from Pictdom, Brule, Ka-nu’s right-hand man, and Kuthulos the slave, who was yet the greatest scholar in the Seven Empires.

“All is illusion,” Kuthulos was saying, “all outward manifestations of the underlying Reality, which is beyond human comprehension, since there are no relative things by which the finite mind may measure the infinite. The One may underlie all, or each natural illusion may possess a basic entity. All these things were known to Raama, the greatest mind of all the ages, who eons ago freed humanity from the grasp of unknown demons and raised the race to its heights.”

“He was a mighty necromancer,” said Ka-nu.

“He was no wizard,” said Kuthulos, “no chanting, mumbling conjurer, divining from snakes’ livers. There was naught of mummery about Raama. He had grasped the First Principles, he knew the Elements and he understood natural forces, acted upon by natural causes, producing natural results. He accomplished his apparent miracles by the exercise of his powers in natural ways, which were as simple in their manners to him, as lighting a fire is to us, and as much beyond our ken as our fire would have been to our ape-ancestors.”

“Then why did he not give all his secrets to the race?” asked Tu.

“He knew it is not good for man to know too much. Some villain would subjugate the whole race, nay the whole universe, if he knew as much as Raama knew. Man must learn by himself and expand in soul as he learns.”

“Yet, you say all is illusion,” persisted Ka-nu, shrewd in state-craft but ignorant in philosophy and science, and respecting Kuthulos for his knowledge. “How is that? Do we not hear and see and feel?”

“What is sight and sound?” countered the slave. “Is not sound absence of silence, and silence absence of sound? The absence of a thing is not material substance. It is–nothing. And how can nothing exist?”

“Then why are things?” asked Ka-nu like a puzzled child.

“They are appearances of reality. Like silence; somewhere exists the essence of silence, the soul of silence. Nothing that is something; an absence so absolute that it takes material form. How many of you ever heard complete silence? None of us! Always there are some noises–the whisper of the wind, the flutter of an insect, even the growing of the grass, or on the desert the murmur of the sands. But at the center of silence, there is no sound.”

“Raama,” said Ka-nu, “long ago shut a spectre of silence into a great castle and sealed him there for all time.”

“Aye,” said Brule, “I have seen the castle–a great black thing on a lone hill, in a wild region of Valusia. Since time immemorial it has been known as the Skull of Silence.”

“Ha!” Kull was interested now. “My friends, I would like to look upon this thing!”

“Lord king,” said Kuthulos, “it is not good to tamper with what Raama made fast. For he was wiser than any man. I have heard the legend that by his arts he imprisoned a demon–not by his arts, say I, but by his knowledge of the natural forces, and not a demon but some element which threatened the existence of the race.

“The might of that element is evinced by the fact that not even Raama was able to destroy it–he only imprisoned it.”

“Enough.” Kull gestured impatiently. “Raama has been dead so many thousand years that it wearies me to think on it. I ride to find the Skull of Silence; who rides with me?”

All of those who listened to him, and a hundred of the Red Slayers, Valusia’s mightiest war force, rode with Kull when he swept out of the royal city in the early dawn. They rode up among the mountains of Zalgara and after many days’ search, they came upon a lone hill rising sombrely from the surrounding plateaus and on its summit a great stark castle, black as doom.

“This is the place,” said Brule. “No people live within a hundred miles of this castle, nor have they in the memory of man. It is shunned like a region accursed.”

Kull reined his great stallion to a halt and gazed. No one spoke and Kull was aware of the strange, almost intolerable stillness. When he spoke again every one started. To the king it seemed that waves of deadening quiet emanated from that brooding castle on the hill. No birds sang in the surrounding land and no wind moved the branches of the stunted trees. As Kull’s horsemen rode up the slope, their footfalls on the rocks seemed to tinkle drearily and far away, dying without echo.

They halted before the castle that crouched there like a dark monster and Kuthulos again essayed to argue with the king.

“Kull, consider! If you burst that seal, you may loose upon the world a monster whose might and frenzy no man can stay!”

Kull, impatient of restraint, waved him aside. He was in the grip of a wayward perverseness, a common fault of kings, and though usually reasonable he had now made up his mind and was not to be swerved from his course.

“There are ancient writings on the seal, Kuthulos,” he said. “Read them to me.”

Kuthulos unwillingly dismounted and the rest followed suit, all save the common soldiers who sat their horses like bronze images in the pale sunlight. The castle leered at them like a sightless skull, for there were no windows whatever and only one great door, that of iron and bolted and sealed. Apparently the building was all in one chamber.

Kull gave a few orders as to the disposition of the troops and was irritated when he found he was forced to raise his voice unseemingly in order for the commanders to understand him. Their answers came dimly and indistinctly.

He approached the door, followed by his four comrades. There on a frame beside the door hung a curious appearing gong, apparently of jade–a sort of green in shade. But Kull could not be sure of the color for to his amazed stare it changed and shifted, and sometimes his gaze seemed to be drawn into great depths and sometimes to glance extreme shallowness. Beside the gong hung a mallet of the same strange material. He struck it lightly and then gasped, nearly stunned by the crash of sound which followed–it was like all earth noises concentrated.

“Read the writings, Kuthulos,” he commanded, again, and the slave bent forward in considerable awe, for no doubt these words had been carved by the great Raama himself.

“That which was may be again,” he intoned, “then beware, all sons of men!”

He straightened, a look of fright on his face.

“A warning! A warning straight from Raama! Mark ye, Kull, mark ye!”

Kull snorted and drawing his sword, rent the seal from its hold and cut through the great metal bolt. He struck again and again, being aware of the comparative silence with which the blows fell. The bars fell, the door swung open.

Kuthulos screamed. Kull reeled, stared–the chamber was empty? No! He saw nothing, there was nothing to see, yet he felt the air throb about him as something came billowing from that foul chamber in great unseen waves. Kuthulos leaned to his shoulder and shrieked–and his words came faintly as from over cosmic distance:

“The silence! This is the soul of all Silence!”

Sound ceased. Horses plunged and their riders fell face first into the dust and lay clutching at their heads with their hands, screaming without sound.

Kull alone stood erect, his futile sword thrust in front of him. Silence! Utter and absolute! Throbbing, billowing waves of still horror! Men opened their mouths and shrieked but there was no sound!

The Silence entered Kull’s soul; it clawed at his heart; it sent tentacles of steel into his brain. He clutched at his forehead in torment; his skull was bursting, shattering. In the wave of horror which engulfed him Kull saw red and colossal visions–the Silence spreading out over the earth, over the Universe! Men died in gibbering stillness; the roar of rivers, the crash of seas, the noise of winds faltered and ceased to be. All Sound was drowned by the Silence. Silence, soul destroying, brain shattering–blotting out all life on earth and reaching monstrously up into the skies, crushing the very singing of the stars!

And then Kull knew fear, horror, terror–overwhelming, grisly, soul-killing. Faced by the ghastliness of his vision, he swayed and staggered drunkenly, gone wild with fear. Oh gods, for a sound, the very slightest, faintest noise! Kull opened his mouth like the grovelling maniacs behind him and his heart nearly burst from his breast in his effort to shriek. The throbbing stillness mocked him. He smote against the metal sill with his sword. And still the billowing waves flowed from the chamber, clawing at him, tearing at him, taunting him like a being sensate with terrible Life.

Ka-nu and Kuthulos lay motionless. Tu writhed on his belly, his head in his hands, and squalled soundlessly like a dying jackal. Brule wallowed in the dust like a wounded wolf, clawing blindly at his scabbard.

Kull could almost see the form of the Silence now, the frightful Silence that was coming out of its Skull at last, to burst the skulls of men. It twisted, it writhed in unholy wisps and shadows, it laughed at him! It lived! Kull staggered and toppled, and as he did his outflung arm struck the gong. Kull heard no sound but he felt a distinct throb and jerk of the waves about him–a slight withdrawal, involuntary, just as a man’s hand jerks back from the flame.

Ah, old Raama left a safe-guard for the race, even in death! Kull’s dizzy brain suddenly read the riddle. The sea! The gong was like the sea, changing green shades, never still, now deep and now shallow–never silent.

The sea! Vibrating, pulsing, booming day and night–the greatest enemy of the Silence. Reeling, dizzy, nauseated he caught up the jade mallet. His knees gave way but he clung with one hand to the frame, clutching the mallet with the other, in a desperate death grip. The Silence surged wrathfully about him.

Mortal, who are you to oppose me, who am older than the gods? Before Life was I was, and shall be when Life dies. Before the invader sound was born, the Universe was silent and shall be again. For I shall spread out through all the cosmos and kill Sound–kill Sound–kill Sound–kill Sound!

The roar of Silence reverberated through the caverns of Kull’s crumbling brain in abysmal chanting monotones as he struck on the gong–again–and again–and again!

And at each blow the Silence gave back–inch by inch–inch by inch. Back, back, back. Kull renewed the force of his mallet blows. Now he could faintly hear the far-away tinkle of the gong, over unthinkable voids of stillness–as if someone on the other side of the Universe were striking a silver coin with a horse-shoe nail. At each tiny vibration of noise, the wavering Silence started and shuddered. The tentacles shortened, the waves contracted. The Silence shrank.

Back and back and back–and back. Now the wisps hovered in the doorway and behind Kull men whimpered and wallowed to their knees, chins sagging and eyes vacant. Kull tore the gong from its frame and reeled toward the door. He was a finish fighter–no compromise for him. There would be no bolting the great door upon the horror again. The whole Universe should have halted to watch a man justifying the existence of man-kind, scaling sublime heights of glory in his supreme atonement.

He stood in the doorway and leaned against the waves that hung there, hammering ceaselessly. All Hell flowed out to meet him, from the fright thing whose very last stronghold he was invading. All of the Silence was now in the chamber again, forced back by the unconquerable crashings of Sound–Sound concentrated from all the sounds and noises of earth and imprisoned by the master hand that long ago conquered both Sound and Silence.

