Conan Of The Isles

Next, he made a dash for the bronze doors. But these proved to have no latch or handle on the inside, ,nor did they yield to his pushing.

The dragons were pouring down upon him, now. He found himself facing a semicircle of the brutes. Sweat ran down his forehead and stung his eyes.

This was worse than the rats. They at least were warmblooded mammals - his remote kin, according to some philosophers - but these titanic, sluggish saurians were at the opposite end of the scale from man. They were slithering monsters from the primal slime, leftovers from the youth of the world, when the earth had shaken to the tread of their even mightier forebears, millions of years before the first man thought to stand erect on his hindiegs and fight for a dominating place in Nature's world.

On they came^ like living nightmares from some hideous Hell.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A DAY OF BLOOD AND FIRE

The glassy knife bestrews a rain of blood

to slake the ghoulish thirst,

Yet still It hastens on the curst and gory

ministers of pain.

- The Visions of Ep&mitreus

Under the blazing noonday sun, the line of silent men shuffled slowly toward the mighty pyramid of black-and-scarlet stone. In the fierce heat, Sigurd felt the trickle of sweat down his face and torso.

He had never thought that his end would come in such a scene of barbaric grandeur. On some burning deck, slippery with the blood of the fallen, perhaps - or in the rubble-choked alleys of a seaport under sack, where the flames of burning temples painted the skies with crimson. Or perchance in a desperate duel with some swaggering freebooter in red, roaring Tortage - the cold kiss of a blade against his flesh, the steel sliding in between his ribs, a swart, bearded face grinning into his as red mists rose to drown his vision. But nothing like this!

He gazed about the sunbaked square. On all four sides of this forum rose tiers of stone benches, and on these benches sat thousands of the richer classes among the Antillians, brave in gold and jade and feathers. The common folk, mainly clad in simple loincloths, stood about the square between the benches and the base of the pyramid. The Antillians stood or sat in tense silence absorbed in the somber spectacle taking place on top of the pyramid.

At the base of the pyramid., the priesthood of Ptahuacan stood in swaying ranks. Their voices rose like distant waves in a slow, antiphonal song, punctuated by the rumble of huge drums bound in human hide, which thumped and throbbed like the beating of a gigantic heart. The drummers sat in a bay in the side of the pyramid. The vertical walls of this recess were covered with white plaster, on which were painted bright-colored likenesses of the gods and demons of this exotic land.

Sigurd looked up. High above the throng, silhouetted in black against the azure sky, the hierarch, wrapped in his robe of gleaming emerald feathers and gesticulating skywards with gaunt, bare brown arms, sat on a lofty throne to one side of the platform atop the pyramid. The throne glittered blindingly with gems and mother-of-pearl.

On the platform before the throne stood an altar of shiny black stone. The small temple on the pyramid faced the hierarch's throne across the altar. Around the altar, a sacrificial priest and several assistants were at work. Otherwise stripped to loincloth and sandals, the sacrificer wore a fantastically plumed headdress, whose golden bangles splintered the sunrays into dazzling wheels of light and which hid his head.

At this instant, a slave woman was undergoing the ancient Atlantean rite. While the assistants, gripping her bare brown limbs, held her supine upon the altar, the obsidian blade flashed in the sun as it descended. A moment later, the sacrificer's hand held aloft a dripping heart.

Sigurd's jaw dropped; for, even as he watched, the Feaster on the Pyramid came into view. It materialized out of empty air.

A shadow dimmed the sun. A cold gloom fell over the square. The air bit with the chill of interstellar space. Hovering over the ziggurat, the Demon of Darkness took shape.

Behind him, Sigurd heard a mutter of prayers from the pirates, who were not otherwise a notably pious crew.

Above the pyramid., the Thing solidified and thickened, like darkness with weight and shape, or like a shadow with substance and form. From it a cold, fetid wind blew unceasingly. It looked like a black cloud that had taken the shape of some amorphous sea creature. Its roiling center was fringed with lazily unfolding veils of shadow-stuff. It seethed and swirled like the legendary Maelstrom, supposed to gyrate somewhere off the Arctic coasts of Sigurd's Vanaheitn.

Rapt with fascination and dread, Sigurd watched the Thing. It held his gaze with hypnotic fixity, as the cold eye of the serpent was fabled to fascinate the passing bird.