"L. Sprague De Camp - Conan 26 - The Castle of Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

structure erected by unknown hands for some nameless purpose. It looked like a castle or fortress of
some sort, but of an architectural type that Conan had never seen. Made of dense black stone, it rose in a
complex facade of pillars and terraces and battlements, whose alignment seemed oddly awry. It baffled
the view. The eye followed mind-twisting curves that seemed subtly wrong, weirdly distorted. The huge
structure gave the impression of a chaotic lack of order, as if its builders had not been quite sane.
Conan wrenched his gaze from the vertiginous curves of this misshapen mass of masonry, merely to
look upon which made him dizzy. He thought he could at last perceive why the beasts of the veldt
avoided this crumbling pile. It somehow exuded an aura of menace and horror. Perhaps, during the
millennia that the black citadel had squatted on the plains, the animals had come to dread it and to avoid
its shadowy precincts, until such habits of avoidance were now instinctive.
The moon dimmed suddenly as high-piled storm clouds again darkened her ageless face. Distant
thunder grumbled, and Conan's searching gaze caught the sulfurous flicker of lightning among the
boiling masses of cloud. One of .those quick, tempestuous thunderstorms of the savanna was about to
break.
Conan hesitated. On the one hand, curiosity and a desire for shelter from the coming storm drew him to
the ' crumbled stronghold. On the other, his barbarian's mind held a deep-rooted aversion to the
supernatural. Toward earthly, mortal dangers he was fearless to the point of rashness, but otherworldly
perils could send the tendrils of panic quivering along his nerves. And something about this mysterious
structure hinted at the supernatural. He could feel its menace in the deepest layers of his consciousness.
A louder nimble of thunder decided him. Taking an iron grip on his nerves, he strode confidently into
the dark portal, naked steel in hand, and vanished within.

4. The Serpent Men
Conan prowled the length of the high-vaulted hall, finding nothing that lived. Dust and dead leaves
littered the black pave. Moldering rubbish was heaped in the comers and around the bases of towering
stone columns. However old this pile of masonry was, evidently no living thing had dwelt therein for
centuries.
The hall, revealed by another brief appearance of ,the moon, was two stories high. A balustrated balcony
ran around the second floor. Curious to probe deeper into the mystery of this enigmatic structure which
squatted here on the plain many leagues from any other stone building, Conan roamed the corridors,
which wound as sinuously as a serpent's track. He poked into dusty chambers whose original purpose he
could not even guess.
The castle was of staggering size, even to one who had seen the temple of the spider-god at Yezud in
Zamora and the palace of King Yfldiz at Aghrapur in Turan. A good part of itтАФone whole wing, in fact
тАФhad fallen into a featureless mass of tumbled black blocks, but the part that remained more or less
intact was still the largest building that Conan had seen. Its antiquity was beyond guessing. The black
onyx of which it was wrought was unlike any stone that Conan had seen in this part of the world. It must
have been brought across immense distancesтАФwhy, Conan could not imagine.

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Some features of the bizarre architecture of the structure reminded Conan of ancient tombs in accursed
Zamora. Others suggested forbidden temples that he had glimpsed in far Hyrkania during his mercenary
service with the Turanians. But whether the black castle had been erected primarily as a tomb, a fortress,
a palace, or a temple, or some combination of these, he could not tell.
Then, too, there was a disturbing alienage about the castle that made him obscurely uneasy. Even as the
facades seemed to have been built according to the canons of some alien geometry, so the interior
contained baffling features. The steps of the stairways, for example, were much broader and shallower
than was required for human feet. The doorways were too tall and too narrow, so that Conan had to turn