Golden Blood (6 page)

10. IN THE CRYPTS OF ANZ

THE pillaging of the saddle-bags remained a mystery. Peering about the dead city, after he made the discovery, Price was able to see no living being. Utter silence clung to him, tense, expectant… but nothing happened.

Pushing away their sense of lurking danger, Price and Aysa presently returned their attention to the camels.
With some difficulty.
Aysa tugging at the halter-ropes, Price pushing and goading from the rear, they got the animals one by one upon the platform, and turned them into the sunken garden.

Then Price took Aysa’s golden dagger, their only remaining weapon, and cut himself a heavy club, in the garden.

They rested again, lying beside the fountain, until sunset, and then ventured out again, to find what had become of the pilfered weapons. Somewhat refreshed, and driven by haunting fear, they thoroughly explored the sand-heaped, crumbling piles of the lost city, without finding any inhabitants, or, indeed, any habitable place.

Yet there was no denying that the guns were gone.

In the dusk they were returning to the sunken garden when Aysa seized Price’s shoulder in a grasp nerved with terror, and pointed silently.

A strange figure was darting away from the colonnade before the entrance—a tall man, lean as a desert Arab, attired in a long, hooded, burnoose-like robe that was a peculiar shade of blue. As he ran along the platform, sprang off into the sand, Price saw that he carried the stolen rifle.

A moment he paused, looking back. On his forehead, above his cruel, hatchet face, was a glittering golden brand, the yellow likeness of a coiled serpent. Then he vanished, beyond a broken column.

“A snake-man,” whispered Aysa, her voice muted with fear.

“A what?”
Price took her trembling hand, looked into her distressed violet eyes.

“A slave of the snake, under Malikar.
The golden man must have known of the prophecy that a woman named Aysa would wake Iru. He guessed that I had fled to Anz, and sent the priest here to capture me.”

Price was staring at her in some astonishment. Aysa frightened was a new experience to him. As the helpless prisoner of the Macanese she had revealed no fear. He was shocked to see her white-faced, trembling,
her
violet eyes wide and sick with terror.

While he himself was much disturbed by the loss of the weapons, he did not believe they were in immediate danger. The blue-robe had fled from them.

“Buck up, kid,” he told her. “It can’t be that bad. When everything else goes wrong, we still have the Durand luck.”

She moved toward him a little, and he put his arm around her, still peering alertly into the gloom swift-falling upon the shattered skeleton of the lost city. She drew herself against him with an eager little movement, murmuring softly
“M’almé!”

From that time until the end she was apprehensive, fearful. Shadows of strange dread lurked always in her violet eyes. She tried to forget, to laugh with Price. But her gayety was strained, unnatural,
feverish
.

A week went by, and the snake-man was seen no more. The two were so near supreme happiness! The oasis was a garden of wonder, supplying all physical needs. They would have been content to forget the outer world, dwell there for ever. Each found in the other a joy never known before, a bliss made only more keenly poignant by the intruding darkness of anxiety.

In the rear wall of the courtyard was the arched entrance to a long hall of
granite, that
led back into the sand-heaped, crumbling main pile of the old palace. Near the garden it was bright enough, illuminated by high, unglazed clerestory windows. Farther back, however, the invading sand had completely covered it. It became a dark tunnel into mysterious, buried ruin.

They had explored it as far as daylight penetrated, and since it furnished the only standing roof available, they made the outer end of it their dwelling.

Above the end of the hall was a stone tower, still standing, so high that it overlooked the walls of Anz. Price was able to climb its crumbling stairs. Several times daily he ascended, to scan the ruins of Anz and the surrounding desert for Aysa’s enemies.

On the morning of the ninth day Price saw a tiny speck creeping across the heaving oceans of yellow-reddish dunes, northward. He watched it for an hour, until it had grown to a tiny yellow animal, with a black dot upon its back, running toward the buried city.

“I see that yellow tiger coming,” he told Aysa, when he rejoined her in the green shadows of the marble-walled garden.

He could see that the information threw her into an extremity of terror. Her face went white, and she trembled, though she retained her composure.

