THE OTHER TALES OF CONAN

by Robert E. Howard, Lyon Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

I. The Thing in the Crypt, by Howard, de Camp & Carter

II. The Hall of the Dead, by Howard & de Camp

III. The God in the Bowl, by Howard

IV. The Hand of Nergal, by Howard & Carter

V. The City of Skulls, by de Camp & Carter

VI. The Curse of the Monolith, by de Camp & Carter

VII. The Bloodstained God, by Howard & de Camp

VIII. The Lair of the Ice Worm, by de Camp & Carter

IX. The Castle of Terror, by de Camp & Carter

X. The Snout in the Dark, by Howard, de Camp & Carter

XI. Hawks over Shem, by Howard & de Camp

XII. The Road of the Eagles, by Howard & de Camp

XIII. Black Tears, by de Camp & Carter

XIV. The Flame Knife, by Howard & de Camp

XV. Drums of Tombalku, by Howard & de Camp

XVI. The Treasure of Tranicos, by Howard & de Camp

XVII. Wolves Beyond the Border, by Howard & de Camp

1. THE THING IN THE CRYPT

The greatest hero of Hyborian times was not a Hyborian but a barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian, about whose name whole cycles of legend revolve. From the elder civilizations of Hyborian and Atlantean times, only a few fragmentary, half-legendary narratives survive. One of these, The Nemedian Chronicles, gives most of what is known about the career of Conan. The section concerning Conan begins:

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.

In Conan’s veins flowed the blood of ancient Atlantis, swallowed by the seas eight thousand years before his time. He was born into a clan that claimed an area in the northwest of Cimmeria. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood feud and, after long wandering, took refuge with the people of the North, Conan himself was born on a battlefield, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir.

There is no record of when the young Cimmerian got his first sight of civilization, but he was known as a fighter around the council fires before he had seen fifteen snows. In that year, the Cimmerian tribesmen forgot their feuds and joined forces to repel the Gundermen, who had pushed across the Aquilonian frontier, built the frontier post of Venarium, and begun to colonize the southern marches of Cimmeria. Conan was a member of the howling, bloodmad horde that swept out of the northern hills, stormed over the stockade with sword and torch, and drove the Aquilonians back across their frontiers.

At the sack of Venarium, still short of his full growth, Conan already stood six feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. He had the alertness and stealth of the born woodsman, the iron-hardness of the mountain man, the Herculean physique of his blacksmith father, and a practical familiarity with knife, ax, and sword.

After the plunder of the Aquilonian outpost, Conan returns for a time to his tribe. Restless under the conflicting urges of his adolescence, his tradition, and his times, he spends some months with a band of the Aesir in fruitless raiding against the Vanir and the Hyperboreans. This latter campaign ends with the sixteen-year-old Cimmerian in chains. He does not, however, remain a captive long …

I. Red Eyes

For two days the wolves had trailed him through the woods, and now they were closing in again. Looking back over his shoulder, the boy caught glimpses of them: shaggy, hulking shapes of shadowy gray, loping amongst the black tree trunks, with eyes that burned like red coals in the gathering murk. This time, he knew, he could not fight them off as he had done before.

He could not see very far, because all around him rose, like the silent soldiers of some bewitched army, the trunks of millions of black spruces. Snow clung in dim, white patches to the northern slopes of the hills, but the gurgle of thousands of rills from melting snow and ice presaged the coming of spring. This was a dark, silent, gloomy world even in high summer; and now, as the dim light from the overcast faded with the approach of dusk, it seemed more somber than ever.

The stripling ran on, up the heavily wooded slope, as he had run for the two days since he had fought his way out of the Hyperborean slave pen. Although a purebred Cimmerian, he had been one of a band of raiding Aesir, harrying the borders of the Hyperboreans. The gaunt, blond warriors of that grim land had trapped and smashed the raiding party; and the boy Conan, for the first time in his life, had tasted the bitterness of the chains and the lash that were the normal lot of the slave.

He had not, however, long remained in slavery. Working at night while others slept, he had ground away at one link of his chain until it was weak enough for him to snap. Then, during a heavy rainstorm, he had burst loose. Whirling a four-foot length of heavy, broken chain, he had slain his overseer and a soldier who had sprung to block his way, and vanished into the downpour. The rain that hid him from sight also baffled the hounds of the search party sent after him.

Although free for the moment, the youth had found himself with half the breadth of a hostile kingdom between him and his native Cimmeria. So he had fled south into the wild, mountainous country that separated the southern marches of Hyperborea from the fertile plains of Brythunia and the Turanian steppes. Somewhere to the south, he had heard, lay the fabulous kingdom of Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery. There stood famous cities: the capital, Shadizar, called the City of Wickedness; the thief-city of Arenjun; and Yezud, the city of the spider god.

The year before, Conan had had his first taste of the luxuries of civilization when, as one of the bloodmad horde of Cimmerian clansmen that had poured over the walls of Venarium, he had taken part in the sack of that Aquilonian outpost. The taste had whetted his appetite for more. He had no clear ambition or program of action; nothing but vague dreams of desperate adventures in the rich lands of the South. Visions of glittering gold and jewels, unlimited food and drink, and the hot embraces of beautiful women of noble birth, as his prizes of valor, flitted through his naive young mind. In the South, he thought, his hulking size and strength should somehow easily bring him fame and fortune among the city-bred weaklings. So he headed south, to seek his fate with no more equipment than a tattered, threadbare tunic and a length of chain.

And then the wolves had caught his scent. Ordinarily, an active man had little to fear from wolves. But this was the end of winter; the wolves, starving after a bad season, were ready for any desperate chance.

The first time they had caught up with him, he had wielded the chain with such fury that he left one gray wolf writhing and howling in the snow with a broken back, and another dead with a smashed skull. Scarlet gore spattered the melting snow. The famished pack had slunk away from this fierce-eyed lad with the terrible whirling chain, to feast upon their own dead brethren instead, and young Conan had fled southward. But, ere long, they were again upon his track.

Yesterday, at sunset, they had caught up with him at a frozen river on the borders of Brythunia. He had fought them on the slippery ice, swinging the bloody chain like a flail, until the boldest wolf had seized the iron links between grim jaws, tearing the chain from his numb grasp. Then the fury of the battle and the hurtling weight of the pack had broken the rotten ice beneath them. Conan found himself gasping and choking in the icy flood. Several wolves had fallen in with him he had a brief impression of a wolf, half immersed, scrabbling frantically with its forepaws at the edge of the ice but how many had succeeded in scrambling out, and how many had been swept under the ice by the swift current, he never learned.

Teeth chattering, he hauled himself out on the ice on the farther side, leaving the howling pack behind. All night he had fled south through the wooded hills, half-naked and half-frozen, and all this day. Now they had caught up with him again.

The cold mountain air burned in his straining lungs, until every breath was like inhaling the blast from some hellish furnace. Devoid of feeling, his leaden legs moved like pistons. With each stride, his sandaled feet sank into the water-soaked earth and came out again with sucking sounds.

He knew that, barehanded, he stood little chance against a dozen shaggy man-killers. Yet he trotted on without pausing. His grim Cimmerian heritage would not let him give up, even in the face of certain death.

Snow was falling again big, wet flakes that struck with a faint but audible hiss and spotted the wet, black earth and the towering black spruces with a myriad dots of white. Here and there, great boulders shouldered out of the needle-carpeted earth; the land was growing ever more rocky and mountainous. And herein, thought Conan, might lie his one chance for life. He could take a stand with his back against a rock and fight the wolves off as they came at him. It was a slim chance he well knew the steel-trap quickness of those lean, wiry, hundred-pound bodies but better than none.

The woods thinned out as the slope grew steeper. Conan loped toward a huge mass of rocks that jutted from the hillside, like the entrance to a buried castle. As he did so, the wolves broke from the edge of the thick woods and raced after him, howling like the scarlet demons of Hell as they track and pull down a doomed soul.

II. The Door in the Rock

Through the white blur of whirling snow, the boy saw a yawning blackness between two mighty planes of rock and flung himself toward it. The wolves were upon his heels he thought he could feel their hot, reeking breath upon his bare legs when he hurled himself into the black cleft that gaped before him. He squeezed through the opening just as the foremost wolf sprang at him. Drooling jaws snapped on empty air; Conan was safe. But for how long?

Stooping, Conan fumbled about in the dark, pawing the rough stone floor as he sought for any loose object with which to fight off the howling horde. He could hear them padding about in the fresh snow outside, their claws scraping on stone. Like himself, they breathed in quick pants. They snuffled and whined, hungry for blood. But not one came through the doorway, a dim, gray slit against the blackness. And that was strange.

Conan found himself in a narrow chamber in the rock, utterly black save for the feeble twilight that came through the cleft. The uneven floor of the cell was strewn with litter blown in by centuries of wind or carried in by birds and beasts: dead leaves, spruce needles, twigs, a few scattered bones, pebbles, and chips of rock. There was nothing in all this trash that he could use for a weapon.

Stretching to his full height already inches over six feet the boy began exploring the wall with outstretched hand. Soon he came upon another door. As he groped his way through this portal into pitch-blackness, his questing fingers told him that here were chisel marks on the stone, forming cryptic glyphs in some unknown writing. Unknown, at least, to the, untutored boy from the barbarous northlands, who could neither read nor write and who scorned such civilized skills as effeminate.

He had to stoop double to wedge himself through the inner door, but beyond it he could once more stand erect. He paused, listening warily. Although the silence was absolute, some sense seemed to warn him that he was not alone in the chamber. It was nothing he could see, hear, or smell, but a sense of presence, different from any of these.

His sensitive, forest-trained ears, listening for echoes, told him that this inner chamber was much larger than the outer one. The place smelt of ancient dust and bats’ droppings. His shuffling feet encountered things scattered about the floor. While he could not see these objects, they did not feel like the forest litter that carpeted the antechamber. They felt more like man-made things.

As he took a quick step along the wall, he stumbled over one such object in the dark. As he fell, the thing splintered with a crash beneath his weight. A snag of broken wood scraped his shin, adding one more scratch to those of the spruce boughs and the wolves’ claws. Cursing, he recovered himself and felt in the dark for the thing he had demolished. It was a chair, the wood of which had rotted so that it easily broke beneath his weight.

He continued his explorations more cautiously. His groping hands met another, larger object, which he presently recognized as the body of a chariot. The wheels had collapsed with the rotting of their spokes, so that the body lay on the floor amid the fragments of spokes and pieces of the rims.

Conan’s questing hands came upon something cold and metallic. His sense of touch told him that this was probably a rusty iron fitting from the chariot. This gave him an idea. Turning, he groped his way back to the inner portal, which he could barely discern against the all-pervading blackness. From the floor of the antechamber he gathered a fistful of tinder and several stone chips. Back in the inner chamber, he made a pile of the tinder and tried the stones on the iron. After several failures, he found a stone that emitted a bright flash of sparks when struck against the iron.

Soon he had a small, smoky fire sputtering, which he fed with the broken rungs of the chair and the fragments of the chariot wheels. Now he could relax, rest from his terrible cross-country run, and warm his numbed limbs. The briskly burning blaze would deter the wolves, which still prowled about the outer entrance, reluctant to pursue him into the darkness of the cave but also unwilling to give up their quarry.

The fire sent a warm, yellow light dancing across the walls of roughly dressed stone. Conan gazed about him. The room was square and even larger than his first impressions had told him. The high ceiling was lost in thick shadows and clotted with cobwebs. Several other chairs were set against the walls, together with a couple of chests that had burst open to show their contents of clothing and weapons. The great stone room smelt of death of ancient things long unburied.

And then the hair lifted from the nape of his neck, and the boy felt his skin roughen with a supernatural thrill. For there, enthroned on a great, stone chair at the further end of the chamber, sat the huge figure of a naked man, with a naked sword across his knees and a cavernous skull-face staring at him through the flickering firelight.

Almost as soon as he sighted the naked giant, Conan knew he was dead long ages dead. The corpse’s limbs were as brown and withered as dry sticks. The flesh on its huge torso had dried, shrunk, and split until it clung in tatters to naked ribs.

This knowledge, however, did not calm the youth’s sudden chill of terror. Fearless beyond his years in war, willing to stand against man or brute beast in battle, the boy feared neither pain, nor death, nor mortal foes. But he was a barbarian from the northern hills of backward Cimmeria. Like all barbarians, he dreaded the supernatural terrors of the grave and the dark, with all its dreads and demons and the monstrous, shambling things of Old Night and Chaos, with which primitive folk people the darkness beyond the circle of their campfire. Much rather would Conan have faced even the hungry wolves than remain here with the dead thing glaring down at him from its rocky throne, while the wavering firelight painted life and animation into the withered skull-face and moved the shadows in its sunken sockets like dark, burning eyes.

III. The Thing on the Throne

Although his blood ran chill and his nape hairs prickled, the boy fiercely took hold of himself. Bidding his night-fears be damned, he strode stiff-legged across the vault for a closer look at the long-dead thing.

The throne was a square boulder of glassy, black stone, roughly hollowed into the likeness of a chair on a foot-high dais. The naked man had either died while sitting in it or had been placed upon it in a sitting position after his death. Whatever garments he had worn had long since mouldered away to fragments. Bronze buckles and scraps of leather from his harness still lay about his feet. A necklace of unshaped nuggets of gold hung about his neck; uncut gems winked from golden rings on his clawlike hands, which still clasped the arms of the throne. A horned helm of bronze, now covered with a green, waxy coating of verdegris, crowned the pate above the withered, brown horror of the face.

With iron nerve, Conan forced himself to peer into those time-eaten features. The eyes had sunken in, leaving two black pits. Skin had peeled back from dried lips, letting the yellow fangs grin in a mirthless leer.

Who had he been, this dead thing? A warrior of ancient times some great chief, feared in life and still enthroned in death? None could say. A hundred races had roved and ruled these mountainous borderlands since Atlantis sank beneath the emerald waves of the Western Ocean, eight thousand years before. From the horned helm, the cadaver might have been a chief of the primal Vanir or Aesir, or the primitive king of some forgotten Hyborian tribe, long since vanished into the shadows of time and buried under the dust of ages.

Then Conan’s gaze dropped to the great sword that lay across the corpse’s bony thighs. It was a terrific weapon: a broadsword with a blade well over a yard in length. It was made of blued iron, not copper or bronze, as might have been expected from its obvious age. It might have been one of the first iron weapons borne by the hand of man; the legends of Conan’s people remembered the days when men hewed and thrust with ruddy bronze, and the fabrication of iron was unknown. Many battles had this sword seen in the dim past, for its broad blade, although still keen, was notched in a score of places where, clanging, it had met other blades of sword and ax in the slash and parry of the melee. Stained with age and spotted with rust, it was still a weapon to be feared.

The boy felt his pulses pound. The blood of one born to war seethed within him. Crom, what a sword! With a blade like that, he could more than hold his own against the starving wolves that padded, whined, and waited without. As he reached for the hilt with eager hand, he failed to see the warning flicker that moved within those shadowed eye sockets in the skull-head of the ancient warrior.

Conan hefted the blade. It seemed as heavy as lead a sword of the Elder Ages. Perhaps some fabled hero-king of old had borne it some legendary demigod like Kull of Atlantis, king of Valusia in the ages before Atlantis foundered beneath the restless sea.

The boy swung the sword, feeling his thews swell with power and his heart beat faster with pride of possession. Gods, what a sword! With such a blade, no destiny was too high for a warrior to aspire to! With a sword such as this, even a half-naked young barbarian from the raw Cimmerian wilderness might hack his way across the world and wade through rivers of gore to a place among the high kings of earth!

He stood back from the throne of stone, feinting and cutting the air with the blade, getting the feel of the age-worn hilt against his hard palm. The keen old sword whistled through the smoky air, and the flickering light of the fire glanced in sparkling rays from the planes of the blade to the rough stone walls, whipping along the sides of the chamber like little, golden meteors. With this mighty brand in his grasp, he could face not only the hungry wolves outside but a world of warriors as well.

The boy expanded his chest and boomed out the savage war cry of his folk. The echoes of that cry thunderously reverberated about the chamber, disturbing ancient shadows and old dust. Conan never paused to think that such a challenge, in such a place, might rouse things other than shadows and dust things that by all rights should have slumbered without interruption through all future eons.

He stopped, frozen in mid-stride, as a sound an indescribable, dry creaking came from the throne side of the crypt. Wheeling, he saw. and felt the hair lift from his scalp and the blood turn to ice in his veins. All his superstitious terrors and primal night-fears rose howling, to fill his mind with shadows of madness and horror. For the dead thing lived.

IV. When Dead Men Walk

Slowly, jerkily, the cadaver rose from its great stone chair and glared at him from its black pits, whence now living eyes seemed to blaze forth with a coldly malignant stare. Somehow by what primeval necromancy the boy Conan could not guess life still animated the withered mummy of the long-dead chief. Grinning jaws moved open and shut in a fearful pantomime of speech. But the only sound was the creaking that Conan had heard, as if the shriveled remains of muscles and tendons rubbed dryly together. To Conan, this silent imitation of speech was more terrible than the fact that the dead man lived and moved.

Creaking, the mummy stepped down from the dais of its ancient throne and swiveled its skull in Conan’s direction. As its eyeless gaze fixed itself on the sword in Conan’s hand, lurid witch fires burned within the hollow sockets. Stalking clumsily across the chamber, the mummy advanced upon Conan like a shape of nameless horror from the nightmares of a mad fiend. It extended its bony claws to snatch the sword from Conan’s strong young hands.

Numb with superstitious terror, Conan retreated step by step. The firelight painted the mummy’s black, monstrous shadow on the wall behind it. The shadow rippled over the rough stone. Save for the crackle of the flames as they bit into the pieces of ancient furniture with which Conan had fed the fire, the rustle and creak of the cadaver’s leathery muscles as they propelled it step by faltering step across the crypt, and the panting breath of the youth as he struggled for air in the grip of terror save for these sounds, the tomb was silent.

Now the dead thing had Conan backed against a wall. One brown claw stretched jerkily out. The boy’s reaction was automatic; instinctively, he struck out. The blade whistled and smote the outstretched arm, which cracked like a broken stick. Still clutching at empty air, the severed hand fell with a dry clack to the floor; no blood spurted from the dry stump of the forearm.

The terrible wound, which would have stopped any living warrior, did not even slow the walking corpse. It merely withdrew the stump of the maimed arm and extended the other.

Wildly, Conan burst from the wall, swinging his blade in great, smashing strokes. One blow caught the mummy in the side. Ribs snapped like twigs under the impact, and the cadaver was hurled off its feet with a clatter. Conan stood panting in the center of the room clutching the worn hilt in a sweaty palm. With widened eyes he watched as slowly, creakily, the mummy dragged itself to its feet again and began mechanically shuffling toward him, its remaining claw extended.

V. Duel With the Dead

Around and around they went, circling slowly. Conan swung lustily but retreated step by step before the unstoppable advance of the dead thing that came on and on.

A blow at its remaining arm missed as the mummy jerked the member out of the path of the sword; the impetus swung Conan half around and, before he could recover, it was almost upon him. Its claw-hand snatched at him, caught a fold of his tunic, and ripped the rotten cloth from his body, leaving him naked except for sandals and loincloth.

Conan danced back and swung at the monster’s head. The mummy ducked, and again Conan had to scramble to keep out of its grip. At last he caught it a terrific blow on the side of the head, shearing off one horn of the helm. Another blow sent the helmet itself clanging into a corner. Another bit into the dry, brown skull. The blade stuck for an instant an instant that almost undid the boy, whose skin was scraped by ancient black nails as he frantically tugged his weapon loose.

The sword caught the mummy in the ribs again, lodged for a nearly fatal second in the spine, and then was jerked loose once more. Nothing, it seemed, could stop it. Dead, it could not be hurt. Always it staggered and shuffled toward him, untiring and unfaltering, even though its body bore wounds that would have laid a dozen stout warriors moaning in the dirt.

How can you kill a thing that is already dead? The question echoed madly in Conan’s brain. It went round and round until he thought he would go mad with the repetition of it. His lungs labored; his heart pounded as if it were about to burst. Slash and strike as he would, nothing could even slow the dead thing that shuffled after him.

Now he struck with greater cunning. Reasoning that if it could not walk it could not pursue him, he drove a fierce, backhanded slash against the mummy’s knee. A bone cracked, and the mummy collapsed, groveling in the dust of the cavern floor. But still the unnatural life burned within the mummy’s withered breast. It staggered to its feet again and lurched after the boy, dragging its crippled leg behind it.

Again Conan struck, and the dead thing’s lower face was shorn away; the jawbone went rattling off into the shadows. But the cadaver never stopped. With its lower face a mere expanse of broken white bone beneath the uncanny glow in its eye sockets, it still shambled after its antagonist in tireless, mechanical pursuit. Conan began to wish he had stayed outside with the wolves rather than sought shelter in this cursed crypt, where things that should have died a thousand years ago still stalked and slew.

Then something caught his ankle. Off balance, he fell full-length to the rough stone floor, kicking wildly to free his leg from that bony grip. He stared down and felt his blood freeze when he saw the severed hand of the corpse clutching his foot. Its bony claws bit into his flesh.

Then a grisly shape of nightmare horror and lunacy loomed over him. The broken, mangled face of the corpse leered down into his, and one claw-hand darted towards his throat.

Conan reacted by instinct. With all his might, he brought both sandaled feet up against the shrunken belly of the dead thing stooping over him. Hurled into the air, it fell with a crash behind him, right in the fire.

Then Conan snatched at the severed hand, which still gripped his ankle. He tore it loose, rolled to his feet, and hurled the member into the fire after the rest of the mummy. He stopped to snatch up his sword and whirled back toward the fire to find the battle over.

Desiccated by the passage of countless centuries, the mummy burned with the fury of dry brushwood. The unnatural life within it still flickered as it struggled erect, while flames ran up its withered form, leaping from limb to limb and converting it into a living torch. It had almost clambered out of the fire when its crippled leg gave way, and it collapsed in a mass of roaring flame. One blazing arm dropped off like a twitching stick. The skull rolled through the coals. Within minutes the mummy was utterly consumed, but for a few glowing coals of blackened bone.

VI. The Sword of Conan

Conan let out his breath with a long sigh and breathed deeply once again. The tension drained out of him, leaving him weary in every limb. He wiped the cold sweat of terror from his face and combed back the tangle of his black hair with his fingers. The dead warrior’s mummy was at last truly dead, and the great sword was his. He hefted it again, relishing its weight and power.

For an instant he thought of spending the night in the tomb. He was deathly tired. Outside, the wolves and the cold waited to bring him down, and not even his wilderness-bred sense of direction could keep him on his chosen course on a starless night in a strange land.

But then revulsion seized him. The smoke-filled chamber stank, now, not only of the dust of ages but also of the burning of long-dead human flesh a strange odor, like nothing Conan’s keen nostrils had ever detected before, and altogether revolting. The empty throne seemed to leer at him. That sense of presence that had struck him when he first entered the inner chamber still lingered in his mind. His scalp crawled and his skin prickled when he thought of sleeping in this haunted chamber.

Besides, with his new sword, he was filled with confidence. His chest expanded, and he swung the blade in whistling circles.

Moments later, wrapped in an old fur cloak from one of the chests and holding a torch in one hand and the sword in the other, he emerged from the cave. There was no sign of the wolves. A glance upward showed that the sky was clearing. Conan studied the stars that glimmered between patches of cloud, then once more set his footsteps to southward.

2. THE HALL OF THE DEAD

Becoming fed up with the City of Thieves (and vice versa) Conan wanders westward to the capital of Zamora, Shadizar the Wicked. Here, he hopes, the pickings will be richer. For a time he is indeed, more successful in his thievery than he had been in Arenjun although the women of Shadizar quickly relieve him of his gains in return for initiating him into the arts of love. Rumors of treasure send him to the nearby ruins of ancient Larsha, just ahead of the squad of soldiers sent to arrest him.

The gorge was dark, although the setting sun had left a band of orange and yellow and green along the western horizon. Against this band of color, a sharp eye could still discern, in black silhouette, the domes and spires of Shadizar the Wicked, the city of dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery the capital of Zamora.

As the twilight faded, the first few stars appeared overhead. As if answering a signal, lights winked on in the distant domes and spires. While the light of the stars was pale and wan, that of the windows of Shadizar was a sultry amber, with a hint of abominable deeds.

The gorge was quiet save for the chirping of nocturnal insects. Presently, however, this silence was broken by the sound of moving men. Up the gorge came a squad of Zamorian soldiers five men in plain steel caps and leather jerkins, studded with bronze buttons, led by an officer in a polished bronze cuirass and a helmet with a towering horsehair crest. Their bronze-greaved legs swished through the long, lush grass that covered the floor of the gorge. Their harness creaked and their weapons clanked and tinkled. Three of them bore bows and the other two, pikes; short swords hung at their sides and bucklers were slung across their backs. The officer was armed with a long sword and a dagger.

One of the soldiers muttered: “If we catch this Conan fellow alive, what will they do with him?”

“Send him to Yezud to feed to the spider god, I’ll warrant,” said another. “The question is, shall we be alive to collect that reward they promised us?”

“Not afraid of him, are you?” said a third.

“Me?” The second speaker snorted. “I fear naught, including death itself. The question is, whose death? This thief is not a civilized man but a wild barbarian, with the strength of ten. So I went to the magistrate to draw up my will “

“It is cheering to know that your heirs will get the reward,” said another. “I wish I had thought of that.”

“Oh,” said the first man who had spoken, “they’ll find some excuse to cheat us of the reward, even if we catch the rascal.”

“The prefect himself has promised,” said another. “The rich merchants and nobles whom Conan has been robbing raised a fund. I saw the money a bag so heavy with gold that a man could scarce lift it. After all that public display, they’d not dare to go back on their word.”

“But suppose we catch him not,” said the second speaker. “There was something about paying for it with our heads.” The speaker raised his voice. “Captain Nestor! What was that about our heads “

“Hold your tongues, all of you!” snapped the officer. “You can be heard as far as Arenjun. If Conan is within a mile, he’ll be warned. Cease your chatter, and try to move without so much clangor.”

The officer was a broad-shouldered man of medium height and powerful build; daylight would have shown his eyes to be gray and his hair light brown, streaked with gray. He was a Gunderman, from the northernmost province of Aquilonia, fifteen hundred miles to the west. His mission to take Conan dead or alive troubled him. The prefect had warned him that, if he failed, he might expect severe punishment perhaps even the headsman’s block. The king himself had demanded that the outlaw be taken, and the king of Zamora had a short way with servants who failed their missions. A tip from the underworld had revealed that Conan was seen heading for this gorge earlier that day, and Nestor’s commander had hastily dis patched him with such troopers as could be found in the barracks.

Nestor had no confidence in the soldiers that trailed behind him. He considered them braggarts who would flee in the face of danger, leaving him to confront the barbarian alone. And, although the Gunderman was a brave man, he did not deceive himself about his chances with this ferocious, gigantic young savage. His armor would give him no more than a slight edge.

As the glow in the western sky faded, the darkness deepened and the walls of the gorge became narrower, steeper, and rockier. Behind Nestor, the men began to murmur again: “I like it not. This road leads to the ruins of Larsha the Accursed, where the ghosts of the ancients lurk to devour passers-by. And in that city, ‘tis said, lies the Hall of the Dead “

“Shut up!” snarled Nestor, turning his head. “If “

At that instant, the officer tripped over a rawhide rope stretched across the path and fell sprawling in the grass. There was the snap of a spring pole released from its lodgment, and the rope went slack.

With a rumbling roar, a mass of rocks and dirt cascaded down the left-hand slope. As Nestor scrambled to his feet, a stone the size of a man’s head struck his corselet and knocked him down again. Another knocked off his helmet, while smaller stones stung his limbs. Behind him sounded a multiple scream and the clatter of stone striking metal. Then silence fell.

Nestor staggered to his feet, coughed the dust out of his lungs, and turned to see what had befallen. A few paces behind him, a rock slide blocked the gorge from wall to wall. Approaching, he made out a human hand and a foot projecting from the rubble. He called but received no reply. When he touched the protruding members, he found no life. The slide, set off by the pull on the rope, had wiped out his entire squad.

Nestor flexed his joints to learn what harm he had suffered. No bones appeared to be broken, although his corselet was dented and he bore several bruises. Burning with wrath, he found his helmet and took up the trail alone. Failing to catch the thief would have been bad enough; but if he also had to confess to the loss of his men, he foresaw a lingering and painful death. His only chance now was to bring back Conan or at least his head.

Sword in hand, Nestor limped on up the endless windings of the gorge. A light in the sky before him showed that the moon, a little past full, was rising. He strained his eyes, expecting the barbarian to spring upon him from behind every bend in the ravine.

The gorge became shallower and the walls less steep. Gullies opened into the gorge to right and left, while the bottom became stony and uneven, forcing Nestor to scramble over rocks and underbrush. At last the gorge gave out completely. Climbing a short slope, the Gunderman found himself on the edge of an upland pleateau, surrounded by distant mountains. A bowshot ahead, bone-white in the light of the moon, rose the walls of Larsha. A massive gate stood directly in front of him. Time had bitten scallops out of the walls, and over it rose half-ruined roofs and towers.

Nestor paused. Larsha was said to be immensely old. According to the tales, it went back to Cataclysmic times, when the forebears of the Zamorians, the Zhemri, formed an island of semicivilization in a sea of barbarism.

Stories of the death that lurked in these ruins were rife in the bazaars of Shadizar. As far as Nestor had been able to learn, not one of the many men who, in historic times, had invaded the ruins searching for the treasure rumored to exist there, had ever returned. None knew what form the danger took, because no survivor had lived to carry the tale.

A decade before, King Tiridates had sent a company of his bravest soldiers, in broad daylight, into the city, while the king himself waited outside the walls. There had been screams and sounds of flight, and then nothing. The men who waited outside had fled, and Tiridates perforce had fled with them. That was the last attempt to unlock the mystery of Larsha by main force.

Although Nestor had all the usual mercenary’s lust for unearned wealth, he was not rash. Years of soldiering in the kingdoms between Zamora and his homeland had taught him caution. As he paused, weighing the dangers of his alternatives, a sight made him stiffen. Close to the wall, he sighted the figure of a man, slinking toward the gate. Although the man was too far away to recognize faces in the moonlight, there was no mistaking that panther-like stride. Conan!

Filled with rising fury, Nestor started forward. He walked swiftly, holding his scabbard to keep it from clanking. But, quietly though he moved, the keen ears of the barbarian warned him. Conan whirled, and his sword whispered from its sheath. Then, seeing that only a single foe pursued him, the Cimmerian stood his ground.

As Nestor approached, he began to pick out details of the other’s appearance. Conan was well over six feet tall, and his threadbare tunic failed to mask the hard lines of his mighty thews. A leathern sack hung by a strap from his shoulder. His face was youthful but hard, surmounted by a square-cut mane of thick black hair.

Not a word was spoken. Nestor paused to catch his breath and cast aside his cloak, and in that instant Conan hurled himself upon the older man.

Two swords glimmered like lightnings in the moonlight as the clang and rasp of blades shattered the graveyard silence. Nestor was the more experienced fighter, but the reach and blinding speed of the other nullified this advantage. Conan’s attack was as elemental and irresistible as a hurricane. Parrying shrewdly, Nestor was forced back, step after step. Narrowly he watched his opponent, waiting for the other’s attack to slow from sheer fatigue. But the Cimmerian seemed not to know what fatigue was.

Making a backhand cut, Nestor slit Conan’s tunic over the chest but did not quite reach the skin. In a blinding return thrust, Conan’s point glanced off Nestor’s breastplate, plowing a groove in the bronze.

As Nestor stepped back from another furious attack, a stone turned under his foot. Conan aimed a terrific cut at the Gunderman’s neck. Had it gone as intended, Nestor’s head would have flown from his shoulders; but, as he stumbled, the blow hit his crested helm instead. It struck with a heavy clang, bit into the iron, and hurled Nestor to the ground.

Breathing deeply, Conan stepped forward, sword ready. His pursuer lay motionless with blood seeping from his cloven helmet. Youthful overconfidence in the force of his own blows convinced Conan that he had slain his antagonist. Sheathing his sword, he turned back toward the city of the ancients.

The Cimmerian approached the gate. This consisted of two massive valves, twice as high as a man, made of foot-thick timbers sheathed in bronze. Conan pushed against the valves, grunting, but without effect. He drew his sword and struck the bronze with the pommel. From the way the gates sagged, Conan guessed that the wood of the doors had rotted away; but the bronze was too thick to hew through without spoiling the edge of his blade. And there was an easier way.

Thirty paces north of the gate, the wall had crumbled so that its lowest point was less than twenty feet above the ground. At the same time, a pile of tailings against the foot of the wall rose to within six or eight feet of the broken edge.

Conan approached the broken section, drew back a few paces, and then ran forward. He bounded up the slope of the tailings, leaped into the air, and caught the broken edge of the wall. A grunt, a heave, and a scramble, and he was over the edge, ignoring scratches and bruises. He stared down into the city.

Inside the wall was a cleared space, where for centuries plant life had been waging war upon the ancient pavement. The paving slabs were cracked and upended. Between them, grass, weeds, and a few scrubby trees had forced their way.

Beyond the cleared area lay the ruins of one of the poorer districts. Here the one-story hovels of mud brick had slumped into mere mounds of dirt. Beyond them, white in the moonlight, Conan discerned the better-preserved buildings of stone the temples, the palaces, and the houses of the nobles and the rich merchants. As with many ancient ruins, and aura of evil hung over the deserted city.

Straining his ears, Conan stared right and left. Nothing moved. The only sound was the chirp of crickets.

Conan, too, had heard the tales of the doom that haunted Larsha. Although the supernatural roused panicky, atavistic fears in his barbarian’s soul, he hardened himself with the thought that, when a supernatural being took material form, it could be hurt or killed by material weapons, just like any earthly man or monster. He had not come this far to be stopped from a try at the treasure by man, beast, or demon.

According to the tales, the fabled treasure of Larsha lay in the royal palace. Gripping his scabbarded sword in his left hand, the young thief dropped from the inner side of the broken wall. An instant later, he was threading his way through the winding streets toward the center of the city. He made no more noise than a shadow.

Ruin encompassed him on every side. Here and there the front of a house had fallen into the street, forcing Conan to detour or to scramble over piles of broken brick and marble. The gibbous moon was now high in the sky, washing the ruins in an eery light. On the Cimmerian’s right rose a temple, partly fallen but with the portico, upheld by four massive marble columns, still intact. Along the edge of the roof, a row of marble gargoyles peered down-statues of monsters of bygone days, half demon and half beast.

Conan tried to remember the scraps of legend that he had overheard in the wineshops of the Maul, concerning the abandonment of Larsha. There was something about a curse sent by an angered god, many centuries before, in punishment for deeds so wicked that they made the crimes and vices of Shadizar look like virtues.

He started for the center of the city again but now noticed something peculiar. His sandals tended to stick to the shattered pavement, as if it were covered with warm pitch. The soles made sucking noises as he raised his feet.

He stooped and felt the ground. It was coated with a film of a colorless, sticky substance, now nearly dry.

Hand on hilt, Conan glared about him in the moonlight But no sound came to his ears. He resumed his advance. Again his sandals made sucking noises as he raised them. He halted, turning his head. He could have sworn that similar sucking noises came to his ears from a distance. For an instant, he thought they might be the echoes of his own footsteps. But he had passed the half-ruined temple, and now no walls rose on either side of him to reflect the sound.

Again he advanced, then halted. Again he heard the sucking sound, and this time it did not cease when he froze to immobility. In fact, it became louder. His keen hearing located it as coming from directly in front of him. Since he could see nothing moving in the street before him, the source of the sound must be in a side street or in one of the ruined buildings.

The sound increased to an indescribable slithering, gurgling hiss. Even Conan’s iron nerves were shaken by the strain of waiting for the unknown source of the sound to appear.

At last, around the next corner poured a huge, slimy mass, leprous gray in the moonlight. It glided into the street before him and swiftly advanced upon him, silent save for the sucking sound of its peculiar method of locomotion. From its front end rose a pair of hornlike projections, at least ten feet long, with a shorter pair below. The long horns bent this way and that, and Conan saw that they bore eyes on their ends.

The creature was, in fact, a slug, like the harmless garden slug that leaves a trail of slime in its nightly wanderings. This slug, however, was fifty feet long and as thick through the middle as Conan was tall. Moreover, it moved as fast as a man could run. The fetid smell of the thing wafted ahead of it.

Momentarily paralyzed with astonishment, Conan stared at the vast mass of rubbery flesh bearing down upon him. The slug emitted a sound like that of a man spitting, but magnified many times over.

Galvanized into action at last, the Cimmerian leaped sideways. As he did so, a jet of liquid flashed through the night air, just where he had stood. A tiny droplet struck his shoulder and burned like a coal of fire.

Conan turned and ran back the way he had come, his long legs flashing in the moonlight. Again he had to bound over piles of broken masonary. His ears told him that the slug was close behind. Perhaps it was gaining. He dared not turn to look, lest he trip over some marble fragment and go sprawling; the monster would be upon him before he could regain his feet.

Again came that spitting sound. Conan leaped frantically to one side; again the jet of liquid flashed past him. Even if he kept ahead of the slug all the way to the city wall, the next shot would probably hit its mark.

Conan dodged around a corner to put obstacles between himself and the slug. He raced down a narrow zigzag street, then around another corner. He was lost in the maze of streets, he knew; but the main thing was to keep turning corners so as not to give his pursuer another clear shot at him. The sucking sounds and the stench indicated that it was following his trail. Once, when he paused to catch his breath, he looked back to see the slug pouring around the last corner he had turned.

On and on he went, dodging this way and that through the maze of the ancient city. If he could not outrun the slug, perhaps he could tire it. A man, he knew, could outlast almost any animal in a long-distance run. But the slug seemed tireless.

Something about the buildings he was passing struck him as familiar. Then he realized that he was coming to the half-ruined temple he had passed just before he met the slug. A quick glance showed him that the upper parts of the building could be reached by an active climber.

Conan bounded up a pile of rubbish to the top of the broken wall. Leaping from stone to stone, he made his way up the jagged profile of the wall to an unruined section facing the street. He found himself on a stretch of roof behind the row of marble gargoyles. He approached them, treading softly lest the half-ruined roof collapse beneath him and detouring around holes through which a man could fall into the chambers below.

The sound and smell of the slug came to him from the street. Realizing that it had lost his track and uncertain as to which way to turn, the creature had evidently stopped in front of the temple. Very cautiously for he was sure the slug could see him in the moonlight Conan peered past one of the statues and down into the street.

There lay the great, grayish mass, on which the moon shone moistly. The eye stalks wavered this way and that, seeking the creature’s prey. Beneath them, the shorter horns swept back and forth a little above the ground, as if smelling for the Cimmerian’s trail.

Conan felt certain that the slug would soon pick up his trail. He had no doubt that it could slither up the sides of the building quite as readily as he had climbed it.

He put a hand against a gargoyle a nightmarish statue with a humanoid body, bat’s wings, and a reptilian head and pushed. The statue rocked a trifle with a faint crunching noise.

At the sound, the horns of the slug whipped upward toward the roof of the temple. The slug’s head came around, bending its body into a sharp curve. The head approached the front of the temple and began to slide up one of the huge pillars, directly below the place where Conan crouched with bared teeth.

A sword, Conan thought, would be of little use against such a monstrosity. Like other lowly forms of life, it could survive damage that would instantly destroy a higher creature.

Up the pillar came the slug’s head, the eyes on their stalks swiveling back and forth. At the present rate, the monster’s head would reach the edge of the roof while most of its body still lay in the street below.

Then Conan saw what he must do. He hurled himself at the gargoyle. With a mighty heave, he sent it tumbling over the edge of the roof. Instead of the crash that such a mass of marble would ordinarily make on striking the pavement, there floated up the sound of a moist, squashy impact, followed by a heavy thud as the forward part of the slug’s body fell back to earth.

When Conan risked a glance over the parapet, he saw that the statue had sunk into the slug’s body until it was almost buried. The great, gray mass writhed and lashed like a worm on a fisherman’s hook. A blow of the tail made the front of the temple tremble; somewhere in the interior a few loose stones fell clattering. Conan wondered if the whole structure were about to collapse beneath him, burying him in the debris.

“So much for you!” snarled the Cimmerian.

He went along the row of gargoyles until he found another that was loose and directly over part of the slug’s body. Down it went with another squashing impact. A third missed and shattered on the pavement. A fourth and smaller statue he picked bodily up and, muscles cracking with the strain, hurled outward so that it fell on the writhing head.

As the beast’s convulsions slowly subsided, Conan pushed over two more gargoyles to make sure. When the body no longer writhed, he clambered down to the street. He approached the great, stinking mass cautiously, sword out. At last, summoning all his courage, he slashed into the rubbery flesh. Dark ichor oozed out, and rippling morions ran through the wet, gray skin. But, even though parts might retain signs of independent life, the slug as a whole was dead.

Conan was still slashing furiously when a voice made him whirl about. It said:

“I’ve got you this time!”

It was Nestor, approaching sword in hand, with a bloodstained bandage around his head in place of his helmet. The Gunderman stopped at the sight of the slug. “Mitra! What is this?”

“It’s the spook of Larsha,” said Conan, speaking Zamorian with a barbarous accent “It chased me over half the city before I slew it.” As Nestor stared incredulously, the Cimmerian continued: “What do you here? How many times must I kill you before you stay dead?”

“You shall see how dead I am,” grated Nestor, bringing his sword up to guard.

“What happened to your soldiers?”

“Dead in that rock slide you rigged, as you soon shall be.”

“Look, you fool,” said Conan, “why waste your strength on sword strokes, when there’s more wealth here than the pair of us can carry away if the tales are true? You are a good man of your hands; why not join me to raid the treasure of Larsha instead?”

“I must do my duty and avenge my men! Defend yourself, dog of a barbarian!”

“By Crom, I’ll fight if you like!” growled Conan, bringing up his sword. “But think, man! If you go back to Shadizar, they’ll crucify you for losing your command even if you took my head with you, which I do not think you can do. If one tenth of the stories are true, you’ll get more from your share of the loot than you’d earn in a hundred years as a mercenary captain.”

Nestor had lowered his blade and stepped back. Now he stood mute, thinking deeply. Conan added: “Besides, you’ll never make real warriors of these poltroons of Zamorians!”

The Gunderman sighed and sheathed his sword. “You are right, damn you. Until this venture is over, well fight back to back and go equal shares on the loot, eh?” He held out his hand.

“Done!” said Conan, sheathing likewise and clasping the other’s hand. “If we have to run for it and get separated, let’s meet at the fountain of Ninus.”

The royal palace of Larsha stood in the center of the city, in the midst of a broad plaza. It was the one structure that had not crumbled with age, and this for a simple reason. It was carved out of a single crag or hillock of rock that once broke the flatness of the plateau on which Larsha stood. So meticulous had been the construction of this building, however, that close inspection was needed to show that it was not an ordinary composite structure, lines engraved in the black, basaltic surface imitated the joints between building stones.

Treading softly, Conan and Nestor peered into the dark interior. “We shall need light,” said Nestor. “I do not care to walk into another slug like that in the dark.”

“I don’t smell another slug,” said Conan, “but the treasure might have another guardian.”

He turned back and hewed down a pine sapling that thrust up through the broken pavement. Then he lopped its limbs and cut it into short lengths. Whittling a pile of shavings with his sword, he started a small fire with flint and steel. He split the ends of two of the billets until they were frayed out and then ignited them. The resinous wood burned vigorously. He handed one torch to Nestor, and each of them thrust half the spare billets through his girdle. Then, swords out, they again approached the palace.

Inside the archway, the flickering yellow flames of the torches were reflected from polished walls of black stone; but underfoot the dust lay inches thick. Several bats, hanging from bits of stone carving overhead, squeaked angrily and whirred away into deeper darkness.

They passed between statues of horrific aspect, set in niches on either side. Dark hallways opened on either hand. They crossed a throne room. The throne, carved of the same black stone as the rest of the building, still stood. Other chairs and divans, being made of wood, had crumbled into dust, leaving a litter of nails, metallic ornaments, and semi-precious stones on the floor.

“It must have stood vacant for thousands of years,” whispered Nestor.

They traversed several chambers, which might have been a king’s private apartments; but the absence of perishable furnishings made it impossible to tell. They found themselves before a door. Conan put his torch close to it.

It was a stout door, set in an arch of stone and made of massive timbers, bound together with brackets of green-filmed copper. Conan poked the door with his sword. The blade entered easily; a little shower of dusty fragments, pale in the torchlight, sifted down.

“It’s rotten,” growled Nestor, kicking out. His boot went into the wood almost as easily as Conan’s sword had done. A copper fitting fell to the floor with a dull clank.

In a moment they had battered down the rotten timbers in a shower of wood dust. They stooped, thrusting their torches ahead of them into the opening. Light, reflected from silver, gold, and jewels, winked back at them.

Nestor pushed through the opening, then backed out so suddenly that he bumped into Conan. “There are men in there!” he hissed.

“Let’s see.” Conan thrust his head into the opening and peered right and left. “They’re dead. Come on!”

Inside, they stared about them until their torches burned down to their hands and they had to light a new pair. Around the room, seven giant warriors, each at least seven feet tall, sprawled in chairs. Their heads lay against the chair backs and their mouths hung open. They wore the trappings of a bygone era; their plumed copper helmets and the copper scales on their corselets were green with age. Their skins were brown and waxy-looking, like those of mummies, and grizzled beards hung down to their waists. Copper-bladed bills and pikes leaned against the wall beside them or lay on the floor.

In the center of the room rose an altar, of black basalt like the rest of the palace. Near the altar, on the floor, several chests of treasure had lain. The wood of these chests had rotted away; the chests had burst open, letting a glittering drift of treasure pour out on the floor.

Conan stepped close to one of the immobile warriors and touched the man’s leg with the point of his sword. The body lay still. He murmured: “The ancients must have mummified them, as they tell me the priests do with the dead in Stygia.”

Nestor looked uneasily at the seven still forms. The feeble flames of the torches seemed unable to push the dense darkness back to the sable walls and roof of the chamber.

The block of black stone in the middle of the room rose to waist height. On its flat, polished top, inlaid in narrow strips of ivory, was a diagram of interlaced circles and triangles. The whole formed a seven-pointed star. The spaces between the lines were marked by symbols in some form of writing that Conan did not recognize. He could read Zamorian and write it after a fashion, and he had smatterings of Hyrkanian and Corinthian; but these cryptic glyphs were beyond him.

In any case, he was more interested in the things that lay on top of the altar. On each point of the star, winking in the ruddy, wavering light of the torches, lay a great green jewel, larger than a hen’s egg. At the center of the diagram stood a green statuette of a serpent with up-reared head, apparently carved from jade.

Conan moved his torch close to the seven great, glowing gems. “I want those,” he grunted. “You can have the rest.”

“No, you don’t!” snapped Nestor. “Those are worth more than all the other treasure in this room put together. I will have them!”

Tension crackled between the two men, and their free hands stole toward their hilts. For a space they stood silently, glaring at each other. Then Nestor said: “Then let us divide them, as we agreed to do.”

“You cannot divide seven by two,” said Conan. “Let us flip one of these coins for them. The winner takes the seven jewels, while the other man has his pick of the rest. Does that suit you?”

Conan picked a coin out of one of the heaps that marked the places where the chests had lain. Although he had acquired a good working knowledge of coins in his career as a thief, this was entirely unfamiliar. One side bore a face, but whether of a man, a demon, or an owl he could not tell. The other side was covered with symbols like those on the altar.

Conan showed the coin to Nestor. The two treasure hunters grunted agreement. Conan flipped the coin into the air, caught it, and slapped it down on his left wrist. He extended the wrist, with the coin still covered, toward Nestor.

“Heads,” said the Gunderman.

Conan removed his hand from the coin. Nestor peered and growled: “Ishtar curse the thing! You win. Hold my torch a moment.”

Conan, alert for any treacherous move, took the torch. But Nestor merely untied the strap of his cloak and spread the garment on the dusty floor. He began shoveling handfuls of gold and gems from the heaps on the floor into a pile on the cloak.

“Don’t load yourself so heavily that you can’t run,” said Conan. “We are not out of this yet, and it’s a long walk back to Shadizar.”

“I can handle it,” said Nestor. He gathered up the comers of the cloak, slung the improvised bag over his back, and held out a hand for his torch.

Conan handed it to him and stepped to the altar. One by one he took the great, green jewels and thrust them into the leathern sack that hung from his shoulders.

When all seven had been removed from the altar top, he paused, looking at the jade serpent. “This will fetch a pretty price,” he said. Snatching it up, he thrust it, too, into his booty bag.

“Why not take some of the remaining gold and jewels, too?” asked Nestor. “I have all I can carry.”

“You’ve got the best stuff,” said Conan. “Besides, I don’t need any more. Man, with these I can buy a kingdom! Or a dukedom, anyway, and all the wine I can drink and women!”

A sound caused the plunderers to whirl, staring wildly. Around the walls, the seven mummified warriors were coming to life. Their heads came up, their mouths closed, and air hissed into their ancient, withered lungs. Their joints creaked like rusty hinges as they picked up their pikes and bills and rose to their feet.

“Run!” yelled Nestor, hurling his torch at the nearest giant and snatching out his sword.

The torch struck the giant in the chest, fell to the floor, and went out. Having both hands free, Conan retained his torch while he drew his sword. The light of the remaining torch flickered feebly on the green of the ancient copper harness as the giants closed in on the pair.

Conan ducked the sweep of a bill and knocked the thrust of a pike aside. Between him and the door, Nestor engaged a giant who was moving to block their escape. The Gunderman parried a thrust and struck a fierce, backhanded blow at his enemy’s thigh. The blade bit, but only a little way; it was like chopping wood. The giant staggered, and Nestor hewed at another. The point of a pike glanced off his dented cuirass.

The giants moved slowly, or the treasure hunters would have fallen before their first onset. Leaping, dodging, and whirling, Conan avoided blows that would have stretched him senseless on the dusty floor. Again and again his blade bit into the dry, woody flesh of his assailants. Blows that would have decapitated a living man only staggered these creatures from another age. He landed a chop on the hand of one attacker, maiming the member and causing the giant to drop his pike.

He dodged the thrust of another pike and put every ounce of strength into a low forehand cut at the giant’s ankle. The blade bit half through, and the giant crashed to the floor.

“Out!” bellowed Conan, leaping over the fallen body.

He and Nestor raced out the door and through halls and chambers. For an instant Conan feared they were lost, but he caught a glimpse of light ahead. The two dashed out the main portal of the palace. Behind them came the clatter and tramp of the guardians. Overhead, the sky had paled and the stars were going out with the coming of dawn.

“Head for the wall,” panted Nestor. “I think we can outrun them.”

As they reached the far side of the plaza, Conan glanced back. “Look!” he cried.

One by one, the giants emerged from the palace. And one by one, as they came into the growing light, they sank to the pavement and crumbled into dust, leaving their plumed copper helmets, their scaled cuirasses, and their other accouterments in heaps on the ground.

“Well, that’s that,” said Nestor. “But how shall we get back into Shadizar without being arrested? It will be daylight long before we get there.”

Conan grinned. “There’s a way of getting in that we thieves know. Near the northeast corner of the wall stands a clump of trees. If you poke around among the shrubs that mask the wall, you will find a kind of culvert I suppose to let the water out of the city in heavy rains. It used to be closed by an iron grating, but that has rusted away. If you are not too fat, you can worm your way through it. You come out in a lot where people dump rubbish from houses that have been torn down.”

“Good,” said Nestor. “I’ll – “

A deep rumble cut off his words. The earth heaved and rocked and trembled, throwing him to the ground and staggering the Cimmerian.

“Look out!” yelled Conan.

As Nestor started to scramble up, Conan caught his arm and dragged him back toward the center of the plaza. As he did so, the wall of a nearby building fell over into the plaza. It smashed down just where the two had been standing, but its mighty crash was lost in the thunder of the earthquake.

“Let’s get out of here!” shouted Nestor.

Steering by the moon, now low in the western sky, they ran zigzag through the streets. On either side of them, walls and columns leaned, crumbled, and crashed. The noise was deafening. Clouds of dust arose, making the fugitives cough.

Conan skidded to a halt and leaped back to avoid being crushed under the front of a collapsing temple. He staggered as fresh tremors shook the earth beneath him. He scrambled over piles of ruin, some old and some freshly made. He leaped madly out from under a falling column drum. Fragments of stone and brick struck him; one laid open a cut along his jaw. Another glanced from his shin, making him curse by the gods of all the lands he had visited.

At last he reached the city wall. It was a wall no longer, having been shaken down to a low ridge of broken stone.

Limping, coughing, and panting, Conan climbed the ridge and turned to look back. Nestor was no longer with him. Probably, he thought, the Gunderman had been caught under a falling wall. Conan listened but could hear no cry for help.

The rumble of quaking earth and falling masonry died away. The light of the low moon glistened on the vast cloud of dust that covered the city. Then a dawn breeze sprang up and slowly wafted the dust away.

Sitting on the crest of the ridge of ruin that marked the site of the wall, Conan stared back across the site of Larsha. The city bore an aspect entirely different from when he had entered it. Not a single building remained upright Even the monolithic palace of black basalt, where he and Nestor had found their treasure, had crumbled into a heap of broken blocks. Conan gave up thoughts of going back to the palace on some future occasion to collect the rest of the treasure. An army of workmen would have to clear away the wreckage before the valuables could be salvaged.

All of Larsha had fallen into heaps of rubble. As far as he could see in the growing light, nothing moved in the city. The only sound was the belated fall of an occasional stone.

Conan felt his booty bag, to make sure that he still had had his loot, and turned his face westward, towards Shadizar. Behind him, the rising sun shot a spear of light against his broad back.

The following night, Conan swaggered into his favorite tavern, that of Abuletes, in the Maul. The low, smoke-stained room stank of sweat and sour wine. At crowded tables, thieves and murderers drank ale and wine, diced, argued, sang, quarreled, and blustered. It was deemed a dull evening here when at least one customer was not stabbed in a brawl.

Across the room, Conan sighted his sweetheart of the moment, drinking alone at a small table. This was Semiramis, a strongly-built, black-haired woman several years older than the Cimmerian.

“Ho there, Semiramis!” roared Conan, pushing his way across. “I’ve got something to show you! Abuletes! A jug of your best Kyrian! I’m in luck tonight!”

Had Conan been older, caution would have stopped him from openly boasting of his plunder, let alone displaying it. As it was, he strode up to Semiramis’ table and upended the leathern sack containing the seven great, green gems.

The jewels cascaded out of the bag, thumped the wine-wet table top and crumbled instantly into fine green powder, which sparkled in the candlelight.

Conan dropped the sack and stood with his mouth agape, while nearby drinkers burst into raucous laughter.

“Crom and Mannanan!” the Cimmerian breathed at last. “This time, it seems, I was too clever for my own good.” Then he bethought him of the jade serpent, still in the bag. “Well, I have something that will pay for a few good carousals, anyway.”

Moved by curiosity, Semiramis picked up the sack from the table. Then she dropped it with a scream.

“It’s it’s alive!” she cried.

“What ” began Conan, but a shout from the doorway cut him off : “There he is, men! Seize him!”

A fat magistrate had entered the tavern, followed by a squad of the night watch, armed with bills. The other customers fell silent, staring woodenly into space as if they knew nothing of Conan or of any of the other riffraff who were Abuletes’ guests.

The magistrate pushed toward Conan’s table. Whipping out his sword, the Cimmerian put his back against the wall. His blue eyes blazed dangerously, and his teeth showed in the candle light.

“Take me if you can, dogs!” he snarled. “I’ve done nothing against your stupid laws!” Out of the side of his mouth, he muttered to Semiramis: “Grab the bag and get out of here. If they get me, if’s yours.”

“I I’m afraid of it!” whimpered the woman.

“Oh-ho!” chortled the magistrate, coming forward. “Nothing, eh? Nothing but to rob our leading citizens blind! There’s evidence enough to lop your head off a hundred times over! And then you slew Nestor’s soldiers and persuaded him to join you in a raid on the ruins of Larsha, eh? We found him earlier this evening, drunk and boasting of his feat. The villain got away from us, but you shan’t!”

As the watchmen formed a half-circle around Conan, bills pointing toward his breast, the magistrate noticed the sack on the table. “What’s this, your latest loot? We’ll see.”

The fat man thrust a hand into the sack. For an instant he fumbled. Then his eyes widened; his mouth opened to emit an appalling shriek. He jerked his hand out of the bag. A jade-green snake, alive and writhing, had thrown a loop around his wrist and had sunk its fangs into his hand.

Cries of horror and amazement arose. A watchman sprang back and fell over a table, smashing mugs and splashing liquors. Another stepped forward to catch the magistrate as he tottered and fell. A third dropped his bill and, screaming hysterically, broke for the door.

Panic seized the customers. Some jammed themselves into the door, struggling to get out. A couple started fighting with knives, while another thief, locked in combat with a watchman, rolled on the floor. One of the candles was knocked over; then another, leaving the room but dimly lit by the little earthenware lamp over the counter.

In the gloom, Conan caught Semiramis’ wrist and hauled her to her feet. He beat the panic-stricken mob aside with the flat of his sword and forced his way through the throng to the door. Out in the night, the two ran, rounding several corners to throw off pursuit. Then they stopped to breathe. Conan said:

“This city will be too cursed hot for me after this. I’m on my way. Good-bye, Semiramis.”

“Would you not care to spend a last night with me?”

“Not this time. I must try to catch that rascal Nestor. If the fool hadn’t blabbed, the law would not have gotten on my trail so quickly. He has all the treasure a man can carry, while I ended up with naught. Maybe I can persuade him to give me half; if not ” He thumbed the edge of his sword.

Semiramis sighed. “There will always be a hideout for you in Shadizar, while I live. Give me a last kiss.”

They embraced briefly. Then Conan was gone, like a shadow in the night.

On the Corinthian Road that leads west from Shadizar, three bowshots from the city walls, stands the fountain of Ninus. According to the story, Ninus was a rich merchant who suffered from a wasting disease. A god visited him in his dreams and promised him a cure if he would build a fountain on the road leading to Shadizar from the west, so that travelers could wash and quench their thirst before entering the city. Ninus built the fountain, but the tale does not tell whether he recovered from his sickness.

Half an hour after his escape from Abuletes’ tavern, Conan found Nestor, sitting on the curbing of Ninus’ fountain.

“How did you make out with your seven matchless gems?” asked Nestor.

Conan told what had befallen his share of the loot “Now,” he said, “since thanks to your loose tongue I must leave Shadizar, and since I have none of the treasure left, it would be only right for you to divide your remaining portion with me.”

Nestor gave a barking, mirthless laugh. “My share? Boy, here is half of what I have left.” From his girdle he brought out two pieces of gold and tossed one to Conan, who caught it. “I owe it to you for pulling me away from that falling wall.”

“What happened to you?”

“When the watch cornered me in the dive, I managed to cast a table and bowl a few over. Then I picked up the bright stuff in my cloak, slung it over my back, and started for the door. One who tried to halt me I cut down; but another landed a slash on my cloak. The next thing I knew, the whole mass of gold and jewels spilled out on the floor, and everybody watchmen, magistrate, and customers joined in a mad scramble for them.” He held up the cloak, showing a two-foot rent in the fabric. “Thinking that the treasure would do me no good if my head were adorning a spike over the West Gate, I left while the leaving was good. When I got outside the city, I looked in my mantle, but all I found were those two coins, caught in a fold. You’re welcome to one of them.”

Conan stood scowling for a moment. Then his mouth twitched into a grin. A low laugh rumbled in his throat; his head went back as he burst into a thunderous guffaw. “A fine pair of treasure-seekers we are! Crom, but the gods have had sport with us! What a joke!” Nestor smiled wryly. “I am glad you see the amusing side of it. But after this I do not think Shadizar will be safe for either of us.”

“Whither are you bound?” asked Conan.

“I’ll head east, to seek a mercenary post in Turan. They say King Yildiz is hiring fighters to whip his raggle-taggle horde into a real army. Why not come with me, lad? You’re cut out for a soldier.”

Conan shook his head. “Not for me, marching back and forth on the drill ground all day while some fatheaded officer bawls: “Forward, march! Present, pikes!’ I hear there are good pickings in the West; I’ll try that for a while.”

“Well, may your barbarous gods go with you,” said Nestor. “If you change your mind, ask for me in the barracks at Aghrapur. Farewell!”

“Farewell,” replied Conan. Without further words, he stepped out on the Corinthian Road and soon was lost to view in the night.

3. THE GOD IN THE BOWL

Conan’s grim adventures in the Tower of the Elephant and in the ruins of Larsha leave him with an aversion to the sorcery of the East. He flees northwestward through Corinthia into Nemedia, the second most powerful of the Hyborian kingdoms after Aquilonia. In the city of Numalia, he resumes his professional activities as a thief.

Arus the watchman grasped his crossbow with shaky hands and felt beads of clammy perspiration ooze out upon his skin, as he stared at the unlovely corpse that sprawled on the polished floor before him. It is not pleasant to come upon Death in a lonely place at midnight.

The watchman stood in a vast corridor lighted by huge candles set in niches along the walls. Between the niches, these walls were covered with black velvet wall-hangings, and between the hangings hung shields and crossed weapons of fantastic make. Here and there, too, stood figures of curious gods images carved of stone or rare woods, or cast in bronze, iron, or silver dimly mirrored in the gleaming black floor.

Arus shuddered. He had never become used to the place, although he had worked there as watchman for some months. It was a fantastic establishment, the great museum and antique house that men called Kallian Publico’s Temple, with its rarities from all over the world and now, in the lonesomeness of midnight, Arus stood in the great silent hall and stared at the sprawling corpse that had been the Temple’s rich and powerful owner.

It entered even the dull brain of the watchman that the man looked strangely different, now, from the way he had when he rode along the Palian Way in his gilded chariot, arrogant and domineering, with his dark eyes glinting with magnetic vitality. Men who had hated Kallian Publico would scarcely have recognized him now as he lay like a disintegrated tun of fat, his rich robe half torn from him and his purple tunic awry. His face was blackened, his eyes started from his head, and his tongue lolled from his gaping mouth. His fat hands were thrown out as in a gesture of curious futility. On the thick fingers, gems glittered.

“Why did they not take his rings?” muttered the watchman uneasily. Then he started and stared, the short hairs prickling at the nape of his neck. Through the dark silken hangings that masked one of the many doorways, opening into the hall, came a figure.

Arus saw a tall, powerfully-built youth, naked but for a loincloth and sandals strapped high about his ankles. His skin was burned brown as by the suns of the wastelands, and Arus glanced nervously at his broad shoulders, massive chest, and heavy arms. A single look at the moody, broad-browed features told the watchman that the man was no Nemedian. From under a mop of unruly black hair smoldered a pair of dangerous blue eyes. A long sword hung in a leather scabbard from his girdle.

Arus felt his skin crawl. He fingered his crossbow tensely, of half a mind to drive a bolt through the stranger’s body without parley, yet fearful of what might happen if he failed to inflict death at the first shot.

The stranger looked at the body on the floor more in curiosity than surprise. “Why did you kill him?” asked Arus nervously.

The other shook his touseled head. “I did not kill him,” he answered, speaking Nemedian with a barbaric accent “Who is he?”

“Kallian Publico,” replied Arus, edging back.

A flicker of interest showed in the moody blue eyes. “The owner of the house?”

“Aye.” Arus had edged his way to the wall. Now he took hold of a thick velvet rope, which hung there, and jerked it violently. From the street outside sounded the strident clang of the bell that hung before all shops and establishments to summon the watch.

The stranger started. “Why did you do that?” he asked. “It will fetch the watchman!”

“I am the watchman, knave!” answered Arus, bracing his courage. “Stand where you are. Do not move or I’ll loose a bolt through you!”

His finger touched the trigger of his arbalest; the wicked square head of the quarrel pointed straight at the other’s broad breast. The stranger scowled, his dark face lowering. He showed no fear but seemed to hesitate, whether to obey the command or to chance a sudden break. Arus licked his lips and his blood turned cold as he plainly saw caution struggle with murderous intent in the foreigner’s cloudy eyes.

Then he heard a door crash open and a medley of voices, and he drew a deep breath of grateful amazement. The stranger tensed and glared with the worried look of a startled beast of prey as half a dozen men entered the hall. All but one wore the scarlet tunic of the Numalian police. They were girt with short stabbing swords and carried bills long-shafted weapons, half pike, half ax.

“What devil’s work is this?” exclaimed the foremost man, whose cold gray eyes and lean, keen features, no less than his civilian garments, set him apart from his burly companions.

“By Mitra, Demetrio!” exclaimed Arus. “Fortune is assuredly with me tonight. I had no hope that the watch would answer the summons so swiftly or that you would be among them!”

“I was making the rounds with Dionus,” answered Demetrio. “We were just passing the Temple when the watch-bell clanged. But who is this? Ishtar! The master of the Temple himself!”

“None other,” replied Arus, “and foully murdered. It is my duty to walk about the building steadily all night, because, as you know, there is an immense amount of wealth stored here. Kallian Publico had rich patrons scholars, princes, and wealthy collectors of rarities. Well, only a few minutes ago I tried the door that opens on the portico and found it only bolted, not locked. The door is provided with a bolt, which works from either side, and also a great lock, which can be worked only from without. Only Kallian Publico had a key to that, the very key that now hangs at his girdle.

“I knew something was amiss, for Kallian always locked the door with the great lock when he closed the Temple, and I had not seen him since he left at close of day for his villa in the suburbs. I have a key that works the bolt; I entered and found the body lying as you see it. I have not touched it.”

“So.” Demetrio’s keen eyes swept the somber stranger. “And who is this?”

“The murderer, without doubt!” cried Arus. “He came from that door yonder. He is a northern barbarian of some sort perhaps a Hyperborean or a Bossonian.”

“Who are you?” asked Demetrio.

“I am Conan, a Cimmerian,” answered the barbarian.

“Did you kill this man?”

The Cimmerian shook his head.

“Answer me!” snapped the questioner.

An angry glint rose in the moody blue eyes. “I am no dog, to be spoken to thus!”

“Oh, an insolent fellow!” sneered Demetrio’s companion, a big man wearing the insignia of prefect of police. “An independent cur! I’ll soon knock the impudence out of him. Here, you! Speak up! Why did you murder him?”

“Just a moment, Dionus,” ordered Demetrio. “Fellow, I am chief of the Inquisitorial Council of the city of Numalia. You had best tell me why you are here and, if you are not the murderer, prove it.”

The Cimmerian hesitated. He showed no fear but rather a slight bewilderment, as a barbarian does when confronted by the complexities of civilized systems, the workings of which are so baffling and mysterious to him.

“While he thinks it over,” rapped Demetrio, turning to Arus, “tell me: Did you see Kallian Publico leave the Temple this evening?”

“No, my lord; but he’s usually gone when I arrive to begin my sentry-go. The great door was bolted and locked.”

“Could he have entered the building again without your having seen him?”

“Why, it is possible but hardly probable. If he had returned from his villa, he would of course have come in his chariot, for the way is long and whoever heard of Kallian Publico traveling otherwise? Even if I had been on the other side of the Temple, I should have heard the wheels of the chariot on the cobblestones. And I’ve heard no such thing.”

“And the door was locked earlier in the night?”

“I’ll swear to it. I try all doors several times during the night. The door was locked on the outside until perhaps half an hour ago that was the last time I tried it ere I found it unlocked.”

“You heard no cries or sounds of struggle?”

“No, sir. But that’s not strange, for the walls of the Temple are so thick that no sound can pass through them.”

“Why go to all this trouble of questions and speculations?” complained the burly prefect. “Here’s our man, no doubt about it. Let’s take him to the Court of Justice. I’ll wring a confession from him if I have to smash his bones to a pulp.”

Demetrio looked at the barbarian. “You understand what he said?” asked the inquisitor. “What have you to say?”

“That any man who touches me will quickly be greeting his ancestors in Hell,” the Cimmerian ground between his powerful teeth, his eyes glinting angry flames.

“Why did you come here, if not to kill this man?” pursued Demetrio. “I came to steal,” sullenly answered the other.

“To steal what?”

Conan hesitated. “Food.”

“That’s a lie!” said Demetrio. “You knew there was no food here. Tell me the truth or – “

The Cimmerian laid his hand on his sword hilt, and the gesture was as fraught with menace as the lifting of a tiger’s lip to bare its fangs. “Save your bullying for the cowards who fear you,” he growled. “I’m no city-bred Nemedian to cringe before your hired dogs. I’ve slain better men than you for less than this.”

Dionus, who had opened his mouth to bellow in wrath, closed it again. The watchmen shifted their bills uncertainly and glanced at Demetrio for orders. Speechless at hearing the all-powerful police thus defied, they expected a command to seize the barbarian. But Demetrio did not give it. Arus glanced from one to the other, wondering what was going on in the keen brain behind Demetrio’s hawk face. Perhaps the magistrate feared to arouse the barbaric frenzy of the Cimmerian, or perhaps there was an honest doubt in his mind.

“I have not accused you of killing Kallian,” he snapped. “But you must admit that appearances are against you. How did you enter the Temple?”

“I hid in the shadows of the warehouse behind this building,” Conan answered grudgingly. “When this dog,” he jerked a thumb at Arus, “passed by and rounded the corner, I ran to the wall and scaled it “

“A lie!” broke in Arus. “No man could climb that straight wall!”

“Have you never seen a Cimmerian scale a sheer cliff?” asked Demetrio. “I am conducting this investigation. Go on, Conan.”

“The corner is decorated with carvings,” said the Cimmerian. “It was easy to climb. I gained the roof before this dog came around the building again. I found a trap door, fastened with an iron bolt that went through it and was locked on the inside. I hewed the bolt in twain “

Aras, remembering the thickness of the bolt, gasped and moved back from the barbarian, who scowled abstractedly at him and continued:

“I passed through the trap door and entered an upper chamber. I did not pause but came straightway to the stair “

“How did you know where the stair was? Only Kallian’s servants and his rich patrons were ever allowed in those upper rooms.”

Conan stared in stubborn silence.

“What did you do after you reached the stair?” demanded Demetrio.

“I came straight down it,” muttered the Cimmerian. “It let into the chamber behind yonder curtained door. As I came down the stairs, I heard the opening of another door. When I looked through the hanging, I saw this dog standing over the dead man.”

“Why did you come from your hiding place?”

“Because at first I thought him another thief, come to steal that which –” The Cimmerian checked himself.

“That which you yourself had come after!” finished Demetrio. “You did not tarry in the upper rooms, where the richest goods are stored. You were sent here by someone who knows the Temple well, to steal some special thing!”

“And to kill Kallian Publico!” exclaimed Dionus. “By Mitra, we’ve hit it! Seize him, men well have a confession before morning!”

With a foreign curse Conan leaped back, whipping out his sword with a viciousness that made the keen blade hum.

“Back, if you value your curs’ lives!” he snarled. “Because you dare to torture shopkeepers and strip and beat harlots to make them talk, don’t think you can lay your fat paws on a hillman! Fumble with your bow, watchman, and I’ll burst your guts with my heel!”

“Wait!” said Demetrio. “Call off your dogs, Dionus. I’m still not convinced that he is the murderer.” Demetrio leaned towards Dionus and whispered something that Arus could not catch, but which he suspected of being a plan to trick Conan into parting with his sword.

“Very well,” grunted Dionus. “Fall back, men, but keep an eye on him.”

“Give me your sword,” said Demetrio to Conan.

“Take it if you can!” snarled Conan.

The inquisitor shrugged. “Very well. But do not try to escape. Men with crossbows watch the house on the outside.”

The barbarian lowered his blade, although he relaxed only slightly the tense watchfulness of his attitude. Demetrio turned again to the corpse.

“Strangled,” he muttered. “Why strangle him when a sword stroke is so much quicker and surer? These Cimmerians are born sword in hand, as it were; I never heard of their killing a man in this manner.”

“Perhaps to divert suspicion,” said Dionus.

“Possibly.” Demetrio felt the body with experienced hands. “Dead at least half an hour. If Conan tells the truth about when he entered the Temple, he could hardly have slain the man before Arus entered. True, he might be lying he might have broken in earlier.”

“I climbed the wall after Arus made his last round,” growled Conan.

“So you say.” Demetrio brooded over the dead man’s throat, which had been crushed to a pulp of purplish flesh. The head sagged awry on splintered vertebrae. Demetrio shook his head in doubt. “Why should a murderer use a cable thicker than a man’s arm? And what terrible constriction could have so crushed his neck?”

He rose and walked to the nearest door opening into the corridor.

“Here is a bust knocked from a stand near the door,” he said, “and here the floor is scratched, and the hangings in the doorway are pulled awry. Kallian Publico must have been attacked in that room. Perhaps he broke away from his assailant, or dragged the fellow with him as he fled. Anyway, he staggered out into the corridor, where the murderer must have followed and finished him.”

“And if this heathen isn’t the murderer, then where is he?” demanded the prefect.

“I have not exonerated the Cimmerian yet,” said the inquisitor. “But we’ll investigate that room.”

He halted and wheeled, listening. From the street sounded a rattle of chariot wheels, which approached and then abruptly ceased.

“Dionus!” barked the inquisitor. “Send two men to find that chariot. Bring the driver here.”

“From the sound,” said Arus, who was familiar with all the noises of the street, “I should say that it stopped in front of Promero’s house, just on the other side of the silk merchant’s shop.”

“Who is Promero?” asked Demetrio.

“Kallian Publico’s chief clerk.”

“Fetch him here with the driver,” said Demetrio.

Two guardsmen clomped away. Demetrio still studied the body; Dionus, Arus, and the remaining policemen watched Conan, who stood sword in hand like a bronze figure of brooding menace. Presently sandaled feet echoed outside, and the two guardsmen entered with a strongly-built, dark-skinned man in the leather helmet and long tunic of a charioteer, with a whip in his hand, and a small, timid-looking individual typical of that class which, risen from the ranks of artisans, supplies right-hand men for wealthy merchants and traders. The small man recoiled with a cry from the sprawling bulk on the floor.

“Oh, I knew evil would come of this!” he wailed.

Demetrio said: “You are Promero, the chief clerk, I suppose. And you?”

“Enaro, Kallian Publico’s charioteer.”

“You do not seem overly moved at the sight of his corpse,” observed Demetrio.

The dark eyes flashed. “Why should I be moved? Someone has only done that which I longed to do but dared not.”

“So!” murmured the inquisitor. “Are you a free man?”

Enaro’s eyes were bitter as he drew aside his tunic, showing the brand of the debtor slave on his shoulder.

“Did you know your master was coming here tonight?”

“Nay. I brought the chariot to the Temple this evening as usual. He entered it, and I drove toward his villa. However, before we came to the Palian Way, he ordered me to turn and drive him back. He seemed much agitated.”

“And did you drive him back to the Temple?”

“No. He bade me stop at Promero’s house. There he dismissed me, ordering me to return for him shortly after midnight.”

“What time was this?”

“Shortly after dusk. The streets were almost deserted.”

“What did you do then?”

“I returned to the slave quarters, where I remained until it was time to go to Promero’s house. I drove straight there, and your men seized me as I talked with Promero in his door.”

“Have you no idea why Kallian went to Promero’s house?”

“He didn’t speak of his business to his slaves.”

Demetrio turned to Promero. “What do you know about this?”

“Naught.” The clerk’s teeth chattered as he spoke.

“Did Kallian Publico come to your house as the charioteer says?”

“Aye, sir.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Only a short while. Then he left.”

“Did he go from your house to the Temple?”

“I do not know!” The clerk’s voice was shrill.

“Why did he come to your house?”

“To to talk matters of business with me.”

“You lie,” said Demetrio. “Why did he come to your house?”

I don’t know! I know nothing!” Promero’s voice became hysterical. “I had nothing to do with it “

“Make him talk, Dionus,” snapped Demetrio. Dionus grunted and nodded to one of his men who, grinning savagely, moved toward the two captives.

“Do you know who I am?” he growled, thrusting his head forward and staring at his shrinking prey.

“You’re Posthumo,” answered the clerk sullenly. “You gouged out a girl’s eye in the Court of Justice because she would not incriminate her lover.”

“I always get what I go after!” bellowed the guardsman. The veins in his thick neck swelled and his face grew purple as he seized the wretched clerk by the collar of his tunic, twisting it so that the man was half strangled.

“Speak up, rat!” he growled. “Answer the inquisitor!”

“Oh, Mitra, mercy!” screamed the wretch. “I swear–”

Posthumo slapped him terrifically, first on one side of the face and then on the other, then flung him to the floor and kicked him with vicious accuracy.

“Mercy!” moaned the victim. “I’ll tell, I’ll tell anything

“Then get up, you cur!” roared Posthumo. “Don’t lie there whining!”

Dionus shot a quick glance at Conan to see if he were properly impressed. “You see what happens to those who cross the police,” he said.

Conan spat with a sneer of contempt. “He’s a weakling and a fool,” he growled. “Let one of you touch me, and I’ll spill his guts on the floor.”

“Are you ready to talk?” asked Demetrio wearily.

“All I know,” sobbed the clerk as he dragged himself to his feet, whimpering like a beaten dog, “is that Kallian came to my house shortly after I arrived I left the temple when he did and sent his chariot away. He threatened me with dismissal if I ever spoke of it. I am a poor man, my lords, without friends or favor. Without my position with him, I shall starve.”

“What’s that to me?” said Demetrio. “How long did he remain at your house?”

“Until perhaps half an hour before midnight. Then he left, saying that he was going to the Temple and would return after he had done what he wished to do there.”

“What did he mean to do there?”

Promero hesitated, but a shuddering glance at the grinning Posthumo, doubling his huge first, soon opened his lips. “There was something in the Temple he wished to examine.”

“But why should he come here alone, and in such secrecy?”

“Because the thing was not his property. It arrived at dawn, in a caravan from the south. The men of the caravan knew nothing of it, except that it had been placed with them by the men of a caravan from Stygia and was meant for Caranthes of Hanumar, priest of Ibis. The master of the caravan had been paid by these other men to deliver it directly to Caranthes, but the rascal wished to proceed straight to Aquilonia by the road on which Hanumar does not lie. So he asked if he might leave it in the Temple until Caranthes could send for it.

“Kallian agreed and told him that he himself would send a servant to inform Caranthes. But, after the men had gone and I spoke of the runner, Kallian forbade me to send him. He sat brooding over what the men had left.”

“And what was that?”

“A sort of sarcophagus, such as is found in ancient Stygian tombs. But this one was round, like a covered metal bowl. Its composition was like copper, but harder, and it was carved with hieroglyphics like those on ancient menhirs in southern Stygia. The lid was made fast to the body by carven copperlike bands.”

“What was in it?”

“The men of the caravan did not know. They only said that those who gave it to them said that it was a priceless relic found among the tombs far beneath the pyramids and sent to Caranthes ‘because of the love which the sender bore the priest of Ibis.’ Kallian Publico believed that it contained the diadem of the giant-kings, of the people who dwelt in that dark land before the ancestors of the Stygians came there. He showed me a design carved on the lid, which he swore was the shape of the diadem that legend tells us the monster-kings wore.

He determined to open the bowl to see what it contained. He became like a madman when he thought of the fabled diadem, set with strange jewels known only to the ancient race, a single one of which would be worth more than all the jewels of the modern world.

“I warned him against it but, a short time before midnight, he went alone to the Temple, hiding in the shadows until the watchman had passed to the other side of the building, then letting himself in with his belt key. I watched him from the shadows of the silk shop until he entered, then returned to my own house. If the diadem, or anything else of great value, were in the bowl, he intended hiding it elsewhere in the Temple and slipping out again. Then on the morrow he would raise a great hue and cry, saying that thieves had broken into his house and stolen Caranthes’ property. None would know of his prowlings but the charioteer and I, and neither of us would betray him.”

“But the watchman?” objected Demetrio.

“Kallian did not intend to be seen by him; he planned to have him crucified as an accomplice of the thieves,” answered Promero. Arus gulped and turned pale as the duplicity of his employer came home to him.

“Where is this sarcophagus?” asked Demetrio. Promero pointed, the inquisitor grunted. “So! The very room in which Kallian must have been attacked.”

Promero twisted his thin hands. “Why should a man in Stygia send Caranthes a gift? Ancient gods and queer mummies have come up the caravan roads before, but who loves the priest of Ibis so well in Stygia, where they still worship the arch-demon Set, who coils among the tombs in the darkness? The god Ibis has fought Set since the first dawn of the earth, and Caranthes has fought Set’s priests all his life. There is something dark and hidden here.”

“Show us this sarcophagus,” commanded Demetrio, and Promero hesitantly led the way. All followed, including Conan, who was apparently heedless of the wary eye the guardsmen kept upon him and seemed merely curious. They passed through the torn hangings and entered the room, which was more dimly lit than the corridor. Doors on either side gave into other chambers, and the walls were lined with fantastic images, gods of strange lands and far peoples. Promero cried out sharply.

“Look! The bowl! It’s open and empty!”

In the center stood a strange black cylinder, nearly four feet in height and perhaps three feet in diameter at its widest circumference, which was halfway between the top and the bottom. The heavy, carven lid lay on the floor, and beside it a hammer and a chisel. Demetrio looked inside, puzzled an instant over the dim hieroglyphs, and turned to Conan.

“Is this what you came to steal?”

The barbarian shook his head. “How could one man bear it away?”

“The bands were cut with this chisel,” mused Demetrio, “and in haste. There are marks where misstrokes of the hammer dinted the metal. We may assume that Kallian opened the bowl. Someone was hiding nearby possibly in the hangings of the doorway. When Kallian had the bowl open, the murderer sprang upon him or he might have killed Kallian and opened the bowl himself.”

“This is a grisly thing,” shuddered the clerk. “It is too ancient to be holy. Whoever saw metal like that? It seems harder than Aquilonian steel, yet see how it is corroded and eaten away in spots. And look here on the lid!” Promero pointed a shaky finger. “What would you say that was?”

Demetrio bent closer to the carven design. “I should say it represented a crown of some sort,” he grunted.

“No!” exclaimed Promero. “I warned Kallian, but he would not believe me! It is a scaled serpent coiled with its tail in its mouth. It is the sign of Set, the Old Serpent, the god of the Stygians! This bowl is too old for a human world it is a relic of the time when Set walked the earth in the form of a man. Perhaps the race that sprang from his loins laid the bones of their kings away in such cases as this!”

“And you’ll say that those moldering bones rose up, strangled Kallian Publico, and then walked away?”

“It was no man who was laid to rest in that bowl,” whispered the clerk, his eyes wide and staring. “What man could lie in it?”

Demetrio swore. “If Conan is not the murderer, the slayer is still somewhere in this building. Dionus and Arus, remain here with me, and you three prisoners stay here, too. The rest of you, search the house! The murderer if he got away before Arus found the body could only have escaped by the way Conan used in entering, and in that case the barbarian would have seen him if he is telling the truth.”

“I saw no one but this dog,” growled Conan, indicating Arus.

“Of course not, because you’re the murderer,” said Dionus. “We’re wasting time, but we’ll search as a formality. And if we find no one, I promise that you shall burn! Remember the law, my black-haired savage: For slaying an artisan you go to the mines; a tradesman, you hang; a gentleman, you burn!”

Conan bared his teeth for answer. The men began their search. The listeners in the chamber heard them stamping upstairs and down, moving objects, opening doors, and bellowing to one another through the rooms.

“Conan,” said Demetrio, “you know what it means if they find no one.”

“I did not kill him,” snarled the Cimmerian. “If he had sought to hinder me I’d have split his skull; but I did not see him until I sighted his corpse.”

“Someone sent you here to steal, at least,” said Demetrio, “and by your silence you incriminate yourself in this murder as well. The mere fact of your being here is enough to send you to the mines, whether you admit your guilt or not. But, if you tell the whole tale, you may save yourself from the stake.”

“Well,” answered the barbarian grudgingly, “I came here to steal the Zamorian diamond goblet. A man gave me a diagram of the Temple and told me where to look for it. It is kept in that room,” Conan pointed, “in a niche in the floor under a copper Shemitish god.”

“He speaks truth there,” said Promero. “I thought not half a dozen men in the world knew the secret of that hiding place.”

“And if you had secured it,” Dionus sneered, “Would you really have taken it to the man who hired you?”

Again the smoldering eyes flashed resentment. “I am no dog,” the barbarian muttered. “I keep my word.”

“Who sent you here?” Demetrio demanded, but Conan kept a sullen silence. The guardsmen straggled back from their search.

“There’s no man hiding in this house,” they said. “We’ve ransacked the place. We found the trap door in the roof through which the barbarian entered, and the bolt he cut in half. A man escaping that way would have been seen by our guards, unless he fled before we came. Besides, he would have had to stack furniture to reach the trap door from below, and that has not been done. Why could he not have gone out the front door just before Arus came around the building?”

“Because,” said Demetrio, “the door was bolted on the inside, and the only keys that will work that bolt are the one belonging to Arus and the one that still hangs on the girdle of Kallian Publico.”

Another said: “I think I saw the rope used by the murderer.”

“Where is it, fool?” exclaimed Dionus.

“In the chamber adjoining this one,” answered the guard. “It is a thick black cable wrapped about a marble pillar. I couldn’t reach it.”

He led the way into a room filled with marble statuary and pointed to a tall column. Then he halted and stared.

“It’s gone!” he cried.

“It was never there,” snorted Dionus.

“By Mitra, it was! Coiled about the pillar just above those carven leaves. It is so shadowy up there that I could not tell much but it was there.”

“You’re drunk,” said Demetrio, turning away. “That’s too high for a man to reach, and nobody could climb that smooth pillar.”

“A Cimmerian could,” muttered one of the men.

“Possibly. Say that Conan strangled Kallian, tied the cable around the pillar, crossed the corridor, and hid in the room where the stair is. How, then could he have removed it after you saw it? He has been among us ever since Arus found the body. No, I tell you that Conan did not commit the murder. I believe the real slayer killed Kallian to secure whatever was in the bowl and is hiding now in some secret nook of the Temple. If we cannot find him, we shall have to blame the barbarian, to satisfy justice, but where is Promero?”

They had straggled back to the silent body in the corridor. Dionus bellowed for Promero, who came from the room in which stood the empty bowl. He was shaking and his face was white.

“What now, man?” exclaimed Demetrio irritably.

“I found a symbol on the bottom of the bowl!” chattered Promero. “Not an ancient hieroglyphic, but a symbol freshly carved! The mark of Thoth-Amon, the Stygian sorcerer, Caranthes’ deadly foe! He must have found the bowl in some grisly cavern below the haunted pyramids! The gods of old times did not die as men die they fell into long slumbers, and their worshipers locked them in sarcophagi, so that no alien hand might break their sleep! Thoth-Amon sent death to Caranthes. Kallian’s greed caused him to loose this horror and it is lurking somewhere near us even now it may be creeping upon us “

“You gibbering fool!” roared Dionus, striking Promero heavily across the mouth. “Well, Demetrio,” he said, turning to the inquisitor, “I see nought for it but to arrest this barbarian “

The Cimmerian cried out, glaring toward the door of a chamber that adjoined the room of statues. “Look!” he exclaimed. “I saw something move in that room I saw it through the hangings. Something that crossed the floor like a dark shadow.”

“Bah!” snorted Posthumo. “We searched that room “

“He saw something!” Promero’s voice shrilled and cracked with hysterical excitement “This place is accursed! Something came out of the sarcophagus and killed Kallian Publico! It hid where no man could hide, and now it lurks in that chamber! Mitra defend us from the powers of darkness!” He caught Dionus’ sleeve with clawlike fingers. “Search that room again, my lord!”

As the prefect shook off the clerk’s frenzied grip, Posthumo said: “You shall search it yourself, clerk!” Grasping Promero by neck and girdle, he propelled the screaming wretch before him to the door, where he paused and hurled him into the room so violently that the clerk fell and lay half stunned.

“Enough,” growled Dionus, eyeing the silent Cimmerian. The prefect lifted his hand, and tension crackled in the air, when an interruption came. A guardsman entered, dragging a slender, richly-dressed figure.

“I saw him slinking about the back of the Temple,” quoth the guard, looking for commendation. Instead, he received curses that lifted his hair.

“Release that gentleman, you bungling fool!” shouted the prefect. “Know you not Aztrias Petanius, the nephew of the governor?”

The abashed guard fell away, while the foppish young nobleman fastidiously brushed his embroidered sleeve.

“Save your apologies, good Dionus,” he lisped. “All in line of duty, I know. I was returning from a late revel and walking to rid my brain of the fumes of the wine. What have we here? By Mitra, is it murder?”

“Murder it is, my lord,” answered the prefect. “But we have a suspect who, though Demetrio seems to have doubts on the matter, will doubtless go to the stake for it.”

“A vicious-looking brute,” murmured the young aristocrat. “How can any doubt his guilt? Never before have I seen such a villainous countenance.”

“Oh, yes you have, you scented dog,” snarled the Cimmerian, “when you hired me to steal the Zamorian goblet for you. Revels, eh? Bah! You were waiting in the shadows for me to hand you the loot. I would not have revealed your name if you had given me fair words. Now tell these dogs that you saw me climb the wall after the watchman made his last round, so they shall know I had no time to kill this fat swine before Arus entered and found the body.”

Demetrio looked quickly at Aztrias, who did not change color. “If what he says is true, my lord,” said the inquisitor, “it clears him of the murder, and we can easily hush up the matter of attempted theft. The Cimmerian merits ten years at hard labor for housebreaking; but, if you say the word, we’ll arrange for him to escape, and none but us shall ever know about it. I understand you wouldn’t be the first young nobleman who had to resort to such means to pay gambling debts and the like but you can rely on our discretion.”

Conan looked expectantly at the young noble, but Aztrias shrugged his slender shoulders and covered a yawn with a delicate white hand.

“I know him not,” he answered. “He is mad to say I hired him. Let him take his just deserts. He has a strong back, and the toil in the mines will be good for him.”

Conan, eyes blazing, started as if stung. The guards tensed, gripping their bills; then relaxed as he dropped his head, as if in sullen resignation. Arus could not tell whether or not he was watching them from under his heavy black brows.

The Cimmerian struck with no more warning than a striking cobra; his sword flashed in the candlelight. Aztrias began a shriek that ended as his head flew from his shoulders in a shower of blood, the features frozen into a white mask of horror.

Demetrio drew a dagger and stepped forward for a stab. Catlike, Conan wheeled and thrust murderously for the inquisitor’s groin. Demetrio’s instinctive recoil barely deflected the point, which sank into his thigh, glanced from the bone, and plowed out through the outer side of his leg. Demetrio sank to one knee with a groan of agony.

Conan did not pause. The bill that Dionus flung up saved the prefect’s skull from the whistling blade, which turned slightly as it cut through the shaft, glanced from the side of his head, and sheared off his right ear. The blinding speed of the barbarian paralyzed the police. Half of them would have been down before they had a chance to fight back except that the burly Posthumo, more by luck than by skill, threw his arms around the Cimmerian, pinioning his sword arm. Conan’s left hand leaped to the guard’s head, and Posthumo fell away shrieking, clutching a gaping red socket where an eye had been.

Conan bounded back from the waving bills. His leap carried him outside the ring of his foes to where Arus had bent over to recock his crossbow. A savage kick in the belly dropped him, green-faced and gagging, and Conan’s sandaled heel crunched square in the watchman’s mouth. The wretch screamed through a ruin of splintered teeth, blowing bloody froth from his mangled lips.

Then all were frozen in their tracks by the soul-shaking horror of a scream, which rose from the chamber into which Posthumo had hurled Promero. From the velvet-hung door the clerk came reeling and stood, shaking with great silent sobs, tears running down his pasty face and dripping from his loose, sagging lips, like an idiot-babe weeping.

All halted to stare at him aghast Conan with his dripping sword, the police with their lifted bills, Demetrio crouching on the floor and striving to staunch the blood that jetted from the great gash in his thigh, Dionus clutching the bleeding stump of his severed ear, Arus weeping and spitting out fragments of broken teeth even Posthumo ceased his howls and blinked with his good eye.

Promero reeled out into the corridor and fell stiffly before them, screeching in an unbearable high-pitched laughter of madness: “The god has a long reach; ha-ha-ha! Oh, a cursed long reach!” Then, with a frightful convulsion, he stiffened and lay grinning vacantly at the shadowy ceiling.

“He’s dead!” whispered Dionus in tones of awe, forgetting his own hurt and the barbarian who stood with dripping sword so near him. He bent over the body, then straightened, his pig’s eyes popping. “He’s not wounded. In Mitra’s name, what is in that chamber?”

Then horror swept over them, and they ran screaming for the outer door. The guards, dropping their bills, jammed into it in a clawing and shrieking mob and burst through like madmen. Arus followed, and the half-blind Posthumo blundered blindly after his fellows, squealing like a wounded pig and begging them not to leave him behind. He fell among the rearmost, and they knocked him down and trampled him, screaming in their fear. He crawled after them, and behind him came Demetrio, limping along and grasping his blood-spurting thigh. Police, charioteer, watchman, and officials, wounded or whole, they burst screaming into the street, where the men watching the house took panic and joined in the flight, not waiting to ask why.

Conan stood in the great corridor alone, save for the three corpses on the floor. The barbarian shifted his grip on his sword and strode into the chamber. It was hung with rich silken tapestries. Silken cushions and couches lay strewn about in careless profusion, and over a heavy, gilded screen a Face looked at the Cimmerian.

Conan stared in wonder at the cold, classic beauty of that countenance, whose like he had never seen among the sons of men. Neither weakness, nor mercy, nor cruelty, nor kindness, nor any other human emotion showed in those features. They might have been the marble mask of a god, carved by a master hand, except for the unmistakable life in them life cold and strange, such as the Cimmerian had never known and could not understand. He thought fleetingly of the marble perfection of the body concealed by the screen; it must be perfect, he thought, since the face was so inhumanly beautiful.

But he could see only the finely molded head, which swayed from side to side. The full lips opened and spoke a single word, in a rich, vibrant tone like the golden chimes that ring in the jungle-lost temples of Khitai. It was an unknown tongue, forgotten before the kingdoms of man arose, but Conan knew that it meant: “Come!”

And the Cimmerian came, with a desperate leap and humming slash of his sword. The beautiful head flew from the body, struck the floor to one side of the screen, and rolled a little way before coming to rest.

Then Conan’s skin crawled, for the screen shook and heaved with the convulsions of something behind. He had seen and heard men die by the scores, and never had he heard a human being make such sounds in his death-throes. There was a thrashing, floundering noise. The screen shook, swayed, tottered, leaned forward, and fell with a metallic crash at Conan’s feet. He looked beyond it.

Then the full horror of it rushed over the Cimmerian. He fled, nor did he slacken his headlong flight until the spires of Numalia faded into the dawn behind him. The thought of Set was like a nightmare, and the children of Set who once ruled the earth and who now slept in their nighted caverns below the black pyramids. Behind that gilded screen had lain no human body only the shimmering, headless coils of a gigantic serpent.

4. THE HAND OF NERGAL

Conan has enjoyed his taste of Hyborian intrigue. It is clear to him that there is no essential difference between the motives of the palace and those of the Rats’ Den, whereas the pickings are better in higher places. With his own horse under him and a grubstake from the grateful and thoughtful Murilo, the Cimmerian sets out to look over the civilized world, with an eye to making it his oyster.

The Road of Kings, which winds through the Hyborian kingdoms, at last leads him eastward into Turan, where he takes service in the armies of King Yildiz. He does not at first find military services congenial, being too self-willed and hot-tempered to submit easily to discipline. Moreover, being at this time an indifferent horseman and archer, in a force of which the mounted bowman is the mainstay, he is relegated to a low-paid, irregular unit. Soon, however, a chance arises to show his true mettle.

I. Black Shadows

“Crom!”

The oath was torn from the young warrior’s grim-set lips. He threw back his head, sending his tousled shock of black hair flying, and lifted his smouldering blue eyes skyward. They widened in sheer astonishment. An eery thrill of superstitious awe ran through his tall, powerfully-built body, which was burnt brown by fierce wasteland suns, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, lean of waist, long of leg, and naked save for a rag of cloth about his loins and high-strapped sandals.

He had entered the battle mounted, as one of a troop of irregular cavalry. But his horse, given him by the nobleman Murilo in Corinthia, had fallen to the foemen’s arrows at the first onset and the youth had fought on afoot. His shield had been smashed by the enemy’s blows: he had cast it aside and battled with sword alone.

Above, from the sunset-smouldering sky of this bleak, windswept Turanian steppe, where two great armies were locked in a fury of desperate battle, came horror.

The field was drenched in sunset fires and bathed in human blood. Here the mighty host of Yildiz, king of Turan, in whose army the youth served as a mercenary, had fought for five long hours against the iron-shod legions of Munthassem Khan, rebellious satrap of the Zamorian Marches of northern Turan. Now, circling slowly downwards from the crimson sky, came nameless things whose like the barbarian had never seen or heard of before in all his travels. They were black, shadowy monsters, hovering on broad, arch-ribbed wings like enormous bats.

The two armies fought on, unseeing. Only Conan, here on this low hill, ringed about with the bodies of men his sword had slain, saw them descending through the sunset sky.

Leaning on his dripping blade and resting his sinewy arms for a moment, he stared at the weird shadow-things. For they seemed to be more shadow than substance translucent to the sight, like wisps of noisome black vapor or the shadowy ghosts of gigantic vampire bats. Evil, slitted eyes of green flame glared through their smoky forms.

And even as he watched, nape-hairs prickling with a barbarian’s dread of the supernatural, they fell upon the battle like vultures on a field of blood fell and slew.

Screams of pain and fear rose from the host of King Yildiz, as the black shadows hurtled amongst their ranks. Wherever the shadow-devils swooped, they left a bloody corpse. By the hundred they came, and the weary ranks of the Turanian army fell back, stumbling, tossing away their weapons in panic.

“Fight, you dogs! Stand and fight!” Thundering angry commands in a stern voice, a tall, commanding figure on a great black mare sought to hold the crumbling line. Conan glimpsed the sparkles of silver-gilt chain mail under a rich blue cloak, and a hawk-nosed, black-bearded face, kingly and harsh under a spired steel helm that caught the crimson sun like a polished mirror. He knew the man for King Yildiz’ general, Bakra of Akif.

With a ringing oath, the proud commander drew his tulwar and laid about him with the flat of the blade. Perhaps he could have rallied the ranks, but one of the devil-shadows swooped on him from behind. It folded vaporous, filming wings about him in a grisly embrace and he stiffened. Conan could see his face, suddenly pale with staring, frozen eyes of fear and he saw the features through the enveloping wings, like a white mask behind a veil of thin, black lace.

The general’s horse went mad and bolted in terror. But the phantom-thing plucked the general from his saddle. For a moment it bore him in mid-air on slowly beating wings, then let him fall, a torn and bloody thing in dripping rags. The face, which had stared at Conan through shadowy wings with eyes of glazing terror, was a red ruin. Thus ended the career of Bakra of Akif.

And thus ended his battle, as well.

With its commander gone, the army went mad. Conan saw seasoned veterans, with a score of campaigns under their belts, run shrieking from the field like raw recruits. He saw proud nobles fly screaming like craven serfs. And behind them, untouched by the flying phantoms, grinning with victory, the hosts of the rebel satrap pressed their weirdly-won advantage. The day was lost unless one strong man should stand firm and rally the broken host by his example.

Before the foremost of the fleeing soldiers rose suddenly a figure so grim and savage that it checked their headlong, panic-stricken flight.

“Stand, you fatherless curs, or by Crom I’ll fill your craven bellies with a foot of steel!”

It was the Cimmerian mercenary, his dark face like a grim mask of stone, cold as death. Fierce eyes under black, scowling brows, blazed with volcanic rage. Naked, splattered from head to heel with reeking gore, he held a mighty longsword in one great, scarred fist. His voice was like the deep growl of thunder.

“Back, if you set any value on your sniveling lives, you white-livered dogs back or I’ll spill your cowardly guts at your feet! Lift that scimitar against me, you Hyrkanian pig, and I’ll tear out your heart with my bare hands and make you eat it before you die. What! Are you women, to fly from shadows? But a moment ago, you were men aye, fighting-men of Turan! You stood against foes armed with naked steel and fought them face to face. Now you turn and ran like children from night-shadows, faugh! It makes me proud to be a barbarian to see you city-bred weaklings cringe before a flight of bats!”

For a moment he held them but for a moment only. A black-winged nightmare swooped upon him, and he even he stepped back from its grim, shadowy wings and the stench of its fetid breath.

The soldiers fled, leaving Conan to fight the thing alone. And fight he did. Setting his feet squarely, he swung the great sword, pivoting on slim hips, with the full strength of back, shoulders, and mighty arms behind the blow.

The sword flashed in a whistling arc of steel, cleaving the phantom in two. But it was, as he had guessed, a thing without substance, for his sword encountered no more resistance than the empty air. The force of the blow swung him off balance, and he fell sprawling on the stony plain.

Above him, the shadowy thing hovered. His sword had torn a great rent through it, as a man’s hand breaks a thread of rising smoke. But, even as he watched, the vapory body reformed. Eyes like sparks of green hell-fire blazed down at him, alive with a horrible mirth and an inhuman hunger.

“Crom! Conan gasped. It may have been a curse, but it sounded almost like a prayer.

He sought to lift the sword again, but it fell from nerveless hands. The instant the sword had slashed through the black shadow, it had gone cold, with an aching, stony, bone-deep chill like the interstellar gulfs that yawn blackly beyond the farthest stars.

The shadow-bat hovered on slowly beating wings, as if gloating over its fallen victim or savoring his superstitious fear.

With strengthless hands, Conan fumbled at his waist, where a strip of rawhide bound his loincloth to his middle. There a thin dagger hung beside a pouch. His fumbling fingers found the pouch, not the dagger hilt, and touched something smooth and warm within the leathern bag.

Suddenly, Conan jerked his hand away as a tingling electric warmth tore through his nerves. His fingers had brushed against that curious amulet he had found yesterday, when they lay encamped at Bahari. And, in touching the smooth stone, a strange force had been released.

The bat-thing veered suddenly away from him. A moment before, it had hovered so close that his flesh had crawled beneath the unearthly chill that seemed to radiate from its ghostly form. Now it tore madly away from him, wings beating in a frenzy.

Conan dragged himself to his knees, fighting the weakness that pervaded his limbs. First, the ghastly cold of the shadow’s touch then the tingling warmth that had seethed through his naked body. Between these two conflicting forces, he felt his strength draining away. His vision blurred; his mind wavered on the brink of darkness. Fiercely, he shook his head to clear his wits and gazed about him.

“Mitra! Crom and Mitra! Has the whole world gone mad?”

The grisly host of flying terrors had driven the army of General Bakra from the field, or slain those that did not flee fast enough. But the grinning host of Munthassem Khan they had not touched had ignored, almost as if the soldiers of Yaralet and the shadowy nightmare-things had been partners in some unholy alliance of black sorcery.

But now it was the warriors of Yaralet who fled screaming before the shadowy vampires. Both armies broken and fled. Had the world indeed gone mad, Conan wildly asked of the sunset sky?

As for the Cimmerian, strength and consciousness drained from him suddenly. He fell forward into black oblivion.

II. Field of Blood

The sun flamed like a crimson coal on the horizon. It glowered across the silent battlefield like the one red eye that blazes madly in a Cyclops’s misshapen brow. Silent as death, strewn with the wreckage of war, the battlefield stretched grim and still in the lurid rays. Here and there amidst the sprawled, unmoving bodies, scarlet pools of congealing gore lay like calm lakes reflecting the red-streamered sky.

Dark, furtive figures moved in the tall grasses, snuffling and whining at the heaped and scattered corpses. Their humped shoulders and ugly, doglike snouts marked them as hyenas from the steppes. For them, the battlefield would be a banquet table.

Down from the flaming sky flapped ungainly, black-winged vultures, come to feast on the slain. The grisly birds of prey dropped upon the mangled bodies with a rustle of dusky wings. But for these carrion-eaters, nothing moved on the silent, bloody field. It was still as death itself. No rumble of chariot wheels or peal of brazen trumpets broken the unearthly silence. The stillness of the dead followed fast on the thunder of battle.

Like eery harbingers of Fate, a wavering line of herons flapped slowly away down the sky toward the reed-grown banks of the river Nezvaya, whose turgid flood glinted dully crimson in the last light. Beyond the further shore, the black, walled bulk of the city of Yaralet loomed like a mountain of ebony into the dusk.

Yet one figure moved through that wide-strewn field of ruin, pygmylike against the glowing coals of sunset. It was the young Cimmerian giant with the wild black mane and the smouldering blue eyes. The black wings of interstellar cold had brushed him but lightly; life had stirred and consciousness returned. He wandered to and fro across the black field, limping slightly, for there was a ghastly wound in his thigh, taken in the fury of battle and only noticed and crudely bandaged as he had recovered consciousness and moved to arise.

Carefully yet impatiently he moved among the dead, bloody as were they. He was splashed with gore from head to foot, and the great sword he trailed in his right hand was stained crimson to the hilt. Bone-weary was Conan, and his gullet was desert-dry. He ached from a score of wounds mere cuts and scratches, save for the great slash on his thigh and he lusted for a skin of wine and a platter of beef.

As he prowled among the bodies, limping from corpse to corpse, he growled like a hungry wolf, swearing wrathfully. He had come into this Turanian war as a mercenary, owning naught but his horse now slain and the great sword in his hand. Now that the battle was lost, the war was ended, and he was marooned alone in the midst of the enemy land, he had at least hoped to loot the fallen of some choice pieces of gear they would no longer need. A gemmed dagger, a gold bracelet, a silver breastplate a few such baubles and he could bribe his way out of the reach of Munthassem Khan and return to Zamora with a grubstake.

Others had been here before him, either thieves slinking from the shadowy city or soldiers who crept back to the field from which they had fled. For the field was stripped; there was nothing left but broken swords, splintered javelins, dented helms and shields. Conan glared out across the littered plain, cursing sulphurously. He had lain in his swoon too long; even the looters had left. He was like the wolf who lingers so late at his blood-letting that jackals have stripped the prey; in this case, human jackals.

Straightening up from his fruitless quest, he gave over the search with the fatalism of the true barbarian. Time now to think of a plan. Brows knotted, scowling in thought, he glanced uncertainly afar off across the darkening plain. The square, flat-roofed towers of Yaralet stood black and solid against the dying gleam of sunset. No hope of refuge there, for one who had fought under the banners of King Yildiz! Yet no city, friend or enemy, lay nearer. And Yildiz’s capital of Aghrapur was hundreds of leagues south.

Lost in his thoughts, he did not notice the approach of the great black figure until a faint, shuddering neigh reached his ears. He turned swiftly, favoring his injured leg, lifting the longsword threateningly then relaxed, grinning.

“Crom! You startled me. So I am not the only survivor, eh?” Conan chuckled.

The tall black mare stood trembling, gazing at the naked giant with wide, frightened eyes. It was the same mount that General Bakra had ridden he who lay somewhere on the field, sprawled in a puddle of blood.

The mare whinnied, grateful for the sound of a friendly human voice. Although not a horseman, Conan could see that she was in sad condition. Her sides heaved, lathered with the sweat of fear, and her long legs trembled with exhaustion. The devil-bats had struck terror into her heart, too, Conan thought grimly. He spoke soothingly, calming her, and stepped gingerly nearer until he could reach out and stroke the panting beast, gentling her into submission.

In his far northern homeland, horses were rare. To the penniless barbarians of the Cimmerian tribes from whose loins he was sprung, only the chief of great wealth owned a fine steed, or the bold warrior who had taken one in battle. But despite his ignorance of the fine points of horsemanship, Conan quieted the great black mare and vaulted into the saddle. He sat astride the horse, fumbling with the reins, and rode slowly off the field, now a swamp of inky blackness in the darkness of night. He felt better. There were provisions in the saddlebags, and with a strong mare between his thighs he had a good chance of making it alone across the bleak and barren tundras to the borders of Zamora.

III. Hildico

A low, tortured moan reached his ears.

Conan jerked the reins, drawing the black mare to a halt, and peered about him suspiciously in the deep gloom. His scalp prickled in superstitious dread at the eery sound. Then he shrugged and spat an oath. No night-phanton, no hunting ghoul of the wastes; that was a cry of pain. This meant that still a third survivor of the doomed battle yet drew breath. And a living man might be presumed to be unlooted.

He swung from the saddle, wrapping the reins about the spokes of a broken chariot wheel. The cry had come from the left; here at the very edge of the battlefield, a wounded survivor might well have escaped the cunning eye of looters. Conan might ride into Zamora with a pouchful of gems yet.

The Cimmerian limped toward the source of the quavering moan, which came from the margin of the plain. He parted the straggling reeds that grew in shaggy clumps along the banks of the slow river and glared down at a pale figure, which writhed feebly at his very feet. It was a girl.

She lay there, half-naked, her white limbs cut and bruised. Blood was clotting in the foaming curls of her long, black hair, like a chain of rubies. There was unseeing agony in her lustrous dark eyes, and she moaned in delirium.

The Cimmerian stood looking down at her, noting almost absently the lithe beauty of her limbs and the rounded, lush young breasts. He was puzzled what was a girl like this, a mere child, doing on a battlefield? She had not the sullen, flamboyant, sullied look of a camp trull about her. Her slim and graceful body denoted breeding, even nobility. Baffled, he shook his head, black mane swinging against brawny shoulders. At his feet, the girl stirred.

“The Heart, the Heart of Tammuz! O Master!” she cried softly, her dark head turning restlessly from side to side, babbling as one in a fever.

Conan shrugged, and his eyes clouded momentarily by what, in another man, would have been an expression of pity. Wounded to the death, he thought grimly, and he lifted his sword to put the wench out of her misery.

As the blade hovered above her white breast, she whimpered again like a child in pain. The great sword halted in mid-air, and the Cimmerian stood for an instant, motionless as a bronze statue.

Then, in sudden decision, he slammed the sword back in its sheath and bent, lifting the girl effortlessly in his mighty arms. She struggled blindly, weakly, moaning in half-conscious protest.

Carrying her with careful tenderness, he limped toward the reed-masked riverbank and lay her down gently on the dry, cushioning reeds. Filling his cupped palms with river water, the barbarian bathed her white face and cleansed her cuts as gently as a mother might tend her child.

Her wounds proved superficial, mere bruises, save for the cut on her brow. And even that, although it had bled heavily, was far from mortal. Conan grunted with relief and bathed the girl’s face and brow with cold, clear water. Then, awkwardly pillowing her head against his chest, he dribbled some of the water between her half-parted lips. She gasped, choked a little, and came awake staring up at him from eyes like dark stars, clouded with bewilderment and the shadows of fear.

“Who… What… The bats!”

“They are gone now, girl,” he said gruffly. “You have naught to fear. Came you hither from Yaralet?”

“Yes yes but who are you?”

“Conan, a Cimmerian. What is a lass like you doing on a battlefield?” he demanded.

But she seemed not to hear. Her brow frowned a little, as one in thought, and half under her breath she repeated his name.

“Conan, Conan yes, that was the name!” Wonderingly she lifted her gaze to his scarred, brown face. “It was you I was sent to seek. How strange that you should find me!”

“And who sent you to seek me, wench?” he rumbled suspiciously.

“I am Hildico, a Brythunian, slave to the House of Atalis the Far-seeing, who dwells yonder in Yaralet. My master sent me in secret to move among the warriors of King Yildiz, to seek one Conan, a mercenary of Cimmeria, and to bring him by a private way to his house within the city. You are the man I seek!”

“Aye? And what does your master want with me?”

The girl shook her dark head. “That I know not! But he said to tell you that he means no harm, and that much gold can be yours, if you will come.”

