The Snout in the Dark

ONE: The Thing in the Dark

Amboola of Kush awakened slowly, his senses still sluggish from the wine he had guzzled at the feast the night before. For a muddled moment, he could not remember where he was. The moonlight, streaming through the small barred window, high up on one wall, shone on unfamiliar sur­roundings. Then he remembered that he was lying in the upper cell of the prison into which Queen Tananda had thrown him.

There had, he suspected, been a drug in his wine. While he sprawled helplessly, barely conscious, two black giants of the queen's guard had laid hands upon him and upon the Lord Aahmes, the queen's cousin, and hustled them away to their cells. The last thing he remembered was a brief statement from the queen, like the crack of a whip: “So you villains would plot to overthrow me, would you? You shall see what befalls traitors!”

As the giant black warrior moved, a clank of metal made him aware of fetters on his wrists and ankles, connected by chains to massive iron staples set in the wall. He strained his eyes to pierce the fetid gloom around him. At least, he thought, he still lived. Even Tananda had to think twice about slaying the commander of the Black Spearmen - the backbone of the army of Kemh and the hero of the lower castes of the kingdom.

What most puzzled Amboola was the charge of con­spiracy with Aahmes. To be sure, he and the princeling had been good friends. They had hunted and guzzled and gambled together, and Aahmes had complained privately to Amboola about the queen, whose cruel heart was as cunning and treacherous as her dusky body was desirable. But things had never gotten to the point of actual con­spiracy. Aahmes was not the man for that sort of thing anyway - a good-natured, easygoing young fellow with no interest in politics or power. Some informer, seeking to advance his own prospects at the cost of others, must have laid false accusations before the queen.

Amboola examined his fetters. For all his strength, he knew he could not break them, nor yet the chains that held them. Neither could he hope to pull the staples loose from the wall. He knew, because he had overseen their installation himself.

He knew what the next step would be. The queen would have him and Aahmes tortured, to wring from them the details of their conspiracy and the names of their fellow plotters. For all his barbaric courage, Amboola quailed at the prospect. Perhaps his best hope would lie in accusing all the lords and grandees of Rush of complicity. Tananda could not punish them all. If she tried to, the imaginary conspiracy she feared would quickly become a fact...

Suddenly, Amboola was cold sober. An icy sensation scuttled up his spine. Something - a living, breathing pres­ence - was in the room with him.

With a low cry, he started up and stared about him, straining his eyes to pierce the darkness that clung about him like the shadowy wings of death. By the faint light that came through the small barred window, the officer could just make out a terrible and grisly shape. An icy hand clutched at his heart, which through a score of battles had never, until this hour, known fear.

A shapeless gray fog hovered in the gloom. Seething mists whirled like a nest of coiling serpents, as the phan­tom form congealed into solidity. Stark terror lay on Amboola's writhing lips and shone in his rolling eyes as he saw the thing that condensed slowly into being out of empty air.

First he saw a piglike snout, covered with coarse bristles, which thrust into the shaft of dim luminescence that came through the window. Then he began to make our a hulking form amidst the shadows - something huge, misshapen, and bestial, which nevertheless stood upright. To a piglike head was now added thick, hairy arms ending in rudi­mentary hands, like those of a baboon.

With a piercing shriek, Amboola sprang up - and then the motionless thing moved, with the paralyzing speed of a monster in a nightmare. The black warrior had one frenzied glimpse of champing, foaming jaws, of great chisel-like tusks, of small, piggish eyes that blazed with red fury through the dark. Then the brutish paws clamped his flesh in a viselike grip; tusks tore and slashed …

Presently the moonlight fell upon a black shape, sprawled on the floor in a widening pool of blood. The grayish, shambling thing that a moment before had been savaging the black warrior was gone, dissolved into the im­palpable mist from which it had taken form.