“It’s Malikar!” she whispered, “riding himself after me, upon the tiger.
M’almé,
we must hide! With your weapons gone, we can not fight the golden man! Where—”

Price nodded toward the end of the long hall.

“What about that? I’ve
been wanting
to explore it, anyhow.”

The girl shook her head. “No, we would be trapped there, in the dark.” Then another idea evidently overtook her. “But no matter!” she cried. “Let us hasten!”

Each gathered an armful of the rude torches they had made—merely bundles of dried palm-leaves. And they set out down the hall.

The floor, sifted with red sand, was twenty feet wide; the arched roof thirty feet above. For many yards there was light enough from the entrance and the high windows. Then they entered the main pile of the palace, a mountain of tumbled, sand-covered ruin.

Lighting the torches, they went on, through the darkness and the utter silence of a city entombed. Their feet trod soundlessly upon the sand; instinctively they spoke only in whispers.

Dark, narrower passages opened at intervals from the long central hall. They paused to peer down each. Most of them were filled with sand that had sifted from above; a few were blocked with fallen masonry.

At last, hundreds of feet from the entrance, the central hall ended in a blank stone wall. Price was discouraged; they had found neither hiding-place nor fortress; the hall seemed only a gloomy trap. Aysa eagerly led the way into the last branching passage.

It was a smaller, lower hall, almost free of sand. They had followed it a hundred feet when they passed a pile of moldering wood that once had been a door. Beyond, a steep flight of steps led downward. Complete darkness and breathless silence mocked them from below.

Price could not keep his imagination from conjuring up weird fantasms, upon that black stair, leading into the bowels of a city that had been lost a thousand years. He hesitated, went on only when Aysa moved to pass him.

Three hundred steps
downward,
and they entered the crypts.

A gloomy labyrinth beneath the buried city; long halls, intricately winding, hewn in dark rock.
The stagnant air was dank, laden with dusty odors of the tomb, but not actually dangerous, Price knew, since the torches continued to flare.

They stopped at the foot of the stair, peered rather apprehensively about. The torches were far too feeble to illuminate the vast chambers. Grotesque shadows flickered, leapt at them like dancing demons.

“I believe I’d rather meet Malikar outside,” Price whispered. “Suppose the torches went out!”

Shadows danced like demons in the winding, pillared halls, and a taunting echo mocked:
“… the torches went out…”

“We are in the crypts of Anz!” Aysa cried.
“The tombs of the ancient great ones!
Iru is sleeping here!”

Ghostly echoes whispered,
“… Iru is sleeping here …”

Price shuddered. Above ground, in daylight, it had been easy enough to laugh at the prophecy that an ancient king would wake again; but in these dank, uncanny catacombs, whose lurking darkness was always leaping to battle with the torchlight, the thing seemed grimly possible.

Rather reluctantly, Price accompanied Aysa as she began a circuit of the walls, pausing to study the inscriptions upon the narrow, upright slabs of dark stone that were the doors of tombs.

“The vault of Iru!” she cried suddenly, and Price started.

It was a low, narrow door of stone, with a knob of dull gold. She turned the knob, motioned Price to set his shoulder to it. He hesitated, and she moved to try her own strength with it.

The door swung inward upon silent hinges, when he lunged against it, more easily than he had expected. He fell into the tomb. Aysa followed anxiously, in response to his startled cry. It was a small, square chamber, hewn in dark rock. On a long, shelf-like niche in the farther wall were the remains of Iru.

To Price’s relief, the old king was extremely dead. Only the bare skeleton remained.

On the end of the ledge lay his weapons: a folded skirt of chain-mail, the interlocking links golden, finely wrought; a small, oval shield to be carried on the left arm; and a great battle-ax.

Eagerly, Price picked up the ax: here, at least, was a weapon. The heavy, massive head was gold, untarnished. Its keen, curving blade, half as long as the handle, was engraved, like the sword of tempered gold in Jacob Garth’s possession, with inscriptions in a language Price could not read.

The short, thick helve was of ebony, or some similar black, hard wood. It seemed perfectly preserved. Worn or carved in it was the impression of a hand, a rounded groove for each finger.

