Conan the Barbarian: The Complete Collection

“Shhh!” It was an urgent hiss of command from the large man who held the jewel. Perspiration stood upon his broad white forehead and his eyes were dilated. He leaned forward, and, without touching the thing with his hand, laid on the breast of the mummy the blazing jewel. Then he drew back and watched with fierce intensity, his lips moving in soundless invocation.

It was as if a globe of living fire nickered and burned on the dead, withered bosom. And breath sucked in, hissing, through the clenched teeth of the watchers. For as they watched, an awful transmutation became apparent. The withered shape in the sarcophagus was expanding, was growing, lengthening. The bandages burst and fell into brown dust. The shriveled limbs swelled, straightened. Their dusky hue began to fade.

“By Mitra!” whispered the tall, yellow-haired man on the left. “He was not a Stygian. That part at least was true.”

Again a trembling finger warned for silence. The hound outside was no longer howling. He whimpered, as with an evil dream, and then that sound, too, died away in silence, in which the yellow-haired man plainly heard the straining of the heavy door, as if something outside pushed powerfully upon it. He half turned, his hand at his sword, but the man in the ermine robe hissed an urgent warning: “Stay! Do not break the chain! And on your life do not go to the door!”

The yellow-haired man shrugged and turned back, and then he stopped short, staring. In the Jade sarcophagus lay a living man: a tall, lusty man, naked, white of skin, and dark of hair and beard. He lay motionless, his eyes wide open, and blank and unknowing as a newborn babe’s. On his breast the great jewel smoldered and sparkled.

The man in ermine reeled as if from some let-down of extreme tension.

“Ishtar!” he gasped. “It is Xaltotun! — and he lives! Valerius! Tarascus! Amalric! Do you see? Do you see? You doubted me — but I have not failed! We have been close to the open gates of hell this night, and the shapes of darkness have gathered close about us — aye, they followed him to the very door — but we have brought the great magician back to life.”

“And damned our souls to purgatories everlasting, I doubt not,” muttered the small, dark man, Tarascus.

The yellow-haired man, Valerius, laughed harshly.

“What purgatory can be worse than life itself? So we are all damned together from birth. Besides, who would not sell his miserable soul for a throne?”

“There is no intelligence in his stare, Orastes,” said the large man.

“He has long been dead,” answered Orastes. “He is as one newly awakened. His mind is empty after the long sleep — nay, he was dead, not sleeping. We brought his spirit back over the voids and gulfs of night and oblivion. I will speak to him.”

He bent over the foot of the sarcophagus, and fixing his gaze on the wide dark eyes of the man within, he said, slowly: “Awake, Xaltotun!”

The lips of the man moved mechanically. “Xaltotun!” he repeated in a groping whisper.

“You are Xaltotun!” exclaimed Orastes, like a hypnotist driving home his suggestions. “You are Xaltotun of Python, in Acheron.”

A dim flame flickered in the dark eyes.

“I was Xaltotun,” he whispered. “I am dead.”

“You are Xaltotun!” cried Orastes. “You are not dead! You live!”

“I am Xaltotun,” came the eerie whisper. “But I am dead. In my house in Khemi, in Stygia, there I died.”

“And the priests who poisoned you mummified your body with their dark arts, keeping all your organs intact!” exclaimed Orastes. “But now you live again! The Heart of Ahriman has restored your life, drawn your spirit back from space and eternity.” “The Heart of Ahriman!” The flame of remembrance grew stronger. “The barbarians stole it from me!”

“He remembers,” muttered Orastes. “Lift him from the case.”

The others obeyed hesitantly, as if reluctant to touch the man they had recreated, and they seemed not easier in their minds when they felt firm muscular flesh, vibrant with blood and life, beneath their fingers. But they lifted him upon the table, and Orastes clothed him in a curious dark velvet robe, splashed with gold stars and crescent moons, and fastened a cloth-of-gold fillet about his temples, confining the black wavy locks that fell to his shoulders. He let them do as they would, saying nothing, not even when they set him in a carven throne-like chair with a high ebony back and wide silver arms, and feet like golden claws. He sat there motionless, and slowly intelligence grew in his dark eyes and made them deep and strange and luminous. It was as if long-sunken witch-lights floated slowly up through midnight pools of darkness.