FOUR.

Conan's fall began with ill fortune, which swiftly changed for the better. Had it been otherwise, the stories of many men and not a few realms would have been vastly altered.

He was no spell-smeller, or he might have sensed the magic binding the ground at the mouth of the pit. Then again, perhaps not. It was old earth-magic, and the names of those who discovered it had been lost to human memory long before Atlantis was even built, let alone before the oceans swallowed it.

The art had not been lost, however. The sorcery known to the builders of Xuchotl partook of it. Nor was the doomed city the only creation to which they had turned their magical arts. Deep within the jungle they also built and wrought mighty works, at a time when the Black Kingdoms were but bands of feuding tribesmen.

It was one of these leavings that Conan had en-countered. The earth gaped beneath his feet, he plunged down into darkness briefly lit from above, then continued his plunge in darkness deeper yet as the pit closed above him.

Thrice he struck earthen walls that yet seemed too solid and smooth to be altogether natural. These blows slowed his fall somewhat, but also drove the breath from his lungs. He had just regained it when he struck for a final time, where the wall of the pit had crumbled under the inexorable thrust of the roots of some forest giant. The blow took him across the chest and would have cracked, or even crushed the ribs of any lesser man.

With the Cimmerian, it drove out the barely regained breath and tossed him like a child's ball into the mouth of a tunnel entering the other side of the pit. He struck, half slid and half bounced ten paces, then lay there while earth quivered, rumbled, and fell from the mouth of the tunnel.

He would gladly have lain until his breath returned, but instinct told him that the mouth of the tunnel was only precariously bound by whatever magic ruled here. Lying thus in momentary comfort could end in swift and final burial.

Iron fingers seemed to clutch his chest as he crawled, but the sound of still-falling earth drove him onward. He was sweating with more than his exertions when at last silence fell again, broken only by his harsh breathing.

Probing his ribs with his fingers, he found nothing broken, although he would wager the price of a good inn that he would have the mother and father of all bruises by morning. His breathing had slowed, and cautiously he sat up.

Then a rumble and a series of thuds sounded from the mouth of the tunnel. They rose to a crescendo, but faded as swiftly as they came. Something large had followed him into the pit and plummeted all the way to its distant bottom, as he had not.

He told himself that the sound was too heavy to be Valeria. That kept the ill-luck thought from his mind that she would surely follow him down if she bested the crocodile. She had that loyalty to a battle comrade that defies common sense, and that Conan himself also lived by.

The mouth of the tunnel was now two-thirds blocked by fallen earth-and Conan was thunderstruck to realize that he could see this. He was no longer in utter darkness worthy of the deepest slave-pits of Stygia.

He turned and looked down the tunnel. It sloped away into shadow but was clearly visible for some fifty paces or more. At the very edge of the Cimmerian's vision, the walls seemed to turn from earth into stone, and carved stone at that.

Over all played a subtle light that at one moment seemed sapphire-hued, at the next, as crimson as a fine ruby. Trying to follow the changes of color made Conan dizzy, and in time he ceased his efforts. The light was magic, no doubt, and he was uneasy in the presence of magic. But he would be a cursed deal uneasier in total darkness, and that light might give him a way out of here without Valeria's risking her neck to climb down to him!

Now, if he had some way to tell her that...

Valeria knew that the air had to be cooler this deep in the earth. It only seemed hotter, as though she were climbing down the throat of a volcano toward the molten rock bubbling far below, ready to turn her to ashes should her grip fail for a moment.

"By Erlik's thews!" she muttered. "Forget what you've learned about not letting your fancies run wild, you silly wench, and you will fall."

It was not a fancy that sweat covered every bit of exposed skin, turning into slimy mud where earth had fallen on her from the walls. Her loincloth clung to her, as sodden as a jellyfish, and even her boots seemed to have become heavier with the dampness of the air in this pit.

Truth was, she had never climbed so long and with such precarious holds for hands and feet. Compared to this climb, the time she had raced a shipmate from bow to stern over the masthead on a wager was a child's game. It did not-help, either, that her life had not been at stake in that race.