And here Silence gathered all its forces for one last attack. Hells of soundless cold and noiseless flame whirled about Kull. Here was a thing, elemental and real. Silence the absence of sound, Kuthulos had said–Kuthulos who now grovelled and yammered empty nothingnesses.

Here was more than an absence–an absence whose utter absence became a presence–an abstract illusion that was a material reality. Kull reeled, blind, stunned, numb, almost insensible from the onslaught of cosmic forces upon him; soul, body and mind. Cloaked by the whirling tentacles, the noise of the gong died out again. But Kull never ceased. His tortured brain rocked but he thrust his feet against the sill and shoved powerfully forward. He encountered material resistance, like a wall of solid fire, hotter than flame and colder than ice. Still he plunged forward and felt it give–give.

Step by step, foot by foot he fought his way into the chamber of death, driving the Silence before him. Every step was screaming, demoniac torture; every foot was ravaging Hell. Shoulders hunched, head down, arms raising and falling in jerky rhythm, Kull forced his way, and great drops of blood gathered on his brow and dropped unceasingly.

Behind him men were beginning to stagger up, weak and dizzy from the Silence that had invaded their brains. They gaped at the door, where the king fought his deathly battle for the universe. Brule crawled blindly forward, trailing his sword, still dazed, and only following his stunned instinct which bade him follow the king though the trail led to Hell.

Kull forced the Silence back, step by step, feeling it growing weaker and weaker, feeling it dwindling. Now the sound of the gong pealed out and grew and grew. It filled the room, the earth, the sky. The Silence cringed before it, and as the Silence dwindled and was forced into itself, it took hideous form that Kull saw yet did not see. His arm seemed dead but with a mighty effort he increased his blows. Now the Silence writhed in a dark corner and shrunk and shrunk. Again, a last blow! All the sound in the Universe rushed together in one roaring, yelling, shattering, engulfing burst of sound! The gong blew into a million vibrating fragments! And Silence screamed!

The Striking of the Gong

The Striking of the Gong

Somewhere in the hot red darkness there began a throbbing. A pulsating cadence, soundless but vibrant with reality, sent out long rippling tendrils that flowed through the breathless air. The man stirred, groped about with blind hands, and sat up. At first it seemed to him that he was floating on the even and regular waves of a black ocean, rising and falling with a monotonous regularity which hurt him physically somehow. He was aware of the pulsing and throbbing of the air and he reached out his hands as though to catch the elusive waves. But was the throbbing in the air about him, or in the brain inside his skull? He could not understand and a fantastic thought came to him–a feeling that he was locked inside his own skull.

The pulsing dwindled, centralized, and he held his aching head in his hands and tried to remember. Remember what?

“This is a strange thing,” he murmured. “Who or what am I? What place is this? What has happened and why am I here? Have I always been here?”

He rose to his feet and sought to look about him. Utter darkness met his glance. He strained his eyes, but no single gleam of light met them. He began to walk forward, haltingly, hands out before him, seeking light as instinctively as a growing plant seeks it.

“This is surely not everything,” he mused. “There must be something else–what is different from this? Light! I know–I remember Light, though I do not remember what Light is. Surely I have known a different world than this.”

Far away a faint grey light began to glow. He hastened toward it. The gleam widened, until it was as if he were striding down a long and ever widening corridor. Then he came out suddenly into dim starlight and felt the wind cold in his face.

“This is light,” he murmured, “but this is not all yet.”

He felt and recognized a sensation of terrific height. High above him, even with his eyes and below him, flashed and blazed great stars in a majestic glittering cosmic ocean. He frowned abstractedly as he gazed at these stars.

Then he was aware that he was not alone. A tall vague shape loomed before him in the starlight. His hand shot instinctively to his left hip, then fell away limply. He was naked and no weapon hung at his side.

The shape moved nearer and he saw that it was a man, apparently a very ancient man, though the features were indistinct and illusive in the faint light.

“You are new come here?” said this figure in a clear deep voice which was much like the chiming of a jade gong. At the sound a sudden trickle of memory began in the brain of the man who heard the voice.

He rubbed his chin in a bewildered manner.

“Now I remember,” said he, “I am Kull, king of Valusia–but what am I doing here, without garments or weapons?”

“No man can bring anything through the Door with him,” said the other, cryptically. “Think, Kull of Valusia, know you not how you came?”

“I was standing in the doorway of the council chamber,” said Kull, dazedly, “and I remember that the watchman on the outer tower was striking the gong to denote the hour–then suddenly the crash of the gong merged into a wild and sudden flood of shattering sound. All went dark and red sparks flashed for an instant before my eyes. Then I awoke in a cavern or a corridor of some sort, remembering nothing.”

“You passed through the Door; it always seems dark.”

“Then I am dead? By Valka, some enemy must have been lurking among the columns of the palace and struck me down as I was speaking with Brule, the Pictish warrior.”

“I have not said you were dead,” answered the dim figure. “Mayhap the Door is not utterly closed. Such things have been.”

“But what place is this? Is it paradise or Hell? This is not the world I have known since birth. And those stars–I have never seen them before. Those constellations are mightier and more fiery than I ever knew in life.”

“There are worlds beyond worlds, universes within and without universes,” said the ancient. “You are upon a different planet than that upon which you were born, you are in a different universe, doubtless in a different dimension.”

“Then I am certainly dead.”

“What is death but a traversing of eternities and a crossing of cosmic oceans? But I have not said that you are dead.”

“Then where in Valka’s name am I?” roared Kull, his short stock of patience exhausted.

“Your barbarian brain clutches at material actualities,” answered the other tranquilly. “What does it matter where you are, or whether you are dead, as you call it? You are a part of that great ocean which is Life, which washes upon all shores, and you are as much a part of it in one place as in another, and as sure to eventually flow back to the Source of it, which gave birth to all Life. As for that, you are bound to Life for all Eternity as surely as a tree, a rock, a bird or a world is bound. You call leaving your tiny planet, quitting your crude physical form–death!”

“But I still have my body.”

“I have not said that you are dead, as you name it. As for that, you may be still upon your little planet, as far as you know. Worlds within worlds, universes within universes. Things exist too small and too large for human comprehension. Each pebble on the beaches of Valusia contains countless universes within itself, and itself as a whole is as much a part of the great plan of all universes, as is the sun you know. Your universe, Kull of Valusia, may be a pebble on the shore of a mighty kingdom.

“You have broken the bounds of material limitations. You may be in a universe which goes to make up a gem on the robe you wore on Valusia’s throne or that universe you knew may be in the spider web which lies there on the grass near your feet. I tell you, size and space and time are relative and do not really exist.”

“Surely you are a god?” said Kull curiously.

“The mere accumulation of knowledge and the acquiring of wisdom does not make a god,” answered the other rather impatiently. “Look!” A shadowy hand pointed to the great blazing gems which were the stars.

Kull looked and saw that they were changing swiftly. A constant weaving, an incessant changing of design and pattern was taking place.

“The ‘everlasting’ stars change in their own time, as swiftly as the races of men rise and fade. Even as we watch, upon those which are planets, beings are rising from the slime of the primeval, are climbing up the long slow roads to culture and wisdom, and are being destroyed with their dying worlds. All life and a part of life. To them it seems billions of years; to us, but a moment. All life. And a part of life.”

Kull watched fascinated, as huge stars and mighty constellations blazed and waned and faded, while others equally as radiant took their places, to be in turn supplanted.

Then suddenly the hot red darkness flowed over him again, blotting out all the stars. As through a thick fog, he heard a faint familiar clashing.

Then he was on his feet, reeling. Sunlight met his eyes, the tall marble pillars and walls of a palace, the wide curtained windows through which the sunlight flowed like molten gold. He passed a swift, dazed hand over his body feeling his garments and the sword at his side. He was bloody; a red stream trickled down his temple from a shallow cut. But most of the blood on his limbs and clothing was not his. At his feet in a horrid crimson wallow lay what had been a man. The clashing he had heard, ceased, re-echoing.

“Brule! What is this?! What happened?! Where have I been?”

“You had nearly been on a journey to old king Death’s realms,” answered the Pict with a mirthless grin as he cleansed his sword. “That spy was lying in wait behind a column and was on you like a leopard as you turned to speak to me in the doorway. Whoever plotted your death must have had great power to so send a man to his certain doom. Had not the sword turned in his hand and struck glancing instead of straight, you had gone before him with a cleft skull, instead of standing here now mulling over a mere flesh wound.”

“But surely,” said Kull, “that was hours agone.”

Brule laughed.

“You are still mazed, lord king. From the time he leaped and you fell, to the time I slashed the heart out of him, a man could not have counted the fingers of one hand. And during the time you were lying in his blood and yours on the floor, no more than twice that time elapsed. See, Tu has not yet arrived with bandages and he scurried for them the moment you went down.”

“Aye, you are right,” answered Kull, “I cannot understand–but just before I was struck down I heard the gong sounding the hour, and it was still sounding when I came to myself.

“Brule, there is no such thing as time, nor space; for I have travelled the longest journey of my life, and have lived countless millions of years during the striking of the gong.”

The Altar and the Scorpion

The Altar and the Scorpion

“God of the crawling darkness, grant me aid!”

A slim youth knelt in the gloom, his white body shimmering like ivory. The marble polished floor was cold to his knees but his heart was colder than the stone.

High above him, merged into the masking shadows, loomed the great lapis lazuli ceiling, upheld by marble walls. Before him glimmered a golden altar and on this altar shone a huge crystal image–a scorpion, wrought with a craft surpassing mere art.

