Lorelei of the Red Mist - 4

back, gasping for breath, his nostrils flaring, seeing what his blade
had done to Geil's body, and seeing the great stone gates of Crom Dhu
crashing open. The deliberation. The happiness, the elation to Faolan
and Romna to see old friends returned. Old Rovers, long thought dead.
Alive again, come to help! It made a picture!
With great deliberation, Starke struck flat across before him.
Geil's head, severed from its lazy body, began, with infinite
tiredness, to float toward the ceiling. As it traveled upward, now
facing, now bobbling the back of its skull toward Starke, it finished
its nightmare speaking:
"And then, once inside the gates, what then, Conan? Can you guess? Can
you guess what we'll do, Conan?"
Starke stared at nothingness, the sword trembling in his fist. From far
away he heard Geil's voice:
"--we will kill Faolan in his hall. He will die with surprised lips.
Romna's harp will lie in his disemboweled stomach. His heart with its
last pulsings will sound the strings. And as for Beudag--"
Starke tried to push the thoughts away, raging and helpless. Geil's
body was no longer anything to look at. He had done all he could to
it. Starke's face was bleached white and scraped down to the insane
bone of it, "You'd kill your own people!"
Geil's separated head lingered at the ceiling, light-fish illuminating
its ghastly features. "Our people? But we have no people! We're another
race now. The dead. We do the biddings of the sea-shepherds."
Starke looked out into the hall, then he looked at the circular wall.
"Okay," he said, without tone in his voice. "Come out. Where ever
you're hiding and using this voice-throwing act. Come on out and talk
straight."
In answer, an entire section of ebon stones fell back on silent
hingework. Starke saw a long slender black marble table. Six people sat
behind it in carven midnight thrones.
They were all men. Naked except for film-like garments about their
loins. They looked at Starke with no particular hatred or curiosity.
One of them cradled a harp. It was the shepherd who'd drawn Starke
through the gate. Amusedly, his webbed fingers lay on the strings, now
and then bringing out a clear sound from one of the two hundred strands.
The shepherd stopped Starke's rush forward with a cry of that harp!
The blade in his hand was red hot. He dropped it.
The shepherd put a head on the story. "And then? And then we will march
Rann's dead warriors all the way to Falga. There, Rann's people, seeing
the warriors, will be overjoyed, hysterical to find their friends and
relatives returned. They, too, will fling wide Falga's defenses. And
death will walk in, disguised as resurrection."
Starke nodded, slowly, wiping his hand across his cheek. "Back on Earth
we call that psychology. _Good_ psychology. But will it fool Rann?"
"Rann will be with her ships at Crom Dhu. While she's gone, the
innocent population will let in their lost warriors gladly." The
shepherd had amused green eyes. He looked like a youth of some
seventeen years. Deceptively young. If Starke guessed right, the youth
was nearer to two centuries old. That's how you lived and looked when
you were under the Red Sea. Something about the emanations of it kept
part of you young.
Starke lidded his yellow hawks' eyes thoughtfully. "You've got all
aces. You'll win. But what's Crom Dhu to you? Why not just Rann? She's
one of you, you hate her more than you do the Rovers. Her ancestors
came up on land, you never got over hating them for that--"
The shepherd shrugged. "Toward Crom Dhu we have little actual hatred.
Except that they are by nature land-men, even if they do rove by boat,
and pillagers. One day they might try their luck on the sunken devices
of this city."
Starke put a hand out. "We're fighting Rann, too. Don't forget, we're
on your side!"
"Whereas we are on no one's," retorted the green-haired youth, "Except
our own. Welcome to the army which will attack Crom Dhu."
"Me! By the gods, over my dead body!"
"That," said the youth, amusedly, "is what we intend. We've worked many
years, you see, to perfect the plan. We're not much good out on land.
We needed bodies that could do the work for us. So, every time Faolan
lost a ship or Rann lost a ship, we were there, with our golden hounds,
waiting. Collecting. Saving. Waiting until we had enough of each side's
warriors. They'll do the fighting for us. Oh, not for long, of course.