Groping feet touched a flatter surface. A ledge? Something besides the wall of the pit, anyway... but test it first before putting full weight on it, let alone undoing the rope from its moorings above. "Hooaaa!" The voice seemed more a specter's than a man's as it floated up from below like smoke. Valeria's feet groped for purchase on the ledge, until at last she found a spot whereupon to stand. She left the vine rope in place, though, as she stared downward.

The mouth of the pit was now so far above her that its light barely let her count the fingers of a hand held in front of her face. Beneath, all was blackness. Or was it? From well below, on the far side of the pit, a dim glow seemed to battle the darkness, like distant fireflies on a moonless night.

Except that no firefly ever blinked in those hues of blue and red-no natural firefly, at least. But the laws of nature might not bind whatever lived down here.

Valeria shuddered. She had no more taste for magic than the Cimmerian did, if the truth were known, and for much the same reasons. Magic made honest war skills useless, and made its users more often than not as twisted as the street of her native village in Aquilonia! Tascela was the worst sorceress she had seen, which made her thank the G.o.ds that she had not seen some of the wizards Conan said he had fought.

There would be time to fret over whether Conan had been spinning tales when she knew that the voice below was his... and when she had rejoined him.

"The sea frees us," she called. It was a pa.s.sword of the Red Brotherhood. Only Conan in this jungle was likely to know the reply.

"The land binds us," came the reply. Valeria's knees quivered with relief, but she did not move otherwise.

"Conan! Where are you?"

"In a tunnel, beyond where you see the light. I-" A clod of earth bounced off Valeria's head and spun away into the abyss. She looked up. Was it her fancy, or was the hole above smaller, the light from it dimmer?

The light was surely fading; her hand was now only a blurred, fingerless shape.

The glow from below was holding steady, but it could not take the place of the trickle of daylight from overhead.

"Conan! Something's happening to the light. I'll try to climb down until I'm opposite you, then throw my rope across. How wide is the pit where you are?"

"Wide enough that your pet crocodile didn't stick in its gullet when you sent it down to join me," the reply came. "Best you move quickly, though, if the light's going."

She heard hints of more danger than that in his voice, and was briefly angry at his hiding the truth from her. Reason replaced anger and told her that he might not know all the truth himself. If he did, he would tell it to woman, king, or G.o.d!

The rope was near its end when Valeria found a foothold on a huge curving root opposite the mouth of the tunnel. At least she felt the bark under her feet; the light from above was almost gone. Then Conan's head and ma.s.sive shoulders nearly blocked the light from the tunnel below. She saw now that the mouth of the tunnel was heaped with freshly fallen earth, and understood what Conan feared.

She had not been so desperate for silence since her brief days as a cutpurse.

Even the faint hiss as the slipknot loosened and the rope came free seemed to batter her ears like thunder. The end of the rope flew past her, down into the pit; then she gripped her end and began hauling it in.

She was hauling vigorously when the rope suddenly went taut in her hands. Caught on another root, she thought. Then it began jerking up and down. Caught it was, but by something alive in the depths of the pit-and, she would wager, not by anything as innocent as a crocodile.

Valeria would gladly have faced a score of crocodiles rather than what might even now be climbing from the depths. She did not let fingers or voice shake, however, to give any hint of her fear. She flung her end of the rope across the pit, saw Conan grip it firmly, then heaved with all her strength on the bight of the vines.

For the longest moment of Valeria's life, it was an even contest which would break first-the vine or the grip of whatever lay below. Then, suddenly, the rope shot up like a flying fish. Valeria seized the free end and hastily bound it about her waist.

The rope was covered with a foul ichor that might have oozed from a vast pustule, and now she heard s...o...b..ring and gulping noises from below. Not far below, either, and she would have to swing down to cross the pit. The root offered no foothold fit for a leap.

"Conan!" she called.

"I hear it, too. Jump, Valeria!"

She would drop no farther if she missed her jump than if she swung down, then climbed. Not as far, indeed, for Conan was drawing in the rope until it stretched taut across the gap.

Valeria braced herself, flexed her legs, pressed her hands hard against the wall, and thereby dislodged several more clods of earth. They fell into darkness, and it seemed that the s...o...b..ring and gulping grew louder yet.

