Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned Page 4

  Chapter IV

  : The Attack From the Air

  The shadows were black around her,

  The dripping jaws gaped wide,

  Thicker than rain the red drops fell;

  But my love was fiercer than Death's black spell,

  Nor all the iron walls of hell

  Could keep me from her side.

  --The Song of Belit

  The jungle was a black colossus that locked the ruin-littered glade in ebon arms. The moon had not risen; the stars were flecks of hot amber in a breathless sky that reeked of death. On the pyramid among the fallen towers sat Conyn the Cimmerian like an iron statue, chin propped on massive fists. Out in the black shadows stealthy feet padded and red eyes glimmered. The dead lay as they had fallen. But on the deck of the Tiger, on a pyre of broken benches, spear-shafts and leopardskins, lay the King of the Black Coast in his last sleep, wrapped in Conyn's scarlet cloak. Like a true king he lay, with his plunder heaped high about him: silks, cloth-of-gold, silver braid, casks of gems and golden coins, silver ingots, jeweled daggers and teocallis of gold wedges.

  But of the plunder of the accursed city, only the sullen waters of Zarkheba could tell where Conyn had thrown it with a heathen curse. Now she sat grimly on the pyramid, waiting for her unseen foes. The black fury in her soul drove out all fear. What shapes would emerge from the blackness she knew not, nor did she care.

  She no longer doubted the visions of the black lotus. She understood that while waiting for her in the glade, N'Gora and her comrades had been terror-stricken by the winged monster swooping upon them from the sky, and fleeing in blind panic, had fallen over the cliff, all except their chief, who had somehow escaped their fate, though not madness. Meanwhile, or immediately after, or perhaps before, the destruction of those on the riverbank had been accomplished. Conyn did not doubt that the slaughter along the river had been massacre rather than battle. Already unmanned by their superstitious fears, the blacks might well have died without striking a blow in their own defense when attacked by their inhuman foes.

  Why she had been spared so long, she did not understand, unless the malign entity which ruled the river meant to keep her alive to torture her with grief and fear. All pointed to a human or superhuman intelligence--the breaking of the watercasks to divide the forces, the driving of the blacks over the cliff, and last and greatest, the grim jest of the crimson necklace knotted like a hangman's noose about Belit's white neck.

  Having apparently saved the Cimmerian for the choicest victim, and extracted the last ounce of exquisite mental torture, it was likely that the unknown enemy would conclude the drama by sending her after the other victims. No smile bent Conyn's grim lips at the thought, but her eyes were lit with iron laughter.

  The moon rose, striking fire from the Cimmerian's horned helmet. No call awoke the echoes; yet suddenly the night grew tense and the jungle held its breath. Instinctively Conyn loosened the great sword in its sheath. The pyramid on which she rested was four-sided, one--the side toward the jungle carved in broad steps. In her hand was a Shemite bow, such as Belit had taught his pirates to use. A heap of arrows lay at her feet, feathered ends towards her, as she rested on one knee.

  Something moved in the blackness under the trees. Etched abruptly in the rising moon, Conyn saw a darkly blocked-out head and shoulders, brutish in outline. And now from the shadows dark shapes came silently, swiftly, running low--twenty great spotted hyenas. Their slavering fangs flashed in the moonlight, their eyes blazed as no true beast's eyes ever blazed.

  Twenty: then the spears of the pirates had taken toll of the pack, after all. Even as she thought this, Conyn drew nock to ear, and at the twang of the string a flame-eyed shadow bounded high and fell writhing. The rest did not falter; on they came, and like a rain of death among them fell the arrows of the Cimmerian, driven with all the force and accuracy of steely thews backed by a hate hot as the slag-heaps of hell.

  In her berserk fury she did not miss; the air was filled with feathered destruction. The havoc wrought among the onrushing pack was breathtaking. Less than half of them reached the foot of the pyramid. Others dropped upon the broad steps. Glaring down into the blazing eyes, Conyn knew these creatures were not beasts; it was not merely in their unnatural size that she sensed a blasphemous difference. They exuded an aura tangible as the black mist rising from a corpse-littered swamp. By what godless alchemy these beings had been brought into existence, she could not guess; but she knew she faced diabolism blacker than the Well of Skelos.

  Springing to her feet, she bent her bow powerfully and drove her last shaft point blank at a great hairy shape that soared up at her throat. The arrow was a flying beam of moonlight that flashed onward with but a blur in its course, but the were-beast plunged convulsively in midair and crashed headlong, shot through and through.

  Then the rest were on her, in a nightstallion rush of blazing eyes and dripping fangs. Her fiercely driven sword shore the first asunder; then the desperate impact of the others bore her down. She crushed a narrow skull with the pommel of her hilt, feeling the bone splinter and blood and brains gush over her hand; then, dropping the sword, useless at such deadly close quarters, she caught at the throats of the two horrors which were ripping and tearing at her in silent fury. A foul acrid scent almost stifled her, her own sweat blinded her. Only her mail saved her from being ripped to ribbons in an instant. The next, her naked right hand locked on a hairy throat and tore it open. Her left hand, missing the throat of the other beast, caught and broke its foreleg. A short yelp, the only cry in that grim battle, and hideously human-like, burst from the maimed beast. At the sick horror of that cry from a bestial throat, Conyn involuntarily relaxed her grip.