The Source energy will give them a semblance of life, a momentary
electrical ability of walk and combat, but once out of water they'll
last only half an hour. But that should be time enough once the gates
of Crom Dhu and Falga are open."
* * * * *
Starke said, "Rann will find some way around you. Get her first. Attack
Crom Dhu the following day."
The youth deliberated. "You're stalling. But there's sense in it. Rann
is most important. We'll get Falga first, then. You'll have a bit of
time in which to raise false hopes."
Starke began to get sick again. The room swam.
Very quietly, very easily, Rann came into his mind again. He felt her
glide in like the merest touch of a sea fern weaving in a tide pool.
He closed his mind down, but not before she snatched at a shred of
thought. Her aquamarine eyes reflected desire and inquiry.
"Hugh Starke, you're with the sea people?"
Her voice was soft. He shook his head.
"Tell me, Hugh Starke. How are you plotting against Falga?"
He said nothing. He thought nothing. He shut his eyes.
Her fingernails glittered, raking at his mind. "Tell me!"
His thoughts rolled tightly into a metal sphere which nothing could
dent.
Rann laughed unpleasantly and leaned forward until she filled every
dark horizon of his skull with her shimmering body. "All right. I
_gave_ you Conan's body. Now I'll take it away."
She struck him a combined blow of her eyes, her writhing lips, her
bone-sharp teeth. "Go back to your old body, go back to your old body,
Hugh Starke," she hissed. "Go back! Leave Conan to his idiocy. Go back
to your old body!"
Fear had him. He fell down upon his face, quivering and jerking. You
could fight a man with a sword. But how could you fight this thing in
your brain? He began to suck sobbing breaths through his lips. He was
screaming. He could not hear himself. Her voice rushed in from the dim
outer red universe, destroying him.
"Hugh Starke! Go back to your old body!"
His old body was--dead!
And she was sending him back into it.
Part of him shot endwise through red fog.
He lay on a mountain plateau overlooking the harbor of Falga.
Red fog coiled and snaked around him. Flame birds dived eerily down at
his staring, blind eyes.
His old body held him.
Putrefaction stuffed his nostrils. The flesh sagged and slipped
greasily on his loosened structure. He felt small again and ugly. Flame
birds nibbled, picking, choosing between his ribs. Pain gorged him.
Cold, blackness, nothingness filled him. Back in his old body. Forever.
He didn't want that.
The plateau, the red fog vanished. The flame birds, too.
He lay once more on the floor of the sea shepherds, struggling.
"That was just a start," Rann told him. "Next time, I'll leave you up
there on the plateau in that body. _Now_, will you tell the plans of
the sea people? And go on living in Conan? He's yours, if you tell."
She smirked. "You don't want to be dead."
Starke tried to reason it out. Any way he turned was the wrong way. He
grunted out a breath. "If I tell, you'll still kill Beudag."
"Her life in exchange for what you know, Hugh Starke."
Her answer was too swift. It had the sound of treachery. Starke did not
believe. He would die. That would solve it. Then, at least, Rann would
die when the sea people carried out their strategy. That much revenge,
at least, damn it.
Then he got the idea.
He coughed out a laugh, raised his weak head to look at the startled
sea shepherd. His little dialogue with Rann had taken about ten
seconds, actually, but it had seemed a century. The sea shepherd
stepped forward.
Starke tried to get to his feet. "Got--got a proposition for you. You
with the harp. Rann's inside me. _Now._ Unless you guarantee Crom Dhu
and Beudag's safety, I'll tell her some things she might want to be in
on!"
The sea shepherd drew a knife.
Starke shook his head, coldly. "Put it away. Even if you get me I'll
give the whole damned strategy to Rann."
The shepherd dropped his hand. He was no fool.
Rann tore at Starke's brain. "Tell me! Tell me their plan!"
He felt like a guy in a revolving door. Starke got the sea men in
focus. He saw that they were afraid now, doubtful and nervous. "I'll be
dead in a minute," said Starke. "Promise me the safety of Crom Dhu and
I'll die without telling Rann a thing."
The sea shepherd hesitated, then raised his palm upward. "I promise,"
he said. "Crom Dhu will go untouched."
Starke sighed. He let his head fall forward until it hit the floor.