The pirate woman took the deepest breath of her life, as if enough oxygen in her body would float her over the nightmare gap. Then she leaped. She was in midair for only a heartbeat, but that was long enough for something to reach up from below and pat her. Its touch was as light as a kitten's, yet it burned like a hot iron.

Then she was on the far side, clawing up over the tumbled earth, listening to the howl of a hunter balked of prey echo up and down the pit and into the tunnel. More earth fell from the walls and ceiling. Conan dragged her the rest of the way over the pile by one arm and her hair.

In the process, her loincloth at last deserted her, and she was bare except for weapons and boots as she tumbled at the Cimmerian's feet. For once he seemed to ignore that state, dragging her upright.

"Can you walk?"

"I can run, to get away from that!"

The howling in the tunnel had not diminished, and now Valeria heard another fierce sound joining it.

The walls of the pit were shuddering, as she wanted to do, and she saw ma.s.ses of earth the size of a man plunge past. She also heard them strike something not far below with an ugly, sodden sound.

Then the roof of the tunnel mouth joined the shuddering, and neither Cimmerian nor Aquilonian needed any further warning. They scrambled down the tunnel, slowing only when they felt stone under their feet, not stopping until they heard the rumble of great ma.s.ses of falling earth behind them.

A mephitic breeze wafted from the mouth of the tunnel-or rather, from where the mouth of the tunnel had been. Whether the whole pit had collapsed, they could not say. But the way back was now blocked by a solid ma.s.s of earth that seemed to glare at them in defiance of any puny efforts they might make to shift it and escape. Not that Valeria had the slightest intention of returning by way of the pit, when its inhabitants might still be alive and hungry. Perhaps that wall of earth between her and them was not so dire a fate as she had thought-unless the pit creatures could carve a path through it, or they had kin somewhere in the tunnel beyond.

As to the first, the best course was swift flight. As to the second, keen eyes and keen steel would have to be enough-that, and a prayer or two, if any G.o.d could hear them from these deeps.

She pointed a bare arm down the tunnel. Conan nodded and fell in at the rear, for the moment the post of greater danger. Valeria recognized this, and also that Conan's eyes now roamed over her with concern for any hurts she might have taken.

But there was hardly a price she would not have paid to be able to climb into a hot bath!

Conan took the rear guard until they reached a place where the tunnel divided; there were no sounds of pursuit behind or of life ahead. That this was no natural tunnel was by now made plainer than ever by the remains of incredibly ancient tool marks and patches of stain and corrosion that might once have been bronze or iron.

At the dividing point, Conan examined Valeria's ankle. It showed an ugly dark mark, like the worst sort of burn, but the pain was fading and the ankle would support her weight. Like his ribs, it would slow neither weapons nor feet, depending on what seemed the best way of meeting any danger.

"Now, you will take the shirt off my back, or I'll know why," he said. "Garbed as you are, you'd adorn a royal palace, but I doubt we'll be finding many palaces down here. Their dungeons, perhaps, and the bones of those held in them, but little else."

"You need not soothe me, you son of a he-goat."

"Ha! You've your spirits back. Perhaps you need no clothes then, since without them, you're double-armed, steel and womanhood!"

"Give me that shirt," she snapped, then laughed loud enough to raise echoes. She looked about her while the echoes died, then almost s.n.a.t.c.hed the garment the Cimmerian held out to her.

It came down to mid-thigh. Conan cut the sleeves into strips and bound them around Valeria's feet to protect the blisters until further walking toughened the skin. So clad, with her hair a tangle any honest bird would have disdained to nest in, and her boots dangling from a thong about her neck, Valeria would have been flung into the street from the cheapest waterfront tavern.

Or she would have been but for her sword and daggers-and also for the look in her eyes that said any hand touching her against her will would not return to its owner intact, if at all.

Conan needed no further warnings in that matter. Indeed, he was grateful for the skill and luck that had allowed her to keep her weapons. They would be fighting again before they ever saw daylight, even if the battle was against foes where steel could do no more than give man or woman a clean death.

Valeria found little pleasure in her present situation save being alive. Also, the Cimmerian's presence might well keep her so longer than otherwise. He had been as formidable against natural foes as against magical ones, and for rather more years than she had followed the warrior's path. Where the tunnel divided, one way sloped upward, the other down. They halted, Valeria set her back against the wall and looked to the rear, and Conan briefly explored in both directions.