“Great Scorpion,” the boy continued his invocation. “Aid thy worshipper! Thou knowest how in by-gone days, Gonra of the Sword, my greatest ancestor, died before thy shrine on a heap of slain barbarians who sought to defile thy holiness. Through the mouths of thy priests, thou promised aid to Gonra’s race for all the years to come!

“Great Scorpion! Never has man or woman of my blood before reminded thee of thy vow! But now in my hour of bitter need I come before thee, to abjure thee to remember that oath, by the blood drunk by Gonra’s blade, by the blood spilled from Gonra’s veins!

“Great Scorpion! Guron, high priest of the Black Shadow is my enemy! Kull, king of all Valusia, rides from his purple spired city to smite with fire and steel the priests who have defied him and still offer human sacrifice to the dark elder gods. But before the king may arrive and save us, I and the girl I love shall lie stark on the black altar in the Temple of Everlasting Darkness. Guron has sworn! He will give our soft bodies to ancient and abhorred abominations, and at last, our souls to the god that lurks forever in the Black Shadow.

“Kull sits high on the throne of Valusia and now he rides to our aid, but Guron rules this mountain city and even now he follows me! Great Scorpion, aid us! Remember Gonra, who gave up his life for you when the Atlantean savages carried the torch and sword into Valusia!”

The boy’s slender form drooped, his head sank on his bosom despairingly. The great shimmering image on the altar gave back an icy sheen in the dim light and no sign came to its worshipper, to show that the curious god had heard that passionate invocation.

Suddenly the youth started erect. Quick steps throbbed on the long wide steps outside the temple. A girl darted into the shadowed doorway like a white flame blown before the wind.

“Guron–he comes!” she gasped as she flew into her lover’s arms.

The boy’s face went white and his embrace tightened as he gazed apprehensively at the doorway. Footfalls, heavy and sinister, clashed on the marble and a shape of menace loomed in the opening.

Guron the high priest was a tall, gaunt man, a cadaverous giant. His evil eyes glimmered like fiery pools under his penthouse brows and his thin gash of a mouth gaped in a silent laugh. His only garment was a silken loin cloth, through which was thrust a cruel curved dagger, and he carried a short heavy whip in his lean and powerful hand.

His two victims clung to each other and gazed white eyed at their foe, as birds stare at a serpent. And Guron’s slow swaying stride as he advanced was not unlike the sinuous glide of a crawling snake.

“Guron, have a care!” the youth spoke bravely but his voice faltered from the fearful terror that gripped him. “If you have no fear of the king or pity for us, beware offending the Great Scorpion, under whose protection we are!”

Guron laughed in his might and arrogance.

“The king!” he jeered. “What means the king to me, who am mightier than any king? The Great Scorpion? Ho! Ho! A forgotten god, a deity remembered only by children and women! Would you pit your Scorpion against the Black Shadow? Fool! Valka himself, god of all gods, could not save you now! You are sworn to the god of the Black Shadow!”

He swept toward the cowering youngsters and gripped their white shoulders, sinking his talon-like nails deep into the soft flesh. They sought to resist but he laughed and with incredible strength, lifted them in the air, where he dangled them at arm’s length, as a man might dangle a baby. His grating, metallic laughter filled the room with echoes of evil mockery.

Then, holding the youth between his knees, he bound the girl hand and foot while she whimpered in his cruel clutch, then flinging her roughly to the floor, bound the youth likewise. Stepping back, he surveyed his work. The girl’s frightened sobs sounded quick and panting in the silence. At last the high priest spoke.

“Fools, to think to escape me! Always men of your blood, boy, have opposed me in council and court. Now you pay and the Black Shadow drinks. Ho! ho! I rule the city today, let he be king who may!

“My priests throng the streets, full armed, and no man dare say me nay! Were the king in the saddle this moment, he could not arrive and break my swordsmen in time to save you.”

His eyes roved about the temple and fell upon the golden altar and the silent crystal scorpion.

“Ho ho! What fools to pin your faith on a god whom men have long ceased to worship! Who has not even a priest to attend him, and who is granted a shrine only because of the memory of his former greatness, who is accorded reverence only by simple people and foolish women!

“The real gods are dark and bloody! Remember my words when soon you lie on an ebon altar behind which broods a black shadow forever! Before you die you shall know the real gods, the powerful, the terrible gods, who came from forgotten worlds and lost realms of blackness. Who had their birth on frozen stars, and black suns brooding beyond the light of any stars! You shall know the brain shattering truth of that Unnamable One, to whose reality no earthly likeness may be given, but whose symbol is–the Black Shadow!”

The girl ceased to cry, frozen, like the youth, into dazed silence. They sensed, behind these threats, a hideous and inhuman gulf of monstrous shadows.

Guron took a stride toward them, bent and reached claw-like hands to grip and lift them to his shoulders. He laughed as they sought to writhe away from him. His fingers closed on the girl’s tender shoulder–

A scream shattered the crystal gong of the silence into a million vibrating shards as Guron bounded into the air and fell on his face, screeching and writhing. Some small creature scurried away and vanished through the door. Guron’s screams dwindled into a high thin squealing and broke short at the highest note. Silence fell like a deathly mist.

At last the boy spoke in an awed whisper:

“What was it?”

“A scorpion!” the girl’s answer came low and tremulous. “It crawled across my bare bosom without harming me, and when Guron seized me, it stung him!”

Another silence fell. Then the boy spoke again, hesitantly:

“No scorpion has been seen in this city for longer than men remember.”

“The Great One summoned this of his people to our aid!” whispered the girl. “The gods never forget, and the Great Scorpion has kept his oath! Let us give thanks to him!”

And, bound hand and foot as they were, the youthful lovers wriggled about on their faces where they lay giving praise to the great silent glistening scorpion on the altar for a long time–until a distant clash of many silver shod hoofs and the clangor of swords bore them the coming of the king.

The Curse of the Golden Skull

The Curse of the Golden Skull

Rotath of Lemuria was dying. Blood had ceased to flow from the deep sword gash under his heart, but the pulse in his temple hammered like kettle drums.

Rotath lay on a marble floor. Granite columns rose about him and a silver idol stared with ruby eyes at the man who lay at its feet. The bases of the columns were carved with curious monsters; above the shrine sounded a vague whispering. The trees which hemmed in and hid that mysterious fane spread long waving branches above it, and these branches were vibrant with curious leaves which rustled in the wind. From time to time great black roses scattered their dusky petals down.

Rotath lay dying and he used his fading breath in calling down curses on his slayers–on the faithless king who had betrayed him, and on that barbarian chief, Kull of Atlantis, who dealt him the death blow.

Acolyte of the nameless gods, and dying in an unknown shrine on the leafy summit of Lemuria’s highest mountain–Rotath’s weird inhuman eyes smoldered with a terrible cold fire. A pageant of glory and splendor passed before his mind’s eye. The acclaim of worshippers, the roar of silver trumpets, the whispering shadows of mighty and mystic temples where great wings swept unseen–then the intrigues, the onslaught of the invaders–death!

Rotath cursed the king of Lemuria–the king to whom he had taught fearful and ancient mysteries and forgotten abominations. Fool that he had been to reveal his powers to a weakling who, having learned to fear him, had turned to foreign kings for aid.

How strange it seemed, that he, Rotath of the Moonstone and the Asphodel, sorcerer and magician, should be gasping out his breath on the marble floor, a victim to that most material of all threats–a keen pointed sword in a sinewy hand.

Rotath cursed the limitations of the flesh. He felt his brain crumbling and he cursed all the men of all the worlds. He cursed them by Hotath and Helgor, by Ra and Ka and Valka.

He cursed all men living and dead, and all the generations unborn for a million centuries to come, naming Vramma and Jaggta-noga and Kamma and Kulthas. He cursed humanity by the fane of the Black Gods, the tracks of the Serpent Ones, the talons of the Ape Lords and the iron bound books of Shuma Gorath.

He cursed goodness and virtue and light, speaking the names of gods forgotten even by the priests of Lemuria. He invoked the dark monstrous shadows of the older worlds, and of those black suns which lurk forever behind the stars.

He felt the shades gather about him. He was going fast. And closing about him in an ever nearing ring, he sensed the tiger taloned devils who awaited his coming. He saw their bodies of solid jet and the great red caverns of their eyes. Behind hovered the white shadows of they who had died upon his altars, in horrid torment. Like mist in the moonlight they floated, great luminous eyes fixed on him in sad accusation, a never ending host.

Rotath feared, and fearing, his curses rose louder, his blasphemies grew more terrible. With one last wild passion of fury, he placed a curse on his own bones that they might bring death and horror to the sons of men. But even as he spoke he knew that years and ages would pass and his bones turn to dust in that forgotten shrine before any man’s foot disturbed its silence. So he mustered his fast waning powers for one last invocation to the dread beings he had served, one last feat of magic. He uttered a blood-freezing formula, naming a terrible name.

And soon he felt mighty elemental powers set in motion. He felt his bones growing hard and brittle. A coldness transcending earthly coldness passed over him and he lay still. The leaves whispered and the silver god laughed with cold gemmed eyes.

EMERALD INTERLUDE

Years stretched into centuries, centuries became ages. The green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible. Thrones toppled and the silver trumpets fell silent forever. The races of men passed as smoke drifts from the breast of a summer. The roaring jade green seas engulfed the lands and all mountains sank, even the highest mountain of Lemuria.

ORCHIDS OF DEATH

A man thrust aside the trailing vines and stared. A heavy beard masked his face and mire slimed his boots. Above and about him hung the thick tropic jungle in breathless and exotic brooding. Orchids flamed and breathed about him.

Wonder was in his wide eyes. He gazed between shattered granite columns upon a crumbling marble floor. Vines twined thickly, like green serpents, among these columns and trailed their sinuous length across the floor. A curious idol, long fallen from a broken pedestal, lay upon the floor and stared up with red, unblinking eyes. The man noted the character of this corroded thing and a strong shudder shook him. He glanced unbelievingly again at the other thing which lay on the marble floor, and shrugged his shoulders.

