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Conan the Adventurer by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague DeCamp
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Introduction
------------

Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born and lived most of his life in
Cross Plains, Texas. In his short lifetime he turned out a large volume
of general pulp-magazine fiction: sport, detective, western, and
Oriental adventure stories, besides his many tales of fantasy. Of
Howard's several series of heroic fantasies, the most popular have been
the Conan stories. These are laid in Howard's imaginary Hyborian Age,
between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of recorded history.
Howard was a natural story-teller, whose tales are unsurpassed for
vivid, colorful, headlong, gripping action. The Conan stories are the
ultimate in tales of swashbuckling adventure with a strong and sinister
flavor of the supernatural.

Howard wrote over two dozen Conan stories, ranging in length from 3,000
to 66,000 words. Of these, eighteen were published during his lifetime.
Several others, from mere outlines to completed manuscripts, have
turned up in Howard's scattered papers during the last twenty years. It
has been my good fortune to edit these for publication, to complete
those that were only partly written, and to rewrite several other
unpublished Howard stories to fit them into the Conan saga.

One of the stories in this volume, "Drums of Tombalku," was recently
discovered by Glenn Lord, the literary agent for the Howard estate, in
the form of an outline and a rough draft of the first half. I have
finished the story in accordance with the outline. The other three
stories, except for a few very small editorial changes, are in the form
in which they appeared in Weird Tales in the early 1930's.

As nearly as such things can be calculated. Conan flourished about
twelve thousand years ago. In this time (according to Howard) the
Western parts of the main continent were occupied by the Hyborian
kingdoms. These comprised a galaxy of states set up by northern
invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years before on the ruins of
the evil empire of Acheron. South of the Hyborian kingdoms lay the
quarreling city-states of Shem. Beyond Shem slumbered the ancient,
sinister kingdom of Stygia. Farther south yet, beyond deserts and
veldts, were barbarous black kingdoms.

North of the Hyborians lay the barbarian lands of Cimmeria, Hyperborea,
Vanaheim, and Asgard. West along the ocean were the fierce Picts. To
the east glittered the Hykanian kingdoms, of which the mightiest was
Turan.

Conan, a gigantic adventurer from backward Cimmeria, arrived as a youth
in the kingdom of Zamora, between the Hyborian lands and Turan. For two
or three years he made his living as a thief in Zamora, Corinthia, and
Nemedia. Growing tired of this starveling existence, he enlisted as a
mercenary in the armies of Turan. For the next two years he traveled
widely and refined his knowledge of archery and horsemanship.

As a result of a quarrel with a superior officer, Conan left Turan.
After an unsuccessful try at treasure-hunting in Zamora and a brief
visit to his Cimmerian homeland, he embarked on the career of a
mercenary soldier in the Hyborian kingdoms. Circumstances—violent as
usual—made him a pirate along the coasts of Kush, where the natives
called him Amra, the Lion. When his partner, the Shemitish she-pirate
Belit, was slain, he became a chief of one of the black tribes. Then he
served as a mercenary in Shem and among the most southerly Hyborian
kingdoms.

Later still, Conan appeared as a leader of the kozaks, a horde of
outlaws who roamed the steppes between the Hyborian lands and Turan. He
was captain of a pirate craft on the great inland Sea of Vilayet and a
chief among the nomadic Zuagirs of the southeastern deserts. After a
spell as a mercenary captain in the army of the king of Iranistan, he
arrived in the foothills of the Himelian Mountains, a vast stretch of
broken country separating Iranistan, Turan, and the tropical kingdom of
Vendhya. At that point, the present volume begins.

L. Sprague de Camp


The People of the Black Circle
------------------------------

Declining the offer of Kobad Shah's successor, Arshak, to return to the
service of Iranistan and defend that kingdom against the incursions of
King Yezdigerd of Turan, Conan rides east into the foothills of the
Himelian Mountains, on the northwest frontier of Vendhya. Here he next
appears as a war-chief of the savage Afghuli tribesmen. He is now in
his early thirties (about thirty-three, in fact), at the height of his
physical powers, and known throughout the civilized and barbarian
worlds, from Pictland to Khitai.

1. Death Strikes a King

The king of Vendhya was dying. Through the hot, stifling night the
temple gongs boomed and the conchs roared. Their clamor was a faint
echo in the gold-domed chamber where Bhunda Chand struggled on the
velvet-cushioned dais. Beads of sweat glistened on his dark skin; his
ringers twisted the gold-worked fabric beneath him. He was young; no
spear had touched him, no poison lurked in his wine. But his veins
stood out like blue cords on his temples, and his eyes dilated with the
nearness of death. Trembling slave-girls knelt at the foot of the dais,
and leaning down on him, watching him with passionate intensity, was
his sister, the Devi Yasmina. With her was the wazam, a noble grown old
in the royal court. She threw up her head in a gusty gesture of wrath
and despair as the thunder of the distant drums reached her ears.

"The priests and their clamor!" she exclaimed. "They are no wiser than
the leeches, who are helpless! Nay, he dies and none can say why. He is
dying now—and I stand here helpless, who would burn the whole city and
spill the blood of thousands to save him."

"Not a man of Ayodhya but would die in his place, if it might be,
Devi," answered the wazam "This poison——"

"I tell you it is not poison!" she cried. "Since his birth he has been
guarded so closely that the cleverest poisoners of the East could not
reach him. Five skulls bleaching on the Tower of the Kites can testify
to attempts which were made—and which failed. As you well know, there
are ten men and ten women whose sole duty is to taste his food and
wine, and fifty armed warriors guard his chamber as they guard it now.
No, it is not poison; it is sorcery—black, ghastly magic———"

She ceased as the king spoke; his livid lips did not move, and there
was no recognition in his glassy eyes. But his voice rose in an eery
call, indistinct and far away, as if he called to her from beyond vast,
wind-blown gulfs.

"Yasmina! Yasmina! My sister, where are you? I can not find you. All is
darkness, and the roaring of great winds!"

"Brother!" cried Yasmina, catching his limp hand in a convulsive grasp.
"I am here! Do you not know me———"

Her voice died at the utter vacancy of his face. A low, confused
moaning waned from his mouth. The slave-girls at the foot of the dais
whimpered with fear, and Yasmina beat her breast in her anguish.

In another part of the city, a man stood in a latticed balcony
overlooking a long street in which torches tossed luridly, smokily
revealing upturned dark faces and the whites of gleaming eyes. A
long-drawn wailing rose from the multitude.

The man shrugged his broad shoulders and turned back into the
arabesqued chamber. He was a tall man, compactly built and richly clad.

"The king is not yet dead, but the dirge is sounded," he said to
another man who sat cross-legged on a mat in a corner. This man was
clad in a brown camel-hair robe and sandals, and a green turban was on
his head. His expression was tranquil, his gaze impersonal.

The people know he will never see another dawn," this man answered.

The first speaker favored him with a long, searching stare.

"What I can not understand," he said, "is why I have had to wait so
long for your masters to strike. If they have slain the king now, why
could they not have slain him months ago?"

"Even the arts you call sorcery are governed by cosmic laws," answered
the man in the green turban. "The stars direct these actions, as in
other affairs. Not even my masters can alter the stars. Not until the
heavens were in the proper order could they perform this necromancy."
With a long, stained fingernail he mapped the constellations on the
marble-tiled floor. "The slant of the moon presaged evil for the king
of Vendhya; the stars are in turmoil, the Serpent in the House of the
Elephant. During such juxtaposition, the invisible guardians are
removed from the spirit of Bhunda Chand. A path is opened in the unseen
realms, and once a point of contact was established, mighty powers were
put in play along that path."

"Point of contact?" inquired the other. "Do you mean that lock of
Bhunda Chand's hair?"

"Yes. All discarded portions of the human body still remain part of it,
attached to it by intangible connections. The priests of Asura have a
dim inkling of this truth, and so all nail-trimmings, hair, and other
waste products of the persons of the royal family are carefully reduced
to ashes and the ashes hidden. But at the urgent entreaty of the
princess of Kosala, who loved Bhunda Chand vainly, he gave her a lock
of his long black hair as a token of remembrance. When my masters
decided upon his doom, the lock, in its golden, jewel-crusted case, was
stolen from under her pillow while she slept, and another substituted,
so like the first that she never knew the difference. Then the genuine
lock traveled by camel-caravan up the long, long road to Peshkhauri,
thence up the Zhaibar Pass, until it reached the hands of those for
whom it was intended."

"Only a lock of hair," murmured the nobleman.

"By which a soul is drawn from its body and across gulfs of echoing
space," returned the man on the mat.

The nobleman studied him curiously.

"I do not know if you are a man or a demon, Khemsa," he said at last
"Few of us are what we seem. I, whom the Kshatriyas know as Kerim Shah,
a prince from Iranistan, am no greater a masquerader than most men.
They are all traitors in the one way or another, and half of them know
not whom they serve. There at least I have no doubts; for I serve King
Yezdigerd of Turan."

"And I the Black Seers of Yimsha," said Khemsa; "and my masters are
greater than yours, for they have accomplished by their arts what
Yezdigerd could not with a hundred thousand swords."

Outside, the moan of the tortured thousands shuddered up to the stars
which crusted the sweating Vendhyan night, and the conchs bellowed like
oxen in pain.

In the gardens of the palace the torches glinted on polished helmets
and curved swords and gold-chased corselets. All the noble-born
fighting-men of Ayodhya were gathered in the great palace or about it,
and at each broad-arched gate and door fifty archers stood on guard,
with bows in their hands. But Death stalked through the royal palace
and none could stay his ghostly tread.

On the dais under the golden dome the king cried out again, racked by
awful paroxysms. Again his voice came faintly and far away, and again
the Devi bent to him, trembling with a fear that was darker than the
terror of death.

"Yasmina!" Again that far, weirdly dreeing cry, from realms
immeasurable. "Aid me! I am far from my mortal house! Wizards have
drawn my soul through the windblown darkness. They seek to snap the
silver cord that binds me to my dying body. They cluster around me;
their hands are taloned, their eyes are red like flame burning in
darkness. Aie, save me, my sister! Their ringers sear me like fire!
They would slay my body and damn my soul! What is this they bring
before me?—Aie!"