“Gold, eh?” he mused, speculatively, helping her to her feet and steadying her with a brawny arm about her slim white shoulders as she staggered weakly.

“Yes. But I came not to the field in time to seek you before the battle. So I hid in the reeds along the river’s edge to avoid the warriors. And then the bats! Suddenly they were everywhere, swooping upon the fallen, killing and one horseman fled from them into the reeds, trampling me under his hooves unawares “

“What of this horseman?”

“Dead,” she shuddered. “A bat tore him from the saddle and let his corpse fall into the river. I swooned, for in its panic, the horse struck me.” She lifted one small hand to her gashed brow.

“Lucky you were not slain,” he growled. “Well, lass, we shall visit this master of yours, to learn what he wants of Conan and how he knows my name!”

“You will come?” she asked breathlessly. He laughed and, vaulting astride the black mare, lifted her to the saddlebow before him with powerful arms.

“Aye! I am alone, amid enemies, in an alien land. My employment ended when Bakra’s army was destroyed. Why should I scruple to meet a man who has picked me from ten thousand warriors, and who offers gold?”

They rode across the shallow ford of the river and across the gloom-drenched plain towards Yaralet, stronghold of Munthassem Khan. And Conan’s heart, which never beat more joyously than when thrilled with the promise of excitement and adventure, sang.

IV. The House of Atalis

A strange conclave was taking place in the small, velvet-hung, taper-lit chamber of Atalis, whom some men called a philosopher, others a seer, and others a rogue.

This figure of mystery was a slender man of medium height, with a splendid head and the ascetic features of a dedicated scholar, yet in his smooth face and keen eyes was something of the shrewd merchant. He was clad in a plain robe of rich fabric, and his head was shaven to denote devotion to study and the arts. As he talked in low tones with his companion, a third viewer had any been present might have observed something strange and curious about him. For Atalis, as he conversed, gestured with his left hand only. His right arm lay stretched across his lap at an unnatural angle. And from time to time his calm, clever features were hideously contorted with a sudden spasm of intense pain, at which time his right foot, hidden under his long robes, would twist back excruciatingly upon his ankle.

His companion was one whom the city of Yaralet knew and praised as Prince Than, scion of an ancient and noble house of Turan. The prince was a tall, lithe man, young and undeniably handsome. The firm, clean outline of his soldierly limbs and the steely quality of his cool gray eyes belied the foppishness of his curled and scented black locks and jewelled cloak.

Beside Atalis, who sat in a high-backed chair of dark wood carven by intricate skill with leering gargoyles and grinning faces, stood a small table of ebony inlaid with yellow ivory. Upon this rested a huge fragment of green crystal, as large as a human head. It flickered with a weird inward glow, and from time to time the philosopher would break off his low conversation to peer deeply within the glittering stone.

“Will she find him? And will he come?” Prince Than said, despairingly. “He will come.”

“But every moment that passes increases our danger. Even now Munthassem Khan may be watching, and it is dangerous for us to be together.”

“Munthassem Khan lies drugged with the dream lotus, for the Shadows of Nergal were abroad in the hour of sunset,” said the philosopher. “And some danger we must risk, if ever the city is to be freed of this bloody-handed scourge!” His features knotted sickeningly in an involuntary grimace of intolerable pain, and then smoothed out again. He said grimly, “And you know, O Prince, how little time is left to us. Desperate measures for desperate men!”

Suddenly the prince’s handsome face contorted with panic and he turned upon Atalis with eyes suddenly gone dead as cold marble. Almost as swiftly, light and animation returned to his gaze, and he sank back in his chair, pale and sweating.

“Very little time!” he gasped.

A hidden gong rang softly, somewhere within the dark and silent house of Atalis the Far-seeing. The philosopher raised his left hand to check the prince’s involuntary start.

A moment later, one of the velvet wall-hangings drew aside, revealing a hidden door. And within the door, like a bloody apparition, stood the giant form of Conan with the half-fainting girl leaning on his arm.

With a little cry, the philosopher sprang to his feet and went toward the grim Cimmerian. “Welcome thrice welcome, Conan! Come, enter. Here is wine food “

He gestured to a tabouret against the further wall and took the fainting girl from Conan. The Cimmerian’s nostrils widened like those of some famished wolf at the scent of the food; but also, like a wolf, suspicious, wary of a trap, his smouldering blue eyes raked the smiling philosopher and the pale prince, and pried into every corner of the small chamber.

“See to the wench. She was trampled by a horse but brought me your message,” he growled, and without ceremony he swaggered across the room, and poured and drained a goblet of strong red wine. Tearing a plump leg from a platter of roast fowl, he chewed hungrily. Atalis tugged a bell-rope and gave the girl into the keeping of a silent slave, who appeared from behind another hanging as if by magic.

“Now, what is this all about?” the Cimmerian demanded, seating himself on a low bench and wincing from the pain of his gashed thigh. “Who are you? How do you know my name? And what do you want of me?”

“We have time for talk, but later,” Atalis replied. “Eat, drink, and rest You are wounded “

“Crom take all this delay! We shall talk now.”

“Very well. But you must let me cleanse and bind your wound while we talk!”

The Cimmerian shrugged impatiently and yielded with poor grace to the philosopher’s swift ministrations. As Atalis sponged his gashed thigh, smeared the gaping wound with a scented salve, and bound it with a strip of clean cloth, Conan appeased his hunger by wolfing down the cold spiced meat and drinking deeply of the red wine.

“I know you, although we have never met,” Atalis began in a smooth, soft voice, “because of my crystal there, on yonder stand by the chair. Within its depths I can see and hear for a hundred leagues.”

“Sorcery?” Conan spat sourly, having the warrior’s contempt for all such magical mummery.

“If you like,” Atalis smiled ingratiatingly. “But I am no sorcerer only a seeker after knowledge. A philosopher, some men call me ” His smile twisted into a terrible grin of agony, and with prickling scalp Conan watched the philosopher stagger as his foot bent horribly.

“Crom! Are you sick, man?”

Gasping from the pain, Atalis sank into his high-backed chair. “Not sick cursed. By this fiend who rules us with a dread sceptre of hell-born magic.”

“Munthassem Khan?”

Atalis nodded wearily. “That I am no sorcerer has spared my life thus far. For the satrap slew all wizards in Yaralet; I, being but a humble philosopher, he let live. Yet he suspects that I know something of the Black Arts and has cursed me with this deadly scourge. It withers up my body and tortures my nerves, and will end in a convulsion of death, ere long!” He gestured at the unnaturally twisted limb that lay lifeless across his lap.

Prince Than gazed with wild eyes at Conan. “I, too, have been cursed by this hell-spawn, for that I am next to Munthassem Khan in rank and he thinks I may desire his throne. Me he has tortured in another way: a sickness of the brain spasms of blindness that come and go which will end by devouring my brain and leaving me a mindless, sightless, mewling thing!”

“Crom!” Conan swore softly. The philosopher gestured.

“You are our only hope! You alone can save our city from this blackhearted devil that torments and plagues us!”

Conan stared at him blankly. “I? But I am no wizard, man! What a warrior can do with cold steel, I can do; but how can I combat this devil’s magic?”

“Listen, Conan of Cimmeria. I will tell you a strange and awful tale.”

V. The Hand of Nergal

In the city of Yaralet (said Atalis) when night falls, the people bar their windows, bolt their doors, and sit shuddering behind these barriers, praying in terror with candles burning before their household gods till the clean, wholesome light of dawn etches the squat towers of the city with living fire against the paling skies.

No archers guard the gates. No watchmen stride the lonely streets. No thief steals nimbly through the winding alleys, nor do painted sluts simper and beckon from the dark shadows. For in Yaralet, rogues and honest folk alike shun the night-shadows: thief, beggar, assassin, and bedizened wench seek haven in foul-smelling dens or dim-lit taverns. From dusk to dawn, Yaralet is a city of silence, her black ways empty and desolate.

It was not always thus. Once this was a bright and prosperous city, bustling with commerce, with shops and bazaars, filled with happy people who lived under the strong hand of a wise and gentle satrap Munthassem Khan. He taxed them lightly, ruling with justice and mercy, busy with his private collection of antiquities and in the study of these ancient objects which absorbed his keen, questing mind. The caravans of slow-pacing camels that wound from the Desert Gate bore always with them, amongst the merchants, his agents seeking for rare and curious oddities to purchase for their master’s private museum.

Then he changed, and a terrible shadow fell over Yaralet. The satrap was like one under a powerful and evil spell. Where he had been kind, he became cruel. Where generous, greedy. Where just and merciful, secretive, tyrannical, and savage.

Suddenly, the city guard seized men nobles, wealthy merchants, priests, magicians who vanished into the pits beneath the satrap’s palace, never to be seen again.

Some whispered that a caravan from the far south had brought to him something from the depths of demon-haunted Stygia. Few had glimpsed it, and of those one said shudderingly that the thing was carven with strange, uncouth hieroglyphs like those seen on the dusty Stygian tombs. It seemed to cast an evil spell over the satrap, and it lent him amazing powers of black sorcery. Weird forces shielded him from those despairing patriots who sought to slay him. Strange crimson lights blazed in the windows of a tall tower of his palace, where men whispered that he had converted an empty suite into a grim temple to some dark and bloody god.

And terror walked the streets of nighted Yaralet, as if summoned from the realm of death by some awesome, devil-purchased lore.

Exactly what they feared at night, the people did not know. But it was no vain dream against which they soon came to bolt their doors. Men hinted at slinking, batlike forms glimpsed from barred windows of hovering, shadowy horrors alien to human knowledge, deadly to human sanity. Tales spread of doorways splintered in the night, of sudden unearthly cries and shrieks torn from human throats followed by significant, and utter, silence. And they dared to tell of the rising sun illuminating broken doors that swung in houses suddenly and unaccountably empty.

The thing from Stygia was the Hand of Nergal.

“It looks,” said Atalis softly, “like a clawed hand carven of old ivory, worked all over with weird glyphs in a forgotten tongue. The claws clasp a sphere of shadowy, dim crystal. I know that the satrap has it: I have seen it here” he gestured “in my crystal. For, although no enchanter, I have learned some of the Dark Arts.”

Conan stirred restlessly. “And you know of this thing?”

Atalis smiled faintly. “Know of it? Aye! Old books speak of it and whisper the dark legend of its bloody history. The blind seer who penned the Book of Skelos knew it well. Nergal’s Hand they name it, shudderingly. They say it fell from the stars into the sunset isles of the uttermost west, ages upon ages before King Kull rose to bring the Seven Empires beneath his single standard. Centuries and ages beyond thought have rolled across the world since first bearded Pictish fishermen drew it dripping from the deep and stared wonderingly into its shadowy fires! They bartered it to greedy Atlantean merchants, and it passed east across the world. The withered, hoary-bearded mages of elder Thule and dark Grondar probed its mysteries in their towers of purple and silver. The serpent men of shadow-haunted Valusia peered into its glimmering depths. With it, Kom-Yazoth whelmed the Thirty Kings until the Hand turned upon and slew him. For the Book of Skelos says the Hand brings two gifts unto its possessor first, power beyond all limit then, death beyond all despair.”

Only the calm voice of the philosopher droned through the hushed room, but the black-headed warrior thought he could hear, as in a dream, the faint echo of thundering chariots, the clash of steel, the cry of tormented kings drowned in the clangor of collapsing empires.

“When all of the elder world was broken in the Cataclysm and the green sea rolled in restless fathoms above the shattered spires of lost Atlantis, and the nations sank one by one in red ruin, the Hand passed from the knowledge of men. For three thousand years the Hand slept, but when the young kingdoms of Koth and Ophir awoke and slowly emerged from the murk of barbarism, the talisman was found. The dark wizard-kings of grim Acheron plumbed its secrets, and when the lusty Hyborians broke that cruel kingdom beneath their heel, it passed southwards into dusty Stygia, where the bloody priests of that black land set it to terrible purposes in rites of which I dare not speak. It fell, when some swarthy sorceror was slain, and was buried with him, sleeping away the centuries. but now tomb robbers have roused the Hand of Nergal again, and it has come into the possession of Munthassem Khan. The temptation of ultimate and absolute power, which it holds out to all, has corrupted him, as countless others have been corrupted, who fell beneath its insidious spell. I fear me, Cimmerian, for all these lands, now that the Demon’s Hand wakes and dark forces walk the earth again.”

Atalis’ voice died away in whispering silence, and Conan growled uneasily, bristling.

“Well. Crom, man, what have I to do with such matters?” he rumbled.

“You alone can destroy the influence of the talisman over the satrap’s mind!”

The smouldering blue eyes widened. “How?”

“You alone possess the counter-talisman.”

“I? You are mad I hold no truck with amulets and suchlike magical trash !”

Atalis stilled him with a lifted palm. “Did you not find a curious golden object before the battle?” he queried, softly. Conan started.

“Aye, that I did at Bahari, yestereve, as we lay in camp ” He plunged one hand into his pocket-pouch and drew out the smooth, glowing stone. The philosopher and the prince stared at it, drawing in their breaths.

“The Heart of Tammuz! Yes, the counter-talisman in very truth !” Heart-shaped it was, and large as a child’s fist, worked in golden amber or perhaps rare yellow jade. It lay there in the Cimmerian’s hand, glowing with soft fires, and he remembered with a prickling of awe how the healing, tingling warmth of it had driven from his body the supernatural chill of the bat-winged shadows.

“Come, Conan! We shall accompany you. There is a secret passageway from this my chamber into the satrap’s hall an underground tunnel like that by which my slave, Hildico, led you under the city streets into my house. You, armed with the protection of the Heart, shall slay Munthassem Khan, or destroy the Hand of Nergal. There is no danger, for he lies deep in a magical slumber, which comes upon him whenever he has need to summon forth the Shadows of Nergal, as he has already done this night to overwhelm the Turanian army of King Yildiz. Come!”

Conan strode to the table and drained the last of the wine. Then, shrugging, muttering an oath to Crom, he followed the limping seer and the slim prince into a dark opening behind an arras.

In a moment they were gone, and the chamber lay empty and silent as a grave. The only motion came from flickering lights within the green, jagged crystal beside the chair. Within its depths one could see the small figure of Munthassem Khan, lying in a drugged sleep within his mighty hall.

VI. The Heart of Tammuz

They strode through endless darkness. Water dripped from the roof of the rock-hewn tunnel, and now and then the red eyes of rats gleamed at them from the tunnel’s floor, gleamed and were gone with squeaks of rage as the small scavengers fled before the footsteps of the strange beings who invaded their subterranean domain.

Atalis went first, trailing his one good hand along the wet, uneven cavern wall.

“I would not set this task on you, my young friend,” he was saying in a low whisper. “But it was into your hands the Heart of Tammuz fell, and I sense a purpose a destiny in its choice.

There is an affinity between opposed forces, such as the Dark Power we symbolize as ‘Nergal’ and the Power of Light we call Tammuz.’ The Heart awoke and, in some manner beyond knowledge, caused itself to be found; for the Hand was also awake and working its dread purpose. Thus I commend you to this task, for the Powers seem to have singled you for this deed hush! We are beneath the palace now. We are almost there ” He drew ahead and stroked one delicate hand over the rough surface of rock that closed off the passage. A mass of rock swung silently aside on secret counterweights. Light burst upon them.

They stood at one end of a vast, shadow-filled hall whose high, vaulted roof was lost in darkness overhead. In the center of the hall, which was otherwise empty save for rows of mighty columns, stood a square dais, and upon the dais, a massive throne of black marble, and upon the throne Munthassem Khan.

He was of middle years, but thin and wasted, gaunt to the point of emaciation. Paper-white, unhealthy flesh and shrunken upon his skull-like face, and dark circles shadowed his hollow eyes. Clasped across his chest as he lay sprawled in the throne, he held an ivory rod, like a sceptre. Its end was worked into a demon’s claw, grasping a smoky crystal that pulsed like a living heart with slow fires. Beside the throne, a dish of brass smoked with a narcotic incense: the dream lotus whose fumes empowered the sorcerer to release the shadow-demons of Nergal. Atalis tugged at Conan’s arm.

“See he still sleeps! The Heart will protect you. Seize the ivory Hand from him, and all his power will be gone!” Conan growled reluctant consent, and started forward, his naked sword in one hand. There was something about this that he did not like. It was too easy.

“Ah, gentlemen. I have been expecting you.”

On the dais, Munthassem Khan smiled down at them as they froze in astonishment. His tones were gentle, but a fury of mad rage flamed in his sick eyes. He lifted the ivory sceptre of power, he gestured.

The lights flickered eerily. And suddenly, shockingly, the limping seer screamed. His muscles contorted in a spasm of unendurable agony. He fell forward on the marble flags, writhing in pain.

“Crom!”

Prince Than plucked at his rapier, but a gesture of the magic Hand stayed him. His eyes went blank and dead. Icy sweat started from his paling brow. He shrieked and sank to his knees, clawing frantically at his brow as pangs of blinding pain tore through his brain.

“And you, my young barbarian!”

Conan sprang. He moved like a striking panther, burly limbs a blur of speed. He was upon the first step of the dais before Munthassem Khan could move. His sword flashed up, wavered, and fell from strengthless hands. A wave of arctic cold numbed his limbs. It radiated from the cloudy gem within the ivory claw. He gasped for breath.

The burning eyes of Munthassem Khan blazed into his. The skull-like face chuckled with a ghastly imitation of mirth.

“The Heart protects, in very truth but only him who knows how to invoke its power!” the satrap gloated, chuckling as the Cimmerian strove to summon strength into his iron limbs again. Conan set his jaw and fought grimly, savagely against the tide of chill and fetid darkness that poured in black rays from the demonic crystal and slowly blurred his mind. Strength drained from his limbs as wine from a slashed wineskin; he sank to his knees, then slumped at the foot of the dais. He felt his consciousness shrink to a tiny, lone point of light lost in a vast abyss of roaring darkness; the last spark of will wavered like a candle-flame in a gale. Hopeless, yet with the fierce, indominable determination of his savage breed, he fought on.

VII. Heart and Hand

A woman screamed. Startled, Munthassem Khan jerked at the unexpected sound. His attention flickered away from Conan his focus broke and in that brief instant the slim white form of a nude girl with dark flashing eyes and a black torrent of foaming curls ran on swift feet across the pave from the shadow of a column to the side of the helpless Cimmerian.

Through the roaring haze, Conan gaped at her. Hildico?

Swift as thought, she knelt by his side. One white hand dipped into his pouch and emerged, clutching the Heart of Tammuz. She sprang lithely to her feet and hurled the counter-talisman at Munthassem Khan.

It caught him full between the eyes with an audible thud. Eyes filming, he sank bonelessly into the cushioned embrace of his black throne. The Hand of Nergal slid from nerveless fingers to clank against the marble step.

In the instant the talisman fell from the satrap’s grip, the spell that bound Atalis and Prince Than in webs of scarlet agony snapped. Pale, shaken, exhausted, they were whole. And Conan’s mighty strength poured back into his sprawled body. Cursing, he leapt to his feet. One hand caught Hildico’s rounded shoulder and spun her away, out of danger, while with his other he snatched up his sword from the marble pave. Poised, he was ready to strike.

But he stopped, blinking with astonishment. At either side of the satrap’s body lay the two talismans. And from both arose weird shapes of force.

From the Hand of Nergal, a darkly shimmering web of evil radiance spread a glow of darkness, like the sheen of polished ebony. The foetor of the Pit was its unholy breath, and the bone-deep chill of interstellar space was its blighting touch. Before its subtle advance, the orange glare of the torches faded. It grew larger, fringed with writhing tentacles of radiant blackness.

But a nimbus of golden glory strengthened about the Heart of Tammuz and rose, forming a cloud of dazzling amber fire. The warmth of a thousand honey-hearted springs flowed from it, negating the arctic chill, and shafts of rich gold light cleaved the inky web of Nergal. The two cosmic forces met and fought. From this battle of the gods, Conan retreated with reluctant steps, joining his shaken comrades. He stood with them, staring with awe at the unimaginable conflict. Trembling, the nude form of Hildico shrank into the shelter of his arm.

“How did you get here, girl?” he demanded. She smiled wanly, with frightened eyes.

“I awoke, recovering from my swoon, and came into the Master’s chamber, Ending it empty. But within the Master’s crystal of seership I saw your simulacra enter the satrap’s hall and watched as he awoke and faced you. I, I followed and finding you in his power, chanced all on a try for the Heart.”

“Lucky for all that you did,” Conan acknowledged grimly. Atalis clutched his arm. “Look!

The golden fog of Tammuz was now a giant, flashing figure of intolerable light, dimly manlike in configuration but huge as those Colossi hewn from the stone cliffs of Shem by age-forgotten hands.

The dark shape of Nergal, too, had swelled into giant proportions. It was now a vast, ebon thing, brutal, hulking, misshapen, more like to some stupendous ape than manlike. In the foggy hump that was its brutlelike head, slitted eyes of malignant fire blazed like emerald stars.

The two forces came together with a thunderous, shattering roar like colliding worlds. The very walls shook at the fury of their meeting. Some half-forgotten sense within their flesh told the four that titanic cosmic forces strove and fought. The air was filled with the bitter stench of ozone. Foot-long sparks of electric fire crackled and snapped through the roiling fury as the golden god and the shadowy demon came together.

Shafts of unendurable brilliance tore through the clotted, struggling shadow-form. Bolts of blazing glory ripped it into shreds of drifting darkness. For a moment the dark web enshrouded, and dimmed, the golden flashing shape but for a moment, only. Another roar of earth-shattering thunder, and the black one dissolved before the embrace of intolerable brightness. Then it was gone. And for a moment the figure of light towered above the dais, consuming it like a funeral pyre then it, too, was gone.

Silence reigned in the thunder-riven hall of Munthassem Khan. Upon the blasted dais, both talismans had vanished whether reduced to atoms by the fury of the cosmic forces that had been released here, or transported to some far place to await the next awakening of the beings they symbolized and contained, none could say.

And the body upon the dais? Naught of it was left, save for a handful of ashes.

“The heart is always stronger than the hand,” Atalis said softly, in the ringing silence.

Conan reined the great black steed with a rough but masterly hand. It trembled, eager to be off, hooves ringing on the cobbles. He grinned, his barbaric blood thrilling to the might of the superb mare. A vast cloak of crimson silk belled from his broad shoulders, and his coat of silvered iron mesh mail glittered in the morning light.

“You are determined, then, to leave us, Conan?” asked Prince Than, resplendent in his robes as new satrap of Yaralet

“Aye! The Satrap’s Guard is a tame place, and I hunger for this new war King Yildiz is mounting against the hill tribes. A week of inaction, and I’ve had a bellyfull of peace! So fare you well, Than, Atalis!”

He tugged sharply on the reins, drawing the black mare about, and cantered out of the courtyard of the seer’s house, while Atalis and the prince watched benignly.

“Odd that a mercenary like Conan would accept less in payment than he could get,” the new satrap commented. “I offered him a chest full of gold enough to support him for life. But he would take only one small sack, together with the horse he found on the battlefield and his pick of arms and garments. Too much gold, he said, would only slow him down.”

Atalis shrugged then smiled, pointing to the far end of the courtyard. A slim Brythunian girl with long mane of black curls appeared in a doorway. She came up to Conan, who drew the mare to a halt; he bent to speak with her. They exchanged a few words; then he reached down and caught her supple waist and swung her up before him onto the saddle. She sat sideways, clinging with both arms to his burly neck, her face buried in his breast.

He swung about, flung up one brawny arm, grinned back at them in farewell, and rode off with the lithe girl clasped before him.

Atalis chuckled. “Some men fight for things other than gold,” he observed.

5. THE CITY OF SKULLS

Conan remains in Turanian service for about two years, becoming an expert horseman and archer and traveling over the immense deserts, mountains, and jungles of Hyrkania, as far as the borders of Khitai. One such journey takes him to the fabled kingdom of Mem, a comparatively unknown land between Vendhya to the south, Hyrkania to the north and west, and Khitai to the east.

I. Red Snow

Howling like wolves, a horde of squat, brown warriors swept down upon the Turanian troop from the foothills of the Talakma Mountains, where the hills flattened out into the broad, barren steppes of Hyrkania. The attack came at sunset. The western horizon streamed with scarlet banners, while to the south the invisible sun tinged the snows of the higher peaks with red.

For fifteen days, the escort of Turanians had jogged across the plain, fording the chill waters of the Zaporoska River, venturing deeper and ever deeper into the illimitable distances of the East. Then, without warning, came the attack.

Conan caught the body of Hormaz as the lieutenant slumped from his horse, a quivering, black-feathered arrow protruding from his throat. He lowered the body to the ground; then, shouting a curse, the young Cimmerian ripped his broad-bladed tulwar from its scabbard and turned with his comrades to meet the howling charge. For most of a month, he had ridden the dusty Hyrkanian plains as part of the escort. The monotony had long since begun to chafe him, and now his barbaric soul craved violent action to dispell his boredom.

His blade met the gilded scimitar of the foremost rider with such terrific force that the other’s sword snapped near the hilt. Grinning like a tiger, Conan drew his sword in a backhanded slash across the bowlegged little warrior’s belly. Howling like a doomed soul on the red-hot floors of Hell, his opponent fell twitching into a patch of blood-spattered snow.

Conan twisted in his saddle to catch another slashing sword on his shield. As he knocked the foeman’s blade aside, he drove the point of his tulwar straight into the slant-eyed, yellowish face that snarled into his, watching the enemy’s visage dissolve into a smear of ruined flesh.

Now the attackers were upon them in force. Dozens of small, dark men in fantastic, intricate armor of lacquered leather, trimmed with gold and flashing with gems, assailed them with demoniac frenzy. Bows twanged, lances thrust, and swords whirled and clashed.

Beyond the ring of his attackers, Conan saw his comrade Juma, a gigantic black from Kush, fighting on foot; his horse had fallen to an arrow at the first rush. The Kushite had lost his fur hat, so that the golden bangle in one ear winked in the fading light; but he had retained his lance. With this, he skewered three of the stocky attackers out of their saddles, one after another.

Beyond Juma, at the head of the column of King Yildiz’s troop of picked warriors, the commander of the escort, Prince Ardashir, thundered commands from atop his mighty stallion. He wheeled his horse back and forth to keep between the foe and the horse-litter which bore his charge. This was Yildiz’s daughter, Zosara. The troop were escorting the princess to her wedding with Kujula, the Great Khan of the Kuigar nomads.

Even as Conan watched, he saw Prince Ardashir clutch at his fur-cloaked chest. As if conjured up by magic, a black arrow had sprouted suddenly from his gemmed gorget. The prince gaped at the shaft; then, stiff as a statue, he toppled from horseback, his jewel-crusted, spiked helmet falling into the blood-spotted snow.

Thereafter, Conan became too busy to notice anything but the foes that swept howling around him. Although little more than a youth, the Cimmerian towered several inches above six feet. The swarthy attackers were dwarfed by comparison with his clean-limbed height. As they whirled around him in a snarling, yelping ring, they looked like a pack of hounds attempting to pull down a kingly tiger.

The battle swirled up and down the slope, like dead leaves whirled by autumnal gusts. Horses stamped, reared, and screamed; men hacked, cursed, and yelled. Here and there a pair of dismounted men continued their battle on foot. Bodies of men and horses lay in the churned mud and the trampled snow.

Conan, a red haze of fury thickening before his eyes, swung his tulwar with berserk fury. He would have preferred one of the straight broadswords of the West, to which he was more accustomed. Nevertheless, in the first few moments of the battle, he wreaked scarlet havoc with the unfamiliar weapon. In his flying hand, the glittering steel blade wove a shimmering web of razor-edged death about him. Into that web no less than nine of the sallow little men in lacquered leather ventured, to fall disemboweled or headless from their shaggy ponies. As he fought, the burly young Cimmerian bellowed a savage war chant of his primitive people; but soon he found that he needed every last bit of breath, for the battle grew rather than lessened in intensity.

Only seven months before, Conan had been the only warrior to survive the ill-fated punitive expedition that King Yildiz had launched against a rebellious satrap of northern Turan, Munthassem Khan. By means of black sorcery, the satrap had smashed the force sent against him. He had so he thought wiped out the hostile army from its high-born general, Bakra of Akif, down to the lowliest mercenary foot soldier. Young Conan alone had survived. He lived to penetrate the city of Yaralet, which was writhing under the magic-maddened satrap’s rule, and to bring a terrible doom on Munthassem Khan.

Returning in triumph to the glittering Turanian capital of Aghrapur, Conan received, as a reward, a place in this honor guard. At first he had had to endure the gibes of his fellow troopers at his clumsy horsemanship and indifferent skill with the bow. But the gibes soon died away as the other guardsmen learned to avoid provoking a swing of Conan’s sledgehammer fists, and as his skill in riding and shooting improved with practice.

Now, Conan was beginning to wonder if this expedition could truly be called a reward. The light, leathern shield on his left arm was hacked into a shapeless ruin; he cast it aside. An arrow struck his horse’s rump. With a scream, the beast brought its head down and bucked, lashing out with its heels. Conan went flying over its head; the horse bolted and disappeared.

Shaken and battered, the Cimmerian scrambled to his feet and fought on afoot. The scimitars of his foes slashed away his cloak and opened rents in his hauberk of chain mail. They slit the leathern jerkin beneath, until Conan bled from a dozen little superficial wounds.

But he fought on, teeth bared in a mirthless grin and eyes blazing a volcanic blue in a flushed, congested face framed by a square-cut black mane. One by one his fellows were cut down, until only he and the gigantic black, Juma, stood back to back. The Kushite howled wordlessly as he swung the butt of his broken lance like a club.

Then it seemed as if a hammer came up out of the red mist of berserk fury that clouded Conan’s brain, as a heavy mace crashed against the side of his head, denting and cracking the spiked helm and driving the metal against his temple. His knees buckled and gave. The last thing he heard was the sharp, despairing cry of the princess as squat, grinning warriors tore her from the veiled palanquin down to the red snow that splotched the slope. Then, as he fell face down, he knew nothing.

II. The Cup of the Gods

A thousand red devils were beating against Conan’s skull with red-hot hammers, and his cranium rang like a smitten anvil with every motion. As he slowly clambered out of black insensibility, Conan found himself dangling over one mighty shoulder of his comrade Juma, who grinned to see him awaken and helped him to stand. Although his head hurt abominably, Conan found he was strong enough to stay on his feet. Wondering, he looked about him.

Only he, Juma, and the girl Zosara had survived. The rest of the party including Zosara’s maid, slain by an arrow were food for the gaunt, gray wolves of the Hyrkanian steppe. They stood on the northern slopes of the Talakmas, several miles south of the site of the battle. Stocky brown warriors in lacquered leather, many with bandaged wounds, surrounded them. Conan found that his wrists were stoutly manacled, and that massive iron chains linked the manacles. The princess, in silken coat and trousers, was also fettered; but her chains and fetters were much lighter and seemed to be made of solid silver.

Juma was also chained, upon him most of the attention of their captors was focused. They crowded around the Kushite, feeling his skin and then glancing at their fingers to see if his color had come off. One even moistened a piece of cloth in a patch of snow and then rubbed it against the back of Juma’s hand. Juma grinned broadly and chuckled.

“It must be they’ve never seen a man like me,” he said to Conan.

The officer in command of the victors snapped a command. His men swung into their saddles. The princess was bundled back into her horse litter. To Conan and Juma the commander said, in broken Hyrkanian: “You two! You walk.”

And walk they did, with the spears of the Azweri, as their captors were called, nudging them with frequent pricks between their shoulders. The litter of the princess swayed between its two horses in the middle of the column. Conan noted that the commander of the Azweri troop treated Zosara with respect; she did not appear to have been physically harmed. This chieftain did not seem to bear any grudge against Conan and Juma for the havoc they had wrought among his men, the death and wounds they had dealt.

“You damn good fighters!” he said with a grin. On the other hand, he took no chances of letting his prisoners escape, or of letting them slow down the progress of his company by lagging. They were made to walk at a brisk pace from before dawn to after sunset, and any pause was countered by a prod with a lance. Conan set his jaw and obeyed for the moment.

For two days they wended over a devious trail through the heart of the mountain range. They crossed passes where they had to plow through deep snow, still unmelted from the previous winter. Here the breath came short from the altitude, and sudden storms whipped their ragged garments and drove stinging particles of snow and hail against their faces. Juma’s teeth chattered. The black man found the cold much harder to endure than Conan, who had been reared in a northerly clime.

They came forth on the southern slopes of the Talakmas at last, to look upon a fantastic sight a vast, green valley that sloped down and away before them. It was as if they stood on the lip of a stupendous dish. Below them, little clouds crept over leagues of dense, green jungle. In the midst of this jungle, a great lake or inland sea reflected the azure of the clear, bright sky.

Beyond this body of water, the green continued on until it was lost in a distant purple haze. And above the haze, jagged and white, standing out sharply against the blue, rose the peaks of the mighty Himelias, hundreds of miles further south. The Himelias formed the other lip of the dish, which was encircled by the vast crescent of the Talakmas to the north and the Himelias to the south.

Conan spoke to the officer: “What valley is this?”

“Meru,” said the chief. “Men call it, Cup of Gods.”

“Are we going down there?”

“Aye. You go to great city, Shamballah.”

“Then what?”

“That for rimpoche, for god-king to decide.”

“Who’s he?”

“Jalung Thongpa, Terror of Men and Shadow of Heaven. You move along now, white-skinned dog. No time for talk.”

Conan growled deep in his throat as a spear prick urged him on, silently vowing some day to teach this god-king the meaning of terror. He wondered if this ruler’s divinity were proof against a foot of steel in his guts. But any such happy moment was still in the future.

Down they went, into the stupendous depression. The air grew warmer; the vegetation, denser. By the end of the day they were slogging through a land of steaming jungle warmth and swampy forest, which overhung the road in dense masses of somber dark green, relieved by the brilliant blossoms of flowering trees. Bright-hued birds sang and screeched. Monkeys chattered in the trees. Insects buzzed and bit. Snakes and lizards slithered out of the path of the party.

It was Conan’s first acquaintance with a tropical jungle, and he did not like it. The insects bothered him, and the sweat ran off him in streams. Juma, on the other hand, grinned as he stretched and filled his huge lungs.

“It is like my homeland,” he said.

Conan was struck silent with awe at the fantastic landscape of verdant jungle and steamy swamp. He could almost believe that this vast valley of Meru was, in truth, the home of the gods, where they had dwelt since the dawn of time. Never had he seen such trees as those colossal cycads and redwoods, which towered into the misty heavens. He wondered how such a tropical jungle could be surrounded by mountains clad in eternal snows.

Once an enormous tiger stepped noiselessly into the path before them a monster nine feet long, with fangs like daggers. Princess Zosara, watching from her litter, gave a little scream. There was a quick motion among the Azweri and a rattle of accouterments as they readied their weapons. The tiger, evidently thinking the party too strong for it, slipped into the jungle as silently as it had come.

Later, the earth shook to a heavy tread. With a loud snort, a huge beast burst from the rhododendron thickets and thundered across their path. As gray and rounded as a mountainous boulder, it somewhat resembled an enormous pig, with thick hide folded into bands. From its snout, a stout, blunt, recurved horn, a foot in length, arose. It halted, staring stupidly at the cavalcade from dim little pig’s eyes; then, with another snort, it crashed off through the underbrush.

“Nose-horn,” said Juma. “We have them in Kush.”

The jungle gave way at length to the shores of the great blue lake or inland sea that Conan had seen from the heights. For a time, they followed the curve of this unknown body of water, which the Azweri called Sumeru Tso. At last, across a bay of this sea, they sighted the walls, domes, and spires of a city of rose-red stone, standing amid fields and paddies between the jungle and the sea.

“Shamballah!” cried the commander of the Azweri. As one man, their captors dismounted, knelt, and touched their foreheads to the damp earth, while Conan and Juma exchanged a mystified glance.

“Here gods dwell!” said the chief. “You walk fast, now. If you make us late, they skin you alive. Hurry!”

III. The City of Skulls

The gates of the city were fashioned of bronze, green with age and cast in the likeness of a gigantic, horned human skull. Square, barred windows above the portal made the skulls’s eye sockets, while below them the barred grill of the portcullis grinned at them like the teeth in fleshless jaws. The leader of the little warriors winded his twisted bronze trumpet, and the portcullis rose. They entered the unknown city.

Here, everything was hewn and carved from rose-pink stone. The architecture was ornate, cluttered with sculp ture and friezes swarming with demons and monsters and many-armed gods. Gigantic faces of red stone glared down from the sides of towers, which dwindled tier upon tier into tapering spires.

Every where he looked, Conan saw carvings in the form of human skulls. They were set into the lintels over doorways. They hung on golden chains about the yellow-brown necks of the Meruvians, whose only other garment, both for men and for women, was a short skirt. They appeared on the bosses of the shields of the guards at the gate and were riveted to the fronts of their bronze helmets.

Through the broad, well-planned avenues of this fantastic city the troop pursued its course. The half-naked Meruvians stepped out of their way, casting brief, incurious glances at the two stalwart prisoners and at the horse litter containing the princess. Among the throngs of bare-breasted city-dwellers moved, like crimson shadows, the forms of shaven-headed priests, swathed from neck to ankle in voluminous robes of gauzy red stuff.

Amid groves of trees, covered with flowers of scarlet, azure, and gold, the palace of the god-king loomed up before them. It consisted of one gigantic cone or spire, tapering up from a squat, circular base. Made entirely of red stone, the round tower wall climbed upwards in a spiral, like that of some curious, conical sea-shell. On each stone of the spiral parapet was graved the likeness of a human skull. The palace gave the impression of a tremendous tower made of death’s heads. Zosara could scarcely repress a shudder at this sinister ornamentation, and even Conan set his jaw grimly.

They entered through another skull-gate and thence through massive stone walls and huge rooms into the throne-room of the god-king. The Azweri, dirty and travel-stained, remained in the rear, while a pair of gilded guardsmen, each armed with an ornate halberd, took the arms of each of the three prisoners and led them to the throne.

The throne, which rested atop a dais of black marble, was all of one huge piece of pale jade, carven into the likeness of ropes and chains of skulls, fantastically looped and interwoven. Upon this greenish-white chair of death sat the half-divine monarch, who had summoned the prisoners into this unknown world.

For all the seriousness of his plight, Conan could not repress a grin. For the rimpoche Jalung Thongpa was very short and fat, with scrawny bow legs that scarcely reached the floor. His huge belly was swathed in a sash of cloth-of-gold, which blazed with gems. His naked arms, swollen with flabby fat, were clasped by a dozen golden armlets, and jeweled rings flashed and winked on his pudgy fingers. The bald head that lolled on top of his misshapen body was notably ugly, with dangling dewlaps, pendulous lips, and crooked, discolored teeth. The head was topped by a spired helmet or crown of solid gold, blazing with rubies. Its weight seemed to bow its wearer beneath it.

As Conan looked more closely at the god-king, he saw that Jalung Thongpa was peculiarly deformed. One side of his face did not match the other. It hung slackly from the bone and bore a blank, filmed eye, while the other eye was bright with the glint of malicious intelligence.

The rimpoche’s good eye was now fixed upon Zosara, ignoring the two gigantic warriors who accompanied her. Beside the throne stood a tall, gaunt man in the scarlet robes of a Meruvian priest. Beneath his shaven pate, cold green eyes looked out upon the scene with icy contempt. To him the god-king turned and spoke in a high, squeaky voice. From the few words of Meruvian that Conan had picked up from the Azweri, he pieced together enough to understand that the tall priest was the king’s chief wizard, the Grand Shaman, Tanzong Tengri.

From scraps of the ensuing conversation, Conan further guessed that, by his magic, the shaman had seen the approach of the troop escorting the Princess Zosara to her Kuigar bridegroom and had shown this vision to the god-king. Filled with simple, human lust for the slim Turanian girl, Jalung Thongpa had dispatched the troop of his Azweri horsemen to seize her and fetch her to his seraglio.

That was all that Conan wanted to know. For seven days, ever since his capture, he had been pushed and prodded and bedeviled. He had walked his feet off, and his temper was at the breaking point.

The two guards that flanked him were facing the throne with respectfully downcast eyes, giving their full attention to the rimpoche, who might at any instant issue a command. Conan gently helfted the chains that bound his wrists. They were too stout for him to break by main force; he had tried in the first days of this captivity and failed.

Quietly, he brought his wrists together, so that the length of chain hung down in a loop for a foot. Then, pivoting, he suddenly snapped his arms up past the head of the left-hand guard. The slack of the chain, swung like a whip, caught the guard across the face and sent him staggering back, blood gushing from a broken nose.

At Conan’s first violent movement, the other guard had whirled and brought down the head of his halberd to the guard position. As he did so, Conan caught the head of the halberd in the slack of the chain and jerked the pole arm out of the guard’s grasp.

A slash with the slack of the chain sent another guard reeling back, clutching the bloody ruin of his mouth and spitting a broken tooth. Conan’s feet were chained too closely together to permit a full stride. But from the floor in front of the dais he leaped with both feet together, like a frog. In two such grotesque bounds, Conan was up on the dais, and his hands were locked about the fat neck of the slobbering little god-king, squatting on his pile of skulls. The rimpoche’s good eye goggled in terror, and his face blackened from the pressure of Conan’s thumbs on his windpipe.

The guards and nobles fluttered about, squealing with panic, or stood frozen with shock and terror at this strange giant who dared to lay violent hands upon their divinity.

“One move toward me, and I crush the life from this fat toad!” Conan growled.

Alone of the Meruvians in the room, the Grand Shaman had shown no sign of panic or surprise when the ragged youth had exploded in a whirlwind of fury. In perfect Hyrkanian, he asked: “What is your will, barbarian?”

“Set free the girl and the black! Give us horses, and we will quit your accursed valley forever. Refuse or try to trick us and I’ll crush your little king to a pulp!”

The shaman nodded his skull-like head. His green eyes were as cold as ice in the masklike face of tight-stretched, saffron skin. With a commanding gesture, he raised his carven staff of ebony.

“Set free the princess Zosara and the black-skinned captive,” he ordered calmly. Pale-faced servitors with frightened eyes scurried to do his bidding. Juma grunted, rubbing his wrists. Beside him, the princess shivered. Conan swung the limp form of the king in front of him and stepped from the dais.

“Conan!” bellowed Juma. “Beware!”

Conan whirled, but too late. As he had moved to the edge of the dais, the Grand Shaman acted. Nimble as a striking cobra, his ebony staff flicked out and lightly tapped Conan’s shoulder, where his naked skin bulged through the rents in his ragged clothing. Conan’s lunge toward his antagonist was never completed. Numbness spread through his body, like venom from a reptile’s fang. His mind clouded; his head, too heavy to hold up, fell forward on his chest. Limply, he collapsed. The half-strangled little god-king tore free from his grasp.

The last sound Conan heard was the thunderous bellow of the black as he went down under the wriggling swarm of brown bodies.

IV. The Ship of Blood

Above all, it was hot and it stank. The dead, vitiated air of the dungeon was stale. It reeked with the stench of close-packed, sweating bodies. A score of naked men were crammed into one filthy hole, surrounded on all sides by huge blocks of stone weighing many tons. Many were small, brown Menivians, who sprawled about, listless and apathetic. There were a handful of the squat, slant-eyed little warriors who guarded the sacred valley, the Azweri. There were a couple of hawk-nosed Hyrkanians. And there were Conan the Cimmerian and his giant black comrade, Juma. When the Grand Shaman’s staff had struck him into insensibility and the warriors had pulled down the mighty Juma by weight of numbers, the infuriated rimpoche had commanded that they pay the ultimate penalty for their crime.

In Shamballah, however, the ultimate penalty was not death, which in Meruvian belief merely released the soul for its next incarnation. Enslavement they considered worse, since it robbed a man of his humanity, his individuality. So to slavery they were summarily condemned.

Thinking of it, Conan growled deep in his throat, and his eyes blazed with smouldering fires out of his dark face, peering through the shaggy, matted tangle of his uncut black mane. Chained beside him, Juma, sensing Conan’s frustration, chuckled. Conan glowered at his comrade; sometimes Juma’s invincible good humor irritated him. For a free-born Cimmerian, slavery was indeed an intolerable punishment.

To the Kushite, however, slavery was nothing new. Slave raiders had torn Juma as a child from his mother’s arms and dragged him out of the sweltering jungles of Kush to the slave marts of Shem. For a while he had worked as a field hand on a Shemite farm. Then, as his great thews began to swell, he had been sold as an apprentice gladiator to the arenas of Argos.

For his victory in the games held to celebrate the victory of King Milo of Argos over King Ferdrugo of Zbgara, Juma was given his freedom. For a time he lived in various Hyborian nations by thieving and by odd jobs. Then he drifted east to Turan, where his mighty stature and skill in combat won him a place in the ranks of King Yildiz’s mercenaries.

There he had come to know the youthful Conan. He and the Cimmerian had struck it off from the first. They were the two tallest men among the mercenary troops, and both came from far, outlandish countries; they were the only members of their respective races among the Turanians. Their comradeship had now led them to the slave pits of Shamballah and would shortly lead them to the ultimate indignity of the slave block. There they would stand naked in the blinding sun, poked and prodded by prospective buyers while the slave dealer bellowed praises of their strength.

The days dragged slowly past, as crippled snakes drag their tails painfully through the dust. Conan, Juma, and the others slept and woke to receive wooden bowls of rice, stingily shared out by their overseers. They spent the long days fitfully dozing or languidly quarreling.

Conan was curious to learn more about these Meruvians, for in all his wanderings he had never encountered their like. They dwelt here in this strange valley as their ancestors had done since time began. They had no contact with the outside world and wanted none.

Conan became friendly with a Meruvian named Tashudang, from whom he learned something of their singsong language. When he asked why they called their king a god, Tashudang replied that the king had lived for ten thousand years, his spirit being reborn in a different body after each sojourn in mortal flesh. Conan was skeptical of this, for he knew the sort of lies that kings of other lands spread about themselves. But he prudently kept his opinion to himself. When Tashudang complained mildly and resignedly of the oppression of the king and his shamans, Conan asked:

“Why don’t you and your fellows get together and throw the whole lot into the Sumeru Tso, and rule yourselves? That’s what we would do in my country if anybody tried to tryannize over us.”

Tashudang looked shocked. “You know not what you say, foreigner! Many centuries ago, the priests tell us, this land was much higher than it now is. It stretched from the tops of the Himelias to the tops of the Talakmas one great, lofty plain, covered with snow and whipped by icy winds. The Roof of the World, it was called.

“Then Yama, the king of the demons, determined to create this valley for us, his chosen people, to dwell in. By a mighty spell, he caused the land to sink. The ground shook with the sound of ten thousand thunders, molten rock poured from cracks in the earth, mountains crumbled, ard forests went up in flame. When it was over, the land between the mountain chains was as you now see it. Because it was now a lowland, the climate wanned, and the plants and beasts of the warm countries came to dwell in it. Then Yama created the first Meruvians and placed them in the valley, to inhabit forever. And he appointed the shamans as leaders and enlighteners of the people.

“Sometimes the shamans forget their duties and oppress us, as if they were but greedy common men. But Yama’s command, for us to obey the shamans, still holds good. If we defy it, Yama’s great spell will be nullified, and this land will rise to the height of the mountain tops and again become a cold waste. So, no matter how they abuse us, we dare not revolt against the shamans.”

“Well,” said Conan, “if that filthy little toad is your idea of a god “

“Oh, no!” said Tashudang, his eyeballs glistening white in the dimness with fear. “Say it not! He is the only begotten son of the great god, Yama himself. And when he calls his father, the god comes!” Tashudang buried his face in his hands, and Conan could get no more words out of him that day.

The Meruvians were an odd race. Theirs was a peculiar lassitude of spirit a somnolent fatalism that bade them bow to everything that came upon them as a predestined visitation from their cruel, enigmatic gods. Any resistance to fate on their part, they believed, would be punished, if not immediately, then in their next incarnation.

It was not easy to drag information out of them, but the Cimmerian youth kept doggedly at it. For one thing, it helped to pass the unending days. For another, he did not intend to remain in slavery long, and every bit of information that he could gather about this hidden kingdom and its peculiar people would be of value when he and Juma came to try for freedom. And finally, he knew how important it was in traveling through a strange country, to command at least a smattering of the local language. Although not at all a scholar by temperament, Conan picked up languages easily. He had already mastered several and could even read and write some of them a little.

At last came the fateful day when the overseers in black leather strode amongst the slaves, wielding heavy whips and herding their charges out the door. “Now,” sneered one, “we shall see what prices the princes of the Sacred Land will pay for your unwieldy carcasses, outland swine!” And his whip raised a long weal across Conan’s back.

Hot sun beat down on Conan’s back like whips of fire. After being so long in darkness, he was dazzled by the brightness of day. After the slave auction, they led him up the gangplank to the deck of a great galley, which lay moored to the long, stone quays of Shamballah. He squinted against the sun and cursed in a growling undertone. This, then, was the doom to which they had sentenced him to drudge at the oars until death took him.

“Get down in the hold, you dogs!” spat the ship’s overseer, cuffing Conan’s jaw with the back of his hand. “Only the children of Yama may stride the deck!”

Without thinking, the Cimmerian youth exploded into action. He drove his balled fist into the burly overseer’s bulging belly. As the breath hissed from the man’s lungs, Conan followed the blow with a hammerlike right to the jaw, which stretched the shipman on the deck. Behind him, Juma howled with joy and struggled to get up the line to stand beside him.

The commander of the ship’s guard rapped out an order. In a flash, the points of a dozen pikes, in the hands of wiry little Meruvian marines, were leveled at Conan. The Cimmerian stood in the circle of them, a menacing growl rising to his lips. But he belatedly controlled his rage, knowing that any move would bring instant death.

It took a bucket of water to revive the overseer. He laboriously climbed to his feet, blowing like a walrus, while water ran down his bruised face into his sparse black beard. His eyes glared into Conan’s with insane rage, then cooled to icy venom.

The officer began to issue a command to the marines: “Slay the – ” but the overseer interrupted:

“Nay, slay him not. Death were too easy for the dog. I’ll make him whimper to be put out of his misery ere I’ve done with him.”

“Well, Gorthangpo?” said the officer.

The overseer stared over the oar pit, meeting the cowed gaze of a hundred-odd naked brown men. They were starved and scrawny, and their bent backs were crisscrossed by a thousand whip scars. The ship carried a single bank of long oars on each side. Some oars were manned by two rowers, some by three, depending upon the size and strength of the slaves. The overseer pointed to an oar in the waist, to which three gray-haired, skeletal old men were chained.

“Chain him to yonder oar! Those walking corpses are played out; they are of no more use to us. Clear the oar of them. This foreign lad needs to stretch his arms a bit; well give him all the room he needs. And if he follow not the pace, I’ll open his back to the spine!”

As Conan watched impassively, the sailors unlocked the manacles that connected the wrist chains of the three old men to rings on the oar itself. The old men screamed with terror as brawny arms heaved them over the rail. They hit the water with a great splash and sank without a trace, save for the bubbles that rose one by one to the surface and burst.

Conan was chained to the oar in their place. He was to do the work of all three. As they fastened him to the filth-slimed bench, the overseer eyed him grimly.

“We’ll see how you like pulling an oar, boy. You’ll pull and pull until you think your back is breaking and then you’ll pull some more. And every time you slack off or miss a boat, I’ll remind you of your place, like this!”

His arm swung; the whip uncoiled against the sky and came whistling down across Conan’s shoulders. The pain was like that of a white-hot iron rod against his flesh. But Conan did not scream or move a muscle. It was as if he had felt nothing, so strong was the iron of his will.

The overseer grunted, and the lash cracked again. This time a muscle at one corner of Conan’s grimly set mouth twitched, but his eyes looked stonily ahead. A third lash, and a fourth. Sweat formed on the Cimmerian’s brow; it trickled down into his eyes, stinging and smarting, even as the red blood ran down his back. But he gave no sign of feeling pain.

Behind him, he heard Juma’s whisper: “Courage!”

Then came a call from the afterdeck; the captain wished to sail. Reluctantly, the overseer gave up his pleasure of lashing the Cimmerian’s back to pulp.

The sailors cast off the ropes that moored the ship to the quay and shoved off with boathooks. Aft of the oar benches but on the same level, in the shade of the catwalk that ran the length of the ship over the heads of the rowers, sat a naked Meruvian behind a huge drum. When the ship had cleared the quay, the coxswain lifted a wooden maul and began to thump the drum. With each beat, the slaves bent to the oars, rising to their feet, raising the looms, and leaning back until their weight brought them down on the benches; then pushing the looms down and forward and repeating. Conan soon caught the rhythm, as did Juma, chained to the oar behind him.

Conan had never before been on a ship. As he heaved at his oar, his quick eyes peered around him at the listless, dull-eyes slaves with whip-scarred backs, who worked on the slimy benches in the frightful stench of their own waste. The galley was low through the waist, where the slaves labored; the rail was only a few feet above the water. It was higher in the bow, where the seamen berthed, and in the carved and gilded stern, where the officers had their quarters. A single mast arose amidships. The yard of the single triangular sail, and the furled sail itself, lay along the catwalk over the oar pit.

When the ship had left the harbor, the sailors untied the lashings that held the sail and its yard to the catwalk and raised it, heaving on the halyard and grunting a chantey. The yard went up by jerks, a few inches at a time. As it rose, the gold-and-purple striped sail unfurled and shook out with snapping, booming sounds. Since the wind was fair on the quarter, the oarsmen were given a rest while the sail took over.

Conan noted that the entire galley had been made from some wood that either by nature or by staining was of a dark red color. As he gazed about, eyes half shut against the glare, the ship looked as if it had been dipped in blood. Then the whip sang above him and the overseer, on the catwalk above, yelled down:

“Now lay to, you lazy swine!”

A lash laid another welt across his shoulders. It is indeed a ship of wood, he thought to himself; slaves’ blood.

V. Rogue’s Moon

For seven days, Conan and Juma sweated over the massive oars of the red galley as it plodded its way around the shores of the Sumeru Tso, stopping overnight at each of the seven sacred cities of Meru: Shondakor, Thogara, Auzakia, Issedon, Paliana, Throana, and then having made the circuit of the sea back to Shamballah. Strong men though they were, it was not long before the unremitting labor brought them to the edge of exhaustion, when their aching muscles seemed incapable of further effort. Yet still the tireless drum and the hissing whip drove them on.

Once a day, sailors drew buckets of cold, brackish water up over the side and drenched the exhausted slaves. Once a day, when the sun stood at the zenith, they were given a heaping bowl of rice and a long dipperful of water. At night they slept on their oars. The animal-like round of unvarying drudgery sapped the will and drained the mind, leaving the rowers soulless automata.

It would have broken the strength of any man save for such as Conan. The young Cimmerian did not yield to the crushing burden of fate as did the apathetic Moravians. The unending labor at the oars, the brutal treatment, the indignity of the slimy benches, instead of sapping his will, only fed the fires within him.

When the ship returned to Shamballah and dropped anchor in the wide harbor, Conan had reached the limits of his patience. It was dark and still; the new moon a slim, silver scimitar hung low in the western sky, casting a wan, illusive light. It would soon set. Such a night was called a “rogue’s moon” in the nations of the West, for such poorly-lit night were wont to be chosen by highwaymen, thieves, and assassins to ply their trades. Bent over their oars, ostensibly asleep, Conan and Juma discussed escape with the Meruvian slaves.

On the galley, the feet of the slaves were not fettered. But each wore a pair of manacles joined by a chain, and this chain was strung through an iron ring loosely looped around the loom of the oar. Although this ring slid freely along the loom, its travel was stopped at the outer end by the oarlock and, at the inner, by a collar or ferrule of lead. This collar, securely fastened to the butt end of the oar by an iron spike, acted as a counterweight to the blade of the oar. Conan had tested the strength of his chain and of the manacles and the ring a hundred times; but even his terrific strength, hardened by seven days of rowing, could not strain any of them. Still, in a tense, growling whisper, he urged schemes of revolt upon his fellow slaves.

“If we could get Gorthangpo down on our level,” he said, “we could tear him to pieces with our nails and teeth. And he carries the keys to all our bonds. While we were unlocking the manacles, the marines would kill some of us; but once we got loose, we should outnumber them five or six to one “

“Do not speak of it!” hissed the nearest Meruvian. “Do not even think of it!”

“Aren’t you interested?” asked Conan in astonishment.

“Nay! Even to talk of such violence turns my bones to water.”

“Mine, too,” said another. “The hardships we suffer have been inflicted upon us by the gods, as a just punishment for some misdeed in a former life. To struggle against it were not only useless but a wicked blasphemy as well. I pray you, barbarian, hush your unholy talk and submit with becoming humility to your fate.”

Such an attitude went against Conan’s grain, nor was Juma a man to bow without resistance to any threat of doom. But the Meruvians would not listen to their arguments. Even Tashudang, unusually loquacious and friendly for a Meruvian, begged Conan to do nothing that would enrage Gorthangpo, the overseer, or bring down upon them a worse punishment from the gods than that which their divinities had already inflicted upon them.

Conan’s argument was cut short by the song of the whip. Aroused by the murmur, Gorthangpo had crept out on the catwalk in the darkness. From the few whispered words he overheard, he divined that mutiny was brewing. Now his whip hissed and cracked on Conan’s shoulders.

Conan had had enough. In one surge of motion, he bounded to his feet, seized the lashing end of the whip, and tore it out of Gorthangpo’s grip. The overseer yelled for the marines.

There was still no way for Conan to get the iron ring off the loom of his oar. In his desperation, an inspiration struck him. The construction of the oarlock limited the vertical motion of the loom to a height of less than five feet above the deck on which he stood. Now he pushed the butt end of the oar up as far as it would go, climbed to the bench, and crouching, placed his shoulders beneath the loom. Then, with a terrific heave of his long, powerful legs, he straightened up. The oar broke in its oarlock with a rending crash. Quickly, Conan slipped his ring off the broken end. Now he had a serviceable weapon: a club or quarterstaff nine feet long, with a ten-pound mass of lead on one end.

Conan’s first terrific swing caught the goggling overseer on the side of the head. His skull shattered like a melon, spattering the benches with a bloody spray of pulped brains. Then Conan hauled himself to the catwalk to meet the charge of the marines. Below on the benches, the scrawny, brown Meruvians crouched, whimpering prayers to their devil-gods. Only Juma imitated Conan’s act, breaking his oar at the oarlock and slipping his slave ring loose.

The marines were Meruvians themselves, lax and lazy and fatalistic. They had never had to fight a slave mutiny; they did not believe such a thing possible. Least of all had they expected to have to face a burly young giant armed with a nine-foot club. Still, they came on bravely enough, although the width of the catwalk allowed them to approach Conan only two abreast.

Conan waded in, swinging wildly. His first blow hurled the first marine off the catwalk and into the benches with a broken sword arm. The second dropped the next man with a shattered skull. A pike was thrust at his naked breast; Conan knocked the pike out of its welder’s hand, and his next blow hurled two men at once off the catwalk; the one whom he had struck with crushed-in ribs, and his companion jostled off the walk by the impact of the first victim’s body.

Then Juma climbed up beside him. The Kushite’s naked torso gleamed like oiled ebony in the dim moonlight, and his oar mowed down the advancing Meruvians like a scythe. The marines, unprepared to face two such monsters, broke and ran for the safety of the poop deck, whence their officer, just aroused from slumber, was screeching confused commands.

Conan bent to the corpse of Gorthangpo and searched his pouch for the key ring. Swiftly he found the key to all the manacles on the ship and unlocked his own, then did the same for Juma.

A bow twanged, and an arrow whistled over Conan’s head and struck the mast. The two freed slaves did not wait to pursue the battle further. Dropping off the catwalk, they pushed through the cowering rowers to the rail, vaulted over the side, and vanished into the dark waters of Shamballah’s harbor. A few arrows sped after them, but in the dim light of the setting crescent moon the archers could do little more than shoot at random.

VI. Tunnels of Doom

Two naked men hauled their dripping bodies out of the sea and peered about them in the murk. They had swum for hours, it seemed, looking for a way to get into Shamballah unobserved. At last they had found the outlet to one of the storm sewers of the ancient stone city. Juma still trailed the length of broken oar with which he had fought the marines; Conan had abandoned his on the ship. Occasionally a faint gleam of light came into the sewer from a storm grating set into a gutter in the street overhead, but the light was so feeble the thin moon having set that the darkness below remained impenetrable. So, in almost total darkness, the twain waded through the slimy waters, seeking a way out of these tunnels.

Huge rats squeaked and fled as they went through the stone corridors beneath the streets. They could see the glimmer of eyes through the dark. One of the larger scavengers nipped Conan’s ankle, but he caught and crushed the beast in his hands and flung its corpse at its more cautious fellows. These quickly engaged in a squealing, rustling battle over the feast, while Conan and Juma hurried on through the upward-winding tunnels.

It was Juma who found the secret passage. Sliding one band along the dank wall, he accidentally released a catch and snorted with surprise when a portion of the stone gave way beneath his questing fingers. Although neither he nor Conan knew where the passage led, they took it, as it seemed to slope upward toward the city streets above.

At last, after a long climb, they came to another door. They groped in utter darkness until Conan found a bolt, which he slid back. The door opened with a squeak of dry hinges to his push, and the two fugitives stepped through and froze.

They stood on an ornamental balcony crowded with statues of gods or demons in a huge, octagonal temple The walls of the eight-sided chamber soared upward, past the balcony, to curve inward and meet to form an eight-sided dome. Conan remembered seeing such a dome towering among the lesser buildings of the city, but he had never inquired as to what lay within it.

Below, at one side of the octagonal floor, a colossal statue stood on a plinth of black marble, facing an altar in the exact center of the chamber. The statue dwarfed everything else in the chamber. Rising thirty feet high, its loins were on a level with the balcony on which Conan and Juma stood. It was a gigantic idol of a green stone that looked like jade, although never had men found true jade in so large a mass. It had six arms, and the eyes in its scowling face were immense rubies.

Facing the statue across the altar stood a throne of skulls, like that which Conan had already seen in the throne room of the palace on his arrival in Shamballah, but smaller. The toadlike little god-king of Mem was seated on this throne. As Conan’s glance strayed from the idol’s head to that of the ruler, he thought he saw a hideous suggestion of similarity between the two. He shuddered and his nape prickled at the hint of unguessable cosmic secrets that lay behind this resemblance.

The rimpoche was engaged in a ritual. Shamans in scarlet robes knelt in ranks around the throne and the altar, chanting ancient prayers and spells. Beyond them, against the walls of the chamber, several rows of Memvians sat cross-legged on the marble pavement. From the richness of their jewels and their ornate if scanty apparel, they appeared to be the officials and the nobility of the kingdom. Above their heads, set in wall brackets around the balcony, a hundred torches flickered and smoked. On the floor of the chamber, in a square about the central altar, stood four torcheres, each crowned by the rich, gplden flame of a butter lamp. The four flames wavered and sputtered.

On the altar between the throne and the colossus lay the naked, white, slender body of a young girl, held to the altar by slender golden chains. It was Zosara.

A low growl rumbled in Conan’s throat. His smouldering eyes burned with blue fire as he watched the hated figures of King Jalang Thonpa and his Grand Shaman, the wizard-priest Tanzong Tengri.

“Shall we take them, Conan?” whispered Juma, his teeth showing white in the flickering dimness. The Cimmerian grunted.

It was the festival of the new moon, and the god-king was wedding the daughter of the king of Turan on the altar, before the many-armed statue of the Great Dog of Death and Terror, Yama the Demon King. The ceremony was proceeding according to the ancient rites prescribed in the holy texts of the Book of the Death God. Placidly anticipating the public consummation of his nuptials with the slim, long-legged Turanian girl, the divine monarch of Mem lolled on his throne of skulls as ranks of scarlet-clad shamans droned the ancient prayers.

Then came an interruption. Two naked giants dropped from nowhere to the floor of the temple one a heroic figure of living bronze, the other a long-limbed menace whose mighty physique seemed to have been carved from ebony. The shamans froze in mid-chant as these two howling devils burst into their midst.

Conan seized one of the torcheres and hurled it into the midst of the scarlet-robed shamans. They broke, screaming with pain and panic, as the flaming liquid butter set fire to their gauzy robes and turned them into living torches. The other three lamps followed in rapid succession, spreading fire and confusion over the floor of the chamber.

Juma sprang toward the dais, where the king sat with his good eye staring in fear and astonishment. The gaunt Grand Shaman met Juma on the marble steps with his magical staff lifted to smite. But the black giant still had his broken oar, and he swung it with terrific force. The ebony staff flew into a hundred fragments. A second swing caught the wizard-priest in the body and hurled him, broken and dying, into the chaos of running, screaming, flaming shamans.

King Jalung Thongpa came next. Grinning, Juma charged up the steps toward the cowering little god-king. But Jalung Thongpa was no longer on his throne. Instead, he knelt in front of the statue, arms raised and chanting a prayer.

Conan reached the altar at the same time and bent over the nude, writhing form of the terrified girl. The light golden chains were strong enough to hold her, but not strong enough to withstand Conan’s strength. With a grunt, he braced his feet and heaved on one; a link of the soft metal stretched, opened, and snapped. The other three chains followed, and Conan scooped up the sobbing princess in his arms. He turned but then a shadow fell over him.

Startled, he looked up and remembered what Tashudang had told him: “When he calls his father, the god comes!”

Now he realized the full extent of the horror behind those words. For, looming above him in the flickering torchlight, the arms of the gigantic idol of green stone were moving. The scarlet rubies that served it for eyes were glaring down at him, bright with intelligence.

VII. When the Green God Wakes

The hairs lifted on Conan’s nape, and he felt as if the blood in his veins had congealed to ice. Whimpering, Zosara pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder and clung to his neck. On the black dais that upheld the throne of skulls, Juma also froze, the whites of his eyes showing as the superstitious terrors of his jungle heritage rose within him. The statue was coming to life.

As they watched, powerless to move, the image of green stone shifted one of its huge feet slowly, creakingly. Thirty feet above their heads, its great face leered down at them. The six arms moved jerkily, flexing like the limbs of some gigantic spider. The thing tilted, shifting its monstrous weight. One vast foot came down on the altar on which Zosara had lain. The stone block cracked and crumbled beneath the tons of living green stone.

“Crom!” breathed Conan. “Even stone lives and walks in this mad place! Come, girl.” He picked Zosara up and leaped down from the dais to the floor of the temple. From behind him came an ominous scraping sound of stone on stone. The statue was moving.

“Juma!” yelled Conan, casting a wild eye about for the Kushite. The black still crouched motionless beside the throne. Upon the throne, the little god-king pointed an arm, thick with fat and bright with jewels, at Conan and the girl.

“Kill, Yama! Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screamed.

The many-armed thing paused and peered about with its ruby eyes until it sighted Conan. The Cimmerian was nearly mad with the primitive night-fears of his barbarian people. But, as with many barbarians, his very fear drove him into combat with that which he dreaded. He put down the girl and heaved up a marble bench. Sinews creaking with the effort, he strode forward towards the lumbering colossus.

Juma yelled: “No, Conan! Get away! It sees you!”

Now Conan stood near the monstrous foot of the walking idol. The stone legs towered above him like the pillars of some colossal temple. His face congested with the effort, Conan raised the heavy bench over his head and hurled it at the leg. It crashed into the carven ankle of the colussus with terrific impact. The marble of the bench clouded with a web of cracks, which shot through it from end to end. He stepped even closer, picked up the bench again, and again swung it against the ankle. This time the bench shattered into a score of pieces; but the leg, though slightly chipped, was not materially damaged. Conan reeled back as the statue took another ponderous step toward him.

“Conan! Look out!”

Juma’s yell made him look up. The green giant was stooping. The ruby eyes glared into his. Strange, to stare into the living eyes of a god! They were bottomlessly deep shadow-veiled depths wherein his gaze sank endlessly through red eons of time without thought. And deep within those crystalline depths, a cold, inhuman malignancy coiled. The god’s gaze locked on his own, and the young Cimmerian felt an icy numbness spread through him. He could neither move nor think.

Juma, howling with primal rage and fear, whirled. He saw the many mighty hands of stone swoop toward his comrade, who stood staring like one entranced. Another stride would bring Yama upon the paralyzed Cimmerian.

The black was too far from the tableau to interfere, but his frustrated rage demanded an outlet. Without conscious thought, he picked up the god-king, who shrieked and wriggled in vain, and hurled him toward his infernal parent Jalung Thongpa whirled through the air and thudded down on the tessalated pave before the tramping feet of the idol. Dazed by his fall, the little monarch stared widly about with his good eye. Then he screamed hideously as one titanic foot descended upon him.

The crunch of snapping bones resounded in the ringing silence. The god’s foot slid on the marble, leaving a broad, crimson smear on the tiles. Creaking at the waist, the titanic figure bent and reached for Conan, then stopped.

The groping, green stone hands, fingers outspread, halted in mid-air. The burning crimson light faded from the ruby eyes. The vast body with its many arms and devil’s head, which a moment before had been flexible and informed with life, froze into motionless stone once more.

Perhaps the death of the king, who had summoned this infernal spirit from the nighted depths of nameless dimensions, cancelled the spell that bound Yama to the idol. Or perhaps the king’s death released the devil-god’s will from the domination of his earthly kinsman. Whatever the cause, the instant the Jalung Thongpa was crushed into bubbling gore, the statue reverted to lifeless, immobile stone.

The spell that had gripped Conan’s mind also broke. Numbly, the youth shook his head to clear it. He stared about him. The first thing of which he was aware was the princess Zosara, who flung herself into his arms, weeping hysterically. As his bronzed arms closed about her softness and he felt the feathery touch of her black, silken hair against his throat, a new kind of fire flared up in his eyes, and he laughed deeply.

Juma came running across the floor of the temple. “Conan! Everybody either is dead or has ran away! There should be horses in the paddock behind the temple. Now is our chance to quit this accursed place!”

“Aye! By Crom, I shall be glad to shake the dust of this damned land from my heels,” growled the Cimmerian, tearing the robe from the body of the Grand Shaman and draping it over the princess’s nakedness. He snatched her up and carried her out, feeling the warmth and softness of her supple young body against his own.

An hour later, well beyond the reach of pursuit, they reined in their horses and examined the branching roads. Conan looked up at the stars, pondered, and pointed. “This way!”

Juma wrinkled his brow. “North?”

“Aye, to Hyrkania.” Conan laughed. “Have you forgotten that we still have this girl to deliver to her bridegroom?”

Juma’s brow wrinkled with greater puzzlement than before, seeing how Zosara’s slim, white arms were wound around his comrade’s neck and how her small head was nestled contentedly against his mighty shoulder. To her bridegroom? He shook his head; never would he understand the ways of Cimmerians. But he followed Conan’s lead and turned his steed toward the mighty Talakma Mountains, which rose like a wall to sunder the weird land of Mem from the windy steppes of Hyrkania.

A month later, they rode into the camp of Kujula, the Great Khan of the Kuigar nomads. Their appearance was entirely different from what it had been when they fled from Shamballah. In the villages on the southern slopes of the Talakmas, they had traded the links from the golden chains that still dangled from Zosara’s wrists and ankles for clothing suitable to snowy mountain passes and gusty plains. They wore fur caps, sheepskin coats, baggy trousers of coarse wool, and stout boots.

When they presented Zosara to her black-bearded bridegroom, the khan feasted and praised and rewarded them. After a carousal that lasted for several days, he sent them back to Turan loaded with gifts of gold.

When they were well away from Khan Kujula’s camp, Juma said to his friend: “That was a fine girl. I wonder you didn’t keep her for yourself. She liked you, too.”

Conan grinned. “Aye, she did. But I’m not ready to settle down yet. And Zosara will be happier with Kujula’s jewels and soft cushions than she would be with me, galloping about the steppes and being roasted, frozen, and chased by wolves or hostile warriors.” He chuckled. “Besides, though the Great Khan doesn’t know it, his heir is already on the way.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me, just before we parted.”

Juma made clicking sounds from his native tongue. “Well, I will never, never underestimate a Cimmerian again!”

6. THE CURSE OF THE MONOLITH

The sheer cliffs of dark stone closed about Conan the Cimmerian like the sides of a trap. He did not like the way their jagged peaks loomed against the few faint stars, which glittered like the eyes of spiders down upon the small camp on the flat floor of the valley. Neither did he like the chill, uneasy wind that whistled across the stony heights and prowled about the campfire. It caused the flames to lean and flicker, sending monstrous black shadows writhing across the rough stone walls of the nearer valley side.

On the other side of the camp, colossal redwoods, which had been old when Atlantis sank beneath the waves eight thousand years before, rose amid thickets of bamboo and clumps of rhododendron. A small stream meandered out of the woods, murmured past the camp, and wandered off into the forest again. Overhead, a layer of haze or high fog drifted across the tops of the cliffs, drowning the light of the fainter stars and making the brighter ones seem to weep.

Something about this place, thought Conan, stank of fear and of death. He could almost smell the acrid odor of terror on the breeze. The horses felt it too. They nickered plaintively, pawed the earth, and rolled white eyeballs at the dark beyond the circle of the fire. So was Conan, the barbarian warrior from the bleak hills of Cimmeria. Like his, their senses were more delicately turned to the aura of evil than were the senses of city-bred men like the Turanian troopers he had led into this deserted vale.

The soldiers sat about the fire, sharing the last of this night’s ration of wine from goatskin bags. Some laughed and boasted of the amorous feats they would do in the silken bagnios of Aghrapur upon their return. Others, weary from a long day’s hard ride, sat silently, staring at the fire and yawning. Soon they would settle down for the night, rolled in their heavy cloaks. With their heads pillowed on saddlebags, they would lie in a loose circle about the hissing fire, while two of their number stood guard with their powerful Hyrkanian bows strung and ready.

They sensed nothing of the sinister force that hovered about the valley.

Standing with his back to the nearest of the giant redwoods, Conan wrapped his cloak more closely about him against the dank breeze from the heights. Although his troopers were well-built men of good size, he towered half a head over the tallest of them, while his enormous breadth of shoulder made them seem puny by comparison. His square cut black mane escaped from below the edges of his spired, turban-wound helmet, and the deepset blue eyes in his dark, scarred face caught glints of red from the firelight.

Sunk in one of his fits of melancholy gloom, Conan silently cursed King Yildiz, the well-meaning but weak Turanian monarch who had sent him on this ill-omened mission. Over a year had passed since he had taken the oath of allegiance to the king of Turan. Six months before, he had been lucky enough to earn this king’s favor; with the help of a fellow-mercenary, Juma the Kushite, he had rescued Yildiz’s daughter Zosara from the mad god-king of Meru. He had brought the princess, more or less intact, to her affianced bridegroom, Khan Kujala of the nomadic Kuigar horde.

When Conan returned to Yildiz’s glittering capital of Aghrapur, he had found the monarch generous enough in his gratitude. Both he and Juma had been raised to captain. But, whereas Juma had obtained a coveted post in the Royal Guard, Conan had been rewarded with yet another arduous, perilous mission. Now, as he recalled these events, he sourly contemplated the fruits of success.

Yildiz had entrusted the Cimmerian giant with a letter to King Shu of Kusan, a minor kingdom in western Khitai. At the head of forty veterans, Conan had accomplished the immense journey. He had traversed hundreds of leagues of bleak Hyrkanian steppe and skirted the foothills of the towering Talakma Mountains. He had threaded his way through the windy deserts and swampy jungles bordering the mysterious realm of Khitai, the easternmost land of which the men of the West had heard.

Arrived in Kusan at last, Conan had found the venerable and philosophical King Shu a splendid host. While Conan and his warriors were plied with exotic food and drink and furnished with willing concubines, the king and his advisers decided to accepts King Yildiz’s offer of a treaty of friendship and trade. So the wise old king had handed Conan a gorgeous scroll of gilded silk. Thereon were inscribed, in the writhing ideographs of Khitai and the gracefully slanted characters of Hyrkania, the formal replies and felicitations of the Khitan king.

Besides a silken purse full of Khitan gold, King Shu had also furnished Conan with a high noble of his court, to guide them as far as the western borders of Khitai. But Conan had not liked this guide, this Duke Feng.

The Khitan was a slim, dainty, foppish little man with a soft, lisping voice. He wore fantastical silken garments, unsuited to rugged riding and camping, and drenched his exquisite person in heavy perfume. He never soiled his soft, long-nailed hands with any of the camp chores, but instead kept his two servants busy day and night ministering to his comfort and dignity.

Conan looked down upon the Khitan’s habits with a bard-bitten barbarian’s manly contempt. The duke’s slanting black eyes and purring voice reminded him of a cat, and he often told himself to watch this little princeling for treachery. On the other hand, he secretly envied the Khitan his exquisitely cultivated manners and easy charm. This fact led Conan to resent the duke even more; for, although his Turanian service had given Conan some slight polish, he was still at heart the blunt, boorish young barbarian. He would have to be careful of this sly little Duke Feng.

“Do I disturb the profound meditations of the nobly born commander?”, purred a soft voice.

Conan started and snatched at the hilt of his tulwar before he recognized the person of Duke Feng, wrapped to the lip in a voluminous cloak of pea-green velvet. Conan started to growl a contemptuous curse. Then, remembering his ambassadorial duties, he turned the oath into a formal welcome that sounded unconvincing even in his own ears.

“Perhaps the princely captain is unable to sleep?” murmured Feng, appearing not to notice Conan’s ungraciousness. Feng spoke fluent Hyrkanian. This was one reason for his having been dispatched to guide Conan’s troop, for Conan’s command of the singsong Khitan tongue was little more than a smattering. Feng continued:

“This person is so fortunate as to possess a sovereign remedy for sleeplessness. A gifted apothecary concocted it for me from an ancient recipe: a decoction of lily buds ground into cinnamon and spiced with poppy seeds …”

“No, nothing,” growled Conan. “I thank you, Duke, but it’s something about this accursed place. Some uncanny premonition keeps me wakeful when, after a long day’s ride, I should be as weary as a stripling after his first night’s bout of love.”

The duke’s features moved a trifle, as if he winced at Conan’s crudity or was it merely a flicker of the firelight? In any case, he suavely replied, “I think I understand the misgivings of the excellent commander. Nor are such disquieting emotions unusual in this ah this legend-fraught valley. Many men have perished here.”

“A battlefield, eh?” grunted Conan.

The duke’s narrow shoulders twitched beneath the green cloak. “Nay, nothing like that, my heroic Western friend. This spot lies near the tomb of an ancient king of my people: King Hsia of Kusan. He caused his entire royal guard to be beheaded and their heads buried with him, that their spirits should continue to serve him in the next world. The common superstition, however, avers that the ghosts of these guardsmen march in review, up and down this valley.” The soft voice dropped even lower. “Legend also states that a magnificent treasure of gold and precious jewels was buried with him; and this tale I believe to be true.”

Conan pricked up his ears. “Gold and gems, eh? Has it ever been found, this treasure?”

The Khitan surveyed Conan for a moment with an oblique, contemplative gaze. Then, as if having reached some private decision, he replied, “No, Lord Conan; for the precise location of the trove is not known save to one man.”

Conan’s interest was quite visible now. “To whom?” he demanded bluntly.

The Khitan smiled. “To my unworthy self, of course.”

“Crom and Erlik! If you’ve known where this loot was hidden, why haven’t you dug it up ere now?”

“My people are haunted by superstitious fears of a curse laid upon the site of the old king’s tomb, which is marked by a monolith of dark stone. Hence I have never been able to persuade anyone to assist me in seizing the treasure, whose hiding place I alone know.”

“Why couldn’t you do it all by yourself?”

Feng spread his small, long-nailed hands. “I needed a trustworthy assistant to guard my back against stealthy foe, human or animal, that might approach whilst I was rapt in contemplation of the booty. Moreover, a certain amount of digging and lifting and prying will be required. A gentleman like me lacks the thews for such crude, physical efforts.

“Now harken, gallant sir! This person led the honorable commander through this valley, not by happenstance but by design. When I heard that the Son of Heaven wished me to accompany the brave captain westward, I seized upon the proposal with alacrity. This commission came as a veritable gift from the divine officials in Heaven, for Your Lordship possesses the musculature of three ordinary men. And, being a Western-born foreigner, you naturally do not share the superstitious terrors of us of Kusan. Am I correct in my assumption?”

Conan grunted. “I fear neither god, man, nor devil, and least of all the ghost of a long-dead king. Speak on, Lord Feng.”

The duke sidled closer, his voice dropping to a scarcely audible whisper. “Then, here is my plan. As I have stated, this person guided you hither because I thought you might be he whom I have sought. The task will be light for one of your strength, and my baggage includes tools for excavation. Let us go upon the instant, and within an hour we shall be richer than either of us has dreamed!”

Feng’s seductive, purring whisper awoke the lust for loot in Conan’s barbaric heart, but a residue of caution restrained the Cimmerian from immediate assent.

“Why not rouse a squad of troopers to aid us?” he grumbled. “Or your servants? Surely we shall need help in bringing the plunder back to camp!”

Feng shook his sleek head. “Not so, honorable ally! The treasure consists of two small golden caskets of virgin gold, each packed with exceedingly rare and precious gems. We can each carry the fortune of a princedom, and why share this treasure with others? Since the secret is mine alone, I am naturally entitled to half. Then, if you are so lavish as to divide your half amongst your forty warriors …well, that is for you to decide.”

It took no more urging to persuade Conan to Duke Feng’s scheme. The pay of King Yildiz’s soldiers was meager and usually in arrears. Conan’s recompense for his arduous Turanian service to date had been many empty words of honor and precious little hard coin.

“I go to fetch the digging implements,” murmured Feng. “We should leave the camp separately, so as not to arouse suspicion. Whilst I unpack the utensils, you shall don your coat of mail and your arms.”

Conan frowned. “Why should I need armor, just to dig up a chest?”

“Oh, excellent sir! There are many dangers in these hills. Here roam the terrible tiger, the fierce leopard, the churlish bear, and the irascible wild bull, not to mention wandering bands of primitive hunters. Since a Khitan gentleman is not trained in the use of arms, your mighty self must be prepared to fight for two. Believe me, noble captain, I know whereof I speak!”

“Oh, all right,” grumbled Conan.

“Excellent! I knew that so superior a mind as yours would see the force of my arguments. And now we part, to meet again at the foot of the valley at moonrise. That should occur about one double hour hence, which will give us ample time for our rendezvous.”

The night grew darker and the wind, colder. All the eery premonitions of danger, which Conan had experience since first entering this forsaken vale at sundown, returned in full force.

As he walked silently beside the diminutive Khitan, he cast wary glances into the darkness. The steep rock walls on either side narrowed until there was hardly room to walk between the cliffside and the banks of the stream which gurgled out of the valley at their feet.

Behind them, a glow appeared in the misty sky where the heads of the cliffs thrust blackly up against the firmament. This glow grew stronger and became a pearly opalescence. The walls of the valley fell away on either hand, and the two men found themselves treading a grassy sward that spread out on both sides. The stream angled off to the right and, gurgling, curved out of sight between banks clustered with ferns.

As they issued from the valley, the half moon rose over the cliffs behind them. In the misty air, it looked as if the viewer were seeing it from under water. The wan, illusive light of this moon shone upon a small, rounded hill, which rose out of the sward directly before them. Beyond it, steep-sided, forest-crested hills stood up blackly in the watery moonlight.

As the moon cast a powdering of silver over the hill before them, Conan forgot his premonitions. For here rose the monolith of which Feng had spoken. It was a smooth, dully glistening shaft of dark stone, which rose from the top of the hill and soared up until it pierced the layer of mist that overhung the land. The top of the shaft appeared as a mere blur.

Here, then, was the tomb of the long-dead King Hsia, just as Feng had foretold. The treasure must be buried either directly beneath it or to one side. They would soon find out which.

With Feng’s crowbar and shovel on his shoulder, Conan pushed forcefully through a clump of tough, elastic rhododendron bushes and started up the hill. He paused to give his small companion a hand up. After a brief scramble, they gained the top of the slope.

Before them, the shaft rose from the center of thinly convex surface of the hilltop. The hill, thought Conan, was probably an artificial mound, such as were sometimes piled up over the remains of great chiefs in his own country. If the treasure were at the bottom of such a pile, it would take more than one night’s digging to uncover it …

With a startled oath, Conan clutched at his shovel and crowbar. Some invisible force had seized upon them and pulled them toward the shaft. He leaned away from the shaft, his powerful muscles bulging under his mail shirt. Inch by inch, however, the force dragged him toward the monolith. When he saw that he would be drawn against the shaft willy-nilly, he let go of the tools, which flew to the stone. They struck it with a loud double clank and stuck fast to it. But releasing the tools did not free Conan from the attraction of the monument, which now pulled on his mail shirt as powerfully as it had on the shovel and the crowbar. Staggering and cursing, Conan was slammed against the monolith with crushing force. His back was pinned to the shaft, as were his upper arms where the short sleeves of the mail shirt covered them. So was his head inside the spired Turanian helmet, and so was the scabbarded sword at his waist.

Conan struggled to tear himself free but found that he could not. It was as if unseen chains bound him securely to the column of dark stone.

“What devil’s trick is this, you treacherous dog?” he ground out.

Smiling and imperturbable, Feng strolled up to where Conan stood pinned against the pillar. Seemingly impervious to the mysterious force, the Khitan took a silken scarf from one of the baggy sleeves of his silken coat. He waited until Conan opened his mouth to bellow for help, then adroitly jammed a bunch of the silk into Conan’s mouth. While Conan gagged and chewed on the cloth, the little man knotted the scarf securely around Conan’s head. At last Conan stood, panting but silent, glaring venomously down into the courteous smile of the little duke.

“Forgive the ruse, O noble savage!” lisped Feng. “It was needful that this person concoct some tale to appeal to your primitive lust for gold, in order to allure you hither alone.”

Conan’s eyes blazed with volcanic fury as he hurled all the might of his powerful body against the invisible bonds that held him against the monolith. It did no good; he was helpless. Sweat trickled down his brow and soaked the cotton haqueton beneath his mail. He tried to shout, but only grunts and gurgles came forth.

“Since, my dear captain, your life approaches its predestined end,” continued Feng, “it would be impolite of me not to explain my actions, so that your lowly spirit may journey to whatever hell the gods of the barbarians have prepared for it in full knowledge of the causes of your downfall. Know that the court of his amiable but foolish highness, the king of Kusan, is divided between two parties. One of these, that of the White Peacock, welcomes contact with the barbarians of the West. The other, that of the Golden Pheasant, abominates all association with those animals; and I, of course, am one of the selfless patriots of the Golden Pheasant. Willingly would I give my life to bring your so-called embassy to destruction, lest contact with your barbarous masters contaminate our pure culture and upset our divinely ordained social system.

“Happily, such an extreme measure seems unnecessary. For I have you, the leaser of his band of foreign devils, and there around your neck hangs the treaty the Son of Heaven signed with your uncouth heathen king.”

The little duke pulled out from under Conan’s mail shirt the ivory tube containing the documents. HE unclasped the chain that secured it around Conan’s neck and tucked it into one of his voluminous sleeves, adding with a malicious smile, “As for the force that holds you prisoner, I will not attempt to explain its subtle nature to your childish wits. Suffice it to explain that the substance whereof this monolith was hewn has the curious property of attracting iron and steel with irresistible force. So fear not; it is no unholy magic that holds you captive.”

Conan was little heartened by this news. He had once seen a conjuror in Aghrapur pick up nails with a piece of dark-red stone and supposed that the force that held him was of the same sort. But, since he had never heard of magnetism, it was all equally magic as far as he was concerned.

“Lest you entertain false hopes of rescue by your men,” Feng went on, “I have thought of that, also. In these hills dwell the Jagas, a primitive headhunting tribe. Attracted by your campfire, they will assemble at the ends of the valley and rush your camp at dawn. It is their invariable procedure.

“By that time I shall, I hope, be far away. If they capture me, too well, a man must die some time, and I trust I shall do so with the dignity and decorum befitting one of my rank and culture. My head would make a delightful ornament in a Jaga hut, I am sure.

“And so, my good barbarian, farewell. You will forgive this person for turning his back upon you during your last moments. For your demise is a pity in a way, and I should not enjoy witnessing it. Had you had the advantages of a Khitan upbringing, you would have mad an admirable servant say, a bodyguard for me. But things are as they are.”

After a mocking bow of farewell, the Khitan withdrew to the lower slope of the hill. Conan wondered if the Duke’s plan was to leave him trapped against the shaft until he perished of starvation and thirst. If his men marked his absence before dawn, they might look for him. But then, since he had stolen out of the camp without leaving word of his going, they would not know whether to be alarmed by his absence. If he could only get word to them, they would scour the countryside for him and make short work of the treacherous little duke. But how to get word?

Again he threw his massive strength against the force that held him crushed against the column, but to no avail. He could move his lower legs and arms and even turn his head somewhat from side to side. But his body was firmly gripped by the iron mail that clothed it.

Now the moon brightened. Conan observed that, about his feet and elsewhere around the base of the monument, grisly remains of other victims were scattered. Human bones and teeth were heaped like old rubbish; he must have trodden upon them when the mysterious force pulled him up against the shaft.

In the stronger light, Conan was disquieted to see that these remains were peculiarly discolored. A closer look showed that the bones seemed to have been eaten away here and there, as if some corrosive fluid had dissolved their smooth surfaces to expose the spongy structure beneath.

He turned his head from side to side, seeking some means of escape. The words of the smooth-tongued Khitan seemed to be true, but now he could discern pieces of iron held against the curiously stained and discolored stone of the column by the invisible force. To his left he sighted the shovel, the crowbar, and the rusty bowl of a helmet, while on the other side a time-eaten dagger was stuck against the stone. Yet once more he hurled his strength against this impalpable force …

From below sounded an eery piping sound a mocking, maddening tune. Straining his eyes through the fickle moonlight, Conan saw that Feng had not left the scene after all. Instead, the duke was sitting on the grass on the side of the hill, near its base.

He had drawn a curious flute from his capacious garments and was playing upon it.

Through the shrill piping, a faint, squashy sound reached Conan’s ears. It seemed to come from above. The muscles of Conan’s bullneck stood out as he twisted his head to look upward; the spired Turanian helmet grated against the stone as he moved. Then the blood froze in his veins.

The mist that had obscured the top of the pylon was gone. The rising half moon shone on and through and amorphous thing, which squatted obscenely on the summit of the column. It was like a huge lump of quivering, semi-translucent jelly and it lived. Life throbbing, bloated life pulsed within it. The moonlight glistened wetly upon it as it beat like a huge, living heart.

As Conan, frozen with horror, watched, the dweller on the top of the monolith sent a trickle of jelly groping down the shaft toward him. The slippery pseudopod slithered over the smooth surface of the stone. Conan began to understand the source of the stains that discolored the face of the monolith. The wind had changed, and a vagrant down-draft wafted a sickening stench to Conan’s nostrils. Now he knew why the bones at the base of the shaft bore that oddly eaten appearance. With a dread that almost unmanned him, he understood that the jellylike thing exuded a digestive fluid, by means of which it consumed its prey. He wondered how many men, in ages past had stood in his place, bound helplessly to the pillar and awaiting the searing caress of the abomination now descending toward him.

Perhaps Feng’s weird piping summoned it, or perhaps the odor of living flesh called it to feast. Whatever the cause, it had begun a slow, inching progress down the side of the shaft toward his face. The wet jelly sucked and slobbered as it slithered slowly toward him.

Despair gave new strength to his cramped, tired muscles. He threw himself from side to side, striving with every last ounce of strength to break the grip of the mysterious force. To his surprise, he found that, in one of his lunges, he slid to one side, partway around the column.

So the grip that held him did not forbid all movement! This gave him food for thought, though he knew that he could not long thus elude the monster of living jelly.

Something prodded his mailed side. Looking down, he saw the rust-eaten dagger he had glimpsed before. His movement sideways had brought the hilt of the weapon against his ribs.

His upper arm was still clamped against the stone by the sleeve of his mail shirt, but his forearm and hand were free. Could he bend his arm far enough to clasp the haft of the dagger?

He strained, inching his hand along the stone. The mail of his arm scraped slowly over the surface; sweat trickled into his eyes. Bit by bit, his straining arm moved toward the handle of the dagger. The taunting tune of Feng’s flute sang maddeningly in his ears, while the ungodly stench of the slime-thing filled his nostrils.

His hand touched the dagger, and in an instant he held the hilt fast. But, as he strained it away from the shaft, the rust-eaten blade broke with a sharp ping. Rolling his eyes downward, he saw that about two thirds of the blade, from the tapering point back, had broken off and lay flat against the stone. The remaining third still projected from the hilt. Since there was now less iron in the dagger for the shaft to attract, Conan was able, by a muscle-bulging effort, to tear the stump of the weapon away from the shaft.

A glance showed him that, although most of the blade was lost to him, the stump still had a couple of apparently sharp edges.

With his muscles quivering from the effort of holding the implement away from the stone, he brought one of these edges up against the leathern thong that bound the two halves of the mail shirt together. Carefully, he began to saw the tough rawhide with the rusty blade.

Every movement was agony. The torment of suspense grew unbearable. His hand, bent into an uncomfortable, twisted position, ached and grew numb. The ancient blade was notched, thin, and brittle; a hasty motion might break it, leaving him helpless. Stroke after stroke he sawed up and down, with exquisite caution. The stench of the creature grew stronger and the sucking sounds of its progress, louder.

Then Conan felt the thong snap. The next instant, he hurled his full strength against the magnetic force that imprisoned him. The thong unraveled through the loopholes in the mail shirt, until one whole side of the shirt was open. His shoulder and half an arm came out through the opening.

Then he felt a light blow on the head. The stench became overpowering, and his unseen assailant from above pushed this way and that against his helmet. Conan knew that a jellylike tendril had reached his helmet and was groping over its surface, seeking flesh. Any instant, the corrosive stuff would seep down over his face …

Frantically, he pulled his arm out of the sleeve of the unlaced side of the mail shirt. With his free hand, he unbuckled his sword belt and the chin strap of his helmet. Then he tore himself loose altogether form the deadly constriction of the mail, leaving his tulwar and his armor flattened against the stone.

He staggered free of the column and stood for an instant on trembling legs. The moonlit world swam before his eyes.

Glancing back, he saw that the jelly-beast had now engulfed his helmet. Baffled in its quest for flesh, it was sending more pseudopods down and outward, wavering and questing in the watery light.

Down the slope, the demoniac piping continued. Feng sat cross-legged on the grass of the slope, tweedling away on his flute as if absorbed in some inhuman ecstasy.

Conan ripped off and threw away the gag. He pounced like a striking leopard. He came down, clutching hands first, upon the little duke; the pair rolled down the rest of the slope in a tangle of silken robe and thrashing limbs. A blow to the side of the head subdued Feng’s struggles. Conan groped into the Khitan’s wide sleeves and tore out the ivory cylinder containing the documents.

Then Conan lurched back up the hill, dragging Feng after him. As he reached the level section around the base of the monolith, he heaved Feng into the air over his head. Seeing what was happening to him, the duke uttered one high, thin scream as Conan hurled him at the shaft. The Khitan struck the column with a thud and slid unconscious to the ground at its base. The blow was merciful, for the duke never felt the slimy touch of the haunter of the monolith as the glassy tentacles reached his face.

For a moment, Conan grimly watched. Feng’s features blurred as the rippling jelly slid over them. Then the flesh faded away, and the skull and teeth showed through in a ghastly grin. The abomination flushed pink as it fed.

Conan strode back to camp on stiff legs. Behind him, like a giant’s torch, the monolith stood against the sky, wrapped in smoky, scarlet flames. It had been the work of moments only to strike fire into dry tinder with his flint and steel. He had watched with grim satisfaction as the oily surface of the slime-monster ignited and blazed as it squirmed in voiceless agony. Let them both burn, he thought: the half-digested corpse of that treacherous dog and his loathsome pet!

As Conan neared the camp, he saw that the last of his warriors had not yet retired. Instead, several stood staring curiously at the distant firelight. As he appeared, they turned upon him, crying out: “Where have you been, Captain? What is that blaze? Where is the duke?”

“Ho, you gaping oafs!” he roared as he strode into the firelight. “Wake the boys and saddle up to run for it. The Jaga headhunters caught us, and they’ll be here any time. They got the duke, but I broke free. Khusro! Mulai! Hop to it, if you do not want your heads hung up in their devil huts! And I hope to Crom you’ve left me some of that wine!”

7. THE BLOODSTAINED GOD

Conan continues his service as a soldier of Turan for a total period of about two years, traveling widely and learning the elements of organized warfare. As usual, trouble is his bedfellow. After one of his more unruly episodes said to have involved the mistress of the commander of the cavalry division in which he was serving, Conan finds it expedient to desert from the Turanian army. Rumors of treasure send him seeking for loot in the Kezankian Mountains, along the eastern borders of Zamora.

It was dark as the Pit in that stinking alley down which Conan of Cimmeria groped on a quest as blind as the darkness around him. Had there been anyone to witness, they would have seen a tall and enormously powerful man clad in a flowing Zuagir khilat, over that a mail shirt of fine steel mesh, and over that a Zuagir cloak of camel’s hair. His mane of black hair and his broad, somber, youthful face, bronzed by the desert sun, were hidden by the Zuagir kaffia.

A sharp, pain-edged cry smote his ears.

Such cries were not uncommon in the twisting alleys of Arenjun, the City of Thieves, and no cautious or timid man would think of interfering in an affair that was none of his business. But Conan was neither cautious nor timid. His ever-lively curiosity would not let him pass by a cry for help; besides, he was searching for certain men, and the disturbance might be a clue to their whereabouts.

Obeying his quick barbarian instincts, he turned toward a beam of light that lanced the darkness close at hand. An instant later he peered through a crack in the close-drawn shutters of a window in a thick stone wall.

He was looking into a spacious room hung with velvet tapestries and littered with costly rugs and couches. About one of these couches a group of men clustered, six brawny Zamorian bravos and two more who eluded identification. On that couch another man was stretched out, a Kezankian tribesman naked to the waist. Though he was a powerful man, a ruffian as muscular as himself gripped each wrist and ankle. Between the four of them they had him spread-eagled on the couch, unable to move, though the muscles stood out in quivering knots on his limbs and shoulders. His eyes gleamed redly and his broad chest glistened with sweat. As Conan looked, a supple man in a turban of red silk lifted a glowing coal from a smoking brazier with a pair of tongs and poised it over the quivering breast, already scarred from similar torture.

Another man, taller than the one with the red turban, snarled a question Conan could not understand. The Kezankian shook his head violently and spat savagely at the questioner. The red-hot coal dropped full on the hairy breast, wrenching an inhuman bellow from the sufferer. In that instant Conan launched his full weight against the shutters.

The Cimmerian’s action was not so impulsive as it looked. For his present purposes he needed a friend among the hillmen of the Kezankian range, a people notoriously hostile to all strangers. And here was a chance to get one. The shutters splintered inward with a crash, and he hit the floor inside feet-first, scimitar in one hand and Zuagir sword-knife in the other. The torturers whirled and yelped in astonishment.

They saw a tall, massive figure clad in the garments of a Zuagir, with a fold of his flowing kaffia drawn about his face. Over his mask his eyes blazed a volcanic blue. For an instant the scene held, frozen, then melted into ferocious action.

The man in the red turban snapped a quick word, and a hairy giant lunged to meet the oncoming intruder. The Zamorian held a three-foot sword low, and as he charged he ripped murderously upward. But the down-lashing scimitar met the rising wrist. The hand, still gripping the knife, flew from that wrist in a shower of blood, and the long narrow blade in Conan’s left hand sliced through the man’s throat, choking the grunt of agony.

Over the crumpling corpse the Cimmerian leaped at Red Turban and his tall companion. Red Turban drew a knife, the tall man a saber.

“Cut him down, Jillad!” snarled Red Turban, retreating before the Cimmerian’s impetuous onslaught “Zal, help here!”

The man called Jillad parried Conan’s slash and cut back. Conan avoided the swipe with a shift that would have shamed the leap of a starving panther, and the same movement brought him within reach of Red Turban’s knife. The knife shot out; the point struck Conan’s side but failed to pierce the shirt of black ring mail. Red Turban leaped back, so narrowly avoiding Conan’s knife that the lean blade slit his silken vest and the skin beneath. He tripped over a stool and fell sprawling, but before Conan could follow up his advantage, Jillad was pressing him, raining blows with his saber.

As he parried, the Cimmerian saw that the man called Zal was advancing with a heavy poleax, while Red Turban was scrambling to his feet.

Conan did not wait to be surrounded. A swipe of his scimitar drove Jillad back on his heels. Then, as Zal raised the poleax, Conan darted in under the blow, and the next instant Zal was down, writhing in his own blood and entrails. Conan leaped for the men who still gripped the prisoner. They let go of the man, shouting and drawing their tulwars. One struck at the Kezankian, who evaded the blow by rolling off the bench. Then Conan was between him and them. He retreated before their blows, snarling at the Kezankian:

“Get out! Ahead of me! Quickly!”

“Dogs!” screamed Red Turban. “Don’t let them escape!”

“Come and taste of death yourself, dog!” Conan laughed wildly, speaking Zamorian with a barbarous accent.

The Kezankian, weak from torture, slid back a bolt and threw open a door giving upon a small court. He stumbled across the court while behind him Conan faced his tormentors in the doorway, where in the confined space their very numbers hindered them. He laughed and cursed them as he parried and thrust. Red Turban was dancing behind the mob, shrieking curses. Conan’s scimitar licked out like the tongue of a cobra, and a Zamorian shrieked and fell, clutching his belly. Jillad, lunging, tripped over him and fell. Before the cursing, squirming figures that jammed the doorway could untangle themselves, Conan turned and ran across the yard toward a wall over which the Kezankian had already disappeared.

Sheathing his weapons, Conan leaped and caught the coping, swung himself up, and had one glimpse of the black, winding street outside. Then something smashed against his head, and limply he toppled from the wall into the shadowy street below.

The tiny glow of a taper in his face roused Conan. He sat up, blinking and cursing, and groped for his sword. Then the light was blown out and a voice spoke in the darkness:

“Be at ease, Conan of Cimmeria. I am your friend.”

“Who in Crom’s name are you?” demanded Conan. He had found his scimitar on the ground nearby, and he stealthily gathered his legs under him for a spring. He was in the street at the foot of the wall from which he had fallen, and the other man was but a dim bulk looming over him in the shadowy starlight.

“Your friend,” repeated the other in a soft Iranistanian accent. “Call me Sassan.”

Conan rose, scimitar in hand. The Iranistani extended something toward him. Conan caught the glint of steel in the starlight, but before he could strike he saw that it was his own knife, hilt first.

“You’re as suspicious as a starving wolf, Conan,” laughed Sassan. “But save your steel for your enemies.”

“Where are they?” Conan took the knife.

“Gone. Into the mountains, on the trail of the bloodstained god.”

Conan started and caught Sassan’s khilat in an iron grip and glared into the man’s dark eyes, mocking and mysterious in the starlight.

“Damn you, what know you of the bloodstained god?” Conan’s knife touched the Iranistani’s side below his ribs.

“I know this,” said Sassan. “You came to Arenjun following thieves who stole from you the map of a treasure greater than Yildiz’s hoard. I, too, came seeking something. I was hiding nearby, watching through a hole in the wall, when you burst into the room where the Kezankian was being tortured. How did you know it was they who stole your map?”

“I didn’t,” muttered Conan. “I heard a man cry out and thought it a good idea to interfere. If I had known they were the men I sought! How much do you know?”

“This much. Hidden in the mountains near here is an ancient temple which the hill folk fear to enter. It is said to go back to Pre-Cataclysmic times, though the wise men disagree as to whether it is Grondarian or was built by the unknown prehuman folk who ruled the Hyrkanians just after the Cataclysm.

“The Kezankians forbid the region to all outsiders, but a Nemedian named Ostorio did find the temple. He entered it and discovered a golden idol crusted with red jewels, which he called the bloodstained god. He could not bring it away with him, as it was bigger than a man, but he made a map, intending to return. Although he got safely away, he was stabbed by some ruffian in Shadizar and died there. Before he died he gave the map to you, Conan.”

“Well?” demanded Conan grimly. The house behind him was dark and still.

“The map was stolen,” said Sassan. “By whom, you know.”

“I didn’t know at the time,” growled Conan. “Later I learned the thieves were Zyras, a Corinthian, and Arshak, a disinherited Turanian prince. Some skulking servant spied on Ostorio as he lay dying and told them. Though I knew neither by sight, I traced them to this city. Tonight I learned they were hiding in this alley. I was blundering about looking for a clue when I stumbled into that brawl.”

“You fought them in ignorance!” said Sassan. “The Kezankian was Rustum, a spy of the Kezankian chieftain Keraspa. They lured him into their house and were singeing him to make him tell them of the secret trails through the mountains. You know the rest.”

“All except what happened when I climbed the wall.”

“Somebody threw a stool at you and hit your head. When you fell outside the wall they paid you no more heed, either thinking you were dead or not knowing you in your mask. They chased the Kezankian, but whether they caught him I know not. Soon they returned, saddled up, and rode like madmen westward, leaving the dead where they fell. I came to see who you were and recognized you.”

“Then the man in the red turban was Arshak,” muttered Conan. “But where was Zyras?”

“Disguised as a Turanian, the man they called Jillad.”

“Oh. Well then?” growled Conan.

“Like you, I want the red god, even though of all the men who have sought it down the centuries only Ostorio escaped with his life. There is supposed to be some mysterious curse on would-be plunderers, “

“What know you of that?” said Conan, sharply.

Sassan shrugged. “Nothing much. The folk of Kezankia speak of a doom that the god inflicts on those who raise covetous hands against him, but I’m no superstitious fool. You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Of course not!” As a matter of fact Conan was. Though he feared no man or beast, the supernatural filled his barbarian’s mind with atavistic terrors. Still, he did not care to admit the fact. “What have you in mind?”

“Why, only that neither of us can fight Zyras’ whole band alone, but together we can follow them and take the idol from them. What do you say?”

“Aye, I’ll do it. But I’ll kill you like a dog if you try any tricks!”

Sassan laughed. “I know you would, so you can trust me. Come; I have horses waiting.”

The Iranistani led the way through twisting streets overhung with latticed balconies and along stinking alleys until he stopped at the lamplit door of a courtyard. At his knock, a bearded face appeared at the wicket. After some muttered words, the gate opened. Sassan strode in, Conan following suspiciously. But the horses were there, and a word from the keeper of the serai set sleepy servants to saddling them and filling the saddle pouches with food.

Soon Conan and Sassan were riding together out of the west gate, perfunctorily challenged by the sleepy guard. Sassan was portly but muscular, with a broad, shrewd face and dark, alert eyes. He bore a horseman’s lance over his shoulder and handled his weapons with the expertness of practice. Conan did not doubt that in a pinch he would fight with cunning and courage. Conan also did not doubt that he could trust Sassan to play fair just so long as the alliance was to his advantage, and to murder his partner at the first opportunity when it became expedient to do so in order to keep all the treasure himself.

Dawn found them riding through the rugged defiles of the bare, brown, rocky Kezankian Mountains, separating the easternmost marches of Koth and Zamora from the Turanian steppes. Though both Koth and Zamora claimed the region, neither had been able to subdue it, and the town of Arenjun, perched on a steep-sided hill, had successfully withstood two sieges by the Turanian hordes from the east. The road branched and became fainter until Sassan confessed himself at a loss to know where they were.

“I’m still following their tracks,” grunted Conan. “If you cannot see them, I can.”

Hours passed, and signs of the recent passage of horses became clear. Conan said: “We’re closing on them, and they still outnumber us. Let us stay out of sight until they get the idol, then ambush them and take it from them.”

Sassan’s eyes gleamed. “Good! But let’s be wary; this is the country of Keraspa, who robs all he catches.”

Midafternoon found them still following the trace of an ancient, forgotten road. As they rode toward a narrow gorge, Sassan said:

“If that Kezankian got back to Keraspa, the Kezankians will be alert for strangers.”

They reined up as a lean, hawk-faced Kezankian rode out of the gorge with hand upraised. “Halt!” he cried. “By what leave do you ride in the land of Keraspa?”

“Careful,” muttered Conan. “They may be all around us.”

“Keraspa claims toll on travelers,” answered Sassan under his breath. “Maybe that is all this fellow wants.” Fumbling in his girdle, he said to the tribesman: “We are but poor travelers, glad to pay your brave chief’s toll. We ride alone.”

“Then who is that behind you?” demanded the Kezankian, nodding his head in the direction from which they had come.

Sassan half turned his head. Instantly the Kezankian whipped a dagger from his girdle and struck at the Iranistani.

Quick as he was, Conan was quicker. As the dagger darted at Sassan’s throat, Conan’s scimitar flashed and steel rang. The dagger whirled away, and with a snarl the Kezankian caught at his sword. Before he could pull the blade free, Conan struck again, cleaving turban and skull. The Kezankian’s horse neighed and reared, throwing the corpse headlong. Conan wrenched his own steed around.

“Ride for the gorge!” he yelled. “It’s an ambush!”

As the Kezankian tumbled to earth, there came the flat snap of bows and the whistle of arrows. Sassan’s horse leaped as an arrow struck it in the neck and bolted for the mouth of the defile. Conan felt an arrow tug at his sleeve as he struck in the spurs and fled after Sassan, who was unable to control his beast.

As they swept towards the mouth of the gorge, three horsemen rode out swinging broad-bladed tulwars. Sassan, abandoning his effort to check his maddened mount, drove his lance at the nearest. The spear transfixed the man and hurled him out of the saddle.

The next instant Conan was even with a second swordsman, who swung the heavy tulwar. The Cimmerian threw up his scimitar and the blades met with a crash as the horses came together breast to breast. Conan, rising in his stirrups, smote downwards with all his immense strength, beating down the tulwar and splitting the skull of the wielder. Then he was galloping up the gorge with arrows screeching past him. Sassan’s wounded horse stumbled and went down; the Iranistani leaped clear as it fell.

Conan pulled up, snarling: “Get up behind me!” Sassan, lance in hand, leaped up behind the saddle. A touch of the spurs, and the heavily-burdened horse set off down the gorge. Yells behind showed that the tribesmen were scampering to their hidden horses. A turn in the gorge muffled the noises.

“That Kezankian spy must have gotten back to Keraspa,” panted Sassan. “They want blood, not gold. Do you suppose they have wiped out Zyras?”

“He might have passed before they set up their ambush, or they might have been following him when they turned to trap us. I think he’s still ahead of us.”

A mile further on they heard faint sounds of pursuit. Then they came out into a natural bowl walled by sheer cliffs. From the midst of this bowl a slope led up to a bottleneck pass on the other side. As they neared this pass, Conan saw that a low stone wall closed the gut of the pass. Sassan yelled and jumped down from the horse as a flight of arrows screeched past. One struck the horse in the chest.

The beast lurched to a thundering fall, and Conan jumped clear and rolled behind a cluster of rocks, where Sassan had already taken cover. More arrows splintered against boulders or stuck quivering in the earth. The two adventurers looked at each other with sardonic humor.

“We’ve found Zyras!” said Sassan.

“In an instant,” laughed Conan, “they’ll rush us, and Keraspa will come up beehind us to close the trap.”

A taunting voice shouted: “Come out and get shot, curs! Who’s the Zuagir with you, Sassan? I thought I had brained him last night!”

“My name is Conan,” roared the Cimmerian.

After a moment of silence, Zyras shouted: “I might have known! Well, we have you now!”

“You’re in the same fix!” yelled Conan. “You heard the fighting back down the gorge?”

“Aye; we heard it when we stopped to water the horses. Who’s chasing you?”

“Keraspa and a hundred Kezankians! When we are dead, do you think he’ll let you go after you tortured one of his men?”

“You had better let us join you,” added Sassan.