Then he rolled over, put his hands over his eyes. "It's a deal. Go give
Rann hell for me, will you, boys? Give her hell!"
As he drifted into mind darkness, Rann waited for him. Feebly, he told
her. "Okay, duchess. You'd kill me even if I'd told you the idea. I'm
ready. Try your god-awfullest to shove me back into that stinking body
of mine. I'll fight you all the way there!"
Rann screamed. It was a pretty frustrated scream. Then the pains began.
She did a lot of work on his mind in the next minute.
That part of him that was Conan held on like a clam holding to its
precious contents.
The odor of putrid flesh returned. The blood mist returned. The flame
birds fell down at him in spirals of sparks and blistering smoke, to
winnow his naked ribs.
Starke spoke one last word before the blackness took him.
"Beudag."
* * * * *
He never expected to awaken again.
He awoke just the same.
There was red sea all around him. He lay on a kind of stone bed, and
the young sea shepherd sat beside him, looking down at him, smiling
delicately.
Starke did not dare move for a while. He was afraid his head might
fall off and whirl away like a big fish, using its ears as propellers.
"Lord," he muttered, barely turning his head.
The sea creature stirred. "You won. You fought Rann, and won."
Starke groaned. "I feel like something passed through a wild-cat's
intestines. She's gone. Rann's gone." He laughed. "That makes me sad.
Somebody cheer me up. Rann's gone." He felt of his big, flat-muscled
body. "She was bluffing. Trying to drive me batty. She knew she
couldn't really tuck me back into that carcass, but she didn't want me
to know. It was like a baby's nightmare before it's born. Or maybe you
haven't got a memory like me." He rolled over, stretching. "She won't
ever get in my head again. I've locked the gate and swallowed the key."
His eyes dilated. "What's _your_ name?"
"Linnl," said the man with the harp. "You didn't tell Rann our
strategy?"
"What do _you_ think?"
Linnl smiled sincerely. "I think I like you, man of Crom Dhu. I think
I like your hatred for Rann. I think I like the way you handled the
entire matter, wanted to kill Rann and save Crom Dhu, and being so
willing to die to accomplish either."
"That's a lot of thinking. Yeah, and what about that promise you made?"
"It will be kept."
Starke gave him a hand. "Linnl, you're okay. If I ever get back to
Earth, so help me, I'll never bait a hook again and drop it in the
sea." It was lost to Linnl. Starke forgot it, and went on, laughing.
There was an edge of hysteria to it. Relief. You got booted around
for days, people milled in and out of your mind like it was a bargain
basement counter, pawing over the treads and convolutions, yelling
and fighting; the woman you loved was starved on a ship masthead, and
as a climax a lady with green eyes tried to make you a filling for an
accident-mangled body. And now you had an ally.
And you couldn't believe it.
He laughed in little starts and stops, his eyes shut.
"Will you let me take care of Rann when the time comes?"
His fingers groped hungrily upward, closed on an imaginary figure of
her, pressed, tightened, choked.
Linnl said, "She's yours. I'd like the pleasure, but you have as much
if not more of a revenge to take. Come along. We start now. You've been
asleep for one entire period."
Starke let himself down gingerly. He didn't want to break a leg off. He
felt if someone touched him he might disintegrate.
He managed to let the tide handle him, do all the work. He swam
carefully after Linnl down three passageways where an occasional silver
inhabitant of the city slid by.
Drifting below them in a vast square hall, each gravitating but
imprisoned by leg-shackles, the warriors of Falga looked up with pale
cold eyes at Starke and Linnl. Occasional discharges of light-fish from
interstices in the walls, passed luminous, fleeting glows over the
warriors. The light-fish flirted briefly in a long shining rope that
tied knots around the dead faces and as quickly untied them. Then the
light-fish pulsed away and the red color of the sea took over.
Bathed in wine, thought Starke, without humor. He leaned forward.
"Men of Falga!"
Linnl plucked a series of harp-threads.
"Aye." A deep suggestion of sound issued from a thousand dead lips.
"We go to sack Rann's citadel!"
"Rann!" came the muffled thunder of voices.