At the terror in his hopeless cry Yasmina screamed uncontrollably and
threw herself bodily upon him in the abandon of her anguish. He was
torn by a terrible convulsion; foam flew from his contorted lips and
his writhing fingers left their marks on the girl's shoulders. But the
glassy blankness passed from his eyes like smoke blown from a fire, and
he looked up at his sister with recognition.

"Brother!" she sobbed. "Brother——"

"Swift!" he gasped, and his weakening voice was rational. "I know now
what brings me to the pyre. I have been on a far journey and I
understand. I have been ensorcelled by the wizards of the Himelians.
They drew my soul out of my body and far away, into a stone room. There
they strove to break the silver cord of life, and thrust my soul into
the body of a foul night-weird their sorcery summoned up from Hell. Ah!
I feel their pull upon me now! Your cry and the grip of your fingers
brought me back, but I am going fast. My soul clings to my body, but
its hold weakens. Quick—kill me, before they can trap my soul for
ever!"

"I can not!" she wailed, smiting her naked breasts.

"Swiftly, I command you!" There was the old imperious note in his
failing whisper. "You have never disobeyed me—obey my last command!
Send my soul clean to Asura! Haste, lest you damn me to spend eternity
as a filthy gaunt of darkness. Strike, I command you! Strike!

Sobbing wildly, Yasmina plucked a jeweled dagger from her girdle and
plunged it to the hilt in his breast He stiffened and then went limp, a
grim smile curving his dead lips. Yasmina hurled herself face-down on
the rush-covered floor, beating the reeds with her clenched hands.
Outside, the gongs and conchs brayed and thundered and the priests
gashed themselves with copper knives.

2. A Barbarian from the Hills

Chunder Shan, governor of Peshkauri, laid down his golden pen and
carefully scanned that which he had written on parchment that bore his
official seal. He had ruled Peshkhauri so long only because he weighed
his every word, spoken or written. Danger breeds caution, and only a
wary man lives long in that wild country where the hot Vendhyan plains
meet the crags of the Himelians. An hour's ride westward or northward
and one crossed the border and was among the Hills where men lived by
the law of the knife.

The governor was alone in his chamber, seated at his ornately-carven
table of inlaid ebony. Through the wide window, open for the coolness,
he could see a square of the blue Himelian night, dotted with great
white stars. An adjacent parapet was a shadowy line, and further
crenelles and embrasures were barely hinted at in the dim starlight Hie
governor's fortress was strong, and situated outside the walls of the
city it guarded. The breeze that stirred the tapestries on the wall
brought faint noises from the streets of Peshkhauri—occasional snatches
of wailing song, or the thrum of a cithern.

The governor read what he had written, slowly, with his open hand
shading his eyes from the bronze butter-lamp, his lips moving.
Absently, as he read, he heard the drum of horses' hoofs outside the
barbican, the sharp staccato of the guards' challenge. He did not heed,
intent upon his letter. It was addressed to the wazam of Vendhya, at
the royal court of Ayodhya, and it stated, after the customary
salutations:

Let it be known to your Excellency that I have faithfully carried out
your Excellency's instructions. The seven tribesmen are well guarded in
their prison, and I have repeatedly sent word into the hills that their
chief come in person to bargain for their release. But he has made no
move, except to send word that unless they are freed he will burn
Peshkhauri and cover his saddle with my hide, begging your Excellency's
indulgence. This he is quite capable of attempting, and I have tripled
the numbers of the lance guards. The man is not a native of Ghulistan.
I can not with certainty predict his next move. But since it is the
wish of the Devil.p>

He was out of his ivory chair and on his feet facing the arched door,
all in one instant. He snatched at the curved sword lying in its ornate
scabbard on the table, and then checked the movement.

It was a woman who had entered unannounced, a woman whose gossamer
robes did not conceal the rich garments beneath any more than they
concealed the suppleness and beauty of her tall, slender figure. A
filmy veil fell below her breasts, supported by a flowing headdress
bound about with a triple gold braid and adorned with a golden
crescent. Her dark eyes regarded the astonished governor over the veil,
and then with an imperious gesture of her white hand, she uncovered her
face.

"Devi!" The governor dropped to his knee before her, his surprise and
confusion somewhat spoiling the stateliness of his obeisance. With a
gesture she motioned him to rise, and he hastened to lead her to the
ivory chair, all the while bowing level with his girdle. But his first
words were of reproof.

"Your Majesty! This was most unwise! The border is unsettled. Raids
from the hills are incessant You came with a large attendance?"

"An ample retinue followed me to Peshkhauri," she answered. "I lodged
my people there and came on to the fort with my maid, Gitara."

Chunder Shan groaned in horror.

"Devil You do not understand the peril. An hour's ride from this spot,
the hills swarm with barbarians who make a profession of murder and
rapine. Women have been stolen and men stabbed between the fort and the
city. Peshkhauri is not like your southern provinces———"

"But I am here, and unharmed," she interrupted with a trace of
impatience. "I showed my signet ring to the guard at the gate, and to
the one outside your door, and they admitted me unannounced, not
knowing me, but supposing me to be a secret courier from Ayodhya. Let
us not now waste time. You have received no word from the chief of the
barbarians?"

"None save threats and curses, Devi He is wary and suspicious. He deems
it a trap, and perhaps he is not to be blamed. The Kshatriyas have not
always kept their promises to the hill people."

"He must be brought to terms!" broke in Yasmina, the knuckles of her
clenched hands showing white.

"I do not understand." The governor shook his head. "When I chanced to
capture these seven hillmen, I reported their capture to the wazam, as
is the custom, and then, before I could hang them, there came an order
to hold them and communicate with their chief. This I did, but the man
holds aloof, as I have said. These men are of the tribe of Afghulis,
but he is a foreigner from the West, and he is called Conan. I have
threatened to hang them tomorrow at dawn, if he does not come."

"Good!" exclaimed the Devi. "You have done well. And I will tell you
why I have given these orders.

My brother———" she faltered, choking, and the governor bowed his head,
with the customary gesture of respect for a departed sovereign.

"The king of Vendhya was destroyed by magic," she said at last. "I have
devoted my life to the destruction of his murderers. As he died he gave
me a clue, and I have followed it. I have read the Book of Skelos, and
talked with nameless hermits in the caves below Jhelai. I learned how,
and by whom, he was destroyed. His enemies were the Black Seers of
Mount Yimsha."

"Asura!" whispered Chunder Shan, paling.

Her eyes knifed him through. "Do you fear them?"

"Who does not, your Majesty?" he replied. "They are black devils,
haunting the uninhabited hills beyond the Zhaibar. But the sages say
that they seldom interfere in the lives of mortal men."

"Why they slew my brother I do not know," she answered. "But I have
sworn on the altar of Asura to destroy them I And I need the aid of a
man beyond the border. A Kshatriya army, unaided, would never reach
Yimsha."

"Aye," muttered Chunder Shan. "You speak the truth there. It would be
fight every step of the way, with hairy hillmen hurling down boulders
from every height, and rushing us with their long knives in every
valley. The Turanians fought their way through the Himelians once, but
how many returned to Khurusun? Few of those who escaped the swords of
the Kshatriyas, after the king, your brother, defeated their host on
the Jhumda River, ever saw Secunderam again."

"And so I must control men across the border," she said, "men who know
the way to Mount Yimsha———"

"But the tribes fear the Black Seers and shun the unholy mountain,"
broke in the governor.

"Does the chief, Conan, fear them?" she asked.

"Well, as to that," muttered the governor, "I doubt if there is
anything that devil fears."

"So I have been told. Therefore he is the man I must deal with. He
wishes the release of his seven men. Very well; their ransom shall be
the heads of the Black Seers! Her voice thrummed with hate as she
uttered the last words, and her hands clenched at her sides. She looked
an image of incarnate passion as she stood there with her head thrown
high and her bosom heaving.

Again the governor knelt, for part of his wisdom was the knowledge that
a woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to
any about her.

"It shall be as you wish, your Majesty." Then as she presented a calmer
aspect, he rose and ventured to drop a word of warning. "I can not
predict what the chief Conan's action will be. The tribesmen are always
turbulent, and I have reason to believe that emissaries from the
Turanians are stirring them up to raid our borders. As your majesty
knows, the Turanians have established themselves in Secunderam and
other northern cities, though the hill tribes remain unconquered. King
Yezdigerd has long looked southward with greedy lust and perhaps is
seeking to gain by treachery what he could not win by force of arms. I
have thought that Conan might well be one of his spies."

"We shall see," she answered. "If he loves his followers, he will be at
the gates at dawn, to parley. I shall spend the night in the fortress.
I came in disguise to Peshkhauri, and lodged my retinue at an inn
instead of the palace. Besides my people, only yourself knows of my
presence here."

"I shall escort you to your quarters, your Majesty," said the governor,
and as they emerged from the doorway, he beckoned the warrior on guard
there, and the man fell in behind them, spear held at salute.

The maid waited, veiled like her mistress, outside the door, and the
group traversed a wide, winding corridor, lighted by smoky torches, and
reached the quarters reserved for visiting notables—generals and
viceroys, mostly; none of the royal family had ever honored the
fortress before. Chunder Shan had a perturbed feeling that the suite
was not suitable to such an exalted personage as the Devi, and though
she sought to make him feel at ease in her presence, he was glad when
she dismissed him and he bowed himself out. All the menials of the fort
had been summoned to serve his royal guest—though he did not divulge
her identity—and he stationed a squad of spearmen before her doors,
among them the warrior who had guarded his own chamber. In his
preoccupation he forgot to replace the man.

The governor had not been gone long from her when Yasmina suddenly
remembered something else which she had wished to discuss with him, but
had forgotten unto that moment It concerned the past actions of one
Kerim Shah, a nobleman from Iranistan, who had dwelt for a while in
Peshkhauri before coming on to the court at Ayodhya. A vague suspicion
concerning the man had been stirred by a glimpse of him in Peshkhauri
that night. She wondered if he had followed her from Ayodhya. Being a
truly remarkable Devi, she did not summon the governor to her again,
but hurried out into the corridor, and hastened toward his chamber.

Chunder Shan, entering his chamber, closed the door and went to his
table. There he took the letter he had been writing and tore it to
bits. Scarcely had he finished when he heard something drop softly onto
the parapet adjacent to the window. He looked up to see a figure loom
briefly against the stars, and then a man dropped lightly into the
room. The light glinted on a long sheen of steel in his hand.

