There were shouts, partly muffled by the sound of the water. Conan flattened himself against the side of the tunnel, and a storm of arrows whipped through the sheet of water, bringing little splashes of droplets with them and rebounding with a clatter from the walls and floor of the tunnel.
A glance back showed Conan that his men had vanished into the gloom of the tunnel. He ran after them, so that when, a few moments later, the guardsmen again burst through the waterfall, they found nobody in front of them.
Meanwhile in the gorge, voices filled with horror rose as the newcomers halted among the corpses. The general knelt beside the dead prince and the dying girl.
"It is Prince Teyaspal" he cried.
"He is beyond your power," murmured Roxana. "I would have made him king, but you robbed him of his manhood ... so I killed him . . ."
"But I bring him the crown of Turan!" cried the general. "Yildiz is dead, and the people will rise against his son Yezdigerd if they have anyone else to follow—"
"Too late!" whispered Roxana, and her dark head sank on her arm.
Conan ran up the tunnel with the feet of the pursuing Turanians echoing after him. Where the tunnel opened into the great natural chimney lined with the tombs of the forgotten race, he saw his men grouped uncertainly on the floor of the pit below him, some looking at the hissing flame and some up at the stair down which they had come.
"Go on to the ship!" he bellowed through cupped hands. The words rattled back from the black cylindrical walls.
The men ran out into the cleft that led to the outer world. Conan turned again and leaned against the side of the chimney just alongside the tunnel entrance. He waited as the footsteps grew louder.
An Imperial Guard popped out of the tunnel. Again Conan's sword swished and struck, biting into the man's back through mail and skin and spine. With a shriek the guard pitched head-first off the platform. His momentum carried him out from the spiral stair toward the middle of the floor below. His body plunged into the hole in the rocky floor from which issued the flame and wedged there like a cork in a bottle. The flame went out with a pop, plunging the chamber into gloom only faintly relieved by the opening to the sky far above.
Conan did not see the body strike the floor, for he was watching the tunnel opening for his next foe. The next guard looked out but leaped back as Conan struck at him with a ferocious backhand. There came a jabber of voices; an arrow whizzed out of the tunnel past Conan's face, to strike the far side of the chamber and shatter against the black rock.
Conan turned and started down the stone steps, taking three at a time. As he reached the bottom, he saw Ivanos herding the last of the pirates into the cleft across the floor, perhaps ten strides away. To the left of the cleft, five times Conan's height from the floor, the Turanian guards boiled out of the tunnel and clattered down the stairs. A couple loosed arrows at the Cimmerian as they ran, but between the speed of his motion and the dimness of the light their shots missed.
But, as Conan reached the bottom steps, another group of beings appeared. With a grinding sound, the slabs of stone blocking the ends of the tomb cavities swung inward, first a few, then by scores. Like a swarm of larvae issuing from their cells, the inhabitants of the tombs came forth. Conan had not taken three strides toward the cleft when he found the way blocked by a dozen of the things.
They were of vaguely human form, but white and hairless, lean and stringy as if from a long fast. Their toes and fingers ended in great, hooked claws. They had large, staring eyes set in faces that looked more like those of bats than of human beings, with great, flaring ears, little snub noses, and wide mouths that opened to show needle-pointed fangs.
The first to reach the floor were those who crawled out of the bottom tiers of cells. But the upper tiers were opening too and the creatures were spelling out of them by hundreds, climbing swiftly down the pitted walls of the chamber by their hooked claws. Those that reached the floor first glimpsed the last pirates as they entered the cleft. With a pointing of clawed fingers and a shrill twittering, those nearest the cleft rushed toward and into it.
Conan, the hairs of his neck prickling with a barbarian's horror of supernatural menaces, recognized the newcomers as the dreaded brylukas of Zaporoskan legend— creatures neither man nor beast nor demon, but a little of all three. Their near-human intelligence served their bestial lust for human blood, while their supernatural powers enabled them to survive even though entombed for centuries. Creatures of darkness, they had been held at bay by the light of the flame. When this was put out they emerged, as ferocious as ever and even more avid for blood.
Those that struck the floor near Conan rushed upon him, claws outstretched. With an inarticulate roar he whirled, making wide sweeps with his great sword to keep them from piling on his back. The blade sheared off a head here, an arm there, and cut one bryluka in half. Still they clustered, twittering, while from the spiral staircase rose the shrieks of the leading Turanians as brylukas leaped upon them from above and climbed up from below to fasten their claws and fangs in their bodies.
The stair was clustered with writhing, battling figures as the Turanians hacked madly at the things crowding upon them, A cluster consisting of one guard with several brylukas clinging to him tolled off the stair to strike the floor. The entrance to the cleft was solidly jammed with twittering brylukas trying to force their way in to chase Conan's pirates. In the seconds before they overwhelmed him too, Conan saw that neither way out would serve him. With a bellow of fury he ran across the floor, but not in the direction the brylukas expected. Weaving and zigzagging, his sword a whirling glimmer in the gloom, he reached the wall directly below the platform that formed the top of the stair and the entrance to the tunnel, leaving a trail of still or writhing figures behind him. Hooked claws snatched at him as he ran, glancing off his mail, tearing his clothes to ribbons, and drawing blood from deep scratches on his arms and legs.
As he reached the wall, Conan dropped his buckler, took his sword in his teeth, sprang high in the air, and caught the lower sill of one of the cells in the third tier above the floor, a cell that had already discharged its occupant. With simian agility the Cimmerian mountaineer went up the wall, using the cell openings as hand and foot-holds. Once, as his face came opposite a cell opening, a hideous batlike visage looked into his as the bryluka started to emerge. Conan's fist lashed out and struck the grinning face with a crunch of bone; then, without waiting to see what execution he had done, he swarmed on up.
Below him, other brylukas climbed the wall in pursuit. Then with a heave and a grunt he was on the platform. Those guards who had been behind the ones who first started down the stair, seeing what was happening in the chamber, had turned and raced back through the tunnel. A few brylukas crowded into the tunnel in pursuit just as Conan reached the platform.
Even as they turned toward him he was among them like a whirlwind. Bodies, whole or dismembered, spilled off the platform as his sword sheared through white, unnatural flesh. For an instant the platform was cleared of the gibbering horrors. Conan plunged into the tunnel and ran with all his might.
Ahead of him ran a few of the vampires, and ahead of them the guards who had been coming along the tunnel. Conan, coming to the brylukas from behind, struck down one, then another, then another, until they were all writhing in their blood behind him. He kept on until he came to the end of the tunnel, where the last of the guards had just ducked through the waterfall.