Conan Of The Isles

The four priests holding Sigurd released his limbs to gawk at the spectacle below, snatching at one another's arms, pointing, and gabbling excitedly. As they did so, the pirates snapped out of their trancelike state. Whether this resulted from the sudden cessation of the hymns wafting up from below, or from the distraction of the archpriest's attention, or even from the wavering of the concentration of the black thing above, none could say. But, whatever the cause, the hypnotic spell that bound them was shattered.

Sigurd rolled off the sacrificial altar. Yasunga, white teeth flashing in his black face, swung his heavy manacles in a glittering curve, which caught the distracted sacrificer on the side of the head and hurled him, bleeding and unconscious., to the pavement.

Meanwhile Sigurd, thinking faster than he ever had in his life, hurled himself upon the priest who held the keys to the manacles. The northerner's hairy hands fastened upon the scrawny neck. As he bore the befeathered figure to the ground, his fingers dug into the priest's throat and shut off his windpipe.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

GATES OF DOOM

They lift the gory, dripping fruit

Before the seething ebon cloud;

The silent and adoring crowd is numb,

bewildered, dazed, and mute.

- The Visions of Epemitreus

Springing forward, Conan swung his long stone club with the courage of desperation. With a thud, it caught the foremost of the giant reptiles on its scaly snout. The stalactite broke in half with a loud crack, and the thick end fell to the ground with a thump.

Hissing furiously, the dragon started back, baring its fangs and lashing its tail. In all the centuries that it had dwelt under Ptahuacan, never had one of its victims turned upon it, let alone given it a painful clout on the nose. The dragon was out of practice at overcoming live prey, and Oman's blow astonished and bewildered its small, reptilian mind as much as it angered it.

Conan's weapon was now reduced to a two-foot spike of limestone. Still, he thought, it was sharp enough to thrust into one of the great, green eyes that blinked at him from the semicircle of scaly heads. And if he could thrust it up to the end, it might reach the sluggish little brain behind the eye. Not, he knew, that this would save him; for such creatures took a long time to realize that they were dead.

But, at least, the dragons would know they had been in a fight. As a couple of the giant lizards hitched themselves closer - practically within snapping distance - Conan rose on the balls of his feet, holding the spike like a dagger. In an instant he would hurl himself at the head of the nearest dragon...

Then came an interruption. Down through the shaft in the ceiling, whence came the beam of light that shone down upon a spot of floor and illumined the entire chamber, something fell to land with a thud on the illuminated spot. It was a naked corpse, whose chest cavity gaped with a huge, ghastly wound.

Grunting, the dragon that Conan had struck wheeled around and waddled quickly over to the corpse. Such unresisting food was more to its taste than creatures that gave it a rap on the nose, merely because it tried to eat them. As the first dragon turned away, another and then another imitated its action, until they were all brainlessly streaming away across the cavern floor.

As the first dragon reached the corpse, it scooped the upper part of the dead man's body up into its vast jaws, turning its head sideways to do so. But, as it raised its head, a second dragon grabbed the dangling legs of the corpse. The two reptiles engaged in a grisly rug-of-war, grunting and wagging their massive heads from side to side, while others crowded round, trying to snatch a piece of the corpse.

Presently, the body tore in half with a rending sound. The two dragons that had first seized it backed away to gulp down their portions, while the others scrambled for the entrails that had spilled out on the ground.

In a flash of insight, Conan understood much that had puzzled him. For one thing, he had wondered what such huge flesh-eaters could find to live on in this maze of caverns. Bats and luminous grubs would surely not sustain them, but a steady supply of sacrificial victims would support them in draconian luxury. The girl Catlaxoc and the arch-thief Metemphoc had both described the mass sacrifices to Xotli, and the corpses had to be disposed of somehow. This arrangement explained the fact that, when he had first entered the cavern, Conan had found a half-dozen dragons crouched in a circle beneath the shafts with heads expectantly raised.