He entered the shrine. He gazed at the carvings on the bases of the sullen columns, wondering at their unholy and indescribable appearance. Over all the scent of the orchids hung like a heavy fog.

This small, rankly grown, swampy island was once the pinnacle of a great mountain, mused the man, and he wondered what strange people had reared up this fane–and left that monstrous thing lying before the fallen idol. He thought of the fame which his discoveries should bring him–of the acclaim of mighty universities and powerful scientific societies.

He bent above the skeleton on the floor, noting the inhumanly long finger bones, the curious formation of the feet; the deep cavern-like eye-sockets, the jutting frontal bone, the general appearance of the great domed skull, which differed so horribly from mankind as he knew it.

What long dead artizan had shaped the thing with such incredible skill? He bent closer, noting the rounded ball-and-socket of the joints, the slight depressions on flat surfaces where muscles had been attached. And he started as the stupendous truth was borne on him.

This was no work of human art–that skeleton had once been clothed in flesh and had walked and spoken and lived. And this was impossible, his reeling brain told him, for the bones were of solid gold.

The orchids nodded in the shadows of the trees. The shrine lay in purple and black shade. The man brooded above the bones and wondered. How could he know of an elder world sorcery great enough to serve undying hate, by lending that hate a concrete substance, impervious to Time’s destructions?

The man laid his hand on the golden skull. A sudden deathly shriek broke the silence. The man in the shrine reeled up, screaming, took a single staggering step and then fell headlong, to lie with writhing limbs on the vine-crossed marble floor.

The orchids showered down on him in a sensuous rain and his blind, clutching hands tore them into exotic fragments as he died. Silence fell and an adder crawled sluggishly from within the golden skull.

The Black City

(Unfinished Fragment)

The Black City

(Unfinished Fragment)

The cold eyes of Kull, king of Valusia, clouded with perplexity as they rested on the man who had so abruptly entered the royal presence and who now stood before the king, trembling with passion. Kull sighed; he knew the barbarians who served him, for was not he himself an Atlantean by birth? Brule, the Spear-slayer, bursting rudely into the king’s chamber, had torn from his harness every emblem given him by Valusia and now stood bare of any sign to show that he was allied to the empire. And Kull knew the meaning of this gesture.

“Kull!” barked the Pict, pale with fury. “I will have justice!”

Again Kull sighed. There were times when peace and quiet were things to be desired and in Kamula he thought he had found them. Dreamy Kamula–even as he waited for the raging Pict to continue his tirade, Kull’s thoughts drifted away and back along the lazy, dreamy days that had passed since his coming to this mountain city, this metropolis of pleasure, whose marble and lapis-lazuli palaces were built, tier upon gleaming tier, about the dome shaped hill that formed the city’s center.

“My people have been allies of the empire for a thousand years!” The Pict made a swift, passionate gesture with his clenched fist. “Now, is it that one of my warriors can be snatched from under my nose, in the very palace of the king?”

Kull straightened with a start.

“What madness is this? What warrior? Who seized him?”

“That’s for you to discover,” growled the Pict. “One moment he was there, lounging against a marble column–the next–zut! He was gone with only a foul stench and a frightful scream for clue.”

“Perhaps a jealous husband–” mused Kull.

Brule broke in rudely: “Grogar never looked at any woman–even of his own race. These Kamulians hate we Picts. I have read it in their looks.”

Kull smiled. “You dream, Brule; these people are too indolent and pleasure loving to hate anyone. They love, they sing, they compose lyrics–I suppose you think Grogar was snatched away by the poet Taligaro, or the singing woman Zareta, or prince Mandara?”

“I care not!” snarled Brule. “But I tell you this, Kull, Grogar has spilt his blood like water for the empire, and he is my best chief of mounted bowmen. I will find him, alive or dead, if I have to tear Kamula apart, stone by stone! By Valka, I will feed this city to the flames and quench the flames in blood–”

Kull had risen from his chair.

“Take me to the place you last saw Grogar,” he said, and Brule ceased his tirade and led the way sullenly. They passed out of the chamber through an inner door and proceeded down a winding corridor, side by side, as different in appearance as two men could well be, yet alike in the litheness of movement, the keenness of eye, the intangible wildness that proclaimed the barbarian.

Kull was tall, broad shouldered and deep chested–massive yet lithe. His face was brown from sun and wind, his square cut black hair like a lion’s mane, his grey eyes cold as a sword gleaming through fathoms of ice.

Brule was typical of his race–of medium height, built with the savage economy of a panther, and of skin much darker than the king’s.

“We were in the Jeweled Room,” grunted the Pict, “Grogar, Manaro and I. Grogar was leaning against a half-column set into the wall when he shifted his weight full against the wall–and vanished before our eyes! A panel swung inward and he was gone–and we had but a glimpse of black darkness within, and a loathsome scent flowed momentarily outward. But Manaro, standing beside Grogar, whipped out his sword in that instant and thrust the good blade into the opening, so the panel could not wholly close. We thrust against it, but it did not yield and I hasted after you, leaving Manaro holding his sword in the crack.”

“And why did you tear off your Valusian emblems?” asked Kull.

“I was angry,” growled the Spear-slayer sullenly, avoiding Kull’s eye. The king nodded without reply. It was the natural, unreasoning action of an infuriated savage, to whom no natural enemy appears to be slashed and rent.

They entered the Jeweled Room, the further wall of which was set into the natural stone of the hill on which Kamula was built.

“Manaro swore he heard a whisper as of music,” grunted Brule. “And there he leans with his ear at the crack. Hola–Manaro!”

Kull frowned as he saw the tall Valusian did not change his posture or give any heed to the hail. He did in truth lean against the panel, one hand gripping the sword which held the secret doorway apart, one ear glued to the thin crack. Kull noted the almost material darkness of that thin strip of blackness–it seemed to him that beyond that unknown opening, the darkness must lurk like a living, sentient thing.

He strode forward impatiently and clapped the soldier heavily on the shoulder. And Manaro rocked away from the wall and fell stiffly to lie at Kull’s feet with horror glazed eyes staring blankly upward.

“Valka!” swore Brule. “He’s been stabbed–I was a fool to leave him here alone–”

The king shook his lion-like head. “There’s no blood on him–look at his face.” Brule looked and cursed. The dead Valusian’s features were set in a mask of horror–and the effect was distinctly one of listening.

Kull cautiously approached the crack in the wall and then beckoned Brule. From somewhere beyond that mysterious portal sounded a thin, wailing sound as of a ghostly piping. It was so dim as to barely be heard, but it held in its music all the hate and venom of a thousand demons. Kull shrugged his giant shoulders.

Untitled Fragment

Untitled Fragment

Three men sat at a table playing a game. Across the sill of an open window there whispered a faint breezing, blowing the filmy curtains about and bearing to the players the incense of roses and vines and growing green things.

Three men sat at a table–one was a king–one a prince of an ancient house–one was the chief of a terrible and barbaric nation.

“Score!” quoth Kull, king of Valusia, as he moved one of the ivory figures. “My wizard menaces your warrior, Brule.”

Brule nodded. He was not as large a man as the king, but he was firmly knit, compactly yet lithely built. Kull was the tiger, Brule was the leopard. Brule was a Pict and dark like all his race. Immobile features set off a fine head, powerful neck, heavy trim shoulders and a deep chest. These features, with the muscular legs and arms, were characteristics of the nation to which he belonged. But in one respect Brule differed from his tribesmen, for whereas their eyes were mostly hard scintillant brown or wicked black, his were a deep volcanic blue. Somewhere in his blood was a vagrant strain of Celt or of those scattered savages who lived in ice caves close to the Arctic circle.

“A wizard is a hard man to beat, Kull,” said this man. “In this game or in the real red game of battle–Well, there was once when my life hung on the balance of power between a Pictland wizard and me–he had his charms and I had a well forged blade–”

He paused to drink deeply from a crimson goblet which stood at his elbow.

“Tell us the tale, Brule,” urged the third player. Ronaro, prince of the great atl Volante house, was a slim elegant young man with a splendid head, fine dark eyes and a keen intellectual face. He was the patrician–the highest type of intelligent aristocracy any land has ever produced. These other two in a way were his antithesis. He was born in a palace; of the others, one had been born in a wattle hut, the other in a cave. Ronaro traced his descent back two thousand years, through a line of dukes, knights, princes, statesmen, poets and kings. Brule could trace his ancestors vaguely for a few hundred years and he named among them skin clad chiefs, painted and feathered warriors, shamans with bison skull masks and finger bone necklaces–one or two island kings who held court in mud huts, and a legendary hero or two, semi-deified for feats of personal strength or whole sale murder. Kull did not know who his own parents were.

But in the countenances of all three gleamed an equality beyond the shackles of birth and circumstance–the aristocracy of the Man. These men were natural patricians, each in his own way. Ronaro’s ancestors were kings; Brule’s, skin-clad chiefs; Kull’s might have been slaves or chieftains. But about each of the three was that indefinable something which sets the superior man apart and shatters the delusion that all men were born equal.

“Well,” Brule’s eyes filled with brooding reminiscence, “it happened in my early youth, yes, in my first war raid. Oh, I had killed a man or so in the fishing brawls and at the tribal feasts, but I had not yet been ornamented with the scars of the warrior clan–” he indicated his bare breast where the listeners saw three small horizontal marks, barely discernable in the sun bronze of the Pict’s mighty chest.

Ronaro watched him with a never failing interest as he talked. These fierce barbarians with their primitive vitality and straightforwardness intrigued the young prince. Years in Valusia as one of the empire’s strongest allies had wrought an outward change on the Pict–had not tamed him, but had given him a veneer of culture, education and reserve. But beneath that veneer burned the blind black savage of old. To a greater extent had this change worked on Kull, once warrior of Atlantis, now king of Valusia.

