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

sideways to get through them.
The walls were sculptured in low relief with coiling, geometrical arabesques of baffling, hypnotic
complexity. Conan found that he had to wrench his gaze away from the sculptured walls by force of
will, lest his mind be entrapped and held by the cryptic symbols formed by the writhing lines.
In fact, everything about this strange, baffling enigma in stone reminded Conan of serpentsтАФthe
winding corridors, the writhing decoration, and even, he thought, a faint trace of a musky, ophidian odor.
Conan halted, brows knotted. Could this unknown ruin have been raised by the serpent folk of ancient
Valussa? The day of that pre-human people lay an unthinkable interval in the past, before the dawn of
man himself, in the dim mists of time when giant reptiles ruled the earth. Or ever the Seven Empires
arose in the days before the CataclysmтАФeven before Atlantis arose from the depths of the Western
OceanтАФthe serpent people had reigned. They had vanished long before the coming of manтАФbut not
entirely.
Around the campfires in the bleak hills of Cimmeria and again in the marbled courts of the temples of
Nemedia, Conan had heard the legend of Kull, the Atlantean king of Valusia. The snake people had
survived here and there by means of their magic, which enabled them to appear to others as ordinary
human beings. But Kull had stumbled upon their secret and had purged his realm dean of their taint,
wiping them out with fire and sword.
Still, might not the black castle, with its alien architecture, be a relic of that remote era, when men
contended for the rule of the planet with these reptilian survivors of lost ages?

5. Whispering Shadows
The first thunderstorm missed the black castle. There was a brief patter of raindrops on the crumbling
stonework and a trickle of water through holes in the roof. Then the lightning and thunder diminished as
the storm passed off to westward, leaving the moon to shine unobstructed once more through the gaps in
the stone. But other storms followed, muttering and flickering out of the east. Conan slept uneasily in a
comer of the balcony above the great hall, tossing and turning like some wary animal that dimly senses
the approach of danger. Caution had made him suspicious of sleeping in the hall before the wide-open
doors. Even though the circle of death seemed to bar the denizens of the plains, he did not trust the
unseen force that held the beasts at bay.
A dozen times he started awake, clutching at his sword and probing the soft shadows with his eyes,
searching for whatever had aroused him. A dozen times he found nothing in the gloomy vastness of the
ancient wreck. Each time he composed himself for slumber again, however, dim shadows clustered
around him, and he half-heard whispering voices.
Growling a weary curse to his barbaric gods, the Cimmerian damned all shadows and echoes to the
eleven scarlet Hells of his mythology and threw himself down again, striving to slumber. At length he

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fell into a deep sleep. And in that sleep there came upon him a strange dream.
It seemed that, although his body slept, his spirit waked and was watchful. To the immaterial eyes of his
ka, as the Stygians called it, the gloomy balcony was filled with a dim glow of blood-hued light from
some unseen source. This was neither the silvery sheen of the moon, which cast slanting beams into the
hall through gaps in the stone, nor the pallid Bicker of distant lightning. By sanguine radiance, Conan's
spirit could see drifting shadows, which flitted like cloudy bats among die black marble columnsтАФ
shadows with glaring eyes filled with mindless hungerтАФshadows that whispered in an all but audible
cacophony of mocking laughter and bestial cries.
Conan's spirit somehow knew that these whispering
shadows were the ghosts of thousands of sentient beings who had died within this ancient structure. How
he knew this, he could not say, but to his ka it was a plain fact. The unknown people who had raised this