"Shhhh!" he warned. "Don't make a noise, or I'll send the Devil a
henchman!"

The governor checked his motion toward the sword on the table. He was
within reach of the yard-long Zhaibar knife that glittered in the
intruder's fist, and he Knew the desperate quickness of a hillman.

The invader was a tall man, at once strong and supple. He was dressed
like a hillman, but his dark features and blazing blue eyes did not
match his garb. Chunder Shan had never seen a man like him; he was not
an Easterner, but some barbarian from the West But his aspect was as
untamed and formidable as any of the hairy tribesmen who haunt the
hills of Ghulistan.

"You come like a thief in the night," commented the governor,
recovering some of his composure, although he remembered that there was
no guard within call. Still, the hillman could not know that.

"I climbed a bastion," snarled the intruder. "A guard thrust his head
over the battlement in time for me to nip it with my knife-hilt."

"You are Conan?"

"Who else? You sent word into the hills that you wished for me to come
and parley with you. Well, by Crom, I've come! Keep away from that
table or I'll gut you."

"I merely wish to seat myself," answered the governor, carefully
sinking into the ivory chair, which he wheeled away from the table.
Conan moved restlessly before him, glancing suspiciously at the door,
thumbing the razor edge of his three-foot knife. He did not walk like
ah Afghuli, and was bluntly direct where the East is subtle.

"You have seven of my men," he said abruptly. "You refused the ransom I
offered. What the devil do you want?"

"Let us discuss terms," answered Chunder Shan cautiously.

"Terms?" There was a timbre of dangerous anger in his voice. "What do
you mean? Haven't I offered you gold?"

Chunder Shan laughed.

"Gold? There is more gold in Peshkhauri than you ever saw."

"You're a liar," retorted Conan. "I've seen the suk of the goldsmiths
in Khurusun."

"Well, more than any Afghuli ever saw," amended Chunder Shan. "And it
is but a drop of all the treasure of Vendhya. Why should we desire
gold? It would be more to our advantage to hang these seven thieves."

Conan ripped out a sulfurous oath and the long blade quivered in his
grip as the muscles rose in ridges on his brown arm.

"I'll split your head like a ripe melon!"

A wild blue flame flickered in the hillman's eyes, but Chunder Shan
shrugged his shoulders, though keeping an eye on the keen steel.

"You can kill me easily, and probably escape over the wall afterward.
But that would not save the seven tribesmen. My men would surely hang
them. And these men are headmen among the Afghulis."

"I know it," snarled Conan. "The tribe is baying like wolves at my
heels because I have not procured their release. Tell me in plain words
what you want, because, by Crom! if there's no other way, I'll raise a
horde and lead it to the very gates of Peshkhauri!"

Looking at the man as he stood squarely, knife in fist and eyes
glaring, Chunder Shan did not doubt that he was capable of it. The
governor did not believe any hill-horde could take Peshkhauri, but he
did not wish a devastated countryside.

There is a mission you must perform" he said, choosing his words with
as much care as if they had been razors, "There——"

Conan had sprung back, wheeling to face the door at the same instant,
lips asnarl. His barbarian ears had caught the quick tread of soft
slippers outside the door. The next instant the door was thrown open
and a slim, silk-robed form entered hastily, pulling the door shut—then
stopping short at sight of the hillman.

Chunder Shan sprang up, his heart jumping into his mouth.

"Devil" he cried involuntarily, losing his head momentarily in his
fright.

"Devil" It was like an explosive echo from the hillman's lips. Chander
Shan saw recognition and intent flame up in the fierce blue eyes.

The governor shouted desperately and caught at his sword, but the
hillman moved with the devastating speed of a hurricane. He sprang,
knocked the governor sprawling with a savage blow of his knife-hilt,
swept up the astounded Devi in one brawny arm and leaped for the
window. Chunder Shan, struggling frantically to his feet, saw the man
poise an instant on the sill in a flutter of silken skirts and white
limbs that was his royal captive, and heard his fierce, exultant snarl:
"Now dare to hang my men I" and then Conan leaped to the parapet and
was gone. A wild scream floated back to the governor's can.

"Guard! Guard?' screamed the governor, struggling up and running
drunkenly to the door. He tore it open and reeled into the hall. His
shouts re-echoed along the corridors, and warriors came running, gaping
to see the governor holding his broken head, from which the blood
streamed.

"Turn out the lancers!" he roared. "There has been an abduction!" Even
in his frenzy he had enough sense left to withhold the full truth. He
stopped short as he heard a sudden drum of hoofs outside, a frantic
scream and a wild yell of barbaric exultation.

Followed by the bewildered guardsmen, the governor raced for the stair.
In the courtyard of the fort a force of lancers always stood by saddled
steeds, ready to ride at an instant's notice. Chunder Shan led his
squadron flying after the fugitive, though his head swam so he had to
hold with both hands to the saddle. He did not divulge the identity of
the victim, but said merely that the noblewoman who had borne the royal
signet ring had been carried away by the chief of the Afghulis. The
abductor was out of sight and hearing, but they knew the path he would
strike—the road that runs straight to the mouth of the Zhaibar. There
was no moon; peasant huts rose dimly in the starlight Behind them fell
away the grim bastion of the fort, and the towers of Peshkhauri. Ahead
of them loomed the black walls of the Himelians.

3. Khemsa Uses Magic

In the confusion that reigned in the fortress while the guard was being
turned out, no one noticed that the girl who had accompanied the Devi
slipped out the great arched gate and vanished in the darkness. She ran
straight for the city, her garments tucked high. She did not follow the
open road, but cut straight through fields and over slopes, avoiding
fences and leaping irrigation ditches as surely as if it were broad
daylight, and as easily as if she were a trained masculine runner. The
hoof-drum of the guardsmen had faded away up the hill road before she
reached the city wall. She did not go to the great gate, beneath whose
arch men leaned on spears and craned their necks into the darkness,
discussing the unwonted activity about the fortress. She skirted the
wall until she reached a certain point where the spire of a tower was
visible above the battlements. Then she placed her hands to her mouth
and voiced a low, weird call that carried strangely.

Almost instantly a head appeared at an embrasure and a rope came
wriggling down the wall. She seized it, placed a foot in the loop at
the end, and waved her arm. Then quickly and smoothly she was drawn up
the sheer stone curtain. An instant later she scrambled over the
merlons and stood up on a flat roof which covered a house that was
built against the wall. There was an open trap there, and a man in a
camel-hair robe who silently coiled the rope, not showing in any way
the strain of hauling a full-grown woman up a forty-foot wall.

"Where is Kerim Shah?" she gasped, panting after her long run.

"Asleep in the house below. You have news?"

"Conan has stolen the Devi rut of the fortress and carried her away
into the hills!" She blurted out her news in a rush, the words
stumbling over one another.

Khemsa showed no emotion, but merely nodded his turbaned head. "Kerim
Shah will be glad to hear that," he said.

"Wait!" The girl threw her supple arms about his neck. She was panting
hard, but not only from exertion. Her eyes blazed like black jewels in
the starlight. Her upturned face was close to Khemsa's, but though he
submitted to her embrace, he did not return it.

"Do not tell the Hyrkanian!" she panted. "Let us use this knowledge
ourselves! The governor has gone into the hills with his riders, but he
might as well chase a ghost He has not told anyone that it was the Devi
who was kidnapped. None in Peshkhauri or the fort knows it except us."

"But what good does it do us?" the man expostulated. "My masters sent
me with Kerim Shah to aid him in every way———"

"Aid yourself!" she cried fiercely. "Shake off your yoke!

"You mean—disobey my masters?" he gasped, and she felt his whole body
turn cold under her arms.

"Aye!" she shook him in the fury of her emotion. "You too are a
magician! Why will you be a slave, using your powers only to elevate
others? Use your arts for yourself!"

"That is forbidden!" He was shaking as if with an ague. "I am not one
of the Black Circle. Only by the command of the masters do I dare to
use the knowledge they have taught me."

"But you can use it!" she argued passionately. "Do as I beg you! Of
course Conan has taken the Devi to hold as hostage against the seven
tribesmen in the governor's prison. Destroy them, so Chunder Shan can
not use them to buy back the Devi. Then let us go into the mountains
and take her from the Afghulis. They can not stand against your sorcery
with their knives. The treasure of the Vendhyan kings will be ours as
ransom—and then when we have it in our hands, we can trick them, and
sell her to the king of Turan. We shall have wealth beyond our maddest
dreams. With it we can buy warriors. We will take Khorbhul, oust the
Turanians from the hills, and send our hosts southward; become king and
queen of an empire!"

Khemsa too was panting, shaking Lice a leaf in her grasp; his face
showed gray in the starlight, beaded with great drops of perspiration.

"I love you!" she cried fiercely, writhing her body against his, almost
strangling him in her wild embrace, shaking him in her abandon. "I will
make a king of you! For love of you I betrayed my mistress; for love of
me betray your masters! Why fear the Black Seers? By your love for me
you have broken one of their laws already! Break the rest! You are as
strong as they!"

A man of ice could not have withstood the searing heat of her passion
and fury. With an inarticulate cry he crushed her to him, bending her
backward and showering gasping kisses on her eyes, face, and lips.

"I'll do it!" His voice was thick with laboring emotions. He staggered
like a drunken man. "The arts they have taught me shall work for me,
not for my masters. We shall be rulers of the world—of the world———"

"Come then!" Twisting lithely out of his embrace, she seized his hand
and led him toward the trap-door. "First we must make sure that the
governor does not exchange those seven Afghulis for the Devi."

He moved like a man in a daze, until they had descended a ladder and
she paused in the chamber below. Kerim Shah lay on a couch motionless,
an arm across his face as though to shield his sleeping eyes from the
soft light of a brass lamp. She plucked Khemsa's arm and made a quick
gesture across her own throat. Khemsa lifted his hand; then his
expression changed and he drew away.

"I have eaten his salt," he muttered. "Besides, he can not interfere
with us."

He led the girl through a door that opened on a winding stair. After
their soft tread had faded into silence, the man on the couch sat up.
Kerim Shah wiped the sweat from his face. A knife-thrust he did not
dread, but he feared Khemsa as a man fears a poisonous reptile.