“You, Kull, and you, Ronaro,” Brule said, “we of The Islands are all one blood, but of many tribes, and each tribe has customs and traditions peculiar to itself alone. We all acknowledge Nial of the Tatheli as over-king but his rule is loose. He does not interfere with our affairs among ourselves, nor does he levy tribute or taxes, as the Valusians call it, from any except the Nargi and the Dano and the Whale-slayers who live on the isle of Tathel with his own tribe. These he protects against other tribes and for that reason he collects toll. But he takes no toll of my tribe, the Borni, nor of any other tribe. Neither does he interfere when two tribes go to war–unless some tribe encroaches on the three who pay tribute. When the war is fought and won, he arbitrates the matter, and his judgment is final–what stolen women shall be returned, what payment of war canoes made, what blood price paid and so on. And when the Lemurians or the Celts or any foreign nation or band of reavers come against us, he sends forth for all tribes to put aside their quarrels and fight side by side. Which is a good thing. He might be a supreme tyrant if he liked, for his own tribe is very strong, and with the aid of Valusia he might do as he liked–but he knows that though he might, with his tribes and their allies, crush all the other tribes, there would never be peace again, but revolt as long as a Borni or a Sungara or a Wolf-slayer or any of the tribesmen was left alive.

By This Axe I Rule!

By This Axe I Rule!

I

“MY SONGS ARE NAILS FOR A KING’S COFFIN!”

“At midnight the king must die!”

The speaker was tall, lean and dark, and a crooked scar close to his mouth lent him an unusually sinister cast of countenance. His hearers nodded, their eyes glinting. There were four of these–one was a short fat man, with a timid face, weak mouth and eyes which bulged in an air of perpetual curiosity–another a great somber giant, hairy and primitive–the third a tall, wiry man in the garb of a jester whose flaming blue eyes flared with a light not wholly sane–and last a stocky dwarf of a man, inhumanly short and abnormally broad of shoulders and long of arms.

The first speaker smiled in a wintry sort of manner. “Let us take the vow, the oath that may not be broken–the Oath of the Dagger and the Flame. I trust you–oh, yes, of course. Still, it is better that there be assurance for all of us. I note tremors among some of you.”

“That is all very well for you to say, Ascalante,” broke in the short fat man. “You are an ostracized outlaw, anyway, with a price on your head–you have all to gain and nothing to lose, whereas we–”

“Have much to lose and more to gain,” answered the outlaw imperturbably. “You called me down out of my mountain fastnesses to aid you in overthrowing a king–I have made the plans, set the snare, baited the trap and stand ready to destroy the prey–but I must be sure of your support. Will you swear?”

“Enough of this foolishness!” cried the man with the blazing eyes. “Aye, we will swear this dawn and tonight we will dance down a king! ‘Oh, the chant of the chariots and the whir of the wings of the vultures–’”

“Save your songs for another time, Ridondo,” laughed Ascalante. “This is a time for daggers, not rhymes.”

“My songs are nails for a king’s coffin!” cried the minstrel, whipping out a long lean dagger. “Varlets, bring hither a candle! I shall be first to swear the oath!”

A silent and sombre slave brought a long taper and Ridondo pricked his wrist, bringing blood. One by one the other four followed his example, holding their wounded wrists carefully so that the blood should not drip yet. Then gripping hands in a sort of circle, with the lighted candle in the center, they turned their wrists so that the blood drops fell upon it. While it hissed and sizzled, they repeated:

“I, Ascalante, a landless man, swear the deed spoken and the silence covenanted, by the oath unbreakable!”

“And I, Ridondo, first minstrel of Valusia’s courts!” cried the minstrel.

“And I, Volmana, count of Karaban,” spoke the dwarf.

“And I, Gromel, commander of the Black Legion,” rumbled the giant.

“And I, Kaanuub, baron of Blaal,” quavered the short fat man, in a rather tremulous falsetto.

The candle sputtered and went out, quenched by the ruby drops which fell upon it.

“So fade the life of our enemy,” said Ascalante, releasing his comrades’ hands. He looked on them with carefully veiled contempt. The outlaw knew that oaths may be broken, even “unbreakable” ones, but he knew also that Kaanuub, of whom he was most distrustful, was superstitious. There was no use overlooking any safe guard, no matter how slight.

“Tomorrow,” said Ascalante abruptly, “I mean today, for it is dawn now, Brule the Spear-slayer, the king’s right hand man, departs from Grondar along with Ka-nu the Pictish ambassador, the Pictish escort and a goodly number of the Red Slayers, the king’s bodyguard.”

“Yes,” said Volmana with some satisfaction. “That was your plan, Ascalante, but I accomplished it. I have kin high in the counsel of Grondar and it was a simple matter to indirectly persuade the king of Grondar to request the presence of Ka-nu. And of course, as Kull honors Ka-nu above all others, he must have a sufficient escort.”

The outlaw nodded.

“Good. I have at last managed, through Gromel, to corrupt an officer of the Red Guard. This man will march his men away from the royal bedroom tonight just before midnight, on a pretext of investigating some suspicious noise or the like. The various sentries will have been disposed of. We will be waiting, we five, and sixteen desperate rogues of mine who I have summoned from the hills and who now hide in various parts of the city. Twenty-one against one–”

He laughed. Gromel nodded, Volmana grinned, Kaanuub turned pale; Ridondo smote his hands together and cried out ringingly:

“By Valka, they will remember this night, who strike the golden strings! The fall of the tyrant, the death of the despot–what songs I shall make!”

His eyes burned with a wild fanatical light and the others regarded him dubiously, all save Ascalante who bent his head to hide a grin. Then the outlaw rose suddenly.

“Enough! Get back to your places and not by word, deed or look do you betray what is in your minds.” He hesitated, eyeing Kaanuub. “Baron, your white face will betray you. If Kull comes to you and looks into your eyes with those icy grey eyes of his, you will collapse. Get you out to your country estate and wait until we send for you. Four are enough.”

Kaanuub almost collapsed then, from a reaction of joy; he left babbling incoherencies. The rest nodded to the outlaw and departed.

Ascalante stretched himself like a great cat and grinned. He called for a slave and one came, a somber evil looking fellow whose shoulders bore the scars of the brand that marks thieves.

“Tomorrow,” quoth Ascalante, taking the cup offered him, “I come into the open and let the people of Valusia feast their eyes upon me. For months now, ever since the Rebel Four summoned me from my mountains, I have been cooped in like a rat–living in the very heart of my enemies, hiding away from the light in the daytime, skulking masked through dark alleys and darker corridors at night. Yet I have accomplished what those rebellious lords could not. Working through them and through other agents, many of whom have never seen my face, I have honeycombed the empire with discontent and corruption. I have bribed and subverted officials, spread sedition among the people–in short, I, working in the shadows, have paved the downfall of the king who at the moment sits throned in the sun. Ah, my friend, I had almost forgotten that I was a statesman before I was an outlaw, until Kaanuub and Volmana sent for me.”

“You work with strange comrades,” said the slave.

“Weak men, but strong in their ways,” lazily answered the outlaw. “Volmana–a shrewd man, bold, audacious, with kin in high places–but poverty stricken, and his barren estates loaded with debts. Gromel–a ferocious beast, strong and brave as a lion, with considerable influence among the soldiers, but otherwise useless–lacking the necessary brains. Kaanuub, cunning in his low way and full of petty intrigue, but otherwise a fool and a coward–avaricious but possessed of immense wealth, which has been essential in my schemes. Ridondo, a mad poet, full of hare-brained schemes–brave but flighty. A prime favorite with the people because of his songs which tear out their heart-strings. He is our best bid for popularity, once we have achieved our design. I am the power that has welded these men, useless without me.”

“Who mounts the throne, then?”

“Kaanuub, of course–or so he thinks! He has a trace of royal blood in him–the old dynasty, the blood of that king whom Kull killed with his bare hands. A bad mistake of the present king. He knows there are men who still boast descent from the old dynasty but he lets them live. So Kaanuub plots for the throne. Volmana wishes to be reinstated in favor, as he was under the old regime, so that he may lift his estate and title to their former grandeur. Gromel hates Kelka, commander of the Red Slayers, and thinks he should have that position. He wishes to be commander of all Valusia’s armies. As to Ridondo–bah! I despise the man and admire him at the same time. He is your true idealist. He sees in Kull, an outlander and a barbarian, merely a rough footed, red handed savage who has come out of the sea to invade a peaceful and pleasant land. He already idolizes the king Kull slew, forgetting the rogue’s vile nature. He forgets the inhumanities under which the land groaned during his reign, and he is making the people forget. Already they sing ‘The Lament for the King’ in which Ridondo lauds the saintly villain and vilifies Kull as ‘that black hearted savage’–Kull laughs at these songs and indulges Ridondo, but at the same time wonders why the people are turning against him.”

“But why does Ridondo hate Kull?”

“Because he is a poet, and poets always hate those in power, and turn to dead ages for relief in dreams. Ridondo is a flaming torch of idealism and he sees himself as a hero, a stainless knight, which he is, rising to overthrow the tyrant.”

“And you?”

Ascalante laughed and drained the goblet. “I have ideas of my own. Poets are dangerous things, because they believe what they sing–at the time. Well, I believe what I think. And I think Kaanuub will not hold the throne seat overlong. A few months ago I had lost all ambitions save to waste the villages and the caravans as long as I lived. Now, well–now we shall see.”