“Is that the truth?” yelled Zyras, his turbaned head appearing over the wall.

“Are you deaf, man?” retorted Conan.

The gorge reverberated with yells and hoofbeats.

“Get in, quickly!” shouted Zyras. “Time enough to divide the idol if we get out of this alive.”

Conan and Sassan leaped up and ran up the slope to the wall, where hairy arms helped them over. Conan looked at his new allies: Zyras, grim and hard-eyed in his Turanian guise; Arshak, still dapper after leagues of riding; and three swarthy Zamorians who bared their teeth in greeting. Zyras and Arshak each wore a shirt of chain mail like those of Conan and Sassan.

The Kezankians, about a score of them, reined up as the bows of the Zamorians and Arshak sent arrows swishing among them. Some of them shot back; others whirled and rode back out of range to dismount, as the wall was too high to be carried by a mounted charge. One saddle was emptied and one wounded horse bolted back down the gorge with its rider.

“They must have been following us,” snarled Zyras. “Conan, you lied! That is no hundred men!”

“Enough to cut our throats,” said Conan, trying his sword. “And Keraspa can send for reinforcements whenever he likes.”

Zyras growled: “We have a chance behind this wall. I believe it was built by the same race that built the red god’s temple. Save your arrows for the rush.”

Covered by a continuous discharge of arrows from four of their number on the flanks, the rest of the Kezankians ran up the slope in a solid mass, those in front holding up light bucklers. Behind them Conan saw Keraspa’s red beard as the wily chief urged his men on.

“Shoot!” screamed Zyras. Arrows plunged into the mass of men and three writhing figures were left behind on the slope, but the rest came on, eyes glaring and blades glittering in hairy fists.

The defenders shot their last arrows into the mass and then rose up behind the wall, drawing steel. The mountaineers rolled up against the wall. Some tried to boost their fellows up to the top; others pushed small boulders up against the foot of the wall to provide steps. Along the barrier sounded the smash of bone-breaking blows, the rasp and slither of steel, the gasping oaths of dying men. Conan hewed the head from the body of a Kezankian, and beside him saw Sassan thrust his spear into the open mouth of another until the point came out the back of the man’s neck. A wild-eyed tribesman stabbed a long knife into the belly of one of the Zamorians. Into the gap left by the falling body the howling Kezankian lunged, hurling himself up and over the wall before Conan could stop him. The giant Cimmerian took a cut on his left arm and crushed in the man’s shoulder with a return blow.

Leaping over the body, he hewed into the men swarming up over the wall with no time to see how the fight was going on either side. Zyras was cursing in Corinthian and Arshak in Hyrkanian. Somebody screamed in mortal agony. A tribesman got a pair of gorilla-like hands on Conan’s thick neck, but the Cimmerian tensed his neck muscles and stabbed low with his knife again and again until with a moan the Kezankian released him and toppled from the wall.

Gasping for air, Conan looked about him, realizing that the pressure had slackened. The few remaining Kezankians were staggering down the slope, all streaming blood. Corpses lay piled deep at the foot of the wall. All three of the Zamorians were dead or dying, and Conan saw Arshak sitting with his back against the wall, his hands pressed to his body while blood seeped between his fingers. The prince’s lips were blue, but he achieved a ghastly smile.

“Born in a palace,” he whispered, “and dying behind a rock wall! No matter, it is fate. There is a curse on the treasure, all men who rode on the trail of the bloodstained god have died.” And he died.

Zyras, Conan, and Sassan glanced silently at one another: three grim tattered figures, all splashed with blood. All had taken minor wounds on their limbs, but their mail shirts had saved them from the death that had befallen their companions.

“I saw Keraspa sneaking off!” snarled Zyras. “He’ll make for his village and get the whole tribe on our trail. Let us make a race of it: get the idol and drag it out of the mountains before he catches us. There’s enough treasure for all.”

“True,” growled Conan. “But give me back my map before we start.”

Zyras opened his mouth to speak, and then saw that Sassan had picked up one of the Zamorians’ bows and had drawn an arrow on him. “Do as Conan tells you,” said the Iranistani.

Zyras shrugged and handed over a crumpled parchment “Curse you, I still deserve a third of the treasure!”

Conan glanced at the map and thrust it into his girdle. “All right; I’ll not hold a grudge. You’re a swine, but if you play fair with us we’ll do the same, eh, Sassan?”

Sassan nodded and gathered up a quiverful of arrows.

The horses of Zyras’ party were tied in the pass behind the wall. The three men mounted the best beasts and led the three others, up the canyon behind the pass. Night fell, but with Keraspa behind them they pushed recklessly on.

Conan watched his companions like a hawk. The most dangerous time would come when they had secured the golden statue and no longer needed each other’s help. Then Zyras and Sassan might conspire to murder Conan, or one of them might approach him with a plan to slay the third man. Tough and ruthless though the Cimmerian was, his barbaric code of honor would not let him be the first to try treachery.

He also wondered what it was that the maker of the map had tried to tell him just before he died. Death had come upon Ostorio in the midst of a description of the temple, with a gush of blood from his mouth. The Nemedian had been about to warn him of something, he thought, but of what?

Dawn broke as they came out of a narrow gorge into a steep-walled valley. The defile through which they had entered was the only way in. It came out upon a ledge thirty paces wide, with the cliff rising a bowshot above it on one side and falling away to an unmeasurable depth below. There seemed no way down into the mist-veiled depths of the valley far below. The men wasted few glances in this direction, for the sight ahead drove hunger and fatigue from their minds.

There on the ledge stood the temple, gleaming in the rising sun. It was carved out of the sheer rock of the cliff, its great portico facing them. The ledge led to its great bronzen door, green with age.

What race or culture it represented Conan did not try to guess. He unfolded the map and glanced at the notes on the margin, trying to discover a method of opening the door.

But Sassan slipped from his saddle and ran ahead of them, crying out in his greed.

“Fool!” grunted Zyras, swinging down from his horse. “Ostorio left a warning on the margin of the map; something about the god’s taking his toll.”

Sassan was pulling at the various ornaments and projections on the portal. They heard him cry out in triumph as it moved under his hands. Then his cry changed to a scream as the door, a ton of bronze, swayed outward and fell crashing, squashing the Iranistani like an insect. He was completely hidden by the great metal slab, from beneath which oozed streams of crimson.

Zyras shrugged. “I said he was a fool. Ostorio must have found some way to swing the door without releasing it from its hinges.”

One less knife in the back to watch for, thought Conan. “Those hinges are false,” he said, examining the mechanism at close range. “Ho! The door is rising back up again!”

The hinges were, as Conan had said, fakes. The door was actually mounted on a pair of swivels at the lower corners so that it could fall outward like a drawbridge. From each upper corner of the door a chain ran diagonally up, to disappear into a hole near the upper corner of the doorframe. Now, with a distant grinding sound, the chains had tautened and had started to pull the door back up into its former position.

Conan snatched up the lance that Sassan had dropped. Placing the butt in a hollow in the carvings of the inner surface of the door, he wedged the point into the corner of the door frame. The grinding sound ceased and the door stopped moving in a nine-tenths open position.

“That was clever, Conan,” said Zyras. “As the god has now had his toll, the way should be open.”

He stepped up on to the inner surface of the door and strode into the temple. Conan followed. They paused on the threshold and peered into the shadowy interior as they might have peered into a serpent’s lair. Silence held the ancient temple, broken only by the soft scuff of their boots.

They entered cautiously, blinking in the half-gloom. In the dimness, a blaze of crimson like the glow of a sunset smote their eyes. They saw the god, a thing of gold crusted with flaming gems.

The statue, a little bigger than life size, was in the form of a dwarfish man standing upright on great splay feet on a block of basalt. The statue faced the entrance, and on each side of it stood a great carven chair of dense black wood, inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl in a style unlike that of any living nation.

To the left of the statue, a few feet from the base of the pedestal, the floor of the temple was cleft from wall to wall by a chasm some fifteen feet wide. At some time, probably before the temple had been built, an earthquake had split the rock. Into that black abyss, ages ago, screaming victims had doubtless been hurled by hideous priests as sacrifices to the god. The walls were lofty and fantastically carved, the roof dim and shadowy above.

But the attention of the men was fixed on the idol. Though a brutish and repellant monstrosity, it represented wealth that made Conan’s brain swim.

“Crom and Ymir!” breathed Conan. “One could buy a kingdom with those rubies!”

“Too much to share with a lout of a barbarian,” panted Zyras.

These words, spoken half-unconsciously between the Corinthian’s clenched teeth, warned Conan. He ducked just as Zyras’ sword whistled towards his neck; the blade sliced a fold from his headdress. Cursing his own carelessness, Conan leaped back and drew his scimitar.

Zyras came on in a rush and Conan met him. Back and forth they fought before the leering idol, feet scuffing on the rock, blades rasping and ringing. Conan was larger than the Corinthian, but Zyras was strong, agile, and experienced, full of deadly tricks. Again and again Conan dodged death by a hair’s breadth.

Then Conan’s foot slipped on the smooth floor and his blade wavered. Zyras threw all his strength and speed into a lunge that would have driven his saber through Conan. But the Cimmerian was not so off balance as he looked. With the suppleness of a panther, he twisted his powerful body aside so that the long blade passed under his right armpit, plowing through his loose khilat. For an instant, the blade caught in the cloth. Zyras stabbed with the dagger in his left hand. The blade sank into Conan’s right arm, and at the same time the knife in Conan’s left drove through Zyras’ mail shirt, snapping the links, and plunged between Zyras’ ribs. Zyras screamed, gurgled, reeled back, and fell limply.

Conan dropped his weapons and knelt, ripping a strip of cloth from his robe for a bandage, to add to those he already wore. He bound up the wound, tying knots with fingers and teeth, and glanced at the bloodstained god leering down at him. Its gargoyle face seemed to gloat. Conan shivered as the superstitious fears of the barbarian ran down his spine.

Then he braced himself. The red god was his, but the problem was, how to get the thing away? If it were solid it would be much too heavy to move, but a tap of the butt of his knife assured him that it was hollow. He was pacing about, his head full of schemes for knocking one of the carven thrones apart to make a sledge, levering the god off its base, and hauling it out of the temple by means of the extra horses and the chains that worked the falling front door, when a voice made him whirl.

“Stand where you are!” It was a shout of triumph in the Kezankian dialect of Zamoria.

Conan saw two men in the doorway, each aiming at him a heavy double-curved bow of the Hyrkanian type. One was tall, lean, and red-bearded.

“Keraspa!” said Conan, reaching for the sword and the knife he had dropped.

The other man was a powerful fellow who seemed familiar.

“Stand back!” said the Kezankian chief. “You thought I had run away to my village, did you not? Well, I followed you all night, with the only one of my men not wounded.” His glance appraised the idol. “Had I known the temple contained such treasure I should have looted it long ago, despite the superstitions of my people. Rustum, pick up his sword and dagger.”

The man stared at the brazen hawk’s head that formed the pommel of Conan’s scimitar.

“Wait!” he cried. “This is he who saved me from torture in Arenjun! I know this blade!”

“Be silent!” snarled the chief. “The thief dies!”

“Nay! He saved my life! What have I ever had from you but hard tasks and scanty pay? I renounce my allegiance, you dog!”

Rustum stepped forward, raising Conan’s sword, but then Keraspa turned and released his arrow. The missile thudded into Rustum’s body. The tribesman shrieked and staggered back under the impact, across the floor of the temple, and over the edge of the chasm. His screams came up, fainter and fainter, until they could no longer be heard.

Quick as a striking snake, before the unarmed Conan could spring upon him, Keraspa whipped another arrow from his quiver and nocked it. Conan had taken one step in a tigerish rush that would have thrown him upon the chief anyway when, without the slightest warning, the ruby-crusted god stepped down from its pedestal with a heavy metallic sound and took one long stride towards Keraspa.

With a frightful scream, the chief released his arrow at the animated statue. The arrow struck the god’s shoulder and bounced high, turning over and over, and the idol’s long arms shot out and caught the chief by an arm and a leg.

Scream after scream came from the foaming lips of Keraspa as the god turned and moved ponderously towards the chasm. The sight had frozen Conan with horror, and now the idol blocked his way to the exit; either to the right or the left his path would take him within reach of one of those ape-long arms. And the god, for all its mass, moved as quickly as a man.

The red god neared the chasm and raised Keraspa high over its head to hurl him into the depths. Conan saw Keraspa’s mouth open in the midst of his foam-dabbled beard, shrieking madly. When Keraspa had been disposed of, no doubt the statue would take care of him. The ancient priests did not have to throw the god’s victims into the gulf; the image took care of that detail himself.

As the god swayed back on its golden heels to throw the chief, Conan, groping behind him, felt the wood of one of the thrones. These had no doubt been occupied by the high priests or other functionaries of the cult in the ancient days. Conan turned, grasped the massive chair by its back, and lifted it. With muscles cracking under the strain, he whirled the throne over his head and struck the god’s golden back between the shoulders, just as Keraspa’s body, still screaming, was cast into the abyss.

The wood of the throne splintered under the impact with a rending crash. The blow caught the deity moving forward with the impulse that it had given Keraspa and overbalanced it. For the fraction of a second the monstrosity tottered on the edge of the chasm, long golden arms lashing the air; and then it, too, toppled into the gulf.

Conan dropped the remains of the throne to peer over the edge of the abyss. Keraspa’s screams had ceased. Conan fancied that he heard a distant sound such as the idol might have made in striking the side of the cliff and bouncing off, far below, but he could not be sure. There was no final crash or thump; only silence.

Conan drew his muscular forearm across his forehead and grinned wryly. The curse of the bloodstained god was ended, and the god with it. For all the wealth that had gone into the chasm with the idol, the Cimmerian was not sorry to have bought his life at that price. And there were other treasures.

He gathered up his sword and Rustum’s bow, and went out into the morning sunshine to pick a horse.

8. THE LAIR OF THE ICE WORM

Haunted by Atali’s icy beauty and bored with the simple life of the Cimmerian villages, Conan rides south toward the civilized realms, hoping to find a ready market for his sword as a condottiere in the service of various Hyborian princelings. At this time, Conan is about twenty-three.

I.

All day, the lone rider had breasted the slopes of the Eiglophian Mountains, which strode from east to west across the world like a mighty wall of snow and ice, sundering the northlands of Vanaheim, Asgard, and Hyperborea from the southern kingdoms. In the depth of winter, most of the passes were blocked. With the coming of spring, however, they opened, to afford bands of fierce, light-haired northern barbarians routes by which they could raid the warmer lands to the south.

This rider was alone. At the top of the pass that led southward into the Border Kingdom and Nemedia, he reined in to sit for a moment, looking at the fantastic scene before him.

The sky was a dome of crimson and golden vapors, darkening from the zenith to the eastern horizon with the purple of oncoming evening. But the fiery splendor of the dying day still painted the white crests of the mountains with a deceptively warm-looking rosy radiance. It threw shadows of deep lavender across the frozen surface of a titanic glacier, which wound like an icy serpent from a coomb among the higher peaks, down and down until it curved in front of the pass and then away again to the left, to dwindle in the foothills and turn into a flowing stream of water. He who traveled through the pass had to pick his way cautiously past the margin of the glacier, hoping that he would neither fall into one of its hidden crevasses nor be overwhelmed by an avalanche from the higher slopes. The setting sun turned the glacier into a glittering expanse of crimson and gold. The rocky slopes that rose from the glacier’s flanks were dotted with a thin scattering of gnarled, dwarfish trees.

This, the rider knew, was Snow Devil Glacier, also known as the River of Death Ice. He had heard of it, although his years of wandering had never before chanced to take him here. Everything he had heard of this glacier-guarded pass was shadowed by a nameless fear. His own Cimmerian fellow-tribesmen, in their bleak hills to the west, spoke of the Snow Devil in terms of dread, although no one knew why. Often he had wondered at the legends that clustered about the glacier, endowing it with the vague aura of ancient evil. Whole parties had vanished there, men said, never to be heard of again.

The Cimmerian youth named Conan impatiently dismissed these rumors. Doubtless, he thought, the missing men had lacked mountaineering skill and had carelessly strayed out on one of the bridges of thin snow that often masked glacial crevasses. Then the snow bridge had given way, plunging them all to their deaths in the blue-green depths of the glacier. Such things happened often enough, Crom knew; more than one boyhood acquaintance of the young Cimmerian had perished thus. But this was no reason to refer to the Snow Devil with shudders, dark hints, and sidelong glances.

Conan was eager to descend the pass into the low hills of the Border Kingdom, for he had begun to find the simple life of his native Cimmerian village boring. His ill-fated adventure with a band of golden-haired Aesir on a raid into Vanaheim had brought him hard knocks and no profit. It had also left him with the haunting memory of the icy beauty of Atali, the frost giant’s daughter, who had nearly lured him to an icy death.

Altogether, he had had all he wanted of the bleak northlands. He burned to get back to the hot lands of the South, to taste again the joys of silken raiment, golden wine, fine victuals, and soft feminine flesh. Enough, he thought, of the dull round of village life and the Spartan austerities of camp and field!

His horse picked its way to the place where the glacier thrust itself across the direct route to the lowlands. Conan slid off his mount and led the animal along the narrow pathway between the glacier on his left and the lofty, snow-covered slope on his right. His huge bearskin cloak exaggerated even his hulking size. It hid the coat of chain mail and the heavy broadsword at his hip.

His eyes of volcanic blue glowered out from under the brim of a horned helmet, while a scarf was wound around the lower part of his face to protect his lungs from the bite of the cold air of the heights. He carried a slender lance in his free hand. Where the path meandered out over the surface of the glacier, Conan went gingerly, thrusting the point of the lance into the snow where he suspected that it might mask a crevasse. A battle-ax hung by its thong from his saddle.

He neared the end of the narrow path between the glacier and the hillside, where the glacier swung away to the left and the path continued down over a broad, sloping surface, lightly covered with spring snow and broken by boulders and hummocks. Then a scream of terror made him whip around and jerk up his helmeted head.

A bowshot away to his left, where the glacier leveled off before beginning its final descent, a group of shaggy, hulking creatures ringed a dim girl in white furs. Even at this distance, in the clear mountain air, Conan could discern the warm, fresh-cheeked oval of her face and the mane of glossy brown hair that escaped from under her white hood. She was a real beauty.

Without waiting to ponder the matter, Conan threw off his cloak and, using his lance as a pole, vaulted into the saddle. He gathered up the reins and drove his spurs into the horse’s ribs. As the startled beast reared a little in the haste with which it bounded forward, Conan opened his mouth to utter the weird and terrible Cimmerian war cry, then shut it again with a snap. As a younger man he would have uttered this shout to hearten himself, but his years of Turanian service had taught him the rudiments of craftiness. There was no use in warning the girl’s attackers of his coming any sooner than he must

They heard his approach soon enough, however. Although the snow muffled his horse’s hoofs, the faint jingle of his mail and the creak of his saddle and harness caused one of them to turn. This one shouted and pulled at his neighbor’s arm, so that in a few seconds all had turned to see Conan’s approach and set themselves to meet it

There were about a dozen of the mountain men, armed with crude wooden clubs and with stone-headed spears and axes. They were short-limbed, thick-bodied creatures, wrapped in tattered, mangy furs. Small, bloodshot eyes glared out from under beetling brows and sloping foreheads; thick lips drew back to reveal large yellow teeth. They were like leftovers from some earlier stage of human evolution, about which Conan had once heard philosophers argue in the courtyards of Nemedian temples. Just now, however, he was too fully occupied with guiding his horse and aiming his lance to spare such matters more than the barest fleeting thought Then he crashed among them like a thunderbolt.

II,

Conan knew that the only way to deal with such a number of enemies afoot was to take full advantage of the mobility of the horse, to keep moving, so as never to let them cluster around him. For while his mail would protect his own body from most of their blows, even their crude weapons could quickly bring down his mount. So he drove toward the nearest beastman, guiding his horse a little to the left.

As the iron lance crushed through bone and hairy flesh, the mountain man screamed, dropped his own weapon, and tried to clutch at the shaft of Conan’s spear. The thrust of the horse’s motion hurled the sub-man to earth. The lance head went down and the butt rose. As he cantered through the scattered band, Conan dragged his lance free.

Behind him, the mountain men broke into a chorus of yells and screams. They pointed and shouted at one another, issuing a dozen contradictory commands at once. Meanwhile Conan guided his mount in a tight circle and galloped back through the throng. A thrown spear glanced from his mailed shoulder; another opened a small gash in his horse’s flank. But he drove his lance into another mountain man and again rode free, leaving behind a wriggling, thrashing body to spatter the snow with scarlet.

At his third charge, the man he speared rolled as he fell, snapping the lance shaft. As he rode clear, Conan threw away the stump of the shaft and seized the haft of the ax that hung from his saddle. As he rode into them once more, he leaned from his saddle. The steel blade flashed fire in the sunset glow as the ax described a huge figure-eight, with one loop to the right and one to the left. On each side, a mountain man fell into the snow with a cloven skull. Crimson drops spattered the snow. A third mountain man, who did not move quickly enough, was knocked down and trampled by Conan’s horse.

With a wail of terror, the trampled man staggered to his feet and fled limping. In an instant, the other six had joined him in panic-stricken flight across the glacier. Conan drew rein to watch their shaggy figures dwindle, and then had to leap clear of the saddle as his horse shuddered and fell. A flint-headed spear had been driven deep into the animal’s body, just behind Conan’s left leg. A glance showed Conan that the beast was dead.

“Crom damn me for a meddling fool!” he growled to himself. Horses were scarce and costly in the northlands. He had ridden this steed all the way from far Zamora. He had stabled and fed and pampered it through the long winter. He had left it behind when he joined the Aesir in their raid, knowing that deep snow and treacherous ice would rob it of most of its usefulness. He had counted upon the faithful beast to get him back to the warm lands, and now it lay dead, all because he had impulsively intervened in a quarrel among the mountain folk that was none of his affair.

As his panting breath slowed and the red mist of battle fury faded out of his eyes, he turned toward the girl for whom he had fought. She stood a few feet away, staring at him wide-eyed.

“Are you all right, lass?” he grunted. “Did the brutes hurt you? Have no fear; I’m not a foe. I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”

Her reply came in a dialect he had never heard before. It seemed to be a form of Hyperborean, mixed with words from other tongues, some from Nemedian and others from sources he did not recognize. He found it hard to gather more than half her meaning.

“You fight, like a god,” she panted. “I thought, you Ymir come to save Ilga.”

As she calmed, he drew the story from her in spurts of words. She was Ilga of the Vininian people, a branch of the Hyperboreans who had strayed into the Border Kingdom. Her folk lived in perpetual war with the hairy cannibals who dwelt in caves among the Eiglophian peaks. The struggle for survival in this barren realm was desperate; she would have been eaten by her captors had not Conan rescued her.

Two days before, she explained, she had set out with a small party of Virunians to cross the pass above Snow Devil Glacier. Thence they planned to journey several days’ ride northeast to Sigtona, the nearest of the Hyperborean strongholds. There they had kinsmen, among whom the Virunians hoped to trade at the spring fair. There Ilga’s uncle, who accompanied her, also meant to seek a good husband for her. But they had been ambushed by the hairy ones, and only Ilga had survived the terrible battle on the slippery slopes. Her uncle’s last command to her, before he fell with his skull cleft by a flint ax, had been to ride like the wind for home.

Before she was out of sight of the mountain men, her horse had fallen on a patch of ice and broken a leg. She had thrown herself clear and, though bruised, had fled afoot. The hairy ones, however, had seen the fall, and a party of them came scampering down over the glacier to seize her. For hours, it seemed, she had run from them. But at last they had caught up with her and ringed her round, as Conan had seen.

Conan grunted his sympathy; his profound dislike of Hyperboreans, based upon his sojourn in a Hyperborean slave pen, did not extend to their women. It was a hard tale, but life in the bleak northlands was grim. He had often heard the like.

Now, however, another problem faced them. Night had fallen, and neither had a horse. The wind was rising, and they would have little chance of surviving through the night on the surface of the glacier. They must find shelter and make a fire, or Snow Devil Glacier would add two more victims to its toll.

III.

Late that night, Conan fell asleep. They had found a hollow beneath an overhang of rock on the side of the glacier, where the ice had melted away enough to let them squeeze in. With their backs to the granite surface of the cliff, deeply scored and striated by the rubbing of the glacier, they had room to stretch out. In front of the hollow rose the flank of the glacier, clear, translucent ice, fissured by cavernous crevasses and tunnels. Although the chill of the ice struck through to their bones, they were still warmer than they would have been on the surface above, where a howling wind was now driving dense clouds of snow before it.

Ilga had been reluctant to accompany Conan, although he made it plain that he meant the lass no harm. She had tugged away from his hand, crying out an unfamiliar word, which sounded something like yakhmar. At length, losing patience, he had given her a mild cuff on the side of the head and carried her unconscious to the dank haven of the cave.

Then he had gone out to recover his bearskin cloak and the gear and supplies tied to his saddle. From the rocky slope that rose from the edge of the glacier, he had gathered a double armful of twigs, leaves, and wood, which he had carried to the cave. There, with flint and steel, he had coaxed a small fire into life. It gave more the illusion of warmth than true warmth, for he dared not let it grow too large lest it melt the nearby walls of the glacier and flood them out of their refuge.

The orange gleams of the fire shone deeply into the fissures and tunnels that ran back into the body of the glacier until their windings and branchings were lost in the dim distance. A faint gurgle of running water came to Conan’s ears, now and then punctuated by the creak and crack of slowly moving ice.

Conan went out again into the biting wind, to hack from the stiffening body of his horse some thick slabs of meat. These he brought back to the cave to roast on the ends of pointed sticks. The horse steaks, together with slabs of black bread from his saddle bag, washed down with bitter Asgardian beer from a goatskin bottle, made a tough but sustaining repast.

Ilga seemed withdrawn as she ate. At first Conan thought she was still angry with him for the blow. But it was gradually borne upon him that her mind was not on this incident at all. She was, instead, in the grip of stark terror. It was not the normal fear she had felt for the band of shaggy brutes that had pursued her, but a deep, superstitious dread somehow connected with the glacier. When he tried to question her, she could do nothing but whisper the strange word, “Yakhmar! Yakhmarr while her lovely face took on a pale, drawn look of terror. When he tried to get the meaning of the word out of her, she could only make vague gestures, which conveyed nothing to him.

After the meal, warm and weary, they curled up together in his bearskin cloak. Her nearness brought to Conan’s mind the thought that a bout of hot love might calm her mind for sleep. His first tentative caresses found her not at all unwilling. Nor was she unresponsive to his youthful ardor; as he soon discovered, she was not new to this game. Before the hour of lovemaking was over, she was gasping and crying out in her passion. Afterwards, thinking her now relaxed, the Cimmerian rolled over and slept like a dead man.

The girl, however, did not sleep. She lay rigid, staring out at the blackness that yawned in the ice cavities beyond the feeble glow of the banked fire. At last, near dawn, came the thing she dreaded.

It was a faint piping sound, a thin, ullulating thread of music that wound around her mind until it was as helpless as a netted bird. Her heart fluttered against her ribs. She could neither move nor speak, even to rouse the snoring youth beside her.

Then two disks of cold green fire appeared in the mouth of the nearest ice tunnel, two great orbs that burned into her young soul and cast a deathly spell over her. There was no soul or mind behind those flaming disks, only remorseless hunger.

Like one walking in a dream, Ilga rose, letting her side of the bearskin cloak slide to her feet. Naked, a slim white form against the dimness, she went forward into the darkness of the tunnel and vanished. The hellish piping faded and ceased; the cold green eyes wavered and disappeared. And Conan slept on.

IV.

Conan awoke suddenly. Some eery premonition, some warning from the barbarian’s hyperacute senses, sent its current quivering along the tendrils of his nerves. Like some wary jungle cat, Conan came instantly from deep, dreamless slumber to full wakefulness. He lay without movement, every sense searching the air around him.

Then, with a deep growl rumbling in his mighty chest, the Cimmerian heaved to his feet and found himself alone in the cavern. The girl was gone. But her furs, which she had discarded during their lovemaking, were still there. His brows knotted in a baffled scowl. Danger was still in the air, scrabbling with tenuous fingers at the edges of his nerves.

He hastily donned his garments and weapons. With his ax in his clenched fist, he thrust himself through the narrow space between the overhang and the flank of the glacier. Outside on the snow, the wind had died. Although Conan sensed dawn in the air, no gleam of morning had yet dimmed the diamond blaze of thousands of throbbing stars overhead. A gibbous moon hung low above the western peaks, casting a wan glow of pale gold across the snow fields.

Conan’s keen glance raked the snow. He saw no footprints near the overhang, nor any sign of struggle. On the other hand, it was incredible that Ilga should have wandered off into the labyrinth of tunnels and crevasses, where walking was almost impossible even with spiked boots and where a false step could plunge one into one of those cold streams of ice-melt that run along the bottoms of glaciers.

The hairs on Conan’s nape prickled at the weirdness of the girl’s disappearance. At heart a superstitious barbarian, he feared nothing mortal but was filled with dread and loathing by the uncanny supernatural beings and forces that lurked in the dark corners of his primeval world.

Then, as he continued to search the snow, he went rigid. Something had lately emerged from a gap in the ice a few strides from the overhang. It was huge, long, soft, and sinuous, and it moved without feet. Its writhing track was clearly visible in the curving path that its belly had crushed in the soft whiteness, like some monstrous serpent of the snows.

The setting moon shone faintly, but Conan’s wilderness-sharpened eyes easily read the path. This path led, curving around hillocks of snow and outjutting ledges of rock, up the hillside away from the glacier, up, toward the windswept peaks. He doubted that it had gone alone.

As he followed the path, a bulky, black, furry shadow, he passed the place where his dead horse had lain. Now there was little left of the carcass but a few bones. The track of the thing could be discerned about the remains, but only faintly, for the wind had blown loose snow over them.

A little further on, he came upon the girl, or what was left of her. Her head was gone, and with it most of the flesh of her upper body, so that the white bones gleamed like ivory in the dimming moonlight. The protruding bones had been cleaned, as if the flesh had been sucked from them or rasped off by some many-toothed tongue.

Conan was a warrior, the hard song of a hard people, who had seen death in a thousand forms. But now a mighty rage shook him. A few hours before, this slim, warm girl had lain in the mighty circle of his arms, returning passion for passion. Now nothing was left of her but a sprawled, headless thing, like a doll broken and thrown away.

Conan mastered himself to examine the corpse. With a grunt of surprise, he found that it was frozen solid and sheathed in hard ice.

V.

Conan’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. She could not have left his side more than an hour ago, for the cloak had still held some of the warmth from her body when he awoke. In so brief a time, a warm body does not freeze solid, let alone become encased in glittering ice. It was not according to nature.

Then he grunted a coarse expletive. He knew now, with inward loathing and fury, what had borne the sleeping girl from his side. He remembered the half-forgotten legends told around the fire in his Cimmerian boyhood. One of these concerned the dread monster of the snows, the grim Remora, the vampiric ice worm whose name was an almost forgotten whisper of horror in Cimmerian myth.

The higher animals, he knew, radiated heat. Below them in the scale of being came the scaled and plated reptiles and fishes, whose temperature was that of their surroundings. But the Remora, the worm of the ice lands, seemed unique in that it radiated cold; at least, that was how Conan would have expressed it. It gave out a sort of bitter cold that could encase a corpse in an armor of ice within minutes. Since none of Conan’s fellow-tribesmen claimed to have seen a Remora, Conan had assumed that the creature was long extinct.

This, then, must be the monster that Ilga had dreaded, and of which she had vainly tried to warn him by the name Yakhmar.

Conan grimly resolved to track the thing to its lair and slay it. His reasons for this decision were vague, even to himself. But, for all his youthful impulsiveness and his wild, lawless nature, he had his own rude code of honor. He liked to keep his word and to fulfill an obligation that he had freely undertaken. While he did not think of himself as a stainless, chivalrous hero, he treated women with a rough kindness that contrasted with the harshness and truculence with which he met those of his own sex. He refrained from forcing his lusts upon women if they were unwilling, and he tried to protect them when he found them dependent upon him.

Now he had failed in his own eyes. In accepting his rough act of love, the girl Ilga had placed herself under his protection. Then, when she needed his strength, he had slumbered unaware like some besotted beast. Not knowing about the hypnotic piping sound by which the Remora paralyzed its victims and by which it had kept him, usually a light sleeper, sound asleep, he cursed himself for a stupid, ignorant fool not to have paid more heed to her warnings. He ground his powerful teeth and bit his lips in rage, determined to wipe out this stain on his code of honor if it cost him his life.

As the sky lightened in the east, Conan returned to the cave. He bundled together his belongings and laid his plans. A few years before, he might have rushed out on the ice worm’s trail, trusting to his immense strength and the keen edges of his weapons to see him through. But experience, if it had not yet tamed all his rash impulses, had taught him the beginnings of caution.

It would be impossible to grapple with the ice worm with naked hands. The very touch of the creature meant frozen death. Even his sword and his ax were of doubtful effectiveness. The extreme cold might make their metal brittle, or the cold might run up their hafts and freeze the hand that wielded them.

But, and here a grim smile played over Conan’s lips, perhaps he could turn the ice worm’s power against itself.

Silently and swiftly he made his preparations. Gorged, the gelid worm would doubtless slumber through the daylight hours. But Conan did not know how long it would take him to reach the creature’s lair, and he feared that another gale might wipe out its serpentine track.

VI.

As it turned out, it took Conan little more than an hour to find the ice worm’s lair. The dawning sun had ascended only a little way above the eastern peaks of the Eiglophians, making the snow fields sparkle like pavements of crushed diamonds, when he stood at last before the mouth of the ice cave into which the writhing snow track led him. This cave opened in the flank of a smaller glacier, a tributary of the Snow Devil. From his elevation, Conan could look back down the slope to where this minor glacier curved to join the main one, like the affluent of a river.

Conan entered the opening. The light of the rising sun glanced and flashed from the translucent ice walls on either side, breaking up into rainbow patterns and polychrome gleams. Conan had the sensation of walking by some magical means through the solid substance of a colossal gem.

Then, as he penetrated deeper into the glacier, the darkness congealed around him. Still, he doggedly set one foot before the other, plodding onward. He raised the collar of his bearskin cloak to protect his face from the numbing cold that poured past him, making his eyeballs ache and forcing him to take short, shallow breaths to keep his lungs from being frosted. Crystals of ice formed like a delicate mask upon his face, to shatter with each movement and as quickly to reform. But he went on, carefully holding that which he carried so gingerly inside his cloak.

Then in the gloom before him opened two cold green eyes, which stared into the roots of his soul. These luminous orbs cast a gelid, submarine light of their own. By their faint, fungoid phosphorescence, he could see that there the cavern ended in a round well, which was the ice worm’s nest. Coil on undulating coil, its immense length was curled in the hollow of its nest. Its boneless form was covered with the silken nap of thick white fur. Its mouth was merely a jawless, circular opening, now puckered and closed. Above the mouth, the two luminous orbs gleamed out of a smooth, rounded, featureless, eel-like head.

Replete, the ice worm took a few heartbeats to react to Conan’s presence. During the countless eons that the thing of the snows had dwelt in the cold silences of Snow Devil Glacier, no puny man-thing had ever challenged it in the frozen depths of its nest. Now its weird, trilling, mind-binding song rose about Conan, pouring over him in lulling, overpowering, narcotic waves.

But it was too late. Conan threw back his cloak to expose his burden. This was his heavy steel horned Asgardian helm, into which he had packed the glowing coals of his fire, and in which the head of his ax also lay buried, held in place by a loop of the chin strap around the handle. A rein from his horse’s harness was looped around the ax helve and the chin strap.

Holding the end of the rein in one hand, Conan whirled the whole mass over his head, round and round, as if he were whirling a sling. The rush of air fanned the faintly glowing coals to red, then to yellow, then to white. A stench of burning helmet padding arose.

The ice worm raised its blunt head. Its circular mouth slowly opened, revealing a ring of small, inward-pointing teeth. As the piping sound grew to an intolerable pitch and the black circle of mouth moved toward him, Conan stopped the whirl of the helmet on the end of its thong. He snatched out the ax, whose helve was charred, smoking and flaming where it entered the fiercely glowing ax head. A quick cast sent the incandescent weapon looping into the cavernous maw. Holding the helmet by one of its horns, Conan hurled the glowing coals after the ax. Then he turned and ran.

VII.

Conan never quite knew how he reached the exit. The writhing agony from the thing of the snows shook the glacier. Ice cracked thunderously all around him. The draft of interstellar cold no longer wafted out of the tunnel; instead, a blinding, swirling fog of steam choked the air.

Stumbling, slipping, and falling on the slick, uneven surface of the ice, banging into one side wall of the tunnel and then the other, Conan at last reached the outer air. The glacier trembled beneath his feet with the titanic convulsions of the dying monster within. Plumes of steam wafted from a score of crevasses and caverns on either side of Conan, who, slipping and skidding, ran down the snowy slope. He angled off to one side to get free of the ice. But, before he reached the solid ground of the mountainside, with its jagged boulders and stunted trees, the glacier exploded. When the white-hot steel of the ax head met the frigid interior of the monster, something had to give way.

With a crashing roar, the ice quivered, broke up, hurled glassy fragments into the air, and collapsed into a chaotic mass of ice and pouring water, soon hidden by a vast cloud of vapor. Conan lost his footing, fell, tumbled, rolled, slid, and fetched up with bruising force against a boulder on the edge of the ice flow. Snow stuffed his mouth and blinded his eyes. A big piece of ice upended toppled, and struck his boulder, nearly burying him in fragments of ice.

Half stunned, Conan dragged himself out from under the mass of broken ice. Although cautious moving of his limbs showed no bones to be broken, he bore enough bruises to have been in a battle. Above him, a tremendous cloud of vapor and glittering ice crystals whirled upward from the site of the ice worm’s cavern, now a black crater. Fragments of ice and slush poured into this crater from all sides. The whole level of the glacier in the area had sunk.

Little by little the scene returned to normal. The biting mountain breeze blew away the clouds of vapor. The water from the melting of the ice froze again. The glacier returned to its usual near-immobility.

Battered and weary, Conan limped down into the pass.

Lamed as he was, he must now walk all the way to far Nemedia or Ophir, unless he could buy, beg, borrow, or steal another horse. But he went with a high heart, turning his bruised face southward, to the golden South, where shining cities lifted tall towers to a balmy sun, and where a strong man with courage and luck could win gold, wine, and soft, full-breasted women.

9. THE CASTLE OF TERROR

Before he can bring off his plans for building a black, empire with himself at its head, Conan is thwarted by a succession of natural catastrophes and the intrigues of his enemies among the Bamulas, many of whom resent the rise to power in their tribe of a foreigner, forced to flee, he heads north through the equatorial jungle and across the grassy veldt toward the semicivilized kingdom of Kush.

I. Burning Eyes

Beyond the trackless deserts of Stygia lay the vast grasslands of Kush. For over a hundred leagues, there was’ naught but endless stretches of thick grass. Here and there a solitary tree rose to break the gently rolling monotony of the veldt: spiny acacias, sword-leaved dragon, trees, emerald-spired lobelias, and thick fingered, poisonous spurges. Now and then a rare stream cut a shallow dell across the prairie, giving rise to a narrow gallery forest along its banks. Herds of zebra, antelope, buffalo, and other denizens of the savanna drifted athwart the veldt, grazing as they went

The grasses whispered and nodded in the wandering winds beneath skies of deep cobalt in which a fierce tropical sun blazed blindingly. Now and then clouds boiled up; a brief thunderstorm roared and blazed with catastrophic fury, only to die and clear as quickly as it had arisen.

Across this limitless waste, as the day died, a lone silent figure trudged. It was a young giant, strongly built, with eliding thews that swelled under a sun-bronzed hide scored with the white traces of old wounds. Deep of chest and broad of shoulder and long of limb was he; his scanty costume of loincloth and sandals revealed his magnificent physique. His chest, shoulders, and back were burnt nearly as black as the natives of this land. The tangled locks of an unkempt mane of coarse black hair framed a grim, impassive face. Beneath scowling black brows, fierce eyes of burning blue roamed restlessly from side to side as he marched with a limber, tireless stride across the level lands. His wary gaze pierced the thick, shadowy grasses on either side, reddened by the angry crimson of sunset. Soon night would come swiftly across Kush; under the gloom of its world-shadowing wings, danger and death would prowl the waste.

Yet the lone traveler, Conan of Cimmeria, was not afraid. A barbarian of barbarians, bred on the bleak hills of distant Cimmeria, the iron endurance and fierce vitality of the wild were his, granting him survival where civilized men, though more learned, more courteous, and more sophisticated than he, would miserably have perished. Although the wanderer had gone afoot for eight days, with no food save the game he had slain with the great Bamula hunting bow slung across his back, the mighty barbarian had nowhere nearly approached the limits of his strength.

Long had Conan been accustomed to the Spartan life of the wilderness. Although he had tasted the languid luxuries of civilized life in half the walled, glittering cities of the world, he missed them not. He plodded on toward the distant horizon, now obscured by a murky purple haze.

Behind him lay the dense jungles of the black lands beyond Kush, where fantastic orchids blazed amid foliage his way for many weary leagues northward, until he reached the region where the crowding forest thinned out and gave way to the open grasslands. Now he meant to cross the savanna on foot to reach the kingdom of Kush, where his barbaric strength and the weight of his sword might find him employment in the service of the dusky monarchs of that ancient land.

Suddenly his thoughts were snatched away from contemplation of the past by a thrill of danger. Some primal instinct of survival alerted him to the presence of peril. He halted and stared about him through the long shadows cast by the setting sun. As the hairs of his nape bristled with the touch of unseen menace, the giant barbarian searched the air with sensitive nostrils and probed the gloom with smoldering eyes. Although he could neither see nor smell anything, the mysterious sense of danger of the wilderness-bred told him that peril was near. He felt the feathery touch of invisible eyes and whirled to glimpse a pair of large orbs, glowing in the gloom.

Almost in the same instant, the blazing eyes vanished. So short had been his glimpse and so utter the disappearance that he was tempted to shrug off the sight as a product of his imagination. He turned and went forward again, but now he was on the alert. As he continued his journey, flaming eyes opened again amid the thick shadows of dense grasses, to follow his silent progress. Tawny, sinuous forms glided after him on soundless feet. The lions of Kush were on his track, lusting for hot blood and fresh flesh.

II. The Circle of Death

An hour later, night had fallen over the savanna, save for a narrow band of sunset glow along the western horizon, against which an occasional small, gnarled tree of the veldt stood up in black silhouette. And Conan almost reached the limits of his endurance. Thrice lionesses had rushed upon him out of the shadows to right or to left. Thrice he had driven them off with the flying death of his arrows. Although it was hard to shoot straight in the gathering dark, an explosive snarl from the chasing cats had thrice told him of hits, although he had no way of knowing whether he had slain or only wounded the deadly predators.

But now his quiver was empty, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the silent marauders pulled him down. There were eight or ten lions on his track! Now even the grim barbarian felt a pang of despair. Even if his mighty sword accounted for one or two of the attackers, the rest would tear him into gory pieces before he could slash or thrust again. Conan had encountered lions before and knew their enormous strength, which enabled them to pick up and drag a whole zebra as easily as a cat does a mouse. Although Conan was one of the strongest men of his time, once a lion got its claws and teeth into him that strength would be no more effective than that of a small child.

Conan ran on. He had been running now for the better part of an hour, with a long, loping stride that ate up the leagues. At first he had run effortlessly, but now the grueling exertions of his flight through the black jungles and his eight-day trek across the plain began to take their toll. His eyes blurred; the muscles of his legs ached. Every beat of his bursting heart seemed to drain away the strength remaining in his giant form.

He prayed to his savage gods for the moon to emerge from the dense, stormy clouds that veiled most of the sky. He prayed for a hillock or a tree to break the gently rolling flatness of the plain, or even a boulder against which he could set his back to make a last stand against the pride.

But the gods heard not The only trees in this region were dwarfish, thorny growths, which rose to a height of six or eight feet and then spread their branches out horizontally in a mushroom shape. If he managed to climb such a tree despite the thorns, it would be easy for the first lion to reach the base to spring upon him from below and bear him to the ground in one leap. The only hillocks were termite nests, some rising several feet in height but too small for purposes of defense. There was nothing to do but run on. To lighten himself, he had cast aside the great hunting bow when he had spent his last shaft, although it wrenched his heart to throw away the splendid weapon. Quiver and straps soon followed. He was now stripped to a mere loincloth of leopard hide, the high-laced sandals that clad his feet, his goatskin water bag, and the heavy broadsword, which he now carried scabbarded in one fist. To part with these would mean surrendering his last hope.

The lions were now almost at his heels. He could smell the strong reek of their lithe bodies and hear their panting breath. Any moment, now, they would, close in upon him, and he would be making his last furious fight for life before they pulled him down.

He expected his pursuers to follow their age-old tactics. The oldest male—the chief of the pride—would follow directly behind him, with the younger males on either flank. The swifter lionesses would range ahead on either side in a crescent formation until they were far enough ahead of him to close the circle and trap him. Then they would all rush in upon him at once, making any effective defense impossible.

Suddenly, the land was flooded with light. The round, silver eye of the rising moon glared down upon the broad plains, bathing the racing figure of the giant barbarian with her gaze and drawing lines of pale silver fire along the rippling sinews of the lions as they loped at his heels, washing their short, silken fur with her ghostly radiance.

Conan’s wary eye caught the moonfire on rippling fur ahead to his left, and he knew that the encirclement was nearly complete. As he braced himself to meet the charge, however, he was astounded to see the same lioness veer off and halt. In two strides he was past her. As he went, he saw that the young lioness on his right had also stopped short. She squatted motionless on the grass with tail twitching and lashing. A curious sound, half roar and half wail, came from her fanged jaws.

Conan dared to slow his run and glance bad. To his utter astonishment, he saw that the entire pride had halted as if at some invisible barrier. They stood in a snarling line with fangs gleaming like silver in the moonlight. Earth shaking roars of baffled rage came from their throats.

Conan’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and his scowling brows knotted in puzzlement. What had halted the pride at the very moment when they had made sure of their prey? What unseen force had annulled the fury of the chase? He stood for a moment facing them, sword in hand, wondering if they would resume their charge. But the lions stayed where they were, growling and roaring from foam-dripping jaws.

Then Conan observed a curious thing. The place where the lions had halted seemed to mark a line of demarcation across the plain. On the further side grew thick, long, lush grasses. At the invisible boundary, however, the grass became thin, stubby, and ill nourished, with broad patches of bare earth. Although Conan could not clearly distinguish colors by moonlight alone, it seemed to him that the grasses on the hither side of the line lacked the normal green color of growing things. Instead, the grasses around his feet seemed dry and gray, as if leached of all vitality.

To either side, in the bright moonlight, he could see the region of dead grasses curve away into the distance, as if he stood alone in a vast circle of death.

III. The Black Citadel

Although he still ached with weariness, the brief pause had given Conan the strength to continue his progress. Since he did not know the nature of the invisible line that had halted the lions, he could not tell how long this mysterious influence would continue to hold them at bay. Therefore he preferred to put as much distance between the pride and himself as possible.

Soon he saw a dark mass take form out of the dimness ahead of him. He went forward even more warily than before, sword in hand and eyes searching the hazy immensities of this domain. The moonlight was still brilliant, but its radiance became obscure with distance as if veiled by some thickening haze. So, at first, Conan could make nothing of the black, featureless mass that lifted out of the plain before him, save for its size and its stillness. Like some colossal idol of primitive devil worship, hewn from a mountain of black stone by some unknown beings in time’s dawn, the dark mass squatted motionless amid the dead gray grass. As Conan came nearer, details emerged from the dark, featureless blur. He saw that it was a tremendous edifice, which lay partly in ruins on the plains of Kush—a colossal 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.

V. 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 it—one whole wing, in fact—had 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 distances—why, Conan could not imagine.

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 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 serpents—the 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 Valusia? The day of that prehuman 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 Cataclysm—even before Atlantis arose from the depths of the Western Ocean—the serpent people had reigned. They had vanished long before the coming of man—but 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?

V. 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 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 columns—shadows with glaring eyes filled with mindless hunger—shadows 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 enormous ruin—whether the serpent men of Valusian legend or some other forgotten race—had drenched the marble altars of the black castle with the blood of thousands. The ghosts of their victims were chained forever to this castle of terror. Perhaps they were held earthbound by some powerful spell of prehuman sorcery. Perhaps it was the same spell that kept out the beasts of the veldt.

But this was not all. The ghosts of the black castle hungered for the blood of the living—for the blood of Conan.

His exhausted body lay chained in ensorcelled slumber while shadowy phantoms flitted about him, tearing at him with impalpable fingers. But a spirit cannot harm a living being unless it first manifests itself on the physical plane and assumes material form. These gibbering shadow hordes were weak. Not for years had a man defied the ancient curse to set foot within the black castle, enabling them to feed. Enfeebled by long starvation, they could no longer easily materialize into a shambling horde of ghoul-things.

Somehow, the spirit of the dreaming Conan knew this. While his body slept on, his ka observed movements on the astral plane and watched the vampiric shadows as they beat insubstantial wings about his sleeping head and slashed with impalpable claws at his pulsing throat But for all their voiceless frenzy, they could harm him not. Bound by the spell, he slept on.

After an indefinite time, a change took place in die ruddy luminance of the astral plane. The specters were clustering together into a shapeless mass of thickening shadows. Mindless dead things though they were, hunger drove them into an uncanny alliance. Each ghost possessed a small store of that vital energy that went toward bodily materialization. Now each phantom mingled its slim supply of energy with that of its shadowy brethren.

Gradually, a terrible shape, fed by the life force of ten thousand ghosts, began to materialize. In the dim gloom of the black marble balcony, it slowly formed out of a swirling cloud of shadowy particles.

And Conan slept on.

VI. The Hundred Heads

Thunder crashed deafeningly, lightning blazed with sulfurous fires above the darkened plain, whence the moonlight had fled again. The thick-piled storm clouds burst, soaking the grassy swales with a torrential downpour.

The Stygian slave raiders had ridden all night, pressing southward toward the forests beyond Kush. Their expedition had thus far been fruitless; not one black of the nomadic hunting and herding tribes of the savanna had fallen into their hands. Whether war or pestilence had swept the land bare of humankind, or whether the tribesmen, warned of the coming of the slavers, had fled beyond reach, they did not know.

In any case, it seemed that they would do better among the lush jungles of the South. The forest Negroes dwelt in permanent villages, which the slavers could surround and take by surprise with a quick dawn rush, catching the inhabitants like fish in a net. Villagers too old, too young, or too sickly to endure the trek back to Stygia they would slay out of hand. Then they would drive the remaining wretches, fettered together to form a human chain, northward.

There were forty Stygians, well-mounted warriors in helms and chain-mail hauberks. They were tall, swarthy, hawk-faced men, powerfully muscled. They were hardened marauders—tough, shrewd, fearless, and merciless, with no more compunction about killing a non-Stygian than most men have about slipping a gnat

Now the first downpour of the storm swept their column. Winds whipped their woolen cloaks and linen robes and blew their horses manes into their faces. The almost continuous blaze of lightning dazzled them.

Their leader sighted the black castle, looming above the grasslands, for the blazing lightning made it visible in the rain-veiled dark. He shouted a guttural command and drove his spurs into the ribs of his big black mare. The others spurred after him and rode up to the frowning bastions with a clatter of hoofs, a creaking of leather, and a jingle of mail. In the blur of rain and night, the abnormality of the facade was not visible, and the Stygians were eager to get under shelter before they were soaked.

They came stamping in, cursing and bellowing and shaking the water from their cloaks. In a trice, the gloomy silence of the ruin was broken with a clamor of noise. Brushwood and dead leaves were gathered; flint and steel were struck. Soon a smoking, sputtering fire leaped up in the midst of the cracked marble floor, to paint the sculptured walls with rich orange.

The men flung down their saddlebags, stripped off wet burnooses, and spread them to dry. They struggled out of their coats of mail and set to rubbing the moisture from them with oily rags. They opened their saddlebags and sank strong white teeth into round loaves of hard, stale bread.

Outside, the storm bellowed and flashed. Streams of rainwater, like little waterfalls, poured through gaps in the masonry. But the Stygians heeded them not.

On the balcony above, Conan stood silently, awake but trembling with shudders that wracked his powerful body. With the cloudburst, the spell that held him captive had broken. Starting up, he glared about for the shadowy conclave of ghosts that he had seen form in his dream. When the lightning flashed, he thought he glimpsed a dark, amorphous form at the far end of the balcony, but he did not care to go closer to investigate.

While he pondered the problem of how to quit the balcony without coming in reach of the Thing, the Stygians came stamping and roaring in. They were hardly an improvement on the ghosts. Given half a chance, they would be delighted to capture him for their slave gang. For all his immense strength and skill at arms, Conan knew that no man can fight forty well-armed foes at once. Unless he instantly cut his way out and escaped, they would bring him down. He faced either a swift death or a bitter life of groaning drudgery in a Stygian slave pen. He was not sure which he preferred. If the Stygians distracted Conan’s attention from the phantoms, they likewise distracted the attention of the phantoms from Conan. In their mindless hunger, the shadow-things ignored the Cimmerian in favor of the forty Stygians encamped below. Here was living flesh and vital force enough to glut their phantasmal lusts thrice over. Like autumn leaves, they drifted over the balustrade and down from the balcony into the hall below.

The Stygians sprawled around their fire, passing a bottle of wine from hand to hand and talking in their guttural tongue. Although Conan knew only a few words of Stygian, from the intonations and gestures he could follow the course of the argument The leader—a clean-shaven giant, as tall as the Cimmerian—swore that he would not venture into the downpour on such a night They would await the dawn in this crumbling ruin. At least, the roof seemed to be still sound in places, and a man could here out of the drip.

When several more bottles had been emptied, the Stygians, now warm and dry, composed themselves for sleep. The fire burned low, for the brushwood with which they fed it could not long sustain a strong blaze. The leader pointed to one of his men and spoke a harsh sentence. The man protested, but after some argument he heaved himself up with a groan and pulled on his coat of mail. He, Conan realized, had been chosen to stand the first watch.

Presently, with sword in hand and shield on arm, the sentry was standing in the shadows at the margin of the light of the dying fire. From time to time he walked slowly up and down the length of the hall, pausing to peer into the winding corridors or out through the front doors, where the storm was in retreat.

While the sentry stood in the main doorway with his back to his comrades, a grim shape formed among the snoring band of slavers. It grew slowly out of wavering clouds of insubstantial shadows. The compound creature that gradually took shape was made up of the vital force of thousands of dead beings. It became a ghastly form—a huge bulk that sprouted countless malformed limbs and appendages. A dozen squat legs supported its monstrous weight. From its top, like grisly fruit, sprouted scores of heads: some lifelike, with shaggy hair and brows; others mere lumps in which eyes, ears, mouths, and nostrils were arranged at random.

The sight of the hundred-headed monster in that dimly firelit ball was enough to freeze the blood of the stoutest with terror. Conan felt his nape hairs rise and his skin crawl with revulsion as he stared down upon the scene.

The thing lurched across the floor. Leaning unsteadily down, it clutched one of the Stygians with half a dozen grasping claws. As the man awoke with a scream, the nightmare Thing tore its victim apart, spattering his sleeping comrades with gory, dripping fragments of the man.

VII. Flight from Nightmare

In an instant, the Stygians were on their feet. Hardbitten ravagers though they were, the sight was frightful enough to wring yells of terror from some. Wheeling at the first scream, the sentry rushed back into the hall to hack at the monster with his sword. Bellowing commands, the leader snatched up the nearest weapon and fell to. The rest, although unarmored, disheveled, and confused, seized sword and spear to defend themselves against the shape that shambled and slew among them.

Swords hacked into misshapen thighs; spears plunged into the swollen, swaying belly. Clutching hands and arms were hacked away to thud, jerking and grasping, to the floor. But, seeming to reel no pain, the monster snatched up man after man. Some Stygians had their heads twisted off by strangling hands. Others were seized by the feet and battered to gory remnants against the pillars.

As the Cimmerian watched from above, a dozen Stygians were battered or torn to death. The ghastly wounds inflicted on the monster by the weapons of the Stygians instantly closed up and healed. Severed heads and arms were replaced by new members, which sprouted from the bulbous body.

Seeing that the Stygians had no chance against the monster, Conan resolved to take his leave while the Thing was still occupied with the slavers and before it turned its attention to him. Thinking it unwise to enter the hall, he sought a more direct exit He cimbed out through a window. This let on to a roof terrace of broken tiles, where a false step could drop him through a gap in the pavement to ground level.

The rain had slackened to a drizzle. The moon, now nearly overhead, showed intermittent beams again. Looking down from the parapet that bounded the terrace, Conan found a place where the exterior carvings, together with climbing vines, provided means of descent. With the lithe grace of an ape, he lowered himself hand over hand down the weirdly carven facade.

Now the moon glazed out in full glory, lighting the courtyard below where the Stygians horses stood tethered, moving and whinnying uneasily at the sounds of mortal combat that came from the great hall. Over the roar of battle sounded screams of agony as man after man was torn limb from limb.

Conan dropped, landing lightly on the earth of the courtyard. He sprinted for the great black mare that had belonged to the leader of the slavers. He would have liked to linger to loot the bodies, for he needed their armor and other supplies. The mail shirt he had worn as Belit’s piratical partner had long since succumbed to wear and rust, and his flight from Bamula had been too hasty to allow him to equip himself more completely. But no force on earth could have drawn him into that hall, where a horror of living death still stalked and slew.

As the young Cimmerian untethered the horse he had chosen, a screaming figure burst from the entrance and came pelting across the courtyard toward him. Conan saw that it was the man who had stood the first sentry-go. The Stygian’s helmet and mail shirt had protected him just enough to enable him to survive the massacre of his comrades.

Conan opened his mouth to speak. There was no love lost between him and the Stygian people; nevertheless, if this Stygian were the only survivor of his party, Conan would have been willing to form a rogues alliance with him, however temporary, until they could reach more settled country.

But Conan had no chance to make such a proposal, for the experience had driven the burly Stygian mad. His eyes blazed wildly in the moonlight, and foam dripped from his lips. He rushed straight upon Conan, whirling a scimitar so that the moonlight flashed upon it and shrieking, “Back to your hell, O demon!”

The primitive survival instinct of the wilderness-bred Cimmerian flashed into action without conscious thought. By the time the man was within striking distance. Conan’s own sword had cleared its scabbard. Again and gain, steel clanged against steel, striking sparks. As the wild-eyed Stygian swung back for another slash, Conan drove his point into the madman’s throat The Stygian gurgled, swayed, and toppled.

For an instant, Conan leaned on the mare’s saddle bow, panting. The duel had been short but fierce, and the Stygian had been no mean antagonist.

From within the ancient pile of stone, no more cries of terror rang. There was naught but an ominous silence. Then Conan heard slow, heavy, shuffling footsteps. Had the ogreish thing slaughtered them all? Was it dragging its misshapen bulk toward the door, to emerge into the courtyard?

Conan did not wait to find out. With trembling fingers he unlaced the dead man’s hauberk and pulled the mail shirt off. He also collected the Stygian’s helmet and shield, the latter made from the hide of one of the great, thick-skinned beasts of the veldt He hastily tied these trophies to the saddle, vaulted upon the steed, wrenched at the reins, and kicked the mare’s ribs. He galloped out of the ruined courtyard into the region of withered grass. With every stride of the flying hoofs, the castle of ancient evil fen behind.

Somewhere beyond the circle of dead grass, perhaps the hungry lions still prowled. But Conan did not care. After the ghostly horrors of the black citadel, he would gladly take his chances with mere lions.

10. THE SNOUT IN THE DARK

Continuing his northward trek, now speeded by his possession of a horse, Conan at last reaches the semicivilized kingdom of Kush. This is the land to which the name “Kush” properly applies, although Conan, like other northerners, tends to use the term loosely to mean any of the Negro countries south of the deserts of Stygia. Here an opportunity to display his prowess at arms soon presents itself.

I. The Thing in the Dark

Amboola of Kush awakened slowly, his senses still sluggish from the wine he had guzzled at the feast the night before. For a muddled moment, he could not remember where he was. The moonlight, streaming through the small barred window, high up on one wall, shone on unfamiliar surroundings. Then he remembered that he was lying in the upper cell of the prison into which Queen Tananda had thrown him.

There had, he suspected, been a drug in his wine. While he sprawled helplessly, barely conscious, two black giants of the queen’s guard had laid hands upon him and upon the Lord Aahmes, the queen’s cousin, and hustled them away to their cells. The last thing he remembered was a brief statement from the queen, like the crack of a whip: “So you villains would plot to overthrow me, would you? You shall see what befalls traitors!”

As the giant black warrior moved, a clank of metal made him aware of fetters on his wrists and ankles, connected by chains to massive iron staples set in the wall. He strained his eyes to pierce the fetid gloom around him. At least, he thought, he still lived. Even Tananda had to think twice about slaying the commander of the Black Spearmen the backbone of the army of Kush and the hero of the lower castes of the kingdom.

What most puzzled Amboola was the charge of conspiracy with Aahmes. To be sure, he and the princeling had been good friends. They had hunted and guzzled and gambled together, and Aahmes had complained privately to Amboola about the queen, whose cruel heart was as cunning and treacherous as her dusky body was desirable. But things had never gotten to the point of actual conspiracy. Aahmes was not the man for that sort of thing anyway a good-natured, easygoing young fellow with no interest in politics or power. Some informer, seeking to advance his own prospects at the cost of others, must have laid false accusations before the queen.

Amboola examined his fetters. For all his strength, he knew he could not break them, nor yet the chains that held them. Neither could he hope to pull the staples loose from the wall. He knew, because he had overseen their installation himself.

He knew what the next step would be. The queen would have him and Aahmes tortured, to wring from them the details of their conspiracy and the names of their fellow plotters. For all his barbaric courage, Amboola quailed at the prospect. Perhaps his best hope would lie in accusing all the lords and grandees of Kush of complicity. Tananda could not punish them all. If she tried to, the imaginary conspiracy she feared would quickly become a fact.

Suddenly, Amboola was cold sober. An icy sensation scuttled up his spine. Something a living, breathing presence was in the room with him.

With a low cry, he started up and stared about him, straining his eyes to pierce the darkness that clung about him like the shadowy wings of death. By the faint light that came through the small barred window, the officer could just make out a terrible and grisly shape. An icy hand clutched at his heart, which through a score of battles had never, until this hour, known fear.

A shapeless gray fog hovered in the gloom. Seething mists swirled like a nest of coiling serpents, as the phantom form congealed into solidity. Stark terror lay on Amboola’s writhing lips and shone in his rolling eyes as he saw the thing that condensed slowly into being out of empty air.

First he saw a piglike snout, covered with coarse bristles, which thrust into the shaft of dim luminescence that came through the window. Then he began to make out a hulking form amidst the shadows something huge, misshapen, and bestial, which nevertheless stood upright. To a piglike head was now added thick, hairy arms ending in rudimentary hands, like those of a baboon.

With a piercing shriek, Amboola sprang up and then the motionless thing moved, with the paralyzing speed of a monster in a nightmare. The black warrior had one frenzied glimpse of champing, foaming jaws, of great chisel-like tusks, of small, piggish eyes that blazed with red fury through the dark. Then the brutish paws clamped his flesh in a viselike grip; tusks tore and slashed.

Presently the moonlight fell upon a black shape, sprawled on the floor in a widening pool of blood. The grayish, shambling thing that a moment before had been savaging the black warrior was gone, dissolved into the impalpable mist from which it had taken form.

II. The Invisible Terror

“Tuthmes!” The voice was urgent as urgent as the fist that hammered on the teakwood door of the house of the most ambitious nobleman of Kush. “Lord Tuthmes! Let me in! The devil is loose again!”

The door opened, and Tuthmes stood within the portal a tall, slender, aristocratic figure, with the narrow features and dusky skin of his caste. He was wrapped in robes of white silk as if for bed and held a small bronze lamp in his hand.

“What is it, Afari?” he asked.

The visitor, the whites of his eyes flashing, burst into the room. He panted as if from a long run. He was a lean, wiry, dark-skinned man in a white jubbah, shorter than Tuthmes and with his Negroid ancestry more prominent in his features. For all his haste, he took care to close the door before he answered.

“Amboola! He is dead! In the Red Tower!”

“What?” exclaimed Tuthmes. “Tananda dared to execute the commander of the Black Spears?”

“No, no, no! She would not be such a fool, surely. He was not executed but murdered. Something got into his cell how, Set only knows and tore his throat out, stamped in his ribs, and smashed his skull. By Derketa’s snaky locks, I have seen many dead men, but never one less lovely in death than Amboola. Tuthmes, it is the work of the demon, of whom the black people murmur! The invisible terror is again loose in Meroe!” Afari clutched the small paste idol of his protector god, which hung from a thong around his scrawny neck. “Amboola’s throat was bitten out, and the marks of the teeth were not like those of a lion or an ape. It was as if they had been made by razor-sharp chisels!”

“When was this done?”

“Some time about midnight. Guards in the lower part of the tower, watching the stair that leads up to the cell in which he was imprisoned, heard him cry out. They rushed up the stairs, burst into the cell, and found him lying as I have said. I was sleeping in the lower part of the tower, as you bade me. Having seen, I came straight here, bidding the guards to say naught to anyone.”

Tuthmes smiled a cool, impassive smile that was not pleasant to see. He murmured: “You know Tananda’s mad rages. Having thrown Amboola and her cousin Aahmes into prison, she might well have had Amboola slain and the corpse maltreated to look like the work of the monster that has long haunted the land. Might she not, now?”

Comprehension dawned in the eyes of the minister. Tuthmes, taking Afari’s arm, continued: “Go, now, and strike before the queen can learn of it. First, take a detachment of black spearmen to the Red Tower and slay the guards for sleeping at their duty. Be sure you let it be known that you do it by my orders. That will show the blacks that I have avenged their commander and remove a weapon from Tananda’s hand. Kill them before she can have it done.

“Then spread word to the other chief nobles. If this be Tananda’s way of dealing with the powerful ones of her realm, we had all best be on the alert.

“Then go into the Outer City and find old Ageera, the witch-smeller. Do not tell him flatly that Tananda caused this deed to be done, but hint at it.” Afari shuddered. “How can a common man lie to that devil? His eyes are like coals of fire; they seem to look into depths unnamable. I have seen him make corpses rise and walk, and skulls champ and grind their fleshless jaws.”

“Don’t lie,” answered Tuthmes. “Simply hint to him of your own suspicions. After all, even if a demon did slay Amboola, some human being summoned it out of the night. Perhaps Tananda is behind this, after all. So go quickly!”

When Afari, mulling, intensely over his patron’s commands, had departed, Tuthmes stood for a moment in the midst of his chamber, which was hung with tapestries of barbaric magnificence. Blue smoke seeped through a domed censer of pierced brass in one corner. Tuthmes called:

“Muru!”

Bare feet scuffed the floor. An arras of dull crimson cloth, hung athwart one wall, was thrust back, and an immensely tall, thin man ducked his head under the lintel of the hidden door and entered the room. “I am here, master,” he said.

The man, who towered over even the tall Tuthmes, wore a large piece of scarlet cloth, hung like a toga from one shoulder. Although his skin was as black as jet, his features were narrow and aquiline, like those of the ruling caste of Meroe. The woolly hair of his head was trimmed into a fantastic, crested shape. “Is it back in its cell?” inquired Tuthmes.

“It is.”

“Is all secure?”

“Aye, my lord.”

Tuthmes frowned. “How can you be sure that it will always obey your commands and then return to you? How know you that some day, when you release it, it will not slay you and flee back to whatever unholy dimension it calls home?” Muru spread his hands. “The spells I learned from my master, the exiled Stygian wizard, to control the demon, have never failed.”

Tuthmes gave the sorcerer a piercing look. “Meseems you wizards spend most of your lives in exile. How do I know that some enemy will not bribe you to turn the monster loose on me some day?”

“Oh, master, think not such thoughts! Without your protection, whither should I go? The Kushites despise me, for I am not of their race; and for reasons you know, I cannot return to Kordafa.”

“Hm. Well, take good care of your demon, for we may have more use for it soon. That loose-tongued fool, Afari, loves nothing more than to appear wise in the opinions of others. He will spread the tale of Amboola’s murder, embellished with my hints of the queen’s role, to a hundred waiting ears. The breach between Tananda and her lords will widen, and I shall reap the benefit.” Chuckling with rare good humor, Tuthmes splashed wine into two silver cups and handed one to the gaunt sorcerer, who accepted it with a silent bow. Tuthmes continued: “Of course, he will not mention that he began the whole charade with his false accusations against Amboola and Aahmes without orders from me, too. He knows not that thanks to your necromantic skill, friend Muru I know all about this. He pretends to be devoted to my cause and faction but would sell us out in an instant if he thought he could gain thereby. His ultimate ambition is to wed Tananda and rule Kush as royal consort. When I am king, I shall need a more trustworthy tool than Afari.” Sipping the wine, Tuthmes mused: “Ever since the late king, her brother, perished in battle with the Stygians, Tananda has clung insecurely to the ivory throne, playing one faction off against another. But she lacks the character to hold power in a land whose tradition does not accept the rule of a woman. She is a rash, impulsive wanton, whose only method of securing power is to slay whatever noble she most fears at the moment, thus alerting and antagonizing the rest.

“Be sure to keep a close watch on Afari, O Muru. And keep your demon on a tight rein. We shall need the creature again.” When the Kordafan had left, ducking his head once more to get through the doorway, Tuthmes mounted a staircase of polished mahogany. He came out upon the flat, moonlit roof of his palace.

Looking over the parapet; he saw below him the silent streets of the Inner City of Meroe. He saw the palaces, the gardens, and the great inner square into which, at an instant’s notice, a thousand black horsemen could ride from the courts of the adjoining barracks.

Looking farther, he saw the great bronze gates of the Inner City and, beyond them, the Outer City. Meroe stood in the midst of a great plain of rolling grasslands, which stretched broken only by occasional low hills to the horizon. A narrow river, meandering across the grasslands, touched the straggling edges of the Outer City.

A lofty, massive wall, which enclosed the palaces of the ruling caste, separated the Inner and Outer Cities. The rulers were descendants of Stygians who, centuries ago, had come southward to hack out an empire and mix their proud blood with that of their black subjects. The Inner City was well laid out, with regular streets and squares, buildings of stone, and gardens.

The Outer City, on the other hand, was a sprawling wilderness of mud huts. Its streets straggled into irregular open spaces. The black people of Kush, the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, dwelt in the Outer City. None but the ruling caste lived in the Inner City, except for their servants and the black horsemen who served as their guardsmen.

Tuthmes glanced out over that vast expanse of huts. Fires glowed in the ragged squares; torches swayed to and fro in the wandering streets. From time to time he caught a snatch of song, a barbaric chant that thrummed with an undertone of wrath or blood lust. Tuthmes drew his cloak more closely about him and shivered.

Advancing across the roof, he halted at the sight of a figure sleeping under a palm in the artificial garden. When stirred by Tuthmes’ toe, this man awoke and sprang up.

“There is no need for speech,” cautioned Tuthmes. “The deed is done. Amboola is dead; and, before dawn, all Meroe will know he was murdered by Tananda.”

“And the the devil?” whispered the man, shivering.

“Safely back in its cell. Harken, Shubba; it is time you were gone. Search among the Shemites until you find a suitable woman a white woman. Bring her speedily here. If you return within the moon, I will give you her weight in silver. If you fail, I will hang your head from that palm tree.”

Shubba prostrated himself and touched his forehead to the dust. Then, rising, he hurried from the roof. Tuthmes glanced again toward the Outer City. The fires seemed somehow to glow more fiercely, and a drum had begun to emit an ominous monotone. A sudden clamor of furious yells welled up to the stars.

“They have heard that Amboola is dead,” muttered Tuthmes, and again a strong shudder shook his frame.

III. Tananda Rides

Dawn lit the skies above Meroe with crimson flame. Shafts of rich, ruddy light struck through the misty air and glanced from the copper-sheathed domes and spires of the stone-walled Inner City. Soon the people of Meroe were astir. In the Outer City, statuesque black women walked to the market square with gourds and baskets on their heads, while young girls chattered and laughed on their way to the wells. Naked children fought and played in the dust or chased each other through the narrow streets. Giant black men squatted in the doorways of their thatched huts, working at their trades, or lolled on the ground in the shade.

In the market square, merchants squatted under striped awnings, displaying pots and other manufactures, and vegetables and other produce, on the littered pavement. Black folks chaffered and bargained with endless talk over plaintains, banana beer, and hammered brass ornaments. Smiths crouched over little charcoal fires, laboriously beating out iron hoes, knives, and spearheads. The hot sun blazed down on all the sweat, mirth, anger, nakedness, strength, squalor, and vigor of the black people of Kush.

Suddenly there came a change in the pattern, a new note in the timbre. With a clatter of hoofs, a group of horsemen rode by in the direction of the great gate of the Inner City. There were half a dozen men and a woman, who dominated the group.

Her skin was a dusky brown; her hair, a thick, black mass, caught back and confined by a golden fillet Besides the sandals on her feet and the jewel-crusted golden plates that partly covered her full breasts, her only garment was a short silken skirt girdled at the waist. Her features were straight; her bold, scintillant eyes, full of challenge and sureness. She handled the slim Kushite horse with ease and certitude by means of a jeweled bridle and palm-wide, gilt-worked reins of scarlet leather. Her sandaled feet stood in wide silver stirrups, and a gazelle lay across her saddle bow. A pair of slender coursing hounds trotted close behind her horse.

As the woman rode by, work and chatter ceased. The black faces grew sullen; the murky eyes burned redly. The blacks turned their heads to whisper in one another’s ears, and the whispers grew to an audible, sinister murmur.

The youth who rode at the woman’s stirrup became nervous. He glanced ahead, along the winding street. Estimating the distance to the bronze gates, not yet in view between the huts, he whispered, “The people grow ugly, Highness. It was folly to ride through the Outer City today.”

“All the black dogs in Kush shall not keep me from my hunting!” replied the woman. “If any threaten, ride them down.”

“Easier said than done,” muttered the youth, scanning the silent throng. “They are coming from their houses and massing thick along the street look there!”

They entered a wide, ragged square, where the black folk swarmed. On one side of this square stood a house of dried mud and palm trunks, larger than its neighbors, with a cluster of skulls above the doorway. This was the temple of Jullah, which the ruling caste contemptuously called the devil house. The black folk worshiped Jullah in opposition to Set, the serpent-god of their rulers and of their Stygian ancestors.

The black folk thronged in this square, sullenly staring at the horsemen. There was an air of menace in their attitude. Tananda, for the first time feeling a slight nervousness, failed to notice another rider, approaching the square along another street. This rider would ordinarily have attracted attention, for he was neither brown nor black. He was a white man, a powerful figure in chain mail and helmet.

“These dogs mean mischief,” muttered the youth at Tananda’s side, half drawing his curved sword. The other guardsmen black men like the folk around them drew closer about her but did not draw their blades. The low, sullen muttering grew louder, although no movement was made.

“Push through them,” ordered Tananda, spurring her horse. The blacks gave back sullenly before her advance.

Then, suddenly, from the devil house came a lean, black figure. It was old Ageera, the witch-smeller, clad only in a loincloth. Pointing at Tananda, he yelled: “There she rides, she whose hands are dipped in blood! She who murdered Amboola!”

His shout was the spark that set off the explosion. A vast roar arose from the mob. They surged forward, screaming, “Death to Tananda!”

In an instant, a hundred black hands were clawing at the legs of the riders. The youth reined between Tananda and the mob, but a flying stone shattered his skull. The guardsmen, thrusting and hacking, were torn from their steeds and beaten, stamped, and stabbed to death. Tananda, beset at last by terror, screamed as her horse reared. A score of wild black figures, men and women, clawed at her.

A giant grasped her thigh and plucked her from the saddle, full into the furious hands that eagerly awaited her. Her skirt was ripped from her body and waved in the air above her, while a bellow of primitive laughter went up from the surging mob. A woman spat in her face and tore off her breastplates, scratching her breasts with blackened fingernails. A hurtling stone grazed her head.

Tananda saw a stone clutched in a hand, whose owner sought to reach her in the press to brain her. Daggers glinted. Only the hindering numbers of the jammed mass kept them from instantly doing her to death. A roar went up: “To the temple of Jullah!”

An instant clamor responded. Tananda felt herself half carried, half dragged along by the surging mob. Black hands gripped her hair, arms, and legs. Blows aimed at her in the crush were blocked or diverted by the mass.

Then came a shock, under which the whole throng staggered, as a horseman on a powerful steed crashed full into the press. Men, screaming, went down to be crushed under the flailing hoofs. Tananda caught a glimpse of a figure towering above the throng, of a dark, scarred face under a steel helmet, and a great sword lashing up and down, spattering crimson splashes. But, from somewhere in the crowd, a spear licked upward, disemboweling the steed. It screamed, plunged, and went down.

The rider, however, landed on his feet, smiting right and left. Wildly driven spears glanced from his helmet or from the shield on his left arm, while his broadsword cleft flesh and bone, split skulls, and spilled entrails into the bloody dust.

Flesh and blood could not stand it. Clearing a space, the stranger stooped and caught up the terrified girl. Covering her with his shield, he fell back, cutting a ruthless path until he had backed into the angle of a wall. Pushing her behind him, he stood before her, beating back the frothing, screaming onslaught.

Then there was a clatter of hoofs. A company of guardsmen swept into the square, driving the rioters before them. The Kushites, screaming in sudden panic, fled into the side streets, leaving a score of bodies littering the square. The captain of the guard a giant Negro, resplendent in crimson silk and gold-worked harness approached and dismounted.

“You were long in coming,” said Tananda, who had risen and regained her poise.

The captain turned ashy. Before he could move, Tananda had made a sign to the men behind him. Using both hands, one of them drove his spear between his captain’s shoulders with such force that the point started out from his breast. The officer sank to his knees, and thrusts from a half-dozen more spears finished the task.

Tananda shook her long, black, disheveled hair and faced her rescuer. She was bleeding from a score of scratches and as naked as a newborn babe, but she stared at the man without perturbation or uncertainty. He gave back her stare, his expression betraying a frank admiration for her cool bearing and the ripeness of her brown limbs and voluptuously molded torso.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“I am Conan, a Cimmerian,” he grunted.

“Cimmerian?” She had never heard of his far country, which lay hundreds of leagues to the north. She frowned. “You wear Stygian mail and helm. Are you a Stygian of some sort?”

He shook his head, baring white teeth in a grin. “I got the armor from a Stygian, but I had to kill the fool first.”

“What do you, then, in Meroe?”

“I am a wanderer,” he said simply, “with a sword for hire. I came here to seek my fortune.” He did not think it wise to tell her of his previous career as a corsair on the Black Coast, or of his chieftainship of one of the jungle tribes to the south.

The queen’s eyes ran appraisingly over Conan’s giant form, measuring the breadth of his shoulders and the depth of his chest. “I will hire your sword,” she said at last. “What is your price?”

“What price do you offer?” he countered, with a rueful glance at the carcass of his horse. “I am a penniless wanderer and now, alas, afoot.”

She shook her head. “No, by Set! You are penniless no longer, but captain of the royal guard. Will a hundred pieces of gold a month buy your loyalty?”

He glanced casually at the sprawling figure of the former captain, who lay in silk, steel, and blood. The sight did not dim the zest of his sudden grin.

“I think so,” said Conan.

IV. The Golden Slave

The days passed, and the moon waned and waxed. A brief, disorganized rising by the lower castes was put down by Conan with an iron hand. Shubba, Tuthmes’ servant, returned to Meroe. Coming to Tuthmes in his chamber, where lion skins carpeted the marble floor, he said, “I have found the woman you desired, master a Nemedian girl, captured from a trading vessel of Argos. I paid the Shemite slave trader many broad pieces of gold for her.”

“Let me see her,” commanded Tuthmes.

Shubba left the room and returned a moment later, leading a girl by the wrist. She was supple, and her white body formed a dazzling contrast to the brown and black bodies to which Tuthmes was accustomed. Her hair fell in a curly, rippling, golden stream over her white shoulders. She was clad only in a tattered shift. This Shubba removed, leaving her shrinking in complete nudity.

Impersonally, Tuthmes nodded. “She is a fine bit of merchandise. If I were not gambling for a throne, I might be tempted to keep her for myself. Have you taught her Kushite, as I commanded?”

“Aye; in the city of the Stygians and later, daily, on the caravan trail, I taught her. After the Shemite fashion, I impressed upon her the need of learning with a slipper. Her name is Diana.”

Tuthmes seated himself on a couch and indicated that the girl should sit cross-legged on the floor at his feet. This she did.

“I am going to give you to the queen of Kush as a present,” he said. “Nominally you will be her slave, but actually you will still belong to me. You will receive your orders regularly, and you shall not fail to carry them out. The queen is cruel and hasty, so beware of roiling her. You shall say nothing, even if tortured, of your continuing connection with me. Lest, when you fancy yourself out of my reach in the royal palace, you be tempted to disobey, I shall demonstrate my power to you.”

Taking her hand, he led her through a corridor, down a flight of stone stairs, and into a long, dimly-lit room.

This chamber was divided into equal halves by a wall of crystal, as clear as water although a yard thick and strong enough to resist the lunge of a bull elephant. Tuthmes led Diana to this wall and made her stand, facing it, while he stepped back. Abruptly, the light went out.

As she stood in darkness, her slender limbs trembling with unreasoning panic, light began to glow out of the blackness. She saw a malformed, hideous head grow out of the blackness. She saw a bestial snout, chisel-like teeth, and bristles. As the horror moved toward her, she screamed and turned, forgetting in her frantic fear the sheet of crystal that kept the brute from her. In the darkness, she ran full into the arms of Tuthmes. She heard him hiss, “You have been my servant. Do not fail me, for if you do he will search you out wherever you may be. You cannot hide from him.” When he whispered something else in her ear, she fainted.

Tuthmes carried her up the stairs and gave her into the hands of a black woman with orders to revive her, see that she had food and wine, and bathe, comb, perfume, and deck her for presentation to the queen on the morrow.

V. The Lash of Tananda

The next day, Shubba led Diana of Nemedia to Tuthmes’ chariot, hoisted her into the car, and took the reins. It was a different Diana, scrubbed and perfumed, with her beauty enhanced by a discreet touch of cosmetics. She wore a robe of silk so thin that every contour could be seen through it. A diadem of silver sparkled on her golden hair.

She was, however, still terrified. Life had been a nightmare ever since the slavers had kidnapped her. She had tried to comfort herself, during the long months that followed, with the thought that nothing lasts forever and that things were so bad that they were bound to improve. Instead, they had only worsened.

Now she was about to be proffered as a gift to a cruel and irascible queen. If she survived, she would be caught between the dangers of Tuthmes’ monster on one hand and the suspicions of the queen on the other. If she did not spy for Tuthmes, the demon would get her; if she did, the queen would probably catch her at it and have her done to death in some even more gruesome fashion.

Overhead, the sky had a steely look. In the west, clouds were piling up, tier upon tier; for the end of Kush’s dry season was at hand.

The chariot rumbled toward the main square in front of the royal palace. The wheels crunched softly over drifted sand, now and then rattling loudly as they encountered a stretch of bare pavement. Few upper-caste Meroites were abroad, for the heat of the afternoon was at its height. Most of the ruling class slumbered in their houses. A few of their black servants slouched through the streets, turning blank faces, shining with sweat, toward the chariot as it passed.

At the palace, Shubba handed Diana down from the chariot and led her in through the gilded bronze gates. A fat major domo conducted them through corridors and into a large chamber, fitted out with the ornate opulence of the room of a Stygian princess which in a way it was. On a couch of ivory and ebony, inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl, sat Tananda, clad only in a brief skirt of crimson silk.

The queen’s eyes insolently examined the trembling blond slave before her. The girl was obviously a fine piece of human property. But Tananda’s heart, steeped in treachery itself, was swift to suspect treachery in others. The queen spoke suddenly, in a voice heavy with veiled menace:

“Speak, wench! Why did Tuthmes send you to the palace?”

“I do not know where am I? Who are you?” Diana had a small, high voice, like that of a child.

“I am Queen Tananda, fool! Now answer my question.”

“I know not the answer, my lady. All I know is that Lord Tuthmes sent me as a gift “

“You lie! Tuthmes is eaten-up with ambition. Since he hates me, he would not make me a gift without an ulterior reason. He must have some plot in mind Speak up, or it will be the worse for you!”

“I do not know! I do not know!” wailed Diana, bursting into tears. Frightened almost to insanity by Muru’s demon, she could not have spoken even if she had wished. Her tongue would have refused to obey her brain.

“Strip her!” commanded Tananda. The flimsy robe was torn from Diana’s body.

“String her up!” said Tananda. Diana’s wrists were bound, the rope was thrown over a beam, and the end was pulled taut, so that the girl’s arms were extended straight over her head.

Tananda rose, a whip in her hand. “Now,” she said with a cruel smile, “we shall see what you know about our dear friend Tuthmes’ little schemes. Once more: will you speak?”

Her voice choked with sobs, Diana could only shake her head. The whip wristled and cracked across the Nemedian girl’s skin, leaving a red welt diagonally across her back. Diana uttered a piercing shriek.

“What’s all this?” said a deep voice. Conan, wearing his coat of mail over his jubbah and girt with his sword, stood in the doorway. Having become intimate with Tananda, he was accustomed to entering her palace unannounced. Tananda had taken lovers before the murdered Amboola among them but never one in whose embraces she found such ecstasy, nor one whose relationship with her she flaunted so brazenly. She could not have enough of the giant northerner.

Now, however, she spun about. “Just a northern slut, whom Tuthmes was sending me as a gift no doubt to slip a dagger into my ribs or a potion into my wine,” she snapped. “I am trying to learn the truth from her. If you want to love me, come back later.”

“That is not my only reason for coming,” he replied, grinning wolfishly. “There is also a little matter of state. What is this folly, to let the blacks into the Inner City to watch Aahmes burn?”

“What folly, Conan? It will show the black dogs I am not to be trifled with. The scoundrel will be tortured in a way that will be remembered for years. Thus perish all foes of our divine dynasty! What objection have you, pray?”

“Just this: if you let a few thousand Kushites into the Inner City and then work up their blood lust by the sight of the torture, it won’t take much to set off another rising. Your divine dynasty has not given them much cause to love it.”

“I do not fear those black scum!”

“Maybe not. But I have saved your pretty neck from them twice, and the third time my luck might run out. I tried to tell your minister Afari this just now, in his palace, but he said it was your command and he could do naught. I thought you might listen to sense from me, since your people fear you too much to say anything that might displease you.”

“I’ll do naught of the kind. Now get out of here and leave me to my work unless you would care to wield the whip yourself.” Conan approached Diana. “Tuthmes has taste,” he said. “But the lass has been frightened out of her wits. No tale you got out of her would be worth the hearing. Give her to me, and I’ll show you what a little kindness can do.”

“You, kind? Ha! Mind your own affairs, Conan, and I will mind mine. You should be posting your guardsmen against tonight’s gathering.” Tananda spoke sharply to Diana: “Now speak, hussy, damn your soul!” The whip hissed as she drew back her arm for another lash.

Moving with the effortless speed of a lion, Conan caught Tananda’s wrist and twisted the whip out of her hand.

“Let me go!” she screamed. “You dare to use force on me? I’ll have you– “

“You’ll what?” said Conan calmly. He tossed the whip into a corner, drew his dagger, and cut the rope that bound Diana’s wrists. Tananda’s servants exchanged uneasy glances.

“Mind your royal dignity, Highness!” grinned Conan, gathering Diana into his arms. “Remember that, with me in command of the guard, you have at least a chance. Without me well, you know the answer to that. I shall see you at the torture.”

He strode toward the door, carrying the Nemedian girl. Screaming with rage, Tananda picked up the discarded whip and hurled it after him. The handle struck his broad back, and the whip fell to the floor.

“Just because she has a fish-belly skin like yours, you prefer her to me!” shrieked Tananda. “You shall rue your insolence!”

With a rumbling laugh, Conan walked out. Tananda sank to the floor, beating the marble with her fists and weeping with frustration.

Moments later, Shubba, driving Tuthmes’ chariot back toward his master’s house, passed Conan’s dwelling. He was astonished to see Conan, carrying a naked girl in his arms, entering his front door. Shubba shook the reins and hastened on his way.

VI. Dark Counsel

The first lamps had been lit against the dusk as Tuthmes sat in his chamber with Shubba and with Muru, the tall Kordafan sorcerer. Shubba, glancing uneasily at his master, had finished his tale.

“I see that I did not credit Tananda with her full measure of suspiciousness,” said Tuthmes. “A pity to waste so promising an instrument as that Nemedian girl, but not every shaft strikes the butt. The question, however, is: what shall we do next? Has anyone seen Ageera?”

“Nay, my lord,” said Shubba. “He vanished after stirring up that riot against Tananda very prudently, if I may say so. Some say he has left Meroe; some, that he lurks in the temple of Jullah, working divinations by day and night.”

“If our divine queen had the wit of a worm,” sneered Tuthmes, “she would invade that devil house with a few stout guardsmen and hang the priests to their own rooftree.” His two companions started and shifted their eyes uneasily. “I know; you are all terrified of their spells and spooks. Well, let us see. The girl is now useless to us. If Tananda failed to wring our secrets from her, Conan will do so by gentler means, and in his house she will learn naught of interest to us anyway. She must die forthwith. Muru, can you send your demon to Conan’s house while he is commanding his guardsmen this evening, to make away with the wench?”

“That I can, master,” replied the Kordafan. “Should I not command it to stay there until Conan returns and slay him, too? For I see that you will never be king whilst Conan lives. As long as he holds his present post, he will fight like a devil to protect the queen, his leman, because he so promised to do, regardless of how he and she may quarrel otherwise.”

Shubba added: “Even if we got rid of Tananda, Conan would still stand in our way. He might become king himself. He is practically the uncrowned king of Kush now the queen’s confidant and lover. His guardsmen love him, swearing that despite his white skin he is really a black man like themselves inside.”

“Good,” said Tuthmes. “Let us dispose of the twain at the same time. I shall be watching the torture of Aahmes in the main square, so that none shall say that I had a hand in the slaying.”

“Why not set the demon on Tananda, also?” asked Shubba.

“It is not yet time. First, I must align the other nobles behind my claim to the throne, and this will not be easy. Too many of them, as well, fancy themselves as king of Kush. Until my faction grows stronger, my hold on the throne would be as insecure as Tananda’s now is. So I am satisfied to wait, meanwhile letting her hang herself by her own excesses.”

VII. The Fate of a Kingdom

In the main square of the Inner City, Prince Aahmes was tied to a stake in the center. Aahmes was a plump, brown-skinned young man, whose very innocence in matters of politics, it seemed, had enabled Afari to trap him by a false accusation.

Bonfires in the corners of the square and lines of torches illuminated an infernal scene. Between the stake and the royal palace stood a low platform, on which sat Tananda. Around the platform, royal guards were ranked three deep.

The fires shone redly on the long blades of their spears, their shields of elephant hide, and the plumes of their headdresses.

To one side of the square, Conan sat his horse at the head of a company of mounted guardsmen with lances erect. In the distance, lightning rippled through high-piled clouds.

In the center, where Lord Aahmes was tied, more guardsmen kept a space clear. In the space, the royal executioner was heating the instruments of his calling over a little forge. The rest of the square was jammed with most of the folk of Merofi, mingled in one vast, indiscriminate throng. The torchlight picked out white eyeballs and teeth against dark skins. Tuthmes and his servants formed a solid clump in the front row.

Conan looked over the throng with dark foreboding. All had been orderly so far; but who knew what would happen when primitive passions were stirred? A nameless anxiety nagged at the back of his mind. As time passed, this anxiety became fixed, not on the fate of the headstrong queen, but on the Nemedian girl whom he had left at his house. He had left her with only a single servant, a black woman, because he had needed all his guardsmen to control the gathering in the square.

In the few hours he had known Diana, Conan had become much taken with her. Sweet, gentle, and perhaps even a virgin, she contrasted in every way with the fiery, temptestuous, passionate, cruel, sensual Tananda. Being Tananda’s lover was certainly exciting, but after a time Conan thought he might prefer someone less stormy for a change. Knowing Tananda, he would not have put it past her to have sent one of her servants to murder Diana while Conan was otherwise occupied.

In the center of the square, the executioner blew on his little charcoal fire with a bellows. He held up an instrument, which glowed a bright cherry red in the dark. He approached the prisoner. Conan could not hear over the murmur of the crowd, but he knew that the executioner was asking Aahmes for details of his plot The captive shook his head.

It was as though a voice were speaking inside Conan’s mind, urging him to return to his house. In the Hyborian lands, Conan had listened to the speculations of priests and philosophers. They had argued over the existence of guardian spirits and over the possibility of direct communication from mind to mind. Being convinced that they were all mad, he had not paid much attention at the time. Now, however, he thought he knew what they were talking about. He tried to dismiss the sensation as mere imagination; but it returned, stronger than ever.

At last Conan told his adjutant: “Mongo, take command until I return.”

“Whither go you, Lord Conan?” asked the Black.

“To ride through the streets, to be sure no gang of rascals has gathered under cover of darkness. Keep things under control; I shall soon be back.”

Conan turned his horse and trotted out of the square. The crowd opened to let him pass. The sensation in his head was stronger than ever. He clucked his steed to an easy canter and presently drew rein in front of his dwelling. A faint rumble of thunder sounded.

The house was dark, save for a single light in the back. Conan dismounted, tied his horse, and entered, hand on hilt. At that instant he heard a frightful scream, which he recognized as the voice of Diana.

With a sulfurous oath, Conan rushed headlong into the house, tearing out his sword. The scream came from the living room, which was dark save for the stray beams of a single candle that burned in the kitchen.

At the door of the living room, Conan halted, transfixed by the scene before him. Diana cowered on a low settee strewn with leopard skins, her white limbs unveiled by the disarray of her silken shift. Her blue eyes were dilated with terror.

Hanging in the center of the room, a gray, coiling mist was taking shape and form. The seething fog had already partly condensed into a hulking, monstrous form with sloping, hairy shoulders and thick, bestial limbs. Conan glimpsed the creature’s misshapen head with its bristling, piglike snout and tusked, champing jaws.

The thing had solidified out of thin air, materializing by some demonic magic. Primal legends rose in Conan’s mind whispered tales of horrid, shambling things that prowled the dark and slew with inhuman fury. For half a heartbeat his atavistic fears made him hesitate. Then, with a snarl of rage, he sprang forward to give battle and tripped over the body of the black woman servant, who had fainted and lay just inside the doorway. Conan fell sprawling, the sword flying from his hand.

At the same instant the monster, with supernatural quickness, whirled and launched itself at Conan in a gigantic bound. As Conan fell flat, the demon passed clear over his body and fetched up against the wall of the hall outside.

The combatants were on their feet in an instant. As the monster sprang upon Conan anew, a flash of lightning outside gleamed upon its great chisel tusks. The Cimmerian thrust his left elbow up under its jaw, while he fumbled with his right hand for his dagger.

The demon’s hairy arms encircled Conan’s body with crushing force; a smaller man’s back would have been broken. Conan heard his clothing rip as the blunt nails of its hands dug in, and a couple of links of his mail shirt snapped with sharp, metallic sounds. Although the weight of the demon was about the same as the Cimmerian’s, its strength was incredible. As he strained every muscle, Conan felt his left forearm being bent slowly back, so that the snouted jaws came closer and closer to his face.

In the semi-dark, the two stamped and staggered about like partners in some grotesque dance. Conan fumbled for his dagger, while the demon brought its tusks ever nearer. Conan realized that his belt must have become awry, so that the dagger was out of reach. He felt even his titanic strength ebbing, when something cold was thrust into his groping right hand. It was the hilt of his sword, which Diana had picked up and now pressed into his grasp.

Drawing back his right arm, Conan felt with his point for a place in the body of his assailant. Then he thrust. The monster’s skin seemed of unnatural toughness, but a mighty heave drove the blade home. Spasmodically champing its jaws, the creature uttered a bestial grunt.

Conan stabbed again and again, but the shaggy brute did not even seem to feel the bite of the steel. The demonic arms dragged the Cimmerian into an ever closer, bone-crushing embrace. The chisel-toothed jaws came closer and closer to his face. More links of his mail shirt parted with musical snapping sounds. Rough claws ripped his tunic and dug bloody furrows in his sweat-smeared back. A viscous fluid from the creature’s wounds, which did not feel like any normal blood, ran down the front of Conan’s garments.

At length, doubling both legs and driving them into the thing’s belly with every ounce of strength remaining to him, Conan tore himself free. He staggered to his feet, dripping gore. As the demon shuffled toward him again, swinging its apelike arms for another grapple, Conan, with both hands on his hilt, swung his sword in a desperate arc. The blade bit into the monster’s neck, half severing it. The mighty blow would have decapitated two or even three human foes at once, but the demon’s tissues were tougher than those of mortal men.

The demon staggered back and crashed to the floor. As Conan stood panting, with dripping blade, Diana threw her arms about his neck. “I’m so glad I prayed to Ishtar to send you “

“There, there,” said Conan, comforting the girl with rough caresses. “I may look ready for the grave, but I can still stand “

He broke off, eyes wide. The dead thing rose, its malformed head wobbling on its half-severed neck. It lurched to the door, tripped over the still-unconscious body of the Negro servant woman, and staggered out into the night.

“Crom and Mitra!” gasped Conan. Pushing the girl aside, he growled: “Later, later! You’re a good lass, but I must follow that thing. That’s the demon of the night they talk about, and by Crom, I’ll find out where it comes from!”

He reeled out, to find his horse gone. A length of rein attached to the hitching ring told that the animal had broken its tether in panic at the demon’s appearance.

Moments later. Conan reappeared in the square. As he rammed his way through the crowd, which had burst into a roar of excitement, he saw the monster stagger and fall in front of the tall Kordafan wizard in Tuthmes’ group. In its final throes, it laid its head at the sorcerer’s feet.

Screams of rage arose from the crowd, which recognized the monster as the demon that for years had terrified Meroe from time to time. Although the guardsmen still struggled to keep the space around the torture stake open, hands reached from the sides and back to pull Muru down. In the confused uproar, Conan caught a few snatches of speech: “Slay him! He is the demon’s master! Kill him!”

A sudden hush fell. In the clear space, Ageera had suddenly appeared, his shaven head painted to resemble a skull. It was as if he had somehow bounded over the heads of the crowd to land in the clearing.

“Why slay the tool and not the man who wields it?” he shrieked. He pointed at Tuthmes. “There stands he whom the Kordafan served! At his command, the demon slew Amboola! My spirits have told me, in the silence of the temple of Jullah! Slay him, too!”

As more hands dragged down the screaming Tuthmes, Ageera pointed toward the platform on which sat the queen. “Slay all the lords! Cast off your bonds! Kill the masters! Be free men again and not slaves! Kill, kill, kill!”

Conan could barely keep his feet in the buffeting of the crowd, which surged this way and that, chanting: “Kill, kill, kill!” Here and there a screaming lord was brought down and torn to pieces.

Conan struggled toward his mounted guards, by means of whom he still hoped to clear the square. Then, over the heads of the mob, he saw a sight that changed his plans. A royal guardsman, standing with his back to the platform, turned about and hurled his spear straight at the queen, whom he was supposed to protect. The spear went through her glorious body as if through butter. As she slumped in her seat, a dozen more spears found their mark in her. At the fall of their ruler, the mounted guardsmen joined the rest of the tribesmen in the massacre of the ruling caste. Moments later, Conan, battered and disheveled but leading another horse, appeared at his dwelling. He tied the animal, rushed inside, and brought a bag of coins out of its hiding place.

“Let’s go!” he barked at Diana. “Grab a loaf of bread! Where in the cold Hells of Niflheim is my shield? Ah, here!”

“But don’t you want to take those nice things.”

“No time; the browns are done for. Hold my girdle while you ride behind me. Up with you, now!”

With its double burden, the horse galloped heavily through the Inner City, through a rabble of looters and rioters, pursuers and pursued. One man, who leaped for the animal’s bridle, was ridden down with a shriek and a snapping of bones; others scrambled madly out of the way. Out through the great bronze gates they rode, while behind them the houses of the nobility blazed up into yellow pyramids of flame. Overhead lightning flashed, thunder roared, and rain came pelting down like a waterfall.

An hour later, the rain had slackened to a drizzle. The horse moved at a slow walk, picking its way through the darkness.

“We’re still on the Stygian road,” grumbled Conan, striving to pierce the dark with his gaze. “When the rain stops, we’ll stop, too, to dry off and get a little sleep.”

“Where are we going?” said the high, gentle voice of Diana.

“I don’t know; but I’m tired of the black countries. You cannot do anything with these people; they are as hidebound and as thick-headed as the barbarians of my own north country the Cimmerians and Aesir and Vanir. I am minded to have another try at civilization.”

“And what about me?”

“What do you want? I’ll send you home or keep you with me, whichever you like.”

“I think,” she said in a small voice, “that in spite of the wet and everything, I like things as they are.”

Conan grinned silently in the darkness and urged the horse to a trot.

11. HAWKS OVER SHEM

Following the events of the story The Snout in the Dark, Conan, dissatisfied with his accomplishments in the black countries, wanders northward across the deserts of Stygia to the meadowlands of Shem. During this trek, his reputation stands him in good stead. He presently finds himself in the army of King Sumuabi of Akkharia, one of the southerly Shemitish city-states. Through the treachery of one Othbaal, cousin of the mad King Akhirom of Pelishtia, the Akkharian forces are ambushed and wiped out.all but Conan, who survives to track the renegade to Asgalun, the Pelishti capital.

The tall figure in the white cloak wheeled, cursing softly, hand at scimitar hilt Not lightly did men walk the nighted streets of Asgalun, capital of Shemitish Pelishtia. In this dark, winding alley of the unsavory river quarter, anything might happen.

“Why do you follow me, dog?” The voice was harsh, slurring the Shemitic gutturals with the accents of Hyrkania.

Another tall figure emerged from the shadows, clad, like the first, in a cloak of white silk but lacking the other’s spired helmet.

“Did you say, ‘dog’?” The accent differed from the Hyrkanian’s.

“Aye, dog. I have been followed.”

Before the Hyrkanian could get further, the other rushed with the sudden blinding speed of a pouncing tiger. The Hyrkanian snatched at his sword. Before the blade cleared the scabbard, a huge fist smote the side of his head. But for the Hyrkanian’s powerful build and the protection of the camail of ring mail that hung down from his helmet, his neck might have been broken. As it was, he was hurled sprawling to the pavement, his sword clattering out of his grasp.

As the Hyrkanian shook his head and groped back to consciousness, he saw the other standing over him with drawn saber. The stranger rumbled: “I follow nobody, and I let nobody call me dog! Do you understand that, dog?”

The Hyrkanian glanced about for his sword and saw that the other had already kicked it out of reach. Thinking to gain time until he could spring for his weapon, he said: “Your pardon if I wronged you, but I have been followed since nightfall. I heard stealthy footsteps along the dark alleys. Then you came unexpectedly into view, in a place most suited for murder.”

“Ishtar confound you! Why should I follow you? I have lost my way. I’ve never seen you before, and I hope never to.”

A stealthy pad of feet brought the stranger round, springing back and wheeling to keep both the Hyrkanian and the newcomers before him.

Four huge figures loomed menacingly in the shadows, the dim starlight glinting on curved blades. There was also a glimmer of white teeth and eyeballs against dark skins.

For an instant there was tense stillness. Then one muttered in the liquid accents of the black kingdoms: “Which is our dog? Here be two clad alike, and the darkness makes them twins.”

“Cut down both,” replied another, who towered half a head above his tall companions. “We shall then make no mistake and leave no witness.”

So saying, the four Negroes came on in deadly silence.

The stranger took two long strides to where the Hyrkanian’s sword lay. With a growl of “Here! he kicked the weapon at the Hyrkanian, who snatched it up; then rushed upon the advancing blacks with a snarling oath.

The giant Kushite and one other closed with the stranger while the other two ran at the Hyrkanian. The stranger, with that same feline speed he had shown earlier, leaped in without awaiting attack. A quick feint, a clang of steel, and a lightning slash sheared the head of the smaller black from his shoulders. As the stranger struck, so did the giant, with a long forehand sweep that should have cut the stranger in two at the waist.

But, despite his size, the stranger moved even faster than the blade as it hissed through the night air. He dropped to the ground in a crouch so that the scimitar passed over him. As he squatted in front of his antagonist, he struck at the black’s legs. The blade bit into muscle and bone. As the black reeled on his wounded leg and swung his sword up for another slash, the stranger sprang up and in, under the lifted arm, and drove his blade to the hilt in the Negro’s chest blood spurted along the stranger’s wrist The scimitar fell waveringly, to cut through the silken kaffia and glance from the steel cap beneath. The giant sank down dying.

The stranger tore out his blade and whirled. The Hyrkanian had met the attack of his two Negroes coolly, retreating slowly to keep them in front of him. He suddenly slashed one across the chest and shoulder so that he dropped his sword and fell to his knees with a moan. As he fell he gripped his foe’s knees and hung on like a leech. The Hyrkanian kicked and struggled in vain. Those black arms, bulging with iron muscles, held him fast, while the remaining Negro redoubled the fury of his strokes.

Even as the Kushite swordsman drew breath for a stroke that the hampered Hyrkanian could not have parried, he heard the rush of feet behind him. Before he could turn, the stranger’s saber drove through him with such fury that the blade sprang half its length out of his chest, while the hilt smote him fiercely between the shoulders. Life went out of him with a cry.

The Hyrkanian caved in the skull of his other antagonist with his hilt and shook himself free of the corpse. He turned to the stranger, who was pulling his saber out of the body it transfixed.

“Why did you come to my aid after nearly knocking my head off?” he asked.

The other shrugged. “We were two men beset by rogues. Fate made us allies. Now, if you like, well take up our quarrel again. You said I spied upon you.”

“I see my mistake and crave your pardon,” answered the Hyrkanian promptly. “I know now who has been skulking after me.”

He wiped and sheathed his scimitar and bent over each corpse in turn. When he came to the body of the giant, he paused and murmured: “Soho! Keluka the Sworder! Of high rank the archer whose shaft is paneled with pearls!” He wrenched from the limp black finger a heavy, ornate ring, slipped the ring into his sash, and laid hold of the garments of the dead man. “Help me to dispose cf this carrion, brother, so that no questions shall be asked.”

The stranger grasped a bloodstained jacket in each hand and dragged the bodies after the Hyrkanian down a reeking black alley, in which rose the broken curb of a ruined and forgotten well. The corpses plunged into the abyss and struck far below with sullen splashes. With a light laugh the Hyrkanian turned.

“The gods have made us allies,” he said. “I owe you a debt.”

“You owe me naught,” answered the other in a surly tone.

“Words cannot level a mountain. I am Farouz, an archer of Mazdak’s Hyrkanian horse. Come with me to a more seemly spot, where we can converse in comfort. I hold no grudge for the buffet you dealt me, though, by Tarim! my head still rings from it.”

The stranger grudgingly sheathed his saber and followed the Hyrkanian. Their way led through the gloom of reeking alleys and along narrow, winding streets. Asgalun was a contrast of splendor and decay, where opulent palaces rose among the smoke-stained ruins of buildings of forgotten ages. A swarm of suburbs clustered about the walls of the forbidden inner city where dwelt King Akhirom and his nobles.

The two men came to a newer and more respectable quarter, where the latticed windows of overhanging balconies almost touched one another across the street.

“All the shops are dark,” grunted .the stranger. “A few days ago the city was lighted like day, from dusk to sunrise.”

“One of Akhirom’s whims. Now he has another, that no lights shall burn in Asgalun. What his mood will be tomorrow, Pteor only knows.”

They halted before an iron-bound door in a heavy stone arch, and the Hyrkanian rapped cautiously. A voice challenged from within and was answered by a password. The door opened, and the Hyrkanian pushed into thick darkness, drawing his companion with him. The door closed behind them, A heavy leather curtain was pulled back, revealing a lamplit corridor and a scarred old Shemite.

“An old soldier turned to wine-selling,” said the Hyrkanian. “Lead us to a chamber where we can be alone, Khannon.”

“Most of the chambers are empty,” grumbled Khannon, limping before them. “I’m a ruined man. Men fear to touch the cup, since the king banned wine. Pteor smite him with gout!”

The stranger glanced curiously into the larger chambers that they passed, where men sat at food and drink. Most of Khannon’s customers were typical Pelishthi: stocky, swarthy men with hooked noses and curly blue-black beards. Occasionally one saw men of the more slender type that roamed the deserts of eastern Shem, or Hyrkanians or black Kushites from the mercenary army of Pelishtia.

Khannon bowed the two men into a small room, where he spread mats for them. He set before them a great dish of fruits and nuts, poured wine from a bulging skin, and limped away muttering.

“Pelishtia has come upon evil days, brother,” drawled the Hyrkanian, quaffing the wine of Kyros. He was a tall man, leaniy but strong built. Keen black eyes, slightly aslant, danced restlessly in a face with a yellowish tinge. His hawk nose overhung a thin, black, drooping mustache. His plain cloak was of costly fabric, his spired helmet was chased with silver, and jewels glittered in the hilt of his scimitar.

He looked at a man as tall as himself, but who contrasted with him in many ways. The other had thicker limbs and greater depth of chest: the build of a mountaineer. Under his white kaffia his broad brown face, youthful but already seamed with the scars of brawls and battles, showed smooth-shaven. His natural complexion was lighter than that of the Hyrkanian, the darkness of his features being more of the sun than of nature. A hint of stormy fires smoldered in his cold blue eyes. He gulped his wine and smacked his lips.

Farouz grinned and refilled his goblet. “You fight well, brother. If Mazdak’s Hyrkanians were not so infernally jealous of outsiders, you’d make a good trooper.”

The other merely grunted.

“Who are you, anyway?” persisted Farouz. “I’ve told you who I am.”

“I am Ishbak, a Zuagir from the eastern deserts.”

The Hyrkanian threw back his head and laughed loudly, bringing a scowl to the face of the other, who said: “What’s so funny?”

“Do you expect me to believe that?”

“Do you say I lie?” snarled the stranger. Farouz grinned. “No Zuagir ever spoke Pelishtic with an accent like yours, for the Zuagir tongue is but a dialect of Shemitish. Moreover, during our fight with the Kushites, you called upon strange gods.Crom and Manannan.whose names I have heard before from barbarians of the far North. Fear not; I am in your debt and can keep a secret”

The stranger half started up, grasping his hilt. Farouz merely took a sip of wine. After an instant of tension the stranger sank back. With an air of discomfiture he said: “Very well. I am Conan, a Cimmerian, late of the army of King Sumuabi of Akkharia.”

The Hyrkanian grinned and stuffed grapes into his mouth. Between chews he said: “You could never be a spy, friend Conan. You are too quick and open in your anger. What brings you to Asgalun?”

“A little matter of revenge.”

“Who is your enemy?”

“An Anaki named Othbaal, may the dogs gnaw his bones!”

Farouz whistled. “By Pteor, you aim at a lofty target! Know you that this man is the general of all King Akhirom’s Anakian troops?”

“Crom! It matters as little to me as if he were a collector of offal.”

“What has Othbaal done to you?”

Conan said: “The people of Anakia revolted against their king, who’s an even bigger fool than Akhirom. They asked help of Akkharia. Sumuabi hoped they would succeed and choose a friendlier king than the one in power, so he called for volunteers. Five hundred of us marched to help the Anakim. But this damned Othbaal had been playing both sides. He led the revolt to encourage the king’s enemies to come out into the open, ard then betrayed the rebels into the arms of this king, who butchered the lot.