Price lifted it, as if to swing it. And those grooves fitted his fingers perfectly, as if the ax were made for his hand, not that of the skeleton beside him, dead a thousand years and more.

“Queer,” he muttered. “Just fits my hand.”

“Even so,” Aysa whispered. “It is strange—or is it strange?”

Puzzled by something in her voice, he looked up at the girl. She stood just within the tiny, rock-hewn tomb, the flaring torches in her hands. She was smiling, framed against the blackness of the crypts, her violet eyes suddenly mysterious with some enigmatic thought.

Price had never seen her
so
beautiful as there against the gloom of the catacombs. The sheer loveliness of her made his heart ache; made him want to take her in his arms again, and kiss her; made him want desperately to carry her away from the weird perils gathering about them, to some far place of security and peace.

“Let’s get out of here,” he muttered.

Aysa turned, and stopped with a horrified gasp, as the torchlight fell upon a man in the doorway behind her—a tall, hatchet-faced man, upon whose high forehead
glittered
the golden likeness of a coiled serpent!

Price leapt at the intruder, whirling the golden battle-ax, which he still had been carrying in his hand. And if Aysa had displayed fright, the snake-man betrayed abject terror. His mouth fell open. His thin, cruel features were distorted with the utmost horror that Price had ever seen upon a human face. Shrieking, hands flung up, he staggered backward, and ran into the black, labyrinthine catacombs.

“A slave of the snake,” Aysa whispered. “Malikar sent him down to search for me.”

“What scared him so? He looked as if he’d seen—I don’t know what!”

“I think I know,” Aysa said quietly. “He saw Iru awakened.”

“Iru awakened? What do you mean?”

“In you the prophecy is fulfilled!” she cried, her violet eyes shining. “You are Iru, come back to conquer the golden folk and deliver the Beni Anz!”

“I? Of course not!
Nonsense!”

“Why not?
You are tall, as Iru was, red-haired, blue-eyed. Did not the ax fit your hand?”

It
was
something of a coincidence. But Price had always looked askance upon theories of reincarnation. He felt that one life was load enough, without attempting to assume the burdens of the dead.

“Anyhow,” Aysa added practically, “it will help for the snake-man to think you are Iru. Why not put on the mail?”

“I’ll be anything, sweetheart,” Price assured her, “to get you out of this.”

“And perhaps you should learn the ax-song, written on the blade,” she suggested. “Iru always sang it in battle.”

By torchlight, she read the words to him. Their strange, chanting rhythm oddly stirred his blood. He could render them only roughly into English:

Hew—

Justice in battle! Foe of all evil!

Strike-Child of the anvil! Forged by the thunder!

Cleave—

Korlu the smiter!

Lightning-tempered!

Slay—

Korlu the war-ax!

Drinker of life-blood!

Kill—

Korlu the red doom!

Keeper of death-gate!

Price donned the yellow mail. Upon his unaccustomed body it felt cold and stiff and heavy, but it fitted extraordinarily well. He took up the small, oval shield, and fiercely gripped the helve of the ax.

He had never loved Aysa more than during the bitter time of that weird vigil in Iru’s tomb, when the cold dank air of the catacombs brushed like clammy wings against them, and minutes stretched into hours, as they awaited the coming of Malikar, sitting side by side.

Greenish light flickered down the stair, and five men came into the crypts. Four were blue-robed, hooded figures; two armed with long pikes, two carrying torches that flared strangely green.

The other was the golden man Price had seen on the tiger.
Gigantic, thick of shoulder, mighty of arm.
He wore a red skull-cap, a voluminous robe of crimson. On his shoulder he carried his great, spiked club of yellow metal.

He led his men straight toward the tomb of Iru.

Triumphant evil rode his harshly lined, golden-bearded yellow face. Ugly elation gleamed in his shallow, tawny eyes.
Eyes of unhuman age and wisdom, brooding with dark secrets of the lost past.

Price waited in the tomb, gripping the ancient ax.

The blue-robes, he saw, were afraid. Their steps dragged. Their faces were white and apprehensive. Malikar pushed roughly past them, but even he stopped outside the tomb.