  One, blood gushing from its torn jugular, lunged at her in a last spasm of ferocity, and fastened its fangs on her throat--to fall back dead, even as Conyn felt the tearing agony of its grip.

  The other, springing forward on three legs, was slashing at her belly as a wolf slashes, actually rending the links of her mail. Flinging aside the dying beast, Conyn grappled the crippled horror and, with a muscular effort that brought a groan from her blood-flecked lips, she heaved upright, gripping the struggling, bearing fiend in her arms. An instant she reeled off balance, its fetid breath hot on her nostrils; its jaws snapping at her neck; then she hurled it from her, to crash with bone-splintering force down the marble steps.

  As she reeled on wide-braced legs, sobbing for breath, the jungle and the moon swimming bloodily to her sight, the thrash of bat-wings was loud in her ears. Stooping, she groped for her sword, and swaying upright, braced her feet drunkenly and heaved the great blade above her head with both hands, shaking the blood from her eyes as she sought the air above her for her foe.

  Instead of attack from the air, the pyramid staggered suddenly and awfully beneath her feet. She heard a rumbling crackle and saw the tall column above her wave like a wand. Stung to galvanized life, she bounded far out; her feet hit a step, halfway down, which rocked beneath her, and her next desperate leap carried her clear. But even as her heels hit the earth, with a shattering crash like a breaking mountain the pyramid crumpled, the column came thundering down in bursting fragments. For a blind cataclysmic instant the sky seemed to rain shards of marble. Then a rubble of shattered stone lay whitely under the moon.

  Conyn stirred, throwing off the splinters that half covered her. A glancing blow had knocked off her helmet and momentarily stunned her. Across her legs lay a great piece of the column, pinning her down. She was not sure that her legs were unbroken. Her black locks were plastered with sweat; blood trickled from the wounds in her throat and hands. She hitched up on one arm, struggling with the debris that prisoned her.

  Then something swept down across the stars and struck the sward near her. Twisting about, she saw it--the winged one!

  With fearful speed it was rushing upon her, and in that instant Conyn had only a confused impression of a gigantic manlike shape hurtling along on bowed and stunted legs; of hug
e hairy arms outstretching misshapen black-nailed paws; of a malformed head, in whose broad face the only features recognizable as such were a pair of blood-red eyes. It was a thing neither woman, beast, nor devil, imbued with characteristics subhuman as well as characteristics superhuman.

  But Conyn had no time for conscious consecutive thought. She threw herself toward her fallen sword, and her clawing fingers missed it by inches. Desperately she grasped the shard which pinned her legs, and the veins swelled in her temples as she strove to thrust it off her. It gave slowly, but she knew that before she could free herself the monster would be upon her, and she knew that those black-taloned hands were death.

  The headlong rush of the winged one had not wavered. It towered over the prostrate Cimmerian like a black shadow, arms thrown wide--a glimmer of white flashed between it and its victim.

  In one mad instant he was there--a tense white shape, vibrant with love fierce as a he-panther's. The dazed Cimmerian saw between her and the onrushing death, his lithe figure, shimmering like ivory beneath the moon; she saw the blaze of his dark eyes, the thick cluster of his burnished hair; his chest heaved, his red lips were parted, he cried out sharp and ringing at the ring of steel as he thrust at the winged monster's breast.

  "Belit!" screamed Conyn. He flashed a quick glance at her, and in his dark eyes she saw his love flaming, a naked elemental thing of raw fire and molten lava. Then he was gone, and the Cimmerian saw only the winged fiend which had staggered back in unwonted fear, arms lifted as if to fend off attack. And she knew that Belit in truth lay on his pyre on the Tiger's deck. In her ears rang his passionate cry: "Were I still in death and you fighting for life I would come back from the abyss--"

  With a terrible cry she heaved upward hurling the stone aside. The winged one came on again, and Conyn sprang to meet it, her veins on fire with madness. The thews started out like cords on her forearms as she swung her great sword, pivoting on her heel with the force of the sweeping arc. Just above the hips it caught the hurtling shape, and the knotted legs fell one way, the torso another as the blade sheared clear through its hairy body.

  Conyn stood in the moonlit silence, the dripping sword sagging in her hand, staring down at the remnants of her enemy. The red eyes glared up at her with awful life, then glazed and set; the great hands knotted spasmodically and stiffened. And the oldest race in the world was extinct.

  Conyn lifted her head, mechanically searching for the beast-things that had been its slaves and executioners. None met her gaze. The bodies she saw littering the moon-splashed grass were of women, not beasts: hawk-faced, dark skinned women, naked, transfixed by arrows or mangled by sword-strokes. And they were crumbling into dust before her eyes.

  Why had not the winged mistress come to the aid of its slaves when she struggled with them? Had it feared to come within reach of fangs that might turn and rend it? Craft and caution had lurked in that misshapen skull, but had not availed in the end.

  Turning on her heel, the Cimmerian strode down the rotting wharfs and stepped aboard the galley. A few strokes of her sword cut his adrift, and she went to the sweep-head. The Tiger rocked slowly in the sullen water, sliding out sluggishly toward the middle of the river, until the broad current caught him. Conyn leaned on the sweep, her somber gaze fixed on the cloak-wrapped shape that lay in state on the pyre the richness of which was equal to the ransom of an empress.