“Othbaal also knew we were coming, so he set a trap for us. Not knowing what had happened, we fell into it. Only I escaped with my life, and that by shamming death. The rest of us either fell on the field or were put to death with the fanciest tortures the king’s Sabatean torturer could devise.” The moody blue eyes narrowed. “I’ve fought men before this and thought no more of them afterwards, but in this case I swore I’d pay back Othbaal for some of my dead friends. When I got back to Akkharia I learned that Othbaal had fled from Anakia for fear of the people and had come here. How has he risen so high so fast?”

“He’s a cousin of King Akhirom,” said Farouz. “Akhirom, though a Pelishti, is also a cousin of the king of Anakia and was reared at that court. The kings of these little Shemitish city-states are all more or less related, which makes their wars all quarrels within the family and all the bitterer in consequence. How long have you been in Asgalun?”

“Only a few days. Long enough to learn that the king is mad. No wine indeed!” Conan spat.

“There is more to learn. Akhirom is indeed mad, and the people murmur under his heel. He holds his power by means of three bodies of mercenary troops, with whose aid he overthrew and slew his brother, the previous king. First, the Anakim, whom he recruited while an exile at the court of Anakia. Secondly, the black Kushites, who under their general, Imbalayo, yearly gain more power. And thirdly, the Hyrkanian horse, like myself. Their general is Mazdak, and among him and Imbalayo and Othbaal there is enough hatred and jealousy to have started a dozen wars. You saw some of it in this evening’s encounter.

“Othbaal came here last year as a penniless adventurer. He has risen partly by his relationship to Akhirom, and partly by the intrigues of an Ophirean slave-woman named Rufia, whom he won at gaming from Mazdak and then refused to return when the Hyrkanian had sobered up. That’s another reason for there being little love between them. There is a woman behind Akhirom, too: Zeriti the Stygian, a witch. Men say she has driven him mad by the potions she has fed him to keep him under her government If that’s true, then she defeated her own ends, for now nobody can control him.”

Conan set down his goblet and looked straight at Farouz. “Well, what now? Will you betray me, or did you speak truth when you said you would not?”

Turning in his fingers the ring he had taken from Keluka, Farouz mused. “Your secret is safe with me. For one reason, I too owe Othbaal a heavy debt. If you succeed in your quest ere I find means to discharge it, I shall bear the loss with serenity.”

Conan started forward, his iron fingers gripping the Hyrkanian’s shoulder. “Do you speak truth?”

“May these potbellied Shemitish gods smite me with boils if I lie!”

“Then let me aid you in your vengeance!”

“You? An outsider, who knows nought of the secret ways of Asgalun?”

“Of course! So much the better; having no local ties, I can be trusted. Come on; let’s make a plan. Where is the swine and how do we get to him?”

Farouz, though no weakling, recoiled a little before the primitive elemental force that blazed in the eyes and showed in the manner of the other. “Let me think,” he said. “There is a way, if one is swift and daring …”

“Later, two hooded figures halted in a group of palms among the ruins of nighted Asgalun. Before them lay the waters of a canal, and beyond it, rising from its bank, the great bastioned wall of sun-dried brick which encircled the inner city. The inner city was really a gigantic fortress, sheltering the king and his trusted nobles and mercenary troops, forbidden to common men without a pass.

“We could climb the wall,” muttered Conan.

“And find ourselves no nearer our foe,” answered Farouz, groping in the shadows. “Here!”

Conan saw the Hyrkanian fumble at a shapeless heap of marble. “An ancient ruined shrine,” grumbled Farouz. “But, ah!”

He lifted a broad slab, revealing steps leading down into darkness. Conan frowned suspiciously.

Farouz explained: “This tunnel leads under the wall and up into the house of Othbaal, which stands just beyond.”

“Under the canal?”

“Aye. Once Othbaal’s house was the pleasure-house of King Uriaz, who slept on a down-cushion floating on a pool of quicksilver, guarded by tame lions.yet fell before the avenger’s dagger in spite of all. He prepared secret exits from all parts of his houses. Before Othbaal took the house, it belonged to his rival Mazdak. The Anaki knows nothing of this secret, so come!”

Swords drawn, they groped down a flight of stone steps and advanced along a level tunnel in blackness. Conan’s groping fingers told him that the walls, floor, and ceiling were composed of huge blocks of stone. As they advanced, the stones became slippery and the air grew dank. Drops of water fell on Conan’s neck, making him shiver and swear. They were passing under the canal. Later, this dampness abated. Farouz hissed a warning, and they mounted another flight of stairs.

At the top, the Hyrkanian fumbled with a catch. A panel slid aside, and a soft light streamed in. Farouz slipped through the opening and, after Conan had followed, closed it behind them. It became one of the inlaid panels of the wall, not differing to the sight from the other panels. They stood in a vaulted corridor, while Farouz pulled his kaffia around to hide his face and motioned Conan to do likewise. Farouz then led the way down the corridor without hesitation. The Cimmerian followed, sword in hand, glancing to right and left.

They passed through a curtain of dark velvet and came upon an arched doorway of gold-inlaid ebony. A brawny black, naked but for a silken loincloth, started up from his doze, sprang to his feet, and swung a great scimitar. But he did not cry out; his open mouth revealed the cavernous emptiness of the mouth of a mute.

“Quietly!” snapped Farouz, avoiding the sweep of the mute’s sword. As the Negro stumbled from his wasted effort, Conan tripped him. He fell sprawling, and Farouz passed his sword through the dark body.

“That was quick and silent enough!” breathed Farouz with a grin. “Now for the real prey!”

Cautiously he tried the door, while the giant Cimmerian crouched at his shoulder, eyes burning like those of a hunting tiger. The door gave inward, and they sprang into the chamber. Farouz closed the door behind them and set his back to it, laughing at the man who leaped up from his divan with a startled oath. Beside him, a woman half-rose from the cushions and screamed. Farouz said:

“We’ve run the buck to cover, brother!”

For a fraction of a second, Conan took in the spectacle. Othbaal was a tall, lusty man, his thick black hair gathered in a knot at his nape and his black beard oiled, curled, and precisely trimmed. Late as the hour was, he was fully clad in silken kilt and velvet vest, under which gleamed the links of a mail shirt. He dove for a scabbarded sword that lay on the floor beside the couch.

As for the woman, she was not conventionally pretty but still good to look at: red-haired, with a broad, slightly freckled face, and brown eyes sparkling with intelligence. She was rather broadly built, with shoulders wider than the average, a big bust, and full hips. She gave the impression of great physical vigor.

“Help!” shouted Othbaal, rising to meet the Cimmerian’s rush. “I am beset!”

Farouz started across the wide floor not more than a step behind Conan, but then leaped back to the door through which they had come. With half an ear, Conan was aware of a commotion in the corridor and heard the thump of some heavy object rammed against the door. Then his blade crossed that of the Anaki. The swords clanged in mid-air, showering sparks, flashing and flickering in the lamplight.

Both men attacked, smiting furiously, each too intent on the life of the other to give much thought to showy swordplay. Each stroke had full weight and murderous will behind it. They fought in silence. As they circled, Conan saw, over Othbaal’s shoulder, that Farouz had braced his shoulder against the door. From the other side came increasingly heavy blows, which had already torn loose the bolt. The woman had vanished.

“Can you deal with him?” said Farouz. “If I let this door go, his slaves will pour in.”

“All right so far,” grunted Conan, parrying a ferocious slash.

“Hasten, then, for I cannot hold them much longer.”

Conan plunged in with fresh ferocity. Now it was the Anaki whose attention was devoted to parrying the Cimmerian’s sword, which beat on his blade like a hammer on an anvil. The sheer strength and fury of the barbarian began to tell. Othbaal paled under his swarthy skin. His breath came in gasps as he gave ground. Blood streamed from gashes on arms, thigh, and neck. Conan bled, too, but there was no slackening in the headlong fury of his attack.

Othbaal was close to the tapestried wall when suddenly he sprang aside as Conan lunged. Carried off-balance by his wasted thrust, the Cimmerian plunged forward and his sword point clashed against the stone beneath the tapestries. At the same instant, Othbaal slashed at his foe’s head with all his waning power.

But Conan’s sword of Stygian steel, instead of snapping like a lesser blade, bent and sprang straight again. The falling scimitar bit through Conan’s helmet into the scalp beneath. Before Othbaal could recover his balance, Conan’s heavy blade sheared upward through steel links and hip bone to grate into the spinal column.

The Anaki reeled and fell with a choking cry, his entrails spilling out on the floor. His fingers clawed briefly at the nap of the heavy carpet, then went limp.

Conan, blind with blood and sweat, was driving his sword in silent frenzy again and again into the form at his feet, too drunken with fury to realize that his antagonist was dead, until Farouz called: “Cease, Conan! They’ve stopped their attack to bring up a heavier ram, and we can run for it.”

“How?” said Conan, dazedly raking the blood from his eyes, for he was still dizzy from the stroke that had cloven his helmet. He tore off the riven, blood-filled headpiece and threw it aside, exposing his square-cut black mane. A crimson torrent descended into his face, blinding him anew. He stooped and tore a strip from Othbaal’s kilt to bind up his head.

“That door!” said Farouz, pointing. “Rufia fled that way, the slut! If you’re ready, we’ll run.”

Conan saw an inconspicuous little door to one side of the couch. It had been concealed by draperies, but Rufia in her flight had disarranged these and left the door open behind her.The Hyrkanian took from his girdle the ring that he had pulled from the finger of the black slayer, Keluka. He ran across the floor, dropped the ring near Othbaal’s body, and continued on toward the small door. Conan followed him, though he had to crouch and almost turn sideways to get through the door.

They emerged into another corridor. Farouz led Conan by a roundabout route, turning and twisting through a maze of passages, until Conan was hopelessly lost. By this means they avoided the main body of household retainers, gathered in the corridor outside the principal entrance to the room where they had slain Othbaal. Once they aroused feminine screams from a room they passed, but Farouz kept on. Presently they reached the secret panel, entered it, and groped in darkness until they emerged once more into the silent grove.

Conan stopped to get his breath and retie his bandage. Farouz said: “How is your wound, brother?”

“A scratch only. Why did you drop that ring?”

“To blind the avengers of blood. Tarim! All that trouble, and the strumpet got away.”

Conan grinned wryly in the darkness. Rufia evidently did not regard Farouz as a rescuer. The brief picture that Conan had obtained, in the second before he closed with Othbaal, stuck in his mind. Such a woman, he thought, would suit him very well.

Within the massive wall of the inner city, a stupendous event was coming to pass. Under the shadows of the balconies stole a veiled and hooded figure. For the first time in three years, a woman was walking the streets of Asgalun.

Knowing her peril, she trembled with fear not wholly inspired by the lurking shadows. The stones hurt her feet in her tattered velvet slippers; for three years the cobblers of Asgalun had been forbidden to make street shoes for women. King Akhirom had decreed that the women of Pelishtia should be shut up like reptiles in cages.

Rufia, the red-haired Ophirean, favorite of Othbaal, had wielded more power than any woman in Pelishtia save Zeriti, the king’s witch-mistress. And now, as she stole through the night, an outcast, the thought that burned her like a white-hot brand was the realization that the fruits of all her scheming had been spilt in a second by the sword of one of Othbaal’s enemies.

Rufia came of a race of women accustomed to swaying thrones with their beauty and wit. She scarcely remembered her native Ophir from which she had been stolen by Kothian slavers. The Argossean magnate who had bought her and raised her for his household had fallen in battle with the Shemites, and as a supple girl of fourteen Rufia had passed into the hands of a prince of Stygia, a languorous, effeminate youth whom she came to twist around her pink fingers. Then, after some years, had come the raid of a band of wandering freebooters from the half-mythical lands beyond the Sea of Vilayet, upon the prince’s pleasure island on the upper Styx, with slaughter, fire, and plunder, crashing walls and shrieks of death, and a red-haired girl screaming in the arms of a tall Hyrkanian chieftain.

Because she came of a race whose women were rulers of men, Rufia neither perished nor became a whimpering toy. When Mazdak enlisted his band under Akhirom in Anakia, as part of Akhirom’s plan to seize Pelishtia from his hated brother, Rufia had gone along. She had not liked Mazdak. The sardonic adventurer was coldly masterful in his relations with women, keeping a large harem and letting none command or persuade him in the slightest. Because Rufia could endure no rival, she had not been displeased when Mazdak had gambled her away to his rival Othbaal.

The Anaki was more to her taste. Despite a streak of cruelty and treachery, the man was strong, vital, and intelligent. Best of all, he could be managed. He only needed a spur to his ambition, and Rufia supplied that. She had started him up the shining rungs of the ladder and now he had been slain by a pair of masked murderers who had sprung from nowhere.

Engrossed in her bitter thoughts, she looked up with a start as a tall, hooded figure stepped from the shadows of an overhanging balcony and confronted her. Only his eyes burned at her, almost luminous in the starlight. She cowered back with a low cry.

“A woman on the streets of Asgalun!” The voice was hollow and ghostly. “Is this not against the king’s commands?”

I walk not the streets by choice, lord,” she answered. “My master has been slain, and I fled from his murderers.”

The stranger bent his hooded head and stood statue-like. Rufia watched him nervously. There was something gloomy and portentous about him. He seemed less like a man pondering the tale of a chance-met slave girl than a somber prophet weighing the doom of a sinful people. At last he lifted his head.

“Come,” said he. “I will find a place for you.”

Without pausing to see if she obeyed, he stalked away up the street. Rufia hurried after him. She could not walk the streets all night, for any officer of the king would strike off her head for violating the edict of King Akhirom. This stranger might be leading her into worse slavery, but she had no choice.

Several times she tried to speak, but his grim silence struck her silent in turn. His unnatural aloofness frightened her. Once she was startled to see furtive forms stealing after them,

“Men follow us!” she exclaimed.

“Heed them not,” answered the man in his weird voice.

Nothing was said until they reached a small arched gate in a lofty wall. The stranger halted and called out. He was answered from within. The gate opened, revealing a black mute holding a torch. In its light, the height of the robed stranger was inhumanly exaggerated.

“But this.this is a gate of the Great Palace!” stammered Rufia.

For answer, the man threw back his hood, revealing a long pale oval of a face, in which burned those strange, luminous eyes.

Rufia screamed and fell to her knees. “King Akhirom!”

“Aye, King Akhirom, O faithless and sinful one!” The hollow voice rolled out like a bell. “Vain and foolish woman, who ignores the command of the Great King, the King of Kings, the King of the World, which is the word of the gods! Who treads the street in sin, and sets aside the mandates of the Good King! Seize her!”

The following shadows closed in, becoming a squad of Negro mutes. As their fingers seized her flesh, Rufia fainted.

The Ophirean regained consciousness in a windowless chamber whose arched doors were bolted with bars of gold. She stared wildly about for her captor and shrank down to see him standing above her, stroking his pointed, graying beard while his terrible eyes burned into her soul.

“O Lion of Shem!” she gasped, struggling to her knees. “Mercy!”

As she spoke, she knew the futility of the plea. She was crouching before the man whose name was a curse in the mouths of the Pelishtim; who, claiming divine guidance, had ordered all dogs killed, all vines cut down, all grapes and honey dumped into the river; who had banned all wine, beer, and games of chance; who believed that to disobey his most trivial command was the blackest sin conceivable. He roamed the streets at night in disguise to see that his orders were obeyed. Rufia’s flesh crawled as he stared at her with.unblinking eyes.

“Blasphemer!” he whispered. “Daughter of evil! O Pteor!” he cried, flinging up his arms. “What punishment shall be devised for this demon? What agony terrible enough, what degradation vile enough to render justice? The gods grant me wisdom!”

Rufia rose to her knees and pointed at Akhirom’s face. “Why call on the gods?” she shrieked. “Call on Akhirom! You are a god!”

He stopped, reeled, and cried out incoherently. Then he straightened and looked down at her. Her face was white, her eyes staring. To her natural acting ability was added the terror of her position.

“What do you see, woman?” he asked.

“A god has revealed himself to me! In your face, shining like the sun! I bum, I die in the blaze of thy glory!”

She sank her face in her hands and crouched trembling. Akhirom passed a shaking hand over his brow and bald pate.

“Aye,” he whispered. “I am a god! I have guessed it; I have dreamed it. I alone possess the wisdom of the infinite. Now a mortal has seen it also. I see the truth at last, no mere mouthpiece and servant of the gods, but the God of gods himself! Akhirom is the god of Pelishtia; of the Earth. The false demon Pteor shall be cast down from his place and his statues melted up.”

Bending his gaze downward, he ordered: “Rise, woman, and look upon thy god!”

She did so, shrinking before his awful gaze. A change clouded Akhirom’s eyes as he seemed to see her clearly for the first time.

“Your sin is pardoned,” he intoned. “Because you were the first to hail your god, you shall henceforth serve me in honor and splendor.”

She prostrated herself, kissing the carpet before his feet. He clapped his hands. A eunuch entered and bowed.

“Go quickly to the house of Abdashtarth, the high priest of Pteor,” he said, looking over the servant’s head. “Say to him: ‘This is the word of Akhirom, who is the one true god of the Pelishtim, and shall soon be the god of all the peoples of the earth: that on the morrow shall be the beginning of beginnings. The idols of the false Pteor shall be destroyed, and statues of the true god shall be erected in their stead. The true religion shall be proclaimed, and a sacrifice of one hundred of the noblest children of the Pelishtim shall celebrate it –’”

Before the temple of Pteor stood Mattenbaal, the first assistant to Abdashtarth. The venerable Abdashtarth, his hands tied, stood quietly in the grip of a pair of brawny Anaki soldiers. His long white beard moved as he prayed. Behind him, other soldiers stoked the fire in the base of the huge, bull-headed idol of Pteor, with his obscenely exaggerated male characteristics. In the background towered the great seven-storied zikkurat of Asgalun, from which the priests read the will of the gods in the stars.

When the brazen sides of the idol glowed with the heat within, Mattenbaal stepped forward, raised a piece of papyrus, and read:

“For that your divine king, Akhirom, is of the seed of Yakin-Ya, who was descended from the gods when they walked the earth, so is a god this day among ye! And now I command ye, all loyal Pelishtim, to recognize and bow down to and worship the greatest of all gods, the God of gods, the Creator of the Universe, the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom, the king of gods, who is Akhirom the son of Azurnelek, king of Pelishtia! And inasmuch as the wicked and perverse Abdashtarth, in the hardness of his heart, has rejected this revelation and has refused to bow down before his true god, let him be cast into the fire of the idol of the false Pteor!”

A soldier tugged open the brazen door in the belly of the statue. Abdashtarth cried:

“He lies! This king is no god, but a mortal madman! Slay the blasphemers against the true god of the Pelishtim, the mighty Pteor, lest the all-wise one turn his back upon his people.”

At this point, four Anakim picked up Abdashtarth as if he had been a log of wood and hurled him feet-first through the opening. His shriek was cut off by the clang of the closing door, through which these same soldiers had, in times past, tossed hundreds of the children of the Pelishtim in times of crisis under the direction of this same Abdashtarth. Smoke poured from the vents in the statue’s ears, while a look of smug satisfaction spread over the face of Mattenbaal.

A great shudder rippled across the throng. Then a frenzied yell broke the stillness. A wild-haired figure ran forward, a half-naked shepherd. With a shriek of “Blasphemer!” he hurled a stone. The missile struck the new high priest in the mouth, breaking his teeth. Mattenbaal staggered, blood streaming down his beard. With a roar, the mob surged forward. High taxes, starvation, tyranny, rapine, and massacre.all these the Pelishtim had endured from their mad king, but this tampering with their religion was the last straw. Staid merchants became madmen; cringing beggars turned into hot-eyed fiends.

Stones flew like hail, and louder rose the roar of the mob. Hands were clutching at the garments of the dazed Mattenbaal when the armored Anakim closed in around him, beat the mob back with bowstaves and spear shafts, and hustled the priest away.

With a clanking of weapons and a jingling of bridle chains, a troop of Kushite horse, resplendent in headdresses of ostrich feathers and lions’ manes and corselets of silvered scales, galloped out of one of the streets leading into the great Square of Pteor. Their white teeth shone in their dark faces. The stones of the mob bounced off their bucklers of rhinoceros hide. They urged their horses into the press, slashing with curved blades and thrusting long knees through the bodies of the Asgalunim. Men rolled howling under the stamping hooves. The rioters gave way, fleeing wildly into shops and alleys, leaving the square littered with writhing bodies.

The black riders leaped from their saddles and began crashing in the doors of shops and dwellings and heaping their arms with plunder. Screams of women sounded from within the houses. A crash of latticework, and a white-clad body struck the street with bone-crushing impact. Another horseman, laughing, passed his lance through the body as it lay.

The giant Imbalayo, in flaming silk and polished steel, rode roaring among his men, beating them into order with a heavy leaded ship. They mounted and swung into line behind him. In a canter they swept off down the street, gory human heads bobbing on their lances as an object lesson to the maddened Asgalunim who crouched in their coverts, panting with hate.

The breathless eunuch who brought news of the uprising to King Akhirom was swiftly followed by another, who prostrated himself and cried: “O divine king, the general Othbaal is dead! His servants found him murdered in his palace, and beside him the ring of Keluka the Sworder. Wherefore the Anakim cry out that he was murdered by the order of the general Imbalayo. They search for Keluka in the Kushites’ quarter and fight with the Kushites!”

Rufia, listening behind a curtain, stifled a cry. Akhirom’s faraway gaze did not alter. Wrapped in aloofness he replied:

“Let the Hyrkanians separate them. Shall private quarrels interfere with the destiny of a god? Othbaal is dead, but Akhirom lives forever. Another man shall lead my Anakim. Let the Kushites handle the mob until they realize the sin of their atheism. My destiny is to reveal myself to the world in blood and fire, until all the tribes of the earth know me and bow down before me! You may go.”

Night was falling on a tense city as Conan, his head wound now healed, strode through the streets adjoining the quarter of the Kushites. In that section, occupied mostly by soldiers, lights shone and stalls were open by tacit agreement. All day, revolt had rumbled in the quarters. The mob was like a thousand-headed serpent; stamp it out here and it broke out there. The hooves of the Kushites had clattered from one end of the city to the other, spattering blood.

Only armed men now traversed the streets. The great iron-bound wooden gates of the quarters were locked as in times of civil war. Through the lowering arch of the great gate of Simura canned troops of black horsemen, the torchlight crimsoning their naked scimitars. Their silken cloaks flowed in the wind, and their black arms gleamed like polished ebony.

Conan entered a cookshop where girdled warriors gorged and secretly guzzled forbidden wine. Instead of taking the first place open he stood, head up, his smoldering eyes roaming the place. His gaze came to rest on a far corner where a plainly-dressed man with a kaffia pulled well down over his face sat cross-legged on the floor in a dim alcove. A low table of food stood on the floor in front of the man.

Conan strode across, swerving around the other tables. He kicked a cushion into the alcove opposite the seated man and dropped down upon it.

“Greetings, Farouz!” he rumbled. “Or should I say General Mazdak?”

The Hyrkanian started. “What’s that?”

Conan grinned wolfishly. “I knew you when we entered the house of Othbaal. No one but the master of the house could know its secrets so well, and that house had once belonged to Mazdak the Hyrkanian.”

“Not so loud, friend! How did you pick me out when my own men don’t know me in this Zuagir’s headcloth?”

“I used my eyes. Well, now that our first venture has paid us so well, what shall we do next?”

“I know not. I should be able to do something with one of your brawn and force. But you know how it is with the dog-brothers.”

“Aye,” snarled Conan. “I tried to get mercenary service, but your three rival armies hate each other so and strive so fiercely for the rule of the state that none will have me. Each thinks I’m a spy for one of the other two.” He paused to order a joint of beef.

“What a restless dog you are!” said Mazdak. “Will you then go back to Akkharia?”

Conan spat. “Nay. It’s small, even for one of these little Shemitish fly-specks of a state, and has no great wealth. And the people are as crazily touchy about their racial and national pride as you all are here, so I couldn’t hope to rise very high. Perhaps I’d do better under one of the Hyborian rulers to the north, if I could find one who’d pick men for fighting ability only. But look you, Mazdak, why don’t you seize the rule of this nation for yourself? Now that Othbaal’s gone, you have only to find an excuse for putting a blade into Imbalayo’s guts, and …”

“Tarim! I’m as ambitious as the next man, but not so headlong as that! Know that Imbalayo, having gotten the confidence of our mad monarch, dwells in the Great Palace, surrounded by his black swordsmen. Not that one could not kill him by a sudden stab during some public function.if one did not mind being cut to bits instantly afterward. And then where’s ambition?”

“We should be able to think up something,” said Conan, eyes narrowed.

“We, eh? I suppose you’d expect a reward for your part?”

“Of course. What sort of fool do you think me?”

“No more foolish than the next. I see no immediate prospect of such an enterprise, but I’ll bear your words in mind. And fear not but that you’d be well repaid. Now fare you well, for I must go back into the toils of politics.”

Conan’s joint arrived as Mazdak left. Conan dug his teeth into the meat with even more than his usual gusto, for the success of his vengeance had made his spirits soar. While devouring a mass that would have satisfied a lion, he listened to the talk around him.

“Where are the Anakim?” demanded a mustached Hyrkanian, cramming his jaws with almond cakes.

“They sulk in their quarter,” answered another. “They swear the Kushites slew Othbaal and show Keluka’s ring to prove it. Keluka has disappeared, and Imbalayo swears he knows naught of it. But there’s the ring, and a dozen had been slain in brawls when the king ordered us to beat them apart. By Asura, this has been a day of days!”

“Akhirom’s madness brought it on,” declared another In a lowered voice. “How soon before this lunatic dooms us all by some crazy antic?”

“Careful,” cautioned his mate. “Our swords are his as long as Mazdak orders. But if revolt breaks out again, the Anakim are more likely to fight against the Kushites than with them. Men say Akhirom has taken Othbaal’s concubine Rufia into his harem. That angers the Anakim the more, for they suspect that Othbaal was slain by the king’s orders, or at least with his consent. But their anger is naught beside that of Zeriti, whom the king has put aside. The rage of the witch, they say, makes the sandstorm of the desert seem like a spring breeze.”,

Conan’s moody blue eyes blazed as he digested this news. The memory of the red-haired wench had stuck in his mind during the last few days. The thought of stealing her out from under the nose of the mad king, and keeping her out of sight of her former owner Mazdak, gave spice to life. And, if he had to leave Asgalun, she would make a pleasant companion on the long road to Koth. In Asgalun there was one person who could best help him in this enterprise: Zeriti the Stygian, and if he could guess human motives she would be glad to do so.

He left the shop and headed towards the wall of the inner city. Zeriti’s house, he knew, was in this part of Asgalun. To get to it he would have to pass the great wall, and the only way he knew of doing this without discovery was through the tunnel that Mazdak had shown him.

Accordingly, he approached the canal and made his way to the grove of palms near the shore. Groping in the darkness among the marble ruins, he found and lifted the skb. Again he advanced through blackness and dripping water, stumbled on the other stair, and mounted it. He found the catch and emerged into the corridor, now dark. The house was silent, but the reflection of lights elsewhere showed that it was still occupied, doubtless by the slain general’s servants and women.

Uncertain as to which way led to the outer stair, he set off at random, passed through a curtained archway and confronted six black slaves who sprang up glaring. Before he could retreat, he heard a shout and a rush of feet behind him. Cursing his luck, he ran straight at the blacks. A whirl of steel and he was through, leaving a writhing form on the floor behind him, and dashed through a doorway on the other side of the room. Curved blades sought his back as he slammed the door behind him. Steel rang on the wood and glittering points showed through the panels. He shot the bolt and whirled, glaring about for an exit. His gaze found a gold-barred window.

With a headlong rush, he launched himself full at the window. The soft bars tore out with a crash, taking half the casement with them, before the impact of his hurtling body. He shot through space as the door crashed inward and howling figures flooded into the room.

In the Great East Palace, where slave-girls and eunuchs glided on bare feet, no echo reverberated of the hell that seethed outside the walls. In a chamber whose dome was of gold-filagreed ivory, King Akhirom, clad in a white silken robe that made him look even more ghostly, sat cross-legged on a couch of gemmed ivory and stared at Rufia kneeling before him.

Rufia wore a robe of crimson silk and a girdle of satin sewn with pearls. But amidst all this splendor, the Ophirean’s eyes were shadowed. She had inspired Akhirom’s latest madness, but she had not mastered him. Now he seemed withdrawn, with an expression in his cold eyes that made her shudder. Abruptly he spoke:

“It is not meet for a god to mate with mortals.”

Rufia started, opened her mouth, then feared to speak.

“Love is a human weakness,” he continued. “I will cast it from me. Gods are beyond love. Weakness assails me when I lie in your arms.”

“What do you mean, my lord?” she ventured.

“Even the gods must sacrifice, and therefore I give you up, lest my divinity weaken.” He clapped his hands, and a eunuch entered on all fours. “Send in the general Imbalayo,” ordered Akhirom, and the eunuch banged his head against the floor and crawled out backwards. These were the most recently instituted customs of the court.

“No!” Rufia sprang up. “You cannot give me to that beast.” She fell to her knees, catching at his robe, which he drew back from her.

“Woman!” he thundered. “Are you mad? Would you assail a god?”

Imbalayo entered uncertainly. A warrior of barbaric Darfar, he had risen to his present high estate by wild fighting and crafty intrigue. But shrewd, brawny, and fearless though the Negro was, he could not be sure of the mad Akhirom’s intentions from moment to moment.

The king pointed to the woman cowering at his feet. ‘Take her!”

Imbalayo grinned and caught up Rufia, who writhed and screamed in his grasp. She stretched her arms towards Akhirom as Imbalayo bore her from the chamber. But Akhirom answered not, sitting with hands folded and gaze detached.

Another heard. Crouching in an alcove, a slim brown-skinned girl watched the grinning Kushite carry his captive up the hall. Scarcely had he vanished when she fled in another direction.

Imbalayo, the favored of the king, alone of the generals dwelt in the Great Palace. This was really an aggregation of buildings united into one great structure and housing the three thousand servants of Akhirom. Following winding corridors, crossing an occasional court paved with mosaics, he came to his own dwelling in the southern wing. But even as he came in sight of the door of teak, banded with arabesques of copper, a supple form barred his way.

“Zeriti!” Imbalayo recoiled in awe. The hands of the handsome, brown-skinned woman clenched and unclenched in controlled passion.

“A servant brought me word that Akhirom has discarded the red-haired slut,” said the Stygian. “Sell her to me! I owe her a debt that I would pay.”

“Why should I?” said the Kushite, fidgeting impatiently. “The king has given her to me. Stand aside, lest I hurt you.”

“Have you heard what the Anakim shout in the streets?”

“What is that to me?”

“They howl for the head of Imbalayo, because of the murder of Othbaal. What if I told them their suspicions were true?”

“I had naught to do with it!” he shouted.

“I can produce men to swear they saw you help Keluka cut him down.”

“I’ll kill you, witch!”

She laughed. “You dare not! Now will you sell me the red-haired jade, or will you fight the Anakim?”

Imbalayo let Rufia slip to the floor. “Take her and begone!” he snarled.

Take your pay!” she retorted and hurled a handful of coins into his face. Imbalayo’s eyes burned red and his hands opened and closed with suppressed blood-lust

Ignoring him, Zeriti bent over Rufia, who crouched, dazed with the hopeless realization that against this new possessor the wiles she played against men were useless. Zeriti gathered the Ophirean’s red locks in her fingers and forced her head back, to stare fiercely into her eyes. Then she clapped her hands. Four eunuchs entered.

“Take her to my house,” Zeriti ordered, and they bore the shrinking Rufia away. Zeriti followed, breathing softly between her teeth.

When Conan plunged through the window, he had no idea of what lay in the darkness ahead of him. Shrubs broke his crashing fall. Springing up, he saw his pursuers crowding through the window he had just shattered. He was in a garden, a great shadowy place of trees and ghostly blossoms. His hunters blundered among the trees while he reached the wall unopposed. He sprang high, caught the coping with one hand, and heaved himself up and over.

He halted to locate himself. Though he had never been in the inner city, he had heard it described often enough so that he carried a mental map of it. He was in the Quarter of the Officials. Ahead of him, over the flat roofs, loomed a structure that must be the Lesser West Palace, a great pleasure house giving into the famous Garden of Abibaal. Sure of his ground, he hurried along the street into which he had dropped and soon emerged on the broad thoroughfare that traversed the inner city from north to south.

Late as it was, there was much stirring abroad. Armed Hyrkanians strode past. In the great square between the two palaces, Conan heard the jingle of reins on restive horses and saw a squadron of Kushite troopers sitting their steeds under the torchlight. There was reason for their alertness. Far away he heard tom-toms drumming sullenly among the quarters. The wind brought snatches of wild song and distant yells. With his soldierly swagger, Conan passed unnoticed among the mailed figures. When he plucked the sleeve of a Hyrkanian to ask the way to Zeriti’s house, the man readily gave him the information. Conan, like everyone else in Asgalun, knew that however much the Stygian regarded Akhirom as her personal property, she by no means considered herself his exclusive posession in return. There were mercenary captains as familiar with her chambers as was the king of Pelishtia.

Zeriti’s house adjoined a court of the East Palace, to whose gardens it was connected so that Zeriti, in the days of her favor, could pass from her house to the palace without violating the king’s order for the seclusion of women.

Zeriti, the daughter of a free chieftain, had been Akhirom’s mistress but not his slave.

Conan did not expect difficulty in gaining entrance to her house. She pulled hidden strings of intrigue and politics, and men of all races and conditions were admitted to her audience chamber, where dancing girls and the fumes of the black lotus offered entertainment That night there were no dancing girls or guests, but a villainous-looking Zuagir opened the arched door under a burning cresset and admitted Conan without question. He showed Conan across a small court, up an outer stair, down a corridor, and into a broad chamber bordered by fretted arches hung with curtains of crimson velvet.

The softly lit room was empty, but somewhere sounded the scream of a woman in pain. Then came a peal of musical laughter, also feminine, indescribably vindictive and malicious.

Conan jerked his head to catch the direction of the sounds. Then he began examining the drapes behind the arches to see which of them concealed doors.

Zeriti straightened up from her task and dropped the heavy whip. The naked figure bound to the divan was crossed by red weals from neck to ankles. This, however, was but a prelude to a more ghastly fate.

The witch took from a cabinet a piece of charcoal, with which she drew a complex figure on the floor, adding words in the mysterious glyphs of the serpent-folk who ruled Stygia before the Cataclysm. She set a small golden lamp at each of the five corners of the figure and tossed into the flame of each a pinch of the pollen of the purple lotus, which grows in the swamps of southern Stygia, A strange smell, sickeningly sweet, pervaded the chamber. Then she began to incant in a language that was old before purple-towered Python rose in the lost empire of Acheron, over three thousand years before.

Slowly a dark something took form. To Rufia, half dead with pain and fright, it seemed like a pillar of cloud. High up in the amorphous mass appeared a pair of glowing points that might have been eyes. Rufia felt an all-pervading cold, as if the thing were drawing all the heat out of her body by its mere presence. The cloud gave the impression of being black without much density. Rufia could see the wall behind it through the shapeless mass, which slowly thickened.

Zeriti bent and snuffed out the lamps.one, two, three, four. The room, lit by the remaining lamp, was now dim. The pillar of smoke was hardly discernible except for the glowing eyes.

A sound made Zeriti turn: a distant, muffled roar, faint and far-off but of vast volume. It was the bestial howling of many men.

Zeriti resumed her incantation, but there came another interruption: angry words and the voice of the Zuagir, a cry, the crunch of a savage blow, and the thud of a body. Imbalayo burst in, a wild-looking figure with his eyeballs and teeth gleaming in the light of the single lamp and blood dripping from his scimitar.

“Dog!” exclaimed the Stygian, drawing herself up like a serpent from its coil. “What do you here?”

The woman you took from me!” roared Imbalayo. The city has risen and all Hell is loose! Give me the woman before I kill you!”

Zeriti glanced at her rival and drew a jeweled dagger, crying: “Hotep! Khafra! Help me!”

With a roar, the black general lunged. The Stygian’s supple quickness was futile; the broad blade plunged through her body, standing out a foot between her shoulders. With a choking cry she stumbled, and the Kushite wrenched his scimitar free as she fell. At that instant Conan appeared at the door, sword in hand.

Evidently taking the Cimmerian for one of the witch’s servants, the Kushite bounded across the floor, his saber whistling in a fearful slash. Conan leaped back; the sword missed his throat by a finger’s breadth and nicked the doorframe. As he leaped, Conan struck backhanded in return. It was incredible that the black giant should recover from his missed cut in time to parry, but Imbalayo somehow twisted his body, arm, and blade all at once to catch a blow that would have felled a lesser man by sheer impact.

Back and forth they surged, swords clanging. Then recognition dawned in Imbalayo’s features. He fell back with a cry of “Amra!”

Now Conan knew that he must kill this man. Though he did not remember ever seeing him before, the Kushite had recognized him as the leader of a crew of black corsairs who, under the name of Amra, the Lion, had plundered the coasts of Kush and Stygia and Shem. If Imbalayo revealed Conan’s identity to the Pelishtim, the vengeful Shemites would tear Conan apart with their bare hands if need be. Bitterly though the Shemites fought among themselves, they would unite to destroy the red-handed barbarian who had raided their coast.

Conan lunged and drove Imbalayo back a step, feinted, and struck at the Kushite’s head. The force of the blow beat down Imbalayo’s scimitar and came down stunningly on the bronze helmet and Conan’s sword, weakened by deep notches in the blade, broke off short.

For the space of two heartbeats, the two barbarian warriors confronted each other. Imbalayo’s bloodshot eyes sought a vulnerable spot on Conan’s form; his muscles tensed for a final, fatal spring and slash.

Conan hurled his hilt at Imbalayo’s head. As the Kushite ducked the missile, Conan whirled his cloak around his left forearm and snatched out his poniard with his right hand. He had no illusions about his chances with Imbalayo in this Zingaran-style fighting. The Kushite, now stalking forward on the balls of his feet like a cat, was no slow-moving mountain of muscle like Keluka, but a superbly-thewed fighting machine almost as lightning-fast as Conan himself. The scimitar whipped up …

And a shapeless mass of cloudy something, hitherto unnoticed in the gloom, swept forward and fastened itself on Imbalayo’s back. Imbalayo screamed like a man being roasted alive. He kicked and squirmed and tried to reach back with his sword. But the luminous eyes glowed over his shoulder and the smoky substance lapped around him, drawing him slowly backwards.

Conan reeled back from the sight, his barbarian’s fears of the supernatural rising like a choking lump in his throat,

Imbalayo’s shrieks ceased. The black body slid to the ground with a soft, squashy sound. The cloudy thing was gone.

Conan advanced cautiously. Imbalayo’s body had a curiously pallid, collapsed appearance, as if the demon had extracted all the bones and blood, leaving only a man-shaped bag of skin with a few organs inside it. The Cimmerian shuddered.

A sob from the divan called his attention to Rufia. With two strides he reached her and cut her bonds. She sat up, weeping silently, when a voice shouted:

“Imbalayo! In the name of all the fiends, where are you? It’s time to mount and ride! I saw you run in here!”

A mailed and helmeted figure dashed into the chamber. Mazdak recoiled at the sight of the bodies and cried: “Oh, you cursed savage, why must you slay Imbalayo at this time? The city has risen. The Anakim are fighting the Kushites, who had their hands full already. I ride with my men to aid the Kushites. As for you.I still owe you my life, but there’s a limit to all things! Get out of this city and never let me see you again!”

Conan grinned. “It wasn’t I who killed him, but one of Zeriti’s demons after he slew the witch. Look at his body if you don’t believe me.” As Mazdak bent to see, Conan added: “And have you no greeting for your old friend Rufia?”

Rufia had been cowering behind Conan. Mazdak plucked at his mustache. “Good. I’ll take her back to my house; we have.”

The distant roaring of the mob became louder.

“No,” said Mazdak distractedly. “I must go to put down the sedition. But how can I leave her to wander the streets naked?”

Conan said: “Why not throw in your lot with the Anakim, who will be as glad to get rid of this mad king as are the Asgalunim? With Imbalayo and Othbaal dead, you’re the only general alive in Asgalun. Become leader of the revolt, put down the crazy Akhirom, and set some feeble cousin or nephew in his place. Then you’ll be the real ruler of Pelishtia!”

Mazdak, listening like a man in a dream, gave a sudden shout of laughter. “Done!” he cried. “To horse! Take Rufia to my house, then join the Hyrkanians in battle. Tomorrow I shall rule Pelishtia, and you may ask of me what you will. Farewell for now!”

Off went the Hyrkanian with a swirl of his cloak. Conan turned to Rufia. “Get some clothes, wench.”

“Who are you? I heard Imbalayo call you Amra …”

“Don’t say that name in Shem! I am Conan, a Cimmerian.”

“Conan? I heard you spoken of when I was intimate with the king. Do not take me to Mazdak’s house!”

“Why not? He’ll be the real ruler of Pelishtia.”

“I know that cold snake too well. Take me with you instead! Let’s loot this house and flee the city. With all this uproar, nobody will stop us.”

Conan grinned. “You tempt me, Rufia, but if s worth too much to me right now to keep on Mazdak’s good side. Besides, I told him I would deliver you, and I like to keep my word. Now get into a garment or I’ll drag you as you are.”

“Well,” said Rufia in a temporizing tone, but then stopped.

A gurgling sound came from the sprawled body of Zeriti. As Conan watched with his hair standing up in horror, the witch slowly rose to a sitting position, despite a wound that any fighter would have said would be instantly fatal. She struggled to her feet and stood, swaying, regarding Conan and Rufia. A little blood ran down from the wounds in her back and chest. When she spoke, it was in a voice choked with blood.

“It takes …more than …a sword-thrust …to kill …a daughter of Set.” She reeled towards the door. In the doorway she turned back to gasp: “The Asgalunim …will be interested to know …that Amra and his woman …are in their city,”

Conan stood irresolutely, knowing that for his own safety he ought to rush upon the witch and hew her in pieces, but restrained by his rude barbarian’s chivalry from attacking a woman. “Why bother us?” he burst out. “You can have your mad king back!”

Zeriti shook her head. “I know …what Mazdak plans. And ere I quit this body …for good …I will …have …my revenge …on this drab.”

“Then.” growled Conan, snatching up Imbalayo’s scimitar and starting towards the witch. But Zeriti made a gesture and spoke a word. A line of flame appeared across the floor between Conan and the doorway, extending from wall to wall. Conan recoiled, throwing up a hand to shade his face from the fierce heat. Then Zeriti was gone.

“After her!” cried Rufia. “The fire is but one of her illusions.”

“But if she can’t be killed.”

“Nevertheless, heads do not tell secrets when sundered from their bodies.”

Grimly, Conan rushed for the exit, leaping across the line of flame. There was an instant of heat, and then the flames vanished as he passed through them.

“Wait here!” he barked at Rufia, and ran after Zeriti.

But when he reached the street, there was no witch to be seen. He ran to the nearest alley and looked up it, then to the alley in the opposite direction. Still there was no sign of her.

In seconds he was back in Zeriti’s house. “You were right the first time,” he grunted at Rufia. “Let’s grab what we can and go.”

In the great Square of Adonis, the tossing torches blazed on a swirl of straining figures, screaming horses, and lashing blades. Men fought hand-to-hand: Kushites and Shemites, gasping, cursing, and dying. Like madmen the Asgalunim grappled the black warriors, dragging them from their saddles, slashing the girths of the frenzied horses. Rusty pikes clanged against lances. Fire burst out here and there, mounting into the skies until the shepherds on the Libnun Hills gaped in wonder. From the suburbs poured a torrent of figures converging on the great square. Hundreds of still shapes, in mail or striped robes, lay under the trampling hooves, and over them the living screamed and hacked.

The square lay in the Kushite quarter, into which the Anakim had come ravening while the bulk of the Negroes had been fighting the mob elsewhere. Now withdrawn in haste to their own quarter, the ebony swordsmen were overwhelming the Anakian infantry by sheer numbers, while the mob threatened to engulf both bodies. Under their captain, Bombaata, the Kushites retained a semblance of order that gave them an advantage over the unorganized Anakim and the leaderless mob. Their squadrons clattered back and forth across the square, charging to keep a space clear in the midst of he swarming thousands, so that they could use their horses to advantage.

Meanwhile the maddened Asgalunim were smashing and plundering the houses of the blacks, dragging forth howling women. The blaze of burning buildings made the square swim in an ocean of fire, while the shrieks of their women and children as they were torn to pieces by the Shemites made the Negroes fight with even more than their usual ferocity.

Somewhere arose the whir of Hyrkanian kettledrums above the throb of many hooves.

“The Hyrkanians at last!” panted Bombaata. “They’ve loitered long enough. And where in Derketa’s name is Imbalayo?”

Into the square raced a frantic, horse, foam flying from its bit rings. The rider, reeling in the saddle, screamed: “Bombaata! Bombaata!” as he clung to the mane with bloody hands.

“Here, fool!” roared the Kushite, catching the other’s bridle.

“Imbalayo is dead!” shrieked the man above the roar of the flames and the rising thunder of the kettledrums.

“The Hyrkanians have turned against us! They have slain our brothers in the palaces! Here they come!”

With a deafening thunder of hooves and drums, the squadrons of mailed lancers burst upon the square, riding down friend and foe. Bombaata saw the lean, exultant face of Mazdak beneath the blazing arc of his scimitar, and then a sword fell and the Kushite with it.

On the rocky spurs of Libnun the herdsmen watched and shivered, and the clangor of swords was heard miles up the river, where pallid nobles trembled in their gardens. Hemmed in by mailed Hyrkanians, furious Anakim, and shrieking Asgalunim, the Kushites died fighting to a man.

It was the mob that first turned its attention to Akhirom. They rushed through the unguarded gates into the inner city, and through the great bronze doors of the East Palace. Ragged hordes streamed yelling down the corridors through the Golden Gates into the great Golden Hall, tearing aside the curtain of cloth-of-gold to reveal an empty throne. Silken tapestries were ripped from the walls by grimed and bloody fingers. Sardonyx tables were overthrown with a clatter of golden vessels. Eunuchs in crimson robes fled squeaking, and slave-girls shrieked in the hands of ravishers.

In the Great Emerald Hall, King Akhirom stood like a statue on a fur-strewn dais, his white hands twitching. At the entrance to the hall clustered a handful of his faithful servants, beating back the mob with swords. A band of Anakim plowed through the throng and burst the barrier of black slaves. As the wedge of swarthy Shemitish soldiers clattered forward, Akhirom seemed to come to himself. He dashed to an exit in the rear. Anakim and Pelishtim, mingling as they ran, chased the fleeing king. After them came a band of Hyrkanians with the blood-splashed Mazdak at their head.

Akhirom ran down a corridor, then turned aside to dash up a winding stair. The stair curled up and up until it came out on the roof of the pakce. But it did not stop there; it continued on up into the slender spire that rose from the roof, from which Akhirom’s father, King Azumelek, had observed the stars.

Up went Akhirom, and after him came the pursuers, until the stair became so narrow that only one man could negotiate it, and the pursuit slowed for lack of breath.

King Akhirom came out on the small circular platform at the top of the tower, “unrounded by a low wall. He slammed down the stone trapdoor and bolted it. Then he leaned over the wall. Men swarmed on the roof, and below them others gazed up from the main courtyard.

“Sinful mortals!” screeched Akhirom. ‘Tou do not believe I am a god! I will show you! I am not bound to the surface of the earth as worms like you are, but can soar through the heavens like a bird! You shall see, and then you will bow down and worship me as you ought! Here I go!”

Akhirom climbed to the top of the wall, balanced an instant, and dove off, spreading his arms like wings. His body described a long, steep parabola downward, missing the edge of the roof and plunging on down, the wind whistling in his garments, until he struck the stones of the courtyard below with the sound of a melon hit by a sledgehammer.

Not even the extermination of the Kushites and the death of Akhirom brought peace to troubled Asgalun. Other mobs roamed the city, incited by a mysterious rumor that Amra, the pirate chief of the black corsairs, was there, and that the Ophirean woman Rufia was with him. The rumors grew and changed with each retelling until men said that Amra had sent Rufia to Asgalun as a spy for the pirates, and that a pirate navy was waiting off the coast for word from Amra to march overland against the city. But, though they combed the whole town over, no sign did the searchers find of Amra and his doxy.

North from Asgalon, through the meadowlands of western Shem, ran the long road to Koth, Along this road, as the sun rose, Conan and Rufia rode at a canter. Conan bestrode his own horse; the Ophirean woman, a riderless horse which Conan had caught on the streets of Asgalun that night. She wore clothes from the chests of Zeriti. tight for her full figure, but adequate.

Rufia said: “If you had stayed in Asgalun, Conan, you could have risen high under Mazdak.”

“And who begged me not to turn her back to him?”

“I know. He was a cold, unfeeling master. But …”

“Besides, I rather liked the fellow. If I had stayed there, sooner or later one of us would have had to kill the other over you.” The Cimmerian chuckled and slapped the bag of loot from Zeriti’s house, so that the coins and ornaments jingled. “I shall do as well in the North. Come on there, beat some speed out of that nag!”

“But I’m still sore where she beat me.”

“If you don’t hurry, I’ll see that you get even sorer. Do you want Mazdak’s Hyrkanians to catch us before we’ve even had breakfast?”

12. THE ROAD OF THE EAGLES

As chieftain of this mongrel Red Brotherhood, Conan is more than ever a thorn in King Yildizts sensitive flesh. That henpecked monarch, instead of strangling his brother Teyaspa in the approved Turanian manner, has been prevailed upon to keep him cooped up in a castle deep in the Colchian Mountains, southeast of Vilayet, as a prisoner of the Zaporoskan brigand Gleg. To rid himself of another embarrassment, Yildiz sends one of Teyaspa’s strongest partisans, General Artaban, to destroy the pirate stronghold at the mouth of the Zaporoska River. This he does, but he becomes the harried instead of the harrier.

The loser of the sea fight wallowed in the crimson wash. Just out of bowshot, the winner limped away toward the rugged hills that overhung the blue water. It was a scene common enough on the Sea of Vilayet in the reign of King Yildiz of Turan.

The ship heeling drunkenly in the blue waste was a high-beaked Turanian war galley, a sister to the other. On the loser, death had reaped a plentiful harvest. Dead men sprawled on the high poop; they hung loosely over the scarred rail; they slumped along the runway that bridged the waist, where the mangled oarsmen lay among their broken benches.

Clustered on the poop stood the survivors, thirty men, many dripping blood. They were men of many nations: Kothians, Zamorians, Brythunians, Corinthians, Shemites, Zaporoskans. Their features were those of wild men, and many bore the scars of lash or branding iron. Many were half naked, but the motley clothes they wore were often of good quality, though now stained with tar and blood. Some were bareheaded, while others wore steel caps, fur caps, or strips of cloth wound turbanwise about their heads. Some wore shirts of chain mail; others were naked to their sash-girt waists, their muscular arms and shoulders burnt almost black. Jewels glittered in earrings and the hilts of daggers. Naked swords were in their hands. Their dark eyes were restless.

They stood about a man bigger than any of them, almost a giant, with thickly corded muscles. A square-cut mane of black hair surmounted his broad, low forehead, and the eyes that blazed in his dark, scarred face were a volcanic blue.

These eyes now stared at the shore. No town or harbor was visible along this stretch of lonely coast between Khawarism, the southernmost outpost of the Turanian kingdom, and its capital of Aghrapur. From the shoreline rose tree-covered hills, climbing swiftly to the snow-tipped peaks of the Colchians in the distance, on which the sinking sun shone red.

The big man glared at the slowly receding galley. Its crew had been glad to break away from the death grapple, and it crawled toward a creek that wound out of the hills between high cliffs. On the poop, the pirate captain could still make out a tall figure on whose helmet the low sun sparkled. He remembered, the features under that helmet, glimpsed in the frenzy of battle: hawk-nosed, black-bearded, with slanting black eyes. That was Artaban of Shahpur, until recently the scourge of the Sea of Vilayet.

A lean Corinthian spoke: “We almost had the devil. What shall we do now, Conan?”

The gigantic Cimmerian went to one of the steering-sweeps. “Ivanos,” he addressed the one who had spoken, “you and Hermio take the other sweep. Medius, pick three besides yourself and start bailing. The rest of you dogs tie up your cuts and then go down into the waist and bend your backs on the oars. Throw as many stiffs overboard as you need to make room.”

“Are you going to follow the other galley to the creek-mouth?” asked Ivanos.

“Nay. We’re too waterlogged from the holing their ram gave us to risk another grapple. But if we pull hard, we can beach her on that headland.”

Laboriously they worked the galley inshore. The sun set; a haze like soft blue smoke hovered over the dusky water. Their late antagonist vanished into the creek. The starboard rail was almost awash when the bottom of the pirates’ galley grounded on the sand and gravel of the headland.

The Akrim River, which wound through patches of meadow and farmland, was tinged red, and the mountains that rose on either side of the valley looked down on a scene only less old than they. Horror had come upon the peaceful valley dwellers, in the shape of wolfish riders from the outlands. They did not turn their gaze toward the castle that hung on the sheer slope of the mountains, for there too lurked oppressors.

The clan of Kurush Khan, a subchief of one of the more barbarous Hyrkanian tribes from east of the Sea of Vilayet, had been driven westward out of its native steppes by a tribal feud. Now it was raking toll of the Yuetshi villages in the valley of Akrim. Though this was mainly a simple raid for cattle, slaves, and plunder, Kurush Khan had wider ambitions. Kingdoms had been carved out of these hills before.

However, just now, like his warriors, Kurush Khan was drunk with slaughter. The huts of the Yuetshi lay in smoking ruins. The barns had been spared because they contained fodder, as well as the ricks. Up and down the valley the lean riders raced, stabbing and loosing their barbed arrows. Men howled as the steel drove home; women screamed as they were jerked naked across the raiders’ saddle bows.

Horsemen in sheepskins and high fur caps swarmed in the streets of the largest village.a squalid cluster of huts, half mud, half stone. Routed out of their pitiful hiding places, the villagers knelt, vainly imploring mercy, or as vainly fled, to be ridden down as they ran. The yataghans whistled, ending in the zhukk of cloven flesh and bone.

A fugitive turned with a wild cry as Kurush Khan. swooped down on him with his cloak spreading out in the wind like the wings of a hawk. In that instant the eyes of the Yuetshi saw. as in a dream, the bearded face with its thin, down-curving nose, the wide sleeve falling away from the arm that rose grasping a curving glitter of steel. The Yuetshi carried one of the few effective weapons in the valley: a heavy hunting bow with a single arrow. With a screech of desperation he nocked the arrow, drew, and loosed, just as the Hyrkanian struck at him in passing. The arrow thudded home and Kurush Khan tumbled out of the saddle, instantly dead from a cloven heart.

As the riderless horse raced away, one of the two figures drew itself up on one elbow. It was the Yuetshi, whose life was welling fast from a ghastly cut across neck and shoulder. Gasping, he looked at the other form. Kurush Khan’s beard jutted upwards as if in comic surprise. The Yuetshi’s arm gave way and his face fell into the dirt, filling his mouth with dust. He spat red, gave a ghastly laugh from frothy lips, and fell back. When the Hyrkanians reached the spot, he, too, was dead.

The Hyrkanians squatted like vultures about a dead sheep and conversed over the body of their khan. When they rose, the doom had been sealed of every Yuetshi in the valley of Akrim.

Granaries, ricks, and stables, spared by Kurush Khan, went up in flames. All prisoners were slain, infants tossed living into the flames, young girls ripped up and flung into the bloody streets. Beside the khan’s corpse grew a heap of severed heads. Riders galloped up, swinging these trophies by the hair, to toss them on the grim pyramid. Every place that might hide a shuddering wretch was ripped apart.

One tribesman, prodding into a stack of hay, discerned a movement in the straw. With a wolfish yell, he pounced upon the stack and dragged his victim to light. It was a girl, and no dumpy, apelike Yuetshi woman either. Tearing off her cloak, the Hyrkanian feasted his eyes on her scantily covered beauty.

The girl struggled silently in his grip. He dragged her toward his horse. Then, quick and deadly as a cobra, she snatched a dagger from his girdle and sank it under his heart. With a groan he crumpled, and she sprang like a she-leopard to his horse. The steed neighed and reared, and she wrenched it about and raced up the valley. Behind her the pack gave tongue and streamed out in pursuit. Arrows whistled about her head.

She guided the horse straight at the mountain wall on the south of the valley, where a narrow canyon opened out. Here the going was perilous, and the Hyrkanians reined to a less headlong pace among the stones and boulders. But the girl rode like a windblown leaf and was leading them by several hundred paces, when she came to a low wall or barrier across the mouth of the canyon, as if at some time somebody had rolled boulders together to make a crude defense. Feathery tamarisks grew out of the ridge, and a small stream cut through a narrow notch in the center. Men were there.

She saw them among the rocks, and they shouted to her to halt. At first she thought them more Hyrkanians and then saw otherwise. They were tall and strongly built, chain mail glinting under their cloaks, and spired steel caps on their heads. She made up her mind instantly. Throwing herself from her steed, she ran up to the rocks and fell on her knees, crying: “Aid, in the name of Ishtar the merciful!”

A man emerged, at the sight of whom she cried out: “General Artaban!” She clasped his knees. “Save me from those wolves that follow!”

“Why should I risk my life for you?” he asked indifferently.

“I knew you at the court of the king at Aghrapurl I danced before you. I am Roxana, the Zamorian,”

“Many women have danced before me.”

“Then I will give you a password,” said she in desperation. “Listen!”

As she whispered a name in his ear, he started as if stung. He stared piercingly at her. Then, clambering upon a great boulder, he faced the oncoming riders with lifted hand.

“Go your way in peace, in the name of King Yildiz of Turan!”

His answer was a whistle of arrows about his ears. He sprang down and waved. Bows twanged all along the barrier and arrows sheeted out among the Hyrkanians. Men rolled from their saddles; horses screamed and bucked. The other riders fell back, yelling in dismay. They wheeled and raced back down the valley. “

Artaban turned to Roxana: a tall man in a cloak of crimson silk and a chain-mail corselet threaded with gold. Water and blood had stained his apparel, yet its richness was still notable. His men gathered about him, forty stalwart Turanian mariners, bristling with weapons. A miserable-looking Yuetshi stood by with his hands bound.

“My daughter,” said Artaban, “I have made enemies in this remote land on your behalf because of a name whispered in my ear. I believed you.”

“If I lied, may my skin be stripped from me.”

“It will be,” he promised gently. “I will see to it personally. You named Prince Teyaspa. What do you know of him?”

“For three years I have shared his exile.”

“Where is he?”

She pointed down the valley to where the turrets of the castle were just visible among the crags. “In yonder stronghold of Gleg the Zaporoskan.”

“It would be hard to take,” mused Artaban.

“Send for the rest of your sea hawks! I know a way to bring you to the heart of that keep!”

He shook his head. “These you see are all my band. Seeing her incredulity he added: “I am not surprised that you wonder. I will tell you …”

With the frankness that his fellow-Turanians found so disconcerting, Artaban sketched his fall. He did not tell her of his triumphs, which were too well-known to need repetition. He was famous as a general for his swift raids into far countries – Brythunia, Zamora, Koth, and Shem – when five years before, the pirates of the Sea of Vilayet, working in league with the outlaw kozaki of the adjoining steppes, had become a formidable menace to that westernmost Hyrkanian kingdom, and King Yildiz had called upon Artaban to redress the situation. By vigorous action Artaban had put down the pirates, or at least driven them away from the western shores of the sea.

But Artaban, a passionate gambler, had gotten deeply in debt. To discharge his debts he had, while on a lone patrol with his flagship, seized a legitimate merchantman out of Khorusun, put all her people to the sword, and taken her cargo back to his base to sell secretly But, though his crew was sworn to secrecy, somebody blabbed. Artaban had kept his head only at the price of a command from King Yildiz that almost amounted to suicide: to sail across the Sea of Vilayet to the mouth of the Zaporoska River and destroy the encampments of the pirates. Only two ships happened to be available for this enterprise

Artaban had found the fortified camp of the Vilayet pirates and had taken it by storm, because only a few of the pirates were in it at the time. The rest had gone up the river to fight a band of wandering Hyrkanians, similar to Kurush Khan’s band, that had attacked the native Zaporoskans along the river, with whom the pirates were on friendly terms. Artaban destroyed several pirate ships in their docks and captured a number of old or sick pirates.

To cow the absent pirates, Artaban had ordered that those taken alive should be impaled, burned by slow fires, and flayed alive all at once. This sentence was in the midst of being executed when the main body of the pirates had returned. Artaban had fled, leaving one of his ships in their hands. Knowing the penalty for failure, he had struck out for the wild stretch along the southwestern shore of Vilayet Sea where the Colchian Mountains came down to the water. He was soon pursued by the pirates in the captured ship and overtaken when the western shore was already in sight The resulting battle had raged over the decks of both ships until dead and wounded ky everywhere. The greater numbers and superior equipment of the Turanians, together with Artaban’s adroit use of his ram, had barely given them a defensive, indecisive victory.

“So we ran the galley ashore in the creek. We might have repaired it, but the king’s fleet rules all of Vilayet Sea, and he will have a bowstring ready for me when he knows I’ve failed. We struck into the mountains, seeking we know not what. A way out of Turanian dominions or a new kingdom to rule.”

Roxana listened and then without comment began her tale. As Artaban well knew, it was the custom of the kings of Turan, upon coming to the throne, to kill their brothers and their brothers’ children in order to eliminate the chance of a civil war. Moreover it was the custom, when the king died, for the nobles and generals to acclaim as king the first of his sons to reach the capital after the event

Even with this advantage, the weak Yildiz could not have conquered his aggressive brother Teyaspa had it not been for his mother, a Kothian woman named Khushia. This formidable old dame, the real ruler of Turan, preferred Yildiz because he was more docile, and Teyaspa was driven into exile. He sought refuge in Iranistan but discovered that the king of that land was corresponding with Yildiz in regard to poisoning him. In an attempt to reach Vendhya, he was captured by a nomadic Hyrkanian tribe, who recognized him and sold him to the Turanians. Teyaspa thought his fate was sealed, but his mother intervened and stopped Yildiz from having his brother strangled.

Instead, Teyaspa was confined in the castle of Gleg the Zaporoskan, a fierce semibandit chief who had come into the valley of the Akrim many years before and set himself up as a feudal lord over the primitive Yuetshi, preying on them but not protecting them. Teyaspa was furnished with all luxuries and forms of dissipation calculated to soften his fiber.

Roxana explained that she was one of the dancing girls sent to entertain him. She had fallen violently in love with the handsome prince and, instead of seeking to ruin him, had striven to lift him back to manhood.

“But,” she concluded, “Prince Teyaspa has sunk into apathy. One would not know him for the young eagle who led his horsemen into the teeth of the Brythunian knights and the Shemitic asshuri. Imprisonment and wine and the juice of the black lotus have drugged his senses. He sits entranced on his cushions, rousing only when I sing or dance for him. But he has the blood of conquerors in him. He is a lion who but sleeps.

“When the Hyrkanians rode into the valley, I slipped out of the castle and went looking for Kurush Khan, in hope of finding a man bold enough to aid Teyaspa. But I saw Kurush Khan slain, and then the Hyrkanians became like mad dogs. I hid from them, but they dragged me out. O my lord, help us! What if you have but a handful? Kingdoms have been built on less! When it is known that the prince is free, men will flock to us! Yildiz is a fumbling mediocrity, and the people fear his son Yezdigerd, a fierce, cruel, and gloomy youth.

“The nearest Turanian garrison is three days’ ride from here. Akrim is isolated, known to few but wandering nomads and the wretched Yuetshi. Here an empire can be plotted unmolested. You too are an outlaw; let us band together to free Teyaspa and place him on his throne! If he were king, all wealth and honor were yours, while . Yildiz offers you naught but a bowstring!”

She was on her knees, gripping his cloak, her dark eyes ablaze with passion. Artaban stood silently, then suddenly laughed a gusty laugh.

“We shall need the Hyrkanians,” he said, and the girl clapped her hands with a cry of joy.

“Hold up!” Conan the Cimmerian halted and glanced about, craning his massive neck. Behind him, his comrades shifted with a clank of weapons. They were in a narrow canyon, flanked on either hand by steep slopes grown with stunted firs. Before them, a small spring welled up among straggling trees and trickled away down a moss-green channel.

“Water here at least,” grunted Conan. “Drink.” The previous evening, a quick march had brought them to Artaban’s ship in its hiding place in the creek before dark. Conan had left four of his most seriously wounded men here, to work at patching up the vessel, while he pushed on with the rest. Believing that the Turanians were only a short distance ahead, Conan had pressed recklessly on in hope of corning up with them and avenging the massacre on the Zaporoska. But then, with the setting of the young moon, they had lost the trail in a maze of gullies and wandered blindly. Now at dawn they had found water but were lost and worn cut The only sign of human life they had seen since leaving the coast was a huddle of huts among the crags, housing nondescript skin-clad creatures who fled howling at their approach. Somewhere in the hills a lion roared.

Of the twenty-six, Conan was the only one whose muscles retained their spring. “Get some sleep,” he growled. “Ivanos, pick two men to take the first watch with you. When the sun’s over that fir, wake three others. I’m going to scout up this gorge.”

He strode up the canyon and was soon lost among the straggling growth. The slopes changed to towering cliffs that rose sheer from the sloping, rock-littered floor. Then, with heart-stopping suddenness, a wild, shaggy figure sprang up from a tangle of bushes and confronted the pirate. Conan’s breath hissed through his teeth as his sword flashed. Then he checked the stroke, seeing that the apparition was weaponless.

It was a Yuetshi: a wizened, gnomelike man in sheepskins, with long arms, short legs, and a flat, yellow, slant-eyed face seamed with many small wrinkles.

“Khosatral!” exclaimed the vagabond. “What does one of the Free Brotherhood in this Hyrkanian-haunted land?” The man spoke the Turanian dialect of Hyrkanian, but with a strong accent.

“Who are you?” grunted Conan.

“I was a chief of the Yuetshi,” answered the other with a wild laugh. “I was called Vinashko. What do you here?”

“What lies beyond this canyon?” Conan countered.

“Over yonder ridge lies a tangle of gullies and crags. If you thread your way among them, you will come out overlooking the broad valley of the Akrim, which until yesterday was the home of my tribe, and which today holds their charred bones,”

“Is there food there?”

“Aye, and death. A horde of Hyrkanian nomads holds the valley.”

As Conan ruminated this, a step brought him about, to see Ivanos approaching.

“Hah!” Conan scowled. “I told you to watch while the men slept!”

“They are too hungry to sleep,” retorted the Corinthian, suspiciously eyeing the Yuetshi.

“Crom!” growled the Cimmerian. “I cannot conjure food out of the air. They must gnaw their thumbs until we find a village to loot.”

“I can lead you to enough food to feed an army,” interrupted Vinashko.

Conan said, his voice heavy with menace: “Don’t mock me, my friend! You just said the Hyrkanians.”

“Nay! There’s a place near here, unknown to them, where we stored food. I was going thither when I saw you.”

Conan hefted his sword, a broad, straight, double-edged blade over four feet long, in a land where curved blades were more the rule. “Then lead on, Yuetshi, but at the first false move, off goes your head!”

Again the Yuetshi laughed that wild, scornful laugh, and motioned them to follow. He made for the nearer cliff, groped among the brittle bushes, and disclosed a crack in the wall. Beckoning, he bent and crawled inside.

“Into that wolf’s den?” said Ivanos.

“What are you afraid of?” said Conan, “Mice?”

He bent and squeezed through the opening, and the other followed him. Conan found himself, not in a cave, but in a narrow cleft of the cliff. Overhead a narrow, crooked ribbon of blue morning sky appeared between the steep walls, which got higher with every step. They advanced through the gloom for a hundred paces and came out into a wide circular space surrounded by towering walls of what looked at first glance like a monstrous honeycomb. A low roaring came from the center of the space, where a small circular curbing surrounded a hole in the floor, from which issued a pallid flame as tall as a man, casting a wan illumination about the cavity.

Conan looked curiously about him. It was like being at the bottom of a gigantic well. The floor was of solid rock, worn smooth as if by the feet of ten thousand generations. The walls, too regularly circular to be altogether natural, were pierced by hundreds of black square depressions a hand’s breadth deep and arranged in regular rows and tiers. The wall rose stupendously, ending in a small circle of blue sky, where a vulture hung like a dot. A spiral stairway cut in the black rock started up from ground level, made half a complete circle as it rose, and ended with a platform in front of a larger black hole in the wall, the entrance to a tunnel.

Vinashko explained: “Those holes are the tombs of an ancient people who lived here even before my ancestors came to the Sea of Vilayet There are a few dim legends about these people; it is said they were not human, but preyed upon my ancestors until a priest of the Yuetshi by a great spell confined them to their holes in the wall and lit that fire to hold them there. No doubt their bones have all long since crumbled to dust. A few of my people have tried to chip away the slabs of stone that block these tombs, but the rock defied their efforts.” He pointed to heaps of stuff at one side of the amphitheater. “My people stored food here against times of famine. Take your fill; there are no more Yuetshi to eat it.”

Conan repressed a shudder of superstitious fear. “Your people should have dwelt in these caves. One man could hold that outer cleft against a horde.”

The Yuetshi shrugged. “Here there is no water. Besides, when the Hyrkanians swooped down there was no time. My people were not warlike; they only wished to till the soil.”

Conan shook his head, unable to understand such natures. Vinashko was pulling out leather bags of grain, rice, moldy cheese, and dried meat, and skins of sour wine,

“Go bring some of the men to help carry the stuff, Ivanos,” said Conan, staring upward. “I’ll stay here.”

As Ivanos swaggered off, Vinashko tugged at Conan’s arm. “Now do you believe I’m honest?”

“Aye, by Crom,” answered Conan gnawing a handful of dried figs. “Any man that leads me to food must be a friend. But how did you and your tribe get here from the valley of the Akrim? It m”´t be a long steep road.”

Vinashko’s eyes gleamed like those of a hungry wolf. “That is our secret. I will show you, if you trust me.”

“When my belly’s full,” said Conan with his mouth full of figs. “We’re following that black devil, Artaban of Shahpur, who is somewhere in these mountains.”

“He is your enemy?”

“Enemy! If I catch him, I’ll make a pair of boots of his hide.”

“Artaban of Shahpur is but three hours’ ride from here.”

“Ha!” Conan started up, feeling for his sword, his blue eyes ablaze. “Lead me to him!”

“Take care!” cried Vinashko. “He has forty armored Turanians and has been joined by Dayuki and a hundred and fifty Hyrkanians. How many warriors have you, lord?”

Conan munched silently, scowling. With such a disparity of numbers, he could not afford to give Artaban any advantages. In the months since he had become a pirate captain, he had beaten and bullied his crew into an effective force, but it was still an instrument that had to be used with care. By themselves they were reckless and improvident; well led, they could do much, but without wise leadership they would throw away their lives on a whim.

Vinashko said: “If you will come with me, kozak, I will show you what no man save a Yuetshi has seen for a thousand years!”

“What’s that?”

“A road of death for our enemies!”

Conan took a step, then halted. “Wait; here come the red brothers. Hear the dogs swear!”

“Send them back with the food,” whispered Vinashko as half a dozen pirates swaggered out of the cleft to gape at the cavern. Conan faced them with a grand gesture.

“Lug this stuff back to the spring,” he said. “I told you I should find food.”

“And what of you?” demanded Ivanos.

“Don’t fret about me! I have words with Vinashko. Go back to camp and gorge yourselves, may the fiends bite you!”

As the pirates’ footsteps faded away down the cleft, Conan gave Vinashko a clap on the back that staggered him.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The Yuetshi led the way up the circular stairway carved in the rock wall. Above the last tier of tombs, it ended at the tunnel’s mouth. Conan found that he could stand upright in the tunnel.

“If you follow this tunnel,” said Vinashko, “you will come out behind the castle of the Zaporoskan, Gleg, that overlooks Akrim.”

“What good will that do?” grunted Conan, feeling his way behind the Yuetshi.

“Yesterday when the slaying began, I strove for a while against the Hyrkanian dogs. When my comrades had all been cut down I fled the valley, running up to the Gorge of Diva. I had run into the gorge when I found myself among strange warriors, who knocked me down and bound me, wishing to ask me what went on in the valley. They were sailors of the king’s Vilayet squadron and called their leader Artaban.

“While they questioned me, a girl came riding like mad with the Hyrkanians after her. When she sprang from her horse and begged aid of Artaban, I recognized her as the Zamorian dancing girl who dwells in Gleg’s castle. A volley of arrows scattered the Hyrkanians, and then Artaban talked with the girl, forgetting about me. For three years Gleg has held a captive. I know, because I have taken grain and sheep to the castle, to be paid in the Zaporoskan fashion, with curses and blows. Kozak, the prisoner is Teyaspa, brother of King Yildiz!”

Conan grunted in surprise.

“The girl, Roxana, disclosed this to Artaban, and he swore to aid her in freeing the prince. As they talked, the Hyrkanians returned and halted at a distance, vengeful but cautious. Artaban hailed them and had speech with Dayuki, the new chief since Kurush Khan was slain. At last the Hyrkanian came over the wall of rocks and shared bread and salt with Artaban. And the three plotted to rescue Prince Teyaspa and put him on the throne.

“Roxana had discovered the secret way to the castle. Today, just before sunset, the Hyrkanians are to attack the castle from the front. While they thus attract the attention of the Zaporoskans, Artaban and his men are to come to the castle by a secret way. Roxana will open the door for them, and they will take the prince and flee into the hills, to recruit warriors. As they talked, night fell, and I gnawed through my cords and slipped away.

“You wish vengeance. I’ll show you how to trap Artaban. Slay the lot. All but Teyaspa. You can either extort a mighty price from Khushia for her son, or from Yildiz for killing him, or if you prefer you can try to be kingmaker yourself.”

“Show me,” said Conan, eyes agleam with eagerness.

The smooth floor of the tunnel, in which three horses might have been ridden abreast, slanted downward. From time to time short flights of steps gave on to lower levels. For a while Conan could not see anything in the darkness. Then a faint glow ahead relieved it. The glow became a silvery sheen, and the sound of falling water filled the tunnel.

They stood in the mouth of the tunnel, which was masked by a sheet of water rushing over the cliff above. From the pool that foamed at the foot of the falls, a narrow stream raced away down the gorge. Vinashko pointed out a ledge that ran from the cavern mouth, skirting the pool. Conan followed him. Plunging through the thin edge of the falls, he found himself in a gorge like a knife cut through the hills. Nowhere was it more than fifty paces wide, with sheer cliffs on both sides. No vegetation grew anywhere except for a fringe along the stream. The stream meandered down the canyon floor to plunge through a narrow crack in the opposite cliff.

Conan followed Vinashko up the twisting gorge. Within three hundred paces, they lost sight of the waterfall. The floor slanted upward. Shortly the Yuetshi drew back, clutching his companion’s arm. A stunted tree grew at an angle in the rock wall, and behind this Vinashko crouched, pointing.

Beyond the angle, the gorge ran on for eighty paces and ended in an impasse. On their left the cliff seemed curiously altered, and Conan stared for an instant before he realized that he was looking at a man-made wall. They were almost behind a castle built in a notch in the cliffs. Its wall rose sheer from the edge of a deep crevice. No bridge spanned this chasm, and the only apparent entrance in the wall was a heavy, iron-braced door halfway up the wall. Opposite to it, a narrow ledge ran along the opposite side of the gorge, and this had been improved so that it could be reached on foot from where they stood.

“By this path the girl Roxana escaped,” said Vinashko. “This gorge runs almost parallel to the Akrim. It narrows to the west and finally comes into the valley through a narrow notch, where the stream flows through. The Zaporoskans have blocked the entrance with stones so that the path cannot be seen from the outer valley unless one knows of it. They seldom use this road and know nothing of the tunnel behind the waterfall.”

Conan rubbed his shaven chin. He yearned to loot the castle himself but saw no way to come to it. “By Crom, Vinashko, I should like to look on this noted valley.”

The Yuetshi glanced at Conan’s bulk and shook his head. “There is a way we call the Eagle’s Road, but it is not for such as you.”

“Ymir! Is a skin-clad savage a better climber than a Cimmerian hillman? Lead on!”

Vinashko shrugged and led the way back down the gorge until, within sight of the waterfall, he stopped at what looked like a shallow groove corroded in the. higher cliff-wall. Looking closely, Conan saw a series of shallow handholds notched into the solid rock.

“I’d have deepened these pockmarks,” grumbled Conan, but started up nevertheless after Vinashko, clinging to the shallow pits by toes and fingers. At last they reached the top of the ridge forming the southern side of the gorge and sat down with their feet hanging over the edge.

The gorge twisted like a snake’s track beneath them. Conan looked out over the opposite and lower wall of the gorge into the valley of the Akrim.

On his right, the morning sun stood high over the glittering Sea of Vilayet; on his left rose the white-hooded peaks of the Colchians. Behind him he could see down into the tangle of gorges among which he knew his crew to be encamped.

Smoke still floated lazily up from the blackened patches that had been villages. Down the valley, on the left bank of the river, were pitched a number of tents of hide. Conan saw men swarming like ants around these tents. These were the Hyrkanians, Vinashko said, and pointed up the valley to the mouth of a narrow canyon where the Turanians were encamped. But the castle drew Conan’s interest

It was solidly set in a notch in the cliffs between the gorge beneath them and the valley beyond. The castle faced the valley, entirely surrounded by a massive twenty-foot wall. A ponderous gate flanked by towers pierced with slits for arrows commanded the outer slope. This slope was not too steep to be climbed or even ridden up, but afforded no cover.

“It would take a devil to storm that castle,” growled Conan. “How are we to come at the king’s brother in that pile of rock? Lead us to Artaban, so I can take his head back to the Zaporoska.”

“Be wary if you wish to wear your own,” answered Vinashko. “What do you see in the gorge?”

“A lot of bare stone with a fringe of green along the stream.”

The Yuetshi grinned wolflike. “And do you notice that the fringe is denser on the right bank, where it is also higher? Listen! From behind the waterfall we can watch until the Turanians come up the gorge. Then, while they are busy at Cleg’s castle, we’ll hide among the bushes along the stream and waylay them as they return. We’ll kill all but Teyaspa, whom we will take captive. Then we’ll go back through the tunnel. Have you a ship to escape in?”

“Aye,” said Conan, rising and stretching. “Vinashko, is there any way down from this knife edge you have us balanced on except that shaft we came up by?”

“There is a trail that leads east along the ridge and then down into those gullies where your men camp. Let me show you. Do you see that rock that looks like an old woman? Well, you turn right there …”

Conan listened attentively to the directions, but the substance of them was that this perilous path, more suitable for ibex or chamois than for men, did not provide access to the gorge beneath them.

In the midst of his explanation, Vinashko turned and stiffened. “What’s this?” he said.

Men were galloping out of the distant Hyrkanian camp and lashing their horses across the shallow river.

The sun struck glints from lance points. On the castle walls helmets began to sparkle.

“The attack!” cried Vinashko. “Khosatral Khel! They’ve changed their plans; they were not going to attack until evening! Quickly! We must get down before the Turanians arrive!”

They levered their bodies into the shallow groove and crept down, step by step.

At last they stood in the gorge and hastened toward the waterfall. They reached the pool, crossed the ledge, and plunged through the fall. As they came into the dimness beyond, Vinashko gripped Conan’s mailed arm. Above the rush of water the Cimmerian heard the clink of steel on rock. He looked out through the silver-shimmering screen that made everything ghostly and unreal, but which hid them from the eyes of anyone outside. They had not gained their refuge any too soon. A band of men was corning along the gorge.tall men in mail hauberks and turban-bound helmets. At their head strode one taller than the rest, with black-bearded, hawklike features. Conan sighed and gripped his sword hilt, moving forward a trifle, but Vinashko caught him.

“In the gods’ names, kozak,” he whispered frantically “don’t throw away our lives! We have them trapped, but if you rush out now.”

“Don’t worry, little man,” said Conan with a somber grin. “I am not so simple as to spoil a good vengeance by a thoughtless impulse.”

The Turanians were crossing the narrow stream. On the farther bank they halted in an attitude of listening. Presently, above the rush of the waters, the men in the cave-mouth heard the distant shouting of many men.

“The attack!” whispered Vinashko.

As if it were a signal, the Turanians started swiftly up the gorge. Vinashko touched the Cimmerian’s arm.

“Bide here and watch. I’ll hasten back and bring your pirates.”

“Hurry, then,” said Conan, “It will be touch and go if you can get them here in time.” And Vinashko slipped away like a shadow.

In a broad chamber luxuriant with gold-worlced tapestries, silken divans, and velvet cushions, the prince Teyaspa reclined. He seemed the picture of voluptuous idleness as he lounged in silks and satins, a crystal jar of wine at his elbow. His dark eyes were those of a dreamer whose dreams are tinted with wine and drugs. His gaze rested on Roxana, who tensely gripped the bars of a casement, peering out, but his expression was placid and faraway. He seemed unaware of the yells and clamor that raged without.

Roxana moved restlessly, glancing at the prince over her slim shoulder. She had fought like a tigress to keep Teyaspa from falling into the gulf of degeneracy and resignation that his captors had prepared. Roxana, no fatalist, had stung him into life and ambition.

“It is time,” she breathed, turning. “The sun hangs at the zenith. The Hyrkanians ride up the slope, lashing their steeds and loosing their arrows vainly against the walls. The Zaporoskans pour arrows and stones down upon them, until bodies litter the slope, but they come on again like madmen. I must hasten. You shall yet sit on the golden throne, my lover!”

She prostrated herself and kissed his slippers in an ecstasy of adoration, then rose and hurried out of the room, through another where ten great black mutes kept guard night and day. She traversed a corridor to the outer court that lay between the castle and the, postern wall. Though Teyaspa was not allowed unguarded out of his chamber, she was free to come and go as she liked.

Crossing the court, she approached the door that led into the gorge. One warrior leaned there, disgruntled because he could not take part in the fighting. Though the rear of the castle seemed invulnerable, the cautious Gleg had posted a sentry there anyway. The man on guard was a Sogdian, his felt cap perched on the side of his head. He leaned, on a pike, scowling, as Roxana approached him. “What do you here, woman?”

“I am afraid. The cries and shouts frighten me, lord. The prince is drugged with lotus juice, and there is none to soothe my fears.”

She would have fired the heart of a corpse as she stood in an attitude of fear and supplication. The Sogdian plucked his thick beard.

“Nay, fear not, little gazelle,” he said. “I’ll soothe you.” He laid a black-nailed hand on her shoulder and drew her close. “None shall touch a lock of your hair. I … ahhh!”

Snuggling in his arms, Roxana had slipped a dagger from her sash and thrust it through his thick throat. One of the Sogdian’s hands clutched at his beard while the other fumbled for the hilt in his girdle. He reeled and fell heavily. Roxana snatched a bunch of keys from his girdle and ran to the door. She swung it open and gave a low cry of joy at the sight of Artaban and his Turanians on the ledge across the chasm.

A heavy plank, used as a bridge, lay inside the gate, but it was far too heavy for her to handle. Chance had enabled her to use it for her previous escape, when rare carelessness had left it in place across the chasm and unguarded for a few minutes. Artaban tossed her the end of a rope, which she made fast to the hinges of the door. The other end was gripped by half a dozen strong men, and three Turanians crossed the crevice, swinging hand over hand. They spanned the chasm with the plank for the rest to cross.

“Twenty men guard the bridge,” snapped Artaban. “The rest follow me.”

The sea wolves drew their steel and followed their chief. Artaban led them swiftly after the light-footed girl. As they entered the castle, a servitor sprang up and gaped at them. Before he could cry out, Dayuki’s razor-edged yataghan sliced through his throat, and the band rushed into the chamber where the ten mutes sprang up, gripping scimitars. There was a flurry of fierce, silent righting, noiseless except for the hiss and rasp of steel and the gasps of the wounded. Three Turanians died, and the rest strode into the inner chamber over the mangled bodies of the blacks.

Teyaspa rose, his quiet eyes gleaming with old fire, as Artaban dramatically knelt before him and lifted the hilt of his bloody scimitar.

“These are the warriors who shall set you on your throne!” cried Roxana.

“Let us go quickly, before the Zaporoskan dogs are aware of us,” said Artaban.

He drew up his men in a clump around Teyaspa. Swiftly they traversed the chambers, crossed the court, and approached the gate. But the clang of steel had been heard. Even as the raiders were crossing the bridge, savage yells rose behind them. Across the courtyard rushed a stocky, powerful figure in silk and steel, followed by fifty helmeted archers and swordsmen, “Gleg!” screamed Roxana.

“Cast down the plank!” roared Artaban, springing to the bridgehead.

On each side of the chasm bows twanged until the air over the plank was clouded with shafts whistling in both directions. Several Zaporoskans fell, but so did the two Turanians who stooped to lift the plank, and across the bridge rushed Gleg, his cold gray eyes blazing under his spired helmet. Artaban met him breast to breast. In a glittering whirl of steel the Turanian’s scimitar grated around Cleg’s blade, and the keen edge cut through the camail and the thick muscles of the Zaporoskan’s neck. Gleg staggered and, with a wild cry, pitched off into the chasm.

In an instant the Turanians had cast the bridge after him. On the far side, the Zaporoskans halted with furious yells and began shooting their thick horn bows as fast as they could draw and nock. Before the Turanians, running down the ledge, could get out of range, three more had been brought down and a couple of others had received minor wounds from the vicious arrow storm. Artaban cursed at his losses.

“All but six of you go forward to see that the way is clear,” he ordered. “I follow with the prince. My lord, I could not bring a horse up this defile, but I will have the dogs make you a litter of spears.”

“The gods forbid that I ride on my deliverers’ shoulders!” cried Teyaspa. “Again I am a man! I shall never forget this day!”

“The gods be praised!” whispered Roxana.

They came within sight of the waterfall. All but the small group in the rear had crossed the stream and were straggling down the left bank, when there came a multiple snap of bowstrings, as though a hand had swept across the strings of a muted harp. A sheet of arrows hissed across the stream into their ranks, and then another and another. The foremost Turanians went down like wheat under the scythe and the rest gave back, shouting alarm.

“Dog!” shouted Artaban, turning on Dayuki. “This is your work.”

“Do I order my men to shoot at me?” squalled the Hyrkanian, his dark face pale. “This is some new enemy!”

Artaban ran down the gorge toward his demoralized men, cursing. He knew that the Zaporoskans would rig up some sort of bridge across the chasm and pursue him, catching him between two forces. Who his assailants were he had no idea. From the castle he heard the shouts of battle, and then a great rumble of hooves and shouting and clang of steel seemed to come from the outer valley. But, pent in that narrow gorge, which muffled sound, he could not be sure.

The Turanians continued to fall before the storm of arrows from their invisible opponents. Some loosed blindly into the bushes. Artaban knocked their bows aside, shouting:

“Fools!” Why waste arrows on shadows? Draw steel and follow me!”

With a fury of desperation, the remaining Turanians charged the ambush, cloaks flowing and eyes blazing. Arrows brought down some, but the rest leaped into the water and splashed across. From the bushes on the farther bank rose wild figures, mail-clad or half-naked, swords in hands. “Up and at them!” bellowed a great voice. “Cut and thrust!”

A yell of amazement rose from the Turanians at the sight of the Vilayet pirates. Then they closed with a roar. The rasp and clangor of steel echoed from the cliffs. The first Turanians to spring up the higher bank fell back into the stream with heads split. Then the pirates leaped down the bank to meet their foes hand-to-hand, thigh-deep in water that soon swirled crimson. Pirate and Turanian slashed and slew in a blind frenzy, sweat and blood running into their eyes.

Dayuki ran into the melee, glaring. His double-curved blade split a pirate’s head. Then Vinashko leaped upon him barehanded and screaming.

The Hyrkanian recoiled from the mad ferocity in the Yuetshi’s features, but Vinashko caught Dayuki around the neck and sank his teeth in the man’s throat. He hung on, chewing deeper and deeper, heedless of the dagger that Dayuki drove again and again into his side. Blood spurted around his jaws until both lost their footing and fell into the stream. Still tearing and rending, they were washed down with the current, now one face snowing above water, now another, until both vanished forever.

The Turanians were driven back up the left bank, where they made a brief, bloody stand. Then they broke and fled toward the place where Prince Teyaspa stared entranced in the shadow of the cliff, with the small knot of warriors whom Artaban had detailed to guard him.

Thrice he moved as though to draw his sword and cast himself into the fray, but Roxana, clinging to his knees, stopped him.

Artaban, breaking away from the battle, hastened to Teyaspa. The admiral’s sword was red to the hilt, his mail was hacked, and blood dripped from beneath his helmet. After him through the melee came Conan, brandishing his great sword in his sledgelike fist. He beat down his foes with strokes that shattered bucklers, caved in helmets, and clove through mail, flesh, and bone.

“Ho, you rascals!” he roared in his barbarous Hyrkanian. “I want your head, Artaban, and the fellow beside you there.Teyaspa, Fear not, my pretty prince; I’ll, not hurt you.”

Artaban, looking about for an avenue of escape, saw the groove leading up the cliff and divined its purpose.

“Quick, my lord!” he whispered. “Up the cliff! I’ll hold off the barbarian while you climb!”

“Aye, hasten!” urged Roxana. “I’ll follow!”

But the fatalistic mask had descended again on Prince Teyaspa. He shrugged. “Nay, the gods do not will that I should press the throne. Who can escape his destiny?”

Roxana clutched her hair with a look of horror. Artaban sheathed his sword, sprang for the groove, and started up with the agility of a sailor. But Conan, coming up behind him at a run, reached up, caught his ankle, and plucked him out of his cranny like a fowler catching a bird by the leg. Artaban struck the ground with a clang. As he tried to roll over to wrench loose, the Cimmerian drove his sword into the Turanian’s body, crunching through mail links, and into the ground beneath.

Pirates approached with dripping blades. Teyaspa spread his hands, saying: “Take me if you will. I am Teyaspa.”

Roxana swayed, her hands over her eyes. Then like a flash she thrust her dagger through Teyaspa’s heart, and he died on his feet. As he fell, she drove the point into her own breast and sank down beside her lover. Moaning, she cradled his head in her arms, while the pirates stood about, awed and incomprehending.

A sound up the gorge made them lift their heads. They were but a handful, weary and dazed with battle, their garments soaked with blood and water.

Conan said: “Men are coming down the gorge. Get back into the tunnel.”

They obeyed, but slowly, as if they only half understood him. Before the last of them had ducked under the waterfall, a stream of men poured down the path from the castle. Conan, cursing and beating his rearmost men to make them hurry, looked around to see the gorge thronged with armed figures. He recognized the fur caps of the Zaporoskans and with them the white turbans of the Imperial Guards from Aghrapur. One of these wore a spray of bird-of-paradise feathers in his turban, and Conan stared to recognize, from these and other indications, the general of the Imperial Guards, the third man of the Turanian Empire.

The general saw Conan and the tail of his procession too and shouted an order. As Conan, the last in line, plunged through the waterfall, a body of Turanians detached themselves from the rest and ran to the pool.

Conan yelled to his men to run, then turned and faced the sheet of water from the inner side, holding up a buckler from a dead Turanian and his great sword.

Presently a guardsman came through the sheet of water. He started to yell, but the sound was cut off by a meaty chunk as Conan’s sword sheared through his neck. His head and body rumbled separately off the ledge into the pool. The second guard had time to strike at the dim figure that towered over him, but his sword rebounded from the Cimmerian’s buckler. The next instant he in turn fell back into the pool with a cloven skull.

There were shouts, partly muffled by the sound of the water. Conan flattened himself against the side of the tunnel, and a storm of arrows whipped through the sheet of water, bringing little splashes of droplets with them and rebounding with a clatter from the walls and floor of the tunnel.

A glance back showed Conan that his men had vanished into the gloom of the tunnel. He ran after them, so that when, a few moments later, the guardsmen again burst through the waterfall, they found nobody in front of them.

Meanwhile in the gorge, voices filled with horror rose as the newcomers halted among the corpses. The general knelt beside the dead prince and the dying girl.

“It is Prince Teyaspa!” he cried.

“He is beyond your power,” murmured Roxana. “I would have made him king, but you robbed him of his manhood … so I killed him …”

“But I bring him the crown of Turan!” cried the general. “Yildiz is dead, and the people will rise against his son Yezdigerd if they have anyone else to follow.”

“Too late!” whispered Roxana, and her dark head sank on her arm.

Conan ran up the tunnel with the feet of the pursuing Turanians echoing after him. Where the tunnel opened into the great natural chimney lined with the tombs of the forgotten race, he saw his men grouped uncertainly on the floor of the pit below him, some looking at the hissing flame and some up at the stair down which they had come.

“Go on to the ship!” he bellowed through cupped hands. The words rattled back from the black cylindrical walls.

The men ran out into the cleft that led to the outer world. Conan turned again and leaned against the side of the chimney just alongside the tunnel entrance. He waited as the footsteps grew louder.

An Imperial Guard popped out of the tunnel. Again Conan’s sword swished and struck, biting into the man’s back through mail and skin and spine. With a shriek the guard pitched headfirst off the platform. His momentum carried him out from the spiral stair toward the middle of the floor below. His body plunged into the hole in the rocky floor from which issued the flame and wedged there like a cork in a bottle. The flame went out with a pop, plunging the chamber into gloom only faintly relieved by the opening to the sky far above.

Conan did not see the body strike the floor, for he was watching the tunnel opening for his next foe. The next guard looked out but leaped back as Conan struck at him with a ferocious backhand. There came a jabber of voices; an arrow whizzed out of the tunnel past Conan’s face, to strike the far side of the chamber and shatter against the black rock.

Conan turned and started down the stone steps, taking three at a time. As he reached the bottom, he saw Ivanos herding the last of the pirates into the cleft across the floor, perhaps ten strides away. To the left of the cleft, five times Conan’s height from the floor, the Turanian guards boiled out of the tunnel and clattered down the stairs. A couple loosed arrows at the Cimmerian as they ran, but between the speed of his motion and the dimness of the light their shots missed.

But, as Conan reached the bottom steps, another group of beings appeared. With a grinding sound, the slabs of stone blocking the ends of the tomb cavities swung inward, first a few, then by scores. Like a swarm of larvae issuing from their cells, the inhabitants of the tombs came forth. Conan had not taken three strides toward the cleft when he found the way blocked by a dozen of the things.

They were of vaguely human form, but white and hairless, lean and stringy as if from a long fast. Their toes and fingers ended in great, hooked claws. They had large, staring eyes set in faces that looked more like those of bats than of human beings, with great, flaring ears, little snub noses, and wide mouths that opened to show needle-pointed fangs.

The first to reach the floor were those who crawled out of the bottom tiers of cells. But the upper tiers were opening too and the creatures were spelling out of them by hundreds, climbing swiftly down the pitted walls of the chamber by their hooked claws. Those that reached the floor first glimpsed the last pirates as they entered the cleft. With a pointing of clawed fingers and a shrill twittering, those nearest the cleft rushed toward and into it.

Conan, the hairs of his neck prickling with a barbarian’s horror of supernatural menaces, recognized the newcomers as the dreaded brylukas of Zaporoskan legend. creatures neither man nor beast nor demon, but a little of all three. Their near-human intelligence served their bestial lust for human blood, while their supernatural powers enabled them to survive even though entombed for centuries. Creatures of darkness, they had been held at bay by the light of the flame. When this was put out they emerged, as ferocious as ever and even more avid for blood.

Those that struck the floor near Conan rushed upon him, claws outstretched. With an inarticulate roar he whirled, making wide sweeps with his great sword to keep them from piling on his back. The blade sheared off a head here, an arm there, and cut one bryluka in half. Still they clustered, twittering, while from the spiral staircase rose the shrieks of the leading Turanians as Brylukas leaped upon them from above and climbed up from below to fasten their claws and fangs in their bodies.

The stair was clustered with writhing, battling figures as the Turanians hacked madly at the things crowding upon them, A cluster consisting of one guard with several brylukas clinging to him tolled off the stair to strike the floor. The entrance to the cleft was solidly jammed with twittering brylukas trying to force their way in to chase Conan’s pirates. In the seconds before they overwhelmed him too, Conan saw that neither way out would serve him. With a bellow of fury he ran across the floor, but not in the direction the brylukas expected. Weaving and zigzagging, his sword a whirling glimmer in the gloom, he reached the wall directly below the platform that formed the top of the stair and the entrance to the tunnel, leaving a trail of still or writhing figures behind him. Hooked claws snatched at him as he ran, glancing off his mail, tearing his clothes to ribbons, and drawing blood from deep scratches on his arms and legs.

As he reached the wall, Conan dropped his buckler, took his sword in his teeth, sprang high in the air, and caught the lower sill of one of the cells in the third tier above the floor, a cell that had already discharged its occupant. With simian agility the Cimmerian mountaineer went up the wall, using the cell openings as hand and footholds. Once, as his face came opposite a cell opening, a hideous batlike visage looked into his as the bryluka started to emerge. Conan’s fist lashed out and struck the grinning face with a crunch of bone; then, without waiting to see what execution he had done, he swarmed on up.

Below him, other brylukas climbed the wall in pursuit. Then with a heave and a grunt he was on the platform. Those guards who had been behind the ones who first started down the stair, seeing what was happening in the chamber, had turned and raced back through the tunnel. A few brylukas crowded into the tunnel in pursuit just as Conan reached the platform.

Even as they turned toward him he was among them like a whirlwind. Bodies, whole or dismembered, spilled off the platform as his sword sheared through white, unnatural flesh. For an instant the platform was cleared of the gibbering horrors. Conan plunged into the tunnel and ran with all his might Ahead of him ran a few of the vampires, and ahead of them the guards who had been coming along the tunnel. Conan, coming to the brylukas from behind, struck down one, then another, then another, until they were all writhing in their blood behind him. He kept on until he came to the end of the tunnel, where the last of the guards had just ducked through the waterfall.

A glance back showed Conan another swarm of brylukas rushing upon him with outstretched claws. Conan bolted through the sheet of water in his turn and found himself looking down upon the scene of the recent battle with the Turanians. The general and the rest of his escort were standing about, shouting and gesticulating as their fellows emerged from the water and ran down the ledge to the ground. When Conan appeared right after the last of these, the yammer continued without a break until a louder shout from the general cut through it:

“It is one of the pirates! Shoot!”

Conan, running down the ledge, was already halfway to the ladder shaft. Those in front of him, who had just reached the floor of the gorge, turned to stare as he raced past them with such tremendous strides that the archers, misjudging his speed, sent a flight of arrows clattering against the rocks behind him. Before they had nocked their second arrows, he had reached the vertical groove in the cliff face.

The Cimmerian slipped into the shaft, whose concavity protected him momentarily from the arrows of the Turanians standing near the general. He caught at the indentations with hands and toes and went up like a monkey. By the time the Turanians had recovered their wits enough to run up the gorge to a position in front of the groove, where they could see him to shoot at, Conan was fifteen paces up and rising fast.

Another storm of arrows whistled about him, clattering as they glanced from the rock. A couple struck his body but were prevented from piercing his flesh by his mail shirt. A couple of others struck his clothing and caught in the cloth. One hit his right arm, the point passing shallowly under the skin and then out again.

With a fearful oath Conan tore the arrow out of the wound point-first, threw it from him, and continued his climb. Blood from the flesh wound soaked up his arm and down his body. By the next volley, he was so high that the arrows had little force left when they reached him. One struck his boot but failed to penetrate.

Up and up he went, the Turanians becoming small beneath him. When their arrows no longer reached him, they ceased shooting. Snatches of argument floated up. The general wanted his men to climb the shaft after Conan, and the men protested that this would be futile, as he would simply wait at the top of the cliff and cut their heads off one by one as they emerged. Conan smiled grimly.

Then he reached the top. He sat gasping on the edge with his feet hanging down into the shaft while he bandaged his wounds with strips torn from his clothing, meantime looking about him. Glancing ahead over the rock wall into the valley of the Akrim, he saw sheepskin-clad Hyrkanians riding hard for the hills, pursued by horsemen in glittering mail.Turanian soldiers. Below him, the Turanians and Zaporoskans milled around like ants and finally set off up the gorge to the castle, leaving a few of their number on watch in case Conan should come back down the groove.

Some time later Conan rose, stretched his great muscles, and turned to look eastward toward the Sea of Vilayet. He started as his keen vision picked up a ship, and shading his eyes with his hand he made out a galley of the Turanian navy crawling away from the mouth of the creek where Artaban had left his ship.

“Crom!” he muttered. “So the cowards piled aboard and pulled out without waiting!”

He struck his palm with his fist, growling deep in his throat like an angry bear. Then he relaxed and laughed shortly. It was no more than he should have expected. Anyway, he was getting tired of the Hyrkanian lands, and there were still many countries in the West that he had never visited.

He started to hunt for the precarious route down from the ridge that Vinashko had shown him.

13. BLACK TEARS

I. The Jaws of the Trap

The noonday sun blazed down from the fiery dome of the sky. The harsh, dry sands of Shan-e-Sorkh, the Red Waste, baked in the pitiless blaze as in a giant oven. Naught moved in the still air; the few thorny shrubs that crowned the low, gravel-strewn hills, which rose in a wall at the edge of the Waste, stirred not.

Neither did the soldiers who crouched behind them, watching the trail.

Here some primeval conflict of natural forces had riven a cleft through the escarpment. Ages of erosion had widened this cleft, but it still formed a narrow pass between steep slopes a perfect site for an ambush.

The troop of Turanian soldiery had lain hidden atop the hills all through the hot morning hours. Sweltering in their tunics of chain and scale mail, they crouched on sore hams and aching knees. Cursing under his breath, their captain, the Amir Boghra Khan, endured the long, uncomfortable vigil with them. His throat was as dry as sun-baked leather; within his mail, his body stewed. In this accursed land of death and blazing sun, a man could not even sweat comfortably; the desiccated desert air greedily drank up every drop of moisture, leaving one as dry as the withered tongue of a Stygian mummy.

Now the amir blinked and rubbed his eyes, squinting against the glare to see again that tiny flash of light. A forward scout, concealed behind a dune of red sand, caught the sun in his mirror and flashed a signal toward his chief, hidden atop the hills.

Now a cloud of dust could be seen. The portly, black-bearded Turanian nobleman grinned and forgot his discomfort. Surely his traitorous informant had truly earned the bribe it took to buy him!

Soon, Boghra Khan could discern the long line of Zua-gir warriors, robed in flowing white khalats and mounted on slender desert steeds. As the band of desert marauders emerged from the cloud of dust raised by the hoofs of their horses, the Turanian lord could even make out the dark, lean, hawk-faced visages of his quarry, framed by their flowing headdresses so clear was the desert air and so bright the sun. Satisfaction seethed through his veins like red wine of Aghrapur from young King Yezdigerd’s private cellars.

For years, now, this outlaw band had harried and looted towns and trading posts and caravan stations along the borders of Turan first under that blackhearted Zaporoskan rogue, Olgerd Vladislav; then, a little more than a year ago, by his successor, Conan. At last, Turanian spies in villages friendly to the outlaw band had found a corruptible member of that band, one Vardanes, not a Zuagir but a Zamorian. Vardanes had been a blood brother to Olgerd, whom Conan had overthrown, and was hungry for vengeance against the stranger who had usurped the chieftainship.

Boghra thoughtfully tugged his beard. The Zamorian traitor was a smiling, laughing villain, dear to a Turanian heart. Small, lean, lithe, and swaggering, handsome and reckless as a young god, Vardanes was an amusing drinking companion and a devilish fighter but as cold-hearted and untrustworthy as an adder.

Now the Zuagirs were passing through the defile. And there, at the head of the outriders, rode Vardanes on a prancing black mare. Boghra Khan raised a hand to warn his men to be ready. He wanted to let as many as possible of the Zuagirs enter the pass before closing the trap upon them. Only Vardanes was to be allowed through. The moment he was beyond the walls of sandstone, Boghra brought his hand down with a chopping motion.

“Slay the dogs!” he thundered, rising.

A hail of hissing arrows fell slanting through the sunlight like a deadly rain. In a second, the Zuagirs were a turmoil of shouting men and bucking horses. Flight after flight of arrows raked them. Men fell, clutching at feathered shafts, which sprouted as by magic from their bodies. Horses screamed as keen barbs gashed their dusty flanks.

Dust rose in a choking cloud, veiling the pass below. So thick it became that Boghra Khan halted his archers for a moment, lest they waste their shafts in the murk. And that momentary twinge of thrift was his undoing. For out of the clamor rose one deep, bellowing voice, dominating the chaos.

“Up the slopes and at them!”

It was the voice of Conan. An instant later, the giant form of the Cimmerian himself came charging up the steep slope on a huge, fiery stallion. One might think that only a fool or a madman would charge straight up a steep slope of drifting sand and crumbling rock into the teeth of his foe, but Conan was neither. True, he was wild with ferocious lust for revenge, but behind his grim, dark face and smouldering eyes, like blue flames under scowling black brows, the sharp wit of a seasoned warrior was at work. He knew that often the only road through an ambush is the unexpected.

Astonished, the Turanian warriors let bows slacken as they stared. Clawing and scrambling up the steep slopes of the sides of the pass, out of the dust-clouded floor of the defile, came a howling mob of frenzied Zuagirs, afoot and mounted, straight at them. In an instant the desert warriors more numerous than the amir had expected came roaring over the crest, scimitars flashing, cursing and shrieking bloodthirsty war cries.

Before them all came the giant form of Conan. Arrows had ripped his white khalat, exposing the glittering black mail that clad his lion-thewed torso. His wild, unshorn mane streamed out from under his steel cap like a tattered banner, a chance shaft had torn away his flowing kaffia. On a wild-eyed stallion, he was upon them like some demon of myth. He was armed not with the tulwar of the desert folk but with a great, cross-hilted western broadsword his favorite among the many weapons of which he was master. In his scarred fist, this length of whirling, mirror-bright steel cut a scarlet path through the Turanians. It rose and fell, spraying scarlet droplets into the desert air. At every stroke it clove armor and flesh and bone, smashing in a skull here, lopping a limb there, hurling a third victim mangled and prone with ribs crushed in.

By the end of a short, swift half-hour it was all over. No Turanians survived the onslaught save a few who had fled early and their leader. With his robe torn away and his face bloody, the limping and disheveled amir was led before Conan, who sat on his panting steed, wiping the gore from his steel with a dead man’s khalat.

Conan fixed the wilted lordling with a scornful glance, not unmixed with sardonic humor.

“So, Boghra, we meet again!” he growled.

The amir blinked with disbelief. “You!” he gasped.

Conan chuckled. A decade before, as a wandering young vagabond, the Cimmerian had served in the mercenaries of Turan. He had left King Yildiz’s standards rather hurriedly over a little matter of an officer’s mistress so hurriedly, in fact, that he had failed to settle a gambling wager with the same amir who stood astonished before him now. Then, as the merry young scion of a noble house, Boghra Khan and Conan had been comrades in many an escapade from gaming table to drinking shop and bawdy house. Now, years older, the same Boghra gaped up, crushed in battle by an old comrade whose name he had somehow never connected with that of the terrible leader of the desert tribesmen.

Conan raked him with narrowing eyes. “You were awaiting us here, weren’t you?” he growled.

The amir sagged. He did not wish to give information to the outlaw leader, even if they were old drinking companions. But he had heard too many grim tales of the Zuagirs’ bloody methods of wringing information from captives. Fat and soft from years of princely living, the Turanian officer feared he could not long keep silent under such pressure.

Surprisingly, his cooperation was not needed. Conan had seen Vardanes, who had curiously requested the post of advance scout that morning, spur ahead through the further end of the pass just before the trap had been sprung.

“How much did you pay Vardanes?” Conan demanded suddenly.

“Two hundred silver shekels …” the Turanian mumbled. Then he broke off, astonished at his own indiscretion. Conan laughed.

“A princely bribe, eh? That smiling rogue like every Zamorian, treacherous to the bottom of his rotten black heart! He’s never forgiven me for unseating Olgerd.” Conan broke off, leveling a quizzical glance at the bowed head of the amir. He grinned, not unkindly. “Nay, berate yourself not, Boghra. You did not betray your military secrets; I tricked you out of them. You can ride back to Aghrapur with your soldierly honor intact.”

Boghra lifted his head with astonishment. “You will let me live?” he croaked.

Conan nodded. “Why not? I still owe you a bag of gold from that old wager, so let me settle the debt this way. But next time, Boghra, have a care how you set traps for wolves. Sometimes you catch a tiger!”

II. The Land of Ghosts

Two days of hard riding through the red sands of Shan-e-Sorkh, and still the desert marauders had not caught up with the traitor. Thirsty for the sight of Vardanes’ blood, Conan pressed his men hard. The cruel code of the desert demanded the Death of Five Stakes for the roan who betrayed his comrades, and Conan was determined to see the Zamorian pay that price.

On the evening of the second day, they made camp in the shelter of a hillock of parched sandstone, which thrust up from the rust-colored sands like the stump of some ruined ancient tower. Conan’s hard face, burnt almost black by the desert sun, was lined with fatigue. His stallion panted at the edge of exhaustion, slobbering through frothy lips as he set the water bag to the animal’s muzzle. Behind him, men stretched weary legs and aching arms. They watered the horses and lit a campfire to keep the wild desert dogs away. He heard the creak of ropes as saddlebags disgorged tents and cooking equipment.

Sand crunched under a sandaled heel behind him. He turned to see the lined, bewhiskered face of one of his lieutenants. This was Gomer, a sloe-eyed, hook-nosed Shemite with greasy, blue-black ringlets escaping from the folds of his headdress.

“Well?” growled Conan as he rubbed down the tired stallion with long, slow strokes of a stiff brush.

The Shernite shrugged. “He’s still making a straight path to the southwest,” he said. “The blackhearted devil must be made of iron.”

Conan laughed harshly. “His mare may be iron, but not Vardanes. He’s flesh and blood, as you shall see when we spread him out to the stakes and slit his guts for the vultures!”

Comer’s sad eyes were haunted by a vague fear. “Conan, will you not give over this quest? Each day takes us deeper into this land of sun and sand, where only vipers and scorpions can live. By Dagon’s tail, unless we turn back, we shall leave our bones here to bleach forever!”

“Not so,” grunted the Cimmerian. “If any bones are left to bleach here, they’ll be Zamorian. Don’t fret, Gomer; we’ll catch up to the traitor yet. Tomorrow, perhaps. He can’t keep up this pace forever.”

“Nor can we!” Gomer protested. He paused, feeling Conan’s smoldering blue gaze searching his face.

“But that’s not all that’s eating at your heart, is it?” demanded Conan. “Speak up, man. Out with it!”

The burly Shemite shrugged eloquently. “Well, no. I the men feel ” His voice trailed away.

“Speak, man or I’ll kick it out of you!”

“This this is the Makan-e-Mordan!” Gomer burst out.

“I know. I’ve heard of this ‘Place of Ghosts’ before. So what? Are you afraid of old crones’ fables?”

Gomer looked unhappy. “They are not just fables, Conan. You are no Zuagir; you do not know this land and its terrors, as do we who have long dwelt in the wilderness. For thousands of years, this land has been a cursed and haunted place, and with every hour that we ride, we go deeper into this evil land. The men fear to tell you, but they are half mad with terror.”

“With childish superstition, you mean,” snarled Conan. “I know they’ve been quaking in their boots over legends of ghosts and goblins. I’ve heard stories of this country, too, Gomer. But they are only tales to frighten babes, not warriors! Tell your comrades to beware. My wrath is stronger than all the ghosts that ever died!”