"People who plot on roofs should remember to lower their voices," he
muttered. "But as Khemsa has turned against his masters, and as he was
my only contact with them, I can count on their aid no longer. From now
on I play the game in my own way."

Rising to his feet he went quickly to a table, drew pen and parchment
from his girdle, and scribbled a few succinct lines:

To Khosru Khan, governor of Secunderam: the Cimmerian Conan has carried
the Devi Yasmina to the villages of the Afghulis. It is an opportunity
to get the Devi into our hands, as the king has so long desired. Send
three thousand horsemen at once. I will meet then in the Valley of
Gurashah with native guides.

And he signed it with a name that was not in the least like Kerim Shah.

Then from a golden cage he drew forth a carrier pigeon, to whose leg he
made fast the parchment, rolled into a tiny cylinder and secured with
gold wire. Then he went quickly to a casement and tossed the bird into
the night It wavered on fluttering wings, balanced, and was gone like a
flitting shadow. Catching up helmet, sword, and cloak, Kerim Shah
hurried out of the chamber and down the winding stair.

The prison quarters of Peshkhauri were separated from the rest of the
city by a massive wall, in which was set a single iron-bound door under
an arch. Over the arch burned a lurid red cresset, and beside the door
squatted a warrior with spear and shield.

This warrior, leaning on his spear, and yawning from time to time,
started suddenly to his feet. He had not thought he had dozed, but a
man was standing before him, a man he had not heard approach. The man
wore a camel-hair robe and a green turban. In the flickering light of
the cresset his features were shadowy, but a pair of lambent eyes shone
surprisingly in the lurid glow.

"Who comes?" demanded the warrior, presenting his spear. "Who are you?"

The stranger did not seem perturbed, though the spear-point touched his
bosom. His eyes held the warrior's with strange intensity.

"What are you obliged to do?" he asked, strangely.

"To guard the gate!" The warrior spoke thickly and mechanically; he
stood rigid as a statue, his eyes slowly glazing.

"You lie! You are obliged to obey me! You have looked into my eyes, and
your soul is no longer your own. Open that door!"

Stiffly, with the wooden features of an image, the guard wheeled about,
drew a great key from his girdle, turned it in the massive lock, and
swung open the door. Then he stood at attention, his unseeing stare
straight ahead of him.

A woman glided from the shadows and laid an eager hand on the
mesmerist's arm.

"Bid him fetch us horses, Khemsa," she whispered.

"No need of that," answered the Rakhsha. Lifting his voice slightly he
spoke to the guardsman. "I have no more use for you. Kill yourself!"

Like a man in a trance, the warrior thrust the butt of his spear
against the base of the wall and placed the keen head against his body,
just below the ribs. Then slowly, stolidly, he leaned against it with
all his weight, so that it transfixed his body and came out between his
shoulders. Sliding down the shaft he lay still, the spear jutting above
him its full length, like a horrible stalk growing out of his back.

The girl stared down at him in morbid fascination, until Khemsa took
her arm and led her through the gate. Torches lighted a narrow space
between the outer wall and a lower inner one, in which were arched
doors at regular intervals. A warrior paced this enclosure, and when
the gate opened he came sauntering up, so secure in his knowledge of
the prison's strength that he was not suspicious until Khemsa and the
girl emerged from the archway. Then it was too late. The Rahksha did
not waste time in hypnotism, though his action savored of magic to the
girl. The guard lowered his spear threateningly, opening his mouth to
shout an alarm that would bring spearmen swarming out of the guardrooms
at either end of the alleyway. Khemsa flicked the spear aside with his
left hand, as a man might flick a straw, and his right flashed out and
back, seeming gently to caress the warrior's neck in passing. And the
guard pitched on his face without a sound, his head lolling on a broken
neck.

Khemsa did not glance at him, but went straight to one of the arched
doors and placed his open hand against the heavy bronze lock. With a
rending shudder the portal budded inward. As the girl followed him
through, she saw that the thick teakwood hung in splinters, the bronze
bolts were bent and twisted from their sockets, and the great hinges
broken and disjointed. A thousand-pound battering-ram with forty men to
swing it could have shattered the barrier no more completely. Khemsa
was drunk with freedom and the exercise of his power, glorying in his
might and flinging his strength about as a young giant exercises his
thews with unnecessary vigor in the exultant pride of his prowess.

The broken door let them into a small courtyard, lit by a cresset.
Opposite the door was a wide grille of iron ban. A hairy hand was
visible, gripping one of these bars, and in the darkness behind them
glimmered the whites of eyes.

Khemsa stood silent for a space, gazing into the shadows from which
those glimmering eyes gave back his stare with burning intensity. Then
his hand went into his robe and came out again, and from his opening
fingers a shimmering feather of sparkling dust shifted to the flags.
Instantly a flare of green fire lighted the enclosure. In the brief
glare the forms of seven men, standing motionless behind the ban, were
limned in vivid detail; tall, hairy men in ragged hillmen's garments.
They did not speak, but in their eyes blazed the fear of death, and
their hairy fingers gripped the ban.

The fire died out but the glow remained, a quivering ball of lambent
green that pulsed and shimmered on the flags before Khemsa's feet. The
wide gaze of the tribesmen was fixed upon it. It wavered, elongated; it
turned into a luminous green smoke spiraling upward. It twisted and
writhed like a great shadowy serpent, then broadened and billowed out
in shining folds and whirls. It grew to a cloud moving silently over
the flags—straight toward the grille. The men watching its coming with
dilated eyes; the ban quivered with the grip of their desperate
fingers. Bearded lips parted but no sound came forth. The green cloud
rolled on the ban and blotted them from sight Like a fog it oozed
through the grille and hid the men within. From the enveloping folds
came a strangled gasp, as of a man plunged suddenly under the surface
of water. That was all.

Khemsa touched the girl's arm, as she stood with parted lips and
dilated eyes. Mechanically she turned away with him, looking back over
her shoulder. Already the mist was thinning; close to the bars she saw
a pair of sandaled feet, the toes turned upward—she glimpsed the
indistinct outlines of seven still, prostrate shapes'.

"And now for a steed swifter than the fastest horse ever bred in a
mortal stable," Khemsa was saying. "We will be in Afghulistan before
dawn."

4. An Encounter in the Pass

Yasmina Devi could never clearly remember the details of her abduction.
The unexpectedness and violence stunned her, she had only a confused
impression of a whirl of happenings—the terrifying grip of a mighty
arm, the blazing eyes of her abductor, and his hot breath burning on
her flesh. The leap through the window to the parapet, the mad race
across battlements and roofs when the fear of falling froze her, the
reckless descent of a rope bound to a merlon—he went down almost at a
run, his captive folded limply over his brawny shoulder—all this was a
befuddled tangle in the Devi's mind. She retained a more vivid memory
of him running fleetly into the shadows of the trees, carrying her like
a child, and vaulting into the saddle of a fierce Bhalkhana stallion
which reared and snorted. Then there was a sensation of flying, and the
racing hoofs were striking sparks of fire from the flinty road as the
stallion swept up the slopes.

As the girl's mind cleared, her first sensations were furious rage and
shame. She was appalled. The rulers of the golden kingdoms south of the
Himelians were considered little short of divine; and she was the Devi
of Vendyhal. Fright was submerged in regal wrath. She cried out
furiously and began struggling. She, Yasmina, to be carried on the
saddle-bow of a hill chief, like a common wench of the market place! He
merely hardened his massive thews slightly against her writhings, and
for the first time in her lire she experienced the coercion of superior
physical strength. His arms felt like iron about her slender limbs. He
glanced down at her and grinned hugely. His teeth glimmered whitely in
the starlight. The reins lay loose on the stallion's flowing mane, and
every thew and fiber of the great beast strained as he hurtled along
the bolder-strewn trail. But Conan sat easily, almost carelessly, in
the saddle, riding like a centaur.

"You hill-bred dog!" she panted, quivering with the impact of shame,
anger, and the realization of helplessness. "You dare—you dare! Your
life shall pay for this! Where are you taking me?"

"To the villages of Afghulistan," he answered, casting a glance over
his shoulder.

Behind them, beyond the slopes they had traversed, torches were tossing
on the walls of the fortress, and he glimpsed a flare of light that
meant the great gate had been opened. And he laughed a deep-throated
boom gusty as the hill wind.

"The Governor has sent his riders after us" he laughed. "By Crom, we
will lead him a merry chase! What do you think, Devi—will they pay
seven lives for a Kshatriya princess?"

They will send an army to hang you and your spawn of devils," she
promised him with conviction.

He laughed gustily and shifted her to a more comfortable position in
his arms. But she took this as a fresh outrage, and renewed her vain
struggles, until she saw that her efforts were only amusing him.
Besides, her light silken garments, floating on the wind, were being
outrageously disarranged by her struggles. She concluded that a
scornful submission was the better part of dignity, and lapsed into a
smoldering quiescence.

She felt even her anger being submerged by awe as they entered the
mouth of the Pass, lowering like a black well mouth in the blacker
walls that rose like colossal ramparts to bar their way. It was as if a
gigantic knife had cut the Zhaibar out of walls of solid rock. On
either hand sheer slopes pitched up for thousands of feet, and the
mouth of the Pass was dark as hate. Even Conan could not see with any
accuracy, but he knew the road, even by night And knowing that armed
men were racing through the starlight after him, he did not check the
stallion's speed. The great brute was not yet showing fatigue. He
thundered along the road that followed the valley bed, labored up a
slope, swept along a low ridge where treacherous shale on either hand
lurked for the unwary, and came upon a trail that followed the lap of
the left-hand wall.

Not even Conan could spy, in that darkness, an ambush set by Zhaibar
tribesmen. As they swept past the black mouth of a gorge that opened
into the Pass, a javelin swished through the air and thudded home
behind the stallion's straining shoulder. The great beast let out his
life in a shuddering sob and stumbled, going headlong in mid-stride.
But Conan had recognized the flight and stroke of the javelin, and he
acted with spring-steel quickness.

As the horse fell he leaped clear, holding the girl aloft to guard her
from striking boulders. He lit on his feet like a cat, thrust her into
a cleft of rock, and wheeled toward the outer darkness, drawing his
knife.

