Chapter 2

‘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
witchlights floated slowly up through midnight pools of darkness.

Orastes cast a furtive glance at his companions, who stood staring in
morbid fascination at their strange guest. Their iron nerves had
withstood an ordeal that might have driven weaker men mad. He knew it
was with no weaklings that he conspired, but men whose courage was as
profound as their lawless ambitions and capacity for evil. He turned his
attention to the figure in the ebon-black chair. And this one spoke at
last.

‘I remember,’ he said in a strong, resonant voice, speaking Nemedian
with a curious, archaic accent. ‘I am Xaltotun, who was high priest of
Set in Python, which was in Acheron. The Heart of Ahriman–I dreamed I
had found it again–where is it?’

Orastes placed it in his hand, and he drew breath deeply as he gazed
into the depths of the terrible jewel burning in his grasp.

‘They stole it from me, long ago,’ he said. ‘The red heart of the night
it is, strong to save or to damn. It came from afar, and from long ago.
While I held it, none could stand before me. But it was stolen from me,
and Acheron fell, and I fled in exile into dark Stygia. Much I remember,
but much I have forgotten. I have been in a far land, across misty voids
and gulfs and unlit oceans. What is the year?’

Orastes answered him. ‘It is the waning of the Year of the Lion, three
thousand years after the fall of Acheron.’

‘Three thousand years!’ murmured the other. ‘So long? Who are you?’

‘I am Orastes, once a priest of Mitra. This man is Amalric, baron of
Tor, in Nemedia; this other is Tarascus, younger brother of the king of
Nemedia; and this tall man is Valerius, rightful heir of the throne of
Aquilonia.’

‘Why have you given me life?’ demanded Xaltotun. ‘What do 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
iron-bound 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 priest. ‘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 Tarantia,’ said
Orastes. ‘By devious ways I discovered this, after I had located your
remains in Set’s subterranean temple in Stygia.