II

“THEN I WAS THE LIBERATOR–NOW–”

A room strangely barren in contrast to the rich tapestries on the walls and the deep carpets on the floor. A small writing table, behind which sat a man. This man would have stood out in a crowd of a million. It was not so much because of his unusual size, his height and great shoulders, though these features lent to the general effect. But his face, dark and immobile, held the gaze and his narrow grey eyes beat down the wills of the onlookers by their icy magnetism. Each movement he made, no matter how slight, betokened steel spring muscles and brain knit to those muscles with perfect coordination. There was nothing deliberate or measured about his motions–either he was perfectly at rest–still as a bronze statue, or else he was in motion, with that cat-like quickness which blurred the sight that tried to follow his movements. Now this man rested his chin on his fists, his elbows on the writing table, and gloomily eyed the man who stood before him. This man was occupied in his own affairs at the moment, for he was tightening the laces of his breast-plate. Moreover he was abstractedly whistling–a strange and unconventional performance, considering that he was in the presence of a king.

“Brule,” said the king, “this matter of statecraft wearies me as all the fighting I have done never did.”

“A part of the game, Kull,” answered Brule. “You are king–you must play the part.”

“I wish that I might ride with you to Grondar,” said Kull enviously. “It seems ages since I had a horse between my knees–but Tu says that affairs at home require my presence. Curse him!

“Months and months ago,” he continued with increasing gloom, getting no answer and speaking with freedom, “I overthrew the old dynasty and seized the throne of Valusia–of which I had dreamed ever since I was a boy in the land of my tribesmen. That was easy. Looking back now, over the long hard path I followed, all those days of toil, slaughter and tribulation seem like so many dreams. From a wild tribesman in Atlantis, I rose, passing through the galleys of Lemuria–a slave for two years at the oars–then an outlaw in the hills of Valusia–then a captive in her dungeons–a gladiator in her arenas–a soldier in her armies–a commander–a king!

“The trouble with me, Brule, I did not dream far enough. I always visualized merely the seizing of the throne–I did not look beyond. When king Borna lay dead beneath my feet, and I tore the crown from his gory head, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. From there, it has been a maze of illusions and mistakes. I prepared myself to seize the throne–not to hold it.

“When I overthrew Borna, then people hailed me wildly–then I was the Liberator–now they mutter and stare blackly behind my back–they spit at my shadow when they think I am not looking. They have put a statue of Borna, that dead swine, in the Temple of the Serpent and people go and wail before him, hailing him as a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red handed barbarian. When I led her armies to victory as a soldier, Valusia overlooked the fact that I was a foreigner–now she cannot forgive me.

“And now, in the Temple of the Serpent, there come to burn incense to Borna’s memory, men whom his executioners blinded and maimed, fathers whose sons died in his dungeons, husbands whose wives were dragged into his seraglio–Bah! Men are all fools.”

“Ridondo is largely responsible,” answered the Pict, drawing his sword belt up another notch. “He sings songs that make men mad. Hang him in his jester’s garb to the highest tower in the city. Let him make rhymes for the vultures.”

Kull shook his lion head. “No, Brule, he is beyond my reach. A great poet is greater than any king. He hates me, yet I would have his friendship. His songs are mightier than my sceptre, for time and again he has near torn the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I will die and be forgotten, his songs will live forever.”

The Pict shrugged his shoulders. “As you like; you are still king, and the people cannot dislodge you. The Red Slayers are yours to a man, and you have all Pictland behind you. We are barbarians, together, even if we have spent most of our lives in this land. I go, now. You have naught to fear save an attempt at assassination, which is no fear at all, considering the fact that you are guarded night and day by a squad of the Red Slayers.”

Kull lifted his hand in a gesture of farewell and the Pict clanked out the room.

Now another man wished his attention, reminding Kull that a king’s time was never his own.

This man was a young noble of the city, one Seno val Dor. This famous young swordsman and reprobate presented himself before the king with the plain evidence of much mental perturbation. His velvet cap was rumpled and as he dropped it to the floor when he kneeled, the plume drooped miserably. His gaudy clothing showed stains as if in his mental agony he had neglected his personal appearance for some time.

“King, lord king,” he said in tones of deep sincerity. “If the glorious record of my family means anything to your majesty, if my own fealty means anything, for Valka’s sake, grant my request.”

“Name it.”

“Lord king, I love a maiden–without her I cannot live. Without me, she must die. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep for thinking of her. Her beauty haunts me day and night–the radiant vision of her divine loveliness–”

Kull moved restlessly. He had never been a lover.

“Then in Valka’s name, marry her!”

“Ah,” cried the youth, “there’s the rub. She is a slave, Ala by name, belonging to one Volmana, count of Karaban. It is on the black books of Valusian law that a noble cannot marry a slave. It has always been so. I have moved high heaven and get only the same reply. ‘Noble and slave can never wed.’ It is fearful. They tell me that never in the history of the empire before has a nobleman wanted to marry a slave! What is that to me? I appeal to you as a last resort!”

“Will not this Volmana sell her?”

“He would, but that would hardly alter the case. She would still be a slave and a man cannot marry his own slave. Only as a wife I want her. Any other way would be hollow mockery. I want to show her to all the world, rigged out in the ermine and jewels of val Dor’s wife! But it cannot be, unless you can help me. She was born a slave, of a hundred generations of slaves, and slave she will be as long as she lives and her children after her. And as such she cannot marry a freeman.”

“Then go into slavery with her,” suggested Kull, eyeing the youth narrowly.

“This I desired,” answered Seno, so frankly that Kull instantly believed him. “I went to Volmana and said: ‘You have a slave whom I love; I wish to wed her. Take me, then, as your slave so that I may be ever near her.’ He refused with horror; he would sell me the girl, or give her to me but he would not consent to enslave me. And my father has sworn on the unbreakable oath to kill me if I should so degrade the name of val Dor as to go into slavery. No, lord king, only you can help us.”

Kull summoned Tu and laid the case before him. Tu, chief councillor, shook his head. “It is written in the great iron bound books, even as Seno has said. It has ever been the law, and it will always be the law. A noble may not mate with a slave.”

“Why may I not change that law?” queried Kull.

Tu laid before him a tablet of stone whereon the law was engraved.

“For thousands of years this law has been–see, Kull, on the stone it was carved by the primal law makers, so many centuries ago a man might count all night and still not number them all. Neither you, nor any other king, may alter it.”

Kull felt suddenly the sickening, weakening feeling of utter helplessness which had begun to assail him of late. Kingship was another form of slavery, it seemed to him–he had always won his way by carving a path through his enemies with his great sword–how could he prevail against solicitous and respectful friends who bowed and flattered and were adamant against anything new, or any change–who barricaded themselves and their customs with traditions and antiquity and quietly defied him to change–anything?

“Go,” he said with a weary wave of his hand. “I am sorry. But I cannot help you.”

Seno val Dor wandered out of the room, a broken man, if hanging head and bent shoulders, dull eyes and dragging steps mean anything.

III

“I THOUGHT YOU A HUMAN TIGER!”

A cool wind whispered through the green woodlands. A silver thread of a brook wound among great tree boles, whence hung large vines and gayly festooned creepers. A bird sang and the soft late summer sunlight was sifted through the interlocking branches to fall in gold and black velvet patterns of shade and light on the grass covered earth. In the midst of this pastoral quietude, a little slave girl lay with her face between her soft white arms, and wept as if her little heart would break. The bird sang but she was deaf; the brook called her but she was dumb; the sun shone but she was blind–all the universe was a black void in which only pain and tears were real.

So she did not hear the light footfall nor see the tall broad shouldered man who came out of the bushes and stood above her. She was not aware of his presence until he knelt and lifted her, wiping her eyes with hands as gentle as a woman’s.

The little slave girl looked into a dark immobile face, with cold narrow grey eyes which just now were strangely soft. She knew this man was not a Valusian from his appearance, and in these troublous times it was not a good thing for little slave girls to be caught in the lonely woods by strangers, especially foreigners, but she was too miserable to be afraid and besides the man looked kind.

“What’s the matter, child?” he asked and because a woman in extreme grief is likely to pour her sorrows out to anyone who shows interest and sympathy she whimpered: “Oh, sir, I am a miserable girl! I love a young nobleman–”

“Seno val Dor?”

“Yes, sir.” She glanced at him in surprize. “How did you know? He wishes to marry me and today having striven in vain elsewhere for permission, he went to the king himself. But the king refused to aid him.”

A shadow crossed the stranger’s dark face. “Did Seno say the king refused?”

“No–the king summoned the chief councillor and argued with him awhile, but gave in. Oh,” she sobbed, “I knew it would be useless! The laws of Valusia are unalterable! No matter how cruel or unjust! They are greater than the king.”

The girl felt the muscles of the arms supporting her swell and harden into great iron cables. Across the stranger’s face passed a bleak and hopeless expression.

“Aye,” he muttered, half to himself, “the laws of Valusia are greater than the king.”

Telling her troubles had helped her a little and she dried her eyes. Little slave girls are used to troubles and to suffering, though this one had been unusually kindly used all her life.

“Does Seno hate the king?” asked the stranger.

She shook her head. “He realizes the king is helpless.”

“And you?”

“And I what?”

“Do you hate the king?”

Her eyes flared–shocked. “I! Oh sir, who am I, to hate the king? Why, why, I never thought of such a thing.”

“I am glad,” said the man heavily. “After all, little one, the king is only a slave like yourself, locked with heavier chains.”

“Poor man,” she said, pityingly though not exactly understanding, then she flamed into wrath. “But I do hate the cruel laws which the people follow! Why should laws not change? Time never stands still! Why should people today be shackled by laws which were made for our barbarian ancestors thousands of years ago–” she stopped suddenly and looked fearfully about.

“Don’t tell,” she whispered, laying her head in an appealing manner on her companion’s iron shoulder. “It is not fit that a woman, and a slave girl at that, should so unashamedly express herself on such public matters. I will be spanked if my mistress or my master hears of it!”

The big man smiled. “Be at ease, child. The king himself would not be offended at your sentiments; indeed I believe that he agrees with you.”