Yasmina, confused by the rapidity of events, not quite sure just what
had happened, saw a vague shape rush out of the darkness, bare feet
slapping softly on the rock, ragged garments whipping on the > wind of
his haste. She glimpsed the flicker of steel, heard the lightning crack
of stroke, parry, and counter-stroke, and the crunch of bone as Conan's
long knife split the other's skull.

Conan sprang back, crouching in the shelter of the rocks. Out in the
night men were moving and a stentorian voice roared: "What, you dogs!
Do you flinch? In, curse you, and take them!"

Conan started, peered into the darkness and lifted his voice.

"Yar Afzal! Is it you?

There sounded a startled imprecation, and the voice called warily.

"Conan? Is that you, Conan?"

"Aye!" The Cimmerian laughed. "Come forth, you old war-dog. I've slain
one of your men."

There was movement among the rocks, a light flared dimly, and then a
flame appeared and came bobbing toward him, and as it approached, a
fierce bearded countenance grew out of the darkness. The man who
carried it held it high, thrust forward, and craned his neck to peer
among the boulders it lighted; the other hand gripped a great curved
tulwar. Conan stepped forward, sheathing his knife, and the other
roared a greeting.

"Aye, it is Conan! Come out of your rocks, dogs! It is Conan!"

Others pressed into the wavering circle of light—wild, ragged, bearded
men, with eyes like wolves, and long blades in their fists. They did
not see Yasmina, for she was hidden by Conan's massive body. But
peeping from her covert, she knew icy fear for the first time that
night These men were more like wolves than human beings.

"What are you hunting in the Zhaibar by night, Yar Afzal?" Conan
demanded of the burly chief, who grinned like a bearded ghoul.

"Who knows what might come up the Pass after dark? We Wazulis are
nighthawks. But what of you, Conan?"

"I have a prisoner," answered the Cimmerian. And moving aside he
disclosed the cowering girl. Reaching a long arm into the crevice he
drew her trembling forth.

Her imperious bearing was gone. She stared timidly at the ring of
bearded faces that hemmed her in, and was grateful for the strong arm
that clasped her possessively. The torch was thrust close to her, and
there was a sucking intake of breath about the ring.

"She is my captive," Conan warned, glancing pointedly at the feet of
the man he had slain, just visible within the ring of light "I was
taking her to Afghulistan, but now you have slain my horse, and the
Kshatriyas are close behind me."

"Come with us to my village," suggested Yar Afzal.

"We have horses hidden in the gorge. They can never follow us in the
darkness. They are close behind you, you say?"

"So dose that I hear now the clink of their hoofs on the flint,"
answered Conan grimly.

Instantly there was movement; the torch was dashed out and the ragged
shapes melted like phantoms into the darkness. Conan swept up the Devi
in his arms, and she did not resist The rocky ground hurt her slim feet
in their soft slippers and she felt very small and helpless in that
brutish, primordial blackness among those colossal, nighted crags.

Feeling her shiver in the wind that moaned down the defiles, Conan
jerked a ragged cloak from its owner's shoulders and wrapped it about
her. He also hissed a warning in her ear, ordering her to make no
sound. She did not hear the distant clink of shod hoofs on rock that
warned the keen-eared hillmen; but she was far too frightened to
disobey, in any event.

She could see nothing but a few faint stars far above, but she knew by
the deepening darkness when they entered the gorge mouth. There was a
stir about them, the uneasy movement of horses. A few muttered words,
and Conan mounted the horse of the man he had killed, lifting the girl
up in front of him. Like phantoms except for the dick of their hoofs,
the band swept away up the shadowy gorge. Behind them on the trail they
left the dead horse and the dead man, which were found less than half
an hour later by the riders from the fortress, who recognized the man
as a Wazuli and drew their own conclusions accordingly.

Yasmina, snuggled warmly in her captor's arms, grew drowsy in spite of
herself. The motion of the horse, though it was uneven, uphill and
down, yet possessed a certain rhythm which combined with weariness and
emotional exhaustion to force sleep upon her. She had lost all sense of
time or direction. They moved in soft thick darkness, in which she
sometimes glimpsed vaguely gigantic walls sweeping up like black
ramparts, or great crags shouldering the stars; at times she sensed
echoing depths beneath them, or felt the wind of dizzy heights blowing
cold about her. Gradually these things faded into a dreamy
unwakefulness in which the clink of hoofs and the creak of saddles were
like the irrelevant sounds in a dream.

She was vaguely aware when the motion ceased and she was lifted down
and carried a few steps. There she was laid down on something soft and
rustling, and something— a folded coat, perhaps—was thrust tinder her
head, and the cloak in which she was wrapped was carefully tucked about
her. She heard Yar Afzal laugh.

"A rare prize, Conan; fit mate for a chief of the Afghulis."

"Not for me," came Conan's answering rumble. "This wench will buy the
lives of my seven headmen, blast their souls."

That was the last she heard as she sank into dreamless slumber.

She slept while armed men rode through the dark mils; and the fate of
kingdoms hung in the balance. Through the shadowy gorges and defiles
that night there rang the hoofs of galloping horses, and the starlight
glimmered on helmets and curved blades, until the ghoulish shapes that
haunt the crags stared into the darkness from ravine and boulder and
wondered what tilings were afoot.

A band of these sat gaunt horses in the black pit-mouth of a gorge as
the hurrying hoofs swept past. Their leader, a well-built man in a
helmet and gilt-braided cloak, held up his hand warningly, until the
riders had sped on. Then he laughed softly.

They must have lost the trail! Or else they have found that Conan has
already reached the Afghuli villages. It will take many riders to smoke
out that hive. There will be squadrons riding up the Zhaibar by dawn."

"If there is fighting in the hills there will be looting," muttered a
voice behind him, in the dialect of the Irakzai.

"There will be looting," answered the man with the helmet "But first it
is our business to reach the valley of Gurashah and await the riders
that will be galloping southward from Secunderam before daylight."

He lifted his reins and rode out of the defile, his men falling in
behind him—thirty ragged phantoms in the starlight.

5. The Black Stallion

The sun was well up when Yasmina awoke. She did not start and stare
blankly, wondering where she was. She awoke with full knowledge of all
that had occurred. Her supple limbs were stiff from her long ride, and
her firm flesh still seemed to feel the contact of the muscular arm
that had borne her so far.

She was lying on a sheepskin covering a pallet of leaves on a
hard-beaten dirt floor. A folded sheepskin coat was under her head, and
she was wrapped in a ragged cloak. She was in a large room, the walls
of which were crudely but strongly built of uncut rocks, plastered with
sun-baked mud. Heavy beams supported a roof of the same land, in which
showed a trap-door up to which led a ladder. There were no windows in
the thick walls, only loopholes. There was one door, a sturdy bronze
affair that must have been looted from some Vendhyan border tower.
Opposite it was a wide opening in the wall, with no door, but several
strong wooden bars in place. Beyond them Yasmina saw a magnificent
black stallion munching a pile of dried grass. The building was fort,
dwelling place, and stable in one.

At the other end of the room a girl in the vest and baggy trousers of a
hillwoman squatted beside a small fire, cooking strips of meat on an
iron grid laid over blocks of stone. There was a sooty cleft in the
wall a few feet from the floor, and some of the smoke found its way out
there. Hie rest floated in blue wisps about the room.

The hill girl glanced at Yasmina over her shoulder, displaying a bold,
handsome face, and then continued her cooking. Voices boomed outside;
then the door was kicked open, and Conan strode in. He looked more
enormous than ever with the morning sunlight behind him, and Yasmina
noted some details that had escaped her the night before. His garments
were clean and not ragged. The broad Bakhariot girdle that supported
his knife in its ornamented scabbard would have matched the robes of a
prince, and there was a glint of fine Turanian mail under his shirt.

"Your captive is awake, Conan," said the Wazuli girl, and he grunted,
strode up to the fire, and swept the strips of mutton off into a stone
dish.

The squatting girl laughed up at him, with some spicy jest, and he
grinned wolfishly, and hooking a toe under her haunches, tumbled her
sprawling onto the floor. She seemed to derive considerable amusement
from this bit of rough horseplay, but Conan paid no more heed to her.
Producing a great hunk of bread from somewhere, with a copper jug of
wine, he carried the lot to Yasmina, who had risen from her pallet and
was regarding him doubtfully.

"Rough fare for a Devi, girl, but our best," he grunted. "It will fill
your belly, at least."

He set the platter on the floor, and she was suddenly aware of a
ravenous hunger. Making no comment, she seated herself cross-legged on
the floor, and taking the dish in her lap, she began to eat, using her
fingers, which were all she had in the way of table utensils. After
all, adaptability is one of the tests of true aristocracy. Conan stood
looking down at her, his thumbs hooked in his girdle. He never sat
cross-legged, after the Eastern fashion.

"Where am I?" she asked abruptly.

"In the hut of Yar Afzal, the chief of the Khurum Wazulis," he
answered. "Afghulistan lies a good many miles farther on to the west.
Well hide here awhile. The Kshatriyas are beating up the hills for
you—several of their squads have been cut up by the tribes already."

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"Keep you until Chundar Shan is willing to trade back my seven
cow-thieves," he grunted. "Women of the Wazulis are crushing ink out of
shoki leaves, and after a while you can write a letter to the
governor."

A touch of her old imperious wrath shook her, as she thought how
maddeningly her plans had gone awry, leaving her captive of the very
man she had plotted to get into her power. She flung down the dish,
with the remnants of her meal, and sprang to her feet, tense with
anger.

"I will not write a letter! If you do not take me back, they will hang
your seven men, and a thousand more besides!"

The Wazuli girl laughed mockingly, Conan scowled, and then the door
opened and Yar Afzal came swaggering in. The Wazuli chief was as tall
as Conan, and of greater girth, but he looked fat and slow beside his
hard compactness of the Cimmerian. He plucked his red-stained beard and
stared meaningly at the Wazuli girl, and that wench rose and scurried
out without delay. Then Yar Afzal turned to his guest.

"The damnable people murmur, Conan," quoth he. They wish me to murder
you and take the girl to hold for ransom. They say that anyone can tell
by her garments that she is a noble lady. They say why should the
Afghuli dogs profit by her, when it is the people who take the risk of
guarding her?"

"Lend me your horse," said Conan. "I'll take her and go."