At the sound of another tune, the golden hounds appeared. They touched
the chains. The men of Falga, released, danced through the red sea
substance.
Siphoned into a valve mouth, they were drawn out into a great volcanic
courtyard. Starke went close after. He stared down into a black ravine,
at the bottom of which was a blazing caldera.
This was the Source Life of the Red Sea. Here it had begun a millennium
ago. Here the savage cyclones of sparks and fire energy belched up,
shaking titanic black garden walls, causing currents and whirlpools
that threatened to suck you forward and shoot you violently up to the
surface, in cannulas of force, thrust, in capillaries of ignited mist,
in chutes of color that threatened to cremate but only exhilarated you,
gave you a seething rebirth!
He braced his legs and fought the suction. An unbelievable sinew of
fire sprang up from out the ravine, crackling and roaring.
The men of Falga did not fight the attraction.
They moved forward in their silence and hung over the incandescence.
The vitality of the Source grew upward in them. It seemed to touch
their sandaled toes first, and then by a process of shining osmosis,
climb up the limbs, into the loins, into the vitals, delineating their
strong bone structure as mercury delineates the glass thermometer with
a rise of temperature. The bones flickered like carved polished ivory
through the momentarily film-like flesh. The ribs of a thousand men
expanded like silvered spider legs, clenched, then expanded again.
Their spines straightened, their shoulders flattened back. Their eyes,
the last to take the fire, now were ignited and glowed like candles in
refurbished sepulchers. The chins snapped up, the entire outer skins of
their bodies broke into silver brilliance.
Swimming through the storm of energy like nightmare figments, entering
cold, they reached the far side of the ravine resembling smelted metal
from blast furnaces. When they brushed into one another, purple sparks
sizzled, jumped from head to head, from hand to hand.
Linnl touched Starke's arm. "You're next."
"No thank you."
"Afraid?" laughed the harp-shepherd. "You're tired. It will give you
new life. You're next."
* * * * *
Starke hesitated only a moment. Then he let the tide drift him rapidly
out. He was afraid. Damned afraid. A belch of fire caught him as he
arrived in the core of the ravine. He was wrapped in layers of ecstasy.
Beudag pressed against him. It was her consuming hair that netted him
and branded him. It was her warmth that crept up his body into his
chest and into his head. Somebody yelled somewhere in animal delight
and unbearable passion. Somebody danced and threw out his hands and
crushed that solar warmth deeper into his huge body. Somebody felt
all tiredness, oldness flumed away, a whole new feeling of warmth and
strength inserted.
That somebody was Starke.
Waiting on the other side of the ravine were a thousand men of Falga.
What sounded like a thousand harps began playing now, and as Starke
reached the other side, the harps began marching, and the warriors
marched with them. They were still dead, but you would never know
it. There were no minds inside those bodies. The bodies were being
activated from outside. But you would never know it.
They left the city behind. In embering ranks, the soldier-fighters
were led by golden hounds and distant harps to a place where a huge
intra-coastal tide swept by.
They got on the tide for a free ride. Linnl beside him, using his harp,
Starke felt himself sucked down through a deep where strange monsters
sprawled. They looked at Starke with hungry eyes. But the harp wall
swept them back.
[Illustration: _The dead warriors of Falga moved silently to battle._]
Starke glanced about at the men. They don't know what they're doing, he
thought. Going home to kill their parents and their children, to set
the flame to Falga, and they don't know it. Their alive-but-dead faces
tilted up, always upward, as though visions of Rann's citadel were
there.
Rann. Starke let the wrath simmer in him. He let it cool. Then it was
cold. Rann hadn't bothered him now for hours. Was there a chance she'd
read his thought in the midst of that fighting nightmare? Did she know
this plan for Falga? Was that an explanation for her silence now?
He sent his mind ahead, subtly. _Rann. Rann._ The only answer was the
move of silver bodies through the fiery deeps.
Just before dawn they broke the surface of the sea.
Falga drowsed in the red-smeared fog silence. Its slave streets were
empty and dew-covered. High up, the first light was bathing Rann's
gardens and setting her citadel aglow.