“Have you seen the king?” she asked, her childish curiosity overcoming her misery for the moment.

“Often.”

“And is he eight feet tall,” she asked eagerly, “and has he horns under his crown, as the common people say?”

“Scarcely,” he laughed. “He lacks nearly two feet of answering your description as regards height; as for size he might be my twin brother. There is not an inch difference in us.”

“Is he as kind as you?”

“At times; when he is not goaded to frenzy by a statecraft which he cannot understand and by the vagaries of a people which can never understand him.”

“Is he in truth a barbarian?”

“In very truth; he was born and spent his early boyhood among the heathen barbarians who inhabit the land of Atlantis. He dreamed a dream and fulfilled it. Because he was a great fighter and a savage swordsman, because he was crafty in actual battle, because the barbarian mercenaries in Valusian armies loved him, he became king. Because he is a warrior and not a politician, because his swordsmanship helps him now not at all, his throne is rocking beneath him.”

“And he is very unhappy.”

“Not all the time,” smiled the big man. “Sometimes when he slips away alone and takes a few hours holiday by himself among the woods, he is almost happy. Especially when he meets a pretty girl like–”

The girl cried out in sudden terror, slipping to her knees before him: “Oh, sire, sire, have mercy! I did not know–you are the king!”

“Don’t be afraid.” Kull knelt beside her again and put an arm about her, feeling her trembling from head to foot. “You said I was kind–”

“And so you are, sire,” she whispered weakly. “I–I thought you were a human tiger, from what men said, but you are kind and tender–b-but–you are k-king and I–”

Suddenly in a very agony of confusion and embarrassment, she sprang up and fled, vanishing instantly. The overcoming realization that the king, whom she had only dreamed of seeing at a distance some day, was actually the man to whom she had told her pitiful woes, overcame her and filled her with an abasement and embarrassment which was an almost physical terror.

Kull sighed and rose. The affairs of the palace were calling him back and he must return and wrestle with problems concerning the nature of which he had only the vaguest idea and concerning the solving of which he had no idea at all.

IV

“WHO DIES FIRST?”

Through the utter silence which shrouded the corridors and halls of the palace, twenty figures stole. Their stealthy feet, cased in soft leather shoes, made no sound either on thick carpet or bare marble tile. The torches which stood in niches along the halls gleamed redly on bared dagger, broad sword blade and keen edged axe.

“Easy, easy all!” hissed Ascalante, halting for a moment to glance back at his followers. “Stop that cursed loud breathing, whoever it is! The officer of the night guard has removed all the guards from these halls, either by direct order or by making them drunk, but we must be careful. Lucky it is for us that those cursed Picts–the lean wolves–are either revelling at the consulate or riding to Grondar. Hist! back–here come the guard!”

They crowded back behind a huge pillar which might have hidden a whole regiment of men, and waited. Almost immediately ten men swung by; tall brawny men, in red armor, who looked like iron statues. They were heavily armed and the faces of some showed a slight uncertainty. The officer who led them was rather pale. His face was set in hard lines and he lifted a hand to wipe sweat from his brow as the guard passed the pillar where the assassins hid. He was young and this betraying of a king came not easy to him.

They clanked by and passed on up the corridor.

“Good!” chuckled Ascalante. “He did as I bid; Kull sleeps unguarded! Haste, we have work to do! If they catch us killing him, we are undone, but a dead king is easy to make a mere memory. Haste!”

“Aye haste!” cried Ridondo.

They hurried down the corridor with reckless speed and stopped before a door.

“Here!” snapped Ascalante. “Gromel–break me open this door!”

The giant launched his mighty weight against the panel. Again–this time there was a rending of bolts, a crash of wood and the door staggered and burst inward.

“In!” shouted Ascalante, on fire with the spirit of murder.

“In!” roared Ridondo. “Death to the tyrant–”

They halted short–Kull faced them–not a naked Kull, roused out of deep sleep, mazed and unarmed to be butchered like a sheep, but a Kull wakeful and ferocious, partly clad in the armor of a Red Slayer, with a long sword in his hand.

Kull had risen quietly a few minutes before, unable to sleep. He had intended to ask the officer of the guard into his room to converse with him awhile, but on looking through the spy-hole of the door, had seen him leading his men off. To the suspicious brain of the barbarian king had leaped the assumption that he was being betrayed. He never thought of calling the men back, because they were supposedly in the plot too. There was no good reason for this desertion. So Kull had quietly and quickly donned the armor he kept at hand, nor had he completed this act when Gromel first hurtled against the door.

For a moment the tableau held–the four rebel noblemen at the door and the ten wild desperate outlaws crowding close behind them–held at bay by the terrible-eyed silent giant who stood in the middle of the royal bedroom, sword at the ready.

Then Ascalante shouted: “In! And slay him! He is one to twenty and he has no helmet!”

True; there had been lack of time to put on the helmet, nor was there now time to snatch the great shield from where it hung on the wall. Be that as it may, Kull was better protected than any of the assassins except Gromel and Volmana who were in full armor, with their vizors closed.

With a yell that rang to the roof, the killers flooded into the room. First of all was Gromel. He came in like a charging bull, head down, sword low for the disembowelling thrust. And Kull sprang to meet him like a tiger charging a bull, and all the king’s weight and mighty strength went into the arm that swung the sword. In a whistling arc the great blade flashed through the air to crash down on the commander’s helmet. Blade and helmet clashed and flew to pieces together and Gromel rolled lifeless on the floor, while Kull bounded back, gripping the bladeless hilt.

“Gromel!” he snarled as the shattered helmet disclosed the shattered head, then the rest of the pack were upon him. He felt a dagger point rake along his ribs and flung the wielder aside with a swing of his great left arm. He smashed his broken hilt square between another’s eyes and dropped him senseless and bleeding to the floor.

“Watch the door, four of you!” screamed Ascalante, dancing about the edge of that whirlpool of singing steel, for he feared Kull, with his great weight and speed, might smash through their midst and escape. Four rogues drew back and ranged themselves before the single door. And in that instant Kull leaped to the wall and tore there from an ancient battle axe which had hung there for possibly a hundred years.

Back to the wall he faced them for a moment, then leaped among them. No defensive fighter was Kull! He always carried the fight to the enemy. A sweep of the axe dropped an outlaw to the floor with a severed shoulder–the terrible back-hand stroke crushed the skull of another. A sword shattered against his breast-plate–else he had died. His concern was to protect his uncovered head and the spaces between breast plate and back plate–for Valusian armor was intricate and he had had no time to fully arm himself. Already he was bleeding from wounds on the cheek and the arms and legs, but so swift and deadly he was, and so much the fighter that even with the odds so greatly on their side, the assassins hesitated to leave an opening. Moreover their own numbers hampered them.

For one moment they crowded him savagely, raining blows, then they gave back and ringed him, thrusting and parrying–a couple of corpses on the floor gave mute evidence of the unwisdom of their first plan.

“Knaves!” screamed Ridondo in a rage, flinging off his slouch cap, his wild eyes glaring. “Do ye shrink from the combat? Shall the despot live? Out on it!”

He rushed in, thrusting viciously; but Kull, recognizing him, shattered his sword with a tremendous short chop and, with a push, sent him reeling back to sprawl on the floor. The king took in his left arm the sword of Ascalante and the outlaw only saved his life by ducking Kull’s axe and bounding backward. One of the hairy bandits dived at Kull’s legs hoping to bring him down in that manner, but after wrestling for a brief instant at what seemed a solid iron tower, he glanced up just in time to see the axe falling, but not in time to avoid it. In the interim one of his comrades had lifted a sword with both hands and hewed downward with such downright sincerity that he cut through Kull’s shoulder plate on the left side, and wounded the shoulder beneath. In an instant the king’s breast plate was full of blood.

Volmana, flinging the attackers to right and left in his savage impatience, came ploughing through and hacked savagely at Kull’s unprotected head. Kull ducked and the sword whistled above, shaving off a lock of hair–ducking the blows of a dwarf like Volmana is difficult for a man of Kull’s height.

Kull pivoted on his heel and struck from the side, as a wolf might leap, in a wide level arc–Volmana dropped with his whole left side caved in and the lungs gushing forth.

“Volmana!” Kull spoke the word rather breathlessly. “I’d know that dwarf in Hell–”

He straightened to defend himself from the maddened rush of Ridondo who charged in wild and wide open, armed only with a dagger. Kull leaped back, axe high.

“Ridondo!” his voice rang sharply. “Back! I would not harm you–”

“Die, tyrant!” screamed the mad minstrel, hurling himself headlong on the king. Kull delayed the blow he was loath to deliver until it was too late. Only when he felt the bite of steel in his unprotected side did he strike, in a frenzy of blind desperation.

Ridondo dropped with a shattered skull and Kull reeled back against the wall, blood spurting through the fingers which gripped his wounded side.

“In, now, and get him!” yelled Ascalante, preparing to lead the attack.

Kull placed his back to the wall and lifted his axe. He made a terrible and primordial picture. Legs braced far apart, head thrust forward, one red hand clutching at the wall for support, the other gripping the axe on high, while the ferocious features were frozen in a death snarl of hate, and the icy eyes blazed through the mist of blood which veiled them. The men hesitated; the tiger might be dying but he was still capable of dealing death.

“Who dies first?” snarled Kull through smashed and bloody lips.

Ascalante leaped as a wolf leaps–halted almost in mid-air with the unbelievable speed which characterized him, and fell prostrate to avoid the death that was hissing toward him in the form of a red axe. He frantically whirled his feet out of the way and rolled clear just as Kull recovered from his missed blow and struck again–this time the axe sank four inches into the polished wood floor close to Ascalante’s revolving legs.