Tish!" boomed Yar Afzal. "Do you think I can't handle my own people?
I'll have them dancing in their shirts if they cross me! They don't
love you—or any other outlander—but you saved my life once, and I will
not forget. Come out, though, Conan; a scout has returned."

Conan hitched at his girdle and followed the chief outside. They closed
the door after them, and Yasmina peeped through a loop-hole. She looked
out on a level space before the hut. At the farther end of that space
there was a cluster of mud and stone huts, and she saw naked children
playing among the boulders, and the slim erect women of the hills going
about their tasks.

Directly before the chiefs hut a circle of hairy, ragged men squatted,
facing the door. Conan and Yar Afzal stood a few paces before the door,
and between them and the ring of warriors another man sat cross-legged.
This one was addressing his chief in the harsh accents of the Wazuli
which Yasmina could scarcely understand, though as part of her royal
education she had been taught the languages of Iranistan and the
kindred tongues of Ghulistan.

"I talked with a Dagozai who saw the riders last night," said the
scout. "He was lurking near when they came to the spot where we
ambushed the lord Conan. He overheard their speech. Chunder Shan was
with them. They found the dead horse, and one of the men recognized it
as Conan's. Then they found the man Conan slew, and knew him for a
Wazuli. It seemed to them that Conan had been slain and the girl taken
by the Wazuli; so they turned aside from their purpose of following to
Afghulistan. But they did not know from which.village the dead man was
come, and we had left no trail a Kshatriya could follow.

"So they rode to the nearest Wazuli village, which was the village of
Jugra, and burnt it and slew many of the people. But the men of Khojur
came upon them in darkness and slew some of them, and wounded the
governor. So the survivors retired down the Zhaibar in the darkness
before dawn, but they returned with reinforcements before sunrise, and
there has been skirmishing and fighting in the hills all morning. It is
said that a great army is being raised to sweep the hills about the
Zhaibar. The tribes are whetting their knives and laying ambushes in
every pass from here to Gurashah valley. Moreover, Kerim Shah has
returned to the hills."

A grunt went around the circle, and Yasmina leaned closer to the
loop-hole at the name she had begun to mistrust.

"Where went he?" demanded Yar Afzal.

"The Dagozai did not know; with him were thirty Irakzai of the lower
villages. They rode into the hills and disappeared."

"These Irakzai are jackals that follow a lion for crumbs," growled Yar
Afzal. "They have been lapping up the coins Kerim Shah scatters among
the border tribes to buy men like horses. I like him not; for all he is
our kinsman from Iranistan."

"He's not even that," said Conan. "I know him of old. He's an
Hyrkanian, a spy of Yezdigerd's. If I catch him I'll hang his hide to a
tamarisk."

"But the Kshatriyas!" clamored the men in the semicircle. "Are we to
squat on our haunches until they smoke us out? They will learn at last
in which Wazuli village the wench is held. We are not loved by the
Zhaibari; they will help the Kshatriyas hunt us out."

"Let them come," grunted Yar Afzal. "We can hold the defiles against a
host."

One of the men leaped up and shook his fist at Conan.

"Are we to take all the risks while he reaps the rewards?" he howled.
"Are we to fight his battles for him?"

With a stride Conan reached him and bent slightly to stare full into
his hairy face. The Cimmerian had not drawn his long knife, but his
left hand grasped the scabbard, jutting the hilt suggestively forward.

"I ask no man to fight my battles," he said softly. "Draw your blade if
you dare, you yapping dog!"

The Wazuli started back, snarling like a cat.

"Dare to touch me and here are fifty men to rend you apart!" he
screeched.

"What!" roared Yar Afzal, his face purpling with wrath. His whiskers
bristled, his belly swelled with his rage. "Are you chief of Khunim? Do
the Wazulis take orders from Yar Afzal, or from a low-bred cur?"

The man cringed before his invincible chief, and Yar Afzal, striding up
to him, seized him by the throat and choked him until his face was
turning black. Then he hurled the man savagely against the ground and
stood over him with his tulwar in his hand.

"Is there any who questions my authority?" he roared, and his warriors
looked down sullenly as his bellicose glare swept their semicircle. Yar
Afzal grunted scornfully and sheathed his weapon with a gesture that
was the apex of insult. Then he kicked the fallen agitator with a
concentrated vindictiveness that brought howls from his victim.

"Get down the valley to the watchers on the heights and bring word if
they have seen anything," commanded Yar Afzal, and the man went,
shaking with fear and grinding his teeth with fury.

Yar Afzal then seated himself ponderously on a stone, growling in his
beard. Conan stood near him, legs braced apart, thumbs hooked in his
girdle, narrowly watching the assembled warriors. They stared at him
sullenly, not daring to brave Yar Afzal's fury, but hating the
foreigner as only a hillman can hate.

"Now listen to me, you sons of nameless dogs, while I tell you what the
lord Conan and I have planned to fool the Kshatriyas"—the boom of Yar
Afzal's bull-like voice followed the discomfited warrior as he slunk
away from the assembly.

The man passed by the cluster of huts, where women, who had seen his
defeat laughed at him and called stinging comments, and hastened on
along the trail that wound among spurs and rocks toward the valley
head.

Just as he rounded the first turn that took him out of sight of the
village, he stopped short, gaping stupidly. He had not believed it
possible for a stranger to enter the valley of Khurum without being
detected by the hawk-eyed watchers along the heights; yet a man sat
cross-legged on a low ledge beside the path—a man in a camel-hair robe
and a green turban.

The Wazuli's mouth gaped for a yell, and his hand leaped to his
knife-hilt. But at that instant his eyes met those of the stranger and
the cry died in his throat, his fingers went limp. He stood like a
statue, his own eyes glazed and vacant.

For minutes the scene held motionless; then the man on the ledge drew a
cryptic symbol in the dust on the rock with his forefinger. The Wazuli
did not "see him place anything within the compass of that emblem, but
presently something gleamed there—a round, shiny black ball that looked
like polished jet. The man in the green turban took this up and tossed
it the Wazuli, who mechanically caught it.

"Carry this to Yar Afzal," he said, and the Wazuli turned like an
automaton and went back along the path, holding the black jet ball in
his outstretched hand. He did not even turn his head to the renewed
jeers of the women as he passed the huts. He did not seem to hear.

The man on the ledge gazed after him with a cryptic smile. A girl's
head rose above the rim of the ledge and she looked at him with
admiration and a touch of fear that had not been present the night
before.

"Why did you do that?" she asked.

He ran his fingers through her dark locks caressingly.

"Are you still dizzy from your flight on the horse-of-air, that you
doubt my wisdom?" he laughed. "As long as Yar Afzal lives, Conan will
bide safe among the Wazuli fighting-men. Their knives are sharp, and
there are many of them. What I plot will be safer, even for me, than to
seek to slay him and take her from among them. It takes no wizard to
predict what the Wazulis will do, and what Conan will do, when my
victim hands the globe of Yezud to the chief of Khurum."

Back before the hut, Yar Afzal halted in the midst of some tirade,
surprised and displeased to see the man he had sent up the valley,
pushing his way through the throng.

"I bade you go to the watchers!" the chief bellowed. "You have not had
time to come from them."

Hie other did not reply; he stood woodenly, staring vacantly into the
chiefs face, his palm outstretched holding the jet ball. Conan, looking
over Yar Afzal's shoulder, murmured something and reached to touch the
chiefs arm, but as he did so, Yar Afzal, in a paroxysm of anger, struck
the man with his clenched fist and felled him like an ox. As he fell,
the jet sphere rolled to Yar Afzal's foot, and the chief, seeming to
see it for the first time, bent and picked it up. The men, staring
perplexedly at their senseless comrade, saw their chief bend, but they
did not see what he picked up from the ground.

Yar Afzal straightened, glanced at the jet, and made a motion to thrust
it into his girdle,

"Carry that fool to his hut," he growled. "He has the look of a
lotus-eater. He returned me a blank stare. I— aie!

In his right hand, moving toward his girdle, he had suddenly felt
movement where movement should not be. His voice died away as he stood
and glared at nothing; and inside his clenched right hand he felt the
quivering of change, of motion, of life. He no longer held a smooth
shining sphere in his fingers. And he dared not look; his tongue clove
to the roof of his mouth, and he could not open his hand. His
astonished warriors saw Yar Afzal's eyes distend, the color ebb from
his face. Then suddenly a bellow of agony bunt from his bearded lips;
he swayed and fell as if struck by lightning, his right arm tossed out
in front of him. Face down, he lay, and from between his opening
fingers crawled a spider—a hideous, black, hairy-legged monster whose
body shone like black jet The men yelled and gave back suddenly,
and«the creature scuttled into a crevice of the rocks and disappeared.

The warriors started up, glaring wildly, and a voice rose above their
clamor, a far-carrying voice of command which came from none knew
where. Afterward each man there —who still lived—denied that he had
shouted, but all there heard it.

"Yar Afzal is dead! Kill the outlander!

That shout focused their whirling minds as one. Doubt, bewilderment and
fear vanished in the uproaring surge of the blood-lust. A furious yell
rent the skies as the tribesmen responded instantly to the suggestion.
They came headlong across the open space, cloaks flapping, eyes
blazing, knives lifted.

Conan's action was as quick as theirs. As the voice shouted he sprang
for the hut door. But they were closer to him than he was to the door,
and with one foot on the sill he had to wheel and parry the swipe of a
yard-long blade. He split the man's skull—ducked another swinging knife
and gutted the wielder—felled a man with his left fist and stabbed
another in the belly—and heaved back mightily against the closed door
with his shoulders. Hacking blades were nicking chips out of the jambs
about his can, but the door flew open under the impact of his
shoulders, and he went stumbling backward into the room. A bearded,
tribesman, thrusting with all his fury as Conan sprang back,
over-reached and pitched headfirst through the doorway. Conan stooped,
grasped the slack of his garments and hauled him clear, and slammed the
door in the faces of the men who came surging into it. Bones snapped
under the impact, and the next instant Conan slammed the bolts into
place and whirled with desperate haste to meet the man, who sprang from
the floor and tore into action like a madman.

