The Hour of the Dragon | Page 3

you
require of me?"
The man was now fully alive and awake, his keen eyes reflecting the
working of an unclouded brain. There was no hesitation or uncertainty
in his manner. He came directly to the point, as one who knows that no
man gives something for nothing. Orastes met him with equal candor.
"We have opened the doors of hell this night to free your soul and
return it to your body because we need your aid. We wish to place
Tarascus on the throne of Nemedia, and to win for Valerius the crown
of Aquilonia. With your necromancy you can aid us."
Xaltotun's mind was devious and full of unexpected slants.
"You must be deep in the arts yourself, Orastes, to have been able to
restore my life. How is it that a priest of Mitra knows of the Heart of
Ahriman, and the incantations of Skelos?"
"I am no longer a priest of Mitra," answered Orastes. "I was cast forth
from my order because of my delving in black magic. But for Amalric
there I might have been burned as a magician.
"But that left me free to pursue my studies. I journeyed in Zamora, in
Vendhya, in Stygia, and among the haunted jungles of Khitai. I read the
ironbound books of Skelos, and talked with unseen creatures in deep
wells, and faceless shapes in black reeking jungles. I obtained a
glimpse of your sarcophagus in the demon-haunted crypts below the
black giant-walled temple of Set in the hinterlands of Stygia, and I
learned of the arts that would bring back life to your shriveled corpse.
From moldering manuscripts I learned of the Heart of Ahriman. Then
for a year I sought its hiding-place, and at last I found it."

"Then why trouble to bring me back to life?" demanded Xaltotun, with
his piercing gaze fixed on the priests. "Why did you not employ the
Heart to further your own power?"
"Because no man today knows the secrets of the Heart," answered
Orastes. "Not even in legends live the arts by which to loose its full
powers. I knew it could restore life; of its deeper secrets I am ignorant.
I merely used it to bring you back to life. It is the use of your
knowledge we seek. As for the Heart, you alone know its awful
secrets."
Xaltotun shook his head, staring broodingly into the flaming depths.
"My necromantic knowledge is greater than the sum of all the
knowledge of other men," he said; "yet I do not know the full power of
the jewel. I did not invoke it in the old days; I guarded it lest it be used
against me. At last it was stolen, and in the hands of a feathered shaman
of the barbarians it defeated all my mighty sorcery. Then it vanished,
and I was poisoned by the jealous priests of Stygia before I could learn
where it was hidden."
"It was hidden in a cavern below the temple of Mitra, in Taran-tia,"
said Orastes. "By devious ways I discovered this, after I had located
your remains in Set's subterranean temple in Stygia.
"Zamorian thieves, partly protected by spells I learned from sources
better left unmentioned, stole your mummy-case from under the very
talons of those which guarded it in the dark, and by camel-caravan and
galley and ox-wagon it came at last to this city.
"Those same thieves-or rather those of them who still lived after their
frightful quest-stole the Heart of Ahriman from its haunted cavern
below the temple of Mitra, and all the skill of men and the spells of
sorcerers nearly failed. One man of them lived long enough to reach me
and give the jewel into my hands, before he died slavering and
gibbering of what he had seen in that accursed crypt. The thieves of
Zamora are the most faithful of men to their trust. Even with my
conjurements, none but them could have stolen the Heart from where it

has lain in demon-guarded darkness since the fall of Acheron, three
thousand years ago."
Xaltotun lifted his lion-like head and stared far off into space, as if
plumbing the lost centuries.
"Three thousand years!" he muttered. "Set! Tell me what has chanced
in the world."
"The barbarians who overthrew Acheron set up new kingdoms," quoted
Orastes. "Where the empire had stretched now rose realms called
Aquilonia, and Nemedia, and Argos, from the tribes that founded them.
The older kingdoms of Ophir, Corinthia and western Koth, which had
been subject to the kings of Acheron, regained their independence with
the fall of the empire."
"And what of the people of Acheron?" demanded Orastes. "When I fled
into Stygia, Python was in ruins, and all the great, purple-towered cities
of Acheron fouled with blood and trampled by