“But, Conan!”

Conan cut him off with a coarse word. “Enough of your childish night fears, Shemite! I have sworn by Crom and Mitra that I will have the blood of that Zamorian traitor or die trying! And if I have to scatter a little Zuagir blood along the way, I’ll not scruple to do so. Now cease yammering and come share a bottle with me. My throat’s as dry as this blasted desert, and all this talk dries it out the more.”

Clapping Gomer on the shoulder, Conan strode away toward the campfire, where the men were unpacking stores of smoked meat, dried figs and dates, goat cheese, and leathern bottles of wine.

But the Shemite did not rejoin the Cimmerian at once. He stood long, gazing after the swaggering chieftain he had followed for nearly two years, ever since they had found Conan crucified near the walls of Khauran. Conan had been a guard captain in the service of Queen Taramis of Khauran until her throne was usurped by the witch Salome, leagued with Constantius the Falcon, the Kothic voivode of the Free Companies.

When Conan, realizing the substitution, took his stand with Taramis and was defeated, Constantius had him crucified outside the city. By chance, Olgerd Vladislav, chief of the local band of Zuagir outlaws, had come riding by and had cut Conan down from his cross, saying that if he survived his wounds he might join their band. Conan not only survived but also proved so able a leader that in time he ousted Olgerd from the band, which he had led from this day to this.

But this was the end of his leadership. Gomer of Akkharia sighed deeply. Conan had ridden before them for the last two days, sunk in his own grim lust for revenge. He did not realize the depth of the passion in the hearts of the Zuagirs. Gomer knew that, although they loved Conan, their superstitious terrors had driven them to the brink of mutiny and murder. To the scarlet gates of Hell they might follow the Cimmerian but no further into the Land of Ghosts.

The Shemite idolized his chieftain. But, knowing that no threat would swerve the Cimmerian from the path of vengeance, he could think of but one way to save Conan from the knives of his own men. From a pocket in his white khalat he withdrew a small, stoppered phial of green powder. Secreting it in his palm, he rejoined Conan by the campfire, to share a bottle of wine with him.

III. Invisible Death

When conan awoke, the sun was high. Heat waves shimmered across the barren sands. The air was hot and still and dry, as if the heavens were an inverted brazen bowl heated to incandescence.

Conan staggered to his knees and clutched his throbbing brow. His aching skull felt as if he had been clubbed.

He lurched to his feet and stood swaying. Through bleary eyes, squinted against the glare, he looked slowly about him. He was alone in this cursed, waterless land.

He croaked a curse on the superstitious Zuagirs. The entire troop had decamped, taking with them all the gear, the horses, and the provisions. Two goatskin water bags lay beside him. These, his mail shirt and khalat, and his broadsword were all that his erstwhile comrades had left him.

He fell to his knees again and pulled the stopper from one of the water bags. Swirling the lukewarm fluid about, he rinsed the vile taste from his mouth and drank sparingly, reluctantly replacing the stopper before his fiery thirst was half assuaged. Although he longed to up-end the bag over his aching head, reason asserted its dominance. If he were lost in this sandy waste, every drop would be needed for survival.

Through the blinding headache and the groggy state of his wits, he could see what must have occurred. His Zuagirs were more fearful of this dubious realm than he had supposed, despite Comer’s warnings. He had made a serious perhaps a fatal error. He had underestimated the power of superstition over his desert warriors and overestimated his power to control and dominate them. With a dull groan, Conan cursed his own arrogant, bull-headed pride. Unless he learned better, it might some day be the death of him.

And perhaps this was the day. He took a long, stony look at his chances. They seemed slim. He had water for two days on short rations three, if he would risk madness by limiting his intake further. No food and no horse, which meant he must wend afoot.

Well then, on he would go. But whither? The obvious answer was: back the way he had come. But there were arguments against that course. Of these, the most eloquent was that of distance. They had ridden for two days after leaving the last water hole. A man on foot could travel at best at only half the speed of a horse. For him, then, to return by the route they had come would mean he must travel for at least two full days without any water at all …

Conan rubbed his jaw reflectively, trying to forget the throbbing in his skull and to cudgel some sense out of his groggy wits. Retracing his steps would not be the best idea, for he knew there was no water closer than four days’ march away.

He looked ahead, where the trail of the fleeing Vardanes stretched straight from this place to the horizon.

Perhaps he should continue to follow the Zamorian. While the path led into unknown country, the mere fact that the land was unknown was in its favor. An oasis might lie just beyond the nearest dunes. It was hard to reach a sensible decision under such circumstances, but Conan resolved upon what seemed the wiser course. Girding his khalat about his mailed form and slinging his sword across his shoulders, he strode off along Vardanes’ track, the water bags slapping against his back.

The sun hung forever in a sky of burning brass. It blazed down like a fiery eye in the brow of some colossal cyclops, gazing upon the tiny, slow-moving figure that trudged across the baking surface of the crimson sands. It took forever for the afternoon sun to glide down the vast, empty curve of the sky, to die on the flaming funeral pyre of the west. Then purple evening stole on shadowy wings across the vault of the heavens, and a trace of blessed coolness crept across the dunes, with soft shadows and a light breeze.

By then, Conan’s leg muscles were beyond pain. Fatigue had numbed the ache in them, and he stumbled forward on limbs like stone columns animated by sorcery.

His great head was bowed on his massive chest. He plodded on numbly, needing rest but driven by the knowledge that now, in the coolness of evening, he could make the most distance with the least discomfort.

His throat was caked with dust; his swarthy visage was dusted brick-red with a mask of desert sand. He had drunk a mouthful an hour ago and would drink no more until it became so dark that he could no longer see to follow Vardanes’ trail.

His dreams that night were turgid and confused, filled with shaggy nightmare figures with one glaring eye in their bestial brows, who beat his naked body with whips of red-hot chain.

When he blinked awake, he found the sun already high and another hot day before him. It was agony to rise. Every muscle throbbed as if tiny needles had been thrust deep into his tissues. But rise he did, to drink lightly and go forward.

Soon he lost track of time, but still the tireless engine of his will drove him on, step after staggering step. His mind wandered away into shadowy bypaths of delusion. But still he held three thoughts before him: to follow the trail of hoofprints, to save water stringently, and to stay on his feet. If once he fell, he knew he would be unable to rise again. And if he fell during the scorching day, his bones would desiccate and whiten amidst these scarlet wastes for ages to come.

IV. The Deathless Queen

Vardanes of zamora halted at the crest of the hills and stared down at a sight so strange that it struck him dumb. For five days, since the botched ambush against the Zuagirs had rebounded upon the Turanians, he had ridden like a madman, scarcely daring to snatch an hour or two of rest for himself and his mare. A terror so great that it robbed the very manhood from within him goaded him on.

Well did he know the vengeance of the desert outlaws. His imagination was filled with sickening scenes of the price the grim avengers would exact from his body if ever he fell into their hands. Thus, when he saw that the ambush had failed, he had galloped straight out into the desert. He knew that devil, Conan, would flay the traitor’s name from Boghra Khan and then would come howling on his heels with a bloodthirsty mob of Zuagirs. Nor would they easily give up the quest of their treacherous former comrade.

His one slim chance had been to head out into the trackless reaches of Shan-e-Sorkh. Although Vardanes was a city-bred Zamorian of culture and sophistication, the fortunes of his age had flung him in with the desert outlaws, and he knew them well. He knew they dreaded the very name of the Red Waste and that their savage imaginations peopled it with every monster and devil ever dreamed of. Why the desert tribesmen feared the Red Waste so terribly he neither knew nor cared, so long as their fear would keep them from following him very far into that deadly desert.

But they had not turned back. His lead on them was so slight that, day after day, he could see the clouds of dust raised by the Zuagir horsemen behind him. He pressed ahead with every moment, eating and drinking in the saddle and pushing his mount to the verge of exhaustion in order to widen that narrow gap.

After five days, he knew not whether they were still on his track; but soon it mattered little. He had exhausted the food and water for himself and his mare and pressed on in the faint hope of finding a water hole in this endless waste.

His horse, caked with dry mud where desert dust had stuck to lathered sides, staggered forward like a dead thing driven by a sorcerer’s will. Now it was near to death. Seven times this day it had fallen, and only the lash of the whip had driven it to its feet again. Since it could no longer support his weight, Vardanes walked, leading it by its rein.

The Red Waste had taken a fearful toll of Vardanes himself. Once handsome as a laughing young god, he was now a gaunt, sunblackened skeleton. Bloodshot eyes glared through matted, stringy locks. Through cracked, swollen lips he mumbled mindless prayers to Ishtar, Set, Mitra, and a score of other deities. As he and his trembling steed lurched to the crest of yet another row of dunes, he looked down and saw a lush green valley, dotted with clumps of emerald-green date palms.

Amid this fertile vale lay a small, walled city of stone. Bulging domes and squat guard towers rose above a stuccoed wall, wherein was set a great gate whose polished bronzen hinges redly reflected the sun.

A city in this scorching waste? A lush valley of cool, green trees and soft lawns and limped lotus pools, in the heart of this bleak wilderness? Impossible!

Vardanes shuddered, shut his eyes, and licked his cracked lips. It must be a mirage, or a phantom of his disordered wits! Yet a shard of half-forgotten lore, gleaned from his youthful studies long ago, came back to him. It was a fragment of legend called Akhlat the Accursed.

He strove to recover that thread of memory. It had been in an old Stygian book, which his Shemite tutor kept locked in a sandalwood chest. Even as a bright-eyed lad, Vardanes had been blessed or cursed with greed, curiosity, and nimble fingers. One dark night, he had picked that lock and pored with mingled awe and loathing through the portentous pages of that dark grimoire of elder necromancy. Penned in a spidery hand on pages of dragon parchment, the text described strange rites and ceremonies. The pages crawled with cryptic hieroglyphs from elder kingdoms of sorcerous evil, like Acheron and Lemuria, which had flourished and fallen in time’s dawn.

Among the pentacle-crowded pages had been fragments of some dark liturgy designed to draw down undying demon-things from dark realms beyond the stars, from the chaos that ancient mages said reigned beyond the borders of the cosmos. One of these liturgies contained cryptic references to “devil-cursed and demon-haunted Akhlat in the Red “Waste, where power-mad sorcerers of yore called down to this earthly sphere a Demon from Beyond, to their unending sorrow … Akhlat, where the Undying One rules with a hand of horror to this very day … doomed, accursed Akhlat, which the very gods spumed, transforming all the realm round about into a burning waste …”

Vardanes was still sitting in the sand by the head of his panting mare when grim-faced warriors seized him and bore him down from the ring of stony hills that encircled the city down into the garden valley of date palms and lotus pools down to the gates of Akhlat the Accursed.

V. The Hand of Zillah

Conan roused slowly, but this time it was different. Before, his awakening had been painful, prying gummed lids open to squint at the fiery sun, hoisting himself slowly erect to stagger forward across broiling sands.

This time he awoke easily, with a blissful sensation of repletion and comfort. Silken pillows lay beneath his head. Thick awnings with tasseled fringes kept the sun from his body, which was clean and naked save for a fresh loincloth of white linen.

He sprang instantly to full alertness, like an animal whose survival in the wild depends upon this ability. He stared about with unbelieving eyes. His first thought was that death had claimed him at last and that his spirit had been borne beyond the clouds to the primitive paradise where Crom, the god of his people, sat enthroned amid a thousand heroes.

Beside his silken couch lay a silver ewer, filled with fresh, clear water.

Moments later, Conan lifted his dripping face from the ewer and knew that whatever paradise he was in, it was real and physical. He drank deep, although the state of his throat and mouth told him that he was no longer racked with the burning thirst of his desert trek. Some caravan must have found him and borne him to these tents for healing and succor. Looking down, Conan saw that his limbs and torso had been washed clean of desert dust and smeared with soothing salve. Whoever his rescuers might be, they had fed and cherished him while he raved and slumbered his way toward recovery.

He peered around the tent. His great broadsword lay across an ebony chest. He padded toward it on silent feet, like some wary jungle cat then froze as he heard the tinkle of a warrior’s harness behind him.

The musical sound, however, came from no warrior but from a slim, fawn-eyed girl who had just entered the tent and stood staring. Dark, shining hair fell unbound to her waist, and tiny silver bells were threaded through these tresses. Thence had come the faint tinkle.

Conan took in the girl in one swift glance: young, scarcely more than a child, slim and lovely, with a pale body that gleamed enticingly through gauzy veils. Jewels glistened on her slim, white hands. From the golden bangles on her brow and the look of her large, dark eyes, Conan guessed her to be of some folk akin to the Shemites.

“Oh!” she cried. “You are too weak to stand! You must rest some more to regain your strength.” Her language was a dialect of Shemitish, full of archaic forms but close enough to the Shemitish that Conan knew for him to understand.

“Nonsense, girl, I’m fit enough,” he replied in the same tongue. “Was it you who tended me here? How long since you found me?”

“Nay, strange lord, ‘twas my father. I am Zillah the daughter of Enosh, a lord of Akhlat the Accursed. We found your body amid the everlasting sands of the Waste three days past,” she replied, veiling her eyes with silken lashes.

Gods! he thought, but this was a fair wench. Conan had seen no woman in weeks, and he frankly studied the swelling contours of her lithe body, scarcely hidden by the gauzy veils. A trace of scarlet rose to her cheeks.

“So your pretty hand tended me, eh, Zillah?” he said. “My thanks to you and your sire for this mercy. I was close enough to death, I’ll warrant. How did you chance upon me?” He strove without success to recall any city by the name of Akhlat the Accursed, although he thought he knew every city of the southern deserts, by repute if not by an actual visit.

“It was not by chance; indeed, we came in search of you,” said Zillah.

Conan’s eyes narrowed as his nerves tingled to the sense of danger. Something in the sudden hardening of his grim, impassive face told the girl that he was a man of swift animal passions, a dangerous man unlike the soft, mild townsmen she had known.

“We meant you no harm!” she protested, lifting one slim hand defensively. “But follow me, sir, and my sire will explain all things to you.”

For a moment, Conan stood tense, wondering if Vardanes had set these people on his trail. The silver he had carried off from the Turanians should be enough to buy the souls of half a hundred Shemites.

Then he relaxed, deliberately calming the blood lust that rose within him. He took up his sword and slung the baldric over his shoulder.

“Then take me to this Enosh, lass,” he said calmly. “I would hear his tale.”

She led him from the chamber. Conan squared his naked shoulders and padded after her.

VI. The Thing from Beyond

Enosh was poring over a wrinkled, time-faded scroll in a high-backed chair of black wood, as Zillah conducted Conan into his presence. This part of the tent was hung with dark purple cloth; thick carpets muffled the tread of their feet. On a coiling stand composed of intertwined serpents of glinting brass, a black mirror of curious design reposed. Eery lights flickered in its ebon depths.

Enosh rose and greeted Conan with courtly phrases. He was a tall, elderly man, lean but straight. His pate was covered with a headdress of snowy linen, his face was lined with age and creased with thought, and his dark eyes were weary with ancient sorrow.

He bade his guest be seated and commanded Zillah to bring wine. When the formalities were over, Conan asked abruptly: “How did you come to find me, O shaykh?”

Enosh glanced at the black mirror. “Whilst I am no fell sorcerer, my son, I can make use of some means not altogether natural.”

“How is it that you were looking for me?”

Enosh lifted a thin, blue-veined hand to quiet the warrior’s suspicions. “Be patient, my friend, and I will explain all,” he said in his quiet, deep-toned voice. Reaching to a low tabouret, he set aside his scroll and accepted a silver cup of wine.

When they had drunk, the old man began his tale: “Ages ago, a wily sorcerer of this land of Akhlat conceived of a plot against the ancient dynasty that had ruled in this place since the fall of Atlantis,” he said slowly. “With cunning words, he made the people think their monarch a weak, self-indulgent man was their foe, and the people rose and trampled the foolish king into the mire. Setting himself up as a priest and prophet of the Unknown Gods, the sorcerer pretended to divine inspiration. He averred that one of the gods would soon descend to earth to rule over Akhlat the Holy as it was called in person.”

Conan snorted. “You Akhlatim, it seems, are no less gullible than the other nations I have seen.”

The old man smiled wearily. “It is always easy to believe what one wishes to be true. But the plan of this black sorcerer was more terrible than any could dream. With vile and nameless rites, he conjured into this plane of existence a demoness from Outside, to serve as goddess to the people. Retaining his sorcerous control over this being, he presented himself as the interpreter of her divine will. Struck with awe, the people of Akhlat soon groaned beneath a tyranny far worse than that which they had suffered from the old dynasty.”

Conan smiled wolfishly. “I have seen that revolutions often throw up worse governments than those they replace.”

“Perhaps. At any rate, this one did. And in time matters became even grimmer; for the sorcerer lost control over the demoniac Thing he had summoned down from Beyond, and it destroyed him and ruled in his place. And it rules to this very day,” he concluded softly.

Conan started. “The creature is immortal, then? How long ago was this?”

“More years have passed than these wastes have grains of sand,” said Enosh. “And still the goddess rules supreme in sad Akhlat. The secret of her power is such that she leaches the life force from living creatures. All this land about us was once green and fair, lush with date palms along the streams and grassy hills whereon the fat herds pastured. Her vampiric thirst for life has drained the land dry, save for the valley wherein the city of Akhlat stands. That she has spared, for without living things to drain to dry, lifeless husks, she cannot sustain herself on this plane of being.”

“Crom!” whispered Conan, draining his wine cup.

“For centuries, now,” Enosh continued, “this land has been transformed into a dead and sterile waste. Our young go to slake the dark thirst of the goddess, as do the beasts of our Socks. She feeds daily. Each day she chooses a victim, and each day they dwindle and lessen. When she attacks one victim incessantly, day after day, he may last but a few days or he may linger half a moon. The strongest and bravest endure for as many as thirty days before she exhausts their store of life force and must begin on the next.”

Conan fondled the hilt of his sword. “Crom and Mitra, man, why have you not slain this thing?”

The old man wearily shook his head. “She is invulnerable, unkillable,” he said softly. “Her flesh is composed of matter drawn to her and held together by the goddess’s unconquerable will. An arrow or a sword could but wound that flesh: it is a trifling matter for her to repair the injury. And the life force she drinks from others, leaving them dry husks, gives her a terrible store of inner strength from which to remold her flesh anew.”

“Bum the thing,” Conan growled. “Burn the palace down about her head, or cut her into little pieces for the flames of a bonfire to devour!”

“No. She shields herself with dark powers of hellish magic. Her weapon transfixes into paralysis all she looks upon. As many as a hundred warriors have crept into the Black Temple, determined to end this grim tyranny. Naught was left of them but a living forest of motionless men, who served in turn as human banquets for the insatiable monster.”

Conan stirred restlessly. ” ‘Tis a wonder that any of you still dwell in this accursed land!” he rumbled, “How has this damnable leech not drained every last human being in this valley dry long since? And why have you not bundled your belongings and fled from this demon-haunted place?”

“In truth, very few of us are left; she consumes us and our beasts faster than their natural increase can make up the loss. For ages, the demoness sated her lust with the minute life force of growing green things, sparing the people. When the land became a waste, she fed first upon our flocks and then from our slaves and finally from the Akhlatim themselves. Soon we shall be gone, and Akhlat will be one vast city of death. Nor can we leave the land, for the power of the goddess holds us within narrow bounds, beyond which we cannot stray.”

Conan shook his head, his unshorn mane brushing his bare, bronzed shoulders. “It is a tragic tale you tell, old man. But why do you repeat it to me?”

“Because of an ancient prophecy,” said Enosh gently, picking up the worn and wrinkled scroll from the tabouret.

“What prophecy?”

Enosh partly unrolled the scroll and pointed to lines of writing of a form so old that Conan could not read it, although he could manage the written Shemitish of his own time. “That in the fullness of time,” said Enosh, “when our end was near, the Unknown Gods, whom our ancestors turned away from to worship the demoness, would relent of their wrath and send a liberator, who should overthrow the goddess and destroy her evil power. You, Conan of Cimmeria, are that savior …”

VII. Hall of the Living Dead

For days and nights, Vardanes lay in a dank dungeon cell beneath the Black Temple of Akhlat. He yelled and pleaded and wept and cursed and prayed, but the dull-eyed, cold-faced, bronze-helmed guardsmen paid him no heed, save to tend to his bodily needs. They would not answer his questions. Neither would they submit to bribery, which much astonished him. A typical Zamorian, Vardanes could hardly conceive of men who did not lust for wealth, yet these strange men with their antique speech and old-fashioned armor were so little covetous of the silver he had rung from the Turanians in payment for his betrayal that they even let his coin-filled saddle bags lie undisturbed in a corner of his cell.

They tended him well, however, bathing his haggard body and soothing his blisters with salves. And they fed him sumptuously with fine roast fowl, rich fruits, and sweetmeats. They even gave him wine. Having known other gaols in his time, Vardanes realized how extraordinary this was. Could they, he wondered uneasily, be fattening him for slaughter?

Then, one day, guards came to his cell and brought him forth. He assumed he was at last to appear before some magistrate to answer whatever absurd charges his accusers might make. Confidence welled up within him. Never had he known a magistrate whose mercy could not be purchased with the silver in those fat saddle bags!

But, instead of to a judge or suffete, he was led by dark and winding ways before a mighty door of greened bronze, which loomed in front of him like the gate of Hell itself. Triply locked and barred was this portal, and strong enough to withstand an army. With nervous hands and taut faces, the warriors unfastened the great door and thrust Vardanes within.

As the door clanged shut behind him, the Zamorian found himself in a magnificent hall of polished marble. It was drowned in deep, purple gloom and thick with dust. On every hand lay tokens of unrepaired decay, of untended neglect. He went forward curiously.

Was this a great throne room, or the transept of some colossal temple? It was hard to say. The most peculiar thing about the vast, shadowy hall, other than the neglect from which it had evidently long suffered, was the statuary that stood about its floor in clusters. A host of puzzling questions rose within Vardanes’ troubled brain.

The first mystery was the substance of the statues. Whereas the hall itself was builded of sleek marble, the statues were made of some dull, lifeless, porous gray stone that he could not identify. Whatever the stuff was, it was singularly unattractive. It looked like dead wood ash, though hard as dry stone to the touch.

The second mystery was the amazing artistry of the unknown sculptor, whose gifted hands had wrought these marvels of art. They were lifelike and detailed to an incredible degree: every fold of garment or drapery hung like real cloth; every tiny strand of hair was visible. This astonishing fidelity was carried even to the postures. No heroic groupings, no monumental majesty was visible in these graven images of dull-gray, plasterlike material. They stood in lifelike poses, by the score and the hundred. They were scattered here and there with no regard for order. They were carved in the likeness of warriors and nobles, youths and maidens, doddering grandsires and senile hags, blooming children and babes in arms.

The one disquieting feature held in common by all was that each figure bore on its stony features an expression of unendurable terror.

Before long, Vardanes heard a faint sound from the depths of this dark place. Like the sound of many voices it was, yet so faint that he could make out no words. A weird diapason whispered through this forest of statues. As Vardanes drew nearer, he could distinguish the strains of sound that made up the whole: slow, heart-rending sobs, faint, agonized moans; the blurred babble of prayers; croaking laughter; monotonous curses. These sounds seemed to come from half a hundred throats, but the Zamorian could see no source for them. Although he peered about, he could see naught in all this place but himself and the thousands of statues.

Sweat trickled down his forehead and his lean cheeks. A nameless fear arose within him. He wished from the depths of his faithless heart that he were a thousand leagues from this accursed temple, where voices of invisible beings moaned, sobbed, babbled, and laughed hideously.

Then he saw the golden throne. It stood in the midst of the hall, towering above the heads of the statues. Vardanes’ eyes fed hungrily on the luster of gold. He edged through the stony forest toward it.

Something was propped up on that rich throne the shriveled mummy of some long-dead king? Withered hands were clasped over a sunken breast. From throat to heel, the thin body was wrapped in dusty cerements. A thin mask of beaten gold, worked in the likeness of a woman of unearthly beauty, lay over the features.

A twinge of greed quickened Vardanes’ panting breath. He forgot his fears, for, between the brows of that golden mask, a tremendous black sapphire glowed like a third eye. It was an astounding gem, worth a prince’s ransom.

At the foot of the throne, Vardanes stared covetously at the golden mask. The eyes were carved as if closed in slumber. Sweet and beautiful slept the drowsy, full-lipped mouth in that lovely golden face. The huge, dark sapphire flashed with sultry fires as he reached for it.

With trembling fingers, the Zamorian snatched the mask away. Beneath it lay a brown, withered face. The cheeks had fallen in; the flesh was hard, dry, and leathery. He shuddered at the malevolent expression on the features of that death’s head.

Then it opened its eyes and looked at him.

He staggered back with a scream, the mask falling from nerveless fingers to clatter against the marble pave. The dead eyes in the skull-face leered into his own. Then the Thing opened its third eye …

VIII. The Face of the Gorgon

Conan padded through the hall of gray statues on naked feet, prowling the dusty, shadow-haunted aisles like some great jungle cat. Dim light slowed along the keen edge of the mighty broadsword in his huge, capable fist. His eyes glared from side to side and the hackles bristled upon his nape. This place stank of death; the reek of fear lay heavy in the still air.

How had he ever let old Enosh talk him into this foolish venture? He was no redeemer, no destined liberator, no holy man come from the gods to free Akhlat from the deathless curse of the demoness. His only purpose was one of red revenge.

But the wise old shaykh had spoken many words, and his eloquence had persuaded Conan to undertake this perilous mission. Enosh had pointed out two facts that convinced even the hard-bitten barbarian. One was that, once within this land, Conan was bound there by black magic and could not leave until the goddess was slain. The other was that the Zamorian traitor was immured beneath the Black Temple of the goddess, soon to face the doom that would, if not averted, destroy them all.

So Conan had come by secret underground ways, which Enosh had shown him. He had emerged from a hidden portal in the wall of this vast, gloomy hall, for Enosh knew when Vardanes was to go before the goddess.

Like the Zamorian, Conan also noted the marvelous realism of the gray statues; but, unlike Vardanes, he knew the answer to this riddle. He averted his eyes from the expressions of horror on the stone faces about him.

He, too, heard the mournful wailing and crying. As he drew nearer to the center of the mighty hypostyle hall, the sobbing voices became clearer. He saw the golden throne and the withered thing upon it, and he crept toward the lustrous chair on silent feet.

As he approached, a statue spoke to him. The shock almost unmanned him. His flesh crawled, and sweat started from his brow.

Then he saw the source of the cries, and his heart pounded with revulsion. For those about the throne were not yet dead. They were stone up to the neck, but the heads still lived. Sad eyes rolled in despairing faces, and dry lips prayed that he would bury his sword in the living brains of these almost but not completely petrified beings.

Then he heard a scream, in Vardanes’ well-known voice. Had the goddess slain his enemy before he could wreak his vengeance? He sprang forward to the side of the throne.

There a terrible sight met his eyes. Vardanes stood before the throne, eyes popping and lips working feverishly. The rasp of stone caught Conan’s ear, and he looked at Vardanes’ legs. Where the Zamorian’s feet touched the floor, a gray pallor crept slowly up them. Before Conan’s gaze, the warm flesh whitened. The gray tide had reached Vardanes’ knees; but, even as Conan watched, the flesh of the upper legs was transmuted into ashen-gray stone. Vardanes strained to walk but could not. His voice rose in a shriek, while his eyes glared at Conan with the naked fear of a trapped animal.

The thing on the throne laughed a low, dry cackle. As Conan watched, the dead, withered flesh of her skeletal arms and wrinkled throat swelled and became smooth; it flushed from dead, leathery brown to the warm flesh tones of life. With every vampiric draught of vital energy that the Gorgon drained from Vardanes’ body, her own body became imbued with life.

“Crom and Mitra!” breathed Conan.

With every atom of her mind focused on the half-petrified Zamorian, the Gorgon paid Conan no heed. Now her body was filling out. She bloomed; a soft rondure of hip and thigh stretched the dull cerements. Her woman’s breasts swelled, straining the thin fabric. She stretched firm, youthful arms. Her moist, crimson mouth opened in another peal of laughter this time, the musical, voluptuous laughter of a full-bodied woman.

The tide of petrification had crept to Vardanes’ loins. Conan did not know whether she would spare Vardanes with the semi-petrification of those near the throne or whether she would drain him to the dregs. He was young and vital; his life force must have been a robust vintage to the vampire goddess.

As the stony tide swept up to the Zamorian’s panting breast, he uttered another scream the most awful sound that Conan had ever heard from human lips. Conan’s reaction was instinctive. Like a striking panther, he leaped from his place of concealment behind the throne. Light caught the edge of his blade as he swung it.

Vardanes’ head jumped from its trunk and fell with a meaty smack to the marble floor.

Shaken by the impact, the body toppled and fell. It crashed to the floor, and Conan saw the petrified legs crack and splinter. Stony fragments scattered, and blood welled from the cracks in the petrified flesh.

So died Vardanes the traitor. Even Conan could not tell whether he struck from lust for revenge, or whether a merciful impulse to end the torment of a helpless creature had prompted the blow.

Conan turned to the goddess. Without meaning to, he instinctively raised his eyes to hers.

IX. The Third Eye

Her face was a mask of inhuman loveliness; her soft, moist lips were as full and crimson as ripe fruit. Glossy, ebon hair tumbled across shoulders of glowing pearl, to fall in tides of silken night through which thrust the round moons of her breasts. She was beauty incarnate save for the great dark orb between her brows.

The third eye met Conan’s gaze and riveted him fast. This oval orb was larger than any organ of human vision. It was not divided into pupil, iris, and white as are human eyes; it was all black. His gaze seemed to sink into it and become lost in endless seas of darkness. He stared rapt, the sword forgotten in his hand. The eye was as black as the lightless seas of space between the stars.

Now he seemed to stand at the brink of a black, bottomless well, into which he toppled and fell. Down, down through ebon fogs he fell, through a vast, cold abyss of utter darkness. He knew that, if he did not soon turn his eyes away, he would be forever lost to the world.

He made a terrible effort of will. Sweat stood out on his brow; his muscles writhed like serpents beneath his bronzed skin. His deep chest heaved.

The Gorgon laughed a low, melodious sound with cold, cruel mockery in it. Conan flushed, and rage rose within him.

With a surge of will, he tore his eyes from that black orb and found himself staring at the floor. Weak and dizzy, he swayed on his feet. As he fought for the strength to stand erect, he glanced at those feet. Thank Crom, they were still of warm flesh, not cold, ashen stone! The long moment he had stood ensorcelled by the Gorgon’s gaze had been only a brief instant, too short for the stony tide to have crept up his flesh.

The Gorgon laughed again. With his shaggy head bowed, Conan felt the tug of her will. The muscles of his corded neck swelled in his effort to keep his head bent away.

He was still looking down. Before him, on the marble pave, lay the thin golden mask with the huge sapphirine gem set in it to represent the third eye. And suddenly, Conan knew.

This time, as his glance rose, his sword swung with it. The flashing blade clove the dusty air and caught the mocking face of the goddess slashing the third eye in twain.

She did not move. With her two normal eyes of surpassing beauty, she stared silently at the grim warrior, her face blank and white. A change swept over her.

From the ruin of the Gorgon’s third eye, dark fluid ran down the face of inhuman perfection. Like black tears, the slow dew fell from the shattered organ.

Then she began to age. As the dark fluid ran from the riven orb, so the stolen life force of aeons drained from her body. Her skin darkened and roughened into a thousand wrinkles. Withered dewlaps formed beneath her chin. Glowing eyes became lusterless and milky.

The superb bosom sagged and shrank. Sleek limbs became scrawny. For a long moment, the dwarfed, withered form of a tiny woman, incredibly senile, tottered on the throne. Then flesh rotted to papery scraps and mouldering bones. The body collapsed, spilling across the pavement in a litter of leathery fragments, which crumbled as Conan watched to a colorless, ashy powder.

A long sigh went through the hall. It darkened briefly as if the passage of half-transparent wings dimmed the obscure light. Then it was gone, and with it the brooding air of age-old menace. The chamber became just a dusty, neglected old room, devoid of supernatural terrors.

The statues slept forever now in graves of eternal stone. As the Gorgon passed from this dimension, so her spells snapped, including those that had held the living dead in a grisly semblance of life. Conan turned away, leaving the empty throne with its litter of dust and the broken, headless statue of what had once been a bold, high-spirited Zamorian fighting man.

“Stay with us, Conan!” Zillah pleaded in her low, soft voice. “There will be posts of high honor for a man such as you in Akhlat, now that we are freed of the curse.”

He grinned hardly, sensing something more personal in her voice than the desire of a good citizen to enlist a worthy immigrant in the cause of civic reconstruction. At the probing gaze of his hot, male eyes, she flushed in confusion.

Lord Enosh added his gentle voice to the pleadings of his daughter. Conan’s victory had lent new youth and vigor to the elderly man. He stood straight and tall, with a new firmness in his step and a new command in his voice. He offered the Cimmerian wealth, honors, position, and a place of power in the newborn city. Enosh had even hinted that he would look with favor upon Conan as a son-in-law.

But Conan, knowing himself ill-suited to the life of placid, humdrum respectability they held out to him, refused all offers. Courtly phrases did not spring readily to the lips of one whose years had been spent on the field of battle and in the wine shops and joy houses of the world’s cities. But, with such tact as his blunt, barbaric nature could muster, he turned aside his hosts’ pleas.

“Nay, friends,” he said. “Not for Conan of Cimmeria the tasks of peace. I should too soon become bored, and when boredom strikes, I know of but few cures: to get drunk, to pick a fight, or to steal a girl. A fine sort of citizen I should make for a city that now seeks peace and quiet to recover its strength!”

“Then whither will you go, O Conan, now that the magical barriers are dissolved?” asked Enosh.

Conan shrugged, ran a hand through his black mane, and laughed. “Crom, my good sir, I know not! Luckily for me, the goddess’s servants fed and watered Vardanes’ horse. Akhlat, I see, has no horses only donkeys and a great lout like me would look like a fool, jogging along on a sleepy little ass with my toes dragging in the dust!

“I think I’ll bend my path to the southeast. Somewhere yonder lies the city of Zamboula, which I have never been. Men say it is a rich city of fleshpots and revelry, where the wine all but flows free in the gutters. I’ve a mind to taste the joys of Zamboula, to see what excitement it has to offer.”

“But you need not leave us a beggar!” Enosh protested. “We owe you much. Let us give you what little gold and silver we have for your labors.”

Conan shook his head. “Keep your treasure, shaykh. Akhlat is no rich metropolis, and you will need your money when the merchants’ caravans begin to arrive again from across the Red Waste. And now that my water bags are full and I’ve provisions aplenty, I must be off. This time, I shall make the journey through the Shan-e-Sorkh in comfort.”

With a last, brisk farewell, he swung into the saddle and cantered up out of the valley. They stood looking after him, Enosh proudly, but Zillah with tears on her cheeks. Soon he was out of sight.

As he reached the top of the dunes, Conan halted the black mare for a last look at Akhlat. Then he rode off into the Waste. Perhaps he had been a fool not to accept their small store of treasure. But there was plenty in Vardanes’ saddle bags, which he reached behind him to thunp. He grinned. Why squabble over a few shekels like a greasy tradesman? It does a man good, once in a while, to be virtuous. Even a Cimmerian!

Conan may or may not have made good his boast to burn Jehungir’s city of Khawarizm, but in any event he builds his combined kozak and pirate raiders into so formidable a threat that King Yezdigerd calls off his march of empire to crush them. The Turanian forces are ordered back from the frontiers and in one massive assault succeed in breaking up the kozak host. Some survivors ride east into the wilds of Hyrkania, others west to join the Zuagirs in the desert. With a sizeable band, Conan retreats southward through the passes of the Jlbars Mountains to take service as light cavalry in the army of one of Yezdigerd’s strongest rivals, Kobad Shah, king of Iranistan.

14. THE FLAME KNIFE

I. Knives in the Dark

The scuff of swift and stealthy feet in the darkened doorway warned the giant Cimmerian. He wheeled to see a fall figure lunging at him from the black arch. It was dark in the alley, but Conan glimpsed a fierce, bearded face and the gleam of steel in a lifted hand, even as he avoided the blow with a twist of his body. The knife ripped his tunic and glanced along the shirt of light chain mail he wore beneath it. Before the assassin could recover his balance, the Cimmerian caught his arm and brought his massive fist down like a sledge hammer on the back of the fellow’s neck. The man crumpled to earth without a sound.

Conan stood over him, listening with tense expectancy. Up the street, around the next comer, he caught the shuffle of sandaled feet, the muffled clink of steel. These sinister sounds told him the nighted streets of An-shan were a deathtrap. He hesitated, half-drew the scimitar at his side, then shrugged and hurried down the street He swerved wide of the dark arches that gaped in the walls that lined it.

He turned into a wider street and a few moments later rapped softly on a door, above which burned a bronze lantern. The door opened almost instantly. Conan stepped inside, snapping:

“Lock the door!”

The massive Shemite who had admitted the Cimmerian shot home the heavy bolt and turned, tugging his curled blue-black beard as he inspected his commander.

“Your shirt is gashed, Conan!” he rumbled.

“A man tried to knife me,” answered Conan. “Others followed.”

The Shemite’s black eyes blazed as he laid a broad, hairy hand on the three-foot Ilbarsi knife that jutted from his hip. “Let us sally forth and slay the dogs!” he urged.

Conan shook his head. He was a huge man, much taller than the Shemite, but for all his size he moved with the lightness of a cat. His thick chest, corded neck, and square shoulders spoke of primordial strength, speed, and endurance.

“Other things come first,” he said. “They’re enemies of Balash, who knew I quarreled with the king tonight”

“You did!” cried the Shemite. “This is dark news indeed. What said the king?”

Conan picked up a flagon of wine and gulped down half of it. “Oh, Kobad Shah is mad with suspicion,” he said. “Now it’s our friend Balash. The chief’s enemies have poisoned the king against him; but then, Balash is stubborn. He won’t come in and surrender as Kobad demands, saying Kobad means to stick his head on a pike. So Kobad ordered me to take the kozaki into the Ilbars Mountains and bring back Balash all of him if possible, but his head in any case.”

“And?”

“I refused.”

“You did?” said the Shemite in an awed whisper.

“Of course! What do you think I am? I told Kobad Shah how Balash and his tribe saved us when we got lost in the Ilbars in the middle of winter, on our ride south from the Vilayet Sea. Most hillmen would have wiped us out. But the fool wouldn’t listen. He began shouting about his divine right and the insolence of low-born barbarians and such stuff. One more word and I’d have stuffed his imperial turban down his throat.”

“You did not strike the king?” said the Shemite.

“Nay, though I felt like it. Crom! I can’t understand the way you civilized men crawl on your bellies before any copper-riveted ass who happens to sit on a jeweled chair with a bauble on his head.”

“Because these asses can have us flayed or impaled at a nod. Now, we must flee from Iranistan to escape the king’s wrath.”

Conan flnished the wine and smacked his lips. “I think not; he’ll get over it. He knows his army is not what it was in his grandsire’s time, and we’re the only light horse he can count on. But that still leaves our friend Balash. I’m tempted to ride north to warn him.”

“Alone, Conan?”

“Why not? You can give it out that I’m sleeping off a debauch for a few days until “

A light knock on the door made Conan cut off his sentence. He glanced at the Shemite, stepped to the door, and growled:

“Who’s there?”

“It is I, Nanaia,” said a woman’s voice.

Conan stared at his companion. “Do you know any Nanaia, Tubal?”

“Not I. It must be some trick.”

“Let me in,” said the voice.

“We shall see,” muttered Conan, his eyes blazing a volcanic blue in the lamplight. He drew his scimitar and laid a hand on the bolt, while Tubal, knife drawn, took his place on the other side of the door.

Conan snapped the bolt and whipped open the door. A veiled figure stepped across the threshold, then gave a little shriek and shrank back at the sight of the gleaming blades poised on muscular arms.

Conan’s blade darted out so that its tip touched the back of the visitor. “Enter, my lady,” he rumbled in barbarously accented Iranistani.

The woman stepped forward. Conan slammed the door and shot home the bolt. “Is anybody with you?”

“N-nay, I came alone …”

Conan’s left arm shot out with the speed of a serpent’s strike and ripped the veil from the woman’s face. She was tall, lithe, young, and dark, with black hair and finely-chiseled features.

“Now, Nanaia, what is this all about?” he said.

“I am a girl from the king’s seraglio “

Tubal gave a long whistle. “Now we are in for it”

“Go on, Nanaia,” said Conan.

“Well, I have often seen you through the lattice behind the throne, when you were closeted with Kobad. It is the king’s pleasure to let his women watch him at his royal business. We are supposed to be shut out of this gallery when weighty matters are discussed, but tonight Xathrita the eunuch was drunk and failed to lock the door between the gallery and the women’s apartments. I stole back and heard your bitter speech with the king.

“When you had gone, Kobad was very angry. He called in Hakhamani the informer and bade him quietly murder you. Hakhamani was to make it look like an accident.”

“If I catch Hakhamani, I’ll make him look like an accident,” gritted Conan. “But why all this delicacy? Kobad is no more backward than most kings about shortening or lengthening the necks of people he likes not”

“Because the king wants to keep the services of your kozaki, and if they knew he had slain you they would revolt or ride away.”

“And why did you bring me this news?”

She looked at him from large dark melting eyes. “I perish in the harem from boredom. With hundreds of women, the king has no time for me. I have admired you through the screen ever since you took service here and hope you will take me with you. Anything is better than the suffocating monotony of this gilded prison, with its everlasting gossip and intrigue. I am the daughter of Kujala, chief of the Gwadiri. We are a tribe of fishermen and mariners, far to the south among the Islands of Pearl. I have steered my own ship through a typhoon, and such indolence drives me mad.”

“How did you get out of the palace?”

“A rope and an unguarded old window with the bars broken away … But that is not important. Will you take me?”

“Send her back,” said Tubal in the lingua franca of the kozaki: a mixture of Zaporoskan, Hyrkanian, and other tongues. “Or better yet, cut her throat and bury her in the garden. He might let us go unharmed, but he’d never let us get away with the wench. Let him find that you have ran off with one of his concubines and he’ll overturn every stone in Iranistan to find you.”

The girl evidently did not understand the words but quailed at the menace of the tone.

Conan grinned wolfishly. “On the contrary. The thought of slinking out of the country with my tail between my legs makes my guts ache. But if I can take something like this along for a trophy well, so long as we must leave anyway …” He turned to Nanaia. “You understand that the pace will be fast, the going rough, and the company not so polite as you’re used to?”

“I understand.”

“And furthermore,” he said with narrowed eyes, “that I command absolutely?”

“Aye.”

“Good. Wake the dog-brothers, Tubal; we ride as soon as they can stow their gear and saddle up.”

Muttering his forebodings, the Shemite strode into an inner chamber and shook a man sleeping on a heap of carpets. “Awaken, son of a long line of thieves. We ride northward.”

Hattusas, a slight, dark Zamorian, sat up yawning. “Whither?”

“To Kushaf in the Ilbars Mountains, where we wintered, and where the rebel dog Balash will doubtless cut all our throats,” growled Tubal.

Hattusas grinned as he rose. “You have no love for the Kushafi, but he is Oman’s sworn friend.”

Tubal scowled as he stalked out into the courtyard and through the door that led to the adjacent barrack. Groans and curses came from the barrack as the men were shaken awake.

Two hours later, the shadowy figures that lurked about Conan’s house shrank back into the shadows as the gate of the stable yard swung open and the three hundred Free Companions clattered out in double file, leading pack mules and spare horses. They were men of all nations, the remnants of the band of kozaki whom Conan had led south from the steppes around the Vilayet Sea when King Yezdigerd of Turan had gathered a mighty army and broken the outlaw confederacy in an all-day battle. They had arrived in Anshan ragged and half-starved. Now they were gaudy in silken pantaloons and spired helmets of Iranistani pattern, and loaded down with weapons.

Meanwhile in the palace, the king of Iranistan brooded on his throne. Suspicion had eaten into his troubled soul until he saw enemies everywhere, within and without For a time he had counted on the support of Conan, the leader of the squadron of mercenary light horse. The northern savage might lack the suave manners of the cultivated Iranistani court, but he did seem to have his own barbarian code of honor. Now, however, he had flatly refused to carry out Kobad Shah’s order to seize the traitor Balash …

The king glanced at the curtain masking an alcove, absently reflecting that the wind must be rising, since the tapestry swayed a little. His eyes swept the gold-barred window and he went cold. The light curtains there hung motionless. Yet the hangings over the alcove had stirred …

Though short and fat, Kobad Shah did not lack personal courage. As he sprang, seized the tapestries, and tore them apart, a dagger in a dark hand licked from between them and smote him full in the breast. He cried out as he went down, dragging his assailant with him. The man snarled like a wild beast, his dilated eyes glaring madly. His dagger ribboned the king’s robe, revealing the mail shirt that stopped his first thrust.

Outside, a deep shout echoed the king’s shrill yells for help. Booted feet pounded in the corridor. The king had grasped his attacker by throat and knife wrist, but the man’s stringy muscles were like knotted steel cords. As they rolled on the floor, the dagger, glancing from the links of the mail shirt, fleshed itself in arm, thigh, and hand. Then, as the bravo heaved the weakening ruler under him, grasped his throat, and lifted the knife again, something flashed in the lamplight like a jet of blue lightning. The murderer collapsed, his head split to the teeth.

“Your majesty! Sire!” It was Gotarza, the towering captain of the royal guard, pale under his long black beard. As Kobad Shah sank down on a divan, Gotarza began ripping strips from the hangings to bind his wounds.

“Look!” gasped the king, pointing. His face was livid; his hand shook. “The knife! By Asura, the knife!”

It lay glinting by the dead man’s hand a curious weapon with a wavy blade shaped like a flame. Gotarza started and swore under his breath.

“The flame knife!” panted Kobad Shah. “The same weapon that struck at the King of Vendhya and the King of Turan!”

“The mark of the Hidden Ones,” muttered Gotarza, uneasily eyeing the ominous symbol of the terrible cult.

The noise had roused the palace. Men were running down the corridors, shouting to know what had hap pened.

“Shut the door!” exclaimed the king. “Admit no one but the majordomo of the palace!”

“But we must have a physician, your majesty,” protested the officer. “These wounds will not slay of themselves, but the dagger might have been poisoned.”

“No, fetch no one! Whoever he is, he might be in the service of my foes. Asural The Yezmites have marked me for doom!” The experience had shaken the king’s courage. “Who can fight the dagger in the dark, the serpent underfoot, the poison in the wine cup? There is that western barbarian, Conan but no, not even he is to be trusted, now that he has defied my commands … Let the majordomo in, Gotarza.” When the officer admitted the stout official, the king asked: “What news, Bardiya?”

“Oh, sire, what has happened? It is “

“Never mind what has happened to me. I see by your eyes you have news. What know you?”

“The kozaki have ridden forth from the city with Conan, who told the guard at the North Gate they were on their way to take Balash as you commanded.”

“Good. Perhaps the fellow has repented his insolence. What else?”

“Hakhamani the informer caught Conan on his way home, but Conan slew one of his men and escaped.”

“That is just as well. Call off Hakhamani until we know what Conan intends by this foray. Anything more?”

“One of your women, Nanaia the daughter of Kujala, has fled the palace. We found the rope by which she escaped.”

Kobad Shah gave a roar. “She must have gone with Conan! It is too much to have been pure chance! And he must be connected with the Hidden Ones too! Else why should they strike at me just after I have quarreled with him? He must have gone straight from my presence to send the Yezmite to slay me. Gotarza, turn out the royal guard. Ride after the kozaki and bring me Conan’s head, or your own shall answer for it! Take at least five hundred men, for the barbarian is fierce and crafty and not to be trifled with.”

As Gotarza hurried from the chamber, the king groaned: “Now, Bardiya, fetch a leech. My veins are afire. Gotarza was right; the dagger must have been envenomed.”

Three days after his hurried departure from Anshan, Conan sat cross-legged in the trail where it looped over the rock ridge to follow the slope down to the village of Kushaf.

“I would stand between you and death,” he said to the man who sat opposite him, “as you did for me when your hill wolves would have massacred us.”

The man tugged his purple-stained beard reflectively. He was broad and powerful, with gray-flecked hair and a broad belt bristling with knife and dagger hilts. He was Balash, chief of the Kushafi tribesmen and overlord of Kushaf and its neighboring villages. But he spoke modestly:

“The gods favor you! Yet what man can pass the spot of his death?”

“A man can either fight or flee, and not sit on a rock like an apple in a tree, waiting to be picked. If you want to take a long chance of making your peace with the king, you can go to Anshan “

“I have too many enemies at court In Anshan, the king would listen to their lies and hang me up in an iron cage for the kites to eat. Nay, I will not go!”

“Then take your people and find another abode. There are places in these hills where not even the king could follow you.”

Balash glanced down the rocky slope to the cluster of mud-and-stone towers that rose above the encircling wall. His thin nostrils expanded, and into his eyes came a dark flame like that of an eagle surveying its eyrie.

“Nay, by Asura! My clan has held Kushaf since the days of Bahram. Let the king rule in Anshan; this is mine!”

“The king will likewise rule in Kushaf,” grunted Tubal, squatting behind Conan with Hattusas the Zamorian.

Balash glanced in the other direction where the trail disappeared to the east between jutting crags. On these crags, bits of white cloth were blown out by the wind, which the watchers knew were the garments of archers and javelin men who guarded the pass day and night.

“Let him come,” said Balash. “We hold the passes.”

“He’ll bring ten thousand men, in heavy armor, with catapults and other siege gear,” said Conan. “He’ll burn Kushaf and take your head back to Anshan.”

“That will happen which will happen,” said Balash.

Conan fought down a rising anger at the fatalism of these people. Every instinct of his strenuous nature was a negation of this inert philosophy. But, as they seemed to be deadlocked, he said nothing but sat staring at the western crags where the sun hung, a ball of fire in the sharp, windy blue.

Balash dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand and said: “Conan, there is something I would show you. Down in yonder ruined hut outside the wall lies a dead man, whose like was never seen in Kushaf. Even in death, he is strange and evil. I think he is no natural man at all, but a demon. Come.”

He led the way down the slope to the hovel, explaining: “My warriors came upon him lying at the base of a cliff, as if he had fallen or been thrown from the top. I made them bring him here, but he died on the way, babbling in a strange tongue. They deem him a demon, with good cause.”

“A long day’s journey southward, among mountains so wild and barren not even a goat could dwell among them, lies the country we call Drujistan.”

“Drujistan!” echoed Conan. “Land of demons, eh?”

“Aye! An evil region of black crags and wild gorges, shunned by wise men. It seems uninhabited, yet men dwell there men or devils. Sometimes a man is slain or a child or woman stolen from a lonely trail, and we know it is their work. We have followed and glimpsed shadowy figures moving through the night, but always the trail ends against a blank cliff, through which only a demon could pass. Sometimes we hear drums echoing among the crags, or the roaring of the fiends. It is a sound to turn men’s hearts to ice. The old legends say that among these mountains, thousands of years ago, the ghoul-king Ura built the magical city of Yanaidar, and that the deadly ghosts of Ura and his hideous subjects still haunt the ruins. Another legend tells how, a thousand years ago, a chief of the Ilbarsi hillmen settled in the ruins and began to repair them and make the city his stronghold; but in one night he and his followers vanished, nor were they ever seen again.”

They reached the ruined hut, and Balash pulled open the sagging door. A moment later, the five men were bending over a figure sprawled on the dirt floor.

It was a figure alien and incongruous: that of a stocky man with broad, square, flat features, colored like dark copper, and narrow, slanting eyes an unmistakable son of Khitai. Blood clotted the coarse black hair on the back of his head, and the unnatural position of his body told of shattered bones.

“Has he not the look of an evil spirit?” asked Balash.

“He’s no demon, whether he was a wizard in life or not,” answered Conan. “He’s a Khitan, from a country far to the east of Hyrkania, beyond mountains and deserts and jungles so vast you could lose a dozen Iranistans in them. I rode through that land when I soldiered for the king of Turan. But what this fellow is doing here I cannot say “

Suddenly his blue eyes blazed and he tore the bloodstained tunic away from the squat throat. A stained woolen shirt came into view, and Tubal, looking over Conan’s shoulder, grunted explosively. On the shirt, worked in thread so crimson it might at first glance have been mistaken for a splash of blood, appeared a curious emblem: a human fist grasping a hilt from which jutted a knife with a wavy blade.

“The flame knife!” whispered Balash, recoiling from that symbol of death and destruction.

All looked at Conan, who stared down at the sinister emblem, trying to recapture a vague train of associations it roused dim memories of an ancient and evil cult, which used that symbol. Finally he said to Hattusas:

“When I was a thief in Zamora, I heard rumors of a cult called the Yezmites that used such a symbol. You’re a Zamorian; what know you of this?”

Hattusas shrugged. “There are many cults whose roots go back to the beginnings of time, to the days before the Cataclysm. Often rulers have thought they had stamped them out, and often they have come to life again. The Hidden Ones or Sons of Yezm are one of these, but more I cannot tell you. I meddle not in such matters.”

Conan spoke to Balash: “Can your men guide me to where you found this man?”

“Aye. But it is an evil place, in the Gorge of Ghosts, on the borders of Drujistan, and –”

“Good. Everybody get some sleep. We ride at dawn.”

“To Anshan?” asked Balash.

“No. To Drujistan.”

“Then you think ?”

“I think nothing yet.”

“Will the squadron ride with us?” asked Tubal. “The horses are badly worn.”

“No, let the men and horses rest. You and Hattusas shall go with me, together with one of Balash’s Ktishafis for a guide. Codrus commands in my absence, and if there’s any trouble as a result of my dogs’ laying hands on the Kushafi women, tell him he is to knock their heads in.”

II. The Black Country

Dusk mantled the serrated skyline when Conan’s guide halted. Ahead, the rugged terrain was broken by a deep canyon. Beyond the canyon rose a forbidding array of black crags and frowning cliffs, a wild, haglike chaos of broken black rock.

“There begins Drujistan,” said the Kushafi. “Beyond that gorge, the Gorge of Ghosts, begins the country of horror and death. I go no farther.”

Conan nodded, his eyes picking out a trail that looped down rugged slopes into the canyon. It was a fading trace of the ancient road they had been following for many miles, but it looked as though it had often been used of late.

Conan glanced around. With him were Tubal, Hattusas, the guide and Nanaia the girl. She had insisted on coming because, she said, she feared to be separated from Conan among all these wild foreigners, whose speech she could not understand. She had proved a good traveling companion, tough and uncomplaining, though of volatile and fiery disposition.

The Kushafi said: “The trail is well-traveled, as you see. By it the demons of the black mountains come and go. But men who follow it do not return.”

Tubal jeered. “What need demons with a trail? They fly with wings like bats!”

“When they take the shape of men they walk like men,” said the Kushafi. He pointed to the jutting ledge over which the trail wound. “At the foot of that slope we found the man you called a Khitan. Doubtless his brother demons quarreled with him and cast him down.”

“Doubtless he tripped and fell,” grunted Conan. “Khitans of the desert are unused to climbing, their legs being bowed and weakened by a life in the saddle. Such a one would easily stumble on a narrow trail.”

“If he was a man, perhaps,” said the Kushafi. “But Asura!”

All but Conan jumped, and the Kushafi snatched at his bow, glaring wildly. Out over the crags, from the south, rolled an incredible sound a strident, braying roar, which vibrated among the mountains.

“The voice of the demons!” cried the Kushafi, jerking the rein so that his horse squealed and reared. “In the name of Asura, let us be gone! ‘Tis madness to remain!”

“Go back to your village if you’re afraid,” said Conan. “I’m going on.” In truth, the hint of the supernatural made the Cimmerian’s nape prickle too, but before his followers he did not wish to admit this.

“Without your men? It is madnessl At least send back for your followers.”

Conan’s eyes narrowed like those of a hunting wolf. “Not this time. For scouting and spying, the fewer the better. I think I’ll have a look at this land of demons; I could use a mountain stronghold.” To Nanaia he said: “You had better go back, girl.”

She began to weep. “Do not send me away, Conan! The wild mountaineers will ravish me.”

He glanced down her long, well-muscled figure. “Anyone who tried it would have a task. Well, come on then, and do not say I didn’t warn you.”

The guide wheeled his pony and kicked it into a run, calling back: “Balash will weep for you! There will be woe in Kushaf! Aie! Ahai!”

His lamentations died away amidst the clatter of hoofs on stone as the Kushafi, flogging his pony, topped a ridge and vanished.

“Run, son of a noseless dam!” yelled Tubal. “We’ll brand your devils and drag them to Kushaf by their tails!” But he fell silent the instant the victim was out of hearing.

Conan spoke to Hattusas: “Have you ever heard a sound like that?”

The lithe Zamorian nodded. “Yes, in the mountains of the devil worshipers.”

Conan lifted his reins without comment. He, too, had heard the roar of the ten-foot bronze trumpets that blared over the bare black mountains of forbidden Pathenia, in the hands of shaven-headed priests of Erlik.

Tubal snorted like a rhinoceros. He had not heard those trumpets, and he thrust his horse in ahead of Hattusas so as to be next to Conan as they rode down the steep slopes in the purple dusk. He said roughly: “Now that we have been lured into this country of devils by treacherous Kushafi dogs who will undoubtedly steal back and cut your throat while you sleep, what have you planned?”

It might have been an old hound growling at his master for patting another dog. Conan bent his head and spat to hide a grin. “We’ll camp in the canyon tonight. The horses are too tired for struggling through these gulches in the dark. Tomorrow we shall explore. I think the Hidden Ones have a camp in that country across the gorge. The hills hereabouts are but thinly settled. Kushaf is the nearest village, and it’s a hard day’s ride away. Wandering clans stay out of these parts for fear of the Kushafis, and Balash’s men are too superstitious to explore across the gorge. The Hidden Ones, over there, could come and go without being seen. I know not just what we shall do; our destiny is on the knees of the gods.”

As they came down into the canyon, they saw that the trail led across the rock-strewn floor and into the mouth of a deep, narrow gorge, which debouched into the canyon from the south. The south wall of the canyon was higher than the north and more sheer. It swept up in a sullen rampart of solid black rock, broken at intervals by narrow gorge mouths. Conan rode into the gulch into which the trail wound and followed it to the first bend. He found that this bend was but the first of a succession of kinks. The ravine, running between sheer walls of rock, writhed and twisted like the track of a serpent and was already filled with darkness.

“This is our road tomorrow,” said Conan. His men nodded silently as he led them back to the main canyon, where some light still lingered. The clang of their horses’ hoofs on the flint seemed loud in the sullen silence.

A few score of paces west of the trail ravine, another, narrower gulch opened into the canyon. Its rocky floor showed no sign of any trail, and it narrowed so rapidly that Conan thought it ended in a blind alley.

Halfway between these ravine mouths, near the north wall, a tiny spring bubbled up in a natural basin of age-hollowed rock. Behind it, in a cavelike niche in the cliff, dry wiry grass grew sparsely. There they tethered the weary horses. They camped at the spring, eating dried meat and not risking a fire, which might be seen by hostile eyes.

Conan divided his party into two watches. Tubal he placed on guard west of the camp, near the mouth of the narrower ravine, while Hattusas had his station close to the mouth of the eastern ravine. Any hostile band coming up or down the canyon, or entering it from either ravine, would have to pass these vigilant sentries.

Darkness came swiftly in the canyon, seeming to flow in waves down the black slopes and ooze out of the mouths of the ravines. Stars blinked out, cold, white, and impersonal. Above the invaders brooded the great dusky bulks of the broken mountains. Conan fell asleep wondering idly what grim spectacles they had witnessed since the beginning of time.

The razor-keen perceptions of the barbarian had never been dulled by Conan’s years of contact with civilization. As Tubal approached him to lay a hand on his shoulder, Conan awoke and rose to a crouch, sword in hand, before the Shemite even had a chance to touch him.

“What is it?” muttered Conan.

Tubal squatted beside him, gigantic shoulders bulking dimly in the gloom. Back in the shadow of the cliffs, the unseen horses moved restlessly. Conan knew that peril was in the air even before Tubal spoke:

“Hattusas is slain and the girl is gone! Death is creeping upon as in the dark!”

“What?”

“Hattusas lies near the mouth of the ravine with his throat cut. I heard the sound of a rolling pebble from the mouth of the eastern ravine and stole thither without rousing you, and lo, there lay Hattusas in his blood. He must have died silently and suddenly. I saw no one and heard no further sound in the ravine. Then I hastened back to you and found Nanaia gone. The devils of the hills have slain one and snatched away the other without a sound. I sense that Death still skulks here. This is indeed the Gorge of Ghosts!”

Conan crouched silently on one knee, straining eyes and ears into the darkness. That the keen-sensed Zamoran should have died and Nanaia been spirited away without the sound of a struggle smacked of the diabolical.

“Who can fight devils, Conan? Let us mount and ride “

“Listen!”

Somewhere a bare foot scuffed the rock floor, Conan rose, peering into the gloom. Men were moving out there in the darkness. Shadows detached themselves from the black background and slunk forward. Conan drew a dagger with his left hand. Tubal crouched beside him, gripping his Ilbarsi knife, silent and deadly as a wolf at bay.

The dim-seen line moved in slowly, widening as it came. Conan and the Shemite fell back a few paces to have the rock wall at their backs and keep themselves from being surrounded.

The rush came suddenly, bare feet slapping softly over the rocky floor, steel glinting dully in the dim starlight. Conan could make out but few details of their assailants only the bulks of them, and the shimmer of steel. He struck and parried by instinct and feel as much as by sight.

He killed the first man to come within sword reach. Tubal sounded a deep yell at the discovery that his foes were human after all and exploded in a burst of berserk ferocity. The sweep of his heavy, three-foot knife was devastating. Side by side, with the wall at their backs, the two companions were safe from attack on rear or flank.

Steel rang sharp on steel and blue sparks flew. There rose the ugly butcher-shop sound of blades cleaving flesh and bone. Men screamed or gasped death gurgles from severed throats. For a few moments a huddled knot writhed and milled near the rock wall. The work was too swift and blind and desperate to allow consecutive thought. But the advantage lay with the men at bay. They could see as well as their attackers; man for man they were stronger; and they knew that when they struck their steel would flesh itself only in hostile bodies. The others were handicapped by their numbers; for, the knowledge that they might kill a companion with a blind stroke must have tempered their frenzy.

Conan ducked a sword before he realized he had seen it swinging. His return stroke grated against mail; instead of hacking through it he slashed at an unprotected thigh and brought the man down. As he engaged the next man, the fallen one dragged himself forward and drove a knife at Conan’s body, but Conan’s own mail stopped it, and the dagger in Conan’s left hand found the man’s throat. Men spurted their blood on him as they died.

Then the rush ebbed. The attackers melted away like phantoms into the darkness, which was becoming less absolute. The eastern rim of the canyon was lined with a faint silvery fire that marked the moonrise.

Tubal gave tongue like a wolf and charged after the retreating figures, the foam of blood lust flecking his beard. He stumbled over a corpse and stabbed savagely downward before he realized it was a dead man. Then Conan grabbed his arm. He almost dragged the mighty Cimmerian off his feet as he plunged and snorted like a lassoed bull.

“Wait, fool!” snarled Conan. “Do you want to ran into a trap?”

Tubal subsided to a wolfish wariness. Together they glided after the vague figures, which disappeared into the mouth of the eastern ravine. There the pursuers halted, peering warily into the black depths. Somewhere far down it, a dislodged pebble rattled on the stone. Conan tensed like a suspicious panther.

“The dogs still flee,” muttered Tubal. “Shall we follow?”

Conan shook his head. With Nanaia a captive, he could not afford to throw his life away by a mad rush into the well of blackness, where ambushes might make any step a march of death. They fell back to the camp and the frightened horses, which were frantic with the stench of fresh-spilt blood.

“When the moon rises high enough to flood the canyon with light,” said Tubal, “they will shoot us with arrows from the ravine.”

“We must take the chance,” grunted Conan. “Maybe they are poor shots.”

They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence as the moonlight, weird and ghostly, grew in the canyon, and boulder, ledge, and wall took shape. No sound disturbed the brooding quiet. Then, by the waxing light, Conan investigated the four dead men left behind by the attackers. As he peered from face to bearded face, Tubal exclaimed:

“Devil-worshipersl Sabateans!”

“No wonder they could creep like cats,” muttered Conan. In Shem he had learned of the uncanny stealth of the people of that ancient and abominable cult, which worshiped the Golden Peacock in the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea. “What are they doing here? Their homeland is in Shem. Let’s see – Ha!”

Conan opened the man’s robe. There on the linen jerkin that covered the Sabatean’s thick chest appeared the emblem of a hand gripping a flame-shaped dagger. Tubal ripped the tunics from the other three corpses. Each displayed the fist and knife. He said:

“What sort of cult is this of the Hidden Ones, that draws men from Shem and Khitai, thousands of miles asunder?”

“That’s what I mean to find out,” answered Conan. They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence. Then Tubal rose and said:

“What now?”

Conan pointed to dark splotches on the bare rock floor, which the moonlight now made visible. “We can follow that trail.”

Tubal wiped and sheathed his knife, while Conan wound around his waist a coil of thin, strong rope with a three-pointed iron hook at one end. He had found such a rope useful in his days as a thief. The moon had risen higher, drawing a silver thread along the middle of the ravine.

Through the moonlight, they approached the mouth of the ravine. No bowstring twanged; no javelin sighed through the night air; no furtive figures flitted among the shadows. The blood drops speckled the rocky floor; the Sabateans must have carried grim wounds away with them.

They pushed up the ravine, afoot, because Conan believed their foes were also afoot. Besides, the gulch was so narrow and rugged that a horseman would be at a disadvantage in a fight.

At each bend they expected an ambush, but the trail of blood drops led on, and no figures barred their way. The blood spots were not so thick now, but they were enough to mark the way.

Conan quickened his pace, hoping to overtake the Sabateans. Even though the latter had a long start, their wounds and their prisoner would slow them down. He thought Nanaia must still be alive, or they would have come upon her corpse.

The ravine pitched upward, narrowing, then widened, descended, bent, and came out into another canyon running east and west. This was a few hundred feet wide. The bloody trail ran straight across to the sheer south wall and ceased.

Tubal grunted. “The Kushafi dogs spoke truth. The trail stops at a cliff that only a bird could fly over.”

Conan halted, puzzled. They had lost the trace of the ancient road in the Gorge of Ghosts, but this was undoubtedly the way the Sabateans had come. He raised his eyes up the wall, which rose straight for hundreds of feet. Above him, at a height of fifteen feet, jutted a narrow ledge, a mere outcropping a few feet wide and four or five paces long. It seemed to offer no solution, but halfway up to the ledge he saw a dull smear on the rock of the wall.

Uncoiling his rope, Conan whirled the weighted end and sent it soaring upward. The hook bit into the rim of the ledge and held. Conan went up it, clinging to the thin, smooth strand, as swiftly as most men would have climbed a ladder. As he passed the smear on the stone he confirmed his belief that it was dried blood, such as might have been made by a wounded man climbing or being hauled up to the ledge.

Tubal, below, fidgeted and tried to get a better view of the ledge, as if fearing it were peopled with unseen assassins. But the shelf lay bare when Conan pulled himself over the edge.

The first thing he saw was a heavy bronze ring set in the stone above the ledge, out of sight from below. The metal was polished by usage. More blood was smeared along the rim of the ledge. The drops led across the ledge to the sheer wall, which showed much weathering at that point. Conan saw something else: the blurred print of bloody fingers on the rock of the wall. He studied the cracks in the rock, then laid his hand over the bloody hand print and pushed. A section of the wall swung smoothly inward. He was staring into the door of a narrow tunnel, dimly lit by the moon somewhere at the far end.

Wary as a stalking leopard, he stepped into it. At once he heard a startled yelp from Tubal, to whose view it seemed that he had melted into solid rock. Conan emerged head and shoulders to exhort his follower to silence and then continued his investigation.

The tunnel was short; moonlight poured into it from the other end, where it opened into a cleft. The cleft ran straight for a hundred feet and made an abrupt bend, like a knife-cut through solid rock. The door through which he had entered was an irregular slab of rock hung on heavy, oiled bronze hinges. It fitted perfectly into its aperture, its irregular shape making the cracks appear to be merely natural seams in the cliff.

A rope ladder of heavy rawhide was coiled just inside the tunnel mouth. Conan returned to the ledge outside with this, made it fast to the bronze ring, and let it down. While Tubal swung up in a frenzy of impatience, Conan drew up his own rope and coiled it around his waist again.

Tubal swore strange Shemitic oaths as he grasped the mystery of the vanishing trail. He asked: “But why was not the door bolted on the inside?”

“Probably men are coming and going constantly, and a man might be in a hurry to get through from the outside without having to shout to be let in. There was little chance of its being discovered; I should not have found it but for the blood marks.”

Tubal was for plunging instantly into the cleft, but Conan had become wary. He had seen no sign of a sentry but did not think a people so ingenious in hiding the entrance to their country would leave it unguarded.

He hauled up the ladder, coiled it back on its shelf, and closed the door, plunging that end of the tunnel into darkness. Commanding the unwilling Tubal to wait for him, he went down the tunnel and into the cleft.

From the bottom of the cleft, an irregular knife-edge of starlit sky was visible, hundreds of feet overhead. Enough moonlight found its way into the cleft to serve Conan’s catlike eyes.

He had not reached the bend when a scuff of feet beyond it reached him. He had scarcely concealed himself behind a broken outcrop of rock, split away from the side wall, when the sentry came. He came in the leisurely manner of one who performs a perfunctory task, confident of his own security. He was a squat Khitan with a face like a copper mask. He swung along with the wide roll of a horseman, trailing a javelin.

He was passing Conan’s hiding place when some instinct brought him about in a flash, teeth bared in a startled snarl, spear whipping up for a cast or a thrust. Even as he turned, Conan was upon him with the instant uncoiling of steel-spring muscles. As the javelin leaped to a level, the scimitar lashed down. The Khitan dropped like an ox, his round skull split like a ripe melon.

Conan froze to immobility, glaring along the passage. As he heard no sound to indicate the presence of any other guard, he risked a low whistle which brought Tubal headlong into the cleft. The Shemite grunted at the sight of the dead man.

Conan stooped and pushed back the Khitan’s upper lip, showing the canine teeth filed to points. “Another son of Erlik, the Yellow God of Death. There is no telling how many more may be in this defile. We’ll drag him behind these rocks.”

Beyond the bend, the long, deep defile ran empty to the next kink. As they advanced without opposition, Conan became sure that the Khitan was the only sentry in the cleft.

The moonlight in the narrow gash above them was paling into dawn when they came into the open at last. Here the defile broke into a chaos of shattered rock. The single gorge became half a dozen, threading between isolated crags and split-off rocks, as a river splits into separate streams at its delta. Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone stood up like gaunt ghosts in the pale predawn light.

Threading their way among these grim sentinels, the adventurers presently looked out upon a level, rock-strewn floor that stretched three hundred paces to the foot of a cliff. The trail they had followed, grooved by many feet in the weathered stone, crossed the level and twisted a tortuous way up the cliff on ramps cut in the rock. But what lay on top of the cliffs they could not guess. To right and left, the solid wall veered away, flanked by broken pinnacles.

“What now, Conan?” In the gray light, the Shemite looked like a mountain goblin surprised out of his cave by dawn.

“I think we must be close to listen!”

Over the cliffs rolled the blaring reverberation they had heard the night before, but now much nearer: the strident roar of the giant trumpet.

“Have we been seen?” wondered Tubal, fingering his knife.

Conan shrugged. “Whether we have or not, we must see ourselves before we try to climb that cliff. Here!”

He indicated a weathered crag, which rose like a tower among its lesser fellows. The comrades went up it swiftly, keeping its bulk between them and the opposite cliffs. The summit was higher than the cliffs. Then they lay behind a spur of rock, staring through the rosy haze of the rising dawn.

“Pteor!” swore Tubal.

From their vantage point, the opposite cliffs assumed their real nature as one side of a gigantic mesalike block, which rose sheer from the surrounding level, four to five hundred feet high. Its vertical sides seemed unscalable, save where the trail had been cut into the stone. East, north, and west it was girdled by crumbling crags, separated from the plateau by the level canyon floor, which varied in width from three hundred paces to half a mile. On the south, the plateau abutted on a gigantic bare mountain, whose gaunt peaks dominated the surrounding pinnacles.

But the watchers gave but little attention to this topographical formation. Conan had expected, at the end of the bloody trail, to find some sort of rendezvous: a cluster of horsehide tents, a cavern, perhaps even a village of mud and stone nestling on a hillside. Instead, they were looking at a city, whose domes and towers glistened in the rosy dawn like a magical city of sorcerers stolen from some fabled land and set down in this wilderness.

“The city of the demons!” cried Tubal. “It is enchantment and sorcery!” He snapped his fingers to ward off evil spells.

The plateau was oval, about a mile and a half long from north to south and somewhat less than a mile from east to west. The city stood near its southern end, etched against the dark mountain behind it. A large edifice, whose purple dome was shot with gold, gleamed in the dawn. It dominated the flat-topped stone houses and clustering trees.

The Cimmerian blood in Conan’s veins responded to the somber aspect of the scene, the contrast of the gloomy black crags with the masses of green and the sheens of color in the city. The city awoke forebodings of evil. The gleam of its purple, gold-traced dome was somehow sinister. The black, crumbling crags formed a fitting setting for it. It was like a city of ancient, demonic mystery, rising with an evil glitter amidst ruin and decay.

“This must be the stronghold of the Hidden Ones,” muttered Conan. “Who’d have thought to find a city like this in an uninhabited country?”

“Not even we can fight a whole city,” grunted Tubal.

Conan fell silent while he studied the distant view. The city was not so large as it had looked at first glance. It was compact but unwalled; a parapet around the edge of the plateau furnished its defense. The two and three-storey houses stood among surprising groves and gardens surprising because the plateau looked like solid rock without soil for growing things. He reached a decision and said:

“Tubal, go back to our camp in the Gorge of Ghosts. Take the horses and ride to Kushaf. Tell Balash I need all his swords, and bring the kozaki and the Kushafis through the cleft and halt them among these defiles until you get a signal from me, or know I’m dead.”

“Pteor devour Balash! What of you?”

“I go into the city.”

“You are mad!”

“Worry not, my friend. It is the only way I can get Na-naia out alive. Then we can make plans for attacking the city. If I live and am at liberty, I shall meet you here; otherwise, you and Balash follow your own judgment.”

“What do you want with this nest of fiends?”

Conan’s eyes narrowed. “I want a base for empire. We cannot stay in Iranistan nor yet return to Turan. In my hands, who knows what might not be made of this impregnable place? Now get along.”

“Balash loves me not. He’ll spit in my beard, and then I’ll kill him and his dogs will slay me.”

“He’ll do no such thing.”

“He will not come.”

“He would come through Hell if I sent for him.”

“His men will not come; they fear devils.”

“They’ll come when you tell them the devils are but men.”

Tubal tore his beard and voiced his real objection to leaving Conan. “The swine in that city will flay you alive!”

“Nay, I’ll match guile with guile. I shall be a fugitive from the wrath of the king, an outlaw seeking sanctuary.” Tubal abandoned his argument. Grumbling in his beard, the thick-necked Shemite clambered down the crag and vanished into the defile. When he was out of sight, Conan also descended and walked toward the cliffs.

III. The Hidden Ones

Conan reached the foot of the cliffs and began mounting the steep road without having seen any human being. The trail wound interminably up a succession of ramps, with low, massive, cyclopean walls along the outer edges. This was no work of Ilbarsi hillmen; it looked ancient and as strong as the mountain itself.

For the last thirty feet, the ramps gave way to a flight of steep steps cut in the rock. Still no one challenged Conan. He passed through a line of low fortification along the edge of the mesa and came upon seven men squatting over a game.

At the crunch of Conan’s boots on the gravel, the seven sprang to their feet, glaring wildly. They were Zuagirs desert Shemites, lean, hawk-nosed warriors with fluttering kaffias over their heads and the hilts of daggers and scimitars protruding from their sashes. They snatched up the javelins they had laid beside them and poised them to throw.

Conan showed no surprise, halting and eyeing them-tranquilly. The Zuagirs, as uncertain as cornered wildcats, merely glared.

“Conan!” exclaimed the tallest of the Zuagirs, his eyes ablaze with fear and suspicion. “What do you here?”

Conan ran his eyes over them all and replied: “I seek your master.”

This did not seem to reassure them. They muttered among themselves, moving their javelin arms back and forth as if to try for a cast. The tall Zuagir’s voice rose:

“You chatter like crows! This thing is plain: We were gambling and did not see him come. We have failed in our duty. If it is known, there will be punishment. Let us slay him and throw him over the cliff.”

“Aye,” agreed Conan. “Try it. And when your master asks: ‘Where is Conan, who brought me important news?’ say ‘Lo, you did not consult with us about his man, so we slew him to teach you a lesson!’ “

They winced at the irony. One growled: “Spear him; none will know.”

“Nay! If we fail to bring him down with the first cast, he’ll be among us like a wolf among sheep.”

“Seize him and cut his throat!” suggested the youngest of the band. The others scowled so murderously at him that he fell back in confusion.

“Aye, cut my throat,” taunted Conan, hitching the hilt of his scimitar around within easy reach. “One of you might even live to tell of it!”

“Knives are silent,” muttered the youngster. He was rewarded by a javelin butt driven into his belly, which doubled him up gasping. Having vented some of their spleen on their tactless comrade, the Zuagirs grew calmer. The tall one asked Conan: “You are expected?”

“Would I come otherwise? Does the lamb thrust his head unbidden into the lion’s maw?”

“Lamb!” The Zuagir cackled. “More like a gray wolf with blood on his fangs.”

“If there is fresh-spilt blood, it is but that of fools who disobeyed their master. Last night, in the Gorge of Ghosts “

“By Hanuman! Was it you the Sabatean fools fought? They said they had slain a Vendhyan merchant and his servants in the gorge.”

So that was why the sentries were careless! For some reason the Sabateans had lied about the outcome of the battle, and the Watchers of the Road were not expecting pursuit.

“None of you was among them?” said Conan.

“Do we limp? Do we bleed? Do we weep from weariness and wounds? Nay, we have not fought Conan!”

“Then be wise and make not their mistake. Will you take me to him who awaits me, or will you cast dung in his beard by scorning his commands?”

“The gods forbid!” said the tall Zuagir. “No order has been given us concerning you. But if this be a lie, our master shall see to your death, and if be not a lie, then we can have no blame. Give up your weapons and we will take you to him.”

Conan gave up his weapons. Ordinarily he would have fought to the death before letting himself be disarmed, but now he was gambling for large stakes. The leader straightened up the young Zuagir with a kick in the rump, told him to watch the Stair as if his life depended on it; then barked orders at the others.

As they closed around the unarmed Cimmerian, Conan knew their hands itched to thrust a knife into his back. But he had sown the seeds of uncertainty in their primitive minds, so that they dared not strike.

They started along the wide road that led to the city. Conan asked casually: “The Sabateans passed into the city just before dawn?”

“Aye,” was the terse reply.

“They couldn’t march fast,” mused Conan. “They had wounded men to carry, and the girl, their prisoner, to drag.”

One man began: “Why, as to the girl “

The tall leader barked him to silence and turned a baleful gaze on Conan. “Do not answer him. If he mocks us, retort not. A serpent is less crafty. If we converse with him he’ll have us beguiled ere we reach Yanaidar.”

Conan noted the name of the city, confirming the legend Balash had told him. “Why mistrust me?” he demanded. “Have I not come with open hands?”

“Aye!” The Zuagir laughed mirthlessly. “Once I saw you come to the Hyrkanian masters of Khorusun with open hands, but when you closed those hands the streets ran red. Nay, Conan, I know you of old, from the days when you led your outlaws over the steppes of Turan. I cannot match my wits against yours, but I can keep my tongue between my teeth. You shall not snare and blind me with words. I’ll not speak, and if any of my men answer you I will break his head.”

“I thought I knew you,” said Conan. “You are Antar the son of Adi. You were a stout fighter.”

The Zuagir’s scarred face lighted at the praise. Then he recollected himself, scowled, swore at one of his unoffending men, and marched stiffly ahead of the party.

Conan strolled with the air of a man walking amidst an escort of honor, and his bearing affected the warriors. By the time they reached the city they were carrying their javelins on their shoulders instead of poised for a thrust at Conan.

The secret of the plant life became apparent as they neared Yanaidar. Soil, laboriously brought from distant valleys, had been used to fill the many depressions pitting the surface of the plateau. An elaborate system of deep, narrow irrigation-ditches, originating in some natural water supply near the center of the city, threaded the gardens. Sheltered by a ring of peaks, the plateau would present a milder climate than was common in these mountains.

The road ran between large orchards and entered the city proper lines of flat-roofed stone houses fronting each other across the wide, paved main street, each with an expanse of garden behind it. At the far end of the street began a half-mile of ravine-gashed plain separating the city from the mountain that frowned above and behind it. The plateau was like a great shelf jutting out from the massive slope.

Men working in the gardens or loitering along the street stared at the Zuagirs and their captive. Conan saw Iranistanis, Hyrkanians, Shemites, and even a few Vendhyans and black Kushites. But no Ilbarsis; evidently the mixed population had no connection with the native mountaineers.

The street widened into a suk closed on the south side by a broad wall, which enclosed the palatial building with the gorgeous dome.

There was no guard at the massive, bronze-barred, gold-worked gates, only a gay-clad Negro who bowed deeply as he opened the portals. Conan and his escort came into a broad courtyard paved with colored tile, in the midst of which a fountain bubbled and pigeons fluttered. East and west, the court was bounded by inner walls, over which peeped the foliage of more gardens. Conan noticed a slim tower, which rose as high as the dome itself, its lacy tile work gleaming in the sunlight.

The Zuagirs marched across the court until they were halted on the pillared portico of the palace by a guard of thirty Hyrkanians, resplendent in plumed helmets of silvered steel, gilded corselets, rhinoceros-hide shields, and gold-chased scimitars. The hawk-faced captain of the guard conversed briefly with Antar the son of Adi. Conan divined from their manner that no love was lost between the two.

Then the captain, who was addressed as Zahalc, gestured with his slim yellow hand, and Conan was surrounded by a dozen glittering Hyrkanians and marched up the broad marble steps and through the wide arch whose doors stood open. The Zuagirs, looking unhappy, followed.

They passed through wide, dimly-lit halls, from the vaulted and fretted ceilings of which hung smoking bronze censers, while on either hand velvet-curtained alcoves hinted at inner mysteries. Mystery and intangible menace lurked in those dim, gorgeous halls.

Presently they emerged into a broader hallway and approached a double-valved bronze door, flanked by even more gorgeously-clad guardsmen. These stood impassively as statues while the Hyrkanians strode by with their captive or guest and entered a semi-circular room. Here dragon-worked tapestries covered the walls, hiding all possible apertures except the one by which they had entered. Golden lamps hung from an arched ceiling fretted with gold and ebony.

Opposite the great doorway stood a marble dais. On the dais stood a great canopied chair, scrolled and carved like a throne, and on the velvet cushions which littered the seat sat a slender figure in a, pearl-sewn robe. On the rose-colored turban glistened a great golden brooch in the shape of a hand gripping a wavy-bladed dagger. The face beneath the turban was oval, light-brown, with a small, pointed black beard. Conan guessed the man to be from farther east, Vendhya or Kosala. The dark eyes stared at a piece of carven crystal on a pedestal in front of the man, a piece the size of Conan’s fist, roughly spherical but faceted like a great gem. It glittered with an intensity not accounted for by the lights of the throne room, as if a mystical fire burned in its depths.

On either side of the throne stood a giant Kushite. They were like images carved of black basalt, naked but for sandals and silken loincloths, with broad-tipped tulwars in their hands.

“Who is this?” languidly inquired the man on the throne in Hyrkanian.

“Conan the Cimmerian, my lord!” answered Zahak with a swagger.

The dark eyes quickened with interest, then sharpened with suspicion. “How comes he into Yanaidar unannounced?”

“The Zuagir dogs who watch the Stair say he came to them, swearing that he had been sent for by the Magus of the Sons of Yezm.”

Conan stiffened at that title, his blue eyes fixed with fierce intensity on the oval face. But he did not speak. There was a time for silence as well as for bold speech. His next move depended upon the Magus’ words. They might brand him as an impostor and doom him. But Conan depended on the belief that no ruler would order him slain without trying to learn why he was there, and the fact that few rulers wholly trust their own followers.

After a pause, the man on the throne spoke: “This is the law of Yanaidar: No man may ascend the Stair unless he makes the Sign so the Watchers of the Stair can see. If he does not know the Sign, the Warder of the Gate must be summoned to converse with the stranger before he may mount the Stair. Conan was not announced. The Warder of the Gate was not summoned. Did Conan make the Sign, below the Stair?”

Antar sweated, shot a venomous glance at Conan, and spoke in a voice harsh with apprehension: “The guard in the cleft did not give warning. Conan appeared upon the cliff before we saw him, though we were vigilant as eagles. He is a magician who makes himself invisible at will. We knew he spoke truth when he said you had sent for him, otherwise he could not have known the Secret Way “

Perspiration beaded the Zuagir’s narrow forehead. The man on the throne did not seem to hear his voice. Zahak struck Antar savagely in the mouth with his open hand. “Dog, be silent until the Magus deigns to command your speech!”

Antar reeled, blood starting down his beard, and looked black murder at the Hyrkanian, but said nothing.

The Magus moved his hand languidly, saying: “Take the Zuagirs away. Keep them under guard until further orders. Even if a man is expected, the Watchers should not be surprised. Conan did not know the Sign, yet he climbed the Stair unhindered. If they had been vigilant, not even Conan could have done this. He is no wizard. You may go. I will talk to Conan alone.”

Zahak bowed and led his glittering swordsmen away between the silent files of warriors lined on each side of the door, herding the shivering Zuagirs before them. These turned as they passed and fixed their burning eyes on Conan in a silent glare of hatred.

Zahak pulled the bronze doors shut behind them. The Magus spoke in Iranistani to Conan: “Speak freely. These black men do not understand Iranistani.”

Conan, before replying, kicked a divan up before the dais and settled himself comfortably on it, with his feet propped up on a velvet footstool. The Magus showed no surprise that his visitor should seat himself unbidden. His first words showed that he had had much dealings with Westerners and had, for his own purposes, adopted some of their directness. He said: “I did not send for you.”

“Of course not. But I had to tell those fools something or else slay them all.”

“What do you want here?”

“What does any man want who comes to a nest of outlaws?”

“He might come as a spy.”

Conan gave a rumbling laugh. “For whom?”

“How did you know the Road?”

“I followed the vultures; they always lead me to my goal.”

“They should; you have fed them full often enough. What of the Khitan who watched the cleft?”

“Dead; he wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“The vultures follow you, not you the vultures,” commerited the Magus. “Why sent you no word to me of your coming?”

“By whom? Last night in the Gorge of Ghosts a band of your fools fell upon my party, slew one, and carried another away. The fourth man was frightened and fled, so I came on alone when the moon rose.”

“They were Sabateans, whose duty it is to watch the Gorge of Ghosts. They did not know you sought me. They limped into the city at dawn, with one dying and most of the others wounded, and swore they had slain a rich Vendhyan merchant and his servants in the Gorge of Ghosts. Evidently they feared to admit that they ran away leaving you alive. They shall smart for their lie, but you have not told me why you came here.”

“For refuge. The King of Iranistan and I have fallen out.”

The Magus shrugged. “I know about that. Kobad Shah will not molest you for some time, if ever. He was wounded by one of our agents. However, the squadron he sent after you is still on your trail.”

Conan felt the prickling at his nape that magic aroused in him. “Crom! You keep up to date on your news.”

The Magus gave a tiny nod towards the crystal. “A toy, but not without its uses. However, we have kept our secret well. Therefore, since you knew of Yanaidar and the Road to Yanaidar, you must have been told of it by one of the Brotherhood. Did the Tiger send you?”

Conan recognized the trap. “I know no Tiger,” he answered. “I need not be told secrets; I learn them for myself. I came here because I had to have a hiding place. I’m out of favor at Anshan, and the Turanians would impale me if they caught me.”

The Magus said something in Stygian. Conan, knowing he would not change the language of their conversation without a reason, feigned ignorance.

The Magus spoke to one of the blacks, and that giant drew a silver hammer from his girdle and smote a golden gong hanging by the tapestries. The echoes had scarcely died away when the bronze doors opened long enough to admit a slim man in plain silken robes, who bowed before the dais a Stygian from his shaven head. The Magus addressed him as “Khaza” and questioned him in the tongue he had just tested on Conan. Khaza replied in the same language.

“Do you know this man?” said the Magus.

“Aye, my lord.”

“Have our spies included him in their reports?”

“Aye, my lord. The last dispatch from Anshan bore word of him. On the night that your servant tried to execute the king, this man talked with the king secretly an hour or so before the attack. After leaving the palace hurriedly he fled from the city with his three hundred horsemen and was last seen riding along the road to Kushaf. He was pursued by horsemen from Anshan, but whether these gave up the chase or still seek him I know not.”

“You have my leave to go.”

Khaza bowed and departed, and the Magus meditated for a space. Then he lifted his head and said: “I believe you speak the truth. You fled from Anshan to Kushaf, where no friend of the king would be welcome. Your enmity toward the Turanians is well-known. We need such a man. But I cannot initiate you until the Tiger passes on you. He is not now in Yanaidar but will be here by tomorrow’s dawn. Meanwhile I should like to know how you learned of our society and our city.”

Conan shrugged. “I hear the secrets the wind sings as it blows through the branches of the dry tamarisks, and the tales the men of the caravans whisper about the dung-fires in the serais.”

“Then you know our purpose? Our ambition?”

“I know what you call yourselves.” Conan, groping his way, made his answer purposely ambiguous.

“Do you know what my title means?” asked the Magus.

“Magus of the Sons of Yezm magician-in-chief of the Yezmites. In Turan they say the Yezmites were a pre-Catastrophic race who lived on the shores of the Vilayet Sea and practiced strange rites, with sorcery and cannibalism, before the coming of the Hyrkanians, who destroyed the last remnants of them.”

“So they say,” sneered the Magus. “But their descendants still dwell in the hills of Shem.”

“So I suspected,” said Conan. “I’ve heard tales of them, but until now I scorned them as legends.”

“Aye! The world deems them legends but since the Beginning of Happenings the Fire of Yezm has not been wholly extinguished, though for centuries it smoldered to glowing embers. The Society of the Hidden Ones is the oldest cult of all. It lies behind the worship of Mitra, Ish-tar, and Asura. It recognizes no difference in race or religion. In the ancient past its branches extended all over the world, from Grondar to Valusia. Men of many lands and races belong and have belonged to the society of the Hidden Ones. In the long, long ago the Yezmites were only one branch, though from their race the priests of the cult were chosen.

“After the Catastrophe, the cult reestablished itself. In Stygia, Acheron, Koth, and Zamora were bands of the cult, cloaked in mystery and only half-suspected by the races among which they dwelt. But, as the millennia passed, these groups became isolated and fell apart, each branch going its separate way and each dwindling in strength because of lack of unity.

“In olden days, the Hidden Ones swayed the destinies of empires. They did not lead armies in the field, but they fought by poison and fire and the flame-bladed dagger that bit in the dark. Their scarlet-cloaked emissaries of death went forth to do the bidding of the Magus of the Sons of Yezm, and kings died in Luxur, in Python, in Kuthchemes, in Dagon.

“And I am a descendant of that one who was Magus of Yezm in the days of Tuthamon, he whom all the world feared!” A fanatical gleam lit the dark eyes. “Throughout my youth I dreamed of the former greatness of the cult, into which I was initiated as a child. Wealth that flowed from the mines of my estate made the dream a reality. Virata of Kosala became the Magus of the Sons of Yezm, the first to hold the title in five hundred years.

“The creed of the Hidden ones is broad and deep as the sea, uniting men of opposing sects. Strand by strand I drew together and united the separate branches of the cult: the Zugites, the Jhilites, the Erlikites, the Yezudites. My emissaries traveled the world seeking members of the ancient society and finding them in teeming cities, among barren mountains, in the silence of upland deserts. Slowly, surely, my band has grown, for I have not only united all the various branches of the cult but have also gained new recruits among the bold and desperate spirits of a score of races and sects. All are one before the Fire of Yezm; I have among my followers worshippers of Gullah, Set, and Mitra; of Derketo, Ishtar, and Yun.

“Ten years ago, I came with my followers to this city, then a crumbling mass of ruins, unknown to the hillmen because their superstitious legends made them shun this region. The buildings were crumbled stone, the canals filled with rubble, and the groves grown wild and tangled. It took six years to rebuild it. Most of my fortune went into the labor, for bringing material hither in secret was tedious and dangerous work. We brought it out of Iranistan, over the old caravan route from the South and up an ancient ramp on the western side of the plateau which I have since destroyed. But at last I looked upon forgotten Yanaidar as it was in the days of old. “Look!”

He rose and beckoned. The giant blacks closed in on each side of the Magus as he led the way into an alcove hidden behind a tapestry. They stood in a latticed balcony looking down into a garden enclosed by a fifteen-foot wall. This wall was almost completely masked by thick shrubbery. An exotic fragrance rose from masses of trees, shrubs, and blossoms, and silvery fountains tinkled. Conan saw women moving among the trees, scantily clad in filmy silk and jewel-crusted velvet slim, supple girls, mostly Vendhyan, Iranistani, and Shemite. Men, looking as if they were drugged, lay under the trees on silken cushions. Music wailed melodiously.

“This is the Paradise Garden, such as was used by the Magi of old times,” said Virata, closing the casement and turning back into the throne room. “Those who serve me well are drugged with the juice of the purple lotus. Awakening in this garden with the fairest women of the world to serve them, they think they are in truth in the heaven promised for those who die serving the Magus.” The Kosalan smiled thinly. “I show you this because I will not have you ‘taste Paradise’ like these. You are not such a fool as to be duped so easily. It does no harm for you to know these secrets. If the Tiger does not approve of you, your knowledge will die with you; if he does, you have learned no more than you would in any event as one of the Sons of the Mountain.

“You can rise high in my empire. I shall become as mighty as my ancestor. Six years I prepared; then I began to strike. Within the last four years, my followers have gone forth with poisoned daggers as they went forth in the old days, knowing no law but my will, incorruptible, invincible, seeking death rather than life.”

“And your ultimate ambition?”

“Have you not guessed it?” The Kosalan almost whispered it, his eyes wide and blank with fanaticism.

“Who wouldn’t?” grunted Conan. “But I had rather hear it from you.”

“I shall rule the world! Sitting here in Yanaidar, I shall control its destinies! Kings on their thrones shall be but puppets dancing on my strings. Those who disobey my commands shall die. Soon none will dare disobey. Power will be mine. Power! Yajur! What is greater?”

Conan silently compared the Magus’ boasts of absolute power with the role of the mysterious Tiger who must decide Conan’s fate. Virata’s authority was evidently not supreme after all.

“Where is the girl, Nanaia?” he demanded. “Your Sabateans carried her away after they murdered my lieutenant Hattusas.”

Virata’s expression of surprise was overdone. “I know not to whom you refer. They brought back no captive.”

Conan was sure he was lying but realized it would be useless to press the question further now. He thought of various reasons why Virata should deny knowledge of the girl, all disquieting.

The Magus motioned to the black, who again smote the gong. Again Khaza entered, bowing.

“Khaza will show you to your chamber,” said Virata. “There food and drink will be brought you. You are not a prisoner; no guard will be placed over you. But I must ask you not to leave your chamber unescorted. My men are suspicious of outsiders, and until you are initiated –” He let the sentence trail off into meaningful silence.

IV. Whispering Swords

The impassive stygian led Conan through the bronze doors, past the files of glittering guards, and along a narrow corridor, which branched off from the broad hallway. He conducted Conan into a chamber with a domed ceiling of ivory and sandalwood and one heavy, brass-bound, teakwood door. There were no windows; air and light came through apertures in the dome. The walls were hung with rich tapestries; the floor was hidden by cushion-strewn rugs.

Khaza bowed himself out without a word, shutting the door behind him. Conan seated himself on a velvet divan. This was the most bizarre situation he had found himself in during a life packed with wild and bloody adventures. He brooded over the fate of Nanaia and wondered at his next step.

Sandaled feet padded in the corridor. Khaza entered, followed by a huge Negro bearing viands in golden dishes and a golden jug of wine. Before Khaza close the door, Conan had a glimpse of the spike of a helmet protruding from the tapestries before an alcove on the opposite side of the corridor. Virata had lied when he said no guard would be placed to watch him, which was no more than Conan expected.

“Wine of Kyros, my lord, and food,” said the Stygian. “Presently a maiden beautiful as the dawn shall be sent to entertain you.”

“Good,” grunted Conan.

Khaza motioned the slave to set down the food. He himself tasted each dish and sipped liberally of the wine before bowing himself out. Conan, alert as a trapped wolf, noted that the Stygian tasted the wine last and stumbled a little as he left the chamber. When the door closed behind the men, Conan smelled of the wine. Mingled with the bouquet of the wine, so faint that only his keen barbarian nostrils could have detected it, was an aromatic odor he recognized. It was that of the purple lotus of the sullen swamps of southern Stygia, which induced a deep slumber for a short or a long time depending on the quantity. The taster had to hurry from the room before he was overcome, Conan wondered if Virata meant to convey him to the Paradise Garden after all.

Investigation convinced him that the food had not been tampered with, and he fell to with gusto.

He had scarcely finished the meal, and was staring at the tray hungrily as if in hope of finding something more to eat, when the door opened again. A slim, supple figure slipped in: a girl in golden breastplates, a jewel-crusted girdle, and filmy silk trousers.

“Who are you?” growled Conan.

The girl shrank back, her brown skin paling. “Oh, sire, do not hurt me! I have done nothing!” Her dark eyes were dilated with fear and excitement; her words tumbled over one another, and her fingers fluttered childishly.

“Who said anything about hurting you? I asked who you were.”

“I – I am called Parusati.”

“How did you get here?”

“They stole me, my lord, the Hidden Ones, one night as I walked in my father’s garden in Ayodhya. By secret, devious ways they brought me to this city of devils, to be a slave with the other girls they steal out of Vendhya and Iranistan and other lands.” She hurried on. “I have d-dwelt here for a month. I have almost died of shame! I have been whipped! I have seen other girls die of torture. Oh, what shame for my father, that his daughter should be made a slave of devil worshipers!”

Conan said nothing, but the red glint in his blue eyes was eloquent. Though his own career had been red-spattered with slaying and rapine, towards women he possessed a rough, barbaric code of chivalry. Up till now he had toyed with the idea of actually joining Virata’s curt in hope of working up and making himself master of it, if need be by killing those above him. Now his intentions crystallized on the destruction of this den of snakes and the conversion of their lair to his own uses. Parusati continued:

“Today the Master of the Girls came to send a girl to you to learn if you had any hidden weapon. She was to search you while you lay in drugged stupor. Then, when you awoke, she was to beguile you to learn if you were a spy or a true man. He chose me for the task. I was terrified, and when I found you awake all my resolution melted. Do not slay me!”

Conan grunted. He would not have hurt a hair of her head, but he did not choose to tell her so just yet. Her terror could be useful. “Parusati, do you know anything of a woman who was brought in earlier by a band of Sabateans?”

“Yes, my lord! They brought her here captive to make another pleasure girl like the rest of us. But she is strong, and after they reached the city and delivered her into the hands of the Hyrkanian guards, she broke free, snatched a dagger, and slew the brother of Zahak. Zahak demanded her life, and he is too powerful even for Virata to refuse in this matter.”

“So that’s why the Magus lied about Nanaia,” muttered Conan.

“Aye, my lord. Nanaia lies in a dungeon below the palace, and tomorrow she is to be given to the Hyrkanian for torture and execution.”

Conan’s dark face became sinister. “Lead me tonight to Zahak’s sleeping quarters,” he demanded, his narrowed eyes betraying his deadly intention.

“Nay, he sleeps among his warriors, all proven swordsmen of the steppes, too many even for so mighty a fighter as you. But I can lead you to Nanaia.”

“What of the guard in the corridor?”

“He will not see us, and he will not admit anyone else here until he has seen me depart.”

“Well, then?” Conan rose to his feet like a tiger setting out on its hunt.

Parusati hesitated. “My lord do I read your mind rightly, that you mean, not to join these devils, but to destroy them?”

Conan grinned wolfishly. “You might say accidents have a way of happening to those I like not.”

“Then will you promise not to harm me, and if you can to free rne?”

“If I can. Now let’s not waste more time in chatter. Lead on.”

Parusati drew aside a tapestry on the wall opposite the door and pressed on the arabesqued design. A panel swung inward, revealing a narrow stair that slanted down into lightless depths.

“The masters think their slaves do not know their secrets,” she muttered. “Come.”

She led the way into the stair, closing the panel after them. Conan found himself in darkness that was almost complete, save for a few gleams of light through holes in the panel. They descended until Conan guessed that they were well beneath the palace and then struck a narrow, level tunnel, which ran away from the foot of the stair.

“A Kshatriya who planned to flee Yanaidar showed me this secret way,” she said. “I planned to escape with him. We hid food and weapons here. He was caught and tortured, but died without betraying rne. Here is the sword he hid.” She fumbled in a niche and drew out a blade, which she gave to Conan.

A few moments later they reached an iron-bound door, and Parusati, gesturing for caution, drew Conan to it and showed him a tiny aperture to peer through. He looked down a wide corridor, flanked on one side by a blank wall in which showed a single ebon door, curiously ornate and heavily bolted, and on the other by a row of cells with barred doors. The other end of the corridor was not far distant and was closed by another heavy door. Archaic hanging bronze lamps cast a mellow glow.

Before one of the cell doors stood a resplendent Hyrkanian in glittering corselet and plumed helmet, scimitar in hand. Parusati’s fingers tightened on Conan’s arm.

“Nanaia is in that cell,” she whispered. “Can you slay the Hyrkanian? He is a mighty swordsman.”

With a grim smile, Conan tried the balance of the blade she had given him a long Vendhyan steel, light but well nigh unbrealcable. Conan did not stop to explain that he was master alike of the straight blades of the West and the curved blades of the East, of the double-curved II-barsi knife and the leaf-shaped broadsword of Shem. He opened the secret door.

As he stepped into the corridor, Conan glimpsed the face of Nanaia staring through the bars behind the Hyrkanian. The hinges creaked, and the guard whirled catlike, lips drawn back in a snarl, and then instantly came to the attack.

Conan met him halfway, and the two women witnessed a play of swords that would have burned the blood of kings. The only sounds were the quick soft shuffle and thud of feet, the slither and rasp of steel, and the breathing of the fighters. The long, light blades flickered lethally in the illusive light, like living things, parts of the men who wielded them.

The hairline balance shifted. The Hyrkanian’s lip curled in ferocious recognition of defeat and desperate resolve to take his enemy into death with him. A louder ring of blades, a flash of steel and Conan’s flickering blade seemed to caress his enemy’s neck in passing. Then the Hyrkanian was stretched on the floor, his neck half severed. He had died without a cry.

Conan stood over him for an instant, the sword in his hand stained with a thread of crimson. His tunic had been torn open, and his muscular breast rose and fell easily. Only a film of sweat glistening there and on his brow betrayed the strain of his exertions. He tore a bunch of keys from the dead man’s girdle, and the grate of steel in the lock seemed to awaken Nanaia from a trance.

“Conan! I had given up hope, but you came. What a fight! Would that I could have struck a blow in it!” The tall girl stepped forth lightly and picked up the Hyrkanian’s sword. “What now?”

“We shan’t have a chance if we make a break before dark,” said Conan. “Nanaia, how soon will another guard come to relieve the man I killed?”

“They change the guard every four hours. His watch had just begun.”

Conan turned to Parusati. “What time of day is it? I have not seen the sun since early this morning.”

The Vendhyan girl said: “It is well into the afternoon. Sundown should be within four hours.”

Conan perceived he had been in Yanaidar longer than he had realized. “As soon as it’s dark, we’ll try to get away. We’ll go back to my chamber now. Nanaia shall hide on the secret stair, while Parusati goes out the door and back to the girls’ apartments.”

“But when the guard comes to relieve this one,” said Nanaia, “he’ll see I have escaped. You should leave me here till you’re ready to go, Conan.”

“I dare not risk it; I might not be able to get you out then. When they find you gone, maybe the confusion will help us. We’ll hide this body.”

He turned toward the curiously decorated door, but Parusati gasped: “Not that way, my lord! Would you open the door to Hell?”

“What mean you? What lies beyond that door?”

“I know not. The bodies of executed men and women, and wretches who have been tortured but still live, are carried through this door. What becomes of them I do not know, but I have heard them scream more terribly than they did under torture. The girls say a man-eating demon has his lair beyond that door.”

“That may be,” said Nanaia. “But some hours ago a slave came through here to hurl through that door something which was neither a man nor a woman, though what it was I could not see.”

“It was doubtless an infant,” said Parusati with a shudder.

“I’ll tell you,” said Conan. “We’ll dress this body in your clothes and lay it in the cell, with the face turned away from the door. You’re a big girl, and they will fit him. When the other guard comes, maybe he’ll think it is you, asleep or dead, and start looking for the guard instead of you. The longer before they find you’ve escaped, the more time we shall have.”

Without hesitation, Nanaia slipped out of her jacket, whipped her shirt off over her head, and dropped her trousers while Conan pulled the clothes off the Hyrkanian. Parusati gave a gasp of shock.

“What’s the matter, don’t you know what a naked human being looks like?” snarled Conan. “Help me with this.”

In a few minutes Nanaia was dressed in the Hyrkanian’s garments, all but the helmet and corselet. She dabbed ineffectively at the blood that soaked the upper part of the longsleeved coat while Conan dragged the Hyrkanian, in Nanaia’s clothes, into the cell. He turned the dead man’s face down and toward the wall so that its wisp of beard and mustache should not show and pulled Nanaia’s shirt up over the ghastly wound in the neck. Conan locked the cell-door behind him and handed the keys to Nanaia. He said:

“There’s nothing we can do about the blood on the floor. I have no definite plan for escaping the city yet. If I can’t get away I’ll kill Virata and the rest will be in Crom’s hands. If you two get out and I don’t, try to go back along the trail and meet the Kushafis as they come. I sent Tubal after them at dawn, so he should reach Kushaf after nightfall, and the Kushafis should get to the canyon below the plateau tomorrow morning.”

They returned to the secret door, which, when closed, looked like part of the blank stone wall. They traversed the tunnel and groped their way up the stair.

“Here you must hide until the time comes,” said Conan to Nanaia. “Keep the swords; they’ll do me no good until then. If anything happens to me, open the panel-door and try to get away, with Parusati if she comes for you.”

“As you will, Conan.” Nanaia seated herself cross-legged on the topmost step.

When Conan and Parusati were back in the chamber, Conan said: “Go now; if you stay too long, they may get suspicious. Contrive to return to me here as soon as it is well dark. I think I’m to stay here till this fellow Tiger returns. When you come back, tell the guard the Magus sent you. I’ll attend to him when we are ready to go. And tell them you saw me drink this drugged wine, and that you searched me without finding any arms.”

“Aye, my lord! I will return after dark.” The girl was trembling with fear and excitement as she left.

Conan took up the winejug and smeared just enough wine on his mouth to make a detectable scent. Then he emptied the contents in a nook behind the tapestries and threw himself on his divan as if asleep.

In a few moments the door opened again and a girl entered. Conan did not open his eyes, but he knew it was a girl by the light rustle of her bare feet and the scent of her perfume, just as he knew by the same evidences that it was not Parusati returning. Evidently the Magus did not place too much trust in any one woman. Conan did not believe she had been sent there to slay him poison in the wine would have been enough so he did not risk peering through slitted lids.

That the girl was afraid was evident by the quick tremor of her breathing. Her nostrils all but touched his lips as she sniffed to detect the drugged wine on his breath. Her soft hands stole over him, searching for hidden weapons. Then with a sigh of relief she glided away.

Conan relaxed. It would be hours before he could make any move, so he might as well snatch sleep when he could.

His life and those of the girls depended on his being able to find or make a way out of the city that night. In the meantime, he slept as soundly as if he lay in the house of a friend.

V. The Mask Falls

Conan awoke the instant a hand touched the door to his room, and came to his feet, fully alert, as Khaza entered with a bow. The Stygian said:

“The Magus of the Sons of Yezm desires your presence, my lord. The Tiger has returned.”

So the Tiger had returned sooner than the Magus had expectedl Conan felt a premonitory tenseness as he followed the Stygian out of the chamber. Khaza did not lead him back to the chamber where the Magus had first received him. He was conducted through a winding corridor to a gilded door before which stood a Hyrkanian swordsman. This man opened the door, and Khaza hurried Conan across the threshold. The door closed behind them. Conan halted.

He stood in a broad room without windows but with several doors. Across the chamber, the Magus lounged on a divan with his black slaves behind him. Clustered about him were a dozen armed men of various races: Zuagirs, Hyrkanians, Iranistanis, Shemites, and even a villainous-looking Kothian, the first Hyborian that Conan had seen in Yanaidar.

But the Cimmerian spared these men only the briefest glance. His attention was fixed on the man who dominated the scene. This man stood between him and the Magus’ divan, with the wide-legged stance of a horseman. He was as tall as Conan, though not so massive. His shoulders were broad; his supple figure hard as steel and springy as whalebone. A short black beard failed to hide the aggressive jut of his lean jaw, and grey eyes cold and piercing gleamed under his tall Zaporoskan fur cap. Tight breeches emphasized his leanness. One hand caressed the hilt of his jeweled saber; the other stroked his thin mustache.

Conan knew the game was up. For this was Olgerd Vladislav, a Zaporoskan adventurer, who knew Conan too well to be deceived. He would hardly have forgotten how Conan had forced him out of the leadership of a band of Zuagirs and given him a broken arm as a farewell gift, less than three years previously.

“This man desires to join us,” said Virata.

The man they called the Tiger smiled thinly. “It would be safer to bed with a leopard. I know Conan of old. He’ll worm his way into your band, turn the men against you, and run you through when you least expect it.”

The eyes fixed on the Cimmerian grew murderous. No more than the Tiger’s word was needed to convince his men.

Conan laughed. He had done what he could with guile and subtlety, and now the game was up. He could drop the mask from the untamed soul of the berserk barbarian and plunge into the bright madness of battle without doubts or regrets.

The Magus made a gesture of repudiation. “I defer to your judgment in these matters, Tiger. Do what you will; he is unarmed.”

At the assurance of the helplessness of their prey, wolfish cruelty sharpened the faces of the warriors. Edged steel slid into view. Olgerd said:

“Your end will be interesting. Let us see if you are still as stoical as when you hung on the cross in Khauran. Bind him, men “

As he spoke, the Zaporoskan reached for his saber in a leisurely manner, as if he had forgotten just how dangerous the black-haired barbarian could be, what savage quickness lurked in Conan’s massive thews. Before Ol-gerd could draw his sword, Conan sprang and struck as a panther slashes. The impact of his clenched fist was like that of a sledge hammer. Olgerd went down, blood spurting from his jaw.

Before Conan could snatch the Zaporoskan’s sword, the Kothian was upon him. Only he had realized Conan’s deadly quickness and ferocity, and even he had not been swift enough to save Olgerd. But he kept Conan from securing the saber, for he had to whirl and grapple as the three-foot Ilbarsi knife rose above him. Conan caught the knife wrist as it fell, checking the stroke in mid-air, the iron sinews springing out on his own wrist in the effort. His right hand ripped a dagger from the Kothian’s girdle and sank it to the hilt under his ribs almost with the same motion. The Kothian groaned and sank down dying, and Conan wrenched away the long knife as he crumpled.