Yasmina cowered in a corner, staring in horror as the two men fought
back and forth across the room, almost trampling her at times; the
flash and clangor of their blades filled the room, and outside the mob
clamored like a wolf-pack, hacking deafeningly at the bronze door with
their long knives, and dashing huge rocks against it. Somebody fetched
a tree trunk, and the door began to stagger under the thunderous
assault. Yasmina clasped her ears, staring wildly. Violence and fury
within, cataclysmic madness without. The stallion in his stall neighed
and reared, thundering with his heels against the walls. He wheeled and
launched his hoofs through the bars just as the tribesman, backing away
from Oman's murderous swipes, stumbled against them. His spine cracked
in three places like a rotten branch and he was hurled headlong against
the Cimmerian, bearing him backward so that they both crashed to the
beaten floor.

Yasmina cried out and ran forward; to her dazed sight it seemed that
both were slain. She reached them just as Conan threw aside the corpse
and rose. She caught his arm, trembling from head to foot.

"Oh, you live! I thought—I thought you were dead!"

He glanced down at her quickly, into the pale, upturned face and the
wide staring dark eyes.

"Why are you trembling?" he demanded. "Why should you care if I live or
die?"

A vestige of her poise returned to her, and she drew away, making a
rather pitiful attempt at playing the Devi.

"You are preferable to those wolves howling without," she answered,
gesturing toward the door, the stone sill of which was beginning to
splinter away.

That won't hold long," he muttered, then turned and went swiftly to the
stall of the stallion.

Yasmina clenched her hands and caught her breath as she saw him tear
aside the splintered ban and go into the stall with the maddened beast.
The stallion reared above him, neighing terribly, hoofs lifted, eyes
and teeth flashing and ears laid back, but Conan leaped and caught his
mane with a display of sheer strength that seemed impossible, and
dragged the beast down on his forelegs. The steed snorted and quivered,
but stood still while the man bridled him and clapped on the
gold-worked saddle, with the wide silver stirrups.

Wheeling the beast around in the stall, Conan called quickly to
Yasmina, and the girl came, sidling nervously past the stallion's
heels. Conan was working at the stone wall, talking swiftly as he
worked.

"A secret door in the wall here, that not even the Wazuli know about
Yar Afzal showed it to me once when he was drunk. It opens out into the
mouth of the ravine behind the hut Ha!"

As he tugged at a projection that seemed casual, a whole section of the
wall slid back on oiled iron runners. Looking through, the girl saw a
narrow defile opening in a sheer stone cliff within a few feet of the
hut's back wall. Then Conan sprang into the saddle and hauled her up
before him. Behind them the great door groaned like a living thing and
crashed in, and a yell rang to the roof as the entrance was instantly
flooded with hairy faces and knives in hairy fists. And then the great
stallion went through the wall like a javelin from a catapult, and
thundered into the defile, running low, foam flying from the bit-rings.

That move came as an absolute surprise to the Wazulis. It was a
surprise, too, to those stealing down the ravine. It happened so
quickly—the hurricane-like charge of the great horse—that a man in a
green turban was unable to get out of the way. He went down under the
frantic hoofs, and a girl screamed. Conan got one glimpse of her as
they thundered by—a slim, dark girl in silk trousers and a jeweled
breast-band, flattening herself against the ravine wall. Then the black
horse and his riders were gone up the gorge like the spume blown before
a storm, and the men who came tumbling through the wall into the defile
after them met that which changed their yells of blood-lust to shrill
screams of fear and death.

6. The Mountain of the Black Seers

"Where now?" Yasmina was trying to sit erect on the rocking saddlebow,
clutching her captor. She was conscious of a recognition of shame that
she should not find unpleasant the feel of his muscular flesh under her
fingers.

"To Afghulistan," he answered. "It's a perilous road, but the stallion
will carry us easily, unless we fall in with some. of your friends, or
my tribal enemies. Now that Yar Afzal is dead, those damned Wazulis
will be on our heels. I'm surprised we haven't sighted them behind us
already."

"Who was that man you rode down?" she asked.

"I don't know. I never saw him before. He's no Ghuli, that's certain.
What the devil he was doing there is more than I can say. There was a
girl with him, too."

"Yes." Her gaze was shadowed. "I can not understand that. That girl was
my maid, Citara. Do you suppose she was coming to aid me? That the man
was a friend? If so, the Wazulis have captured them both."

"Well," he answered, "there's nothing we can do. If we go back, they'll
skin us both. I can't understand how a girl like that could get this
far into the mountains with only one man—and he a robed scholar, for
that's what he looked like. There's something infernally queer in all
this. That fellow Yar Afzal beat and sent away—he moved like a man
walking in his sleep. I've seen the priests of Zamora perform their
abominable rituals in their forbidden temples, and their victims had a
stare like that man. The priests looked into their eyes and muttered
incantations, and then the people became like walking dead men, with
glassy eyes, doing as they ordered.

"And then I saw what the fellow had in his hand, which Yar Afzal picked
up. It was like a big black jet bead, such as the temple girls of Yezud
wear when they dance before the black stone spider which is their god.
Yar Afzal held it in his hand, and he didn't pick up anything else. Yet
when he fell dead, a spider, like the god at Yezud, only smaller, ran
out of his fingers. And then, when the Wazulis stood uncertain there, a
voice cried out for them to kill me, and I know that voice didn't come
from any of the warriors, nor from the women who watched by the huts.
It seemed to come from above."

Yasmina did not reply. She glanced at the stark outlines of the
mountains all about them and shuddered. Her soul shrank from their
gaunt brutality. This was a grim, naked land where anything might
happen. Age-old traditions invested it with shuddery horror for anyone
born in the hot, luxuriant southern plains.

The sun was high, beating down with fierce heat, yet the wind that blew
in fitful gusts seemed to sweep off slopes of ice. Once she heard a
strange rushing above them that was not the sweep of the wind, and from
the way Conan looked up, she knew it was not a common sound to him,
either. She thought that a strip of the cold blue sky was momentarily
blurred, as if some all but invisible object had swept between it and
herself, but she could cot be sure. Neither made any comment, but Conan
loosened his knife in his scabbard.

They were following a faintly marked path dipping down into ravines so
deep the sun never struck bottom, laboring up steep slopes where loose
shale threatened to slide from beneath their feet, and following
knife-edge ridges with blue-hazed echoing depths on either hand.

The sun had passed its zenith when they crossed a narrow trail winding
among the crags. Conan reined the horse aside and followed it
southward, going almost at right angles to their former course.

"A Calzai village is at one end of this trail," he explained. "Their
women follow it to a well, for water. You need new garments."

Glancing down at her filmy attire, Yasmina agreed with him. Her
cloth-of-gold slippers were in tatters, her robes and silken
under-garments torn to shreds that scarcely held together decently.
Garments meant for the streets of Peshkhauri were scarcely appropriate
for the crags of the Himelians.

Coming to a crook in the trail, Conan dismounted, helped Yasmina down
and waited. Presently he nodded, though she heard nothing.

"A woman coming along the trail," he remarked. In sudden panic she
clutched his arm.

"You will not—not kill her?"

"I don't kill women ordinarily," he grunted; "though some of these
hillwomen are she-wolves. No," he grinned as at a huge jest "By Crom,
I'll pay for her clothes! How is that?" He displayed a handful of gold
coins, and replaced all but the largest She nodded, much relieved. It
was perhaps natural for men to slay and die; her flesh crawled at the
thought of watching the butchery of a woman.

Presently, a woman appeared around the crook of the trail—a tall, slim
Galzai girl, straight as a young sapling, bearing a great empty gourd.
She stopped short and the gourd fell from her hands when she saw them;
she wavered as though to run, then realized that Conan was too close to
her to allow her to escape, and so stood still, staring at them with a
mixed expression of fear and curiosity.

Conan displayed the gold coin.

"If you will give this woman your garments," he said, "I will give you
this money."

The response was instant The girl smiled broadly with surprise and
delight, and, with the disdain of a hillwoman for prudish conventions,
promptly yanked off her sleeveless embroidered vest, slipped down her
wide trousers and stepped out of them, twitched off her wide-sleeved
shirt; and kicked off her sandals. Bundling them all in a bunch, she
proffered them to Conan, who handed them to the astonished Devi.

"Get behind that rock and put these on," he directed, further proving
himself no native hillman. "Fold your robes up into a bundle and bring
them to me when you come out."

"The money!" clamored the hill girl, stretching out her hands eagerly.
"The gold you promised me!"

Conan flipped the coin to her, she caught it, bit, then thrust it into
her hair, bent and caught up the gourd and went on down the path, as
devoid of self-consciousness as of garments. Conan waited with some
impatience while the Devi, for the first time in her pampered life,
dressed herself. When she stepped from behind the rock he swore in
surprise, and she felt a curious rush of emotions at the unrestrained
admiration burning in his fierce blue eyes. She felt shame,
embarrassment, yet a stimulation of vanity she had never before
experienced, and a tingling when meeting the impact of his eyes. He
laid a heavy hand on her shoulder and turned her about, staring avidly
at her from all angles.

"By Crom!" said he. "In those smoky, mystic robes you were aloof and
cold and far off as a star! Now you are a woman of warm flesh and
blood! You went behind that rode as the Devi of Vendhya; you come out
as a hill girl —though a thousand times more beautiful than any wench
of the Zhaibar! You were a goddess—now you are real!"

He spanked her resoundingly, and she, recognizing this as merely
another expression of admiration, did not feel outraged. It was indeed
as if the changing of her garments had wrought a change in her
personality. The feelings and sensations she had suppressed rose to
domination in her now, as if the queenly robes she had cast off had
been material shackles and inhibitions.

But Conan, in his renewed admiration, did not forget that peril lurked
all about them. The farther they drew away from the region of the
Zhaibar, the less likely he was to encounter any Kshatriya troops. On
the other hand, he had been listening all throughout their flight for
sounds that would tell him the vengeful Wazulis of Khurum were on their
heels.

Swinging the Devi up, he followed her into the saddle and again reined
the stallion westward. The bundle of garments she had given him, he
hurled over a cliff, to fall into the depths of a thousand-foot gorge.

"Why did you do that?" she asked. "Why did yon not give them to the
girl?"

"The riders from Peshkhauri are combing these hills," he said. "They'll
be ambushed and harried at every turn, and by way of reprisal they'll
destroy every village they can take. They may turn westward any time.
If they found a girl wearing your garments, they'd torture her into
talking, and she might put them on my trail."

"What will she do?" asked Yasmina.