Linnl lay in the shallows beside Starke. They both were smiling
half-cruel smiles. They had waited long for this.
Linnl nodded. "This is the day of the carnival. Fruit, wine and love
will be offered the returned soldiers of Rann. In the streets there'll
be dancing."
Far over to the right lay a rise of mountain. At its blunt peak--Starke
stared at it intently--rested a body of a little, scrawny Earthman,
with flame-birds clustered on it. He'd climb that mountain later. When
it was over and there was time.
"What are you searching for?" asked Linnl.
Starke's voice was distant. "Someone I used to know."
Filing out on the stone quays, their rustling sandals eroded by time,
the men stood clean and bright. Starke paced, a caged animal, at their
center, so his dark body would pass unnoticed.
They were seen.
The cliff guard looked down over the dirty slave dwellings, from their
arrow galleries, and set up a cry. Hands waved, pointed frosty white
in the dawn. More guards loped down the ramps and galleries, meeting,
joining others and coming on.
Linnl, in the sea by the quay, suggested a theme on the harp. The other
harps took it up. The shuddering music lifted from the water and with
a gentle firmness, set the dead feet marching down the quays, upward
through the narrow, stifling alleys of the slaves, to meet the guard.
Slave people peered out at them tiredly from their choked quarters. The
passing of warriors was old to them, of no significance.
These warriors carried no weapons. Starke didn't like that part of it.
A length of chain even, he wanted. But this emptiness of the hands.
His teeth ached from too long a time of clenching his jaws tight. The
muscles of his arms were feverish and nervous.
At the edge of the slave community, at the cliff base, the guard
confronted them. Running down off the galleries, swords naked, they ran
to intercept what they took to be an enemy.
The guards stopped in blank confusion.
* * * * *
A little laugh escaped Starke's lips. It was a dream. With fog over,
under and in between its parts. It wasn't real to the guard, who
couldn't believe it. It wasn't real to these dead men either, who were
walking around. He felt alone. He was the only live one. He didn't like
walking with dead men.
The captain of the guard came down warily, his green eyes suspicious.
The suspicion faded. His face fell apart. He had lain on his fur pelts
for months thinking of his son who had died to defend Falga.
Now his son stood before him. Alive.
The captain forgot he was captain. He forgot everything. His sandals
scraped over stones. You could hear the air go out of his lungs and
come back in in a numbed prayer.
"My son! In Rann's name. They said you were slain by Faolan's men one
hundred darknesses ago. My son!"
A harp tinkled somewhere.
The son stepped forward, smiling.
They embraced. The son said nothing. He couldn't speak.
This was the signal for the others. The whole guard, shocked and
surprised, put away their swords and sought out old friends, brothers,
fathers, uncles, sons!
They moved up the galleries, the guard and the returned warriors,
Starke in their midst. Threading up the cliff, through passage after
passage, all talking at once. Or so it seemed. The guards did the
talking. None of the dead warriors replied. They only _seemed_ to.
Starke heard the music strong and clear everywhere.
They reached the green gardens atop the cliff. By this time the entire
city was awake. Women came running, bare-breasted and sobbing, and
throwing themselves forward into the ranks of their lovers. Flowers
showered over them.
"So this is war," muttered Starke, uneasily.
They stopped in the center of the great gardens. The crowd milled
happily, not yet aware of the strange silence from their men. They were
too happy to notice.
"Now," cried Starke to himself. "Now's the time. Now!"
As if in answer, a wild skirling of harps out of the sky.
The crowd stopped laughing only when the returned warriors of Falga
swept forward, their hands lifted and groping before them....
The crying in the streets was like a far siren wailing. Metal made a
harsh clangor that was sheathed in silence at the same moment metal
found flesh to lie in. A vicious pantomime was concluded in the green
moist gardens.
Starke watched from Rann's empty citadel. Fog plumes strolled by the
archways and a thick rain fell. It came like a blood squall and washed
the garden below until you could not tell rain from blood.
The returned warriors had gotten their swords by now. First they killed
those nearest them in the celebration. Then they took the weapons from
the victims. It was very simple and very unpleasant.