All this had happened in a stunning explosion of speed, embracing a mere tick of time. Olgerd was down and the Kothian dying before the others could get into action. When they did, they were met by the yard-long knife in the hand of the most terrible knife fighter of the Hyborian Age.

Even as Conan whirled to meet the rush, the long blade licked out and a Zuagir went down, choking out his life through a severed jugular. A Hyrkanian shrieked, disemboweled. A Stygian overreached with a ferocious dagger lunge and reeled away, clutching the crimson-gushing stump of a wrist.

Conan did not put his back to the wall this time. He sprang into the thick of his foes, wielding his dripping knife murderously. They swirled and milled about him. He was the center of a whirlwind of blades that flickered and lunged and slashed, and yet somehow missed their mark again and again as he shifted his position constantly and so swiftly that he baffled the eye which sought to follow him. Their numbers hindered them; they cut thin air and gashed one another, confused by his speed and demoralized by the wolfish ferocity of his onslaught.

At such deadly close quarters, the long knife was more effective than the scimitars and tulwars. Conan had mastered its every use, whether the downward swing that splits a skull or the upward rip that spills out a man’s entrails.

It was butcher’s work, but Conan made no false motion. He waded through that melee of straining bodies and lashing blades like a typhoon, leaving a red wake behind him.

The melee lasted only a moment. Then the survivors gave back, stunned and appalled by the havoc wrought among them. Conan wheeled and located the Magus against the farther wall between the stolid Kushites. Then, even as his leg-muscles tensed for a leap, a shout brought him around.

A group of Hyrkanian guardsmen appeared at the door opening into the corridor, drawing thick, double-curved bows to the chin, while those in the room scurried out of the way. Conan’s hesitation lasted no longer than an eyeblink, while the archers’ right arms, bulging with taut muscles, drew back their bowstrings. In that flash of consciousness he weighed his chances of reaching the Magus and killing him before he himself died. He knew he would be struck in mid-leap by a half-dozen shafts, driven by the powerful compound bows of the Hyrkanian deserts, which slay at five hundred paces. Their force would tear through his light mail shirt, and their impact alone would be enough to knock him down.

As the commander of the squad of archers opened his mouth to cry “Loose!”, Conan threw himself flat on the floor. He struck just as the archers’ fingers released their bowstrings. The arrows whipped through the air inches above his back, crisscrossing in their flight with a simultaneous whistling screech.

As the archers reached back for the arrows in their quivers, Conan drove his fists, still holding the knife and the dagger, downward with such force that his body flew into the air and landed on its feet again. Before the Hyrkanians would nock their second flight of arrows, Conan was among them. His tigerish rush and darting blades left a trail of writhing figures behind him. Then he was through the milling mob and racing down the corridor. He dodged through rooms and slammed doors behind him, while the uproar in the palace grew. Then he found himself racing down a narrow corridor, which ended in a cul-de-sac with a barred window.

A Himelian hillman sprang from an alcove, raising a pike. Conan came at him like a mountain storm. Daunted by the sight of the bloodstained stranger, the Himelian thrust blindly with his weapon, missed, drew it back for another stab, and screamed as Conan, maddened with battle lust, struck with murderous fury. The hillman’s head jumped from his shoulders on a spurt of crimson and thudded to the floor.

Conan lunged at the window, hacked once at the bars with his knife, then gripped them with both hands and braced his legs. A heaving surge of iron strength, a savage wrench, and the bars came away in his hands with a splintering crash. He plunged through into a latticed balcony overlooking a garden. Behind him, men were storming down the corridor. An arrow swished past him. He dove at the lattice headfirst, the knife extended before him, smashed through the flimsy material without checking his flight, and landed catlike on his feet in the garden below.

The garden was empty but for half a dozen scantily-clad women, who screamed and ran. Conan raced toward the opposite wall, quartering among the low trees to avoid the arrows that rained after him. A backward glance showed the broken lattice crowded with furious faces and arms brandishing weapons. Another shout warned him of peril ahead.

A man was running along the wall, swinging a tulwar.

The fellow, a dark, fleshily-built Vendhyan, had accurately judged the point where the fugitive would reach the wall, but he himself reached that point a few seconds too late. The wall was not higher than a man’s head. Conan caught the coping with one hand and swung himself up almost without checking his speed. An instant later, on his feet on the parapet, he ducked the sweep of the tulwar and drove his knife through the Vendhyan’s huge belly.

The man bellowed like an ox in pain, threw his arms about his slayer in a death grip, and they went over the parapet together. Conan had only time to glimpse the sheer-walled ravine which gaped below them. They struck on its narrow lip, rolled off, and fell fifteen feet to crash to the rocky floor. As they rushed downward, Conan turned in mid-air so that the Vendhyan was under him when they hit, and the fat, limp body cushioned his fall. Even so, it jolted the breath out of him.

VI. The Haunter of the Gulches

Conan staggered to his feet empty-handed. As he glared about, a row of turbaned and helmeted heads bobbed up along the wall. Bows appeared and arrows were nocked.

A glance showed Conan that there was no cover within leaping distance. Because of the steep angle at which the archers were shooting down at him, there was little chance that he could escape by falling flat a second time.

As the first bowstring twanged and the arrow screeched past him to splinter on the rocks, Conan threw himself down beside the body of the Vendhyan he had killed. He thrust an arm under the body and rolled the dripping, still-warm carcass over on top of himself. As he did so, a storm of arrows struck the corpse. Conan, underneath, could feel the impacts as of a gang were pounding the body with sledge hammers. But such was the girth of the Vendhyan that the shafts failed to pierce through to Conan.

“Crom!” Conan exploded as an arrow nicked his calf.

The tattoo of impacts stopped as the Yezmites saw that they were merely feathering the corpse. Conan gathered up the thick hairy wrists of the body. He rolled to one side, so that the corpse fell squashily on to the rock beside him; sprang to his feet, and heaved the corpse up on his back. Now, as he faced away from the wall, the corpse still made a shield. His muscles quivered under the strain, for the Vendhyan weighed more than he did.

He walked away from the wall down the ravine. The Yezmites yelled as they saw their prey escaping and sent another blast of arrows after him, which struck the corpse again.

Conan slipped around the first buttress of rock and dropped the corpse. The face and the front of the body were pierced by more than a dozen arrows.

“If I had a bow, I’d show those dogs a thing or two about shooting!” Conan muttered wratnfully. He peeked around the buttress.

The wall was crowded with heads, but no more arrows came. Instead, Conan recognized Olgerd Vladislav’s fur hat in the middle of the row. Olgerd shouted:

“Do you think you’ve escaped? Ha ha! Go on; you’ll wish you had stayed in Yanaidar with my slayers. Farewell, dead man!”

With a brusque nod to his followers, Olgerd disappeared. The other heads vanished from the wall too. Conan stood alone save for the corpse at his feet.

He frowned as he peered suspiciously about him. He knew that the southern end of the plateau was cut up into a network of ravines. Obviously he was in one that ran out of that network just south of the palace. It was a straight gulch, like a giant knife-cut, ten paces wide, which issued from a maze of gullies straight toward the city, ceasing abruptly at a sheer cliff of solid stone below the garden wall from which he had fallen. This cliff was fifteen feet high and too smooth to be wholly the work of nature.

The side walls at that end of the gulch were sheer, too, showing signs of having been smoothed by tools. Across the rim of the wall at the end and for fifteen feet out on each side ran a strip of iron with short, knife-edged blades slanting down. He had missed them in his fall, but anyone trying to climb over the wall would be cut to ribbons by them. The bottom of the gulch sloped down away from the city so that beyond the ends of the strips on the side walls, these walls were more than twenty feet high. Conan was in a prison, partly natural, partly man-made.

Looking down the ravine, he saw that it widened and broke into a tangle of smaller gulches, separated by ridges of solid stone, beyond and above which he saw the gaunt bulk of the mountain looming. The other end of the ravine was not blocked, but he knew his pursuers would not safeguard one end of his prison so carefully while leaving an avenue of escape open at the other.

Still, it was not his nature to resign himself to whatever fate they had planned for him. They evidently thought they had him safely trapped, but others had thought that before.

He pulled the knife out of the Vendhyan’s carcass, wiped off the blood, and went down the ravine.

A hundred yards from the city wall, he came to the mouths of the smaller ravines, chose one at random, and at once found himself in a nightmarish labyrinth. Channels hollowed in the rock meandered bafflingly through a crumbling waste of stone. For the most part they ran north and south, but they merged, split, and looped chaotically. He was forever coming to the ends of blind alleys; if he climbed the walls to surmount them, it was only to descend into another equally confusing branch of the network.

As he slid down one ridge, his heel crunched something that broke with a dry crack. He had stepped upon the dried rib bones of a headless skeleton. A few yards away lay the skull, crushed and splintered. He began to stumble upon similar grisly relics with appalling frequency. Each skeleton showed broken, disjointed bones and a smashed skull. The elements could not have done that.

Conan went on warily, narrowly eyeing every spur of rock and shadowed recess. In one spot there was a faint smell of garbage, and he saw bits of melon rind and turnip lying about. In one of the few sandy spots, he saw a partly-effaced track. It was not the spoor of a leopard, bear, or tiger, such as he would have expected in this country. It looked more like the print of a bare, misshapen human foot.

Once he came upon a rough out-jut of rock, to which clung strands of coarse gray hair that might have rubbed off against the stone. Here and there, mixed with the taint of garbage, was an unpleasant, rank odor that he could not define. It hung heavily in cavelike recesses where a beast, or man, or demon might curl up to sleep.

Baffled in his efforts to steer a straight course through the stony maze, Conan scrambled up a weathered ridge, which looked to be higher than most. Crouching on its sharp crest, he stared out over the waste. His view was limited except to the north, but the glimpses he had of sheer cliffs rising above the spurs and ridges to east, west, and south made him believe that they formed parts of a continuous wall, which enclosed the tangle of gullies. To the north, this wall was split by the ravine that ran to the outer palace garden.

Presently the nature of the labyrinth became evident. At one time or another, a section of that part of the plateau which lay between the site of the present city and the mountain had sunk, leaving a great bowl-shaped depression, and the surface of the depression had been cut up into gullies by erosion over an immense period of time.

There was no use wandering about the gulches. Conan’s problem was to get to the cliffs that hemmed in the corrugated bowl and skirt them to find if there was any way to surmount them, or any break in them through which water falling on the bowl drained off. To the south he thought he could trace the route of a ravine more continuous than the others, and which ran more or less directly to the base of the mountain whose sheer wall hung over the bowl. He also saw that, to reach this ravine, he would save time by returning to the gulch be-low the city wall and following another of the ravines that led into it, instead of scrambling over a score of knife-edged ridges between him and the gully he wished to reach.

Therefore he climbed down the ridge and retraced his steps. The sun was swinging low as he reentered the mouth of the outer ravine and started toward the gulch that, he believed, would lead him to his goal. He glanced idly toward the cliff at the other end of the wider ravine and stopped dead.

The body of the Vendhyan was gone, though his tulwar still lay on the rocks at the foot of the wall. Several arrows lay about as if they had fallen out of the body when it was moved. A tiny gleam from the rocky floor caught Conan’s eye. He ran to the place and found that it was made by a couple of silver coins.

Conan scooped up the coins and stared at them. Then he glared about with narrowed eyes. The natural explanation would be that the Yezmites had come out somehow to recover the body. But if they had, they would probably have picked up the undamaged arrows and would hardly have left money lying about.

On the other hand, if not the folk of Yanaidar, then who? Conan thought of the broken skeletons and remembered Parusati’s remark about the “door to Hell.” There was every reason to suspect that something inimical to human beings haunted this maze. What if the ornate door in the dungeon led out to this ravine?

A careful search disclosed the door whose existence Conan suspected. The thin cracks that betrayed its presence would have escaped the casual glance. On the side of the ravine, the door looked like the material of the cliff and fitted perfectly. Conan thrust powerfully at it, but it did not yield. He remembered its heavy, metal-bound construction and stout bolts. It would take a battering ram to shake that door. The strength of the door, together with the projecting blades overhead, implied that the Yezmites were taking no chances that the haunter of the gulches might get into their city. On the other hand, there was comfort in the thought that it must be a creature of flesh and blood, not a demon against whom bolts and spikes would be of no avail.

Conan looked down the gully toward the mysterious labyrinth, wondering what skulking horror its mazes hid. The sun had not yet set but was hidden from the bottoms of the gulches. Although vision was still clear, the ravine was full of shadows.

Then Conan became aware of another sound: a muffled drumming, a slow boom boom boom, as if the drummer were striking alternate beats for marching men. There was something odd about the quality of the sound. Conan knew the clacking hollow log-drums of the Kushites, the whirring copper kettledrums of the Hyrkanians, and the thundering infantry drums of the Hyborians, but this did not sound like any of these. He glanced back at Yanaidar, but the sound did not seem to come from the city. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere from beneath his feet as much as anything.

Then the sound ceased.

A mystical blue twilight hovered over the gulches as Conan reentered the labyrinth. Threading among winding channels, he came out into a slightly wider gully, which Conan believed was the one he had seen from the ridge, which ran to the south wall of the bowl. But he had not gone fifty yards when it split on a sharp spur into two narrower gorges. This division had not been visible from the ridge, and Conan did not know which branch to follow.

As he hesitated, peering along his alternative paths, he suddenly stiffened. Down the right-hand ravine, a still narrower gulch opened into it, forming a well of blue shadows. And in that well something moved. Conan tensed rigidly as he stared at the monstrous, manlike thing that stood in the twilight before him.

It was like ghoulish incarnation of a terrible legend, clad in flesh and bone; a giant ape, as tall on its gnarled legs as a gorilla. It was like the monstrous man-apes that hunted the mountains around the Vilayet Sea, which Conan had seen and fought before. But it was even larger; its hair was longer and shaggier, as of an arctic beast, and paler, an ashen grey that was almost white.

Its feet and hands were more manlike than those of a gorilla, the great toes and thumbs being more like those of man than of the anthropoid. It was no tree-dweller but a beast bred on great plains and gaunt mountains. The face was apish in general appearance, though the nose-bridge was more pronounced, the jaw less bestial. But its manlike features merely increased the dreadfulness of its aspect, and the intelligence which gleamed from its small red eyes was wholly malignant.

Conan knew it for what it was: the monster named in myth and legend of the north the snow ape, the desert man of forbidden Pathenia. He had heard rumors of its existence in wild tales drifting down from the lost, bleak plateau country of Loulan. Tribesmen had sworn to the stories of a manlike beast, which had dwelt there since time immemorial, adapted to the famine and bitter chill of the northern uplands.

All this flashed through Conan’s mind as the two stood facing each other in menacing tenseness. Then the rocky walls of the ravine echoed to the ape’s high, penetrating scream as it charged, low-hanging arms swinging wide, yellow fangs bared and dripping.

Conan waited, poised on the balls of his feet, craft and long knife pitted against the strength of the mighty ape.

The monster’s victims had been given to it broken and shattered from torture, or dead. The semi-human spark in its brain, which set it apart from the true beasts, had found a horrible exultation in the death agonies of its prey. This man was only another weak creature to be torn and dismembered, and his skull broken to get at the brain, even though he stood up with a gleaming thing in his hand.

Conan, as he faced that onrushing death, knew his only chance was to keep out of the grip of those huge arms, which could crush him in an instant. The monster was swifter than its clumsy appearance indicated. It hurled itself through the air for the last few feet in a giant grotesque spring. Not until it was looming over him, the great arms closing upon him, did Conan move, and then his action would have shamed a striking leopard.

The talon-like nails only shredded his ragged tunic as he sprang clear, slashing, and a hideous scream ripped echoing through the ridges. The ape’s right hand was half severed at the wrist. The thick mat of pale hair prevented Conan’s slash from altogether severing the member. With blood spouting from the wound, the brute wheeled and rushed again. This time its lunge was too lightning-quick for any human thews to avoid.

Conan evaded the disembowelling sweep of the great misshapen left hand with its thick black nails, but the massive shoulder struck him and knocked him staggering. He was carried to the wall with the lunging brute, but even as he was swept back he drove his knife to the hilt in the great belly and ripped up in desperation in what he thought was his dying stroke.

They crashed together into the wall. The ape’s great arm hooked terrifyingly about Conan’s straining frame. The scream of the beast deafened him as the foaming jaws gaped above his head. Then they snapped in empty air as a great shudder shook the mighty body. A frightful convulsion hurled the Cimmerian clear, and he staggered up to see the ape thrashing in its death throes at the foot of the wall. His desperate upward rip had disembowelled it, and the tearing blade had plowed up through muscle and bone to find the anthropoid’s fierce heart.

Conan’s corded muscles were quivering as if from a long strain. His iron-hard frame had resisted the terrible strength of the ape long enough to let him come alive out of that awful grapple, which would have torn a weaker man to pieces. But the terrific exertion had shaken even him. His tunic had been ripped nearly off his body and some links of the mail-shirt underneath were broken. Those horny-taloned fingers had left bloody marks across his back. He stood panting as if from a long run, smeared with blood, his own and the ape’s.

Conan shuddered, then stood in thought as the red sun impaled itself on a far peak. The pattern was becoming clear now. Broken captives were thrown out to the ape through the door in the city wall. The ape, like those that lived around the Sea of Vilayet, ate flesh as well as fodder. But the irregular supply of captives would not satisfy the enormous appetite of so large and active a beast. Therefore the Yezmites must feed it a regular ration; hence the remains of melons and turnips.

Conan swallowed, aware of thirst. He had rid the ravines of their haunter, but he could still perish of hunger and thirst if he did not find a way out of the depression. There was no doubt a spring or pool somewhere in the waste, where the ape had drunk, but it might take a month to find it.

Dusk masked the gullies and hung over the ridges as Conan moved off down the right-hand ravine. Forty paces further, the left branch rejoined its brother. As he advanced, the walls were more thickly pitted with cavelike lairs, in which the rank scent of the ape hung strongly. It occurred to him that there might be more than one of the creatures, but that was unlikely, because the scream of the first as it charged would have attracted any others.

Then the mountain loomed above him. The ravine he was following shallowed until Conan found himself climbing up a bank of talus until he stood at its apex and could look out over the depression to the city of Yanaidar. He leaned against a smooth vertical cliff on which a fly would hardly be able to find a foothold.

“Crom and Mitra!” he grumbled.

He jounced down the side of the fan of debris and straggled along the base of the cliff to the edge of the bowl. Here the plateau dropped sheerly away below. It was either straight up or straight down; there was no other choice.

He could not be sure of the distance in the gathering darkness, but he judged the bottom to be several times as far down as the length of his rope. To make sure he uncoiled the line from around his waist and dangled the grapnel on its end the full length of the rope. The hook swung freely.

Next, Conan retraced his steps across the base of the cliff and kept on going to the other side of the plateau. Here the walls were not quite so steep. By dangling his rope he ascertained that there was a ledge about thirty feet down, and from where it ran off and ended on the side of the mountain among broken rocks there seemed to be a chance of getting down by arduous climbing and sliding. It would not be a safe route a misstep would send the climber bouncing down the rocky slope for hundreds of paces but he thought a strong girl like Nanaia could make it.

He still, however, had to try to get back into Yanaidar. Nanaia was still hidden in the secret stairway in Virata’s palace if she had not been discovered. There was a chance that, by lurking outside the door to Hell, he could get in when the Yezmite in charge of feeding the ape opened the door to put out food. There was a chance that the men from Kushaf, roused by Tubal, were on their way to Yanaidar.

In any case, Conan could only try. He shrugged a little and turned back toward the city.

VII. Death in the Palace

Conan groped his way back through the gulches until he came into the outer ravine and saw the wall and the cliff at the other end. The lights of Yanaidar glowed in the sky above the wall, and he could catch the weird melody of whining citherns. A woman’s voice was lifted in plaintive song. He smiled grimly in the dark, skeleton-littered gorges around him.

There was no food on the rocks before the door. He had no way of knowing how often the brute had been fed or whether it would be fed at all that night.

He must gamble, as he often had. The thought of what might be happening to Nanaia maddened him with impatience, but he flattened himself against the rock on the side against which the door opened and waited, still as a statue.

An hour later, even his patience was wearing thin when there came a rattle of chains, and the door opened a crack.

Someone was peering out to be sure the grisly guardian of the gorges was not near before opening the door further. More bolts clanged, and a man stepped out with a great copper bowl full of vegetables. As he set it down, he sounded a weird call. And as he bent, Conan struck with his knife. The man dropped, his head rolling off down the ravine.

Conan peered through the open door and saw that the lamplit corridor was empty; the barred cells stood vacant. He dragged the headless body down the ravine and hid it among broken rocks.

Then he returned and entered the corridor, shut the door, and shot the bolts. Knife in hand, he started toward the secret door that opened into the tunnel that led to the hidden stair. If hiding in the secret passage did not prove feasible, he might barricade himself and Nanaia in this corridor and hold it until the Kushafis came if they came.

Conan had not reached the secret door when the creak of a hinge behind him made him whirl. The plain door at the opposite end was opening. Conan sprinted for it as an armed man stepped through.

It was a Hyrkanian like the one Conan had slain earlier. As he sighted Conan rushing upon him, his breath hissed between his teeth and he reached for his scimitar.

With a leap Conan was upon him and drove him back against the closing door with the point of his knife pricking the Hyrkanian’s chest. “Silence!” he hissed.

The guard froze, pallor tinging his yellowish skin. Gingerly he drew his hand away from his sword hilt and spread both arms in token of surrender.

“Are there any other guards?” asked Conan.

“Nay, by Tarim! I am the only one.”

“Where’s the Iranistani girl, Nanaia?” Conan thought he knew where she was but hoped to learn by indirection whether her escape had been discovered and whether she had been recaptured.

“The gods know!” said the guard. “I was with the party of guards who brought the Zuagir dogs to the dungeon and found our comrade in the cell with his neck half sliced through and the wench gone. Such shouting and rushing to and fro in the palace! But I was told off to guard the Zuagirs, so I cannot tell more.”

“Zuagirs?” said Conan.

“Aye, those who wrongly let you up the Stair. For that they will die tomorrow.”

“Where are they now?”

“In the other bank of cells, through yonder door. I have just now come from them.”

“Then turn around and march back through that door. No tricks!”

The man opened the door and stepped through as if he were treading on naked razors. They came into another corridor lined with cells. At Conan’s appearance, there was a hiss of breath from two of these cells. Bearded faces crowded the grilles and lean hands gripped the bars. The seven prisoners glared silently at him with venomous hate in their eyes. Conan dragged his prisoner in front of these cells and said:

“You were faithful minions; why are you locked up?”

Antar the son of Adi spat at him. “Because of you, outland dog! You surprised us on the Stair, and the Magus sentenced us to die even before he learned you were a spy. He said we were either knaves or fools to be caught off guard, so at dawn we die under the knives of Zahak’s slayers, may Hanuman curse him and you!”

“Yet you will attain Paradise,” Conan reminded them, “because you have faithfully served the Magus of the Sons of Yezm.”

“May the dogs gnaw the bones of the Magus of Yezm!” replied one with whole-hearted venom, and another said: “Would that you and the Magus were chained together in Hell!”

“We spit on his Paradise! It is all lies and tricks with drugs!”

Conan reflected that Virata had fallen short of getting the allegiance his ancestors boasted, whose followers gladly slew themselves at command.

He had taken a bunch of keys from the guard and now weighed them thoughtfully in his hand. The eyes of the Zuagirs fixed upon them with the aspect of men in Hell who look upon an open door.

“Antar the son of Adi,” he said, “your hands are stained with the blood of many men, but when I knew you before, you did not violate your sworn oaths. The Magus has abandoned you and cast you from his service. You are no longer his men, you Zuagirs. You owe him nothing.”

Antar’s eyes were those of a wolf. “Could I but send him to Arallu ahead of me, I should die happy!”

All stared tensely at Conan, who said: “Will you swear, each man by the honor of his clan, to follow and serve me until vengeance is accomplished, or death releases you from the vow?” He put the keys behind him so as not to seem to flaunt them too flagrantly before helpless men. “Virata will give you nothing but the death of a dog. I offer you revenge and, at worst, a chance to die with honor.”

Antar’s eyes blazed and his sinewy hands quivered as they gripped the bars. “Trust us!” he said.

“Aye, we swear!” clamored the men behind him. “Harken, Conan, we swear, each by the honor of his clan!”

He was turning the key in the lock before they finished swearing. Wild, cruel, turbulent, and treacherous these desert men might be by civilized standards, but they had their code of honor, and it was close enough to that of Conan’s kin in far-distant Cimmeria so that he understood it.

Tumbling out of the cell they laid hold of the Hyrkanian, shouting: “Slay him! He is one of Zahak’s dogs!”

Conan tore the man from their grasp and dealt the most persistent a buffet that stretched him on the floor, though it did not seem to arouse any particular resentment.

“Have done!” he growled. “This is my man, to do with as I like.” He thrust the cowering Hyrkanian before him down the corridor and back into the other dungeon corridor, followed by the Zuagirs. Having sworn allegiance, they followed blindly without questions. In the other corridor, Conan ordered the Hyrkanian to strip. The man did, shivering in fear of torture.

“Change clothes with him,” was Conan’s next command to Antar. As the fierce Zuagir began to obey, Conan said to another man: “Step through that door at the end of the corridor “

“But the devil-ape!” cried the man addressed. “He’ll tear me to pieces!”

“He’s dead. I slew him with this. Outside the door, behind a rock, you’ll find a dead man. Take his dagger, and also fetch the sword you’ll see lying near there.”

The desert Shemite gave Conan an awed glance and departed. Conan handed his dagger to another Zuagir and the Hyrkanian’s wavy-edged dagger to still another. Others at his direction bound and gagged the guard and thrust him through the secret door, which Conan opened, into the tunnel. Antar stood up in the spired helmet, longsleeved coat, and silken trousers of the Hyrkanian. His features were oriental enough to fool anyone who was expecting to see a Hyrkanian in that garb. Conan meanwhile pulled Antar’s kaffia over his own head, letting it hang well down in front to hide his features.

“Two still unarmed,” said Conan, running his eyes over them. “Follow me.”

He reentered the tunnel, stepped over the body of the bound guardsman, and strode along the tunnel, past the peepholes and into the darker stretch beyond. At the foot of the stair he halted.

“Nanaia!” he called softly. There was no response.

Scowling in the dark, Conan groped his way up the stair. There was no sign of Nanaia, although at the top of the stair, just inside the masked panel, he found the two swords he had left there earlier. Now each of the eight men had a weapon of some sort.

A glance through a peephole in the masked panel showed the chamber where Conan had slept to be empty. Conan opened the panel, a crack at first, then all the way.

“They must have found the girl,” he whispered to Antar. “Where would they take her if not back to the cells?”

“The Magus has girls who have committed faults chastised in his throne room, where he gave you audience this morning.”

“Then lead – What’s that?”

Conan whirled at the sound of the slow drumming that he had heard earlier, in the ravines. Again it seemed to come out of the earth. The Zuagirs looked at one another, paling under their swarthy skins.

“None knows,” said Antar with a visible shudder. “The sound started months ago and since then has become stronger and comes more and more often. The first time, the Magus turned the city upside down looking for the source. When he found none he desisted and ordered that no man should pay heed to the drumming or even speak of it. Gossip says he has been busy of nights in his oratory, striving with spells and divinations to learn the source of the sound, but the gossip does not say he has found anything.”

The sound had ceased while Antar was speaking. Conan said: “Well, lead me to this chamber of chastisement. The rest of you close up and walk as if you owned the place, but quietly. We may fool some of the palace dogs.”

“Through the Paradise Garden would be the best way,” said Antar. “A strong guard of Stygians would be posted before the main door to the throne room at night.”

The corridor outside the chamber was empty. The Zuagirs took the lead. With nightfall, the atmosphere of silence and mystery had thickened over the palace of the Magus. Lights burned more dimly; shadows hung thickly, and no breeze stole in to ruffle the dully shimmering tapestries.

The Zuagirs knew the way well. A ragged-looking gang, with furtive feet and blazing eyes, they stole swiftly along the dim, richly-decorated hallways like a band of midnight thieves. They kept to passages little frequented at that time of night. The party had encountered no one when they came suddenly to a door, gilded and barred, before which stood two giant black Kushites with naked tulwars.

The Kushites silently lifted their tulwars at the sight of the unauthorized invaders; they were mutes. Eager to begin their vengeance, the Zuagirs swarmed over the two blacks, the man with swords engaging them while the others grappled and dragged them down and stabbed them to death in a straining, sweating, swearing knot of convulsing effort. It was butchery, but necessary.

“Keep watch here,” Conan commanded one of the Zuagirs. He threw open the door and strode out into the garden, now empty in the starlight, its blossoms glimmering whitely, its dense trees and shrubbery masses of dusky mystery. The Zuagirs, now armed with the swords of the blacks, swaggered after him.

Conan headed for the balcony, which he knew overhung the garden, cleverly masked by the branches of trees. Three Zuagirs bent their backs for him to stand upon. In an instant he had found the window from which he and Virata had looked. The next instant he was through it, making no more noise than a cat.

Sounds came from beyond the curtain that masked the balcony alcove: a woman sobbing in terror and the voice of Virata.

Peering through the hanging, Conan saw the Magus lolling on the throne under the pearl-sewn canopy. The guards no longer stood like ebon images on either side of him. They were squatting before the dais in the middle of the floor, whetting daggers and heating irons in a glowing brazier. Nanaia was stretched out between them, naked, spread-eagled on the floor with her wrists and ankles lashed to pegs driven into holes in the floor. No one else was in the room, and the bronze doors were closed and bolted.

“Tell me how you escaped from the cell,” commanded Virata.

“No! Never!” She bit her lip in her struggle to keep her self-control.

“Was it Conan?”

“Did you ask for me?” said Conan as he stepped from the alcove, a grim smile on his dark, scarred face.

Virata sprang up with a cry. The Kushites straightened, snarling and reaching for weapons.

Conan sprang forward and drove his knife through the throat of one before he could get his sword clear. The other lunged toward the girl, lifting his scimitar to slay the victim before he died. Conan caught the descending blow on his knife and, with a lightning riposte, drove the knife to the hilt in the man’s midriff. The Kushite’s momentum carried him forward against Conan, who crouched, placed his free hand on the black’s belly, and straightened, raising the Kushite over his head. The Kushite squirmed and groaned. Conan threw him to one side, to fall with a heavy thump and expire.

Conan turned again to the Magus, who, instead of trying to flee, was advancing upon him with a fixed, wide-eyed stare. His eyes developed a peculiar luminous quality, which caught and held Conan’s gaze like a magnet.

Conan, straining forward to reach the wizard with his knife, felt as if he were suddenly laden with chains, or as if he were wading through the slimy swamps of Stygia where the black lotus grows. His muscles stood out like lumps of iron. Sweat beaded his skin as he strained at the invisible bonds.

Virata stalked slowly toward the Cimmerian, hands outspread before him, making little rhythmic gestures with his fingers and never taking his weird gaze from Conan’s eyes. The hands neared Conan’s throat. Conan had a flash of foreboding that, with the help of his arcane arts, this frail-looking man could snap even the Cimmerian’s bullneck like a rotten stick.

Nearer came the spreading hands. Conan strained harder than ever, but the resistance seemed to increase with every inch the Magus advanced toward him.

And then Nanaia screamed a long, high, piercing shriek, as of a soul being flayed in Hell.

The Magus half-turned, and in that instant his eyes left Conan’s. It was as if a ton had been lifted instantly from Conan’s back. Virata snapped his gaze back to Conan, but the Cimmerian knew better than to meet his eyes again. Peering through narrowed lids at the Magus’ chest, Conan made a disembowelling thrust with his knife. The attack met only air as the Kosalan avoided it with a backward bound of superhuman litheness, then turned and ran toward the door, crying:

“Help! Guard! To me!”

Men were yelling and hammering against the door on the far side. Conan waited until the Magus’ fingers were clawing at the bolts. Then he threw the knife so that the point struck Virata in the middle of his back and drove through his body, pinning him to the door like an insect to a board.

VIII. Wolves at Bay

Conan strode to the door and wrenched out his knife, -letting the body of the Magus slip to the floor. Beyond the door the clamor grew, and out in the garden the Zuagirs were bawling to know if he was safe and loudly demanding permission to join him. He shouted to them to wait and hurriedly freed the girl, snatching up a piece of silk from a divan to wrap around her. She clasped his neck with a hysterical sob, crying:

“Oh, Conan, I knew you would come! They told me you were dead, but I knew they could not slay you “

“Save that till later,” he said gruffly. Carrying the Kushites’ swords, he strode back to the balcony and handed Nanaia down through the window to the Zuagirs, then swung down beside her.

“And now, lord?” said the Zuagirs, eager for more desperate work.

“Back the way we came, through the secret passage and out the door to Hell.”

They started at a run across the garden, Conan leading Nanaia by the hand. They had not gone a dozen pades when ahead of them a clang of steel vied with the din in the palace behind them. Lusty curses mingled with the clangor, a door slammed like a clap of thunder, and a figure came headlong through the shrubbery. It was the Zuagir they had left on guard at the gilded door. He was swearing and wringing blood from a slashed forearm.

“Hyrkanian dogs at the door!” he yelled. “Someone saw us kill the Kushites and ran for Zahak. I sworded one in the belly and slammed the door, but they’ll soon have it down!”

“Is there a way out of this garden that does not lead through the palace, Antar?” asked Conan.

“This way!” The Zuagir ran to the north wall, all but hidden in masses of foliage. Across the garden they could hear the gilded door splintering under the onslaught of the nomads of the steppes. Antar slashed and tore at the fronds until he disclosed a cunningly-masked door set in the wall. Conan slipped the hilt of his knife into the chain of the antiquated lock and twisted the heavy weapon by the blade. His muscles knotted: the Zuagirs watched him, breathing heavily, while the clamor behind them grew. With a final heave Conan snapped the chain.

They burst through into another, smaller garden, lit with hanging lanterns, just as the gilded door gave way and a stream of armed figures flooded into the Paradise Garden.

In the midst of the garden into which the fugitives had come stood the tall, slim tower Conan had noticed when he first entered the palace. A latticed balcony extended out a few feet from its second storey. Above the balcony, the tower rose square and slim to a height of over a hundred yards, then widened out into a walled observation platform.

“Is there another way out of here?” asked Conan.

“That door leads into the palace at a place not far from the stair down to the dungeon,” said Antar, pointing.

“Make for it, then!” said Conan, slamming the door behind him and wedging it with a dagger. “That might hold it for a few seconds at least.”

They raced across the garden to the door indicated, but it proved to be closed and bolted from the inside. Conan threw himself against it but failed to shake it.

Vengeful yells reached a crescendo behind them as the dagger-wedged door splintered inward. The aperture was crowded with wild faces and waving arms as Zahak’s men jammed there in their frantic eagerness.

“The tower” roared Conan. “If we can get in there –”

“The Magus often made magics in the upper chamber,” panted a Zuagir running after Conan. “He let none other than the Tiger in that chamber, but men say arms are stored there. Guards sleep below “

“Come on!” bellowed Conan, racing in the lead and dragging Nanaia so that she seemed to fly through the air. The door in the wall gave way altogether, spilling a knot of Hyrkanians into the garden, falling over one another in their haste. From the noise that came from every other direction, it would be only a matter of minutes before men swarmed into the Garden of the Tower from all its apertures.

As Conan neared the tower, the door in the base opened as five bewildered guards came out. They yelped in astonishment as they saw a knot of men rushing upon them with teeth bared and eyes blazing in the light of the hanging lanterns. Even as they reached for their blades, Conan was upon them. Two fell to his whirling blade as the Zuagirs swarmed over the remaining three, slashing and stabbing until the glittering figures lay still in puddles of crimson.

But now the Hyrkanians from the Paradise Garden were racing towards the tower too, their armor flashing and their accouterments jingling. The Zuagirs stormed into the tower. Conan slammed the bronze door and shot home a bolt that would have stopped the charge of an elephant, just as the Hyrkanians piled up against the door on the outside.

Conan and his people rushed up the stairs, eyes and teeth gleaming, all but one who collapsed halfway up from loss of blood. Conan carried him the rest of the way, laid him on the floor, and told Nanaia to bandage the ghastly gash made by the sword of one of the guards they had just killed. Then he took stock of their surroundings. They were in an upper chamber of the tower, with small windows and a door opening out on to the latticed balcony. The light from the lanterns in the garden, coming in little twinkles through the lattice and the windows, shone faintly on racks of arms lining the walls: helms, cuirasses, bucklers, spears, swords, axes, maces, bows, and sheaves of arrows. There were enough arms here to equip a troop, and no doubt there were more in the higher chambers. Virata had made the tower his arsenal and keep as well as his magical oratory.

The Zuagirs chanted gleefully as they snatched bows and quivers from the walls and went out on the balcony. Though several had minor wounds, they began shooting through the holes in the lattice into the yelling mob of soldiery swarming below.

A storm of arrows came back, clattering against the latticework and a few coming through. The men outside shot at random, as they could not see the Zuagirs in the shadow. The mob had surged to the tower from all directions. Zahak was not in sight, but a hundred or so of his Hyrkanians were, and a welter of men of a dozen other races. They swarmed about the garden yelling like fiends.

The lanterns, swinging wildly under the impact of bodies stumbling against the slender trees, lit a mass of twisted faces with white eyeballs rolling madly upward. Blades flickered lightninglike all over the garden. Bowstrings twanged blindly. Bushes and shrubs were shredded underfoot as the mob milled and eddied. Thump! They had obtained a beam and were using it as a ram against the door.

“Get those men with the ram!” barked Conan, bending the stiffest bow he had been able to find in the racks.

The overhang of the balcony kept the besieged from seeing those at the front end of the ram, but as they picked off those in the rear, those in front had to drop the timber because of its weight. Looking around, Conan was astonished to see Nanaia, her sheet of silk wrapped around her waist to make a skirt, shooting with the Zuagirs.

“I thought I told you ” he began, but she only said:

“Curse it, have you nothing I can use as a bracer? The bowstring is cutting my arm to ribbons.”

Conan turned away with a baffled sigh and resumed shooting his own bow. He understood the celerity with which he and his men had been trapped when he heard Olgerd Vladislav’s voice lifted like the slash of a saber above the clamor. The Zaporoskan must have learned of Virata’s death within minutes and taken instant command.

“They bring ladders,” said Antar.

Conan peered into the dark. By the light of the bobbing lanterns he saw three ladders coming towards the tower, each carried by several men. He stepped into the armory and presently came out on the balcony again with a spear.

A pair of men were holding the base of one ladder against the ground while two more raised it by walking toward the tower holding the ladder’s uprights over their heads. The ends of the ladder crunched against the lattice.

“Push it over! Throw it down!” cried the Zuagirs, and one started to thrust his sword through the lattice.

“Back!” snarled Conan. “Let me take care of this.”

He waited until several men had swarmed up the ladder. The top man was a burly fellow with an ax. As he swung the ax to hack away the flimsy wooden latticework, Conan thrust his spear through one of the holes, placed the point against a rung, and pushed. The ladder swayed back. The men on it screamed, dropping their weapons to clutch at the rungs. Down crashed the ladder and its load into the front ranks of the besiegers.

“Come! Here’s another!” cried a Zuagir, and Conan hurried to another side of the balcony to push over a second ladder. The third was only half raised when arrows brought down two of the men raising it, so that it fell back.

“Keep shooting,” growled Conan, laying down his spear and bending the great bow.

The continuous rain of arrows, to which they could make no effective reply, wore down the spirits of the throng below. They broke and scattered for cover, and the Zuagirs whooped with frantic glee and sent long, arching flights of missiles after them.

In a few moments, the garden was empty except for the dead and dying, though Conan could see the movement of men along the surrounding walls and roofs.

Conan reentered the armory and climbed the stair. He passed through several more rooms lined with arms, then came to the magical laboratory of the Magus. He spared only a brief glance at the dusty manuscripts, the strange instruments and diagrams, and climbed the remaining flight to the observation platform.

From here he could take stock of their position. The palace, he now saw, was surrounded by gardens except in front, where there was a wide courtyard. All was enclosed by an outer wall. Lower, inner walls separated the gardens somewhat like the spokes of a wheel, with the high outer wall taking the place of the rim.

The garden in which they were at bay lay on the northwest side of the palace, next to the courtyard, which was separated from it by a wall. Another wall lay between it and the next garden to the west. Both this garden and the Garden of the Tower lay outside the Paradise Garden, which was half-enclosed by the walls of the palace itself.

Over the outer wall that surrounded the whole of the palace grounds, Conan looked down on the roofs of the city. The nearest house was not over thirty paces from the wall. Lights blazed everywhere, in the palace, the gardens, and the adjacent houses.

The noise, the shouts and groans and curses and the clatter of arms, died down to a murmur. Then Olgerd Vladislav’s voice was raised from behind the courtyard wall: “Are you ready to yield, Conan?”

Conan laughed at him. “Come and get us!”

“I shall at dawn,” the Zaporoskan assured him. “You’re as good as dead now.”

“So you said when you left me in the ravine of the devil-ape, but I’m alive and the ape is dead!”

Conan had spoken in Hyrkanian. A shout of anger and unbelief arose from all quarters. Conan continued: “Do the Yezmites know that the Magus is dead, Olgerd?”

“They know that Olgerd Vladislav is the real ruler of Yanaidar, as he has always been! I know not how you slew the ape, nor how you got those Zuagiri dogs out of their cells, but I’ll have your skins hanging on this wall before the sun is an hour high!”

Presently a banging and hammering sounded on the other side of the courtyard, out of sight. Olgerd yelled: “Do you hear that, you Cimmerian swine? My men are building a helepolis a siege tower on wheels, which will stop your shafts and shelter fifty men behind it. At dawn we’ll push it up to the tower and swarm in. That will be your finish, dog!”

“Send your men on in. Tower or no tower, we’ll pick them off just as fast.”

The Zaporoskan replied with a shout of derisive laughter, and thereafter there was no more parleying. Conan considered a sudden break for freedom but abandoned the idea. Men clustered thickly behind every wall around the garden, and such an attempt would be suicide. The fortress had become a prison.

Conan admitted to himself that if the Kushafis did not appear on time, he and his party were finished despite all his strength and speed and ferocity and the help of the Zuagirs.

The hammering went on unseen. Even if the Kushafis came at sunrise, they might be too late. The Yezmites would have to break down a section of the garden wall to get the machine into the garden, but that would not take long.

The Zuagirs did not share their leader’s somber forebodings. They had already wrought a glorious slaughter; they had a strong position, a leader they worshiped, and an unlimited supply of missiles. What more could a warrior desire?

The Zuagir with the sword cut died just as dawn was paling the lanterns in the garden below. Conan stared at his pitiful band. The Zuagirs prowled the balcony, peering through the lattice, while Nanaia slept the sleep of exhaustion on the floor, wrapped in the silken sheet.

The hammering ceased. Presently, in the stillness, Conan heard the creak of massive wheels. He could not yet see the juggernaut the Yezmites had built, but he could make out the black forms of men huddled on the roofs of the houses beyond the outer wall. He looked further, ever the roofs and clustering trees, toward the northern edge of the plateau. He saw no sign of life, in the growing light, among the fortifications that lined the rim of the cliffs. Evidently the guards, undeterred by the fate of Antar and the original sentries, had deserted their posts to join the fighting at the palace. But, as he watched, Conan saw a group of a dozen men trudging along the road that led to the Stair. Olgerd would not long leave that point unguarded.

Conan turned back toward his six Zuagirs, whose bearded faces looked silently at him out of bloodshot eyes.

“The Kushafis have not come,” he said. “Presently Olgerd will send his slayers against us under cover of a great shield on wheels. They will climb up ladders behind this shield and burst in here. We shall slay some of them; then we shall die.”

“As Hanuman has decreed,” they answered. “We shall slay many ere we die.” They grinned like hungry wolves in the dawn and thumbed their weapons.

Conan looked out and saw the storming machine rumbling across the courtyard. It was a massive affair of beams and bronze and iron, on oxcart wheels. At least fifty men could huddle behind it, safe from arrows. It rolled toward the wall and halted. Sledge hammers began to crash against the wall.

The noise awakened Nanaia. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, stared about, and ran to Conan with a cry.

“Hush up. We’ll beat them yet,” he said gruffly, although he thought otherwise. There was nothing he could do for her now but stand before her in the last charge and perhaps spare one last merciful sword stroke for her.

“The wall crumbles,” muttered a lynx-eyed Zuagir, peering through the lattice. “Dust rises under the hammers. Soon we shall see the workmen who swing the sledges.”

Stones toppled out of the weakened wall; then a whole section crashed down. Men ran into the gap, picked up stones, and carried them away. Conan bent the strong Hyrkanian bow he had been using and sent a long arching shot at the gap. It skewered a Yezmite, who fell shrieking and thrashing. Others dragged the wounded man out of the way and continued clearing the passage. Behind them loomed the siege tower, whose crew shouted impatiently to those toiling in the gap to hurry and clear the way. Conan sent shaft after shaft at the crowd. Some bounced from the stones, but now and then one found a human target. When the men flinched at their task, Olgerd’s whiplash voice drove them back to it.

As the sun rose, casting long shadows across the courts, the last remains of the wall in front of the tower were shoveled out of the way. Then, with a mighty creaking and groaning, the tower advanced. The Zuagirs shot at it, but their arrows merely stuck in the hides that covered its front. The tower was of the same height as the storey on which they stood, with ladders going up its rear side. When it reached the tower in the garden, the Yezmites would swarm up, rush across the small platform on top, and burst through the flimsy lattice on to the balcony on which Conan and his men crouched.

“You have fought well,” he told them. “Let us end well by taking as many Yezmite dogs with us as we can. Instead of waiting for them to swarm in here, let us burst the lattice ourselves, charge out on to the platform, and hurl the Yezmites off it. Then we can slay those that climb the ladders as they come up.”

“Their archers will riddle us from the ground,” said Antar.

Conan shrugged, his lip curling in a somber smile. “We can have some fun in the meantime. Send the men to fetch pikes from the armory; for this kind of push, a solid line of spears is useful. And there are some big shields there; let those on the flanks carry these to protect the rest of us.”

A moment later Conan lined up the six surviving Zuagirs with pikes, while he stood in front of them with a massive battle-ax, ready to chop away the lattice and lead the charge on to the platform.

Nearer rolled the tower, the men huddled behind it shouting their triumph.

Then, when the siege tower was hardly a spear’s length from the balcony, it stopped. The long trumpets blared, a great hubbub arose, and presently the men behind the tower began running back through the gap in the wall.

IX. The Fate of Yanaidar

“Crom, Mitra, and Asura!” roared Conan, throwing down his ax. “The dogs can’t be running before they are even hurt!”

He strode back and forth on the balcony, trying to see what was happening, but the bulk of the deserted siege tower blocked his view. Then he dashed into the armory chamber and up the winding stair to the observation platform.

Toward the north, he looked out over the roofs of Yanaidar along the road that stretched out in the white dawn. Half a dozen men were running along that road. Behind them, other figures were swarming through the fortifications at the rim of the plateau. A fierce, deep yelling came to the ears listening in the suddenly silent city. And in the silence Conan again heard the mysterious drumming that had disturbed him on previous occasions. Now, however, he did not care if all the fiends of Hell were dramming under Yanaidar.

“Balash!” he cried.

Again, the negligence of the guards of the Stair had helped him. The Kushafis had climbed the unguarded Stair in time to slaughter the sentries coming to mount guard there. The numbers swarming up on to the plateau were greater than the village of Kushaf could furnish, and he could recognize, even at this distance, the red silken breeches of his own kozaki.

In Yanaidar, frozen amazement gave way to hasty action. Men yelled on the roofs and ran about in the street. From housetop to housetop the news of the invasion spread. Conan was not surprised, a few moments later, to hear Olgerd’s whiplash voice shouting orders.

Soon, men poured into the square from the gardens and court and from the houses around the square. Conan glimpsed Olgerd, far down the street amidst a glittering company of armored Hyrkanians, at the head of which gleamed Zahak’s plumed helmet. After them thronged hundreds of Yezmite warriors, in good order for tribesmen. Evidently Olgerd had taught them the rudiments of civilized warfare.

They swung along as if they meant to march out on to the plain and meet the oncoming horde in battle, but at the end of the street they scattered, taking cover in the gardens and the houses on each side of the street.

The Kushafis were still too far away to see what was going on in the city. By the time they reached a point where they could look down the street, it seemed empty. But Conan, from his vantage point, could see the gardens at the northern end of the town clustered with menacing figures, the roofs loaded with men with double-curved bows strung for action. The Kushafis were marching into a trap, while he stood there helpless. Conan gave a strangled groan.

A Zuagir panted up the stair and stood beside Conan, knotting a rude bandage about a wounded wrist He spoke through his teeth, with which he was tugging at the rag. “Are those your friends? The fools run headlong into the fangs of death.”

“I know,” growled Conan.

“I know what will happen. When I was a palace guardsman, I heard the Tiger tell his officers his plan for defense. See you that orchard at the end of the street, on the east side? Fifty swordsmen hide there. Across the road is a garden we call the Garden of the Stygian. There too, fifty warriors lurk in ambush. The house next to it is full of warriors, and so are the first three houses on the other side of the street.”

“Why tell me? I can see the dogs crouching in the orchard and on the roofs.”

“Aye! Then men in the orchard and the garden will wait until the Ilbarsis have passed beyond them and are between the houses. Then the archers on the roofs will pour arrows down upon them, while the swordsmen close in from all sides. Not a man will escape.”

“Could I but warn them!” muttered Conan. “Come on, we’re going down.”

He leaped down the stairs and called in Antar and the other Zuagirs. “We’re going out to fight.”

“Seven against seven hundred?” said Antar. “I am no craven, but “

In a few words Conan told him what he had seen from the top of the tower. “If, when Olgerd springs his trap, we can take the Yezmites in the rear in turn, we might just be able to turn the tide. We have nothing to lose, for if Olgerd destroys my friends he’ll come back and finish us.”

“But how shall we be known from Olgerd’s dogs?” persisted the Zuagir. “Your reavers will hew us down with the rest and ask questions afterwards.”

“In here,” said Conan. In the armory, he handed out silvered coats of scale mail and bronze helmets of an antique pattern, with tall, horsehair crests, unlike any he had seen in Yanaidar. “Put these on. Keep together and shout ‘Conanl’ as your war-cry, and we shall do all right.” He donned one of the helms himself.

The Zuagirs grumbled at the weight of the armor and complained that they were half blinded by the helmets, whose cheek plates covered most of their faces.

“Put them on!” roared Conan. “This is a stand-up fight, no desert jackal’s slash-and-run raid. Now, wait here until I fetch you.”

He climbed back to the top of the tower. The Free Companions and the Kushafis were marching along the road in compact companies. Then they halted. Balash was too crafty an old wolf to rush headlong into a city he knew nothing about. A few men detached themselves from the mass and ran towards the town to scout. They disappeared behind the houses, then reappeared again, running back towards the main forces. After them came a hundred or so Yezmites, running in ragged formation.

The invaders spread out into a battle line. The sun glinted on sheets of arrows arching between the two groups. A few Yezmites fell, while the rest closed with the Kushafis and the kozaki. There was an instant of dusty confusion through which sparkled the whirl of blades. Then the Yezmites broke and fled back towards the houses. Just as Conan feared, the invaders poured after them, howling like bloodmad demons. Conan knew the hundred had been sent out to draw his men into the trap. Olgerd would never have sent such an inferior force to charge the invaders otherwise.

They converged from both sides into the road. There, though Balash was unable to check their headlong rush, he did at least manage to beat and curse them into a more compact formation as they surged into the end of the street.

Before they reached it, not fifty paces behind the last Yezmites, Conan was racing down the stairs.

“Come on!” he shouted. “Nanaia, bolt the door behind us and stay here!”

Down the stair to the first storey they pelted, out the door, past the deserted siege tower, and through the gap in the wall. Nobody barred their way. Olgerd must have taken from the palace every man who could bear arms.

Antar led them into the palace and out again through the front entrance. As they emerged, the signal for the Yezmite attack was given by a deafening roar of a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of Olgerd’s Hyrkanians. By the time they reached the street, the trap had closed. Conan could see the backs of a mass of Yezmites struggling with the invaders, filling the street from side to side, while archers poured arrows into the mass from the roofs of the houses on either side.

With a silent rush Conan led his little group straight into the rear of the Yezmites. The latter knew nothing until the pikes of the Zuagirs thrust them through the back. As the first victims fell, the desert Shemites wrenched out their spears and thrust again and again, while in the middle of the line Conan whirled his ax, splitting skulls and lopping off arms at the shoulder. As the pikes broke or became jammed in the bodies of the Yezmites, the Zuagirs dropped them and took to their swords.

Such was the mad fury of Conan’s onslaught that he and his little squad had felled thrice their own number before the Yezmites realized they were taken in the rear. As they looked around, the unfamiliar harness and the shambles of mangled bodies made them give back with cries of dismay. To their imaginations the seven madly slashing and chopping attackers seemed like an army.

“Conan! Conan!” howled the Zuagirs.

At the cry, the trapped force roused itself. There were only two men between Conan and his own force. One was thrust through by the kozak facing him. Conan brought his ax down on the other’s helmet so hard that it not only split helm and head but also broke the ax handle.

In an instant of lull, when Conan and the Zuagirs faced the kozaki and nobody was sure of the others’ identity, Conan pushed his helmet back so that his face showed.

“To me!” he bellowed above the clatter. “Smite them, dog-brothers!”

“It is Conan!” cried the nearest Free Companions, and the cry was taken up through the host.

“Ten thousand pieces of gold for the Cimmerian’s head!” came the sharp voice of Olgerd Vladislav.

The clatter of weapons redoubled. So did the chorus of cries, curses, threats, shrieks, and groans. The battle began to break up into hundreds of single combats and fights among small groups. They swirled up and down the street, trampling the dead and wounded; they surged into the houses, smashed furniture, thundered up and down stairs, and erupted on to the roofs, where the Kushafis and kozaki made short work of the archers posted there.

After that, there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating butchery, hand-to-hand, with straining feet splashing through pools of blood. Mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and eddied up and down Yanaidar’s main street and overflowed into the alleys and gardens. There was little difference in the numbers of the rival hordes. The outcome hung in the balance, and no man knew how the general battle was going; each was too busy killing and trying not to be killed to see what was going on around him.

Conan did not waste breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer muscle and ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, there was nothing for him to do but split as many heads and spill as many guts as he could and let the gods of chance decide the issue.

Then, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle began to thin, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals. Conan knew that one side or the other was giving way as men turned their backs on the slaughter. It was the Yezmites who wavered, the madness inspired by the drugs their leaders had given them beginning to die out.

Then Conan saw Olgerd Vladislav. The Zaporoskan’s helmet and cuirass were dented and blood-splashed, his garments shredded, his corded muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of his saber. His gray eyes blazed and his lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead Kushafis lay at his feet and his saber kept half a dozen blades in play at once. Right and left of him corseleted Hyrkanians and slit-eyed Khitans in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with wild Kushafi tribesmen.

Conan also saw Tubal for the first time, plowing through the wrack of battle like a black-bearded buffalo as he glutted his wild-beast fury in stupendous blows. And he saw Balash reeling out of the battle covered with blood. Conan began beating his way through to Olgerd.

Olgerd laughed with a wild gleam in his eyes as he saw the Cimmerian coming toward him. Blood streamed down Conan’s mail and coursed in tiny rivulets down his massive, sun-browned arms. His knife was red to the hilt.

“Come and die, Conan!” shouted Olgerd. Conan came in as a kozak would come, in a blazing whirl of action. Olged sprang to meet him, and they fought as the kozaki fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow.

In a circle about them, the panting, bloodstained warriors ceased their own work of slaughter to stare at the two leaders settling the destiny of Yanaidar.

“Aie!” cried a hundred throats as Conan stumbled, losing contact with the Zaporoskan blade.

Olgerd cried out ringingly and whirled up his sword. Before he could strike, or even realize the Cimmerian had tricked him, the long knife, driven by Conan’s iron muscles, punched through his breastplate and through the heart beneath. He was dead before he struck the ground, tearing the blade out of the wound as he fell.

As Conan straightened to look around, there came a new outcry, somehow different from what he would have expected to hear as his men set upon the broken Yezmites. He looked up and saw a new force of armed men clattering down the street in a solid, disciplined formation crushing and brushing aside the knots of fighters in their way. As they came close, Conan made out the gilded mail and nodding plumes of the Iranistanian royal guard. At their head raged the mighty Gotarza, striking with his great scimitar at Yezmite and kozak alike.

In a twinkling the whole aspect of the battle had changed. Some Yezmites fled. Conan shouted: “To me, kozaki!” and his band began to cluster around him, mixed with the Kushafis and some of the Yezmites. The latter, finding Conan the only active leader against the new common foe, fell in with the men with whom they had just been locked in a death grapple, while along the front between the two masses, swords flashed and more men fell.

Conan found himself facing Gotarza, who swept the field with blows that would have felled small oaks. Conan’s notched blade sang and flashed too fast for the eye to follow, but the Iranistani was not behind him. Blood from a cut on the forehead ran down the side of Gotarza’s face; blood from another flesh wound in Conan’s shoulder crimsoned the front of his mail. But still the blades whirled and clashed, neither finding an opening in the other’s guard.

Then the roar of battle rose in pitch to screams of pure terror. On all sides, men began to leave the fight to run for the road to the Stair. The panic push drove Conan into a corpse-corps with Gotarza. Breast to breast they strained and wrestled. Conan, opening his mouth to shout, found it full of Gotarza’s long black beard. He spat it out and roared:

“What in Hell is going on, you palace-bred lap dog?”

“The real owners of Yanaidar have come back,” shouted Gotarza. “Look, swine!”

Conan risked a glance. From all sides, hordes of slinking gray shadows with unblinking, soulless eyes and misshapen, doglike jaws swarmed, to fasten upon any man they met, wherever a clawed but manlike hand could-find a hold, and begin to tear him apart and devour him on the spot. Men struck at them with the strength of maniacal terror, but their corpselike skins seemed almost impervious to weapons. Where one fell, three others leaped to take its place.

“The ghouls of Yanaidar!” gasped Gotarza. “We must flee. Smite me not in the back till we win clear, and I’ll hold my hand from you. We can settle our own score later.”

The rush of fugitives bowled the two off their feet. Conan felt human feet on his back. With a tremendous effort he forced himself back on his knees and then to his feet, striking out with fists and elbows to clear enough space to breathe.

The rout flowed out northward along the road to the Stair, Yezmites, kozaki, Kushafis, and Iranistanian guards all mixed together but forgetting their three-cornered battle in the face of this subhuman menace. Women and children mingled with the warriors. Along the flanks of the rout swarmed the ghouls, like great gray lice, flowing over any person who became momentarily separated from the rest. Conan, thrust out to the edges of the crowd by the buffeting of the fugitives, came upon Gotarza staggering under the attack of four ghouls. He had lost his sword, but gripped two by the throat, one with each hand, while a third clung to his legs and a fourth circled around, trying to reach his throat with its jaws.

A swipe of Conan’s knife cut one ghoul in half; a second took off the head of another. Gotarza hurled the others from him, and then they swarmed over Conan, ripping and snapping with claws and fangs. For an instant they almost pulled him down. He was dimly aware that Gotarza had pulled one off him, thrown it to the ground, and was stamping on it with a sticklike snapping of ribs. Conan broke his knife on another and crushed the skull of a third with the hilt.

Then he was running on again with the rest. They poured through the gate in the cyclopean wall, down the Stair, down the ramps, and out across the floor of the canyon. The ghouls pursued them as far as the gate, pulling down man after man. As the last fugitives jammed through the gate, the ghouls fell back, scurrying along the road and into the orchards to fall snarling upon the bodies over which little knots of their own kind already snapped and fought.

In the canyon, men collapsed from weariness, lying down upon the rock heedless of the proximity of their late foes or sitting with their backs against boulders and crags. Most were wounded. All were blood-spattered, disheveled, and bloodshot of eye, in ragged garments and hacked and dented armor. Many had lost their weapons. Of the hundreds of warriors who had gathered for the battle in Yanaidar in the dawn, less than half emerged from the city. For a time the only sounds were those of heavy breathing, the groans of the wounded, the ripping of garments as men made them into crude bandages, and the occasional clink of weapons on the rock as they moved about.

Though he had been fighting, running, and climbing most of the time since the previous afternoon, Conan was one of the first on his feet. He yawned and stretched, winced at the sting of his wounds, and stalked about, caring for his own men and gathering them into a compact mass. Of his squad of Zuagirs, he could find only three including Antar. Tubal he found, but not Codrus.

On the other side of the canyon, Balash, sitting with his leg swathed in bandages, ordered his Kushafis in a weak voice. Gotarza collected his guardsmen. The Yezmites, who had suffered the heaviest losses, wandered about like lost sheep, staring fearfully at the other gathering groups.

“I slew Zahak with my own hands,” explained Antar, “so they have no high officer to rally them.”

Conan strode over to where Balash lay. “How are you doing, old wolf?”

“Well enough, though I cannot walk unaided. So the old legends are true after all! Every so often, the ghouls issue from chambers under Yanaidar to devour any men so rash as to have taken up residence there.” He shuddered. “I do not think anybody will soon try to rebuild the city again.”

“Conan!” called Gotarza. “We have things to discuss.”

“I’m ready,” growled Conan. To Tubal he said: “Gather the men into formation, with those least wounded and best armed on the outside.” Then he strode over the rock-littered canyon floor to a point halfway between his group and Gotarza’s. The latter came forward too, saying:

“I still have orders to fetch you and Balash back to An-shan, dead or alive.”

“Try it,” said Conan.

Balash called from his sitting-place: “I am wounded, but if you try to bear me off by force, my people will harry you through the hills till not one lives.”

“A brave threat, but after another battle you would not have enough men,” said Gotarza. “You know the other tribes would take advantage of your weakness to plunder your village and carry off your women. The king rules the Ilbars because the Ilbarsi tribes have never united and never will.”

Balash remained silent for a moment, then said: “Tell me, Gotarza, how did you find whither we had gone?”

“We came to Kushaf last night, and the prickle of a skinning knife persuaded a boy of the village to tell us you had gone into Drujistan and guide us on your trail.

In the light before dawn, we came up to that place where you climb a cliff by a rope ladder, and the fools in their haste did not draw it up after-them. We bound the men you had left to guard your horses and came up after you.

“But now to business. I have nought against either of you, but I have swom an oath by Asura to obey the commands of Kobad Shah, and I will obey them while I can drew breath. On the other hand, it seems a shame to begin a further slaughter when our men are so weary and so many brave warriors have fallen.”

“What had you in mind?” growled Conan.

“I thought you and I might settle the question by single combat. If I fall, you may go your ways, as there will be none to stop you. If you fall, Balash shall return to Anshan with me. You may be able to prove your innocence at that,” Gotarza added to the Kushafi chief. “The king shall know of your part in ending the cult of the Hidden Ones.”

“Not from what I know of Kobad’s mad suspiciousness,” said Balash. “But I’ll agree, as no city-bred Iranistani dog could worst Conan in such a duel.”

“Agreed,” said Conan shortly, and turned back to his men. “Who has the biggest sword?”

He hefted several and chose a long, straight one of Hyborian pattern. Then he faced Gotarza. “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” said Gotarza, and came on with a rush.

The two blades flashed and clanged in a whirl of steel, so fast that the onlookers could not see clearly what was happening. The warriors leaped, circled, advanced, retreated, and ducked decapitating slashes, while the blades continued their din, never stopping for a second. Slash parry thrust cut lunge parry they went. Never in Yanaidar’s thousands of years had those crags looked down upon so magnificent a display of swordsmanship.

“Hold!” cried a voice. Then, as the fight continued: “I said hold!”

Conan and Gotarza backed away from each other warily and turned to see who was shouting.

“Bardiya!” cried Gotarza at the stout majordomo, who stood in the notch of the gully that led to the cliff of the rope ladder. “What do you here?”

“Cease your battle,” said the Iranistani. “I have killed three horses catching up with you. Kobad Shah has died of the poison on the flame knife, and his son Arshak reigns. He has withdrawn all charges against Conan and Balash and urges Balash to resume his loyal protection of the northern frontier and Conan to return to his service. Iranistan will need such warriors, as Yezdigerd of Turan, having dispersed the bands of kozaki, is again sending his armies forth to ravage and subdue his neighbors.”

“If that’s so,” said Conan, “there will be rich pickings on the Turanian steppe again, and I’m tired of the intrigues of your perfumed court.” He turned to his men. “Those who want to return to Anshan may go; the rest ride north with me tomorrow.”

“But what of us?” wailed a plumed Hyrkanian guard from Yanaidar. “The Iranistanis will slay us out of hand. Our city is taken by ghouls, our families are slaughtered, our leaders are slain. What will become of us?”

“Those who like may come with me,” said Conan indifferently. “The others might ask Balash if he’ll accept them. Many of the women of his tribe will be looking for new husbands Crom!”

Conan’s roving eye had lighted on a group of women in which he recognized Parusati. The sight reminded him of something he had forgotten.

“What is it, Conan?” said Tubal.

“I forgot the wench, Nanaia. She’s still in the tower. Now how in Hell am I to get back to rescue her from the ghouls?”

“You needn’t,” said a voice. One of the surviving Zuagirs who had followed Conan pulled off a bronze helmet, revealing Nanaia’s features as her black hair tumbled down her back.

Conan started, then laughed thunderously. “I thought I told you to stay oh, well, it’s just as well you didn’t.” He kissed her loudly and spanked her sharply. “One’s for fighting beside us; the other’s for disobedience. Now ceme along. Rouse yourselves, dog-brothers; will you sit on your fat behinds on these bare rocks until you starve?”

Leading the tall dark girl, he strode into the cleft that led to the road to Kushaf.

15. DRUMS OF TOMBALKU

Eventually, Conan beats his way back to the Hyborian lands. Seeking further employment as a condottiere, he joins a mercenary army that a Zingaran, Prince Zapayo da Kova, is raising for Argos. Argos and Koth are at war with Stygia. The plan is that Koth shall invade Stygia from the north, while the Argossean army enters Stygja from the south by sea. Koth, however, makes a separate peace with Stygia, and the mercenary army is trapped in southern Stygia between two hostile forces. Again, Conan is among the few survivors. Fleeing through the desert with a young Aquilonian soldier, Amalric, he is captured by desert nomads while Amalric escapes.

I.

Three men squatted beside the water hole, beneath a sunset sky that painted the desert umber and red. One was white, and his name was Amalric; the other two were Ghanatas, their tatters scarcely concealing their wiry black frames. Men called them Cobir and Saidu; they looked like vultures as they crouched beside the water hole.

Nearby, a camel noisily ground its cud and a pair of weary horses vainly nuzzled the bare sand. The men cheerlessly munched dried dates. The black men were intent only on the working of their jaws, while the white man occasionally glanced at the dull-red sky or out across the monotonous level, where shadows were gathering and deepening. He was the first to see the horseman who rode up and drew rein with a jerk that set the steed to rearing.

The rider was a giant whose skin, blacker than that of the other two, as well as his thick lips and flaring nostrils, told of a heavy predominance of Negro blood. His wide silk pantaloons, gathered in about his bare ankles, were supported by a broad girdle wrapped repeatedly about his huge belly. That girdle also supported a flaring-tipped scimitar, which few men could have wielded with one hand. With that scimitar, the man was famed wherever the dark-skinned sons of the desert rode. He was Tilutan, the pride of the Ghanata.

Across his saddle a limp shape lay, or rather hung. Breath hissed through the teeth of the Ghanatas as they caught the gleam of pale limbs. It was a white girl who hung face-down across Tilutan’s saddle bow, her loose hair flowing over his stirrup in a rippling black wave.

The black giant grinned with a glint of white teeth as he casually cast his captive into the sand, where she lay laxly, unconscious. Instinctively, Gobir and Saidu turned toward Amalric, while Tilutan watched him from his saddle: three black men against one white. The entrance of a white woman into the scene had wrought a subtle change in the atmosphere.

Amalric was the only one apparently oblivious to the tension. He absently raked back his yellow locks and glanced indifferently at the girl’s limp figure. If there was a momentary gleam in his gray eyes, the others did not catch it.

Tilutan swung down from his saddle, contemptuously tossing the rein to Amalric.

“Tend my horse,” he said. “By Jhil, I did not find a desert antelope, but I did find this little filly. She was reeling through the sands and fell just as I approached. I think she fainted from weariness and thirst. Get away from there, you jackals, and let me give her a drink.”

The big black stretched the girl out beside the water hole and began laving her face and wrists and trickling a few drops between her parched lips. Presently, she moaned and stirred. Cobir and Saidu crouched with their hands on their knees, staring at her over Tilutan’s burly shoulder. Amalric stood a little apart, his interest seeming only casual.

“She is coming to,” announced Gobir.

Saidu said nothing but licked his thick lips.

Amalric’s gaze traveled impersonally over the prostrated form, from the torn sandals to the loose crown of glossy black hair. The girl’s only garment was a silken kirtle, girdled at the waist. It left her arms, her neck, and part of her bosom bare, and the skirt ended several inches above her knees. On the parts revealed, the gaze of the Ghanatas rested with devouring intensity, taking in the soft contours, childish in their white softness, yet rounded with budding womanhood.

Amalric shrugged. “After Tilutan, who?” he carelessly asked.

A pair of lean heads turned toward him; bloodshot eyes rolled at the question. Then the black men turned and stared at each other. Sudden rivalry crackled electrically between them.

“Don’t fight,” urged Amalric. “Cast the dice.” His hand came out from under his worn tunic, and he threw down a pair of dice before them. A clawlike hand seized them.

“Aye!” agreed Gobir. “We cast—after Tilutan, the winner!”

Amalric threw a glance toward the giant black, who still bent above his captive, bringing life back into her exhausted body. As Amalric looked, her long-lashed lids parted. Deep violet eyes stared bewilderedly up into the leering face of the black man. An explosive exclamation of pleasure escaped the thick lips of Tilutan. Wrenching a flask from his girdle, he put it to her mouth. Mechanically, she drank the wine. Amalric avoided her wandering gaze; he was one white man to three blacks—any one of them his match.

Gobir and Saidu bent above the dice; Saidu cupped them in his palm, breathed on them for luck, shook, and threw. Two vulturellike heads bent over the cubes, which spun in the dim light And with the same motion, Amalric drew and struck. The edge sliced through a lean neck, severing the windpipe. Gobir, his head hanging by a thread, fell across the dice, spurting blood.

Simultaneously Saidu, with the desperate quickness of a desert man, shot to his feet, drew, and hacked ferociously at the slayer’s head. Amalric barely had time to catch the stroke on his lifted sword. The whistling scimitar beat the straight blade down on the white man’s head, staggering him so that he dropped his sword. Recovering, he threw both arms about Saidu, dragging him into close quarters where his scimitar was useless. Under the desert man’s rags, the wiry frame was like steel and rawhide.

Tilutan, instantly comprehending the matter, had cast the girl down and risen with a roar. He rushed toward the stragglers like a charging bull, his great scimitar flaming in his hand. Amalric saw him coming, and his flesh turned cold. Saidu jerked and wrenched, handicapped by the scimitar he was still futilely seeking to turn against his antagonist Their feet twisted and stamped in the sand; their bodies ground against each other. Amalric smashed his sandaled heel down on the Ghanata’s bare instep, feeling bones give way. Saidu howled and plunged convulsively. They lurched drunkenly about, just as Tilutan struck with a rolling drive of his broad shoulders. Amalric felt the steel rasp the under part of his arm and chug deep into Saidu’s body. The smaller Ghanata gave an agonized scream, and his convulsive start tore him free of Amalric’s grasp.

Tilutan roared a furious oath and, wrenching his steel free, hurled the dying man aside. Before he could strike again, Amalric, his skin crawling with the fear of that great curved blade, had grappled with him.

Despair swept over Amalric as he felt the strength of the Negro. Tilutan was wiser than Saidu. He dropped the scimitar and, with a bellow, caught Amalric’s throat with both hands. The great black fingers locked like iron. Amalric, vainly striving to break their grip, was borne down with the Ghanata’s great weight pinning him to the earth. The smaller man was shaken like a rat in the jaws of a dog. His head was savagely smashed against the sand. As in a red mist he saw the furious race of the Negro, the thick lips writhed back in a ferocious grin of hate, the teeth glistening.

“You want her, you white dog!” the Ghanata snarled, mad with rage and lust. “Arrgh! I break your neck! I tear out your throat! I—my scimitar! I cut off your head and make her kiss it!”

With a final ferocious smash of Amalric’s head against the hard-packed sand, Tilutan, in an excess of murderous passion, half-lifted his antagonist and hurled him down. Rising, the black ran, stooping, and caught up his scimitar from where it lay, a broad crescent of steel in the sand. Yelling in ferocious exaltation, he turned and charged back, brandishing the blade on high. Amalric— dazed, shaken, and sick from the manhandling he had received—rose to meet him.

Tilutan’s girdle had become unwound in the fight, and now the end dangled about his feet. He tripped, stumbled, and fell headlong, throwing out his arms to save himself. The scimitar flew from his hand.

Amalric, galvanized, caught up the scimitar with both hands and took a reeling step forward. The desert swam darkly to his gaze. In the dusk before him, be saw Tilutan’s face go slack with a premonition of doom. The wide mouth gaped; the whites of the eyeballs rolled up. The black froze on one knee and one hand, as if incapable of further motion. Then the scimitar fell, cleaving the round head to the chin. Amalric had a dim impression of a black face, divided by a widening red line, fading in the thickening shadows. Then darkness caught him with a rush.

Something cool and soft was touching Amalric’s face with gentle persistence. He groped blindly, and his hand closed on something warm, firm, and resilient As his sight cleared, he looked into a soft, oval face, framed in lustrous black hair. As in a trance, he gazed unspeaking, hungrily dwelling on each detail of the full, red lips, the dark, violet eyes, and the alabaster throat With a start, he realized that the vision was speaking in a soft, musical voice. The words were strange, yet possessed of an elusive familiarity. A small, white hand, holding a dripping bunch of silk, was passed gently over his throbbing head and his face. Dizzily, he sat up.

It was night, under star-splashed skies. The camel still munched its cud; a horse whinnied restlessly. Not far away lay a hulking figure with its cleft head in a horrible puddle of blood and brains.

Amalric looked up at the girl who knelt beside him, talking in her gentle, unknown tongue. As the mists cleared from his brain, he began to understand her. Harking back into half-forgotten tongues he had learned and spoken in the past, he remembered a language used by a scholarly class in a southern province of Koth.

“Who—are—you, girl?” he asked in slow and stumbling speech, imprisoning a small hand in his own hardened fingers.

“I am Lissa.” The name was spoken with almost the suggestion of a lisp. It was like the rippling of a slender stream. “I am glad you are conscious. I feared you were not alive.”

“A little more and I shouldn’t have been,” he muttered, glancing at the grisly sprawl that had been Tilutan. The girl, shuddering, refused to follow his glance. Her hand trembled and, in their nearness, Amalric thought he could feel the quick throb of her heart.

“It was horrible,” she faltered. “like an awful dream. Anger—and blows—and blood—”

“It might have been worse,” he growled.

She seemed sensitive to every changing inflection of voice or mood. Her free hand stole timidly to his own.

“I did not mean to offend you. It was very brave for you to risk your life for a stranger. You are noble as the northern knights about which I have read.”

He cast a quick glance at her. Her wide dear eyes met his, reflecting only the thought that she had spoken. He started to speak, then changed his mind and said another thing.

“What are you doing in the desert?”

“I came from Gazal,” she answered. “I—I was running away. I could not stand it any longer. But it was hot and lonely and wearying, and I saw only sand, sand—and the blazing blue sky. The sands burned by feet, and my sandals were quickly worn out I was so thirsty; my canteen was soon empty. And then I wished to return to Gazal, but one direction looked like another. I did not know which way to go. I was terribly afraid and started running in the direction in which I thought Gazal to be. I do not remember much after that; I ran until I could run no further.

“I must have lain in the burning sand for a while. I remember rising and staggering on; and, toward the last, I thought I heard someone shouting and saw a black man on a black horse riding toward me. Then I knew no more until I awoke and found myself lying with my head in that man’s lap, while he gave me wine to drink. Then there were shouting and fighting—” She shuddered. “When it was all over, I crept to where you lay like a dead man and tried to bring you to.”

“Why?” he demanded.

She seemed at a loss. “Why?” she floundered, “why— you were hurt—and—it is what anyone would do. Besides, I realized that you were fighting to protect me from these black men. The people of Gazal have always said that the black people are wicked and would harm the helpless.”

“That’s no exclusive characteristic of the blacks,” muttered Amalric. “Where is this Gazal?”

“It cannot be far,” she answered. “I walked a whole day—and then I do not know how far the black man carried me after he found me. But he must have discovered me about sunset, so he could not have come far.”

“In which direction?” he demanded.

“I do not know. I traveled eastward when I left the city.”

“City?” he muttered. “A day’s travel from this spot? I had thought there was only desert for a thousand miles.”

“Gazal is in the desert,” she answered. “It is built amidst the palms of an oasis.”

Putting the girl aside, he got to his feet, swearing softly as he fingered his throat, the skin of which was bruised and lacerated. He examined the three blacks in rum, finding no life in any of them. Then, one by one, he dragged them a short distance out into the desert Somewhere, the jackals began yelping. Returning to the water hole, where the girl patiently squatted, he cursed to find only the black stallion of Tilutan with the camel. The other horses had broken their tethers and bolted during the fight.

Amalric returned to the girl and proffered her a handful of dried dates. She nibbled at them eagerly, while the other sat and watched her, an increasing impatience throbbing in his veins.

“Why did you run away?” he asked abruptly. “Are you a slave?”

“We have no slaves in Gazal,” she answered. “Oh, I was weary—so weary of the eternal monotony. I wished to see something of the outer world. Tell me, from what land do you come?”

“I was born in the western hills of Aquilonia,” he answered.

She clapped her hands like a delighted child. “I know where that is! I have seen it on the maps. It is the westernmost country of the Hyborians, and its king is Epeus the Sword-wielder.”

Amalric experienced a distinct shock. His head jerked up, and he stared at his companion.

“Epeus? Why, Epeus has been dead for nine hundred years. The king’s name is Vilerus.”

“Oh, of course,” she said with embarrassment. “I am foolish. Of course Epeus was king nine centuries ago, as you say. But tell me—tell me all about the world!”

“Why, that’s a big order!” he answered, nonplussed. “You have not traveled?”

“This is the first time I have ever been out of sight of the walls of Gazal,” she declared.

His gaze was fixed on the curve of her white bosom. He was not, at the moment, interested in her adventures; Gazal might have been Hell for all he cared.

He started to speak; then, changing his mind, caught her roughly in his arms, his muscles tensed for the struggle he expected. But he encountered no resistance. Her soft, yielding body lay across his knees, and she looked up at him somewhat in surprise but without fear or embarrassment She might have been a child, submitting to a new kind of play. Something about her direct gaze confused him. If she had screamed, wept, fought, or smiled knowingly, he would have known how to deal with her.

“Who in Mitra’s name are you, girl?” he asked roughly. “You are neither touched with the sun nor playing a game with me. Your speech shows you to be no simple country lass, innocent in her ignorance. Yet you seem to know nothing of the world and its ways.”

“I am a daughter of Gazal,” she answered helplessly. “If you saw Gazal, perhaps you would understand.”

He lifted her and set her down in the sand. Rising, he brought a saddle blanket and spread it out for her.

“Sleep, Lissa,” he said, his voice harsh with conflicting emotions. “Tomorrow I mean to see Gazal.”

At dawn they started westward. Amalric had placed Lissa on the camel, showing her how to maintain her balance. She clung to the seat with both hands, displaying no knowledge whatever of camels. This again surprised the young Aquilonian. A girl raised in the desert, who had never before been on a camel; nor, until the preceding night, had she ever ridden or been carried on a horse.

Amalric had manufactured a sort of cloak for her. She wore it without question, not asking whence it came— accepting it as she accepted all the things he did for her, gratefully but blindly, without asking the reason. Amalric did not tell her that the silk that shielded her from the sun once covered the black hide of her abductor.

As they rode, she again begged him to tell her something of the world, like a child asking for a story.

“I know Aquilonia is far from this desert,” she said. “Stygia lies between, and the lands of Shem, and other countries. How is it that you are here, so far from your homeland?”

He rode for a space in silence, his hand on the camel’s guide rope.

“Argos and Stygia are at war” he said abruptly. “Koth became embroiled. The Kothians urged a simultaneous invasion of Stygia. Argos raised an army of mercenaries, which went into ships and sailed southward along the coast At the same time, a Kothic army was to invade Stygia by land. I was one of that mercenary army of Argos. We met the Stygian fleet and defeated it, driving it back into Khemi. We should have landed, looted the city, and advanced along the course of the Styx, but our admiral was cautious. Our leader was Prince Zapayo da Kova, a Zingaran.

“We cruised southward until we reached the jungle-clad coasts of Kush. There we landed, and the ships anchored while the army pushed eastward, along the Stygian frontier, burning and pillaging as we went. It was our intention to turn northward at a certain point and strike into the heart of Stygia, to join the Kothic host pushing down from the north.

“Then word came that we were betrayed. Koth had concluded a separate peace with the Stygians. A Stygian army was pushing southward to intercept us, while another had already cut us off from the coast.

“Prince Zapayo, in desperation, conceived the mad idea of marching eastward, hoping to skirt the Stygian border and eventually to reach the eastern lands of Shem. But the army from the north overtook us. We turned and fought.

All day we fought, and we drove them back in rout to their camp. But, the next day, the pursuing army came up from the west. Crushed between the hosts, our army ceased to be. We were broken, annihilated, destroyed. There were few left to flee. When night fell, I broke away with my companion, a Cimmerian named Conan —a brute of a man with the strength of a bull.

“We rode southward into the desert, because there was no other direction in which we might go. Conan had been in this part of the world before and believed we had a chance to survive. Far to the south we found an oasis, but Stygian riders harried us. We fled again, from oasis to oasis, starving and thirsting until we found ourselves in a barren, unknown land of blazing sun and empty sand. We rode until our horses were reeling and we were half delirious.

“Then, one night, we saw fires and rode up to them, taking a desperate chance that we might make friends with them. As soon as we came within range, a shower of arrows greeted us. Conan’s horse was hit and reared, throwing its rider. His neck must have broken like a twig, for he never moved. Somehow I got away in the darkness, although my horse died under me. I had only a glimpse of the attackers—tall, lean, brown men, wearing strange barbaric garments.

“I wandered on foot through the desert and fell in with those three vultures, you saw yesterday. They were jackals —Ghanatas, members of a robber tribe of mixed blood: Negro and Mitra knows what eke. The only reason they didn’t murder me was that I had nothing they wished. For a month I have been wandering and thieving with them, because there was nothing else I could do.”

“I did not know it was like that,” she murmured. They said there were wars and cruelty out in the world, but it seemed like a dream and far away. Hearing you speak of treachery and battle seems almost like seeing it.”

“Do no enemies ever come against Gazal?” he demanded.

She shook her head. “Men ride wide of Gazal. Sometimes I have seen black dots moving in lines along the horizon, and the old men said they were armies moving to war; but they never come near Gazal.”

Amalric felt a dim stirring of uneasiness. This desert, seemingly empty of life, nevertheless contained some of the fiercest tribes on earth: the Ghanatas, who ranged far to the east; the masked Tibu, who he believed dwelt further to the south; and, somewhere off to the southwest, the semi-mythical empire of Tombalku, ruled by a wild and barbaric race. It was strange that a city in the midst of this savage land should be left so completely alone that one of its inhabitants did not even know the meaning of war.

When he turned his gaze elsewhere, strange thoughts assailed him. Was the girl touched by the sun? Was she a demon in womanly form, come out of the desert to luxe him to some cryptic doom? A glance at her, clinging childishly to the high peak of the camel’s saddle, was sufficient to dispel these broodings. Then again, doubt assailed him. Was he bewitched? Had she cast a spell on him?

Westward they steadily forged, halting only to nibble dates and drink water at midday. To shield her from the burning sun, Amalric fashioned a frail shelter oat of his sword and sheath and the saddle blankets. Weary and stiff from the tossing, bucking gait of the camel, she had to be lifted down in his arms. As he felt again the voluptuous sweetness of her soft body, a hot throb of passion seared through him. He stood momentarily motionless, intoxicated with her nearness, before he laid her down in the shade of a makeshift tent.

He felt a touch almost of anger at the clear gaze with which she met his, at the docility with which she yielded her young body to his hands. It was as if she were unaware of things that might harm her; her innocent trust shamed him and pent a helpless wrath within him.

As they ate, he did not taste the dates he munched; his eyes burned on her, avidly drinking in every detail of her lithe young figure. She seemed as unaware of his intentness as a child. When he lifted her to place her again on her camel, and her arms went instinctively about his neck, he shuddered. But he lifted her up on her mount, and they took up the journey once more.

II.

It was just before sundown when Lissa pointed and cried out: “Look! The towers of Gazal!”

On the desert rim he saw them—spires and minarets, rising in a jade-green cluster against the blue sky. But for the girl, he would have thought it the phantom city of a mirage. He glanced at Lissa curiously; she showed no signs of eager joy at her homecoming. She sighed, and her slim shoulders seemed to droop.

As they approached, the details swam more plainly into view. Sheer from the desert sands rose the wall that enclosed the towers. And Amalric saw that the wall was crumbling in many places. The towers, too, were much in disrepair. Roofs sagged; broken battlements gaped; spires leaned drunkenly. Panic assailed him; was it a city of the dead to which he rode, guided by a vampire? A quick glance at the girl reassured him. No demon could lurk in that divinely molded form. She glanced at him with a strange, wistful questioning in her deep eyes, turned irresolutely toward the desert, and then, with a deep sigh, set her face toward the city, as if gripped by a subtle and fatalistic despair.

Now, through the gaps in the jade-green wall, Amalric saw figures moving within the city. No one hailed them as they rode through a broad breach in the wall and came out into a wide street Close at hand, limned in the sinking sun, the decay was more apparent Grass grew rank in the streets, pushing through shattered paving; grass grew rank in the small plazas. Streets and courts were likewise littered with a rubbish of fallen stones. Here and there, the ruins of a house had been cleared away and the space given over to vegetable gardening.

Domes rose, cracked and discolored. Portals gaped, vacant of doors. Everywhere, ruin had laid its hand. Then Amalric saw one spire untouched: a shining, red, cylindrical tower, which rose in the extreme southeastern corner of the city. It gleamed among the ruins. Amalric indicated it.

“Why is that tower less ruined than the others?” he asked. Lissa turned pale, trembled, and convulsively caught his hand.

“Do not speak of it!” she whispered. “Do not look toward it—do not even think of it!”

Amalric scowled; the nameless implication of her words had somehow changed the aspect of the mysterious tower. Now it seemed like a serpent’s head, rearing amid ruin and desolation. A stream of black specks—bats on the wing—poured from its high black apertures.

The young Aquilonian looked warily about him. After all, he had no assurance that the people of Gazal would receive him in a friendly manner. He saw people moving leisurely about the streets. When they halted and stared at him, his flesh for some reason crawled. They were men and women with kindly features, and their looks were mild. But their interest seemed so slight—so vague and impersonal. They made no move to approach or speak to him. It might have been the commonest thing in the world for an armed horseman to ride into their city from the desert; yet Amalric knew that this was not the case, and the casual manner with which the people of Gazal received him caused a faint uneasiness in his bosom.

Lissa spoke to them, indicating Amalric, whose hand she lifted like an affectionate child. “This is Amalric of Aquilonia, who rescued me from the black people and has brought me home.”

A polite murmur of welcome rose from the people, and several of them approached to extend their hands. Amalric thought he had never seen such vague, kindly faces; their eves were soft and mild, without fear and without wonder. Yet they were not the eyes of stupid oxen; rather, they were the eyes of people wrapped in dreams.

Their stare gave him a feeling of unreality; he hardly knew what was said to him. His mind was occupied by the strangeness of it all: these quiet, dreamy people, in their silken tunics and soft sandals, moving with aimless vagueness among the discolored ruins. A lotus paradise of illusion? Somehow that sinister red tower struck a discordant note.

One of the men, with a smooth, unlined face but hair of silver, said: “Aquilonia? There was an invasion—we heard by King Bragorus of Nemedia. How went the war?”

“He was driven hack,” answered Amalric briefly, resisting a shudder. Nine hundred years had passed since Bragorus had led his spearmen across the marches of Aquilonia.

His questioner did not press him further; the people drifted away, and Lissa tugged at his hand. He turned and feasted his eyes upon her. In a realm of illusion and dream, her soft, firm body anchored his wandering conjectures. She was no dream; she was real; her body was sweet and tangible as cream and honey.

“Come,” she said, “let us go to rest and eat.”

“What of the people?” he demurred. “Will you not tell them of your experiences?”

“They would not heed, except for a few moments,” she answered. “They would listen a little, then drift away. They hardly know I have been gone. Come!”

Amalric led the horse and the camel into an enclosed court, where the grass grew high and water seeped from a broken fountain into a marble trough. There he tethered them; then he followed Lissa. Taking his hand, she led him across the court into an arched doorway. .Night had fallen. In the open space above the court; the stars clustered, etching the jagged pinnacles.

Through a series of dark chambers Lissa went, moving with the sureness of long practice. Amalric groped after her, guided by her little hand in his. He found it no pleasant adventure. The scent of dust and decay hung in the thick darkness. Under his feet were sometimes broken tiles and sometimes worn carpets. His free hand touched the fretted arches of doorways. Then the stars gleamed through a broken roof, showing him a dim winding hallway, hung with rotting tapestries. They rustled in a faint breeze; their noise was like the whispering of witches, causing the hair of his scalp to stir.

Then they came into a chamber dimly lighted by starshine streaming through open windows, and Lissa released his hand. She fumbled for an instant and produced a faint light It was a glassy knob, which glowed with a golden radiance. She set it on a marble table and indicated that Amalric should recline on a couch thickly littered with silks. Groping into some hidden recess, she produced a golden vessel of wine and others containing food unfamiliar to Amalric. There were dates; but the other fruits and vegetables, pallid and insipid to his taste, he did not recognize. The wine was pleasant to the palate but no more heady than dishwater.

Seated on a marble seat facing him, Lissa nibbled daintily.

“What sort of place is this?” he demanded. “You are like these people, yet strangely unlike them.”

“They say I am like our ancestors,” answered Lissa. “Long ago, they came into the desert and built this city amid a great oasis, which contained a series of springs. The stone they took from the ruins of a much older city—only the Red Tower—” (her voice dropped, and she glanced nervously at the star-framing windows) “—only the red tower stood there. It was empty—then.

“Our ancestors, who were called Gazali, once dwelt in southern Koth. They were noted for their scholarly wisdom. But they sought to revive the worship of Mitra, which the Kothians had long since abandoned, and the king drove them from his kingdom. They came southward, many of them: priests, scholars, teachers, and scientists, with their Shemitish slaves.

“They reared Gazal in the desert; but the slaves revolted almost as soon as the city was built and, fleeing, mixed with the wild tribes of the desert. They were not ill-treated; but word came to them in the night—a word that sent them fleeing madly from the city into the desert.

“My people dwelt here, learning to produce their food and drink from such material as was at hand. Their learning was a marvel. When the slaves fled, they took with them every camel, horse, and ass in the city. Thenceforth, there was no communication with the outer world. There are whole chambers in Gazal filled with maps and books and chronicles, but they are all nine hundred years old at the least; for it was nine hundred years ago that my people fled from Koth. Since then, no man of the outside world has set foot in Gazal. And the people are slowly vanishing. They have become so dreamy and introspective that they have neither human passions nor human appetites. The city falls into ruins and none moves a hand to repair it. Horror—” (she choked and shuddered) “—when horror came upon them, they could neither flee nor fight.”

“What do you mean?” he whispered, a cold wind blowing on his spine. The rustling of rotten hangings down nameless black corridors stirred dim fears in his soul.

She shook her head. She rose, came around the marble table, and laid hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were wet and shone with horror and a desperate yearning that caught at his throat. Instinctively his arm went around her lithe form, and he felt her tremble.

“Hold me!” she begged. “I am afraid! Oh, I have dreamed of such a man as you. I am not like my people; they are dead men walking forgotten streets; but I am alive. I am warm and sentient. I hunger and thirst and yearn for life. I cannot abide the silent streets and ruined halls and dim people of Gazal, although I have never known anything else. That is why I ran away; I yearned for life—”

She was sobbing uncontrollably in his arms. Her hair streamed over his face; her fragrance made him dizzy. Her firm body strained against his. She was lying across his knees, her arms locked about his neck. Straining her to his breast, he crushed her lips with his. Eyes, lips, cheeks, hair, throat, breasts—he showered her with hot kisses, unto her sobs changed to panting gasps. His passion was not the violence of a ravisher. The passion that slumbered in her woke in one overpowering wave. The glowing golden ball, struck by his groping fingers, tumbled to the floor and was extinguished. Only the starshine gleamed through the windows.

Lying in Amalric’s arms on the silk-heaped couch, Lissa opened her heart and whispered her dreams and hopes and aspirations—childish, pathetic, terrible.

“I’ll take you away,” he muttered. ‘Tomorrow. You are right; Gazal is a city of the dead. We will seek life in the outer world. It is violent, rough, and cruel, but better than this living death—”

The night was broken by a shuddering cry of agony, horror, and despair. Its timbre brought out cold sweat on Amalric’s skin. He started upright from the couch, but Lissa desperately clung to him.

“No, no!” she begged in a frantic whisper. “Do not go! Stay!”

“But murder is being done!” he exclaimed, fumbling for his sword. The cries seemed to come from across an outer court. Mingled with them was an indescribable, tearing, rending sound. They rose higher and thinner, unbearable in their hopeless agony, then sank away in a long, shuddering sob.

“I have heard men dying on the rack cry out like that!” muttered Amalric, shaking with horror. “What devil’s work is this?”

Lissa was trembling violently in a frenzy of terror. He felt the wild pounding of her heart.

“It is the horror of which I spoke!” she whispered. The horror that dwells in the Red Tower. Long ago it came; some say it dwelt there in the lost years and returned after the building of Gazal. It devours human beings. What it is, no one knows, since none has seen it and lived to tell of it. It is a god or a devil. That is why the slaves fled; why the desert people shun Gazal. Many of us have gone into its awful belly. Eventually, all will have gone, and it will rule over an empty city, as men say it ruled over the ruins from which Gazal was reared.”

“Why have the people stayed to be devoured?” he demanded.

“I do not know,” she whimpered. “They dream –”

“Hypnosis,” muttered Amalric; “hypnosis coupled with decay. I saw it in their eyes. This devil has them mesmerized. Mitra, what a foul secret!”

Lissa pressed her face against his bosom and dung to him.

“But what are we to do?” he asked uneasily.

There is nothing to do,” she whispered. ‘Tour sword would be useless. Perhaps if will not harm us. It has taken a victim tonight. We must wait like sheep for the butcher.”

“I’ll be damned if I will—” Amalric exclaimed, galvanized. “We will not wait for morning. We’ll go tonight Make a bundle of food and drink. I’ll get the horse and the camel and bring them to the court outside. Meet me there.

Since the unknown monster had already struck, Amalric felt that he was safe in leaving the girl alone for a few minutes. But his flesh crawled as he groped his way down the winding corridor and through the black chambers, where the swinging tapestries whispered. He found the beasts huddled nervously together in the court where he had left them. The stallion whinnied and nuzzled him, as if sensing peril in the breathless night.

Amalric saddled and bridled the animals and led them through the narrow opening into the street. A few minutes later, he was standing in the starlit court. Even as he reached it, he was electrified by an awful scream, which rang shudderingly upon the air. It came from the chamber where he had left Lissa.

He answered that piteous cry with a wild yell. Drawing his sword, he rushed across the court and hurled himself through the window. The golden ball was glowing again, carving out black shadows in the shrinking corners. Silks lay scattered on the floor. The marble seat was upset; but the chamber was empty.

A sick weakness overcame Amalric, and he staggered against the marble table, the dim light wavering dizzily to his sight Then he was swept by a mad rage. The Red Tower! There the fiend would bear its victim!

He darted back across the court; sought the streets, and raced toward the tower, which glowed with an unholy light under the stars. The streets did not run straight. He cut through silent black buildings and crossed courts whose rank grass waved in the night wind.

Ahead of him, clustered about the crimson tower, rose a heap of ruins, where decay had eaten more savagely than at the rest of the city. Apparently none dwelt among them. They reeled and tumbled, a crumbling mass of quaking masonry, with the red tower rearing up among them like a poisonous red flower from charnel-house ruin.

To reach the tower, he would be forced to traverse the ruins. Recklessly he plunged into the black mass, groping for a door. He found one and entered, thrusting his sword ahead of him. Then he saw such a vista as men sometimes see in fantastic dreams.

Ahead of him stretched a long corridor, visible in a faint, unhallowed glow, its black walls hung with strange, shuddersome tapestries. Far down it he saw a receding figure—a white, naked, stooped figure, lurching along, dragging something the sight of which filled him with sweating honor. Then the apparition vanished from his sight, and with it vanished the eerie glow. Amalric stood in the soundless dark, seeing nothing, hearing nothing; thinking only of a stooped, white figure, which dragged a limp human form down a long black corridor.

As he groped onward, a vague memory stirred in his brain: the memory of a grisly tale mumbled to him over a dying fire in the skull-shaped devil ‘hut of a black witch-man—a tale of a god that dwelt in a crimson house in a ruined city—a god worshiped by darksome cults in dank jungles and along sullen, dusky rivers. And there stirred, too, in his mind, an incantation whispered in his ear in awed and shuddering tones, while the night held its breath, the lions had ceased to roar along the river, and the very fronds had ceased their scraping, one against the other.

Ollam-Onga, whispered a dark wind down the sightless corridor. Ollam-Onga, whispered the dust that ground beneath his stealthy feet. Sweat stood on his skin, and the sword shook in his hand. He stole through the house of a god, and fear held him in its bony fist. The house of the god—the full horror of the phrase filled his mind. All the ancestral fears and the fears that reached beyond ancestry and primordial race memory crowded upon him; horror cosmic and unhuman sickened him. The realization of his weak humanity crushed him as he went through the house of darkness, which was the house of a god.

About him shimmered a glow so faint that it was scarcely discernable. He knew that he was approaching the tower itself. Another instant, and he groped his way through an arched door and stumbled upon strangely-spaced steps. Up and up he went; and, as he climbed, that blind fury, which is mankind’s last defense against diabolism and all the hostile forces of the universe, surged in him. He forgot his fear. Burning with terrible eagerness, he climbed up and up through the thick, evil darkness, until he came into a chamber lit by a weird, golden glow.

At the far end of the chamber, a short flight of broad steps led upward to a kind of dais or platform, on which stood articles of stone furniture. The mangled remains of the victim lay sprawled on the dais, an arm dangling limply down the steps. The marble steps were stained with a pattern of trickles of blood, like the stalactites that form around the lip of a hot spring. Most of these streaks were old, dried, and dark brown; but a few were still red, moist, and shiny.

Before Amalric, at the foot of these steps, stood a white, naked figure. Amalric halted, his tongue cleaving to his palate. It was to all appearance a naked white man that stood gazing at him, its mighty arms folded on an alabaster breast. The eyes, however, were balls of luminous fire, such as had never looked from any human head. In those eyes, Amalric glimpsed the frozen fires of the ultimate hells, touched by awful shadows.

Then, before him, the form began to grow dim in outline—to waver. With a terrible effort, the Aquilonian burst the bonds of silence and spoke a cryptic and awful incantation. And, as the frightful words cut the silence, the white giant halted—froze. Again his outlines stood out clear and bold against the golden background.

“Now fall on, damn you!” cried Amalric hysterically. “I have bound you into your human shape! The black wizard spoke truly! It was the master word he gave me! Fall on, Ollam-Onga! Till you break the spell by feasting on my heart, you are no more than a man like me!”

With a roar like the gust of a black wind, the creature charged. Amalric sprang aside from the clutch of those hands, whose strength was more than that of a whirlwind. A single, taloned finger, spread wide and catching in his tunic, ripped the garment from him like a rotten rag as the monster plunged by. But Amalric, nerved to more than human quickness by the horror of the fight, wheeled and drove his sword through the thing’s back, so that the point stood out a foot from the broad breast.

A fiendish howl of agony shook the tower. The monster whirled and rushed at Amalric, but the youth sprang aside and raced up the stairs to the dais. There he wheeled and, catching up a marble seat, hurled it down upon the horror lumbering up the stairs. Full in the face the massive missile struck, carrying the fiend back down the steps.

It rose, an awful sight, streaming blood, and again essayed the stairs. In desperation, Amalric lifted a bench of jade, whose weight wrenched a groan of effort from him, and hurled it.

Beneath the impact of the hurtling bulk, Ollam-Onga pitched back down the stair and lay among the marble shards, which were flooded with its blood. With a last, desperate effort, it heaved itself up on its hands, eyes glazing. Throwing back its bloody head, it voiced an awful cry.

Amalric shuddered and recoiled from the abysmal horror of that scream, which was answered. From somewhere in the air above the tower, a faint medley of fiendish cries came back like an echo. Then the mangled white figure went limp among the bloodstained shards. And Amalric knew that one of the gods of Kush was no more. With the thought came blind, unreasoning horror.

In a fog of terror, he rushed down the steps from the dais, shrinking from the thing that lay staring on the floor. The night seemed to cry out against him, aghast at the sacrilege. Reason, exultant over his triumph, was submerged in a flood of cosmic fear.

As he put foot on the head of the stair, he halted short. Up from the darkness, Lissa came to him, her white arms outstretched, her eyes pools of horror.

“Amalric!” It was a haunting cry. He crushed her in his arms.

“I saw it,” she whispered, “dragging a dead man through the corridor. I screamed and fled; then, when I returned, I heard you cry out and knew you had gone to search for me in the Red Tower—”

“And you came to share my fate.” His voice was almost inarticulate.

Then, as she tried to peer in trembling fascination past him, he covered her eyes and turned her about. Better that she should not see what lay on the crimson floor. He snatched up his torn tunic but did not dare to touch his sword. As he half led, half carried Lissa down the shadowed stairs, a glance over his shoulder showed him that a naked white figure no longer lay amid the broken marble. The incantation had bound Ollam-Onga into his human form in life but not in death. Blindness momentarily assailed Amalric; then, stimulated into frantic haste, he hurried Lissa down the stairs and through the dark ruins.

He did not slacken pace until they reached the street, where the camel and the stallion huddled against each other. Quickly he mounted the girl on the camel and swung up on the stallion. Taking the lead line, he headed straight for the broken wall. A few minutes later, he breathed gustily. The open air of the desert cooled his blood; it was free of the scent of decay and hideous antiquity.

There was a small water pouch hanging from his saddle bow. They had no food, and his sword was in the chamber of the Red Tower. Without food and unarmed, they faced the desert; but its peril seemed less grim than the horror of the city behind them.

Without speaking, they rode. Amalric headed south; somewhere in that direction was a water hole. Just at dawn, as they mounted a crest of sand, he looked back toward Gazal, unreal in the pink light. He stiffened, and Lissa cried out. Out of a breach in the wall rode seven horsemen. Their steeds were black, and the riders were cloaked in black from head to foot. There had been no horses in Gazal. Horror swept over Amalric and, turning, he urged their mounts on.

The sun rose red, and then gold, and then a ball of white beaten flame. On and on the fugitives pressed, reeling with heat and fatigue, blinded by the glare. From time to time, they moistened their lips with water. And behind them, at an even pace, rode seven black dots.

Evening began to fall, and the sun reddened and lurched toward the desert’s rim. A cold hand clutched Amalric’s heart. The riders were closing in.

As darkness came on, so came the black riders. Amalric glanced at Lissa, and a groan burst from him. His stallion stumbled and fell. The sun had gone down; the moon was suddenly blotted out by a bat-shaped shadow. In the utter darkness, the stars glowed red, and behind him Amalric heard a rising rush, as of an approaching wind. A black, speeding clump bulked against the night; in which glinted sparks of awful light.

“Ride, girl!” he cried despairingly. “Go on—save yourself; it is I they want!”

For answer, she slid down from the camel and threw her arms about him. “I will die with you!”

Seven black shapes loomed against the stars, racing like the wind. Under the hoods shone balls of evil fire; fleshless jawbones seemed to clack together.

Then there was an interruption; a horse swept past Amalric, a vague bulk in the unnatural darkness. There was the sound of an impact as the unknown steed caromed among the oncoming shapes. A horse screamed frenziedly, and a bull-like voice bellowed in a strange tongue. From somewhere in the night, a clamor of yells replied.

Some sort of violent action was taking place. Horses’ hoofs stamped and clattered; there was the impact of savage blows; and the same stentorian voice cursed lustily. Then the moon came abruptly out and lit a fantastic scene.

A man on a giant horse whirled, slashed, and smote, apparently at thin air. From another direction swept a wild horde of riders, their curved swords flashing in the moonlight Away over the crest of a rise, seven black figures were vanishing, their cloaks floating out like the wings of bats.

Amalric was swamped by wild men, who leaped from their horses and swarmed around him. Sinewy arms pinioned him; fierce brown hawklike faces snarled at him. Lissa screamed.

Then the attackers were thrust right and left as the man on the great horse reined through the crowd. He bent from his saddle and glared closely at Amalric

“The devil!” he roared. “Amalric the Aquilonian!”

“Conan!” Amalric exclaimed in bewilderment “Conan! Alive!”

“More alive than you seem to be,” answered the other. “By Crom, man, you look as if all the devils of this desert had been hunting you through the night. What things were those pursuing you? I was riding around the camp my men had pitched, to make sure no enemies were in hiding, when the moon went out like a candle, and then I heard sounds of flight. I rode toward the sounds; and by Macha, I was among those devils before I knew what was happening. I had my sword in my hand and I laid about me—by Crom, their eyes blazed like fire in the dark! I know my edge bit them; but, when the moon came out, they were gone like a puff of wind. Were they men or devils?”

“Fiends sent up from Hell,” shuddered Amalric “Ask me not; some things are not to be discussed.”

Conan did not press the matter; nor did he look incredulous. His beliefs included night fiends, ghosts, hobgoblins, and dwarfs.

“Trust you to find a woman, even in a desert,” he said, glancing at Lissa. The girl had crept to Amalric and was clinging close to him, glancing fearfully at the wild figures that hemmed them in.

“Wind” roared Conan. “Bring flasks! Here!” He seized a leather flask from those thrust out at him and placed it in Amalric’s hand. “Give the girl a swig and drink some yourself,” he advised. “Then we’ll put you on horses and take you to the camp. You need food, rest, and sleep. I can see that.”

A richly caparisoned horse was brought, rearing and prancing, and willing hands helped Amalric into the saddle. The girl was handed up to him, and they moved off southward, surrounded by the wiry brown riders in their picturesque tatters. Many wore face cloths, which concealed their faces below the eyes.

“Who is he?” whispered Lissa, her arms about her lover’s neck. He was holding her on the saddle in front of him.

“Conan the Cimmerian!” muttered Amalric. The man I wandered with in the desert after the defeat of the mercenaries. These are the men who struck him down. I left him lying under their spears, apparently dead. Now we meet him, obviously in command of them and respected by them.”

“He is a terrible man,” she whispered.

He smiled. “You have never seen a white-skinned barbarian before. He is a wanderer, a plunderer, and a slayer; but he has his own code of morals. I don’t think we have anything to fear from him.”

In his heart, Amalric was not so sure. In a way, it might be said that he had forfeited Conan’s comradeship when he had ridden away into the desert, leaving the Cimmerian senseless on the ground. But he had not known that Conan was alive. Doubt haunted Amalric. Savagely loyal to his companions, the Cimmerian’s wild nature saw no reason why the rest of the world should not be plundered. He lived by the sword. And Amalric suppressed a shudder as he thought of what might chance, did Conan desire Lissa.

Later on, having eaten and drunk in the camp of the riders, Amalric sat by a small fire in front of Conan’s tent; Lissa, covered with a silken cloak, slumbered with her curly head on his knees. And across from him the firelight played on Conan’s face, interchanging lights and shadows.

“Who are these men?” asked the young Aquilonian.

“The riders of Tombalku,” answered the Cimmerian.

“Tombalku!” exclaimed Amalric. ‘Then it is no myth!”

“Far from it!” agreed Conan. “When my accursed steed fell with me, I was knocked senseless; and, when I recovered consciousness, the devils had me bound hand and foot This angered me, so I snapped several of the cords they had tied me with; but they rebound them as fast as I could break them—never did I get a hand entirely free. Still, to them my strength seemed remarkable…”

Amalric gazed at Conan unspeakingly. The man was as tall and broad as Tilutan had been, without the black man’s surplus flesh. He could have broken the Ghanata’s neck with his naked hands.

“They decided to carry me to their city instead of killing me out of hand,” Conan went on. “They thought a man like me should be a long time in dying by torture and so give them sport Well, they bound me on a horse without a saddle, and we went to Tombalku.

“There are two kings of Tombalku. They took me before them—a lean, brown-skinned devil named Zehbeh, and a big fat Negro, who dozed on his ivory-rusk throne. Zehbeh asked a brown priest, Daura, what should be done with me, and Daura cast dice made of sheep bone and said I should be flayed alive before the altar of Jhil. Everyone cheered, and that woke the Negro king.

“I spat on Daura and cursed him roundly, and the kings as well. I told them that, if I was to be skinned, by Crom, I demanded a good bellyful of wine before they began, and I damned them for thieves and cowards and sons of harlots.

“At this, the black king roused and sat up and stared at me. Then he rose and shouted: ‘Amra!’ and I knew him—Sakumbe, a Suba from the Black Coast, a fat adventurer I had known well in the days when I was a corsair along that coast. He trafficked in ivory, gold dust, and slaves and would cheat the devil out of his eye teeth. Well, when he knew me the smelly old devil descended from his throne and embraced me for joy and took my cords off me with his own hands. Then he announced that I was Amra, the Lion, and his friend, and no harm should come to me.

“Then followed much discussion, because Zehbeh and Daura wanted my hide. But Sakumbe yelled for his witch finder, Askia, and he came—all feathers and bells and snake skins—a wizard of the Black Coast and a son of the Devil if ever there was one. Askia pranced and made incantations and announced that Sakumbe was the chosen of Ajujo, the Dark One, and what he said, went. All the black people of Tombalku shouted, and Zehbeh backed down. For the blacks in Tombalku are the real power. Several centuries ago, the Aphaki, a Shemitish race, pushed into the southern desert and established the kingdom of Tombalku. They mixed with the desert blacks, and the result was a brown, straight-haired race, which is still more white than black. They are the dominant caste in Tombalku. But they are in the minority, and a pure black long always sits on the throne beside the Aphaki ruler.

The Aphaki conquered the nomads of the southwestern desert and the Negro tribes of the steppes that lie to the south of them. Most of these riders, for instance, are Tibu, of mixed Stygian and Negro blood. Others are the Bighamra, the Mindanga, and the Borni.

Well, Sakumbe, through Askia, is the real ruler of Tombalku. The Aphaki worship Jhil, but the blacks worship Ajujo the Dark One and his kin. Askia came to Tombalku with Sakumbe and revived the worship of Ajujo, which was crumbling because of the Aphaki priests. He also has a private cult of his own, worshiping the gods know what sort of abominations. Askia made black magic, which defeated the wizardry of the Aphaki, and the blacks hailed him as a prophet sent by the dark gods. Sakumbe and Askia wax as Zehbeh and Daura wane.

