Short Fiction by Robert E. Howard

Author:Robert E. Howard
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Fantasy fiction, American, Conan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2018-04-13T21:40:20+00:00

II Goddess Awakens

The Cim­me­rian at first made no at­tempt to fight the cur­rent that was sweep­ing him through light­less night. He kept him­self afloat, grip­ping be­tween his teeth the sword, which he had not re­lin­quished, even in his fall, and did not even seek to guess to what doom he was be­ing borne. But sud­denly a beam of light lanced the dark­ness ahead of him. He saw the surg­ing, seething black sur­face of the wa­ter, in tur­moil as if dis­turbed by some mon­ster of the deep, and he saw the sheer stone walls of the chan­nel curved up to a vault over­head. On each side ran a nar­row ledge, just be­low the arch­ing roof, but they were far out of his reach. At one point this roof had been bro­ken, prob­a­bly fallen in, and the light was stream­ing through the aper­ture. Beyond that shaft of light was ut­ter black­ness, and panic as­sailed the Cim­me­rian as he saw he would be swept on past that spot of light, and into the un­known black­ness again.

Then he saw some­thing else: bronze lad­ders ex­tended from the ledges to the wa­ter’s sur­face at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals, and there was one just ahead of him. In­stantly he struck out for it, fight­ing the cur­rent that would have held him to the mid­dle of the stream. It dragged at him as with tan­gi­ble, an­i­mate slimy hands, but he buf­feted the rush­ing surge with the strength of des­per­a­tion and now drew closer and closer in­shore, fight­ing fu­ri­ously for ev­ery inch. Now he was even with the lad­der and with a fierce, gasp­ing plunge he gripped the bot­tom rung and hung on, breath­less.

A few sec­onds later he strug­gled up out of the seething wa­ter, trust­ing his weight du­bi­ously to the cor­roded rungs. They sagged and bent, but they held, and he clam­bered up onto the nar­row ledge which ran along the wall scarcely a man’s length be­low the curv­ing roof. The tall Cim­me­rian was forced to bend his head as he stood up. A heavy bronze door showed in the stone at a point even with the head of the lad­der, but it did not give to Co­nan’s ef­forts. He trans­ferred his sword from his teeth to its scab­bard, spit­ting blood—for the edge had cut his lips in that fierce fight with the river—and turned his at­ten­tion to the bro­ken roof.

He could reach his arms up through the crevice and grip the edge, and care­ful test­ing told him it would bear his weight. An in­stant later he had drawn him­self up through the hole, and found him­self in a wide cham­ber, in a state of ex­treme dis­re­pair. Most of the roof had fallen in, as well as a great sec­tion of the floor, which was laid over the vault of a sub­ter­ranean river. Bro­ken arches opened into other cham­bers and cor­ri­dors, and Co­nan be­lieved he was still in the great palace. He won­dered un­easily how many cham­bers in that palace had un­der­ground wa­ter di­rectly un­der them, and when the an­cient

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