The slaves had joined battle now. Swarming up from the slave town,
plucking up fallen daggers and short swords, they circled the gardens,
happening upon the arrogant shining warriors of Rann who had so far
escaped the quiet, deadly killing of the alive-but-dead men.
Dead father killed startled, alive son. Dead brother garroted
unbelieving brother. Carnival indeed in Falga.
An old man waited alone. Starke saw him. The old man had a weapon, but
refused to use it. A young warrior of Falga, harped on by Linnl's harp,
walked quietly up to the old man. The old man cried out. His mouth
formed words. "Son! What _is_ this?" He flung down his blade and made
to plead with his boy.
The son stabbed him with silent efficiency, and without a glance at the
body, walked onward to find another.
Starke turned away, sick and cold.
A thousand such scenes were being finished.
He set fire to the black spider-silk tapestries. They whispered and
talked with flame. The stone echoed his feet as he searched room after
room. Rann had gone, probably last night. That meant that Crom Dhu
was on the verge of falling. Was Faolan dead? Had the people of Crom
Dhu, seeing Beudag's suffering, given in? Falga's harbor was completely
devoid of ships, except for small fishing skiffs.
The fog waited him when he returned to the garden. Rain found his face.
The citadel of Rann was fire-encrusted and smoke shrouded as he looked
up at it.
A silence lay in the garden. The fight was over.
The men of Falga, still shining with Source-Life, hung their blades
from uncomprehending fingers, the light beginning to leave their green
eyes. Their skin looked dirty and dull.
Starke wasted no time getting down the galleries, through the slave
quarter, and to the quays again.
Linnl awaited him, gently petting the obedient harp.
"It's over. The slaves will own what's left. They'll be our allies,
since we've freed them."
Starke didn't hear. He was squinting off over the Red Sea.
Linnl understood. He plucked two tones from the harp, which pronounced
the two words uppermost in Starke's thought.
"Crom Dhu."
"If we're not too late." Starke leaned forward. "If Faolan lives. If
Beudag still stands at the masthead."
Like a blind man he walked straight ahead, until he fell into the sea.
* * * * *
It was not quite a million miles to Crom Dhu. It only seemed that far.
A sweep of tide picked them up just off shore from Falga and siphoned
them rapidly, through deeps along coastal latitudes, through crystal
forests. He cursed every mile of the way.
He cursed the time it took to pause at the Titan's city to gather fresh
men. To gather Clev and Mannt and Aesur and Bruce. Impatiently, Starke
watched the whole drama of the Source-Fire and the bodies again. This
time it was the bodies of Crom Dhu men, hung like beasts on slow-turned
spits, their limbs and vitals soaking through and through, their
skins taking bronze color, their eyes holding flint-sparks. And then
the harps wove a garment around each, and the garment moved the men
instead of the men the garment.
In the tidal basilic now, Starke twisted. Coursing behind him were the
new bodies of Clev and Aesur! The current elevated them, poked them
through obsidian needle-eyes like spider-silk threads.
There was good irony in this. Crom Dhu's men, fallen at Falga under
Conan's treachery, returned now under Conan, to exonerate that
treachery.
Suddenly they were in Crom Dhu's outer basin. Shadows swept over them.
The long dark falling shadows of Falga's longboats lying in that
harbor. Shadows like black culling-nets let down. The school of men
cleaved the shadow nets. The tide ceased here, eddied and distilled
them.
Starke glared up at the immense silver bottom of a Falgian ship. He
felt his face stiffen and his throat tighten. Then, flexing knees, he
rammed upward, night air broke dark red around his head.
The harbor held flare torches on the rims of long ships. On the neck
of land that led from Crom Dhu to the mainland the continuing battle
sounded. Faint cries and clashing made their way through the fog veils.
They sounded like echoes of past dreams.
Linnl let Starke have the leash. Starke felt something pressed into his
fist. A coil of slender green woven reeds, a rope with hooked weights
on the end of it. He knew how to use it without asking. But he wished
for a knife, now, even though he realized carrying a knife in the sea
was all but impossible if you wanted to move fast.
He saw the sleek naked figurehead of Rann's best ship a hundred yards
away, a floating silhouette, its torches hanging fire like Beudag's
hair.