Valeria did not enjoy being even briefly alone here in the bowels of the earth.

But she could master her fancies now; she would wait for real monsters to leap from the shadows before she let herself fear. She pa.s.sed the brief time of waiting by unrolling the sword-thong from about her waist and linking sword and wrist securely. She hoped she would have no call for more climbing, and likewise that the damp air would keep the vine supple and strong should she need it.

Conan returned swiftly. "The way down leads to water, deeper than I'd care to try. And that's leaving out what might be in the water."

Valeria held her nose. "Something that reeks like a days-old battlefield, from what's on you."

"That, and more. I saw statues, kin to the oldest idols I saw in the Black Kingdoms. I'm more than ever certain that someone built this warren."

"But why?"

"Like as not, to save a trek through the jungle. Let's hope it's fit to do the same for us." He looked at .the upward-sloping way. "If I'm not altogether turned about, that leads back the way we came."

"Better the jungle we know than what might be down here," Valeria said fervently. "That beast in the pit sounded like something that could have eaten Xuchotl's Crawler for lunch and the dragon in the forest for dinner."

Conan said nothing, but took the lead. For three hundred paces, the tunnel sloped upward. Valeria began to hope that it might rise so close to the surface that they could make a way for themselves. If another tree had thrust a root down- Disappointment came swiftly. Not only were the tunnel walls intact, save for one place where a niche had crumbled, but the floor began to slope downward as steeply as it had risen. It also grew as slick as if it had been oiled.

The light did not fade, and Valeria now began to make out paintings on the wall.

Or at least they might have been paintings. They also might have been patterns of tiny jewels set into the stone; they seemed to sparkle. Trying to see which, Valeria looked closely at one pattern-and found that it changed before her eyes, from one beast to another, and then to yet others.

One beast was a lion, another a great fish, and she hoped that the third was a dragon. The rest were things that she decided she would not care to look at too closely, let alone meet.

Although the light did not fade, Valeria began to feel moving air brush against her skin. Her nose wrinkled at the growing reek of something long dead and thoroughly rotten. She tore another strip from Conan's shirt and bound it over her nose, and the Cimmerian did likewise.

Past a curve where a slab of wall had fallen to half block the tunnel, they came to a cavern the size of a royal hall. The light seemed to cling to the floor, so that the roof of the cavern was lost in shadow. The far wall, a good bowshot away, was likewise dimmed.

The floor of the cavern was almost lost under a carpet of fungi. They grew in great slabs, rising as high as Valeria's waist; for the most part, they were pale and flabby but with streaks of a more wholesome brown color running through them. From their stems dripped a greasy fluid that turned the soil beneath to a noisome muck, and more than a few of them had the appearance of being half-eaten. This time the two explored together. Unspoken but plain was the agreement that no one should go with unguarded back in this cavern.

As they circled the walls, they found more fungi that looked as if they had been gnawed at. One entire patch of soil had been eaten bare, with fresh fungi already sprouting among the rotting fragments of the old ones.

"These things grow fast," Conan observed. "Fast enough, I wager, for something to browse on them."

Halfway around the cavern, they found the fungi growing thicker than ever, and the smell of decay the strongest. Valeria stepped forward and slashed at the largest slab with her sword. It fell apart in a crumbling ma.s.s of dust and spores, revealing a ma.s.sive rib-part of the remains of some unearthly creature.

"Something did browse on them, Conan," she said.

She could not help looking about the cavern. "Now they're eating it."

"If beasts can eat them-" he said.

Valeria's stomach twisted, and the last of the monkey nearly left her. "Birds and monkeys are a good test. Whatever that creature was, it might have been born of magic, left over from the days of the tunnel-builders. Who knows what it could stomach that would kill us?"

"True enough, but we've found nothing else to eat, and no water fit to drink.

These look like they might have water inside."

"Ah..."

"I'll try a bit first. If my fingers and toes don't turn green and fall off-"

"Ha! A Cimmerian's no better than this beast for testing what common folk can eat. I've seen you eating what they served at the soldiers' taverns in Sukhmet!"