Another desperado rushed at this instant, followed half heartedly by his fellows. The first villain had figured on reaching Kull and killing him before he could get his axe out of the floor, but he miscalculated the king’s speed, or else he started his rush a second too late. At any rate the axe lurched up and crashed down and the rush halted abruptly as a reddened caricature of a man was catapulted back against their legs.

At that moment a hurried clanking of feet sounded down the hall and the rogues in the door raised a shout: “Soldiers coming!”

Ascalante cursed and his men deserted him like rats leaving a sinking ship. They rushed out into the hall–or limped, splattering blood–and down the corridor a hue and cry was raised, and pursuit started.

Save for the dead and dying men on the floor, Kull and Ascalante stood alone in the royal bed room.

Kull’s knees were buckling and he leaned heavily against the wall, watching the outlaw with the eyes of a dying wolf.

“All seems to be lost, particularly honor,” he murmured. “However the king is dying on his feet–and–” whatever other cogitation might have passed through his mind is not known for at that moment he ran lightly at Kull just as the king was employing his axe arm to wipe the blood from his half blind eyes. A man with a sword at the ready can thrust quicker than a wounded man out of position can strike with an axe that weighs his weary arm like lead.

But even as Ascalante began his thrust, Seno val Dor appeared at the door and flung something through the air which glittered, sang and ended its flight in Ascalante’s throat. The outlaw staggered, dropped his sword and sank to the floor at Kull’s feet, flooding them with the flow of a severed jugular–mute witness that Seno’s war-skill included knife throwing as well. Kull looked down bewilderedly at the dead outlaw and Ascalante’s dead eyes stared back in seeming mockery, as if the owner still maintained the futility of kings and outlaws, of plots and counter-plots.

Then Seno was supporting the king, the room was flooded with men-at-arms in the uniform of the great val Dor family and Kull realized that a little slave girl was holding his other arm.

“Kull, Kull, are you dead?” val Dor’s face was very white.

“Not yet,” the king spoke huskily. “Staunch this wound in my left side–if I die ’twill be from it; ’tis deep but the rest are not mortal–Ridondo wrote me a deathly song there! Cram stuff into it for the present–I have work to do.”

They obeyed wonderingly and as the flow of blood ceased, Kull though literally bled white already, felt some slight access of strength. The palace was fully aroused now. Court ladies, lords, men-at-arms, councillors, all swarmed about the place babbling. The Red Slayers were gathering, wild with rage, ready for anything, jealous of the fact that others had aided their king. Of the young officer who had commanded the door guard, he had slipped away in the darkness and neither then nor later was he in evidence, though earnestly sought after.

Kull, still keeping stubbornly to his feet, grasping his bloody axe with one hand and Seno’s shoulder with another singled out Tu, who stood wringing his hands and ordered: “Bring me the tablet whereon is engraved the law concerning slaves.”

“But lord king–”

“Do as I say!” howled Kull, lifting the axe and Tu scurried to obey.

As he waited and the court women flocked about him, dressing his wounds and trying gently but vainly to pry his iron fingers from about the bloody axe handle, Kull heard Seno’s breathless tale.

“–Ala heard Kaanuub and Volmana plotting–she had stolen into a little nook to cry over her–our troubles, and Kaanuub came, on his way to his country estate. He was shaking with terror for fear plans might go awry and he made Volmana go over the plot with him again before he left, so he might know there was no flaw in it.

“He did not leave until it was late, and then Ala stole away and came to me. But it is a long way from Volmana’s city house to the house of val Dor, a long way for a little girl to walk, and though I gathered my men and came instantly, we almost arrived too late.”

Kull gripped his shoulder.

“I will not forget.”

Tu entered with the law tablet, laying it reverently on the table.

Kull shouldered aside all who stood near him and stood up alone.

“Hear, people of Valusia,” he exclaimed, upheld by the wild beast vitality which was his, fired from within by a strength which was more than physical. “I stand here–the king. I am wounded almost unto death, but I have survived mass wounds.

“Hear you! I am weary of this business! I am no king but a slave! I am hemmed in by laws, laws, laws! I cannot punish malefactors nor reward my friends because of law–custom–tradition! By Valka, I will be king in fact as well as in name!

“Here stand the two who have saved my life! Henceforward they are free to marry, to do as they like!”

Seno and Ala rushed into each others’ arms with a glad cry.

“But the law!” screamed Tu.

“I am the law!” roared Kull, swinging up his axe; it flashed downward and the stone tablet flew into a hundred pieces. The people clenched their hands in horror, waiting dumbly for the sky to fall.

Kull reeled back, eyes blazing. The room whirled to his dizzy gaze.

“I am king, state and law!” he roared, and seizing the wand-like sceptre which lay near, he broke it in two and flung it from him. “This shall be my sceptre!” The red axe was brandished aloft, splashing the pallid nobles with drops of blood. Kull gripped the slender crown with his left hand and placed his back against the wall. Only that support kept him from falling but in his arms was still the strength of lions.

“I am either king or corpse!” he roared, his corded muscles bulging, his terrible eyes blazing. “If you like not my kingship–come and take this crown!”

The corded left arm held out the crown, the right gripping the menacing axe above it.

“By this axe I rule! This is my sceptre! I have struggled and sweated to be the puppet king you wished me to be–to king it your way. Now I use mine own way! If you will not fight, you shall obey! Laws that are just shall stand; laws that have outlived their times I shall shatter as I shattered that one! I am king!”

Slowly the pale faced noblemen and frightened women knelt, bowing in fear and reverence to the blood stained giant who towered above them with his eyes ablaze.

“I am king!”

Swords of the Purple Kingdom

Swords of the Purple Kingdom

I

VALUSIA PLOTS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

A sinister quiet lay like a shroud over the ancient city of Valusia. The heat waves danced from roof to shining roof and shimmered against the smooth marble walls. The purple towers and golden spires were softened in the faint haze. No ringing hoofs on the wide paved streets broke the drowsy silence and the few pedestrians who appeared walking, did what they had to do hastily and vanished indoors again. The city seemed like a realm of ghosts.

Kull, king of Valusia, drew aside the filmy curtains and gazed over the golden window sill, out over the court with its sparkling fountains and trim hedges and pruned trees, over the high wall and at the blank windows of houses which met his glance.

“All Valusia plots behind closed doors, Brule,” he grunted.

His companion, a dark faced, powerful warrior of medium height grinned hardly: “You are too suspicious, Kull. The heat drives most of them indoors.”

“But they plot,” reiterated Kull. He was a tall broad shouldered barbarian, the true fighting build–wide shoulders, mighty chest and lean flanks. Under heavy black brows his cold grey eyes brooded. His features betrayed his birth for Kull the usurper was an Atlantean.

“True, they plot. When did the people ever fail to plot, no matter who held the throne? And they might be excused now, Kull.”

“Aye,” the giant’s brow clouded, “I am an alien. The first barbarian to press the Valusian throne since the beginning of time. When I was a commander of her forces they overlooked the accident of my birth. Now–they hurl it into my teeth–by looks and thoughts, at least.”

“What do you care? I am an alien also. Aliens rule Valusia now, since the people have grown too weak and degenerate to rule themselves. An Atlantean sits on her throne, backed by all the Picts, the empire’s most ancient and powerful allies; her court is filled with foreigners, her armies with barbarian mercenaries–and the Red Slayers–well, they are at least Valusians, but they are men of the mountains who look upon themselves almost as a different race.”

Kull shrugged his shoulders restlessly.

“I know what the people think, and with what aversion and anger the powerful old Valusian families must look on the state of affairs. But what would you have? The empire was worse under Borna, a native Valusian and a direct heir of the old dynasty, than it has been under me. This is the price a nation must pay for decaying–the strong young people come in and take possession, one way or another. I have at least rebuilt the armies, organized the mercenaries and restored Valusia to a measure of her former international greatness. Surely it is better to have one barbarian on the throne, holding the crumbling bands together, than to have a hundred thousand riding red handed through the city streets. Which is what would have happened by now, had it been left to king Borna. The kingdom was splitting under his feet; invasions threatening on all sides, the heathen Grondarians were ready to launch a raid of appalling magnitude–

“Well, I killed Borna with my bare hands that wild night when we rode at the head of the rebels. That bit of ruthlessness won me some enemies, but within six months I had put down anarchy and all counter rebellions, had welded the nation back into one piece, had broken the back of the Triple Federation and crushed the power of the Grondarians–well, now Valusia dozes in peace and quiet, and between naps, plots my overthrow. There has been no famine since my reign, the store houses are bulging with grain, the trading ships ride heavy with cargo, the merchants’ purses are full, the people are fat bellied–but still they murmur and curse and spit on my shadow. What do they want?”

The Pict grinned savagely and with bitter mirth. “Another Borna! A red handed tyrant! Forget their ingratitude. You did not seize the kingdom for their sakes, nor do you hold it for their benefit. Well, you have accomplished a life long ambition and you are firmly seated on the throne. Let them murmur and plot. You are king!”

Kull nodded grimly. “I am king of this purple kingdom! And until my breath stops and my ghost goes down the long Shadow road, I will be king! What now?”

A slave bowed deeply: “Delcartes, daughter of the great house of bora Ballin, desires audience, most high majesty!”

A shadow crossed the king’s brow. “More supplication in regard to her damnable love affair!” he sighed to Brule. “Mayhap you’d better go.” To the slave, “Let her enter the presence.”

Kull sat in a chair padded with velvet and gazed at Delcartes. She was only some nineteen years of age, and clad in the costly but scanty fashion of Valusian noble ladies, she presented a ravishing picture, the beauty of which even the barbarian king could appreciate. Her skin was a marvelous white, due partly to many baths in milk and wine, but mainly a part of her heritage of loveliness. Her cheeks were tinted naturally with a delicate pink and her lips were full and red. Under delicate black brows brooded a pair of deep soft eyes, dark as mystery, and the whole picture was set off by a mass of curly black silky hair which was partly confined by a slim golden band.