Since I am Sakumbe’s friend, and Askia spoke for me, the blacks received me with great applause. Sakumbe had Kordofo, the general of the horsemen, poisoned and gave me his place, which delighted the blacks and exasperated the Aphaki.

You will like Tombalku! It was made for men like us to loot! There are half a dozen powerful factions plotting and intriguing against one another. There are continual brawls in the taverns and streets, secret murders, mutilations, and executions. And there are women, gold, wine–all that a mercenary wants! And I am high in favor and power! By Crom, Amalric, you could not come at a better time! Why, what’s the matter? You do not seem so enthusiastic as I remember your once having been in such matters.”

“I crave your pardon, Conan,” said Amalric. “I do not lack interest, but weariness and want of sleep overcome me.”

However, it was not of gold, women, and intrigue that the Aquilonian was thinking, but of the girl who slumbered in his lap. There was no joy in the thought of taking her into such a welter of intrigue and blood as Conan had described. A subtle change had come over Amalric, almost without his knowledge. Carefully, he said:

“You saved our lives just now, for which I shall always be grateful. But I have no real claim on your generosity, since I rode off and left you lying for the Aphaki to capture. True, I thought you surely dead, but…”

Conan threw back his head and laughed a deep, rumbling laugh. Then he slapped the younger man on the back with a force that almost knocked him sprawling. “Forget it! I ought to have been dead, by all reasonable chances; and they’ve had speared you like a frog if you’d tried to rescue me. Come on to Tombalku with us and make yourself useful! You commanded a troop of horse for Zapayo, didn’t you?”

“Aye, that I did.”

“Well, I need an adjutant to help drill my lads. They fight like fiends but without order, each man for himself. Between us, we can make real soldiers of them. More wine!” he roared.

III.

It was the third day after Amalric’s meeting with Conan that the riders of Tombalku neared the capital. Amalric rode at the head of the column beside Conan, and Lissa followed closely behind Amalric on a mare. Behind them trotted the company, strung out in a double line. Loose white garments fluttered in the breeze; bridles jingled; saddle leather creaked; the setting sun shone redly on the points of lances. Most of the riders were Tibu, but there were also contingents from the lesser desert tribes.

All, besides their local languages, spoke the simplified dialect of Shemitish that served as a common tongue for the dark-skinned folk from Kush to Zembabwei and from Stygia to the half-mythical black kingdom of the Atlaians, far to south. Many centuries before, Shemitish traders had stitched this vast area with their bade routes and had brought to it their language along with their trade goods. And Amalric knew enough Shemitish to communicate with these fierce warriors of the arid lands.

As the sun, like a vast drop of blood, sank toward the horizon, points of light appeared ahead. The ground fell away in a gentle slope before the riders, then leveled out again. On this level sprawled a large city of low dwellings. All these houses were made of dun-colored mud brick, so that Amalric’s first impression was of a natural formation of earth and rock—a tumbled mass of bluffs, ravines, and boulders—rather than a city.

At the foot of the slope rose a stout brick wall, over which appeared the upper parts of the houses lights glowed from an open space at the center of the city, whence came a roaring sound, faint with distance.

“Tombalku,” said Conan briefly, then cocked his head to listen. “Crom! Something’s up. We’d better hurry.”

He touched spurs to his horse. The column cantered down the slope, jingling, behind him.

Tombalku stood on a low, wedge-shaped escarpment amid widespread groves of palms and spiny mimosas. The escarpment overlooked a bend in a sluggish river, which reflected the deepening blue of the evening sky. Beyond the river, the land rolled away in grassy savannas.

“What river is that?” asked Amalric.

“The Jeluba,” replied Conan. “It flows east from here. Some say it flows on across Darfar and Keshan to join the Styx; some, that it swings south to pour into the Zarkheba. Perhaps some day I’ll follow it down to see.”

The massive wooden gates stood open as the column cantered through. Inside the gate, white-clad forms moved through the narrow, crooked streets. Behind the white men, the riders shouted hails to acquaintances and boasts of their prowess.

Turning in his saddle, Conan snapped out an order to a brown-skinned warrior, who led the column off toward the barracks. The Cimmerian, followed by Amalric and Lissa, trotted purposefully toward the central square.

Tombalku was awakening from its afternoon doze. Everywhere white-clad, dark-skinned figures trudged through the soft sand of the streets. Amalric was struck by the unexpected size of this desert metropolis and by the incongruous mixtures of barbarism and civilization to be seen on every hand. In spacious temple courtyards, within a few yards of each other, painted and feathered witch-doctors pranced and shook their sacred bones, dusky priests intoned the myths of their race, and dusky philosophers argued the nature of man and the gods.

As the three riders neared the central square, they fell in with more of the people of the city, all hurrying in the same direction. When the street became crowded, Conan’s bellowing voice cleared a path for the horses.

They dismounted on the edge of the square, and Conan tossed the bridles of the horses to a man he picked out of the crowd. Then the Cimmerian shouldered his way toward the thrones on the far side of the square. Lissa clung to Amalric’s arm as he pushed through the crowd in Conan’s wake.

Around the plaza, regiments of black spearmen were drawn up to form a vast hollow square. The light of fires, blazing at the corners of the square, lit up the warriors’ great oval shields of elephant hide, the long blades of their spearheads, the ostrich plumes and lions’ manes of their headdresses, and white eyeballs and teeth against shiny black skins.

In the center of the hollow square, a man was tied to a post. This man, stripped to a loin cloth, was stocky, muscular, and brown-skinned, with heavy features. He strained at his bonds, while in front of him pranced a lean, fantastic figure. This man was black, but most of his skin was covered with painted designs. His shaven head was painted to resemble a skull. His regalia of plumes and monkey fur whipped this way and that as he danced in front of a small tripod, under which a fire smoldered and from which a thin spire of colored smoke ascended.

Beyond the stake, at one side of the hollow square, rose two thrones of stuccoed and painted brick, ornamented with bits of colored glass, with arms made from whole elephants’ tusks. These thrones stood on a single dais, to which several steps led up. On the throne to Amalric’s right, a huge, fat, black figure lounged. This man wore a long white gown and, on his head, an elaborate headdress, which included the skull of a lion and several ostrich plumes.

The other throne was empty, but the man who would have occupied it stood beside the other throne. This was a thin, hawk-faced, brown man, who wore a white robe like the other but, on his head, a jeweled turban instead of the first man’s headgear of bones and feathers. Hie lean man was shaking a fist at the fat one and shouting, while a group of throne guards uneasily watched their kings quarrel. As Amalric, following Conan, came closer, he made out the lean one’s words:

“You lie! Askia himself sent this sending of serpents, as you call it, to give him an excuse to murder Daura! If you do not stop this ‘buffoonery, there will be war! We shall slay you, you black savage, little by little!” The thin man’s voice rose to a scream. “Do as I say! Stop Askia, or else, by Jhil the Merciless…”

He reached for his scimitar, the guards about the throne shifted their spears. The fat black merely laughed up at the furious face above him.

Conan, having pushed through the lines of spearmen, bounded up the brick steps of the dais and thrust himself between the two monarchs.

“Better take your hand off that sword, Zehbeh,” he growled, and turned to the other. “What’s going on, Sakumbe?”

The black king chuckled. “Daura thought to get rid of me by a sending of serpents. Ugh! Vipers in my bedding, asps among my robes, mambas dripping from the roof beams. Three of my women have died of their bites, besides several slaves and attendants. Askia learned by divination that Daura was the culprit, and my men surprised him with the evidence in the midst of his incantations. Look yonder, general Conan: Askia has just slain the goat. His demons will arrive any time, now.”

Following Conan’s gaze, Amalric looked down into the hollow square towards the stake with its bound victim, in front of which the goat was expiring. Askia was nearing the climax of his incantation. His voice rose to a shriek as he leaped and capered and rattled his bones. The smoke from the tripod thickened, writhed, and glowed with a ghastly radiance of its own.

Overhead, night had fallen. The stars, which had began to shine out brightly in the clear desert air, turned dim and red; a crimson veil seemed to be drawn across the face of the rising moon. The fires sank and smoldered redly. A crackle of speech, in no human tongue, wafted down from the upper air. There was a sound like the beating of leathery wings.

Askia stood straight and still, with arms outstretched, plumed head thrown back, mouthing a long incantation of strange names. Amalric’s hair rose; for, among the rush of meaningless syllables, he caught the name “Ollam-Onga,” repeated thrice.

Then Daura shrieked so loudly as to drown out Askia’s incantation. In the flickering firelight, with the weird glow from the tripod blurring Ac sight, Amalric could not be quite sure of what he saw. Something seemed to be happening to Daura, who struggled and screamed.

Around the base of the stake to which the wizard was tied, a pool of blood grew and widened. Ghastly wounds appeared all over the man, although nothing could be seen to deal such injuries. His screams sank to a faint sob and ceased, although his body continued to move in its bindings, as if some invisible presence were tugging at it A faint gleam of white, appeared amidst the dark mass that had been Daura; then another and another. Amalric realized with a start of horror that these white things were bones…

The moon returned to its normal silvery radiance; the stars shone out again like jewels; the fires in the hollow square blazed up. The waxing light showed a skeleton, still bound to the stake and slumped in a pool of blood. King Sakumbe spoke in his high, musical voice:

“So much for that scoundrel Daura. Now, as for Zeh-beh—By Ajujo’s nose, where is the villain?”

Zehbeh had disappeared while all other eyes had been focused on the drama at the stake.

“Conan,” said Sakumbe, “you had better call up the regiments; for I do not think my brother king will let this night’s work pass without taking a hand in it.”

Conan dragged Amalric forward. “King Sakumbe, this is Amalric the Aquilonian, a sometime comrade in arms of mine. I need him for an adjutant. Amalric, you and your girl had better stay with the king, since you don’t knew your way around the city and would only get yourselves killed if you tried to mix in the fight that’s coming.”

“I am pleased to meet a friend of the mighty Amra,” said Sakumbe. “Put him on the payroll, Conan, and muster the warriors—Derketo, the rascal has not lost any time! Look yonder!”

An uproar arose at the far side of the plaza. Conan sprang from the dais in a flying leap and began shouting orders to the commanders of the black regiments. Messengers dashed off. Somewhere, deep-voiced drums, beaten with the light-brown palms of black hands, began to mutter and mumble.

At the far side of the plaza, a troop of white-clad horsemen burst into view, thrusting with lances and smiting with scimitars at the black masses in front of them. Before their onslaught, the lines of black spearmen crumbled into shapeless masses. Man after man went down before their flashing steel. King Sakumbe’s bodyguard closed up around the dais with the two thrones, one empty and the other occupied by the ponderous bulk of Sakumbe.

Lissa, trembling, clung to Amalric’s arm. “Who fights whom?” she whispered.

“That would be Zehbeh’s Aphaki,” replied Amalric, “trying to slay the black king, here, to make Zehbeh sole ruler.”

“Will they break through to the throne?” she said, pointing to the struggling mass of dark figures across the plaza.

Amalric shrugged and glanced at Sakumbe. The Negro king lolled in his throne, apparently unconcerned. He raised a golden cup to his lips and took a swig of wine. Then he handed a similar cup to Amalric.

“You must be thirsty, white man, after coming in from a long patrol without time to wash or rest,” he said. “Have a drink!”

Amalric shared his drink with Lissa. Across the plaza, the trampling and neighing of horses, the clash of arms, the screams of wounded men merged in an unholy din. Raising his voice to be heard, Amalric said:

“Your Majesty must be very brave, to show so little concern; or else very…” Amalric bit off the end of the sentence.

“Or else very stupid, you mean?” The long laughed musically. “No; I am only realistic. I am much too fat to outrun an active man on foot, let alone a mounted man. So, if I run, my people will cry that all is lost and flee, leaving me to be caught by the pursuers. Whereas, if I stay here, there is a good chance that—ah, there they come!

More black warriors were pouring into the square and adding their weight to the battle. And now the Aphaki mounted force began to give way. Horses, speared, reared and fell on their riders; riders were pulled from their horses by strong black arms or struck from the saddle by javelins. Soon a trumpet sounded harshly; the remaining Aphaki wheeled their mounts and galloped out of the square. The din diminished.

Silence fell, save for the moans of the wounded who Uttered the paving of the plaza. Black women came out of the side streets to look for their men among the fallen, to tend them if alive and to wail for them if dead.

Sakumbe sat placidly on his throne, drinking, until Conan, bloody sword in hand and followed by a knot of befeathered black officers, strode across the plaza.

“Zehbeh and most of his Aphaki got away,” he said. “I had to dent a few of your boys’ skulls to stop them from massacring the Aphaki women and children. We may need them for hostages.”

“It is well,” said Sakumbe. “Have a drink.”

“A good idea,” said Conan, quaffing deeply. Then he glanced at the empty throne beside that of Sakumbe. The black king followed his glance and grinned.

“Well?” said Conan. “How about it? Do I get it?”

Sakumbe gave a giggle. “Trust you to strike while the iron is hot, Conan! You have not changed.”

Then the king spoke in a language that Amalric did not know. Conan grunted a reply, and there was an exchange in this unknown tongue. Askia climbed the stairs of the dais and joined the talk. He spoke vehemently, shooting suspicious, scowling glances at Conan and at Amalric.

At last, Sakumbe silenced the wizard with one sharp word and heaved his huge bulk up out of his throne. “People of Tombalku!” he cried.

All over the plaza, eyes turned towards the dais. Sakumbe continued: “Since the false traitor Zehbeh has fled the city, one of the two thrones of Tombalku is empty. You have seen what a mighty warrior Conan is. Will you have him for your other king?”

After a moment of silence, a few shouts of approval were heard. Amalric noted that the men shouting seemed to be Tibu riders, whom Conan had led in person. The shouts swelled to a roar of approval. Sakumbe pushed Conan into the vacant throne. A mighty yell went up. In the plaza, which had now been cleared of corpses and wounded, the fires were rekindled. Drums began to beat again, this time not for war but for a wild all-night celebration.

Hours later, dizzy with drink and weariness, Amalric dragged himself and Lissa along the streets of Tombalku, under Conan’s guidance, to the modest house he had found for them. Before they parted, Amalric asked Conan:

“What was that speech with Sakumbe, in some tongue I do not know, just before you were enthroned?”

A laugh rumbled deep in Conan’s throat. “We spoke a coastal dialect, which these people don’t understand. Sakumbe was telling me that we should get along fine as co-kings, provided I remembered the color of my skin.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“That it would do me no good to scheme to steal his power, because the pure blacks are now in the overwhelming majority here, and they would never obey a white king.”

“Why not?”

“Because they have been too often massacred and plundered and enslaved by marauding bands of white men from Stygia and Shem, I suppose.”

“What about the wizard, Askia? What was he haranguing Sakumbe about?”

“He was warning the king against us. He claimed his spooks have told him that we shall be the cause of woe and destruction to Tombalku. But Sakumbe shut him up, saying he knew me better than that; that he trusted me farther than he trusted any medicine man.” Conan yawned like a sleepy lion. “Get your little girl to bed before she falls asleep on her feet.”

“How about you?”

“Me? I’m going back. The party has hardly started!”

IV.

A month later, Amalric, covered with sweat and dust, reined in his horse as his squadrons thundered past in a last, grand charge. All morning, and for many earlier mornings, he had drilled them over and over in the elements of civilized cavalry tactics: “Forward, walk!”

“Forward, trot!”

“Forward, canter!”

“Charge! “Wheel!”

“Retreat!”

“Rally!”

“Forward, walk!” And so on, over and over.

Although their evolutions were still ragged, the brown desert hawks seemed to be learning at last. At the start there had been much grumbling and sour looks at these strange foreign methods of fighting. But Amalric, backed up by Conan, had overcome resistance by a combination or even-handed justice and tough discipline. Now he was building a formidable fighting force.

“Give them, ‘form column,’” he said to the trumpeter at his side. At the blast of the trumpet, the riders reined in and, with much jostling and cursing, sorted themselves out in a column. They trotted back toward the walls of Tombalku, past fields where half-naked black peasant women stopped work to lean on their hoes and watch.

Back in Tombalku, Amalric turned in his horse at the cavalry stables and sought his home. As he neared the house, he was surprised to see Askia, the wizard, standing in the street in front of the house and talking with Lissa. The latter’s servant, a Suba woman, stood in the doorway, listening.

“How now, Askia?” said Amalric in no very friendly tone as he came up. “What are you doing here?”

“I watch over the welfare of Tombalku. To do that, I must needs ask questions.”

“I do not like strange men to question my wife in my absence.”

Askia smiled a crooked, malevolent grin. “The fate of the city is more important than your likes and dislikes, white man. Fare you well until next time!”

The wizard walked off, his plumes nodding. Amalric, frowning, followed Lissa into the house. “What was he asking you about?” he asked.

“Oh, about my life in Gazal, and how I had come to meet you.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him what a hero you are, and how you slew the god of the Red Tower.”

Amalric frowned in thought “I wish you had not revealed that. I do not know why, but I am sure lie means to make trouble for us. I ought to go to Conan about it, right now… Why, Lissa, you’re weeping!”

“I—I’m so happy!”

“About what?”

“You acknowledged me as your wife!” Her arms were around his neck as she poured out endearments.

“There, there,” he said. “I should have thought of it before.”

“We must have a wedding feast, tonight!”

“Of course! But meantime, I ought to see Conan—”

“Oh, let that wait! Besides, you are dirty and tired. Eat, drink, and rest first, before your face these fearful men!”

Amalric’s better judgment told him that he ought to go to Conan at once. But he was apprehensive about the meeting. While he was sure that Asltia harbored some nefarious plan against him, he had no definite charge to bring against the! wizard. In the end, he allowed Lissa to persuade him. What with eating and drinking and washing and lovemaking and sleeping, the afternoon slipped away. The sun was low when Amalric set out for the palace.

King Sakumbe’s palace was a large compound—like all the rest of Tombalku, of dun-colored mud brick—just off the central plaza. Sakumbe’s bodyguards, knowing Amalric, quickly passed him into the interior, where thin sheets of beaten gold covered the brick walls and dazzlingly reflected the ruddy glare of the setting sun. He crossed a wide courtyard swarming with the lung’s wives and children and entered the king’s private apartment.

He found the two kings of Tombalku, the white and the black, sprawled on mounds of cushions on a large Bakhariot rug, which in turn covered a mosaic floor. In front of each was a pile of golden coins from many lands, and at the elbow of each stood a large winecup. A slave stood ready with a pitcher to refill each cup.

Both men were bloodshot of eye. Evidently, they had been drinking heavily for many hours. A pair of dice lay on the rug between them.

Amalric bowed formally. “My lords—”

Conan looked blearily up; he wore a bejeweled turban like that which Zehbeh had worn. “Amalric! Flop down on a cushion and take a few throws with us. “Your luck can’t be any worse than mine tonight!”

“My lord, I really cannot afford—”

“Oh, to hell with that! Here’s a stake for you.” Conan scooped a fistful of coins from his pile and slammed it down on the rug. As Amalric lowered himself to the floor, Conan, as if struck by a sudden thought, looked sharply at Sakumbe.

“I’ll tell you, brother King,” he said. “Well make one threw each. If I win, you’ll order the army to march against the king of Kush.”

“And if I win?” said Sakumbe.

“Then they don’t, as you prefer.”

Sakumbe shook his head with a chuckle. “No, brother King, I am not caught so easily. When we are ready, then we shall march, and no sooner.”

Conan struck the rug with his fist “What in Hell’s the matter with you, Sakumbe? You’re not the man you were in the old days. Then you were ready for any adventure; now, all you care about is your food, wine, and women. What’s changed you?”

Sakumbe hiccupped. “In the old days, brother King, I wanted to be a king, with many men to obey my commands and plenty of wine, women, and food. Now I have these things. Why should I risk them in unnecessary adventures?”

“But we must extend our boundaries to the Western Ocean, to gain control of the trade routes that come up from the coast. You know as well as I that Tombalku’s wealth derives from control of trade routes.”

“And when we have conquered the king of Kush and reached the sea, what then?”

“Why, then we should turn our armies eastward, to bring the Ghanata tribes under our rule and stop their raiding.”

“And then, no doubt, you’ll want to strike north or south, and so on forever. Tell me, man, suppose we conquered every nation within a thousand miles of Tombalku and possessed wealth greater than that of the kings of Stygia. What should we do then?”

Conan yawned and stretched. “Why, enjoy life, I suppose: deck ourselves in gold, hunt and feast all day, and drink and wench all night. In between times, we could tell each other lies about our adventures.”

Sakumbe laughed again. “If that is all you want, why, we are doing just those things now! If you want more gold, or food, or drink, or women, ask me and you shall have it.”

Conan shook his head, grunting something inaudible and frowning in a puzzled way. Sakumbe turned to Amalric. “And you, my young friend, did you come here with something to tell us?”

“My lord, I came to ask the lord Conan to visit my house and confirm my marriage to my woman. Afterwards, I thought he might do me the favor to remain for a small repast.”

“Small repast?” said Sakumbe. “Not so, by Ajujo’s nose! We shall make a grand revel of it, with whole roast oxen, rivers of wine, and our drummers and dancers! What say you, brother King?”

Conan belched and grinned. “I’m with you, brother King. Well give Amalric such a wedding feast that he won’t wake up for three days afterwards!”

“There was another matter” said Amalric, a little appalled at the prospect of another celebration of the kind these barbarian kings preferred but not knowing how to refuse. He told about Askia’s interrogation of Lissa.

The two kings frowned when he had finished. Sakumbe said: “Fear not Askia, Amalric. All wizards need to be watched, but this one is a valued servant of mine. Why, without his sorcery—” Sakumbe glanced toward the doorway and spoke: “What would you?”

A bodyguard, standing in the doorway, said: “O Kings, a scout of the Tibu riders would speak with you.”

“Send him in” said Conan.

A lean black in ragged white garments entered and prostrated himself. As he flopped down on his belly, a cloud of dust arose from his garments.

“My lords!” he gasped. “Zehbeh and the Aphald march against us! I sighted them yesterday at the oasis of Kidessa and rode all night to bring word.

Conan and Sakumbe, both suddenly sobered, lurched to their feet Conan said: “Brother King, this means that Zehbeh could be here tomorrow. Order the drums beaten for the muster.” While Sakumbe called in an officer and gave this command, Conan turned to Amalric. “Do you thick you could surprise the Aphaki on the way here and smash them with your riders?”

“Perhaps I can,” said Amalric cautiously. They will outnumber us, but some ravines to the north would be suitable for an ambush…”

V.

An hour later, as the sun set behind the dun brick walls of Tombalku, Conan and Sakumbe mounted the thrones on the dais in the plaza. As the drums thundered the muster, black men of military age streamed into the square. Bonfires were lit Plumed officers pushed warriors into line and thumbed the heads of the men’s spears to assure themselves that these were sharp.

Amalric strode across the square to report to the kings that his riders would be ready to move out by midnight His mind teemed with schemes and stratagems: Whether, if the Aphaki refused to break at the first onslaught, he should break off the fight and retire, to attack again when the Aphaki were spread out and dismounted to attack the walls of Tombalku…

He mounted the steps to where the kings sat, surrounded by black officers to whom they were issuing orders. “My lords—” he began.

A screech interrupted him. Askia appeared beside the throne, pointing at Amalric and shouting at the kings.

“There he is!” screamed the wizard. “The man who slew a god! The man who slew one of my gods!”

The Negroes around the thrones turned startled faces toward Amalric. In the firelight, eyeballs gleamed whitely against dark skins. Their expressions had in them something of awe and fear. Clearly, it was inconceivable to them that a man should slay a god. One who did so must be, in some sort, a god himself.

“What punishment were cruel enough for such blasphemy?” continued Askia. “I demand that the slayer of Ollam-Onga and his wench be turned over to me for torture! Gods, they shall suffer such pain as no mortal has ever suffered in all the aeons—”

“Shut up!” roared Conan. “If Amalric killed the spook of Gazal, the world is better for it. Now get out of here and stop bothering us; we have business.”

“But, Conan—” said Sakumbe.

“These white-skinned devils always hang together!” yelled Askia. “Are you king any longer, Sakumbe? If you are, then order them seized and bound! If you do not know what to do with them— “

“Well—” said Sakumbe.

“Listen!” cried Conan. “If Gazal is no longer haunted by this so-called god, we can capture the place, put its people to work, and get them to teach us their sciences. But first get rid of this prancing he-witch, before I try my edge on him!”

“I demand—” screamed Askia.

“Get rid of him!’” bellowed the Cimmerian, hand on his hilt. “By Crom, do you think I’d deliver an old comrade like Amalric to the mercy of a devil-worshiping cutthroat?”

Sakumbe at last roused himself and sat up straight on his throne. “Go, Asiria!” he said. “Amalric is a good warrior, and you shall not have him. Rather, busy yourself with sorceries to defeat Zehbeh.”

“But I—”

“Go! The fat arm pointed.

Askia foamed with rage. “Very well, I go!” he shouted at last “But you have not heard the last of me, you two!” And away rushed the witch doctor.

Amalric resumed his report on the Tibu riders. What with the constant coming and going of messengers, and of officers reporting on the strength of their commands, it was some time before he had laid his entire plan before the king. Conan made a few suggestions and then said:

“It looks good to me, eh, Sakumbe?”

“If you like it, brother King, it must be good. Go, Amalric, and muster our riders—aieee!” An awful scream suddenly broke from Sakumbe, whose eyes seemed to be starting from his head. He staggered up from his throne, clutching at his throat “I burn! I burn! Save me!”

A terrible phenomenon was taking place on the body of Sakumbe. Although there was no sign of visible fire, no sensation of heat, it was plain to be seen that the man was in fact burning, as surely as if he had been tied to a stake over lighted faggots. His skin blistered, then charred and cracked, while the air was filled with the odor of burning flesh.

“Pour water on him!” shouted Amalric. “Or wind Anything you have!”

Scream after scream from the tortured throat of the black king. Someone threw a bucketful of liquid over him; there was a hiss and a cloud of steam, but the screams continued.

“Crom and Ishtar!” swore Conan, glaring furiously about, “I ought to have killed that dancing devil while he was in reach.”

The screams died away and ceased. The remains of the king—a shriveled, shapeless object, not at all like the living Sakumbe—lay on the surface of the dais in a pool of melted human fat. Some of the plumed officers fled in panic; some prostrated themselves, calling upon their various gods.

Conan seized Amalric’s wrist in a bone-crushing grip. “We must get out of here, quickly!” he said in a low, tense lone. “Come along!”

Amalric did not doubt the Cimmerian’s knowledge of the dangers they faced. He followed Conan down the steps of the dais. In the plaza, all was confusion. Plumed warriors milled around, shouting and gesticulating. Fights had broken out here and there among them.

“Die, slayer of Kordofo!” screamed a voice above the din. Directly in front of Conan, a tall, brown man drew back his arm and hurled a javelin at point-blank range. Only the steel-trap quickness of the barbarian saved Conan. The Cimmerian whirled and crouched, so that the missile passed over him, missing Amalric’s head by a finger’s breadth and burying itself in the body of another warrior.

The attacker drew back his arm to hurl a second spear; but, before he could loose it, Conan’s sword sang from its sheath, whirled in a scarlet arc in the firelight, and struck home. The Tombalkan sank to the ground, cloven from shoulder to breastbone.

“Run!” yelled Conan.

Amalric ran, dodging through the swirling crowds in the plaza. Men shouted and pointed at them; some ran after them.

Amalric, his legs pounding and his lungs laboring, raced down a side street after Conan. Behind them swelled the sounds of pursuit. The street narrowed and bent Ahead of Amalric, Conan suddenly disappeared.

“In here, quickly!” came the voice of the Cimmerian, who had dodged into a space a yard in width between two mud-brick houses.

Amalric squeezed into this alcove and stood silently, gasping for breath, as the pursuit raced past in the street.

“Some more of Kordofo’s kin,” muttered the Cimmerian in the darkness. “They’ve been sharpening their spears for me ever since Sakumbe got rid of Kordofo.”

“What do we do now?” asked Amalric.

Conan turned his head up to the narrow, starlit strip of sky above them. “I think we can climb up to the roofs,” he said.

“How?”

“The way I used to climb a cleft in the rocks, when I was a youth in Cimmeria. Here, hold this sticker for me.”

Conan handed Amalric a javelin, and Amalric realized that the Cimmerian had taken it from the man he had slain. The weapon had a narrow head a full yard in length, of soft iron sharpened to a finely serrated edge. Below the hand grip, a slender iron shank balanced the weight of the head.

Conan grunted softly, braced his back against one wall and his feet against the other, and inched his way up. Soon he became a black silhouette against the stars, and then disappeared. A call came softly down: “Hand up that spear, and come on up.”

Amalric handed up the javelin and, in his turn, inched his way up. The roofs were made of wooden beams, on which was laid down a thick layer of palm fronds and, over that, a layer of clay. Sometimes the clay gave a little as they walked on it, and the crackle of the fronds underneath could be heard.

Following Conan, Amalric crossed several roofs, leaping over the chasms between them. At length, they came to a building of good size, almost on the edge of the plaza.

“I must get Lissa out of here!” said Amalric, desperately anxious.

“One thing at a time,” growled Conan. “We want to know what is happening.”

The confusion in the plaza had somewhat died down. Officers were getting their men into orderly formations once more. On the dais with the two thrones, across the square, stood Aslria in his wizard’s regalia, speaking. Although Amalric could not hear all his words, the wizard was evidently telling the Tombalkans what a great and wise leader he would be to them.

A sound off to Amalric’s left drew the Aquilonian’s attention. At first a murmur, like the crowd noises in the square, it swelled to a roar. A man dashed into the square and shouted to Askia:

“The Aphaki attack the east wall!”

Then all was chaos again. The war drams thundered. Askia screamed orders right and left. A regiment of black spearmen began to file out of the square towards the disturbance. Conan said: “We’d better get out of Tombalku. Whichever side wins, they’ll have our hides. Sakumbe was right; these people will never obey a whiteskin. Go to your house and get your girl ready. Rub your faces and arms with soot from the hearth; that way you’ll be less conspicuous in the dark. Crab whatever money you have. I’ll meet you there with horses. If we hurry, we can get out the west gate before they close it or Zehbeh attacks it Before I go, though, I have one little task.”

Conan stared across the serried ranks of the black warriors at Askia, still shouting and orating on the dais. He hefted the javelin.

“A long cast, but I think I can do it,” he muttered.

The Cimmerian walked deliberately back to the other side of the roof, then made a short ran forward, towards the side facing the square. Just before he reached the edge of the roof, with a mighty whirl of arms and twist of torso, he hurled the weapon. The missile vanished from Amalric’s sight into the darkness above. For three heartbeats he wondered whither it had gone.

Askia suddenly screamed and staggered about, the long shaft protruding from his chest and lashing back and forth with the wizard’s convulsive movements. As the witch-man collapsed on the dais, Conan snarled:

“Let’s go!”

Amalric ran, leaping from roof to roof. To the east, the din of battle rose in a medley of war cries, drumbeats, trumpet calls, screams, and clatter of weapons.

It was not yet midnight when Amalric, Lissa, and Conan reined in their horses on a sandy ridge a mile to the west of Tombalku. They looked back toward the city, now illumined by the lurid glare of a conflagration. Fires had sprung up here and there during the battle, when the Aphaki had swarmed over the eastern wall and fought the black spearmen in the streets. Although the latter were much more numerous, their lack of leaders put them at a disadvantage that all their barbaric valor might not be able to overcome. The Aphaki pressed further and further into the city, while the fires merged into a holocaust.

From the ridge, the hideous clamor of battle and massacre came as a murmur. Conan grunted:

“So much for Tombalku! Whoever wins, we shall have to seek our fortunes elsewhere. I’m for the coast of Kush, where I have friends—and also enemies—and where I can pick up a ship for Argos. What of you?”

“I had not thought,” said Amalric.

“That’s a shapely filly you have there,” said Conan with a grin. The light of the rising moon gleamed on his strong white teeth, shining against his soot-blackened skin. “You can’t drag her over the whole wide world.”

Amalric felt himself bristle at the Cimmerian’s tone. He drew closer to Lissa and slid an arm around her waist, meanwhile dropping his free hand toward his sword hilt. Conan’s grin broadened.

“Fear not,” he said. “I have never been so hard up for women that I’ve had to steal those of my friends. If you two come with me, you can beat your way back to Aquilonia.”

“I cannot return to Aquilonia,” said Amalric,

“Why not?”

“My father was slain in a broil with Count Terentius, who is in favor with King Vilerus. So all my father’s kin had to flee the land, lest Terentius’ agents hunt us down.”

“Oh, had you not heard?” said Conan. “Vilerus died within a six-month; his nephew, Numedides, is now king. All the old king’s hangers-on, they say, have been dismissed, and the exiles recalled. I got it from a Shemite trader. If I were you, I’d scurry home. The new king should find a worthy post for you. Take your little Lissa along and make her a countess or something. As for me, I’m for Kush and the blue sea.”

Amalric glanced back toward the red blaze that had been Tombalku. “Conan,” he said, “why did Askia destroy Sakumbe instead of us, with whom he had a more immediate quarrel?”

Conan shrugged his huge shoulders. “Perhaps he had fingernail parings and the like from Sakumbe but not from us. So he worked what spells he could I have never understood wizardly minds.”

“And why did you take the time to kill Askia?”

Conan stared. “Are you joking, Amalric? Me, leave a slain comrade unavenged? Sakumbe, damn his sweaty black hide, was a friend of mine. Even if he got fat and lazy in his late years, he was a better man than most of the white men I have known.” The Cimmerian sighed gustily and shook his head, as a lion shakes his mane. “Well, he’s dead, and we’re alive. If we want to go on being alive, we had better move on before Zehbeh sends a patrol out to hunt for us. Let’s go!”

The three horses plodded down the western slope of the sandy ridge and broke into a brisk trot to westward.

16. THE TREASURE OF TRANICOS

I. The Painted Men

One moment the glade lay empty; the next, a man stood poised warily at the edge of the bushes. There had been no sound to warn the gray squirrels of his coming; but the gay-hued birds that flitted about in the sunshine of the open space took fright at his sudden appearance and rose in a clamoring cloud. The man scowled and glanced quickly back the way he had come, as if fearing that their flight had betrayed his position to someone unseen. Then he stalked across the glade, placing his feet with care.

For all his massive, muscular build, the man moved with the supple certitude of a leopard. He was naked except for a rag twisted about his loins, and his limbs were crisscrossed with scratches from briars and caked with dried mud. A brown-crusted bandage was knotted about his thickly-muscled left arm. Under his matted, black mane, his face was drawn and gaunt, and his eyes burned like those of a wounded wolf. He limped slightly as he followed the faint path that led across the open space.

Halfway across the glade, he stopped short and whirled catlike, racing back the way he had come, as a long-drawn call quavered out across the forest. To another man it would have seemed merely the howl of a wolf. But this man knew it was no wolf. A Cimmerian, he understood the voices of the wilderness as a city-bred man recognizes the voices of his friends.

Rage burned redly in his bloodshot eyes as he turned once more and hurried along the path. This path, as it left the glade, ran along the edge of a dense thicket that rose in a solid clump of greenery among the trees and bushes. A massive log, deeply embedded in the grassy earth, paralleled the fringe of the thicket, lying between it and the path. When the Cimmerian saw this log, he halted and looked back across the glade. To the average eye there were no signs to show that he had passed; but the evidence was visible to his wilderness-sharpened eyes and therefore to the equally keen eyes of those who pursued him. He snarled silently, like a hunted beast ready to turn at bay.

He walked with deliberate carelessness down the trail, here and there crushing a grass-blade beneath his foot Then, when he had reached the further end of the great log, he sprang upon it, turned, and ran lightly back along it. As the bark had long been worn away by the elements, he left no sign to show the keenest eyes that he had doubled on his trail. When he reached the densest part of the thicket, he faded into it like a shadow, with hardly the quiver of a leaf to mark his passing.

The minutes dragged. The gray squirrels chattered again—then flattened their bodies against the branches and were suddenly mute. Again the glade was invaded.

As silently as the first man had appeared, three other men materialized out of the eastern edge of the clearing: dark-skinned men of short stature, with thickly-muscled chests and arms. They wore beaded buckskin loincloths, and an eagle’s feather was thrust into each black topknot. Their bodies were painted in intricate designs, and they were heavily armed with crude weapons of hammered copper.

They had scanned the glade carefully before showing themselves in the open, for they moved out of the bushes without hesitation, in close single file, treading as softly as leopards and bending down to stare at the path. They were following the trail of the Cimmerian—no easy task even for tireless human bloodhounds. They moved slowly across the glade; then one of them stiffened, grunted, and pointed with his broad-bladed stabbing-spear at a crushed grass-blade where the path entered the forest again. All halted instantly, their beady black eyes questing the forest walls. But their quarry was well hidden. Seeing nothing to awaken suspicion, they presently moved on, more rapidly now. They followed the faint marks that implied their prey was growing careless through weakness or desperation.

They had just passed the spot where the thicket crowded closest to the ancient trail, when die Cimmerian bounded into the path behind them, gripping the weapons he had drawn from his loincloth: a long copper-bladed knife in his left hand and a hatchet of the same material in his right. The attack was so quick and unexpected that the last Pict had no chance to save himself as the Cimmerian plunged his knife between the man’s shoulders. The blade was in the Pict’s heart before he knew he was in peril.

The other two whirled with the steel-trap quickness of savages; but, even as the Cimmerian wrenched the knife out of his first victim’s back, he struck a tremendous blow with the war-ax in his right hand. The second Pict was in the act of turning as the ax fell, splitting his skull to the teeth.

The remaining Pict, a chief by the scarlet tip of his eagle feather, came savagely in to the attack. He was stabbing at the Cimmerian’s breast even as the killer wrenched his ax from the dead man’s head. The Cimmerian had the advantage of a greater intelligence, and a weapon in each hand. The hatchet, checked in its downward sweep, struck the spear aside, and the knife in the Cimmerian’s left hand ripped upward into the painted belly.

An awful howl burst from the Pict’s lips as he crumpled, disemboweled. The cry of baffled, bestial fury was answered by a wild chorus of yells from some distance east of the glade. The Cimmerian started convulsively and wheeled, crouching like a wild thing at bay, lips snarling and shaking the sweat from his face. Blood trickled down his forearm from under the bandage.

With a gasping, incoherent imprecation, he turned and fled westward. He did not pick his way now but ran with all the speed of his long legs, calling on the deep and all but inexhaustible reservoirs of endurance that are Nature’s compensation for a barbaric existence. Behind him for a space the woods were silent. Then a demoniac howling burst out, and he knew his pursuers had found the bodies of his victims. He had no breath for cursing the drops of blood that kept falling to the ground from his freshly-opened wound, leaving a trail a child could follow. He had thought that perhaps these three Picts were all that still pursued him of the war-party that had followed him for over a hundred miles. But he might have known that these human wolves would never quit a blood trail.

The woods were silent again; that meant they were racing after him, marking his path by the betraying blood-drops he could not check. A wind out of the west, laden with a salty dampness that he recognized, blew against his face. Dully, he was amazed. If he was that close to the sea, the chase must have been even longer than he had realized.

But now it was nearly over; even his wolfish vitality was ebbing under the terrible strain. He gasped for breath, and there was a sharp pain in his side. His legs trembled with weariness, and the lame one ached like the cut of a knife in the tendons every time he set the foot to earth. He had followed the instincts of the wilderness that had bred him, straining every nerve and sinew, exhausting every subtlety and artifice to survive. Now, in his extremity, he was obeying another instinct—to find a place to turn at bay and sell his life at a bloody price.

He did not leave the trail for the tangled depths on either hand. It was futile, he knew, to hope to evade his pursuers now. He ran on down the trail while the blood pounded louder and louder in his ears and each breath he drew was a racking, dry-lipped gulp. Behind him a mad baying broke out, token that they were close on his heels and expected swiftly to overhaul their prey. Now they would come as fleet as starving wolves, howling at every leap.

Abruptly he burst from the denseness of the trees and saw, ahead of him, the face of a cliff that rose almost straight from the ground without any intermediate slope. Glances to right and left showed that he faced a solitary dome or crag of rock that rose like a tower from the depths of the forest. As a boy, the Cimmerian had scaled the steep bills of his native land; but, while he might have attempted the near side of this crag had he been in prime condition, he knew that he would have little chance with it in his present wounded and weakened state. By the time he had struggled up twenty or thirty feet, the Picts would burst from the woods and fill him with arrows.

Perhaps, however, the crag’s other faces would prove less inhospitable. The trail curved around the crag to the right Following it, he found that at the west side of the crag it wound up rocky ledges between jagged boulders to a broad ledge near the summit That ledge would be as good a place to die as any. As the world swam before him in a dizzy red mist, he limped up the trail, going on hands and knees in the steeper places, holding his knife between his teeth.

He had not yet reached the jutting ledge when some forty painted savages raced around from the far side of the crag, howling like wolves. At the sight of their prey, their screams rose to a devilish crescendo, and they ran to the foot of the crag, loosing arrows as they came. The shafts showered about the man who climbed doggedly upward, and one stuck in the calf of his leg. Without pausing in his climb, he tore it out and threw it aside, heedless of the less accurate missiles that cracked against the rocks about him. Grimly he hauled himself over the rim of the ledge and turned about, drawing his hatchet and shifting his knife to his hand. He lay glaring down at his pursuers over the rim, only his shock of hair and blazing eyes visible. His chest heaved as he drank in the air in great, shuddering gasps, and he clenched his teeth against a tendency toward nausea.

Only a few more arrows whistled up at him; the horde knew its prey was cornered.

The warriors came on howling, war-axes in hand and leaping agilely over the rocks at the foot of the hill. The first to reach the steep part of the crag was a brawny brave, whose eagle feather was stained scarlet as a token of chieftainship. He halted briefly, one foot on the sloping trail, arrow notched and drawn halfway back, head thrown back and lips parted for an exultant yell.

But the shaft was never loosed. He froze into motionlessness as the blood lust in his black eyes gave way to a look of startled recognition. With a whoop he gave back, throwing his arms wide to check the rush of his howling braves.

Although the man on the ledge above them understood the Pictish tongue, he was too far away to catch the significance of the staccato phrases snapped at the warriors by the crimson-feathered chief.

They all ceased their yelping and stood mutely staring up—not, it seemed to the man on the ledge, at him, but at the hill itself. Then, without further hesitation, they unstrung their bows and thrust them into buckskin cases at their girdles, turned their backs, and trotted back along the trail by which they had come, to disappear around the curve of the cliff without a backward look.

The Cimmerian glared in amazement. He knew the Pictish nature too well not to recognize the finality expressed in this departure. He knew they would not come back; they were heading for their villages, a hundred miles to the east.

But he could not understand it. What was there about his refuge that would cause a Pictish war-party to abandon a chase it had followed so long with all the passion of hungry wolves? He knew there were sacred places, spots set aside as sanctuaries by the various clans, and that a fugitive, taking refuge in one of these sanctuaries, was safe from the clan that raised it. But the different tribes seldom respected the sanctuaries of other tribes, and the men who pursued him certainly had no sacred spots of their own in this region. They were men of the Eagle, whose villages lay far to the east, adjoining the country of the Wolf Picts.

It was the Wolves who had captured the Cimmerian when he had plunged into the wilderness in his flight from Aquilonia, and it was they who had given him to the Eagles in return for a captured Wolf chief. The Eagle men had a red score against the giant Cimmerian, and now it was redder still, for his escape had cost the life of a noted war chief. That was why they had followed him so relentlessly, over broad rivers and rugged hills and through long leagues of gloomy forest, the hunting grounds of hostile tribes. And now the survivors of that long chase had turned back when their enemy was run to earth and trapped. He shook his head, unable to understand it.

He rose gingerly, dizzy from the long grind and scarcely able to realize that it was over. His limbs were stiff; his wounds ached. He spat dryly and cursed, rubbing his burning, bloodshot eyes with the back of his thick wrist He blinked and took stock of his surroundings. Below him the green wilderness billowed away and away in a solid mass, and above its western rim rose a steel-blue haze that, he knew, hung over the ocean. The wind stirred his black mane, and the salt tang of the atmosphere revived him. He expanded his enormous chest and drank it in. Then he turned stiffly and painfully about, growling at the twinge in his bleeding calf, and investigated the ledge on which he stood. Behind it rose a sheer, rocky cliff to the crest of the crag, some thirty feet above him. A narrow, ladderlike stair of handholds had been niched into the rock, and a few feet from the foot of this ascent a cleft, wide and tall enough for a man to enter, opened in the wall. He limped to the cleft, peered in, and grunted.

The sun, hanging high above the western forest, threw a shaft of light down the cleft, revealing a tunnel-like cavern beyond with an arch at its end. In that arch, illuminated by the beam, was set a heavy, iron-bound, oaken door.

This was amazing. This country was a howling wilderness. The Cimmerian knew that for a thousand miles, this western coast ran bare and uninhabited except by the villages of the ferocious sea-land tribes, who were even less civilized than their forest-dwelling brothers.

The nearest outposts of civilization were the frontier settlements along Thunder River, hundreds of miles to the east. The Cimmerian knew that he was the only white man ever to cross the wilderness that lay between that river and the coast. Yet that door was no work of Picts.

Being unexplainable, it was an object of suspicion, and suspiciously he approached it, ax and knife ready. Then, as his bloodshot eyes became more accustomed to the soft gloom that lurked on either side of the narrow shaft of sunlight, he noticed something else. The tunnel widened before it came to the door, and along the walls were ranged massive, iron-bound chests. A blaze of comprehension came into his eyes. He bent over one, but the lid resisted his efforts. He lifted his hatchet to shatter the ancient lock; then changed his mind and limped toward the arched door. Now his bearing was more confident, and his weapons hung at his sides. He pushed against the ornately-carven door, and it swung inward without resistance.

Then, with a lightninglike abruptness, his manner changed again. He recoiled with a startled curse, knife and hatchet flashing as they leaped to positions of defense. An instant he poised there, like a statue of fierce menace, craning his massive neck to glare through the door.

He was looking into a cave, darker than the tunnel, but meagerly illuminated by the dim glow that came from the great jewel that stood on a tiny ivory pedestal in the center of the great ebony table, about which sat those silent shapes whose appearance had so startled the Cimmerian.

These did not move, nor did they turn their heads toward him; but the bluish mist that overhung the chamber seemed to move like a living thing.

“Well,” he said harshly, “are you all drunk?”

There was no reply. He was not a man easily abashed, yet now he felt disconcerted.

“You might offer me a glass of that wine you’re swigging,” he growled, his natural belligerence aroused by the awkwardness of the situation. “By Crom, you show damned poor courtesy to a man who’s been one of your own brotherhood. Are you going to—”

His voice trailed off into silence, and in silence he stood and stared a while at those bizarre figures sitting so silently about the great ebon table.

“They’re not drunk,” he muttered presently. “They’re not even drinking. What devil’s game is this? He stepped across the threshold. Instantly the movement of the blue mist quickened. The stuff flowed together and solidified, and the Cimmerian found himself fighting for his life against huge black hands that darted for his throat.

II. Men from the Sea

Belesa idly stirred a sea shell with a daintily slippered toe, mentally comparing its delicate pink edges to the first pink haze of dawn that rose over the misty beaches. Dawn was now past, but the early sun had not yet dispelled the light, pearly clouds that drifted over the waters to westward.

She lifted her splendidly-shaped head and stared out over a scene alien and repellent to her, yet drearily familiar in every detail. From her small feet, the tawny sands ran to meet the softly-lapping waves, which stretched westward to be lost in the biue haze of the horizon. She was standing on the southern curve of a wide bay; south of her the land sloped up to the low ridge that formed one horn on that bay. From that ridge, she knew, one could look southward across the bare waters into infinities of distance as absolute as the view to the westward and to the northward.

Glancing listlessly landward, she absently scanned the fortress, which had been her home for the past year and a half. Against a vague, pearl-and-cerulean morning sky floated the golden and scarlet flag of her house. But the red falcon on its golden field awakened no enthusiasm in her youthful bosom, although it had flown over many a bloody field in the far south.

She made out the figures of men toiling in the gardens and fields that huddled near the fort, seeming to shrink from the gloomy rampart of the forest that fringed the open belt to the east, stretching north and south as far as she could see. She feared that forest, and that fear was shared by everyone in that tiny settlement. Nor was it an idle fear. Death lurked in those whispering depths— death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous—hidden, painted, tireless, unrelenting.

She sighed and moved toward the water’s edge, with no set purpose in mind. The dragging days were all of one color, and the world of cities and courts and gaiety seemed thousands of miles and ages of time away. Again she sought in vain for the reason that had caused a count of Zingara to flee with his retainers to this wild coast, hundreds of miles from the land that bore him, exchanging the castle of his ancestors for a hut of logs.

Belesa’s eyes softened at the light patter of small bare feet across the sands.

A young girl came running over the low, sandy ridge, naked and dripping, with her flaxen hair plastered wetly to her small head. Her wistful eyes were wide with excitement.

“Lady Belesa!” she cried, rendering the Zingaran words with a soft, Ophirean accent. “Oh, Lady Belesa!”

Breathless from her scamper, the child stammered and gestured with her hands. Belesa smiled and put an arm about her, not minding that her silken dress came in contact with the damp, warm body. In her lonely, isolated life, Belesa had bestowed the tenderness of a naturally affectionate nature on the pitiful waif she had taken away from a brutal master on that long voyage up from the southern coasts.

“What are you trying to tell me, Tina? Get your breath, child.”

“A ship!” cried the girl, pointing southward. “I was swimming in a pool that the tide left in the sand, on the other side of the ridge, and I saw it! A ship sailing up out of the south!”

She tugged timidly at Belesa’s hand, her slender body aquiver. And Belesa felt her own heart beat faster at the mere thought of an unknown visitor. They had seen no sail since coming to that barren shore.

Tina flitted ahead of her over the yellow sands, skirting the little pools that the outgoing tide had left in shallow depressions. They mounted the low, undulating ridge. Tina poised there, a slender white figure against the clearing sky, with her wet, flaxen hair blowing about her thin face and a frail arm outstretched.

“Look, my lady!”

Belesa had already seen it: a billowing white sail, filled with the freshening south wind, bearing up along the coast a few miles from the point. Her heart skipped a beat; a small thing can loom large in colorless, isolated lives, but Belesa felt a premonition of strange and violent events. She felt that it was not by chance that this sail was wafting up this lonely coast. There was no harbor town to the north, though one sailed to the ultimate shores of ice; and the nearest port to the south must be nearly a thousand miles away. What had brought this stranger to lonely Korvela Bay, as her uncle had named the place when he landed?

Tina pressed close to her mistress, apprehension pinching her thin features.

“Who can it be, my lady?” she stammered, the wind whipping color to her pale cheeks. “Is it the man the count fears?”

Belesa looked down at her, her brow shadowed. “Why do you say that, child? How do you know my uncle fears anyone?”

“He must,” returned Tina naively, “or he would never have come to hide in this lonely spot. Look, my lady, how fast it comes!”

“We must go and inform my uncle,” murmured Belesa. “The fishing boats have not yet gone out, so that none of the men has seen that sail. Get your clothes, Tina. Hurry!”

The child scampered down the low slope to the pool where she had been bathing when she sighted the craft and snatched up the slippers, tunic, and girdle that she had left lying on the sand. She skipped back up the ridge, hopping as she dressed in mid-flight.

Belesa, anxiously watching the approaching sail, caught her hand, and they hurried toward the fort. A few moments after they had entered the gate of the log palisade that inclosed the building, the strident blare of a trumpet startled the workers in the gardens and the men who were opening the boathouse doors to push the fishing boats on their rollers down to the water’s edge.

Every man outside the fort dropped his tool or left his task and ran for the stockade without pausing to look about for the cause of the alarm. As the straggling lines of fleeing men converged on the open gate, every head was twisted over its shoulder to gaze fearfully at the dark line of woodland to the east; not one looked seaward. They thronged through the gate, shouting questions at the sentries who patrolled the footwalk below the up-jutting points of the logs that formed the palisade:

“What is it?”

“Why are we called in?”

“Are the Picts coming?”

For answer, one taciturn man-at-arms in worn leather and rusty steel pointed southward. From his vantage point the sail was now visible to the men who climbed up on the footwalk, staring toward the sea.

On a small lookout tower on the roof of the manor house, which was built of logs like the other buildings in the inclosure, Count Valenso of Korzetta watched the on-sweeping sail as it rounded the point of the southern horn. The count was a lean, wiry man of medium height and late middle age; dark, somber of expression. His trunk-hose and doublet were of black silk, the only color about his costume being that of the jewels that twinkled on his sword hilt and the wine-red cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders. He nervously twisted his thin black mustache and turned his gloomy eyes on his seneschal, a leather-featured man in steel and satin.

“What do you make of it, Galbro?”

“A carack, sir,” answered the seneschal. “It is a carack trimmed and rigged like a craft of the Barachan pirates —look there!”

A chorus of cries below them echoed his ejaculation; the ship had cleared the point and was slanting inward across the bay. And all saw the flag that suddenly broke forth from the masthead: a black flag with the outline of a scarlet hand. The people within the stockade stared wildly at that dread emblem. Then all eyes turned up toward the tower, where the master of the fort stood somberly, his cloak whipping about him in the wind.

“It is a Barachan, all right,” grunted Galbro. “And unless I am mad, ‘tis Strombanni’s Red Hand. What is he doing on this naked coast?”

“He can mean us no good,” growled the count. A glance below showed him that the massive gates had been closed and that the captain of his men-at-arms, gleaming in steel, was directing his men to their stations, some to the ledges, some to the lower loopholes. He was massing his main strength along the western wall, which contained the gate.

A hundred men—soldiers, vassals, and serfs—and their dependents had followed Valenso into exile. Of these, some forty were men-at-arms, wearing helmets and suits of mail, armed with swords, axes, and crossbows. The rest were toilers, without armor save for shirts of toughened leather; but they were brawny stalwarts, skilled in the use of their hunting bows, woodsmen’s axes, and boar spears. They took their places, scowling at their hereditary enemies. For more than a century the pirates of the Barachan Isles, a tiny archipelago off the southwestern coast of Zingara, had preyed on the people of the mainland.

The men on the stockade gripped their bows or boar spears and stared somberly at the carack as it swung inshore, its brasswork flashing in the sun. They could see the figures swarming on the deck and hear the lusty yells of the seamen. Steel twinkled along the rail.

The count had retired from the tower, shooing his niece and her eager protegee before him. Having donned helmet and cuirass, he betook himself to the palisade to direct the defense. His subjects watched him with moody fatalism. They intended to sell their lives as dearly as they could, but they had scant hope of victory, in spite of their strong position. They were oppressed by a conviction of doom. More than a year on that naked coast, with the brooding threat of that devil-haunted forest looming forever at their backs, had shadowed their souls with gloomy forebodings. Their women stood silently in the doorways of their huts, inside the stockade, and quieted the clamor of their children.

Belesa and Tina watched eagerly from an upper window in the manor house, and Belesa felt the child’s tense little body quiver within the crook of her protecting arm.

“They will cast anchor near the boathouse,” murmured Belesa. “Yesl There goes their anchor, a hundred yards offshore. Do not tremble so, child! They cannot take the fort. Perhaps they wish only fresh water and supplies; perhaps a storm blew them into these seas.”

“They are coming ashore in the longboat!” said the child. “Oh, my lady, I am afraid! They are big men in armor! Look how the sun strikes fire from their pikes and helmets! Will they eat us?”

Belesa burst into laughter in spite of her apprehension. “Of course not! Who put that idea into your head?”

“Zingelito told me the Barachans eat women.”

“He was teasing you. The Barachans are cruel, but they are no worse than the Zingaran renegades who call themselves buccaneers. Zingelito was a buccaneer once.”

“He was cruel,” muttered the child. “I’m glad the Picts cut his head off.”

“Hush, Tina!” Belesa shuddered slightly. “You must not speak that way. Look, the pirates have reached the shore. They line the beach, and one of them is coming toward the fort. That must be Strombanni.”

“Ahoy, the fort there!” came a hail in a voice as gusty as the wind. “I come under a flag of truce!”

The count’s helmeted head appeared over the points of the palisade. His stern face, framed in steel, surveyed the pirate somberly. Strombanni had halted just within earshot: a big man, bareheaded, with hair of the tawny hue sometimes found in Argos. Of all the sea-rovers who haunted the Barachans, none was more famed for deviltry than he.

“Speak!” commanded Valenso. “I have scant desire to convene with one of your breed.”

Strombanni laughed with his lips, not with his eyes. “When your galleon escaped me in that squall off the Trallibes last year, I never thought to meet you again on the Pictish coast, Valenso!” said he. “But I wondered at the time what your destination might be. By Mitra, had I known, I should have followed you then! I got the start of my life a little while ago, when I saw your scarlet falcon floating over a fortress where I had thought to see naught but bare beach. You have found it, of course?”

“Found what?” snapped the count impatiently.

“Do not try to dissemble with me!” The pirate’s stormy nature showed itself in a flash of impatience. “I know why you came here, and I have come for the same reason. I will not be balked. Where is your ship?”

“That is none of your affair.”

“You have none,” confidently asserted the pirate. “I see pieces of ship’s mast in that stockade. It must have been wrecked somehow, after you landed here. If you’d had a ship, you would have sailed away with your plunder long ago.”

“What are you talking about, damn you?” yelled the count “My plunder? Am I a Barachan, to bum and loot? Even so, what should I loot on this bare coast?” “That which you came to find,” answered the pirate coolly. “The same thing I’m after and mean to have. But I shall be easy to deal with. Just give me the loot and I’ll go my way and leave you in peace.”

“You must be mad!” snarled Valenso.

“I came here to find solitude and seclusion, which I enjoyed until you crawled out of the sea, you yellow-headed dog. Begonel I did not ask for a parley, and I weary of this empty talk. Take your rogues and go your ways.”

“When I go, I’ll leave that hovel in ashes!” roared the pirate in a transport of rage. “For the last time: will you give me the loot in return for your lives? I have you hemmed in here, and a hundred and fifty men ready to cut your throats at my word.”

For answer, the count made a quick gesture with his hand below the points of the palisade. Almost instantly, a shaft hummed venomously through a loophole and splintered on Strombanni’s breastplate. The pirate yelled ferociously, bounded back, and ran toward the beach, with arrows whistling all about him. His men roared and came on like a wave, blades gleaming in the sun.

“Curse you, dog!” raved the count, felling the offending archer with his iron-clad fist. “Why did you not strike his throat above the gorget? Ready with your bows, men; here they come!”

But Strombanni checked the headlong rush of his men. The pirates spread out in a long line that overlapped the extremities of the western wall; they advanced warily, loosing their shafts as they came. Although their archery was considered superior to that of the Zingarans, they had to rise to loose their longbows. Meanwhile the Zingarans, protected by their stockade, sent crossbow bolts and hunting arrows back with careful aim.

The long arrows of the Barachans arched over the stockade and quivered upright in the earth. One struck the windowsill over which Belesa watched. Tina cried out and flinched, staring at the vibrating shaft.

The Zingarans sent their missiles in return, aiming and loosing without undue haste. The women had herded the children into their huts and now stoically awaited whatever fate the gods had in store for them.

The Barachans were famed for their furious and headlong style of battling, but they were as wary as they were ferocious and did not intend to waste their strength vainly in direct charges against the ramparts. They crept forward in their widespread formation, taking advantage of every natural depression and bit of vegetation— which was not much, for the ground had been cleared on all sides of the fort against the threat of Pictish raids.

As the Barachans got nearer to the fort, the defenders’ archery became more effective. Here and there a body lay prone, its back-piece glinting in the sun and a quarrel shaft standing up from armpit or neck. Wounded men thrashed and moaned.

The pirates were quick as cats, always shifting their position, and they were protected by their light armor. Their constant raking archery was a continual menace to the men in the stockade. Still, it was evident that as long as the battle remained an exchange of archery, the advantage must remain with the sheltered Zingarans.

Down at the boathouse on the beach, however, men were at work with axes. The count cursed sulfurously when he saw the havoc they were making among his boats, which had been built laboriously of planks sawn out of solid logs.

“They’re making a mantlet, curse them!” he raged. “A sally now, before they complete it—while they are scattered—”

Galbro shook his head, glancing at the unarmored workers with their awkward pikes. “Their arrows would riddle us, and we should be no match for them in hand-to-hand fighting. We must keep behind our walls and trust to our archery.”

“Well enough,” growled Valenso, “if we can keep them outside our walls.”

Time passed while the inconclusive archery duel continued. Then a group of thirty men advanced, pushing before them a great shield made of planks from the boats and the timbers of the boathouse itself. They had found an oxcart and mounted the mantlet on the wheels, which were great solid disks of oak. As they rolled it ponderously before them, it hid them from the sight of the defenders except for glimpses of their moving feet.

It rolled toward the gate, and the straggling line of archers converged toward it, shooting as they ran.

“Shoot!” yelled Valenso, going livid. “Stop them ere they reach the gate!”

A storm of arrows whistled across the palisade and feathered themselves harmlessly in the thick wood. A derisive yell answered the volley. Shafts were Ending loopholes now as the rest of the pirates drew nearer; a soldier reeled and fell from the ledge, gasping and choking, with an arrow through his throat.

“Shoot at their feet!” screamed Valenso. “And forty men at the gate with pikes and axes! The rest hold the wall!”

Bolts ripped into the sand before the moving shield. A bloodthirsty howl announced that one had found its target beneath the edge. A man staggered into view, cursing and hopping as he strove to withdraw the quarrel that skewered his foot In an instant he was feathered by a dozen arrows.

But, with a deep-throated shout, the pirates pushed the mantlet against the gate. Through an aperture in the center of the shield they thrust a heavy, iron-tipped boom, which they had made from the ridgepole of the boathouse. Driven by arms knotted with brawny muscles and backed with bloodthirsty fury, the boom began to thunder against the gate. The massive gate groaned and staggered, while from the stockade bolts poured in a steady stream; seme struck home, but the wild men of the sea were afire with fighting lust.

With deep shouts they swung the ram, while from all sides the others closed in, braving the weakened anow-storm from the walls and shooting back fash and hard. Cursing like a madman, the count sprang from the wall and ran to the gate, drawing his sword. A clump of desperate men-at-arms closed in behind him, gripping their spears. In another moment the gate would cave in, and they must stop the gap with their bodies.

Then a new note entered the clamor: a trumpet, blaring stridently from the ship.

On the crosstree, a figure waved and gesticulated wildly. The thunder of the ram ceased, and Strombanni’s bellow rose above the racket:

“Waitl Wait, damn you, listen!”

In the silence that followed that bull’s bellow, the blare of the trumpet was plainly heard, and a voice that shouted something that was unintelligible to the people inside the stockade. But Strombanni understood, for his voice was lifted again in profane command. The ram was released, and the mantlet began to recede from the gate as swiftly as it had advanced. Pirates who had been trading shafts with the defenders began picking up their wounded fellows and helping them hastily back to the beach.

“Look!” cried Tina at her window, jumping up and down in wild excitement, “They flee! All of them! They are running to the beach! Look! They have abandoned the shield! They leap into the longboat and pull for the ship! Oh, my lady, have we won?”

“I think not.” Belesa was staring seaward. “Look!”

She threw the curtains aside and leaned from the window. Her clear young voice rose above the amazed shouts of the defenders, who turned their heads in the direction she pointed. They sent up a deep yell as they saw another ship swinging majestically around the southern point. Even as they watched, she broke out the royal flag of Zingara.

Strombanni’s pirates were swarming up the sides of their carack and heaving up the anchor. Before the stranger had progressed halfway across the bay, the Red Hand was vanishing around the northern horn.

III. The Dark Stranger

The blue mist had condensed into a monstrous black figure, dimly seen and not quite definite, which filled the hither end of the cave, blotting out the still, seated figures behind. There was an impression of shagging pointed ears, and close-set horns.

Even as the great arms shot out like tentacles toward his throat, the Cimmerian, quick as a flash, struck at them with his Pictish ax. It was like chopping at a trunk of the ebony tree. The force of the blow broke the handle of the tomahawk and sent the copper head flying with a clank against the side of the runnel; but, so far as the Cimmerian could tell, the blade had not bitten into the flesh of his foe at all. It took more than an ordinary edge to pierce a demon’s hide. And then the great fingers closed upon his throat, to break his neck as if it were a reed. Not since he had fought Baal-Pteor hand to hand in the temple of Hanuman in Zamboula had Conan felt such a grip upon him.

As the hairy fingers touched his skin, the barbarian tensed the thickly-corded muscles of his massive neck, drawing his head down between his shoulders to give his unnatural foe the least possible purchase. He dropped the knife and the broken hatchet handle, seized the huge black wrists, swung his legs upward and forward, and drove both bare heels with all his might against the chest of the thing, straightening out his long body.

The tremendous impulse of the Cimmerian’s mighty back and legs tore his neck loose from that lethal grip and sent him shooting like an arrow back up the tunnel down which he had come. He landed on the stone floor on his back and flipped over in a back somersault on to his feet, ignoring the bruises and ready to flee or fight as occasion required.

As he stood there, however, glaring with bared teeth at the door to the inner cave, no black, monstrous form shambled out after him. Almost as soon as Conan had wrenched himself loose, the form had begun to dissolve into the blue mist from which it had condensed. Now it was all gone.

The man stood poised, ready to whirl and bound up the tunnel. The superstitious fears of the barbarian whirled through his mind. Although he was fearless to the point of rashness toward men and beasts, the supernatural could still throw him into terror-stricken panic.

So this was why the Picts had gone! He should have suspected some such danger. He remembered such demonological lore as he had picked up in his youth in cloudy Cimmeria and later in his wanderings over most of the civilized world. Fire and silver were said to be deadly to devils, but he had neither at the moment.

Still, if such spirits took gross material form, they were in some measure subject to the limitations of that form. This lumbering monster, for instance, could run no faster than a beast of its general size and shape, and the Cimmerian thought that he could outdistance it if need be.

Plucking up his wavering courage, the man shouted with boyish braggadocio: “Ho there, ugly-face, aren’t you coming out?”

No reply; the blue mist swirled in the chamber but remained in its diffused form. Fingering his bruised neck, the Cimmerian recalled a Pictish tale of a demon sent by a wizard to slay a group of strange men from the sea, but who was then confined in that cave by this same wizard lest, having once been conjured across nighted gulfs and given material form, he turn upon those who had snatched him from his native hells and rend them.

Once more, the Cimmerian turned his attention to the chests that lay ranked along the walls of the tunnel…

Back at the fort, the count snapped: “Out, quick!” He tore at the bars of the gate, crying: “Drag that mantlet in before these strangers can land!”

“But Strombanni has fled,” expostulated Galbro, “and yonder ship is Zingaran.”

“Do as I order!” roared Valenso. “My enemies are not all foreigners! Out, dogs, thirty of you, and fetch the mantlet into the stockade!”

Before the Zingaran ship had dropped anchor, about where the pirate ship had docked, Valenso’s thirty stalwarts had trundled the device back to the gate and manhandled it sideways through the opening.

Up in the window of the manor house, Tina asked wonderingly: “Why does not the count open the gate and go to meet them? Is he afraid that the man he fears might be on that ship?”

“What mean you, Tina?” asked Belesa uneasily. Although no man to run from a foe, the count had never vouchsafed a reason for his self-exile. But this conviction of Tina’s was disquieting, almost uncanny. Tina, however, seemed not to have heard her question.

“The men are back in the stockade,” she said. “The gate is closed again and barred. The men still keep their places along the wall. If that ship was chasing Strombanni, why did it not pursue him? It is not a war galley but a carack like the other. Look, a boat is coming ashore. I see a man in the bow, wrapped in a dark cloak.”

When the boat had grounded, this man paced in leisurely fashion up the sands, followed by three others. He was a tall, wiry man in black silk and polished steel.

“Halt!” roared the count “I will parley with your leader, alone!”

The tall stranger removed his helmet and made a sweeping bow. His companions halted, drawing their wide cloaks about them, and behind them the sailors leaned on their oars and stared at the flag floating over the palisade.

When the leader came within easy call of the gate, he said: “Why, surely, there should be no suspicion between gentlemen in these naked seas!”

Valenso stared at him suspiciously. The stranger was dark, with a lean, predatory face and a thin black mustache. A bunch of lace was gathered at his throat, and there was lace on his wrists.

“I know you,” said Valenso slowly. “You are Black Zarono, the buccaneer.”

Again the stranger bowed with stately elegance. “And none could fail to recognize the red falcon of the Korzettas!”

“It seems this coast has become a rendezvous of all the rogues of the southern seas,” growled Valenso. “What do you wish?”

“Come, come, sir!” remonstrated Zarono. “This is a churlish greeting to one who has just rendered you a service. Was not that Argossean dog, Strombanni, just now thundering at your gate? And did he not take to his sea-heels when he saw me round the point?”

“True,” grunted the count grudgingly, “although there is little to choose between a pirate and a renegade.”

Zarono laughed without resentment and twirled his mustache. “You are blunt in speech, my lord. But I desire only leave to anchor in your bay, to let my men hunt for meat and water in your woods, and, perhaps, to drink a glass of wine myself at your board.”

“I see not how I can stop you,” growled Valenso. “But understand this, Zarono: no man of your crew shall come within this palisade. If one approaches closer than thirty paces, he shall presently find an arrow through his gizzard. And I charge you to do no harm to my gardens or the cattle in the pens. One steer you may have for fresh meat, but no more. And, in case you think otherwise, we can hold this fort against your ruffians.”

“You were not holding it very successfully against Strombanni,” the buccaneer pointed out with a mocking smile.

“You’ll find no wood to build mantlets this time, unless you fell trees or strip it from your own ship,” assured the count grimly. “And your men are not Barachan archers; they’re no better bowmen than mine. Besides, what little loot you’d find in this castle would not be worth the price.”

“Who speaks of loot and warfare?” protested Zarono. “Nay, my men are sick to stretch their legs ashore, and nigh to scurvy from chewing salt pork, May they come ashore? I guarantee their good conduct.”

Valenso grudgingly signified his consent. Zarono bowed, a shade sardonically, and retired with a tread as measured and stately as if he trod the polished crystal floor of the Kordavan royal court—where indeed, unless rumor lied, he had once been a familiar figure.

“Let no man leave the stockade,” Valenso ordered Galbro. “I trust not that renegade cur. The fact that he drove Strombanni from our gate is no guarantee that he, too, would not cut our throats.”

Galbro nodded. He was well aware of the enmity that existed between the pirates and the Zingaran buccaneers. The pirates were mainly Argosssean sailors turned outlaw; to the ancient feud between Argos and Zingara was added, in the case of the freebooters, the rivalry of opposing interests. Both breeds preyed on the shipping and the coastal towns; and they preyed upon each other with equal rapacity.

So no one stirred from the palisade while the buccaneers came ashore, dark-faced men in flaming silk and polished steel, with scarves bound around their heads and golden hoops in their ears. They camped on the beach, a hundred and seventy-odd of them, and Valenso noticed that Zarono posted lookouts on both points. They did not molest the gardens, and the steer designated by Valenso, shouting from the palisade, was driven forth and slaughtered. Fires were kindled on the sand, and a wattled cask of ale was brought ashore and broached. Other kegs were filled with water from the spring that rose a short distance south of the fort, and men with crossbows in their hands began to straggle toward the woods. Seeing this, Valenso was moved to shout to Zarono, striding back and forth through the camp:

“Do not let your men go into the forest! Take another steer from the pens if you lack enough meat. But if the men go tramping into the woods, they may fall foul of the Picts. Whole tribes of the painted devils live back in the forest. We beat off an attack shortly after we landed, and since then six of my men have been murdered in the forest at one time or another. There’s peace between us just now, but it hangs by a thread. Do not risk stirring them up!”

Zarono shot a startled glance at the lowering woods, as if he expected to see a horde of savage figures lurking there. Then he bowed and said: “I thank you for the warning, my lord.” He shouted for his men to come back, in a rasping voice that contrasted strangely with his courtly accents when addressing the count If Zarono’s vision could have penetrated the leafy screen, he would have been even more apprehensive. He would have seen the sinister figure that lurked there, watching the strangers with inscrutable black eyes—a hideously-painted warrior, naked but for his doeskin breechclout, with a hornbill feather drooping over his left ear.

As evening drew on, a thin skim of gray crawled up from the sea-rim and overcast the sky. The sun sank in a wallow of crimson, touching the tips of the black waves with blood. Fog crawled out of the sea and lapped at the feet of the forest, curling about the stockade in smoky wisps. The fires on the beach shone dull crimson through the mist, and the singing of the buccaneers seemed deadened and far away. They had brought old sail canvas from the carack and made shelters along the strand, where beef was still roasting and the ale granted them by their captain was doled out sparingly.

The great gate was shut and barred. Soldiers stolidly tramped the ledges of the palisade, pike on shoulder, beads of moisture glistening on their steel caps. They glanced uneasily at the fires on the beach and stared with even greater fixity toward the forest, now a vague, dark line in the crawling fog. The compound now lay empty of life—a bare, darkened space. Candles gleamed feebly through the cracks of the hub, and light streamed from the windows of the manor. There was silence except for the tread of the sentries, the drip of water from the eaves, and the distant singing of the buccaneers.

Some faint echo of this singing penetrated into the great hall, where Valenso sat at wine with his unsolicited guest.

“Your men make merry, sir,” grunted the count.

“They are glad to feel the sand under their feet again,” answered Zarono. “It has been a wearisome voyage—aye, a long, stern chase.” He lifted his goblet gallantly to the unresponsive girl who sat on his host’s right, and drank ceremoniously.

Impassive attendants ranged the walls: soldiers with pikes and helmets, servants in satin coats. Valenso’s household in this wild land was a shadowy reflection of the court he had kept in Kordava.

The manor house, as he insisted on calling it, was a marvel for that remote place. A hundred men had worked night and day for months to build it. While its log-walled exterior was devoid of ornamentation, within it was as nearly a copy of Korzetta Castle as possible. The logs that composed the walls of the hall were hidden with heavy silk tapestries, worked in gold. Ship’s beams, stained and polished, formed the lofty ceiling. The floor was covered with rich carpets. The broad stair that led up from the hall was likewise carpeted, and its massive balustrade had once been a galleon’s rail.

A fire in the wide stone fireplace dispelled the dampness of the night. Candles in the great silver candelabrum in the center of the broad mahogany board lit the hall, throwing long shadows on the stair.

Count Valenso sat at the head of that table, presiding over a company composed of his niece, his piratical guest, Calbro, and the captain of the guard. The smallness of the company emphasized the proportions of the vast board, where fifty guests might have sat at ease.

“You followed Strombanni?” asked Valenso. “You drove him this far afield?”

“I followed Strombanni,” laughed Zarono, “but he was not fleeing from me. Strombanni is not the man to flee from anyone. Nay; he came seeking for something— something I, too, desire.”

“What could tempt a pirate or a buccaneer to this naked land?” muttered Valenso, staring into the sparkling contents of his goblet.”

“What could tempt a Count of Zingara?” retorted Zarono, an avid light burning in his eyes.

“The rottenness of the royal court might sicken a man of honor,” remarked Valenso.

“Korzettas of honor have endured its rottenness with tranquility for several generations,” said Zarono bluntly. “My lord, indulge my curiosity: Why did you sell your lands, load your galleon with the furnishings of your castle, and sail over the horizon out of the knowledge of the regent and the nobles of Zingara? And why settle here, when your sword and your name might carve out a place for you in any civilized land?”

Valenso toyed with the golden seal-chain about his neck. “As to why I left Zingara,” he said, “that is my own affair. But it was chance that left me stranded here. I had brought all my people ashore, and much of the furnishings you mentioned, intending to build a temporary habitation. But my ship, anchored out there in the bay, was driven against the cliffs of the north point and wrecked by a sudden storm out of the west. Such storms are common enough at certain times of the year. After that, there was naught to do but remain and make the best of it.”

“Then you would return to civilization, if you could?”

“Not to Kordava. But perhap to some far clime—to Vendhya, or even Khitai…”

“Do you not find it tedious here, my lady?” asked Zarono, for the first time addressing himself directly to Belesa.

Hunger to see a new face and hear a new voice had brought the girl to the great hall that night, but now she wished that she had remained in her chamber with Tina. There was no mistaking the meaning in the glance Zarono turned on her. Although his speech was decorous and formal, his expression sober and respectful, it was but a mask through which gleamed the violent and sinister spirit of the man. He could not keep the burning desire out of his eyes when he looked at the aristocratic young beauty in her low-necked satin gown and jeweled girdle. “There is little diversity here,” she answered in a low voice.

“If you had a ship,” Zarono bluntly asked his host, “you would abandon this settlement?”

“Perhaps,” admitted the count.

“I have a ship,” said Zarono. “If we could reach an agreement—”

“What sort of an agreement?” Valenso lifted his head to stare suspiciously at his guest.

“Share and share alike,” said Zarono, laying his hand on the broad with fingers spread wide, like the legs of a giant spider. The fingers quivered with nervous tension, and the buccaneer’s eyes gleamed with a new light. “Share what?” Valenso stared at him in evident bewilderment. “The gold I brought with me went down in my ship and, unlike the broken timbers, it did not wash ashore.”

“Not that!” Zarono made an impatient gesture. “Let us be frank, my lord. Can you pretend it was chance that caused you to land at this particular spot, with a thousand miles of coast from which to choose?”

“There is no need to pretend,” answered Valenso coldly. “My ship’s master was Zingelito, formerly a buccaneer. He had sailed this coast and persuaded me to land here, telling me he had a reason he would later disclose. But this reason he never divulged because, the day after he landed, he disappeared into the woods, and his headless body was found later by a hunting party. Obviously he had been ambushed and slain by the Picts.”

Zarono stared fixedly at Valenso for a space. “Sink me!” quoth he at last. “I believe you, my lord. A Korzetta has no skill at lying, regardless of his other accomplishments. And I will make you a proposal. I will admit that, when I anchored out there in the bay, I had other plans in mind. Supposing you to have already secured the treasure, I meant to take this fort by strategy and cut all your throats. But circumstances have caused me to change my mind…” He cast a glance at Belesa that brought color to her face and made her lift her head indignantly, and continued: “I have a ship to carry you out of exile, with your household and such of your retainers as you shall choose. The rest can fend for themselves.”

The attendants along the walls shot uneasy, sidelong glances at one another.

Zarono went on, too brutally cynical to conceal his attentions: “But first, you must help me secure the treasure for which I’ve sailed a thousand miles.”

“What treasure, in Mitra’s name?” demanded the count angrily. “Now you are yammering like that dog Strombanni.”

“Have you ever heard of Bloody Tranicos, the greatest of the Barachan pirates?”

“Who has not? It was he who stormed the island castle of the exiled prince, Tothmekri of Stygia, put the people to the sword, and bore off the treasure the prince had brought with him when he fled from Khemi.”

“Aye! And the tale of that treasure brought men of the Red Brotherhood swarming like vultures after carrion— pirates, buccaneers, and even the wild black corsairs from the South. Fearing betrayal by his captains, Tranicos fled northward with one ship and vanished from the knowledge of men. That was nearly a hundred years ago.

“But the tale persists that one man survived that last voyage and returned to the Barachans, only to be captured by a Zingaran war-galley. Before he was hanged, he told his story and drew a map in his own blood, on parchment, which he somehow smuggled out of his captor’s reach. This was the tale he told:

“Tranicos had sailed far beyond the paths of shipping, until he came to a bay on a lonely coast, and there he anchored. He went ashore, taking his treasure and eleven of his most trusted captains, who had accompanied him on his ship. Following his orders, the ship sailed away, to return in a week’s time and pick up their admiral and his captains. In the meantime, Tranicos meant to hide the treasure somewhere in the vicinity of the bay. The ship returned at the appointed time, but there was no trace of Tranicos and his eleven captains, except for the rude dwelling they had built on the beach.”

“This had been demolished, and there were tracks of naked feet about it, but no sign there had been any fighting. Nor was there any trace of the treasure, or any sign to show where it was hidden. The pirates plunged into the forest to search for their chief. Having with them a Bossonian skilled in tracking and woodcraft, they followed the signs of the missing men along old trails running some miles eastward from the shore. Becoming weary and failing to catch up with the admiral, they sent one of their number up a tree to spy, and this one reported that not far ahead a great steep-sided crag or dome rose like a tower from the forest They started forward again, but then were attacked by a party of Picts and driven back to their ship. In despair they heaved anchor and sailed away. Before they raised the Barachas, however, a terrific storm wrecked the ship, and only that one man survived.

“That is the tale of the treasure of Tranicos, which men have sought in vain for nearly a century. That the map exists is known, but its whereabouts have remained a mystery.

“I have had one glimpse of that map. Strombanni and Zingelito were with me, and a Nemedian who sailed with the Barachans. We looked upon it in Messantia, where we were skulking in disguise. Somebody knocked over the lamp, and somebody howled in the dark, and when we got the light on again, the old miser who owned the map was dead with a dirk in his heart, and the map was gone, and the night watch was clattering down the street with their pikes to investigate the clamor. We scattered, and each went his own way.

For years thereafter, Strombanni and I watched each other, each supposing the other had the map. Well, as it turned out, neither had it; but recently word came to me that Strombanni had departed northward, so I followed him. You saw the end of that chase.

“I had but a glimpse at the map as it lay on the old miser’s table and could tell nothing about it, but Strom-bannni’s actions show that he knows this is the bay where Tranicos anchored. I believe they hid the treasure on or near that great, rocky hill the scout reported and, returning, were attacked and slain by the Picts. The Picts did not get the treasure. Men have traded up and down this coast a little, and no gold ornament or rare jewel has ever been seen in the possession of the coastal tribes.”

“This is my proposal: Let us combine our forces. Strombanni is somewhere within striking distance. He fled because he feared to be pinned between us, but he will return. Allied, however, we can laugh at him. We can work out from the fort, leaving enough men here to hold it if he attacks. I believe the treasure is hidden nearby. Twelve men could not have conveyed it far. We will find it, load it in my ship, and sail for some foreign port where I can cover my past with gold. I am sick of this life. I want to go back to a civilized land and live like a noble, with riches and slaves and a castle—and a wife of noble blood.”

“Well?” demanded the count, slit-eyed with suspicion.

“Give me your niece for my wife,” demanded the buccaneer bluntly.

Belesa cried out sharply and started to her feet Valenso likewise rose, livid, his fingers knotting convulsively about his goblet as if he contemplated hurling it at his guest. Zarono did not move; he sat still, one arm on the table with the fingers hooked like talons. His eyes smoldered with passion and menace.

“You dare!” ejaculated Valenso.

“You seem to forget you have fallen from your high estate, Count Valenso,” growled Zarono. “We are not at the Kordavan court, my lord. On this naked coast, nobility is measured by the power of men and arms, and there I rank you. Strangers tread Korzetta Castle, and the Korzetta fortune is at the bottom of the sea. You will die here, an exile, unless I give you the use of my ship.

“You shall have no cause to regret the union of our houses. With a new name and a new fortune, you will find that Black Zarono can take his place among the aristocrats of the world and make a son-in-law of which not even a Korzetta need be ashamed.”

“You are mad to think of it!” exclaimed the count violently. “You—who is that?” A patter of soft-slippered feet distracted his attention. Tina came hurriedly into the hall, hesitated when she saw the count’s eyes fixed angrily on her, curtsied deeply, and sidled around the table to thrust her small hands into Belesa’s fingers. She was panting slightly, her suppers were damp, and her flaxen hair was plastered down on her head.

“Tina!” exclaimed Belesa anxiously. “Where have you been? I thought you were in your chamber hours ago.”

“I was,” answered the child breathlessly, “but I missed the coral necklace you gave me…” She held it up, a trivial trinket, but prized beyond all her other possessions because it had been Belesa’s first gift to her. “I was afraid you wouldn’t let me go if you knew. A soldier’s wife helped me out of the stockade and back again, and please, my lady, don’t make me tell who she was, because I promised not to. I found my necklace by the pool where I bathed this morning. Please punish me if I have done wrong.”

“Tina!” groaned Belesa, clasping the child to her. “I’ll not punish you, but you should not have gone outside the palisade, with the buccaneers camped on the beach, and always a chance of Picts skulking about. Let me take you to your chamber and change these damp clothes—”

“Yes, my lady, but first let me tell you about the black man—”

“What?” The startling interruption was a cry that burst from Valenso’s lips. His goblet clattered to the floor as he caught the table with both hands. If a thunderbolt had struck him, the bearing of the lord of the castle could not have been more horrifyingly altered. His face was livid, his eyes almost starting from his head.

“What did you say?” he panted, glaring wildly at the child, who shrank back against Belesa in bewilderment. “What said you, wench?”

“A b-black man, my lord,” she stammered, while Belesa, Zarono, and the attendants stared at him in amazement. “When I went down to the pool to get my necklace, I saw him. There was a strange moaning in the wind, and the sea whimpered like something afraid, and then he came. He came from the sea in a strange, black boat with blue fire playing all about it, but there was no torch. He drew his boat up on the sands below the south point and strode toward the forest, looking like a giant in the fog—a great, tall man, dark like a Kushite—”

Valenso reeled as if he had received a mortal blow. He clutched at his throat, snapping the golden chain in his violence. With the face of a madman he lurched about the table and tore the child screaming from Belesa’s arms.

“You little slut!” he panted. “You lie! You have heard me mumbling in my sleep and have told this lie to torment me! Say that you lie before I tear the skin from your back!”

“Uncle!” cried Belesa in outraged bewilderment, trying to free Tina from his grasp. “Are you mad? What are you about?”

With a snarl, he tore her hand from his arm and spun her staggering into the arms of Galbro, who received her with a leer he made little effort to disguise.

“Mercy, my lord!” sobbed Tina. “I did not lie!”

“I say you lied!” roared Valenso. “Gebellez!”

The stolid serving-man seized the trembling youngster and stripped her with one brutal wrench that tore her scanty garments from her body. Wheeling, he drew her slender arms over his shoulders, lifting her writhing feet clear of the floor.

“Uncle!” shrieked Belesa, writhing vainly in Galbro’s lustful grasp. “You are mad! You cannot—oh, you cannot—” The voice choked in her throat as Valenso caught up a jewel-handled riding whip and brought it down across the child’s frail body with a savage force that left a red weal across her naked shoulders.

Belesa moaned, sick with the anguish in Tina’s shriek. The world had suddenly gone mad. As in a nightmare, she saw the stolid beast-faces of the soldiers and the servants, reflecting neither pity nor sympathy. Zarono’s faintly sneering visage was part of the nightmare. Nothing in that crimson haze was real except Tina’s naked white body, crisscrossed with red welts from shoulders to knees; no sound real except the child’s sharp cries of agony and the panting gasps of Valenso as he lashed away with the staring eyes of a madman, shrieking: “You lie! You lie! Curse you, you lie! Admit your guilt, or I will flay your stubborn body! He could not have followed me here…” “Oh, have mercy, my lord!” screamed the child, writhing vainly on the brawny servant’s back and too frantic with fear and pain to have the wit to save herself by a lie. Blood trickled in crimson beads down her quivering thighs.

“I saw him! I lie not! Mercy! Please! Aaah!”

“You fool! You fool!” screamed Belesa. “Do you not see she is telling the truth? Oh, you beast! Beast! Beast!”

Some shred of sanity seemed to return to the brain of Count Valenso of Korzetta. Dropping the whip, he reeled back against the table, clutching blindly at its edge. He shook as with an ague. His hair was plastered across his brow in dank strands, and sweat dripped from his livid countenance, which was like a carven mask of Fear. Tina, released by Gebellez, slipped to the floor in a whimpering heap. Belesa tore free from Galbro, rushed to her, sobbing, and fell on her knees. Gathering the pitiful waif in her arms, she lifted a terrible face to her uncle, to pour upon him the vials of her wrath—but he was not looking at her. He seemed to have forgotten both her and his victim. In a daze of incredulity, she heard him say to the buccaneer:

“I accept your offer, Zarono. In Mitra’s name, let us find this accursed treasure and begone from this damned coast!”

At this, the fire of her fury sank to ashes. In stunned silence, she lifted the sobbing child in her arms and carried her up the stair. A glance backward showed Valenso crouching at the table, gulping wine from a huge goblet, which he gripped in both shaking hands, while Zarono towered over him like a somber predatory bird—puzzled at the turn of events but quick to take advantage of the shocking change that had come over the count. He was talking in a low, decisive voice, and Valenso nodded in mute agreement, like one who scarcely heeds what is being said. Galbro stood back in the shadows, chin pinched between forefinger and thumb, and the attendants along the walls glanced furtively at one another, bewildered by their lord’s collapse.

Up in her chamber, Belesa laid the half-fainting girl on the bed and set herself to wash and apply soothing ointments to the weals and cuts on her tender skin. Tina gave herself up in complete submission to her mistress’s hands, moaning faintly. Belesa felt as if her world had fallen about her ears. She was sick and bewildered, overwrought, her nerves quivering from the brutal shock of what she had witnessed. Fear of and hatred for her uncle grew in her soul. She had never loved him; he was hard, grasping, and avid, apparently without natural affection. But she had considered him just and fearless. Revulsion shook her at the memory of his staring eyes and bloodless face. Some terrible fear had aroused his frenzy, and, because of this fear, Valenso had brutalized the only creature she had to love and cherish. Because of that fear he was selling her, his niece, to an infamous outlaw. What lay behind this madness? Who was the black man Tina had seen?

The child muttered in semi-delirium: “I lied not, my lady! Indeed I did not!

Twas a black man in a black boat that burned like blue fire on the water! A tall man, almost as dark as a Kushite, wrapped in a black cloak! I was afraid when I saw him, and my blood ran cold. He left his boat on the sands and went into the forest. Why did the count whip me for seeing him?”

“Hush, Tina,” soothed Belesa. “Lie quietly. The smarting will soon pass.”

The door opened behind her, and she whirled, snatching up a jeweled dagger. The count stood in the door, and her flesh crawled at the sight. He looked years older; his face was gray and drawn, and his eyes stared in a way that roused fear in her bosom. She had never been close to him; now she felt as though a gulf separated them. He was not her uncle who stood there, but a stranger come to menace her.

She lifted the dagger. “If you touch her again,” she whispered from dry lips, “I swear before Mitra that I will sink this blade in your breast.”

He did not heed her. “I have posted a strong guard about the manor,” he said. “Zarono brings his men into the stockade tomorrow. He will not sail until he has found the treasure. When he finds it, we shall sail at once for some port to be decided upon.”

“And you will sell me to him?” she whispered. “In Mitra’s name—”

He fixed upon her a gloomy gaze in which all considerations but his own self-interest had been crowded out. She shrank before it, seeing in it the frantic cruelty that possessed the man in his mysterious fear.

“You shall do as I command,” he said presently, with no more human feeling in his voice than there is in the ring of flint on steel. And, turning, he left the chamber. Blinded by a sudden rush of honor, Belesa fell fainting beside the couch where Tina lay.

IV. A Black Drum Droning

Belesa never knew how long she lay crushed and senseless. She was first aware of Tina’s arms about her and the sobbing of the child in her ear. Mechanically she straightened herself and drew the child into her arms.

She sat there, dry-eyed, staring unseeingly at the flickering candle. There was no sound in the castle. The singing of the buccaneers on the strand had ceased. Dully, almost impersonally she reviewed her problem.

Valenso was mad, driven frantic by the story of the mysterious black man. It was to escape this stranger that he wished to abandon the settlement and flee with Zarono. That much was obvious. Equally obvious was the fact that he was ready to sacrifice her in exchange for that opportunity to escape. In the blackness of spirit which surrounded her she saw no glint of light. The serving men were dull or callous brutes, their women stupid and apathetic. They would neither dare nor care to help her. She was utterly helpless.

Tina lifted her tear-stained face as if she were listening to the prompting of some inner voice. The child’s understanding of Belesa’s inmost thoughts was almost uncanny, as was her recognition of the inexorable drive of Fate and the only alternative left to the weak.

“We must go, my lady!” she whispered. “Zarono shall not have you. Let us go far away into the forest. We shall go until we can go no further, and then we shall lie down and die together.”

That tragic strength that is the last refuge of the weak entered Belesa’s soul. It was the only escape from the shadows that had been closing in upon her since that day when they fled from Zingara.

“We will go, child.”

She rose and was fumbling for a cloak, when an exclamation from Tina brought her about. The girl was on her feet, a finger pressed to her lips, her eyes wide and bright with terror.

“What is it, Tina?” The child’s expression of fright induced Belesa to pitch her voice to a whisper, and a nameless apprehension crawled over her.

“Someone outside in the hall,” whispered Tina, clutching her arm convulsively. “He stopped at our door, then went on toward the count’s chamber at the other end.”

“Your ears are keener than mine,” murmured Belesa. “But there is nothing strange in that. It was the count himself, perchance, or Galbro.”

She moved to open the door, but Tina threw her arms frantically about her neck, and Belesa felt the wild beating of her heart. “No, no, my lady! Open not the door! I am afraid! I do not know why, but I feel that some everything is skulking near us!”

Impressed, Belesa patted her reassuringly and reached a hand toward the metal disk that masked the peephole in the center of the door.

“He is coming back!” quavered Tina. “I hear him!”

Belesa heard something, too—a curious, stealthy pad, which she knew, with a chill of nameless fear, was not the step of anyone she knew. Nor was it the step of Zarono, or any booted man. Could it be the buccaneer, gliding along the hallway on bare, stealthy feet, to slay his host while he slept? She remembered the soldiers on guard below. If the buccaneer had remained in the manor for the night, a man-at-arms would be posted before his chamber door. But who was that sneaking along the corridor? None slept upstairs besides herself, Tina, the Count, and Galbro.

With a quick motion, she extinguished the candle, so that it should not shine through the peephole, and pushed aside the copper disk. All the lights in the hall—ordinarily lighted by candles—were out. Someone was moving along the darkened corridor. She sensed rather than saw a dim bulk moving past her doorway, but she could make nothing of its shape except that it was manlike. A chill wave of terror swept over her; she crouched dumb, incapable of the scream that froze behind her lips. It was not such terror as her uncle now inspired in her, or fear like her fear of Zarono, or even of the brooding forest It was blind, unreasoning horror that laid an icy hand on her soul and froze her tongue to her palate.

The figure passed on to the stairhead, where it was limned momentarily against the faint glow that came up from below. It was a man, but not any man such as Belesa was familiar with. She had an impression of a shaven head with aloof, aquiline features and a glossy, brown skin, darker than that of her swarthy countrymen. The head towered on broad, massive shoulders swathed in a black cloak. Then the intruder was gone.

She crouched there in the darkness, awaiting the outcry that would announce that the soldien in the great hall had seen the intruder. But the manor remained silent. Somewhere a wind wailed shrilly; that was all. Belesa’s hands were moist with perspiration as she groped to relight the candle.

She was still shaken with horror, although she could not decide just what there had been about that black figure etched against the red glow that had roused this frantic loathing in her soul. She only knew that the sight had robbed her of all her new-found resolution. She was demoralized, incapable of action.

The candle flared up, illuminating Tina’s white face in the yellow glow. “It was the black man!” whispered Tina. “I know! My blood turned cold, just as it did when I saw him on the beach. There are soldiers downstairs; why did they not see him? Shall we go and tell the count?”

Belesa shook her head. She did not care to repeat the scene that had ensued upon Tina’s first mention of the black man. At any event, she dared not venture out into that darkened hallway.

“We dare not go into the forest!” shuddered Tina. “He will be lurking there.”

Belesa did not ask the girl how she knew the black man would be in the forest; it was the logical hiding-place for any evil thing, man or devil. And she knew that Tina was right; they dared not leave the fort now. Her determination, which had not faltered at the prospect of certain death, gave way at the thought of traversing those gloomy woods with that dark, sinister creature at large among them. Helplessly she sat down and sank her face in her hands. Tina slept, presently, on the couch. Tears sparkled on her long lashes; she moved her smarting body uneasily in her restless slumber. Belesa watched.

Toward dawn, Belesa was aware of a stifling quality in the atmosphere; she heard a low nimble of thunder somewhere off to seaward. Extinguishing the candle, which had burned to its socket, she went to the window whence she could see both the ocean and a belt of the forest behind the fort. The fog had disappeared, and along the eastern horizon ran a thin, pale streak that presaged dawn. But out to sea, a dusky mass was rising from the horizon.

From it, lightning flickered and the low thunder growled. An answering rumble came from the black woods.

Startled, Belesa turned and stared at the forest, a brooding black rampart. A strange, rhythmic pulsing came to her ears—a droning reverberation that was not the roll of a Pictish drum.

“A drum!” sobbed Tina, spasmodically opening and closing her fingers in her sleep. “The black man—beating on black drum—in the black woods! Oh, Mitra save us!”

Belesa shuddered. The black cloud on the western horizon writhed and billowed, swelling and expanding. She stared in amazement for the previous summer there had been no storms on this coast at this time of year, and she had never seen a cloud like that one.

It came boiling up over the world-rim in great boiling masses of blackness, veined with blue fire. It rolled and billowed with the wind in its belly. Its thundering made the air vibrate. And another sound mingled awesomely with the reverberations of the thunder—the voice of the wind, which raced before its coming. The inky horizon was torn and convulsed in the lightning-flashes. Afar to sea she saw the white-capped waves racing before the wind; she heard its droning roar, increasing in volume as it swept shoreward.

But, as yet, no wind stirred on the land. The air was hot, breathless. There was a sensation of unreality about the contrast: out there, wind and thunder and chaos sweeping inland; but here, stifling stillness. Somewhere below her a shutter slammed, startling in the tense silence, and a woman’s voice was lifted, shrill with alarm. Most of the people of the fort, however, seemed to be sleeping, unaware of the oncoming hurricane. She realized that she still heard that mysterious, droning drumbeat. She stared toward the black forest, her flesh crawling. She could see nothing, but some obscure intuition prompted her to visualize a black, hideous figure squatting under black branches and beating out a nameless incantation on a drum of exotic design.

Desperately she shook off the ghoulish conviction and looked seaward, as a blaze of lightning split the sky. Outlined against its glare, she saw the masts of Zarono’s ship; she saw the tents of the buccaneers on the beach, the sandy ridges of the south point, and the rocky cliffs of the north point as plainly as by a midday sun. Louder and louder rose the roar of the wind, and now the manor was awake. Feet came pounding up the stair, and Zarono’s voice yelled, edged with fright. Doors slammed, and Valenso answered, shouting to be heard above the roar of the elements.

“Why didn’t you warn me of a storm from the west?” howled the buccaneer. “If the anchors hold not—”

“A storm has never come from the west before, at this time of year!” shrieked Valenso, rushing from his chamber in his nightshirt, his face livid and his hair standing stiffly on end. “This is the work of—” His words were lost as he raced madly up the ladder that led to the lookout tower, followed by the cursing buccaneer.

Belesa crouched at her window, awed and deafened. Louder and louder rose the wind, until it drowned all other sound—all except that maddening drone of a drum, which now rose like an inhuman chant of triumph. The storm roared inshore, driving before it a foaming league-long crest of white. Then all hell and destruction were loosed on that coast. Rain fell in driving torrents, sweeping the beaches with blind frenzy. The wind hit like a thunderclap, making the timbers of the fort quiver. The surf roared over the sands, drowning the coals of the fires the seamen had built.

In the glare of lightning Belesa saw, through the curtain of the slashing rain, the tents of the buccaneers whipped to ribbons and whirled away; saw the men themselves staggering toward the fort, beaten almost to the sands by the fury of the blast. And limned against the blue glare she saw Zarono’s ship, ripped loose from her moorings, driven headlong against the jagged rocks that jutted up to receive her.

V. A Man from the Wilderness

The storm had spent its fury; dawn broke in a clear, blue, rain-washed sky. Bright-hued birds lifted a swelling chorus from the trees, on whose broad leaves beads of water sparkled like diamonds, quivering in the gentle morning breeze.

At a small stream that wound over the sands to join the sea, hidden beyond a fringe of trees and shrubs, a man bent to lave his hands and face. He performed his ablutions after the manner of his kind, grunting lustily and splashing like a buffalo. But in the midst of these splashings, he suddenly lifted his head, his tawny hair dripping and water running in rivulets over his brawny shoulders.

For a second he crouched in a listening attitude, then was on his feet facing inland, sword in hand, all in one motion. Then he froze, glaring wide-mouthed.

A man even bigger than himself was striding toward him over the sands, making no attempt at stealth. The pirate’s eyes widened as he stared at the close-fitting silk breeches, the high flaring-topped boots, the wide-skirted coat, and the headgear of a hundred years ago. There was a broad cutlass in the stranger’s hand and unmistakable purpose in his approach.

The pirate went pale as recognition blazed in his eyes.

“You!” he ejaculated unbelievingly. “By Mitra, you!”

Oaths streamed from his lips as he heaved up his cutlass. The birds rose in flaming showers from the trees as the clang of steel interrupted their song. Blue sparks flew from the hacking blades, and the sand grated and ground under the stamping boot heels. Then the clash of steel ended in a chopping crunch, and one man went to his knees with a choking gasp. The hilt escaped his nerveless hand; he slid full-length on the sand, which reddened with his blood. With a dying effort, he fumbled at his girdle and drew something from it, tried to lift it to his mouth, then stiffened convulsively and went limp.

The conqueror bent and ruthlessly tore the stiffening fingers from the object they crumpled in their desperate grasp.

Zarono and Valenso stood on the beach, staring at the driftwood that their men were gathering—spars, pieces of mast, broken timbers. So savagely had the storm hammered Zarono’s ship against the low cliffs that most of the salvage was matchwood. A short distance behind them stood Belesa, listening to their conversation with one arm around Tina. Belesa was pale and listless, apathetic to whatever Fate held in store for her. She heard what the men said, but with little interest She was crushed by the realization that she was but a pawn in the game, however it was to be played out—whether it was to be a wretched life, dragged out on that desolate coast, or a return effected somehow to some civilized land.

Zarono cursed venomously, but Valenso seemed dazed. “This is not the time of year for storms from the west,” muttered the count, staring with haggard eyes at the men dragging the wreckage up on the beach. “It was not chance that brought that storm out of the deep to splinter the ship in which I meant to escape.

Escape? I am caught like a rat in a trap, as it was meant. Nay, we are all trapped rats—”

“I know not whereof you speak,” snarled Zarono, giving a vicious yank at his moustache. “I’ve been unable to get any sense out of you since that flaxen-haired slut upset you so last night with her tale of black men coming out of the sea. But I do know that I’ll not spend my life on this cursed coast. Ten of my men went to Hell in the ship, but I have a hundred and sixty more. You have a hundred. There are tools in your fort and plenty of trees in yonder forest. We’ll build a ship. I’ll set men to cutting down trees as soon as they get this drift out of reach of the waves.”

“It will take months,” muttered Valenso.

“Well, how better to employ our time? We’re here, and unless we build a ship we shall never get away. We shall have to rig up some kind of sawmill, but I’ve never encountered anything yet that balked me for long. I hope the storm smashed that Argossean dog Strombanni to bits! While we’re building the ship, we’ll hunt for old Tranicos’s loot.”

“We shall never complete your ship,” said Valenso somberly.

Zarono turned on him angrily. “Will you talk sense? Who is this accursed black man?”

“Accursed indeed,” said Valenso, staring seaward. “A shadow of mine own red-stained past, risen up to hound me to Hell. Because of him, I fled Zingara, hoping to lose my trail in the great ocean. But I should have known he would smell me out at last.”

“If such a man came ashore, he must be hiding in the woods,” groaned Zarono.

“We’ll rake the forest and hunt him out.”

Valenso laughed harshly. “Seek rather for a shadow that drifts before a cloud that hides the moon; grope in the dark for an asp; follow a mist that steals out of the swamp at midnight.”

Zarono cast him an uncertain look, obviously doubting his sanity. “Who is this man? Have done with ambiguity.” ‘The shadow of my own mad cruelty and ambition; a honor come out of the lost ages—no man of common flesh and blood, but a—” “Sail ho!” bawled the lookout on the northern point.

Zarono wheeled, and his voice slashed the wind. “Do you know her?”

“Aye!” the reply came back faintly. ”Tis the Red Hand Zarono cursed like a wild man. “Strombanni! The devils take care of their own! How could he ride out that blow?” The buccaneer’s voice rose to a yell that carried up and down the strand. “Back to the fort, you dogs!”

Before the Red Hand, somewhat battered in appearance, nosed around the point, the beach was bare of human life, the palisade bristling with helmets and scarf-bound heads. The buccaneers accepted the alliance with the easy adaptability of adventurers, and the count’s henchmen with the apathy of serfs.

Zarono ground his teeth as a longboat swung leisurely in to the beach, and he sighted the tawny head of his rival in the bow. The boat grounded, and Strombanni started toward the fort alone. Some distance away, he halted and shouted in a bull’s bellow that carried clearly in the still morning: “Ahoy, the fort! I would parley!”

“Well, why in Hell don’t you?” snarled Zarono.

“The last time I approached under a flag of truce, an arrow broke on my brisket!” roared the pirate.

“You asked for it,” said Valenso. “I gave you a fair warning to get away from us.”

“Well, I want a promise that it shan’t happen again!”

“You have my promise!” called Zarono with a sardonic smile.

“Damn your promise, you Zingaran dog! I want Valenso’s word.”

A measure of dignity remained to the count There was an edge of authority to his voice as he answered: “Advance, but keep your men back. You shall not be shot at.”

“That’s enough for me,” said Strombanni instantly. “Whatever a Korzetta’s sins, you can trust his word.”

He strode forward and halted under the gate, laughing at the hate-darkened visage Zarono thrust over at him.

“Well, Zarono,” he taunted, “you are a ship shorter than you were when last I saw you! But you Zingarans were never sailors.”

“How did you save your ship, you Messantian gutter-scum?” snarled the buccaneer.

“There’s a cove some miles to the north, protected by a high-ridged arm of land, which broke the force of the gale,” answered Strombanni. “I was anchored behind it. My anchors dragged, but they held me off the shore.”

Zarono scowled blackly; Valenso said nothing. The count had not known of this cove, for he had done scant exploring of his domain. Fear of the Pick, lack of curiosity, and the need to drive his people to their work had kept him and his men near the fort.

“I come to make a trade,” said Strombanni easily.

“We’ve naught to trade with you save sword-strokes,” growled Zarono.

“I think otherwise,” grinned Strombanni, thin-lipped. “You showed your intentions when you murdered Galacus, my first mate, and robbed him. Until this morning, I supposed that Valenso had Tranicos’s treasure. But, if either of you had had it you wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of following me and killing my mate to get the map.”

“The map?” Zarono ejaculated, stiffening.

“Oh, dissemble not with me!” laughed Strombanni, but anger blazed blue in his eyes. “I know you have it. Picts don’t wear boots!”

“But—” began the count, nonplussed; then he fell silent as Zarono nudged him.

“And if we have the map,” said Zarono, “what have you to trade that we might require?”

“Let me come into the fort,” suggested Strombanni. There we can talk.”

He was not so obvious as to glance at the men peering at them from along the wall, but his listeners understood. Strombanni had a ship. That fact would figure in any bargain or battle. But, regardless of who commanded it, it would cany just so many. Whoever sailed away in it, some would be left behind. A wave of tense speculation ran along the silent throng at the palisade.

“Tour men shall stay where they are,” warned Zarono, indicating the boat drawn up on the beach and the ship anchored out in the bay.

“Aye. But think not to seize me and hold me for a hostage!” He laughed grimly.

“I want Valenso’s word that I shall be allowed to leave the fort alive and unhurt within the hour, whether we come to terms or not.”

“You have my pledge,” answered the count.

“All right, then. Open that gate and let’s talk plainly.”

The gate opened and closed; the leaders vanished from sight. The common men of both parties resumed their silent surveillance of each other: the men on the palisade, the men squatting beside their boat, with a broad stretch of sand between; and, beyond a strip of blue water, the carack with steel caps glinting along her raft.

On the broad stair, above the great hall, Belesa and Tina crouched, ignored by the men below. These sat about the broad table: Valenso, Galbro, Zarono, and Strombanni. But for them, the hall was empty.

Strombanni gulped his wine and set the empty goblet on the table. The frankness suggested by his bluff countenance was belied by the dancing light of cruelty and treachery in his wide eyes. But he spoke bluntly enough.

“We all want the treasure old Tranicos hid somewhere near this bay,” he said abruptly. “Each has something the others need. Valenso has laborers, supplies, and a stockade to shelter us from the Picts. You, Zarono, have my map. I have a ship.”

“What I should like to know,” remarked Zarono, “is this: If you’ve had that map all these years, why came you not after the loot sooner?” “I had it not. It was that dog, Zingelito, who knifed the old miser in the dark and stole the map. But he had neither ship nor crew, and it took him more than a year to get them. When he did come after the treasure, the Picts prevented his landing, and his men mutinied and made him sail back to Zingara. One of them stole the map from him and recently sold it to me.”

“That was why Zingelito recognized the bay,” muttered Valenso.

“Did that dog lead you here, count?” asked Strombanni. “I might have guessed it. Where is he?”

“Doubtless in Hell, since he was once a buccaneer. The Picts slew him, evidently while he was searching the woods for the treasure.”

“Good!” approved Strombanni heartily. “Well, I don’t knew how you knew my mate was carrying the map. I trusted him, and the men trusted him more than they did me, so I let him keep it. But this morning he wandered inland with some of the others and got separated from them. We found him sworded to death near the beach, and the map gone. The men were ready to accuse me of killing him, but I showed the fools the tracks left by his slayer and proved to them that my feet wouldn’t fit them. And I knew it wasn’t any one of the crew, because none of them wears boots that make a track of that sort. And Picts wear no boots at all. So it had to be a Zingaran.”

“Well, you have the map, but you have not the treasure. If you had it, you wouldn’t have let me inside the stockade. I have you penned up in this fort. You can’t get out to look for the loot, and even if you did get it you have no ship to get away in.

“Now, here’s my proposal: Zarono, give me the map. And you, Valenso, give me fresh meat and other supplies. My men are nigh to scurvy after the long voyage. In return I’ll take you three men, the Lady Belesa, and her girl, and set you ashore within reach of some Zingaran port—or I’ll put Zarono ashore near some buccaneer rendezvous if he prefers, since doubtless a noose awaits him in Zingara. And, to clinch the bargain, I’ll give each of you a handsome share in the treasure.”

The buccaneer tugged meditatively at his mustache. He knew that Strombanni would not keep any such pact, if made. Nor did Zarono even consider agreeing to his proposal. To refuse bluntly, however, would be to force the issue to a clash of arms. He sought his agile brain for a plan to outwit the pirate. He wanted Strombanni’s ship as avidly as he desired the lost treasure.

“What’s to prevent us from holding you captive and forcing your men to give us your ship in exchange for you?” he asked. Strombanni laughed. “Think you I’m a fool? My men have orders to heave up the anchors and sail hence if I do not appear within the hour, or if they suspect treachery. They’d not give you the ship if you skinned me alive on the beach. Besides, I have the count’s word.”

“My pledge is not straw,” said Valenso somberly. “Have done with threats, Zarono.”

Zarono did not reply. His mind was wholly absorbed in the problems of getting possession of Strombanni’s ship and of continuing the parley without betraying the fact that he did not have the map. He wondered who in Mitra’s name did have the map.

“Let me take my men away with me on your ship when we sail,” he said. “I cannot desert my faithful followers—”

Strombanni snorted. “Why don’t you ask for my cutlass to slit my gullet with? Desert your faithful—bah! You’d desert your brother to the Devil if you could gain anything by it No! You shall not bring enough men aboard to give you a chance to mutiny and take my ship.”

“Give us a day to think it over,” urged Zarono, fighting for time.

Strombanni’s heavy fist banged on the table, making the wine dance in the goblets. “No, by Mitra! Give me my answer now!”

Zarono was on his feet, his black rage submerging his craftiness. “You Barachan dogl I’ll give you your answer —in your guts…”

He tore aside his cloak and caught at his sword hilt. Strombanni heaved up with a roar, his chair crashing backward to the floor. Valenso sprang up, spreading his arms between them as they faced each other across the board with jutting jaws close together, blades half drawn, and faces convulsed. “Gentlemen, have done! Zarono, he has my pledge—” “The foul fiends gnaw your pledge!” snarled Zarono.

“Stand from between us, my lord,” growled the pirate, his voice thick with lust for killing. “Your word was that I should not be treacherously entreated. It shall be considered no violation of your pledge for this dog and me to cross swords in equal play.”

“Well spoken, Strom!” said a deep, powerful voice behind them, vibrant with grim amusement. All wheeled and glared open-mouthed. Up on the stair, Belesa started up with an involuntary exclamation.

A man strode out of the hangings that masked the chamber door and advanced toward the table without haste or hesitation. Instantly he dominated the group, and all felt the situation subtly charged with a new, dynamic atmosphere. The stranger was taller and more powerfully built than either of the freebooters, yet for all his size he moved with pantherish suppleness in his high, flaring-topped boots. His thighs were cased in close-fitting breeches of white silk. His wide-skirted, sky-blue coat was open to reveal an open-necked, white silken shirt beneath, and the scarlet sash that girded his waist. His coat was adorned with acorn-shaped silver buttons, gilt-worked cuffs and pocket flaps, and a satin collar. A lacquered hat completed a costume obsolete by nearly a hundred years. A heavy cutlass hung at the wearer’s hip.

“Conan!” ejaculated both freebooters together, and Valenso and Galbro caught their breath at that name.

“Who else?” The giant strode up to the table, laughing sardonically at their amazement.

“What—what do you here?” stuttered the seneschal. “How came you here, uninvited and unannounced?”

“I climbed the palisade on the east side while you fools were arguing at the gate,” Conan answered, speaking Zingaran with a barbarous accent. “Every man in the fort was craning his neck westward. I entered the manor while Strombanni was being let in at the gate. Every since, I’ve been in that chamber there, eavesdropping.”

“I thought you were dead,” said Zarono slowly. “Three years ago, the shattered hull of your ship was sighted off a reefy coast, and you were heard of on the Main no more.”

“I didn’t drown with my crew,” answered Conan. “Twill take a bigger ocean than that one to drown me. I swam ashore and tried a spell of mercenarying among the black kingdoms; and since then I’ve been soldiering for the king of Aquilonia. You might say I have become respectable,” he grinned wolfishly, “or at least that I had until a recent difference with that ass Numedides. And now to business, fellow thieves.”

Up on the stair, Tina was clutching Belesa in her excitement and staring through the balustrade with all her eyes. “Conan! My lady, it is Conan! Look! Oh, look!”

Belesa was looking, as though she beheld a legendary character in the flesh. Who of all the sea-folk had not heard the wild, bloody tales told of Conan, the wild rover who had once been a captain of the Barachan pirates, and one of the greatest scourges of the sea? A score of ballads celebrated his ferocious, audacious exploits. The man could not be ignored; irresistibly he had stalked into the scene, to form another, dominent element in the tangled plot. And, in the midst of her frightened fascination, Belesa’s feminine instinct prompted the speculation as to Conan’s attitude toward her. Would it be like Strombanni’s brutal indifference or Zarono’s violent desire?

Valenso was recovering from the shock of finding a stranger within his very hall. He knew that Conan was a Cimmerian, born and bred in the wastes of the far north, and therefore not amenable to the physical limitations that controlled civilized men. It was not so strange that he had been able to enter the fort undetected, but Valenso flinched at the reflection that other barbarians might duplicate that feat—the dark, silent Picts, for instance.

“What would you here?” he demanded. “Did you come from the sea?”

“I came from the woods.” The Cimmerian jerked his head toward the east.

“You have been living with the Picts?” Valenso asked coldly.

A momentary anger flickered in the giant’s eyes. “Even a Zingaran ought to know there’s never been peace between Picts and Cimmerians, and never will be,” he retorted with an oath. “Our feud with them is older than the world. If you’d said that to one of my wilder brothers, you’d have found yourself with a split head. But I’ve lived among you civilized men long enough to understand your ignorance and lack of common courtesy—the churlishness that demands his business of a man who appears at your door out of a thousand-mile wilderness. Never mind that.” He turned to the two freebooters, who stood staring glumly at him. “From what I overheard,” quoth he, “I gather there is some dissension over a map.”

“That is none of your affair,” growled Strombanni.

“Is this it?” Conan grinned wickedly and drew from his pocket a crumpled object—a square of parchment, marked with crimson lines.

Strombanni started violently, paling. “My map!” he ejaculated. “Where did you get it?”

“From your mate, Galacus, when I killed him,” answered Conan with grim enjoyment.

“You dog!” raved Strombanni, turning on Zarono. “You never had the map! You lied—”

“I never said I had it,” snarled Zarono. “You deceived yourself. Be not a fool. Conan is alone; if he had a crew he’d already have cut our throats. We’ll take the map from him—”

“You’ll never touch it!” Conan laughed fiercely.

Both men sprang at him, cursing. Stepping back, he crumpled the parchment and cast it into the glowing coals of the fireplace. With an incoherent bellow, Strombanni lunged past him, to be met with a buffet under the ear that stretched him half-senseless on the floor. Zarono whipped out his sword, but before he could thrust, Conan’s cutlass beat it out of his hand.

Zarono staggered against the table with all Hell in his eyes. Strombanni dragged himself erect with his eyes glazed and blood dripping from his bruised ear. Conan leaned slightly over the table, his outstretched cutless just touching the breast of Count Valenso.

“Don’t call for your soldiers, Count,” said the Cimmerian softly. “Not a sound out of you—or from you, either, dog-face!” he said to Galbro, who showed no intention of braving his wrath. “The map’s burned to ashes, and it’ll do no good to spill blood. Sit down, all of you.”

Strombanni hesitated, made an abortive gesture toward his hilt, then shrugged his shoulders and sank sullenly into a chair. The others followed suit. Conan remained standing, towering over the table, while his enemies watched him with eyes full of bitter hate, banging his broad blade on the table.

“You were bargaining,” he said. “That’s all I’ve come to do.”

“And what have you to trade?” sneered Zarono.

“Only the treasure of Tranicos.”

“What?” All four men were on their feet, leaning toward him.

“Sit down,” roared Conan.

They sank back, tense and white with excitement. Conan grinned in huge enjoyment of the sensation his words had caused and continued: “Yes! I found the treasure before I got the map. That’s why I bumed the map. I need it not, and nobody shall ever find it unless I show him where it is.”

They stared at him with murder in their eyes.

“You’re lying,” said Zarono without conviction. ‘You’ve told us one lie already. You said you came from the woods, yet you say you haven’t been living with the Picts. All men know this country is a wilderness, inhabited only by savages. The nearest outposts of civilization are the Aquilonian settlements on Thunder River, hundreds of miles to eastward.”

“That’s where I came from,” replied Conan imperturbably. “I believe I’m the first white man to cross the Pictish Wilderness. When I fled from Aquilonia into Pictland, I blundered into a party of Picts and slew one, but a stone from a sling knocked me senseless during the melee and the dogs took me alive. They were Wolfmen, and they traded me to the Eagle clan in return for a chief of theirs the Eagles had captured. The Eagles carried me nearly a hundred miles westward, to burn me in their chief village; but I killed their war-chief and three or four others one night and broke away. “I could not turn back, since they were behind me and kept herding me westward. A few days ago, I shook them off; and, by Crom, the place where I took refuge turned out to be the treasure trove of old Tranicos! I found it all: chests of garments and weapons—that’s where I got these clothes and this blade—heaps of coins and gems and golden ornaments, and—in the midst of all—the jewels of Tothmekri gleaming like frozen starlight! And old Tranicos and his eleven captains sitting about an ebon table and staring at the hoard, as they’ve stared for a hundred years!”

“What?”

“Aye!” he laughed. “Tranicos died in the midst of his treasure, and all with him! Their bodies had not rotted or shriveled. They sit there in their high boots and skirted coats and lacquered hats, with their wineglasses in their stiff hands, just as they have sat for a century!”

“That’s an unchancy thing!” muttered Strombanni uneasily, but Zarono snarled:

“What boots it? Tis the treasure we want. Go on, Conan.”

Conan seated himself at the board, filled a goblet, and quaffed it before he answered.

“The first wine I’ve drunk since I left Aquilonia, by Crom! Those cursed Eagles hunted me so closely through the forest that I had hardly time to munch the nuts and roots I found. Sometimes I caught frogs and ate them raw because I dared not light a fire.”

His impatient hearers informed him profanely that they were not interested in his dietary adventures prior to finding the treasure.

He grinned insolently and resumed: “Well, after I stumbled on to the trove, I lay up and rested a few days, and made snares to catch rabbits, and let my wounds heal. I saw smoke against the western sky but thought it some Pictish village on the beach. I lay close, but as it happens the loot’s hidden in a place the Picts shun. If any spied on me, they didn’t show themselves.

“Last night I started westward, intending to strike the beach some miles north of the spot where I’d seen the smoke. I wasn’t far from the shore when that storm hit. I took shelter under a lee of rock and waited until it had blown itself out. Then I climbed a tree to look for Picts, and from it I saw Strom’s carack at anchor and his men coming in to shore. I was making my way toward his camp on the beach when I met Galacus. I shoved a sword through him, because there was an old feud between us.”

“What had he done to you?” asked Strombanni.

“Oh, stole a wench of mine years ago. I shouldn’t have known he had a map, had he not tried to eat it ere he died.

“I recognized it for what it was, of course, and was considering what use I could make of it, when the rest of you dogs came up and found the body. I was lying in a thicket not a dozen yards from you while you were arguing with your men over the matter. I judged the time wasn’t ripe for me to show myself!” He laughed at the rage and chagrin displayed in Strombanni’s face. “Well, while I lay there listening to your talk, I got the drift of the situation and learned, from things you let fall, that Zorono and Valenso were a few miles south on the beach. So when I heard you say that Zarono must have done the killing and taken the map, and that you meant to go and parley with him, seeking an opportunity to murder him and get it back—”

“Dog!” snarled Zarono.

Although livid, Strombanni laughed mirthlessly. “Do you think I’d play fair with a treacherous cur like you? Go on, Conan.”

The Cimmerian grinned. It was evident that he was deliberately fanning the fires of hate between the two men.

“Nothing much, then. I came straight through the woods while you tacked along the coast and raised the fort before you did. Your guess that the storm had destroyed Zarono’s ship was a good one—but then, you knew the configuration of this bay.

“Well, there’s the story. I have the treasure, Strom has a ship, Valenso has supplies. By Crom, Zarono, I see not where you fit into the scheme, but to avoid strife I’ll include you. My proposal is simple enough. “We’ll split the treasure four ways. Strom and I shall sail away with our shares aboard the Red Hand. You and Valenso take yours and remain lords of the wilderness, or build a ship out of tree trunks, as you wish.” Valenso branched and Zarono swore, while Strombanni grinned quietly.

“Are you fool enough to go aboard the Red Hand alone with Strombanni?” snarled Zarono. “He’ll cut your throat before you’re out of sight of land!”

Conan laughed with genuine enjoyment. “This is like the problem of the wolf, the sheep, and the cabbage,” he admitted. “How to get them across the river without their devouring one another!”

“And that appeals to your Cimmerian sense of humor!” complained Zarono.

“I will not stay here!” cried Valenso, a wild gleam in his dark eyes. “Treasure or no treasure, I must go!”

Conan gave him a slit-eyed glance of speculation. “Well then,” said he, “how about this plan: We divide the loot as I suggested. Then Strombanni sails away with Zarono, Valenso, and such members of the count’s household as he may select, leaving me in command of the fort, and the rest of Valenso’s men, and all of Zarono’s. I’ll build my own ship.”

Zarono looked sick. “I have the choice of remaining here in exile, or abandoning my crew and going alone on the Red Hand to have my throat cut?”

Conan’s laughter rang gustily through the hall, and he smote Zarono jovially on the back, ignoring the black murder in the buccaneer’s glare. “That’s it, Zarono!” quoth he. “Stay here while Strom and I sail away, or sail away with Strombanni, leaving your men with me.

“I’d rather have Zarono,” said Strombanni frankly. “You’d turn my own men against me, Conan, and cut my throat before I raised the Barachans.”

Sweat dripped from Zarono’s livid face. “Neither I, nor the count, nor his niece will ever reach the land alive if we ship with that devil,” said he. “You are both in my power in this hall. My men surround it. What’s to prevent my cutting you both down?”

“Not a thing,” Conan admitted cheerfully, “except the fact that if you do, Strombanni’s men will sail away and leave you stranded on this coast, where the Picts will presently cut all your throats; and the fact that with me dead you’d never find the treasure; and the fact that I’ll split your skull down to your chin if you try to summon your men.”

Conan laughed as he spoke, as if at some whimsical situation; but even Belesa sensed that he meant what he said. His naked cutlass lay across his knees, and Zarono’s sword was under the table, out of the buccaneer’s reach. Galbro was not a fighting man, and Valenso seemed incapable of decision or action.

“Aye!” said Strombanni with an oath. “You’d find the two of us no easy prey. I’m agreeable to Conan’s proposal. What say you, Valenso?”

“I must leave this coast!” whispered Valenso, staring blankly. “I must hasten—I must go—go far—quickly!”

Strombanni frowned, puzzled at the count’s strange manner, and turned to Zarono, grinning wickedly. “And you, Zarono?”

“What can I say?” snarled Zarono. “Let me take my three officers and forty men aboard the Red Hand, and the bargain’s made.”

“The officers and thirty men!”

“Very well.”

“Done!”

There was no shaking of hands or ceremonial drinking of wine to seal the pact. The two captains glared at each other like hungry wolves. The count plucked his mustache with a trembling hand, rapt in his own somber thoughts. Conan stretched like a great cat, drank wine, and grinned on the assemblage, but it was the sinister grin of a stalking tiger. Belesa sensed the murderous purposes that reigned there, the treacherous intent that dominated each manjs mind. Not one had any intention of keeping his part of the pact, Valenso possibly excluded. Each of the freebooters intended to possess both the ship and the entire treasure. None would be satisfied with less.

But how? What was going on in each crafty mind? Belesa felt oppressed and stifled by the atmosphere of hatred and treachery. The Cimmerian, for all his ferocious frankness, was no less subtle than the others—and even fiercer. His domination of the situation was not physical alone, although his gigantic shoulders and massive limbs seemed too big for even the great hall. There was an iron vitality about the man that overshadowed even the hard vigor of the other freebooters.

“Lead us to the treasure!” Zarono demanded.

“Wait a bit,” answered Conan. “We must keep our power evenly balanced, so that one cannot take advantage of the others. We’ll work it thus: Strom’s men shall come ashore, all but a half-dozen or so, and camp on the beach. Zarono’s men shall come out of the fort and likewise camp on the strand, within easy sight of them. Then each crew can watch the other, to see that nobody slips after us who go for the treasure, to ambush either of us. Those left aboard the Red Hand shall take her out into the bay, out of reach of either party. Valenso’s men shall stay in the fort but leave the gate open. Will you come with us, Count?”

“Go into that forest?” Valenso shuddered and drew his cloak about his shoulders. “Not for all the gold of Tranicos!”

“All right. Twill take about thirty men to carry the loot. We’ll take fifteen from each crew and start as soon as we can.”

Belesa, keenly alert to every angle of the drama being played out beneath her, saw Zarono and Strombanni shoot furtive glances at each other, then quickly lower their gaze as they lifted their glasses, to hide the murky intent in their eyes. She perceived the fatal weakness in Conan’s plan and wondered how he could have overlooked it. Perhaps he was too arrogantly confident in his personal prowess. But she knew that he would never come out of that forest alive. Once the treasure was in their grasp, the others would form a rogue’s alliance long enough to rid themselves of the man both hated. She shuddered, staring morbidly at the man she knew to be doomed. Strange to see that powerful fighting man sitting there, laughing and swilling wine, in full prime and power, and to know that he was already doomed to a bloody death. The whole situation was pregnant with dark and bloody portents. Zarono would trick and kill Strombanni if he could, and she knew that Strombanni had already marked Zarono for death and, doubtless, her uncle and herself also. If Zarono won the final battle of cruel wits, their lives were safe—but, looking at the buccaneer as he sat there chewing his mustache, with all the stark evil of his nature showing naked in his dark face, she could not decide which was more abhorrent—death or Zarono. “How far is it?” demanded Strombanni.

“If we start within the hour, we can be back before midnight,” answered Conan.

He emptied his goblet, rose, adjusted his girdle, and glanced at the count.

“Valenso,” he said, “are you mad, to kill a Pict in his hunting paint?”

Valenso started. “What do you mean?”

“Do you mean to say you don’t know that your men killed a Pict hunter in the woods last night?”

The count shook his head. “None of my men was in the woods last night.”

“Well, somebody was,” grunted the Cimmerian, fumbling in a pocket. “I saw his head nailed to a tree near the edge of the forest. He wasn’t painted for war. I found no boot tracks, from which I judged that it had been nailed up there before the storm. But there were plenty of other signs—moccasin tracks on the wet ground. Picts have been there and seen that head. They were men of some other clan, or they’d have taken it down. If they happen to be at peace with the clan the dead man belonged to, they’ll mate tracks to his village to tell his tribe.”

“Perhaps they slew him,” suggested Valenso.

“No, they didn’t. But they know who did, for the same reason that I know. This chain was knotted about the stump of the severed neck. You must have been utterly mad, to identify your handiwork like that.” He drew forth something and tossed it on the table before the count, who lurched up, choking, as his hand flew to his throat. It was the gold seal-chain that he had habitually worn about his neck.

“I recognized the Korzetta seal,” said Conan. “The presence of that chain alone would tell any Pict it was the work of a foreigner.”

Valenso did not reply. He sat staring at the chain as if at a venomous serpent Conan scowled at him and glanced questioningly at the others. Zarono made a quick gesture to indicate that the count was not quite right in the head. Conan sheathed his cutlass and donned his lacquered hat.

“All right; let’s go,” he said.

The captains gulped down their wine and rose, hitching at their sword belts. Zarono laid a hand on Valenso’s arm and shook him slightly. The count started and stared about him, then followed the others out like a man in a daze, the chain dangling from his fingers. But not all left the hall.

Forgotten on the stair, Belesa and Tina, peeping between the balusters, saw Galbro fall behind the others, loitering until the heavy door closed after them. Then he hurried to the fireplace and raked carefully at the smouldering coals. He sank to his knees and peered closely at something for a long space. Then he straightened and, with a furtive air, stole out of the hall by another door.

Tina whispered: “What did Galbro find in the fire?”

Belesa shook her head; then, obeying the promptings of her curiosity, rose and went down to the empty hall.

An instant later, she was kneeling where the seneschal had knelt, and she saw what he had seen.

It was the charred remnant of the map that Conan had thrown into the fire. It was ready to crumble at a touch, but faint lines and bits of writing were still discernible upon it. She could not read the writing, but she could trace the outlines of what seemed to be the picture of a hill or crag, surrounded by marks evidently representing dense trees. She could make nothing of it; but, from Galbro’s actions, she believed that he recognized it as portraying some scene or topographical feature familiar to him. She knew the seneschal had penetrated inland further than any other man of the settlement.

VI. The Plunder of the Dead

The fortress stood strangely quiet in the noonday heat that had followed the storm of the dawn. Voices of people within the stockade sounded subdued, muffled. The same drowsy stillness reigned on the beach outside, where the rival crews lay in armed suspicion, separated by a few hundred yards of bare sand. Far out in the bay, the Red Hand lay at anchor with a handful of men aboard her, ready to snatch her out of reach at the slightest indication of treachery. The carack was Strombanni’s trump card, his best guaranty against the trickery of his associates.

Belesa came down the stair and paused at the sight of Count Valenso seated at the table, turning the broken chain about in his hands. She looked at him without love and with more than a little fear. The change that had come over him was appalling; he seemed to be locked up in a grim world all his own, with a fear that flogged all human characteristics out of him.

Conan had plotted shrewdly to eliminate the chances of an ambush in the forest by either party. But, as far as Belesa could see, he had failed utterly to safeguard himself against the treachery of his companions. He had disappeared into the woods, leading the two captains and their thirty men, and the Zingaran girl was positive that she would never see him alive again. Presently she spoke, and her voice was strained and harsh to her own ear: “The barbarian has led the captains into the forest. When they have the gold in their hands, they’ll slay him. But when they return with the treasure, what then? Are we to go aboard the ship? Can we trust Strombanni?”

Valenso shook his head absently. “Strombanni would murder us all for our shares of the loot. But Zarono secretly whispered his intentions to me. We will not go aboard the Red Hand save as her masters. Zarono will see that night overtakes the treasure party, so they shall be forced to camp in the forest. He will find a way to kill Strombanni and his men in their sleep. Then the buccaneers will come on stealthily to the beach. Just before dawn, I will send some of my fishermen secretly from the fort, to swim out to the ship and seize her. Strombanni never thought of that, and neither did Conan. Zarono and his men will come out of the forest and, together with the buccaneers encamped on the beach, fall upon the pirates in the dark, while I lead my men-at-arms from the fort to complete the rout. Without their captain, they will be demoralized and, outnumbered, fall easy prey to Zarono and me. Then we shall sail in Strombanni’s ship with all the treasure.”

“But what of me?” she asked with dry lips.

“I have promised you to Zarono,” he answered harshly. “But for my promise, he would not take us off.”

“I will never marry him,” she said helplessly.

“You shall,” he responded gloomily, without the slightest touch of sympathy. He lifted the chain so that it caught the gleam of the sun, slanting through a window. “I must have dropped it on the sand,” he muttered. “He has been that near—on the beach…”

“You did not drop it on the strand,” said Belesa, in a voice as devoid of mercy as his own; her soul seemed turned to stone. “You tore it from your throat, by accident, last night in this hall, when you flogged Tina. I saw it gleaming on the floor before I left the hall.”

He looked up, his face gray with a terrible fear; she laughed bitterly, sensing the mute question in his dilated eyes. ‘Tis! The black man! He was here! In this hall! He must have found the chain on the floor. The guardsmen did not see him, but he was at your door last night I saw him, padding along the upper hallway.”

For an instant she thought he would drop dead of sheer terror. He sank back in his chair, the chain slipping from his nerveless fingers and clinking on the table.

“In the manor!” he whispered. “I thought bolts and bars and armed guards could keep him out, fool that I was! I can no more guard against him than I can escape him! At my door! At my door!” The thought overwhelmed him with horror.

“Why did he not enter?” he shrieked, tearing at the lace upon his collar as though it strangled him. “Why did he not end it? I have dreamed of waking in my darkened chamber to see him squatting above me, with the blue hell-fire playing about his head! Why—”

The paroxysm passed, leaving him faint and trembling.

“I understand!” he panted. “He is playing with me, as a cat with a mouse. To have slain me last night in my chamber were too easy, too merciful. So he destroyed the ship in which I might have escaped him, and he slew that wretched Pict and left my chain upon him, so that the savages might believe I had slain him. They have seen that chain upon my neck many a time.

“But why? What subtle deviltry has he in mind, what devious purpose no human mind can grasp or understand?”

“Who is this black man?” asked Belesa, a chill of fear crawling along her spine.

“A demon loosed by my greed and lust to plague me throughout eternity!” he whispered. He spread his long, thin fingers on the table before him and stared at her with hollow, weirdly luminous eyes, which seemed to see her not at all but to look through her and far beyond to some dim doom.

“In my youth, I had an enemy at court,” he said, as if speaking more to himself than to her “A powerful man who stood between me and my ambition. In my lust for wealth and power, I sought aid from the people of the black arts—a sorcerer who, at my desire, raised up a fiend from the outer gulfs of existence. It crushed and slew mine enemy; I grew great and wealthy, and none could stand before me.

“But I thought to cheat the wizard of the price a mortal must pay who calls the black folk to do his bidding.

“He was Thoth-Amon of the Ring, in exile from his native Stygia. He had fled in the reign of King Mentupherra, and when Mentupherra died and Ctesphon ascended the ivory throne of Luxur, Thoth-Amon lingered in Kordava though he might have returned home, dunning me for the debt I owed him. But, instead of paying him the moiety of my gains as I had promised, I denounced him to my own monarch, so that Thoth-Amon must needs willy-nilly return to Stygia in haste and stealth. There he found favor and waxed in wealth and magical might until he was the virtual ruler of the land.

“Two years ago in Kordava, word came to me that Thoth-Amon had vanished from his accustomed haunts in Stygia. And then one night I saw his brown devil’s face leering at me from the shadows in my castle hall.

“It was not his material body, but his spirit sent to plague me. This time I had no king to protect me, for upon the death of Ferdrugo and the setting up of the regency, the land, as you know, had fallen into factional strife. Before Thoth-Amon could reach Kordava in the flesh, I sailed to put broad seas between me and him. He has his limitations; to follow me across the seas he must remain in his human, fleshly body. But now this field has tracked me down by his uncanny powers even here in this vast wilderness.

“He is too crafty to be trapped or slain as one would do with a common man. When he hides, no man can find him. He steals like a shadow in the night, making naught of bolts and bars. He blinds the eyes of guardsmen with sleep. He can command the spirits of the air, the serpents of the deep, and the fiends of the night; he can raise storms to sink ships and throw down castles. I hoped to drown my trail in the blue, rolling waves—but he has tracked me down to claim his grim forfeit…”

The weird eyes lit palely as Valenso gazed beyond the tapestried walls to far, invisible horizons. “I’ll trick him yet,” he whispered. “Let him delay to strike this night, and dawn shall find me with a ship under my heels, and again I will cast an ocean between me and his vengeance.”

“Hell’s fire!”

Conan stopped short, glaring upward. Behind him, the seamen halted—two compact clumps of them, bows in their hands and suspicion in their attitude. They were following an old path made by Pictish hunters, which led due east. Although they had progressed only some thirty yards, the beach was no longer visible.

“What is it?” demanded Strombanni suspiciously. “Why are you stopping?”

“Are you blind? Look there!”

From the thick limb of a tree that overhung the trail, a head grinned down at them: a dark, painted face, framed in thick black hair, in which a hornbill feather drooped over the left ear.

“I took that head down and hid it in the bushes,” growled Conan, scanning the woods about them narrowly. “What fool could have stuck it back up there? It looks as if somebody were trying his damnedest to bring the Picts down on the settlement.”

Men glanced at one another darkly, a new element of suspicion added to the already seething cauldron. Conan climbed the tree, secured the head, and carried it into the bushes, where he tossed it into a stream and watched it sink.

“The Picts whose tracks are about this tree weren’t Hornbills,” he growled, returning through the thicket. “I’ve sailed these coasts enough to know something about the sea-land tribes. If I read the prints of their moccasins aright, they were Cormorants. I hope they’re having a war with the Hornbills. If they’re at peace, they’ll head straight for the Hornbill village, and there’ll be trouble. I don’t know how far away that village is—but, as soon as they leam of this murder, they’ll come through the forest like starving wolves. That’s the worst insult possible to a Pict—to kill a man not in war-paint and stick his head up in a tree for the vultures to eat. Damned peculiar things going on along this coast. But that’s always the way when civilized men come into the wilderness; they’re all crazy as Hell. Come on.”

Men loosened blades in their scabbards and shafts in their quivers as they strode deeper into the forest. Men of the sea, accustomed to rolling expanses of gray water, they were ill at ease with mysterious, green walls of trees and vines hemming them in. The path wound and twisted until most of them quickly lost their sense of direction and did not even know in which direction the beach lay.

Conan was uneasy for another reason. He kept scanning the trail and finally grunted: “Somebody’s passed along here recently—not more than an hour ahead or us. Somebody in boots, with no woodcraft. Was he the fool who found that Pict’s head and stuck it back up in that tree? No, it couldn’t have been he. I didn’t find his tracks under the tree. But who was it? I found no tracks there, except those of the Picts I’d already seen. And who’s this fellow hurrying ahead of us? Did either of you bastards send a man ahead of us for any reason?”

Both Strombanni and Zarono loudly disclaimed any such act, glaring at each other with mutual disbelief. Neither man could see the signs Conan pointed out; the faint prints that he saw on the grassless, hard-beaten trail were invisible to their untrained eyes.

Conan quickened his pace, and they hurried after him, fresh coals of suspicion added to the smoldering fire of distrust. Presently the path veered norrhward, and Conan left it and began threading his way through the trees in a southeasterly direction. The afternoon wore on as the swearing men plowed through bushes and climbed over logs. Strombanni, momentarily falling behind with Zarono, murmured:

“Think you he’s leading us into an ambush?”

“He might,” retorted the buccaneer. “In any case, we shall never find our way back to the sea without him to guide us.” Zarono gave Strombanni a meaningful look.

“I see your point,” said the latter. “This may force a change in our plans.”

Suspicion grew as they advanced and had almost reached panic proportions when they emerged from the thick woods and saw, just ahead of them, a gaunt crag that jutted up from the forest floor. A dim path, leading out of the woods from the east, ran along a cluster of boulders and wound up the crag on a ladder of stony shelves to a flat ledge near the summit.

Conan halted, a bizarre figure in his piratical finery. “That trail is the one I followed, when I was running from the Eagle Picts,” he said. “It leads up to a cave behind that ledge. In that cave are the bodies of Tranicos and his captains, and the treasure he plundered from Tothmekri. But a word before we go up after it: If you kill me here, you’ll never find your way back to the trail we followed from the beach. I know you seafaring men; you’re helpless in the deep woods. Of course, the beach lies due west; but, if you have to make your way through the tangled woods, burdened with the plunder, it’ll take you, not hours, but days. And I don’t think these woods will be very safe for white men, when the Hornbills learn about their hunter.”

He laughed at the ghastly, mirthless smiles with which they greeted his recognition of their intentions toward him. And he also comprehended the thought that sprang in the mind of each: Let the barbarian secure the loot for them and lead them back to the beach trail before they killed him.

“All of you stay here except Strombanni and Zarono,” said Conan. “We three are enough to pack the treasure down from the cave.”

Strombanni grinned mirthlessly. “Go up there alone with you and Zarono? Do you take me for a fool? One man at least comes with me!”

And he designated his boatswain, a brawny, hard-faced giant, naked to his broad leather belt, with gold hoops in his ears and a crimson scarf around his head.

“And my executioner comes with me!” growled Zarono. He beckoned to a lean sea-thief with a face like a parchment-covered skull, who carried a two-handed scimitar naked over his bony shoulder.

Conan shrugged his shoulders. “Very well. Follow me.”

They were close on his heels as he strode up the winding path and mounted the ledge. They crowded him close as he passed through the cleft in the wall behind it, and their breath sucked greedily between their teeth as he called their attention to the iron-bound chests on either side of the short, tunnel-like cavern.

“A rich cargo here,” he said carelessly. “Silks, laces, garments, ornaments, weapons—the loot of the southern seas. But the real treasure lies beyond that door.”

The massive door stood partly open. Conan frowned. He remembered closing that door before he left the cavern. But he said nothing of the matter to his eager companions as he drew aside to let them through.

They looked into a wide cavern, lit by a strange, blue glow that glimmered through a smoky, mistlike haze. A great ebon table stood in the midst of the cavern, and, in a carved chair with a high back and broad arms, which might once have stood in the castle of some Zingaran baron, sat a giant figure, fabulous and fantastic. There sat Bloody Tranicos, his great head sunk on his bosom, one hand still gripping a jeweled goblet—Tranicos, in his lacquered hat, his gilt-embroidered coat with jeweled buttons that winked in the blue flame, his flaring boots and gold-worked baldric, which upheld a jewel-hilted sword in a golden sheath.

And ranging the board, each with his chin resting on his lace-bedecked breast, sat the eleven captains. The blue fire played weirdly on them and on their giant admiral, as it flowed from the enormous jewel on the tiny ivory pedestal, striking glints of frozen fire from the heaps of fantastically-cut gems that shone before the place of Tranicos—the plunder of Khemi, the jewels of Tothmekri! The stones whose value was greater than that of all the rest of the known jewels in the world put together!

The faces of Zarono and Strombanni showed pallid in the blue glow. Over their shoulders, their men gaped stupidly.

“Go in and take them,” invited Conan, drawing aside.

Zarono and Strombanni crowded avidly past him, jostling each other in their haste. Their followers were treading on their heels. Zarono kicked the door wide open—and halted, with one foot on the threshold, at the sight of a figure on the floor, previously hidden from view by the partly-closed door. It was a man, prone and contorted, with his head drawn back between his shoulders and his white face twisted in a grin of mortal agony.

“Galbro!” exclaimed Zarono. “Dead! What—” With sudden suspicion, he thrust his head over the threshold. Then he jerked back and screamed: “There’s death in the cavern!”

Even as he screamed, the blue mist swirled and condensed. At the same time, Conan hurled his weight against the four men bunched in the doorway, sending them staggering—but not headlong into the misty cavern as he had planned. Suspecting a trap, they were recoiling from the sight of the dead man and the materializing demon. Hence his violent push, while it threw them off their feet, yet failed of the result he desired. Strombanni and Zarono sprawled half over the threshold on their knees, the boatswain tumbled over their legs, and the executioner caromed against the wall.

Before Conan could follow up his ruthless intention of kicking the fallen men into the cavern and holding the door against them until the supernatural horror within had done its deadly work, he had to run and defend himself against the frothing onslaught of the executioner, who was the first to regain his balance and his wits.

The buccaneer missed a tremendous swipe with his headsman’s sword as the Cimmerian ducked, and the great blade banged against the stone wall, spattering blue sparks. The next instant, the executioner’s skull-faced head rolled on the cavern floor under the bite of Conan’s cutlass.

In the split seconds this swift action consumed, the boatswain regained his feet and fell on the Cimmerian, raining blows with a cutlass that would have overwhelmed a lesser man. Cutlass met cutlass with a ring of steel that was deafening in the narrow cavern.

Meanwhile the two captains, terrified of they knew not what in the cavern, scuttled back out of the doorway so quickly that the demon had not fully materialized before they were over the magical boundary and out of its reach. By the time they rose to their feet, reaching for their swords, the monster had diffused again into blue mist.

Hotly engaged with the boatswain, Conan redoubled his efforts to dispose of his antagonist before help could come to him. The boatswain dripped blood at each step as he was driven back before the ferocious onslaught, bellowing for his companions. Before Conan could deal the finishing stroke, the two chiefs came at him with swords in their hands, shouting for their men.

The Cimmerian bounded back and leaped out on to the ledge. Although he felt himself a match for all three men—each a famed swordsman—he did not wish to be trapped by the crews, which would come charging up the path at the sound of the battle.

These were not coming with as much celerity as he expected, however. They were bewildered by the sounds and the muffled shouts issuing from the cavern above them, but no man dared start up the path for fear of a sword in the back. Each band faced the other tensely, grasping their weapons but incapable of decision. When they saw the Cimmerian bound out on the ledge, they still hesitated. While they stood with their arrows nocked, he ran up the ladder of handholds niched in the crag near the cleft and threw himself prone on the summit of the crag, out of their sight.

The captains stormed out on the ledge, raving and brandishing their swords.

Their men, seeing that their leaders were not at sword-strokes, ceased menacing each other and gaped in bewilderment

“Dog!” screamed Zarono. “You planned to trap and murder us! Traitor!”

Conan mocked them from above. “Well, what did you expect? You two were planning to cut my throat as soon as I got the plunder for you. If it hadn’t been for that fool Galbro, I should have trapped the four of you and explained to your men how you rushed in heedless to your doom.”

“And with us both dead, you’d have taken my ship and all the loot, too!” frothed Strombanni.

“Aye! And the pick of each crew! I’ve been thinking of coming back to the Main for months, and this was a good opportunity!

“It was Galbro’s footprints I saw on the trail, although I know not how the fool learned of this cave, or how he expected to lug the loot away by himself.”

“But for the sight of his body, we should have walked into that deathtrap,” muttered Zarono, his swarthy face still ashy.

“What was it,” said Strombanni. “Some poisonous mist?”

“Nay, it writhed like a live thing and came together in some fiendish form ere we backed out. It is some devil bound to the cave by a spell.”

“Well, what are you going to do?” their unseen tormentor yelled sardonically.

“What shall we do?” Zarono asked Strombanni. “The treasure cavern cannot be entered.”

“You, can’t get the treasure,” Conan assured them from his eyrie. “The demon will strangle you. It nearly got me, when I stepped in there. Listen, and I’ll tell you a tale the Picts tell in their huts when the fires bum low!

“Once, long ago, twelve strange men came out of the sea. They fell upon a Pictish village and put all the folk to the sword, except a few who fled in time. Then they found a cave and heaped it with gold and jewels. But a shaman of the slaughtered Picts—one of those who escaped—made magic and evoked a demon from one of the lower hells. By his sorcerous powers, he forced this demon to enter the cavern and strangle the men as they sat at wine. And, lest this demon thereafter roam abroad and molest the Picts themselves, the shaman confined it by his magic to the inner cavern. The tale was told from tribe to tribe, and all the clans shun the accursed spot.

“When I crawled in there to escape the Eagle Picts, I realized that the old legend was true and referred to Tranicos and his men. Death guards old Tranicos’s treasure!”

“Bring up the men!” frothed Strombanni. “We’ll climb up and hew him down!”

“Don’t be a fool!” snarled Zarano. “Think you any man on earth could climb those handholds in the teeth of his sword? We’ll have the men up here, right enough, to feather him with shafts if he dares show himself. But we’ll get those gems yet. He has some plan of obtaining the loot, or he’d not have brought thirty men to bear it back. If he could get it, so can we. We’ll bend a cutlass blade to make a hook, tie it to a rope, and cast it about the leg of that table, then drag it to the door.”

“Well thought, Zarono!” came down Conan’s mocking voice. “Exactly what I had in mind. But how will you find your way back to the beach path? It’ll be dark long before you reach the beach, if you have to feel your way through the woods, and I’ll follow you and kill you one by one in the dark.”

“If’s no empty boast,” muttered Strombanni. “He can move and strike in the dark as subtly and silently as a ghost. If he hunts us back through the forest, few of us will live to see the beach.”

“Then we’ll kill him here,” gritted Zarono. “Some of us will shoot at him, while the rest climb the crag. If he is not struck by arrows, some of us will reach him with our swords. Listen! Why does he laugh?”

“To hear dead men making plots,” came Conan’s grimly amused voice.

“Heed him not,” scowled Zarono. Lifting his voice, he shouted for the men below to join him and Strombanni on the ledge.

The sailors started up the slanting trail, and one started to shout a question. Simultaneously there sounded a hum like that of an angry bee, ending with a sharp thud. The buccaneer gasped, and blood gushed from his open mouth. He sank to his knees, a black shaft protruding from his back. A yell of alarm went up from his companions.

“What’s the matter?” shouted Strombanni.

“Picts!” bawled a pirate, lifting his bow and loosing blindly. At his side, a man moaned and went down with an arrow through his throat.

“Take cover, you fools!” shrieked Zarono. From his vantage point, he glimpsed painted figures moving in the bushes. One of the men on the winding path fell back dying. The rest scrambled hastily down among the rocks about the foot of the crag. They took cover clumsily, not being used to fighting of this kind. Arrows flickered from the bushes, splintering on the boulders. The men on the ledge lay prone.

“We’re trapped!” said Strombanni, his face pale. Bold enough with a deck under his feet, this silent, savage warfare shook his ruthless nerves. “Conan said they feared this crag,” said Zarono. “When night falls, the men must climb up here. We’ll hold this crag; the Picts won’t rush us.”

“Aye!” mocked Conan above them. “They won’t climb the crag to get at you, that’s true. They’ll merely surround it and keep you here until you all die of thirst and starvation.”

“He speaks truth,” said Zarono helplessly. “What shall we do?”

“Make a truce with him,” muttered Strombanni. “If any man can get us out of this jam, he can. Time enough to cut his throat later.” Lifting his voice, he called:

“Conan, let’s forget our feud for the time being. You’re in this fix as much as we are. Come down and help us out of it.”

“How do you figure that?” retorted the Cimmerian. “I have but to wait until dark, climb down the other side of this crag, and melt into the forest. I can crawl through the line the Picts have thrown around this hill, return to the fort, and report you all slain by the savages—which will shortly be the truth!”

Zarono and Strombanni stared at each other in pallid silence.

“But not do that!” Conan roared. “Not because I have any love for you dogs, but because I don’t leave white men, even my enemies, to be butchered by Picts.”

The Cimmerian’s touseled black head appeared over the crest of the crag. “Now listen closely: That’s only a small band down there. I saw them sneaking through the brush when I laughed, a while ago. Anyway, if there had been many of them, every man at the foot of the crag would be dead already. I think that’s a band of fleet-footed young bucks sent ahead of the main war party to cut us off from the beach. I’m certain a big war band is heading in our direction from somewhere.

“They’ve thrown a cordon around the west side of the crag, but I don’t think there are any on the east side. I’m going down on that side, to get into the forest and work around behind them. Meanwhile, you crawl down the path and join your men among the rocks. Tell them to unstring their bows and draw their swords. When you hear me yell, rush the trees on the west side of the clearing.”

“What of the treasure?”

‘To Hell with the treasure! We shall be lucky if we get out of here with our heads on our shoulders.”

The black-maned head vanished. They listened for sounds to indicate that Conan had crawled to the almost sheer eastern wall and was working his way down, but they heard nothing. Nor was there any sound in the est. No more arrows broke against the rocks where the sailors were hidden. But all knew that fierce, black eyes were watching with murderous patience. Gingerly, Strombanni, Zarono, and the boatswain started down the winding path.

They were halfway down when black shafts began to whisper around them. The boatswain groaned and toppled limply down the slope, shot throuth the heart. Arrows shivered on the helmets and breastplates of the chiefs as they tumbled in frantic haste down the steep trail. They reached the foot in a scrambling rush and lay panting among the boulders, swearing breathlessly. “Is this more of Conan’s trickery?” wondered Zarono profanely.

“We can trust him in this matter,” asserted Strombanni. “These barbarians live by their own particular code of honor, and Conan would never desert men of his own complexion to be slaughtered by people of another race. He’ll help us against the Picts, even though he plans to murder us himself—hark!”

A blood-freezing yell knifed the silence. It came from the woods to the west, and simultaneously an object arched out of the trees, struck the ground, and rolled bouncingly toward the rocks—a severed human head, the hideously painted face frozen in a snarl of death.

“Conan’s signal!” roared Strombanni, and the desperate freebooters rose like a wave from the rocks and rushed headlong toward the woods. Arrows whirred out of the bushes, but their flight was hurried and erratic; only three men fell. Then the wild men of the sea plunged through the fringe of foliage and fell on the naked painted figures that rose out of the gloom before them. There was a murderous instant of panting, ferocious, hand-to-hand effort.

Cutlasses beat down war-axes, booted feet trampled naked bodies, and then bare feet were rattling through the bushes in headlong flight as the survivors of that brief carnage quit the fray, leaving seven still, painted figures stretched on the bloodstained leaves that littered the earth. Farther back in the thickets sounded a thrashing and heaving; then it ceased, and Conan strode into view, his lacquered hat gone, his coat torn, his cutlass dripping in his hand.

“What now?” panted Zarono. He knew the charge had succeeded only because Conan’s unexpected attack on the rear of the Picts had demoralized the painted men and prevented them from falling back before the rush. But he exploded into curses as Conan passed his cutlass through a buccaneer who writhed on the ground with a shattered hip.

“We cannot carry him with us,” grunted Conan. “It wouldn’t be any kindness to leave him to be taken alive by the Picts. Come on!”

They crowded close at his heels as he trotted through the trees. Alone, they would have sweated and blundered among the thickets for hours before they found the beach trail—if they had ever found it. The Cimmerian led them unerringly as if he had been following a blazed path, and the rovers shouted with hysterical relief as they burst suddenly upon the trail that ran westward.

“Fool!” Conan clapped a hand on the shoulder of a pirate who started to break into a run and hurled him back among his companions. “You’ll bunt your heart and fall within a thousand yards. We’re miles from the beach. Take an easy gait. We may have to sprint the last mile; save some of your wind for it. Come on, now!” He set off down the trail at a steady jog-trot The seamen followed him, suiting their pace to his.

The sun was touching the waves of the western ocean. Tina stood at the window from which Belesa had watched the storm.

“The setting sun turns the ocean to blood,” she said. “The carack’s sail is a white fleck on the crimson waters. The woods are already darkened with clustering shadows.”

“What of the seamen on the beach?” asked Belesa languidly. She reclined on a couch, her eyes closed, her hands clasped behind her head.

“Both camps are preparing their supper,” said Tina. “They gather driftwood and build fires. I can hear them shouting to one another—what is that?”

The sudden tenseness in the girl’s tone brought Belesa upright on the couch. Tina grasped the windowsill, her face white.

“Listen! A howling, far off, like many wolves!”

“Wolves?” Belesa sprang up, fear clutching her heart. “Wolves do not hunt in packs at this time of year—”

“Oh, look!” shrilled the girl, pointing. “Men are running out of the forest!”

In an instant, Belesa was beside her, staring wide-eyed at the figures small in the distance, streaming out of the woods.

“The sailors!” she gasped. “Empty-handed! I see Zarono—Strombanni—”

“Where is Conan?” whispered the child. Belesa shook her head.

“Listen! Oh, listen!” whimpered Tina, clinging to her. “The Picts!”

All in the fort could hear it now—a vast ululation of mad exultation and blood lust, from the depths of the dark forest. The sound spurred on the panting men, reeling toward the palisade.

“Hasten!” gasped Strombanni, his face a drawn mask of exhausted effort. “They are almost at our heels. My ship—”

“She is too far for us to reach,” panted Zarono. “Make for the stockade. See, the men camped on the beach have seen us!”

He waved his arms in breathless pantomime, but the men on the strand understood and recognized the significance of that wild howling, rising to a triumphant crescendo. The sailors abandoned their fires and cooking pots and fled for the stockade gate. They were pouring through it as the fugitives from the forest rounded the south angle and reeled into the gate, a heaving, frantic mob, half dead from exhaustion. The gate was slammed with frenzied haste, and sailors began to climb to the footwalk to join the men-at-arms already there. Belesa, who had hurried down from the manor, confronted Zarono.

“Where is Conan?”

The buccaneer jerked a thumb toward the blackening woods. His chest heaved; sweat poured down his face.

“Their scouts were at our heels ere we gained the beach. He paused to slay a few and give us time to get away.”

He staggered away to take his place on the footwalk, whither Strombanni had already mounted. Valenso stood there, a somber, cloak-wrapped figure, strangely silent and aloof. He was like a man bewitched.

“Look!” yelped a pirate, above the deafening howling of the yet unseen horde. A man emerged from the forest and raced fleetly across the open belt.

“Conan!” Zarono grinned wolfishly. “We’re safe in the stockade; we know where the treasure is. No reason why we shouldn’t feather him with arrows now.”

“Nay!” Strombanni caught his arm. “We shall need his sword. Look!”

Behind the fleet-footed Cimmerian, a wild horde burst from the forest, howling as they ran—naked Picts, hundred and hundreds of them. Their arrows rained about the Cimmerian. A few strides more, and Conan reached the eastern wall of the stockade, bounded high, seized the points of the logs, and heaved himself up and over, his cutlass in his teeth. Arrows thudded venomously into the logs where his body had just been. His resplendent coat was gone, his white shirt torn and bloodstained.

“Stop them!” he roared as his feet hit the ledge inside. “If they get on the wall, we’re done for!”

Pirates, buccaneers, and men-at-arms responded instantly, and a storm of arrows and quarrels tore into the oncoming horde. Conan saw Belesa with Tina clinging to her hand, and his language was picturesque.

“Get into the manor,” he commanded in conclusion. “Their shafts will arch over the wall—what did I tell you?” A black shaft cut into the earth at Belesa’s feet and quivered like a serpent’s head. Conan caught up a longbow and leaped to the footwalk. “Some of you fellows prepare torches!” he roared, above the clamor of battle. “We can’t find them in the dark!”

The sun had sunk in a welter of blood. Out in the bay, the men aboard the carack had cut the anchor chain, and the Red Hand was rapidly receding on the crimson horizon.

VII. Men of the Woods

Night had fallen, but torches streamed across the strand, casting the mad scene into lurid revealment. Naked men in paint swarmed the beach; like waves they came against the palisade, bared teeth and blazing eyes gleaming in the glare of the torches thrust over the wall. Hornbill feathers waved in black manes, and the feathers of the cormorant and the sea-falcon. A few warriors, the wildest and most barbaric of them all, wore sharks’ teeth woven in their tangled locks. The sea-land tribes had gathered from up and down the coast in all directions to rid their country of the white-skinned invaders.

They surged against the palisade, driving a storm of arrows before them, fighting into the teeth of the shafts and bolts that tore into their masses from the stockade. Sometimes they came so close to the wall that they were hewing at the gate with their war-axes and thrusting their spears through the loopholes.

But each time the tide ebbed back without flowing over the palisade, leaving its drift of dead. At this kind of fighting, the freebooters of the sea were at their stoutest. Their arrows and bolts tore hole? in the charging horde; their cutlasses hewed the wild men from the palisades they strove to scale. Yet again and again, the men of the woods returned to the onslaught with all the stubborn ferocity that had been roused in their fierce hearts.

“They are like mad dogs!” gasped Zarono, hacking downward at the dark hands that grasped the palisade points and the dark faces that snarled up at him.

“If we can hold the fort until dawn, they’ll lose heart,” grunted Conan, splitting a feathered skull with professional precision. “They won’t maintain a long siege. Look, they’re falling back.”

The charge rolled back. The men on the wall shook the sweat out of their eyes, counted their dead, and took a fresh grip on the blood-slippery hilts of their swords. Like blood-hungry wolves, grudgingly driven from a cornered prey, the Picts skulked back beyond the ring of torches. Only the bodies of the slain lay before the palisade.

“Have they gone?” Strombanni shook back his wet, tawny locks. The cutlass in his fist was notched and red; his brawny arm was splashed with blood.

“They’re still out there.” Conan nodded toward the outer darkness that ringed the circle of torches, made more intense by their light. He glimpsed movements in the shadows, the glitter of eyes and the red glint of copper weapons.

“They’ve drawn off for a bit, though,” he said. “Put sentries on guard and let the others rest, eat and drink. Tis past midnight, and we’ve been fighting for hours without respite. Ha, Valenso, how goes the battle with you?”

The count, in dented, blood-splashed helmet and cuirass, moved somberly up to where Conan and the captains stood. For answer, he muttered something inaudible under his breath. And then out of the darkness a voice spoke: a loud, clear voice that rang through the entire fort.

“Count Valenso! Count Valenso of Korzetta! Do you hear me?” It spoke with a Stygian accent.

Conan heard the count gasp as if he had been stricken with a mortal wound. Valenso reeled and grasped the tops of the logs of the stockade, his face pale in the torchlight. The voice resumed:

“It is I, Thoth-Amon of the Ring! Did you think to flee me once more? It is too late for that! All your schemes shall avail you naught, for tonight I shall send a messenger to you. It is the demon that guarded the treasure of Tranicos, whom I have released from his cave and bound to my service. He will inflict upon you the doom that you, you dog, have earned: a death at once slow, hard, and disgraceful. Let us see you mulct your way out of that!” The speech ended in a peal of musical laughter. Valenso gave a scream of terror, jumped down from the footwalk, and ran staggering up the slope toward the manor.

When the lull came in the fighting, Tina had crept to their window, from which they had been driven by the danger of flying arrows. Silently she watched the men gather about the fire. Belesa was reading a letter that had been delivered by a serving-woman to her door. It read:

Count Valenso of Korzetta to his niece Belesa, greeting:

My doom has come upon me at last. Now that I am resigned if not reconciled to it, I would have you know that I am not insensible of the fact that I have used you in a manner not consistent with the honor of the Korzettas. I did so because circumstances left me no other choice. Although it is late for apologies, I ask that you think not too hardly of me; and, if you can bring yourself to do so, and by some chance you survive this night of doom, that you pray to Mitra for the soiled soul of your father’s brother. Meanwhile, I advise that you remain away from the great hall, lest the same fate that awaits me encompass you also. Farewell.

Belesa’s hands shook as she read. Although she could never love her uncle, this was still the most human action she had ever known him to take.

At the window, Tina said: “There ought to be more men on the wall; suppose the black man came back?”

Belesa, going over beside her to look out, shuddered at the thought.

“I am afraid,” murmured Tina. “I hope Strombanni and Zarono are killed.”

“And not Conan?” asked Belesa curiously.

“Conan would not harm us,” said the child confidently. “He lives up to his barbaric code of honor, but they are men who have lost all honor.”

“You are wise beyond your years, Tina,” said Belesa, with the vague uneasiness that the precocity of the child often aroused in her.

“Look!” Tina stiffened. “The sentry is gone from the south wall! saw him on the ledge a moment ago; now he has vanished.”

From their window, the palisade points of the south wall were just visible over the slanting roofs of a row of huts which paralleled that wall for almost its entire length. A sort of open-topped corridor, three or four yards wide, was formed by the stockade and the back of the huts, which were built in a solid row. These huts were occupied by the serfs.

“Where could the sentry have gone?” whispered Tina uneasily.

Belesa was watching one end of the hut row, which was not far from a side door of the manor. She could have sworn she saw a shadowy figure glide from behind the huts and disappear at the door. Was that the vanished sentry? Why had he left the wail, and why should he also subtly into the manor? She could not believe it the sentry she had seen, and a nameless fear congealed her blood.

“Where is the count, Tina?” she asked.

“In the great hall, my lady. He sits alone at the table, wrapped in his cloak and drinking wine, with a face as gray as death.”

“Go and tell him what we have seen. I will keep watch from this window, lest the Picts steal over the unguarded wall.”

Tina scampered away. Suddenly remembering reading in the count’s letter about staying out of the main hall, Belesa rose, hearing slippered feet pattering along the corridor, receding down the stair.

Then abruptly, terribly, there rang out a scream of such poignant fear that Belesa’s heart almost stopped with the shock of it. She was out of the chamber and flying down the corridor before she was aware that her limbs were in motion. She ran down the stairs—and halted as if tamed to stone.

She did nor scream as Tina had screamed. She was incapable of sound or motion. She saw Tina, was aware of the reality of the small girl’s arms frantically grasping her. But these were the only sane realities in a scene of nightmare and lunacy and death, dominated by the monstrous, anthropomorphic shadow that spread awful arms against a lurid, hell-fire glare.

Out in the stockade, Strombanni shook his head at Conan’s question. “I heard nothing.”

“I did!” Conan’s wild instincts were roused; he was tensed, his eyes blazing. “It came from the south wall, behind those huts!”

Drawing his cutlass, he strode toward the palisade. From the compound, the wall on the south and the sentry posted there were not visible, being hidden behind the huts. Strombanni followed, impressed by the Cimmerian’s manner.

At the mouth of the open space between the huts and the wall, Conan halted warily. The space was dimly lighted by torches flaring at either corner of the stockade. And, about midway of that corridor, a crumpled shape sprawled on the ground.

“Bracus!” swore Strombanni, running forward and dropping on one knee beside the figure. “By Mitra, his throat’s been cut from ear to ear!”

Conan swept the space with a quick glance, finding it empty save for himself, Strombanni, and the dead man. He peered through a loophole. No living man moved within the ring of torchlight outside the fort.

“Who could have done this?” he wondered.

“Zarono!” Strombanni sprang up spitting fury like a wildcat, his hair bristling, his face convulsed. “He has set his thieves to stabbing my men in the back! He plans to wipe me out by treachery! Devils! am leagued within and without!”

“Wait!” Conan reached a restraining hand. “I don’t believe Zarono—”

But the maddened pirate jerked away and rushed around the end of the hut row, breathing blasphemies. Conan ran after him, swearing. Strombanni made straight toward the fire by which Zarono’s tall, lean form was visible as the buccaneer chief quaffed a jack of ale.

His amazement was supreme when the jack was dashed violently from his hand, spattering his breastplate with foam, and he was jerked around to confront the passion-distorted face of the pirate captain.

“You murdering dog!” roared Strombanni. “Will you slay my men behind my back while they fight for your filthy hide as well as for mine?”

Conan was hurrying toward them, and on all sides men ceased eating and drinking to stare in amazement.

“What do you mean?” sputtered Zarono.

“You’ve set your men to stabbing mine at their posts!” screamed the maddened Barachan.

“You lie!” Smoldering hate burst into sudden flame.

With an incoherent howl, Strombanni heaved up his cutlass and cut at the buccaneer’s head. Zarono caught the blow on his armored left arm, and sparks flew as he staggered back, ripping out his own sword. In an instant, the captains were fighting like madmen, their blades flaming and flashing in the firelight. Their crews reacted instantly and blindly. A deep roar went up as pirates and buccaneers drew their swords and fell upon one another. The men left on the walls abandoned their posts and leaped down into the stockade, blades in hand. In an instant the compound was a battleground, where knotting, writhing groups of men smote and slew in a blind frenzy. Some of the men-at-arms and serfs were drawn into the melee, and the soldiers at the gate turned and stared down in amazement, forgetting the enemy that linked outside.

It all happened so quickly—smoldering passions exploding into sudden kittle—that men were fighting all over the compound before Conan could reach the maddened chiefs. Ignoring their swords, he tore them apart with such violence that they staggered backward, and Zarono tripped and fell flat.

“You cursed fools, will you throw away all our lives?”

Strombanni was frothing mad and Zarono was bawling for assistance. A buccaneer ran at Conan from behind and cut at his head. The Cimmerian half turned and caught his arm, checking the stroke in midair.

“Look, you fools!” he roared, pointing with his sword.

Something in his tone caught the attention of the battle-crazed mob. Men froze in their places and twisted their heads to stare. Conan was pointing to a soldier on the footwalk. The man was reeling, clawing the air, and choking as he tried to shout. He pitched headlong to the ground, and all saw the black arrow standing out from between his shoulders.

A cry of alarm arose from the compound. On the heels of the shout came a clamor of blood-freezing screams and the shattering impact of axes on the gate. Flaming arrows arched over the wall and stuck in logs, and thin wisps of blue smoke curled upward. Then, from behind the huts that ranged the south wall, came swift and furtive figures racing across the compound.

“The Picts are in!” roared Conan.

Bedlam followed his shout. The freebooters ceased their feud. Some turned to meet the savages; some sprang to the wall. Savages were pouring from behind the huts and streaming over the compound; their axes clashed against the cutlasses of the sailors.

Zarono was still struggling to his feet when a painted savage rushed upon him from behind and brained him with a war-axe. Conan, with a clump of sailors behind him, was battling with the Picts inside the stockade; Strombanni, with most of his men, was climbing up on the stockade, slashing at the dark figures already swarming over the wall. The Picts, who had crept up unobserved and surrounded the fort while the defenders were fighting among themselves, were attacking from all sides, Valenso’s soldiers were clustered at the gate, trying to hold it against a howling swarm of exultant demons who thundered against it from the outside with a tree trunk.

More and more savages streamed from behind the huts, having scaled the undefended south wall. Strombanni and his pirates were beaten back from the other sides of the palisade, and in an instant the compound was swarming with naked warriors. They dragged down the defenders like wolves; the battle resolved into swirling whülpools of painted figures surging about small groups of desperate white men. Picts, sailors, and men-at-arms littered the earth, stamped underfoot by the heedless feet.

Blood-smeared braves dived howling into huts, and shrieks rose above the din of battle as women and children died beneath the red axes. When they heard those pitiful cries, the men-at-arms abandoned the gate, and in an instant the Picts had burst it and were pouring into the palisade at that point also. Huts began to go up in flames.

“Make for the manor!” roared Conan, and a dozen men surged in behind him as he hewed an inexorable way through the snarling pack.

Strombanni was at his side, wielding his red cutlass like a flail. “We can’t hold the manor,” grunted the pirate.

“Why not?” Conan was too busy with his crimson work to spare a glance.

“Because—uh!” a knife in a dark hand sank deep in the Barachan’s back. “Devil eat you, bastard!” Strombanni turned staggeringly and split the savage’s skull to his teeth. The pirate reeled and fell to his knees, blood starting from his lips.

“The manor’s burning!” he croaked, and slumped over in the dust.

Conan cast a swift look about him. The men who had followed him were all down in their blood. The Pict gasping out his life under the Cimmerian’s feet was the last of the group that had barred his way. All about him, battle was swirling and surging, but for the moment he stood alone. He was not far from the south wall. A few strides and he could leap to the ledge, swing over, and be gone through the night. But he remembered the helpless girls in the manor—from which, now, smoke was rolling in billowing masses. He ran toward the manor.

A feathered chief wheeled from the door, lifting a war-axe, and, behind the racing Cimmerian, lines of fleet-footed braves were converging upon him. He did not check his stride. His downward-sweeping cutlass met and deflected the axe and split the skull of the wielder. An instant later, Conan was through the door and had slammed and bolted it against the axes that thudded into the wood. The great hall was full of drifting wisps of smoke, through which he groped, half blinded. Somewhere a woman was whimpering little, catchy, hysterical sobs of nerve-shattering horror. He emerged from a whirl of smoke and stopped dead in his tracks, glaring down the hall.

The hall was dim and shadowy with drifting smoke. The great silver candelabrum was overturned, the candles extinguished; the only illumination was a lurid glow from the great fireplace and the wall in which it was set, where the flames licked from burning floor to smoking roof beams. And limned against that lurid glare, Conan saw a human worm swinging slowly at the end of a rope. The dead face, distorted beyond recognition, turned toward him as the body swung; but Conan knew it was Count Valenso, hanged to his own roof beam. But there was something else in the hall. Conan saw it through the drifting smoke: a monstrous black figure, outlined against the hell-fire glare. That outline was vaguely human, although the shadow thrown on the burning wall was not human at all.

“Crom!” muttered Conan aghast, paralyzed by the realization that he was confronted by a being against whom his sword was useless. He saw Belesa and Tina, clutched in each other’s arms, crouching at the bottom of the stair.

The black monster reared up, looming gigantic against the flame, great arms spread wide. A dim face leered through the drifting smoke—semi-human, demoniac, altogether terrible. Conan glimpsed the close-set horns, the gaping mouth, the peaked ears. It was lumbering toward him through the smoke, and an old memory woke with desperation.

Near the Cimmerian lay the great overturned candelabrum, once the pride of Korzetta Castle: fifty pounds of massy silver, intricately worked with figures of gods and heroes. Conan grasped it and heaved it high above his head. “Silver and fire!” he roared in a voice like a clap of wind, and hurled the candelabrum with all the power of his iron muscles. Full on the great black breast it crashed, fifty pounds of silver winged with terrific velocity. Not even the black one could stand before such a missile. The demon was carried off its feet—hurtled back into the open fireplace, which was a roaring mouth of flame. A horrible scream shook the hall, the cry of an unearthly thing gripped suddenly by earthly death. The mantel cracked, and stones fell from the great chimney, half hiding the black, writhing limbs at which the flames ate in elemental fury. Burning beams crashed down from the roof and thundered on the stones, and the whole heap was enveloped in a roaring burst of fire. Flames were creeping down the stair when Conan reached it. He caught up the fainting child under one arm and dragged Belesa to her feet. Through the crackle and snap of the fire sounded the splintering of the front door under the war-axes.

He glared about, sighted a door opposite the stair landing, and hurried through it, carrying Tina and dragging Belesa, who seemed dazed. As they came into the chamber beyond, a crash behind them announced that the roof was falling in the hall. Through a strangling wall of smoke, Conan saw an open, outer door on the other side of the chamber. As he lugged his charges through it, he saw that it sagged on broken hinges, lock and bolt snapped and splintered as if by some terrific force.

“The devil came in by this door!” Belesa sobbed hysterically. “I saw him—but I did not know—”

They emerged into the firelit compound a few feet from the row of huts that lined the south wall. A Pict was skulking toward the door, eyes red in the firelight and axe lifted. Dropping Tina and swinging Belesa away from the blow, Conan snatched out his cutlass and drove it through the savage’s breast. Then, sweeping both girls off their feet, he ran, carrying them, toward the south wall.

The compound was full of billowing smoke-clouds that half hid the red work going on there, but the fugitives had been seen. Naked figures, black against the dull glare, pranced out of the smoke, brandishing gleaming axes. They were still yards behind him when Conan ducked into the space between the huts and the wall. At the other end of the corridor, he saw other howling shapes, running to cut him off.

Halting short, he tossed Belesa bodily to the footwalk, then Tina, and then leaped up after them. Swinging Belesa over the palisade, he dropped her into the sand outside, and dropped Tina after her. A thrown axe crashed into a log by his shoulder, and then he, too, was over the wall and gathering up his dazed and helpless charges. When the Picts reached the wall, the space before the palisade was empty of all except the dead.

VIII. Swords of Aquilonia

Dawn was tinging the dim waters an old-rose hue. Far out across the tinted waters, a fleck of white grew out of the mist—a sail that seemed to hang suspended in the pearly sky. On a bushy headland, Conan the Cimmerian held a ragged cloak over a fire of green wood. As he manipulated the cloak, puffs of smoke rose upward, quivered against the dawn, and vanished. Belesa crouched near him, one arm about Tina. She asked: “Do you think they’ll see it and understand?”

“They’ll see it, right enough,” he assured her. “They’ve been hanging off this coast all night, hoping to sight some survivors. They’re scared stiff; there’s only half a dozen of them, and not one can navigate well enough to sail from here to the Barachan Isles. They’ll understand my signals; ‘tis the pirate code. They’ll be glad to ship under me, since I’m the only captain left.” “But suppose the Picts see the smoke?” She shuddered, glancing back over the misty sands and bushes to where, miles to the north, a column of smoke stood up in the still air.

“They’re not likely to see it. After I hid you in the woods, I crept back and saw them dragging barrels of wine and ale out of the storehouses. Already most of them were reeling. By this time, they’ll all be lying around, too drunk to move. If I had a hundred men, I could wipe out the whole horde—Crom and Mitra!” he cried suddenly. “That’s not the Red Hand after all, but a war galley! What civilized state would send a unit of its fleet hither? Unless somebody would have words with your uncle, in which case they’ll need a witch-woman to raise his ghost.”

He scowled out to sea in an effort to make out the details of the craft through the mist. The approaching ship was bow-on, so that all he could see was a gilded bow ornament, a small sail bellying in the faint onshore breeze, and the bank of oars on each side rising and falling like a single pair..

“Well,” said Conan, “at least they’re coming to take us off. It would be a long walk back to Zingara. Until we find out who they are and whether they’re friendly, say naught of who I am. I’ll think of a proper tale by the time they get here.”

Conan stamped out the fire, handed the cloak back to Belesa, and stretched like a great, lazy cat. Belesa watched him in wonder. His unperturbed manner was not assumed; the night of fire and blood and slaughter, and the flight through the black woods afterward, had left his nerves untouched. He was as calm as if he had spent the night in feasting and revel. Bandages torn from the hem of Belesa’s gown covered a few minor wounds that he had received in fighting without armor.

Belesa did not fear him; she felt safer than she had felt since she landed on that wild coast. He was not like the freebooters, civilized men who had repudiated all standards of honor and lived without any. Conan, on the other hand, lived according to the code of his people, which was barbaric and bloody but at least upheld its own peculiar standards of honor.

“Think you he is dead?” she asked.

He did not ask her to whom she referred. “I believe so,” he replied. “Silver and fire are both deadly to evil spirits, and he got a bellyfull of both.”

“How about his master?”

“Thoth-Amon? Gone back to lurk in some Stygian tomb, I suppose. These wizards are a queer lot.”

Neither spoke of that subject again; Belesa’s mind shrank from the task of conjuring up the scene when a black figure skulked into the great hall, and a long-delayed vengeance was horribly consummated.

The ship was larger, but some time would yet elapse before it made shore. Belesa asked:

“When you first came to the manor, you said something of having been a general in Aquilonia and then having to flee. What is the tale on that?” Conan grinned. “Put it down to my own folly in trusting that quince-faced Numedides. They made me general because of some small successes against the Picts; and then, when I’d scattered five times my own number of savages in a battle at Velitrium and broken their confederacy, I was called back to Tarantia for an official triumph. All very tickling to the vanity, riding beside the king while girls scatter rose petals before you; but then at the banquet the bastard plied me with drugged wine. I woke up in chains in the Iron Tower, awaiting execution.”

“Whatever for?”

He shrugged. “How know I what goes on in what that numb-wit calls his brain? Perhaps some of the other Aquilonian generals, resentful of the sudden rise of an outland barbarian into their sacred ranks, had worked upon his suspicions. Or perhaps he took offense at some of my frank remarks about his policy of spending the rdyal treasury to adorn Tarantia with golden statues of himself instead of for the defense of his frontiers.

“The philosopher Alcemides confided to me, just before I quaffed the drugged draught, that he hoped to write a book on the use of ingratitude as a principle of statecraft, using the king as a model. Heigh-ho! I was too drunk to realize he was trying to warn me.

“I had, however, friends with whose aid I was smuggled out of the Iron Tower, given a horse and a sword, and turned loose. I rode back to Bossonia with the idea of raising a revolt, beginning with my own troops. But, when I got there, I found my sturdy Bossonians gone, sent to another province, and in their place a brigade of ox-eyed yokels from the Tauran, most of whom had never heard of me. They insisted on trying to arrest me, so I had to split a few skulls in cutting my way out. I swam Thunder River with arrows whizzing about my ears… and here I am.”

He frowned out toward the approaching ship again. “By Crom, I’d swear yonder ensign bore the leopard of Poitain, did I did not know it were a thing impossible. Come.”

He led the girls down to the beach as the chant of the coxswain became audible. With a final heave on the oars, the crew drove the galley’s bow with a rush up the sand. As men tumbled off the bow, Conan yelled:

“Prosperol Trocero! What in the name of all the gods are you doing…”

“Conan!” they roared, and closed in on him, pounding his back and wringing his hands. All spoke at once, but Belesa did not understand the speech, which was that of Aquilonia. The one referred to as “Trocero” must be the Count of Poitain, a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped man who moved with the grace of a panther despite the gray in his black hair.

“What do you here?” persisted Conan.

“We came for you,” said Prospero, the slim, elegantly-clad one.

“How did you know where I was?”

The stout, bald man addressed as “Publius” gestured toward another man in the black robe of a priest of Mitra. “Dexitheus found you by his occult arts. He swore you still lived and promised to lead us to you.”

The black-robed man bowed gravely. “Your destiny is linked with that of Aquilonia, Conan of Cimmeria,” he said. “I am but one small link in the chain of your fate.”

“Well, what’s this all about?” said Conan. “Crom knows I’m glad to be rescued horn this forsaken sand spit, but why came you after me?”

Trocero spoke: “We have broken with Numedides, being unable longer to endure his follies and oppressions, and we seek a general to lead the forces of revolt. “You’re our man!”

Conan laughed gustily and stuck his thumbs in his girdle. “It’s good to find some who understand true merit! Lead me to the fray, my friends!” He glanced around and his eyes caught Belesa, standing timidly apart from the group. He gestured her forward with rough gallantry. “Gentlemen, the Lady Belesa of Korzetta.” Then he spoke to the girl in her own language again. “We can take you back to Zingara, but what will you do then?”

She shook her head helplessly. “I know not. I have neither money nor friends, and I am not trained to earn my living. Perhaps it would have been better had one of those arrows struck my heart.”

“Do not say that, my lady!” begged Tina. “I will work for us both!”

Conan drew a small leather bag from his girdle. “I didn’t get Tothmekri’s jewels,” he rumbled, “but here are some baubles I found in the chest where I got the clothes I’m wearing.” He spilled a handful of flaming rubies into his palm.

“They’re worth a fortune, themselves.” He dumped them back into the bag and handed it to her.

“But I can’t take these—” she began.

“Of course you shall take them! I might as well leave you for the Picts to scalp as to take you back to Zingara to starve,” said he. “I know what it is to be penniless in a Hyborian land. Now, in my country, sometimes there are famines; but people go hungry only when there’s no food in the land at all. But in civilized countries I’ve seen people sick of gluttony while others were starving. Aye, I’ve seen men fall and die of hunger against the walls of shops and storehouses crammed with food.

“Sometimes I was hungry, too, but then I took what I wanted at sword’s point. But you can’t do that. So you take these rubies. You can sell them and buy a castle, and slaves, and fine clothes, and with them it won’t be hard to get a husband, because civilized men all desire wives with these possessions.”

“But what of you?”

Conan grinned and indicated the circle of Aquilonians. “Here’s my fortune. With these true friends, I shall have all the wealth in Aquilonia at my feet.” The stout Publius spoke up: “Your generosity does you credit, Conan, but I wish you had consulted with me first. For revolutions are made not only by wrongs, but also by gold; and Numedides’ publicans have so beggared Aquilonia that we shall be hard put to find the money to hire mercenaries.”

“Ha!” laughed Conan. “I’ll get you gold enough to set every blade in Aquilonia swinging!” In a few words he told of the treasure of Tranicos and of the destruction of Valenso’s settlement. “Now the demon’s gone from the cave; the Picts will be scattering to their villages. With a detail of well-armed men, we can make a quick march to the cavern and back before they realize we’re in Pictland. Are you with me?”

They cheered until Belesa feared that their noise would draw the attention of the Picts. Conan cast her a sly grin and muttered in Zingaran, under cover of the racket:

“How d’you like ‘King Conan’? Sounds not bad, eh?”

17. WOLVES BEYOND THE BORDER

I.

It was the mutter of a drum that awakened me. I lay still amidst the bushes where I had taken refuge, straining my ears to locate it, for such sounds are illusive in the deep forest. In the dense woods about me there was no sound. Above me the tangled vines and brambles bent close to form a massed roof, and above them there loomed the higher, gloomier arch of the branches of the great trees. Not a star shone through that leafy vault. Low-hanging clouds seemed to press down upon the very tree-tops. There was no moon. The night was dark as a witch’s hate.

The better for me. If I could not see my enemies, neither could they see me. But the whisper of that ominous drum stole through the night: thrum! thrum! thrum!, a steady monotone that grunted and growled of nameless secrets. I could not mistake the sound. Only one drum in the world makes just that deep, menacing, sullen thunder: a Pictish war-drum, in the hands of those wild painted savages who haunted the Wilderness beyond the border of the Westermarck.

And I was beyond that border, alone, and concealed in a brambly covert in the midst of the great forest where those naked fiends have reigned since Time’s earliest dawns.

Now I located the sound; the drum was beating westward of my position and I believed at no great distance. Quickly I girt my belt more firmly, settled war-ax and knife in their beaded sheaths, strung my heavy bow and made sure that my quiver was in place at my left hip - groping with my fingers in the yutter darkness - and then I crawled from the thicket and went warily toward the sound of the drum.

That it personally concerned me I did not believe. If the forest-men had discovered me, their discovery would have been announced by a sudden knife in my throat, not by a drum beating in the distance. But the throb of the war-drum had a significance no forestrunner could ignore. It was a warning and a threat, a promise of doom for those white-skinned invaders whose lonely cabins and ax-marked clearings menaced the immemorial solitude of the wilderness. It meant fire and torture, flaming arrows dropping like falling stars through the darkness, and the red ax crunching through skulls of men and women and children.

So through the blackness of the nighted forest I went, feeling my way delicately among the mighty boles, sometimes creeping on hands and knees, and now and then my heart in my throat when a creeper brushed across my face or groping hand. For there are huge serpents in that forest which sometimes hang by their tails from branches and so snare their prey. But the creatures I sought were more terrible than any serpent, and as the drum grew louder I went as cautiously as if I trod on naked swords. And presently I glimpsed a red gleam among the trees, and heard a mutter of barbaric voices mingling with the snarl of the drum.

Whatever weird ceremony might be taking place yonder under the black trees, it was likely that they had outposts scattered about the place, and I knew how silent and motionless a Pict could stand, merging with the natural forest growth even in dim light, and unsuspected until his blade was through his victim’s heart. My flesh crawled at the thought of colliding with one such grim sentry in the darkness, and I drew my knife and held it extended before me. But I knew not even a Pict could see me in that blackness of tangled forest-roof and the cloud-massed sky.

The light revealed itself as a fire before which black silhouettes moved like black devils against the red fires of hell, and presently I crouched close among the dense tamarack and looked into a black-walled glade and the figures that moved therein.

There were forty or fifty Picts, naked but for loincloths, and hideously painted, who squatted in a wide semi-circle, facing the fire, with their backs to me. By the hawk feathers in their thick black manes, I knew them to be of the Hawk Clan, or Onayaga. In the midst of the glade there was a crude altar made of rough stones heaped together, and at the sight of this my flesh crawled anew. For I had seen these Pictish altars before, all charred with fire and stained with blood, in empty forest glades, and though I had never witnessed the rituals wherein these things were used, I had heard the tales told about them by men who had been captives among the Picts, or spied upon them even as I was spying.

A feathered shaman was dancing between the fire and the altar, a slow, shuffling dance indescribably grotesque, which caused his plumes to swing and sway about him: his features were hidden by a grinning scarlet mask that looked like a forestdevil’s face.

In the midst of the semi-circle of warriors squatted one with the great drum between his knees and as he smote it with his clenched fist it gave forth that low, growling rumble which is like the mutter of distant thunder.

Between the warriors and the dancing shaman stood one who was no Pict. For he was tall as I, and his skin was light in the play of the fire. But he was clad only in doeskin loin-clout and moccasins, and his body was painted, and there was a hawk feather in his hair, so I knew he must be a Ligurean, one of those light-skinned savages who dwell in small clans in the great forest, generally at war with the Picts, but sometimes at peace and allied with them. Their skins are white as an Aquilonian’s. The Picts are a white race too, in that they are not black nor brown nor yellow, but they are black-eyed and black-haired and dark of skin, and neither they nor the Ligureans are spoken of as ‘white’ by the people of Westermarck, who only designate thus a man of Hyborian blood.

Now as I watched I saw three warriors drag a man into the ring of the firelight – another Pict, naked and bloodstained, who still wore in his tangled mane a feather that identified him as a member of the Raven Clan, with whom the Hawkmen were ever at war. His captors cast him down upon the altar, bound hand and foot, and I saw his muscles swell and writhe in the firelight as he sought in vain to break the rawhide thongs which prisoned him.

Then the shaman began dancing again, weaving intricate patterns about the altar, and the man upon it, and he who beat the drum wrought himself into a fine frenzy, thundering away like one possessed of a devil. And suddenly, down from an overhanging branch dropped one of those great serpents of which I have spoken. The firelight glistened on its scales as it writhed toward the altar, its beady eyes glittered, and its forked tongue darted in and out, but the warriors showed no fear, though it passed within a few feet of some of them. And that was strange, for ordinarily these serpents are the only living creatures a Pict fears.

The monster reared its head up on arched neck above the altar, and it and the shaman faced one another across the prone body of the prisoner. The shaman danced with a writhing of body and arms, scarcely moving his feet, and as he danced, the great serpent danced with him, weaving and swaying as though mesmerized, and from the mask of the shaman rose a weird wailing that shuddered like the wind through the dry reeds along the sea-marshes. And slowly the great reptile reared higher and higher, and began looping itself about the altar and the man upon it, until his body was hidden by its shimmering folds, and only his head was visible with that other terrible head swaying close above it.

The shrilling of the shaman rose to a crescendo of infernal triumph, and he cast something into the fire. A great green cloud of smoke billowed up and rolled about the altar, so that it almost hid the pair upon it, making their outlines indistinct and illusive. But in the midst of that cloud I saw a hideous writhing and changing – those outlines melted and flowed together horribly, and for a moment I could not tell which was the serpent and which the man. A shuddering sigh swept over the assembled Picts like a wind moaning through nighted branches.

Then the smoke cleared and man and snake lay limply on the altar, and I thought both were dead. But the shaman seized the neck and let the great reptile ooze to the ground, and he tumbled the body of the man from the stones to fall beside the monster, and cut the rawhide thongs that bound wrist and ankle.

Then he began a weaving dance about them, chanting as he danced and swaying his arms in mad gestures. And presently the man moved. But he did not rise. His head swayed from side to side, and I saw his tongue dart out and in again. And Mitra, he began to wriggle away from the fire, squirming along on his belly, as a snake crawls!

And the serpent was suddenly shaken with convulsions and arched its neck and reared up almost its full length, and then fell back, loop on loop and reared up again vainly, horribly like a man trying to rise and stand and walk upright after being deprived of his limbs.

The wild howling of the Picts shook the night, and I was sick where I crouched among the bushes, and fought an urge to retch. I understood the meaning of this ghastly ceremony now. I had heard tales of it. By black, primordial sorcery that spawned and throve in the depths of this black primal forest, that painted shaman had transferred the soul of a captured enemy into the foul body of a serpent. It was the revenge of a fiend. And the screaming of the bloodmad Picts was like the yelling of all Hell’s demons.

And the victims writhed and agonized side by side, the man and the serpent, until a sword flashed in the hand of the shaman and both heads fell together - and gods, it was the serpent’s trunk which but quivered and jerked a little and then lay still, and the man’s body which rolled and knotted and thrashed like a beheaded snake. A deathly faintness and weakness took hold of me, for what white man could watch such black diabolism unmoved? And these painted savages, smeared with war-paint howling and posturing and triumphing over the ghastly doom of a foe, seemed not humans at all to me, but foul fiends of the black world whom it was a duty and an obligation to slay.

The shaman sprang up and faced the ring of warriors, and, ripping off his mask, threat up his head and howled like a wolf. And as the firelight fell full on his face, I recognized him, and with that recognition all horror and revulsion gave place to red rage, and all thought of personal peril and the recollection of my mission, which was my first obligation, was swept away. For that shaman was old Teyanoga of the South Hawks, he who burnt alive my friend, Jon Galter’s son.

In the lust of my hate I acted almost instinctively – whipped up my bow, notched an arrow and loosed, all in an instant. The firelight was uncertain, but the range was not great, and we of the Westermarck live by twang of bow. Old Teyanoga yowled like a cat and reeled back and his warriors howled with amazement to see a shaft quivering suddenly in his breast. The tall, light-skinned warrior wheeled, and for the first time I saw his face – and Mitra, he was a white man!

The horrid shock of that surprise held me paralysed for a moment and had almost undone me. For the Picts instantly sprang up and rushed into the forest, like panthers, seeking the foe who fired that arrow. They had reached the first fringe of bushes when I jerked out of my spell of amaze and horror, and sprang up and raced away in the darkness, ducking and dodging among trees which I avoided more by instinct than otherwise, for it was dark as ever. But I knew the Picts could not strike my trail, but must hunt as blindly as I fled. And presently, as I ran northward, behind me I heard a hideous howling whose bloodmad fury was enough to freeze the blood even of a forestrunner. And I believed that they had plucked my arrow from the shaman’s breast and discovered it to be a white man’s shaft. That would bring them after me with fiercer blood-lust than ever.

I fled on, my heart pounding from fear and excitement, and the horror of the nightmare I had witnessed. And that a white man, a Hyborian, should have stood there as a welcome and evidently honored guest – for he was armed – I had seen knife and hatchet at his belt – was so monstrous I wondered if, after all, the whole thing were a nightmare. For never before had a white man observed the dance of the Changing Serpent save as a prisoner, or a spy, as I had. And what monstrous thing it portended I knew not, but I was shaken with foreboding and horror at the thought.

And because of my horror I went more carelessly than is my wont, seeking haste at the expense of stealth, and occasionally blundering into a tree I could have avoided had I taken more care. And I doubt not it was the noise of this blundering progress which brought the Pict upon me, for he could not have seen me in that pitch-darkness.

Behind me sounded no more yells, but I knew that the Picts were ranging like fire-eyed wolves through the forest, spreading in a vast semi-circle and combing it as they ran. That they had not picked up my trail was evidenced by their silence, for they never yell except when they believe only a short dash is ahead of them, and feel sure of their prey.

The warrior who heard the sounds of my flight could not have been one of that party, for he was too far ahead of them. He must have been a scout ranging the forest to guard against his comrades being surprised from the north.

At any rate he heard me running close to him, and came like a devil of the black night. I knew of him first only by the swift faint pad of his naked feet, and when I wheeled I could not even make out the dim bulk of him, but only heard the soft thudding of those inexorable feet coming to me unseen in the darkness.

They see like cats in the dark, and I know he saw well enough to locate me, though doubtless I was only a dim blur in the darkness. But my blindly upswung hatchet met his falling knife and he impaled himself on my knife as he lunged in, his deathyell ringing like a peal of doom under the forest-roof. And it was answered by a ferocious clamor to the south, only a few hundred yards away, and then they were racing through the bushes giving tongue like wolves, certain of their quarry.

I ran for it in good earnest now, abandoning stealth entirely for the sake of speed, and trusting to luck that I would not dash out my brains against a tree-stem in the darkness.

But here the forest opened up somewhat; there was no underbrush, and something almost like light filtered in through the branches, for the clouds were clearing a little. And through this forest I fled like a damned soul pursued by demons, hearing the yells at first rising higher and higher in bloodthirsty triumph, then edged with anger and rage as they grew fainter and fell away behind me, for in a straight-away race no Pict can match the long legs of a white forestrunner. The desperate risk was that there were other scouts or war-parties ahead of me who could easily cut me off, hearing my flight; but it was a risk I had to take. But no painted figures started up like phantoms out of the shadows ahead of me, and presently, through the thickening growth that betokened the nearness of a creek, I saw a glimmer through the trees far ahead of me and knew it was the light of Fort Kwanyara, the southernmost outpost of Schohira.

II.

Perhaps, before continuing with this chronicle of the bloody years, it might be well were I to give an account of myself, and the reason why I traversed the Pictish Wilderness, by night and alone.

My name is Gault Hagar’s son. I was born in the province of Conajohara. But when I was ten years of age, the Picts broke over Black River and stormed Fort Tuscelan and slew all within save one man, and drove all the settlers of the province east of Thunder River. Conajohara became again part of the Wilderness, haunted only by wild beasts and wild men. The people of Conajohara scattered throughout the Westermarck, in Schohira, Conawaga, or Oriskawny, but many of them went southward and settled near Fort Thandara, an isolated outpost on the Warhorse River, my family among them. There they were later joined by other settlers for whom the older provinces were too thickly inhabited, and presently there grew up the district known as the Free Province of Thandara, because it was not like the other provinces, royal grants to great lords east of the marches and settled by them, but cut out of the wilderness by the pioneers themselves without aid of the Aquiloman nobility. We paid no taxes to any baron. Our governor was not appointed by any lord, but we elected him ourselves, from our own people, and he was responsible only to the king. We manned and built our forts ourselves, and sustained ourselves in war as in peace. And Mitra knows war was a constant state of affairs, for there was never peace between us and our savage neighbors, the wild Panther, Alligator and Otter tribes of Picts.

But we throve, and seldom questioned what went on east of the marches in the kingdom whence our grandsires had come. But at last events in Aquilonia did touch upon us in the wilderness. Word came of civil war, and a fighting man risen to wrest the throne from the ancient dynasty. And sparks from that conflagration set the frontier ablaze, and turned neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother. And it was because knights in their gleaming steel were fighting and slaying on the plains of Aquilonia that I was hastening alone through the stretch of wilderness that separated Thandara from Schohira, with news that might well change the destiny of all the Westermarck.

Fort Kwanyara was a small outpost, a square fortress of hewn logs with a palisade on the bank of Knife Creek. I saw its banner streaming against the pale rose of the morning sky, and noted that only the ensign of the province floated there. The royal standard that should have risen above it, flaunting the golden serpent, was not in evidence. That might mean much, or nothing. We of the frontier are careless about the delicate punctilios of custom and etiquette which mean so much to the knights beyond the marches.

I crossed Knife Creek in the early dawn, wading through the shallows, and was challenged by a picket on the other bank, a tall man in the buckskins of a ranger. When he knew I was from Thandara: ‘By Mitra!’ quoth he, ‘your business must be urgent, that you cross the wilderness instead of taking the longer road.’

For Thandara was separated from the other provinces, as I have said, and the Little Wilderness lay between it and the Bossonian marches; but a safe road ran through it into the marches and thence to the other provinces but it was a long and tedious road.

Then he asked for news from Thandara, but I told him I knew little of the latest events, having just returned from a long scout into the country of the Ottermen, which was a lie, but I had no way of knowing Schohira’s political color, and was not inclined to betray my own until I knew. Then I asked him if Hakon Strom’s son was in Fort Kwanyara, and he told me that the man I sought was not in the fort, but was at the town of Schondara, which lay a few miles east of the fort.

‘I hope Thandara declares for Conan,’ said he with an oath, ‘for I tell you plainly it is our political complexion. And it is my cursed luck which keeps me here with the handful of rangers who watch the border for raiding Picts. I would give my bow and hunting shirt to be with your army which lies even now at Thenitea on Ogaha Creek waiting the onslaught of Brocas of Toth with his damned renegades.’

I said naught but was astounded. This was news indeed. For the Baron of Toth was lord of Conawaga, not Schohira, whose patron was Lord Thasperas of Kormon.

‘Where is Thasperas?’ I asked, and the ranger answered, a thought shortly: ‘Away in Aquilonia, fighting for Conan.’ And he looked at me narrowly as if he had begun to wonder if I were a spy.

‘Is there a man in Schohira,’ I began, ‘who has such connections with the Picts that he dwells, naked and painted among them, and attends their ceremonies of blood-feast and – ‘

I checked myself at the fury that contorted the Schohiran’s features.

‘Damn you,’ says he, choking with passion, ‘what is your purpose in coming here to insult us thus?’

And indeed, to call a man a renegade was the direst insult that could be offered along the Westermarck, though I had not meant it in that way. But I saw the man was ignorant of any knowledge concerning the renegade I had seen, and not wishing to give out information, I merely told him that he misunderstood my meaning.

‘I understand it well enough,’ said he, shaking with passion. ‘But for your dark skin and southern accent I would deem you a spy from Conawaga. But spy or no, you cannot insult the men of Schohira in such manner. Were I not on military duty I would lay down my weapon-belt and show you what manner of men we breed in Schohira.’

‘I want no quarrel,’ said I. ‘But I am going to Schondara, where it will not be hard for you to find me, if you so desire.’

‘I will be there anon,’ quoth he grimly. ‘I am Storm Grom’s son and they know me in Schohira.’

I left him striding his post along the bank, and fingering his knife hilt and hatchet as if he itched to try their edge on my head, and I swung wide of the small fort to avoid other scouts or pickets. For in these troublous times suspicion might fall on me as a spy very easily. Nay, this Storm Grom’s son was beginning to turn such thoughts in his thick noddle when they were swept away by his personal resentment at what he mistook for a slur. And having quarreled with me, his sense of personal honor would not allow him to arrest me on suspicion of being a spy – even had he thought of it. In ordinary times none would think of halting or questioning a white man crossing the border – but everything was in a mad whirl now – it must be, if the patroon of Conawaga was invading the domain of his neighbors.

The forest had been cleared about the fort for a few hundred yards in each direction, forming a solid green wall. I kept within this wall as I skirted the clearing, and met no one, even when I crossed several paths leading from the fort. I avoided clearings and farms. I headed eastward and the sun was not high in the heavens when I sighted the roofs of Schondara.

The forest ran to within less than half a mile of the town, which was a handsome one for a frontier village, with neat houses mostly of squared logs, some painted, but also some fine frame buildings which is something we have not in Thandara. But there was not so much as a ditch or a palisade about the village, which was strange to me. For we of Thandara build our dwelling places for defense as much as shelter, and while there is not a village in the width and breadth of the province, yet every cabin is like a tiny fort.

Off to the right of the village stood a fort, in the midst of a meadow, with palisade and ditch, somewhat larger than Fort Kwanyara, but I saw few heads moving above the parapet, either helmeted or capped. And only the spreading winged hawk of Schohira flapped on the standard. And I wondered why, if Schohira were for Conan, they did not fly the banner he had chosen – the golden lion on a black field, the standard of the regiment he commanded as a mercenary general of Aquilonia.

Away to the left, at the edge of the forest I saw a large house of stone set amid gardens and orchards, and knew it for the estate of Lord Valerian, the richest landowner in western Schohira. I had never seen the man, but knew he was wealthy and powerful. But now the Hall, as it was called, seemed deserted.

The town seemed curiously deserted, likewise; at least of men, though there were women and children in plenty, and it seemed to me that the men had assembled their families here for safety. I saw few able-bodied men. As I went up the street many eyes followed me suspiciously, but none spoke except to reply briefly to my questions.

At the tavern only a few old men and cripples huddled about the ale-stained tables and conversed in low tones, all conversation ceasing as I loomed in the doorway in my worn buckskins, and all turned to stare at me silently.

More significant silence when I asked for Hakon Strom’s son, and the host told me that Hakon was ridden to Thenitea shortly after sun-up, where the militiaarmy lay encamped, but would return shortly. So being hungry and weary, I ate a meal in the taproom, aware of those questioning eyes fixed on me, and then lay down in a corner on a bear skin the host fetched for me, and slept. And was so slumbering when Hakon Strom’s son returned, close upon sunset.

He was a tall man, rangy and broad-shouldered, like most Westlanders, and clad in buckskin hunting shirt and fringed leggins and moccasins like myself. Half a dozen rangers were with him, and they sat them down at a board close to the door and watched him and me over the rims of their ale jacks.

When I named myself and told him I had word for him, he looked at me closely, and bade me sit with him at a table in the corner where mine host brought us ale foaming in leathern jacks.

‘Has no word come through of the state of affairs in Thandara?’ I asked.

‘No sure word; only rumors.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I bring you word from Brant Drago’s son, governor of Thandara, and the council of captains, and by this sign you shall know me for a true man.’ And so saying I dipped my finger in the foamy ale and with it drew a symbol on the table, and instantly erased it. He nodded, his eyes blazing with interest.

‘This is the word I bring you,’ quoth I; ‘Thandara has declared for Conan and stands ready to aid his friends and defy his enemies.’

At that he smiled joyfully and grasped my brown hand warmly with his own rugged fingers.

‘Good!’ he exclaimed. ‘But it is no more than I expected.’

‘What man of Thandara could forget Conan?’ said I. ‘Nay, I was but a child in Conajohara, but I remember him when he was a forestrunner and a scout there. When his rider came into Thandara telling us that Poitain was in revolt, with Conan striking for the throne, and asking our support – he asked no volunteers for his army, merely our loyalty – we sent him one word: ‘We have not forgotten Conajohara.’ Then came the Baron Attelius over the marches against us, but we ambushed him in the Little Wilderness and cut his army to pieces. And now I think we need fear no invasion in Thandara.’

‘I would I could say as much for Schohira,’ he said grimly. ‘Baron Thasperas sent us word that we could do as we chose he has declared for Conan and joined the rebel army. But he did not demand western levies. Nay, both he and Conan know the Westermarck needs every man it has to guard the border.

‘He removed his troops from the forts, however, and we manned them with our own foresters. There was some little skirmishing among ourselves, especially in the towns like Goyaga, where dwell the landholders, for some of them held to Numedides – well, these loyalists either fled away to Conawaga with their retainers, or else surrendered and gave their pledge to remain neutral in their castles, like Lord Valerian of Schondara. The loyalists who fled swore to return and cut all our throats. And presently Lord Brocas marched over the border.

‘In Conawaga the landowners and Brocas are for Numedides, and we have heard pitiful tales of their treatment of the common people who favor Conan.’

I nodded, not surprised. Conawaga was the largest, richest and most thickly settled province in all the Westermarck, and it had a comparatively large, and very powerful class of titled landholders – which we have not in Thandara, and by the favor of Mitra, never shall.

‘It is an open invasion for conquest,’ said Hakon. ‘Brocas commanded us to swear loyalty to Numedides – the dog. I think the black-jowled fool plots to subdue all the Westermarck and rule it as Numedides’ viceroy. With an army of Aquilonian men-at-arms, Bossoman archers, Conawaga loyalists, and Schohira renegades, he lies at Coyaga, ten miles beyond Ogaha Creek. Thenitea is full of refugees from the eastern country he has devastated.

‘We do not fear him, though we are outnumbered. He must cross Ogaha Creek to strike us, and we have fortified the west bank and blocked the road against his cavalry.’

‘That touches upon my mission,’ I said. ‘I am authorized to offer the services of a hundred and fifty Thandaran rangers. We are all of one mind in Thandara and fight no internal wars; and we can spare that many men from our war with the Panther Picts. ‘That will be good news for the commandant of Fort Kwanyara!’

‘What?’ quoth I. ‘Are you not the commandant?’

‘Nay,’ said he, ‘it is my brother Dirk Strom’s son.’

‘Had I known that I would have given my message to him,’ I said. ‘Brant Drago’s son thought you commanded Kwanyara. However, it does not matter.’

‘Another jack of ale,’ quoth Hakon, ‘and we’ll start for the fort so that Dirk shall hear your news first-hand. A plague on commanding a fort. A party of scouts is good enough for me.’

And in truth Hakon was not the man to command an outpost or any large body of men, for he was too reckless and hasty, though a brave man and a gay rogue.

‘You have but a skeleton force left to watch the border,’ I said. ‘What of the Picts?’

‘They keep the peace to which they swore,’ answered he. ‘For some months there has been peace along the border, except for the usual skirmishing between individuals of both races.’

‘Valerian Hall seemed deserted.’

‘Lord Valerian dwells there alone except for a few servants. Where his fighting men have gone, none knows. But he has sent them off. If he had not given his pledge we would have felt it necessary to place him under guard, for he is one of the few white men to whom the Picts give heed. If it had entered his head to stir them up against our borders we might be hard put to it to defend ourselves against them on one side and Brocas on the other.

‘The Hawks, Wildcats and Turtles listen when Valerian speaks, and he has even visited the towns of the Wolf Picts and come away alive.’

If that were true that were strange indeed, for all men knew the ferocity of the great confederacy of allied clans known as the Wolf tribe which dwelt in the west beyond the hunting grounds of the three lesser tribes he had named. Mostly they held aloof from the frontier, but the threat of their hatred was ever a menace along the borders of Schohira.

Hakon looked up as a tall man in trunk-hose, boots and scarlet cloak entered the taproom.

‘There is Lord Valerian now,’ he said.

I stared, started and was on my feet instantly.

‘That man?’ I ejaculated. ‘I saw that man last night beyond the border, in a camp of the Hawks, watching the dance of the Changing Snake!’

Valerian heard me and he whirled, going pale. His eyes blazed like those of a panther.

Hakon sprang up too.

‘What are you saying?’ he cried. ‘Lord Valerian gave his pledge –’

‘I care not!’ I exclaimed fiercely, striding forward to confront the tall noble. ‘I saw him where I lay hidden among the tamarack. I could not mistake that hawklike face. I tell you he was there, naked and painted like a Pict –’

‘You lie, damn you!’ cried Valerian, and whipping aside his cloak he caught at the hilt of his sword. But before he could draw it I closed with him and bore him to the floor, where he caught at my throat with both hands, blaspheming like a madman. Then there was a swift stamp of feet, and men were dragging us apart, grasping my lord firmly, who stood white and panting with fury, still clutching my neckcloth which had been torn away from my throat in the struggle.

‘Loose me, you dogs!’ he raved. ‘Take your peasant hands from me! I’ll cleave this liar to the chin –’

‘Here is no lie,’ I said more calmly. ‘I lay in the tamarack last night and watched while old Teyanoga dragged a Raven chief’s soul from his body and forced it into that of a tree-serpent. It was my arrow which struck down the shaman. And I saw you there – you, a white man, naked and painted, accepted as one of the clan.’

‘If this be true –’ began Hakon.

‘It is true, and there is your proof!’ I exclaimed. ‘Look there! On his bosom!’

His doublet and shirt had been torn open in the scuffle, and there, dim on his naked breast, showed the outline of the white skull which the Picts paint only when they mean war against the whites. He had sought to wash it off his skin, but Pictish paint stains strongly.

‘Disarm him,’ said Hakon, white to the lips.

‘Give me my neckcloth,’ I demanded, but his lordship spat at me, and thrust the cloth inside his shirt.

‘When it is returned to you it shall be knotted in a hangman’s noose about your rebel neck,’ he snarled.

Hakon seemed undecided.

‘Let us take him to the fort,’ I said. ‘Give him in custody of the commander. It was for no good purpose he took part in the Dance of the Snake. Those Picts were painted for battle. That symbol on his breast means he intended to take part in the war for which they danced.’

‘But great Mitra, this is incredible!’ exclaimed Hakon. ‘A white man, loosing those painted devils on his friends and neighbors?’

My lord said naught. He stood there between the men who grasped his arms, livid, his thin lips drawn back in a snarl that bared his teeth, but all hell burned like yellow fire in his eyes where I seemed to sense lights of madness.

But Hakon was uncertain. He dared not release Valerian, and he feared what the effect might be on the people if they saw the lord being led a captive to the fort.

‘They will demand the reason,’ he argued, ‘and when they learn he has been dealing with the Picts in their war-paint, a panic might well ensue. Let us lock him into the gaol until we can bring Dirk here to question him.’

‘It is dangerous to compromise with a situation like this,’ I answered bluntly. ‘But it is for you to decide. You are in command here.’

So we took his lordship out the back door, secretly, and it being dusk by that time, reached the gaol without being noticed by the people, who indeed stayed indoors mostly. The gaol was a small affair of logs, somewhat apart from the town, with four cells, and one only occupied, that by a fat rogue who had been imprisoned overnight for drunkenness and fighting in the street. He stared to see our prisoner. Not a word said Lord Valerian as Hakon locked the grilled door upon him, and detailed one of the men to stand guard. But a demon fire burned in his dark eyes as if behind the mask of his pale face he were laughing at us with fiendish triumph.

‘You place only one man on guard?’ I asked Hakon.

‘Why more?’ said he. ‘Valerian cannot break out, and there is no one to rescue him.’

It seemed to me that Hakon was prone to take too much for granted, but after all, it was none of my affair, so I said no more.

Then Hakon and I went to the fort, and there I talked with Dirk Strom’s son, the commander, who was in command of the town, in the absence of Jon Storm’s son, the governor appointed by Lord Thasperas, who was now in command of the militiaarmy which lay at Thenitea. He looked sober indeed when he heard my tale, and said he would come to the gaol and question Lord Valerian as soon as his duties permitted, though he had little belief that my lord would talk, for he came of a stubborn and haughty breed. He was glad to hear of the men Thandara offered him, and told me that he could find a man to return to Thandara accepting the offer, if I wished to remain in Schohira awhile, which I did. Then I returned to the tavern with Hakon, for it was our purpose to sleep there that night, and set out for Thenitea in the morning. Scouts kept the Schohirans posted on the movements of Brocas, and Hakon, who had been in their camp that day, said Brocas showed no signs of moving against us, which made me believe that he was waiting for Valerian to lead his Picts against the border. But Hakon still doubted, in spite of all I had told him, believing Valerian had but visited the Picts through friendliness as he often did. But I pointed out that no white man, however friendly to the Picts, was ever allowed to witness such a ceremony as the Dance of the Snake; he would have to be a blood-member of the clan.

III.

I awakened suddenly and sat up in bed. My window was open, both shutters and pane, for coolness, for it was an upstairs room, and there was no tree near by which a thief might gain access. But some noise had awakened me, and now as I stared at the window, I saw the starlit sky blotted out by a bulky, misshapen figure. I swung my legs around off the bed, demanding to know who it was, and groping for my hatchet, but the thing was on me with frightful speed and before I could even rise something was around my neck, choking and strangling me. Thrust almost against my face there was a dim frightful visage, but all I could make out in the darkness was a pair of flaming red eyes, and a peaked head. My nostrils were filled with a bestial reek.

I caught one of the thing’s wrists and it was hairy as an ape’s, and thick with iron muscles. But then I had found the haft of my hatchet and I lifted it and split that misshapen skull with one blow. It fell clear of me and I sprang up, gagging and gasping, and quivering in every limb. I found flint, steel and tinder, and struck a light and lit a candle, and glared wildly at the creature lying on the floor.

In form it was like a man, gnarled and misshapen, covered with thick hair. Its nails were long and black, like the talons of a beast, and its chinless, low-browed head was like that of an ape. The thing was a Chakan, one of those semi-human beings which dwell deep in the forests.

There carne a knocking on my door and Hakon’s voice called to know what the trouble was, so I bade him enter. He rushed in, ax in hand, his eyes widened at the sight of the thing on the floor.

‘A Chakan!’ he whispered. ‘I have seen them, far to the west, smelling out trails through the forests – the damned bloodhounds! What is that in his fingers?’

A chill of horror crept along my spine as I saw the creature still clutched a neckcloth in his fingers – the cloth which he had tried to knot like a hangman’s noose about my neck.

‘I have heard that Pictish shamans catch these creatures and tame them and use them to smell out their enemies,’ he said slowly. ‘But how could Lord Valerian so use one?’

‘I know not,’ I answered. ‘But that neck cloth was given to the beast, and according to its nature it smelled my trail out and sought to break my neck. Let us go to the gaol, and quickly.’

Hakon roused his rangers and we hurried there, and found the guard lying before the open door of Valerian’s empty cell with his throat cut. Hakon stood like one turned to stone, and then a faint call made us turn and we saw the white face of the drunkard peering at us from the next cell.

‘He’s gone,’ quoth he; ‘Lord Valerian’s gone. Hark’ee; an hour agone while I lay on my bunk, I was awakened by a sound outside, and saw a strange dark woman come out of the shadows and walk up to the guard. He lifted his bow and bade her halt, but she laughed at him, staring into his eyes and he became as one in a trance. He stood staring stupidly – and Mitra, he took his own knife from his girdle and cut his throat, and he fell down and died. Then she took the keys from his belt and opened the door, and Valerian came out, and laughed like a devil out of hell, and kissed the wench, and she laughed with him. And she was not alone, for something lurked in the shadows behind her – some vague, monstrous being that never came into the light of the lanthorn hanging over the door.

‘I heard her say best to kill the fat drunkard in the next cell, and by Mitra I was so nigh dead of fright I knew not if I were even alive. But Valerian said I was dead drunk, and I could have kissed him for that word. So they went away and as they went he said he would send her companion on a mission, and then they would go to a cabin on Lynx Creek, and there meet his retainers who had been hiding in the forest ever since he sent them from Valerian Hall. He said that Teyanoga would come to them there and they would cross the border and go among the Picts, and bring them back to cut all our throats.’

Hakon looked livid in the lanthorn light.

‘Who is this woman?’ I asked curiously.

‘His half-breed Pictish mistress,’ he said. ‘Half Hawk-Pict and half-Ligurean. I have heard of her. They call her the witch of Skandaga. I have never seen her, never before credited the tales whispered of her and Lord Valerian. But it is the truth.’

‘I thought I had slain old Teyanoga,’ I muttered. ‘The old fiend must bear a charmed life – I saw my shaft quivering in his breast. What now?’

‘We must go to the but on Lynx Creek and slay them all,’ said Hakon. ‘If they loose the Picts on the border hell will be to pay. We can spare no men from the fort or the town. We are enough. I know not how many men there will be on Lynx Creek, and I do not care. We will take them by surprise.’

We set out at once through the starlight. The land lay silent, lights twinkling dimly in the houses. To the westward loomed the black forest, silent, primordial, a brooding threat to the people who dared it.

We went in single file, bows strung and held in our left hands, hatchets swinging in our right hands. Our moccasins made no sound in the dew-wet grass. We melted into the woods and struck a trail that wound among oaks and alders. Here we strung out with some fifteen feet between each man, Hakon leading, and presently we dipped down into a grassy hollow and saw light streaming faintly from the cracks of shutters that covered a cabin’s windows.

Hakon halted us and whispered for the men to wait, while we crept forward and spied upon them. We stole forward and surprised the sentry – a Schohiran renegade, who must have heard our stealthy approach but for the wine which staled his breath. I shall never forget the fierce hiss of satisfaction that breathed between Hakon’s clenched teeth as he drove his knife into the villain’s heart. We left the body hidden in the tall rank grass and stole up to the very wall of the cabin and dared to peer in at a crack. There was Valerian, with his fierce eyes blazing, and a dark, wildly beautiful girl in doeskin loin-clout and beaded moccasins, and her blackly burnished hair bound back by a gold band, curiously wrought. And there were half a dozen Schohiran renegades, sullen rogues in the woolen breeches and jerkins of farmers, with cutlasses at their belts, three forestrunners in buckskins, wild-looking men, and half a dozen Gundermen guards, compactly-built men with yellow hair cut square and confined under steel caps, corselets of chain mail, and polished leg-pieces. They were girt with swords and daggers – yellow-haired men with fair complexions and steely eyes and an accent differing greatly from the natives of the Westermarck. They were sturdy fighters, ruthless and well-disciplined, and very popular as guardsmen among the landowners of the frontier.

Listening there we heard them all laughing and conversing, Valerian boastful of his escape and swearing that he had sent a visitor to that cursed Thandaran that should do his proper business for him; the renegades sullen and full of oaths and curses for their former friends; the forestrunners silent and attentive; the Gundermen careless and jovial, which joviality thinly masked their utterly ruthless natures. And the half-breed girl, whom they called Kwarada, laughed, and plagued Valerian, who seemed grimly amused. And Hakon trembled with fury as we listened to him boasting how he meant to rouse the Picts and lead them across the border to smite the Schohirans in the back while Brocas attacked from Coyaga.

Then we heard a light patter of feet and hugged the wall close, and saw the door open, and seven painted Picts entered, horrific figures in paint and feathers. They were led by old Teyanoga, whose breast-muscles were bandaged, whereby I knew my shaft had but fleshed itself in those heavy muscles. And wondered if the old demon were really a werewolf which could not be killed by mortal weapons as he boasted and many believed.

We lay close there, Hakon and I, and heard Teyanoga say that the Hawks, Wildcats and Turtles dared not strike across the border unless an alliance with the powerful Wolfmen could be struck up, for they feared that the Wolves might ravage their country while they fought the Schohirans. Teyanoga said that the three lesser tribes met the Wolves on the edge of Ghost Swamp for a council; and that the Wolves would abide by the counsel of the Wizard of the Swamp.

So Valerian said they would go to the Ghost Swamp and see if they could not persuade the Wizard to induce the ‘Wolves to join the others. At that Hakon told me to crawl back and get the others, and I saw it was in his mind that we should attack, outnumbered as we were, but so fired was I by the infamous plot to which we had listened that I was as eager as he. I stole back and brought the others, and as soon as he heard us coming, he sprang up and ran at the door to beat it in with his war-ax.

At the same instant others of us burst in the shutters and poured arrows into the room, striking down some and set the cabin on fire.

They were thrown into confusion, and made no attempt to hold the cabin. The candles were upset and went out, but the fire lent a dim glow. They rushed the door and some were slain then, and others as we grappled with them. But presently all fled into the woods except those we slew, Gundermen, renegades and painted Picts, but Valerian and the girl were still in the cabin. Then they came forth and she laughed and hurled something on the ground that burst and blinded us with a foul smoke, through which they escaped.

All but four of our men had been slain in the desperate fighting, but we started instantly in pursuit, sending back one of the wounded men to warn the town. The trail led into the wilderness. We followed, and in fights and skirmishes slew several others, and presently all our men were slain except Hakon and I. We trailed Valerian across the border and into a camp of the wartribes near Ghost Swamp, where the chiefs were going to consult the Wizard, a pre-Pictish shaman.

We trailed Valerian into the swamp, he going secretly to give the shamans instructions, and Hakon waited on the trail to slay Valerian while I stole into the swamp to slay the Wizard. But both of us were captured by the Wizard, who gave his consent to the war and gave them a ghastly magic to use against the white men, and the tribes went howling toward the border. But Hakon and I escaped and slew the Wizard and followed, in time to turn their magic against them, and rout them.