"Go back to her village and tell her people that a stranger attacked
her," he answered. "She'll have them on our track, all right. But she
had to go on and get the water first; if she dared go back without it,
they'd whip the skin off her. That gives us a long start. They'll never
catch us. By nightfall well cross the Afghuli border."

"There are no paths or signs of human habitation in these parts," she
commented. "Even for the Himelians this region seems singularly
deserted. We have not seen a trail since we left the one where we met
the Galzai woman."

For answer he pointed to the northwest, where she glimpsed a peak in a
notch of the crags.

"Yimsha," grunted Conan. 'The tribes build their villages as far from
that mountain as they can."

She was instantly rigid with attention.

"Yimsha!" she whispered. The mountain of the Black Seers!"

"So they say" he answered. "This is as near as I ever approached it. I
have swung north to avoid any Kshatriya troops that might be prowling
through the hills. The regular trail from Khurum to Afghulistan lies
farther south. This is an ancient one, and seldom used."

She was staring intently at the distant peak. Her nails bit into her
pink palms.

"How long would it take to reach Yimsha from this point?"

"All the rest of the day, and all night," he answered, and grinned. "Do
you want to go there? By Crom, it's no place for an ordinary human,
from what the hill people say."

"Why do they not gather and destroy the devils that inhabit it?" she
demanded.

"Wipe out wizards with swords? Anyway, they never interfere with
people, unless the people interfere with them. I never saw one of them,
though I've talked with men who swore they had. They say they've
glimpsed people from the tower among the crags at sunset or
sunrise-tall, silent men in black robes."

"Would you be afraid to attack them?"

"I?" The idea seemed a new one to him. "Why, if they imposed upon me,
it would be my life or theirs. But I have nothing to do with them. I
came to these mountains to raise a following of human beings, not to
war with wizards."

Yasmina did not at once reply. She stared at the peak as at a human
enemy, feeling all her anger and hatred stir in her bosom anew. And
another feeling began to take dim shape. She had plotted to hurl
against the masters of Yimsha the man in whose arms she was now
carried. Perhaps there was another way, besides the method she had
planned, to accomplish her purpose. She could not mistake the look that
was beginning to dawn in this wild man's eyes as they rested on her.
Kingdoms have fallen when a woman's slim white hands pulled the strings
of destiny. Suddenly she stiffened, pointing.

"Look!"

Just visible on the distant peak there hung a cloud of peculiar aspect
It was a frosty crimson in color, veined with sparkling gold. This
cloud was in motion; it rotated, and as it whirled it contracted. It
dwindled to a spinning taper that flashed in the sun. And suddenly it
detached itself from the snow-tipped peak, floated out over the void
like a gay-hued feather, and became invisible against the cerulean sky.

"What could that have been?" asked the girl uneasily, as a shoulder of
rock shut the distant mountain from view; the phenomenon had been
disturbing, even its beauty.

"The hillmen call it Yimsha's Carpet, whatever that means," answered
Conan. "I've seen five hundred of them running as if the devil were at
their heels, to hide themselves in caves and crags, because they saw
that crimson cloud float up from the peak. What in———"

They had advanced through a narrow, knife-cut gash between turreted
walls and emerged upon a broad ledge, flanked by a series of rugged
slopes on one hand, and a gigantic precipice on the other. Hie dim
trail followed this ledge, bent around a shoulder and reappeared at
intervals far below, working a tedious way downward. And emerging from
the gut that opened upon the ledge, the black stallion halted short,
snorting. Conan urged him on impatiently, and the horse snorted and
threw his head up and down, quivering and straining as if against an
invisible barrier.

Conan swore and swung off, lifting Yasmina down with him. He went
forward, with a hand thrown out before him as if expecting to encounter
unseen resistance, but there was nothing to hinder him, though when he
tried to lead the horse, it neighed shrilly and jerked back. Then
Yasmina cried out, and Conan wheeled, hand starting to knife-hilt.

Neither of them had seen him come, but he stood there, with his arms
folded, a man in a camel-hair robe and a green turban. Conan grunted
with surprise to recognize the man the stallion had spurned in the
ravine outside the Waznli village.

"Who the devil are you?" he demanded.

The man did not answer. Conan noticed that his eyes were wide, fixed,
and of a peculiar luminous quality. And those eyes held his like a
magnet.

Khemsa's sorcery was based on hypnotism, as is the case with most
Eastern magic. The way has been prepared for the hypnotist for untold
centuries of generations who have lived and died in the firm conviction
of the reality and power of hypnotism, building up, by mass thought and
practice, a colossal though intangible atmosphere against which the
individual, steeped in tie traditions of the land, finds himself
helpless.

But Conan was not a son of the East. Its traditions were meaningless to
him; he was the product of an utterly alien atmosphere. Hypnotism was
not even a myth in Cimmeria. The heritage that prepared a native of the
East for submission to the mesmerist was not his.

He was aware of what Khemsa was trying to do to him; but he felt the
impact of the man's uncanny power only as a vague impulsion, a tugging
and pulling that he could shake off as a man shakes spider webs
from.his garments.

Aware of hostility and black magic, he ripped out his long knife and
lunged, as quick on his feet as a mountain lion.

But hypnotism was not all of Khemsa's magic. Yasmina, watching, did not
see by what roguery of movement or illusion the man in the green turban
avoided the terrible disemboweling thrust. But the keen blade whickered
between side and lifted arm, and to Yasmina it seemed that Khemsa
merely brushed his open palm lightly against Conan's bullneck. But the
Cimmerian went down like a slain ox.

Yet Conan was not dead; breaking his fall with his left hand, he
slashed at Khemsa's legs even as he went down, and the Rakhsha avoided
the scythe-like swipe only by a most unwizardly bound backward. Then
Yasmina cried out sharply as she saw a woman she recognized as Citara
glide out from among the rocks and come up to the man. Hie greeting
died in the Devi's throat as she saw the malevolence in the girl's
beautiful face.

Conan was rising slowly, shaken and dazed by the cruel craft of that
blow which, delivered with an art forgotten of men before Atlantis
sank, would have broken like a rotten twig the neck of a lesser man.
Khemsa gazed at him cautiously and a trifle uncertainly. The Rakhsha
had learned the full flood of his own power when he faced at bay the
knives of the maddened Wazulis in the ravine behind Khurum village; but
the Cimmerian's resistance had perhaps shaken his newfound confidence a
trifle. Sorcery thrives on success, not on failure.

He stepped forward, lifting his hand—then halted as if frozen, head
tilted back, eyes wide open, hand raised. In spite of himself Conan
followed his gaze, and so did the women—the girl cowering by the
trembling stallion, and the girl beside Khemsa.

Down the mountain slopes, like a whirl of shining dust blown before the
wind, a crimson, conoid cloud came dancing. Khemsa's dark face turned
ashen; his hand began to tremble, then sank to his side. The girl
beside him sensing the change in him, stared at him inquiringly.

Hie crimson shape left the mountain slope and came down in a long
arching swoop. It struck the ledge between Conan and Khemsa, and the
Rakhsha gave back with a stifled cry. He backed away, pushing the girl
Citara back with groping, fending hands.

The crimson cloud balanced like a spinning top for an instant, whirling
in a dazzling sheen on its point. Then without warning it was gone,
vanished as a bubble vanishes when burst. There on the ledge stood four
men. It was miraculous, incredible, impossible, yet it was true. They
were not ghosts or phantoms. They were four tail men, with shaven,
vulture-like heads, and black robes that hid their feet. Their hands
were concealed by their wide sleeves. They stood in, silence, their
naked heads nodding slightly in unison. They were facing Khemsa, but
behind them Conan felt his own blood turning to ice in his veins.
Rising, he backed stealthily away, until he felt the stallion's
shoulder trembling against his back, and the Devi crept into the
shelter of his arm. There was no word spoken. Silence hung like a
stifling pall.

All four of the men in black robes stared at Khemsa. Their vulture-like
faces were immobile, their eyes introspective and contemplative. But
Khemsa shook like a man in an ague. His feet were braced on the rock,
his calves straining as if in physical combat. Sweat ran in streams
down his dark face. His right hand locked on something under his brown
robe so desperately that the blood ebbed from that hand and left it
white. His left hand fell on the shoulder of Gitara and clutched in
agony like the grasp of a drowning man. She did not flinch or whimper,
though his fingers dug like talons into her firm flesh.

Conan had witnessed hundreds of battles in his wild life, but never one
like this, wherein four diabolical wills sought to beat down one lesser
but equally devilish will that opposed them. But he only faintly sensed
the monstrous quality of that hideous struggle. With his back to the
wait driven to bay by his former masters, Khemsa was fighting for his
life with all the dark power, all the frightful knowledge they had
taught him through long, grim years of neophytism and vassalage.

He was stronger than even he had guessed, and the free exercise of his
powers in his own behalf had tapped unsuspected reservoirs of forces.
And he was nerved to super-energy by frantic fear and desperation. He
reeled before the merciless impact of those hypnotic eyes, but he held
his ground. His features were distorted into a bestial grin of agony,
and his limbs were twisted as in a rack. It was a war of souls, of
frightful brains steeped in lore forbidden to men for a million years,
of mentalities which had plumbed the abysses and explored the dark
stars where spawn the shadows.

Yasmina understood this better than did Conan. And she dimly understood
why Khemsa could withstand the concentrated impact of those four
hellish wills which might have blasted into atoms the very rock on
which he stood. The reason was the girl that he clutched with the
strength of his despair. She was like an anchor to his staggering soul,
battered by the waves of those psychic emanations. His weakness was now
his strength. His love for the girl, violent and evil though it might
be, was yet a tie that bound him to the rest of humanity, providing an
earthly leverage for his will, a chain that his inhuman enemies could
not break; at least not break through Khemsa.

They realized that before he did. And one of them turned his gaze from
the Rakhsha full upon Gitara. There was no battle there. The girl
shrank and wilted like a leaf in the drouth. Irresistibly impelled, she
tore herself from her lover's arms before he realized what was
happening. Then a hideous thing came to pass. She began to back toward
the precipice, facing her tormentors, her eyes wide and blank as dark
gleaming glass from behind which a lamp has been blown out. Khemsa
groaned and staggered toward her, falling into the trap set for him. A
divided mind could not maintain the unequal battle. He was beaten, a
straw in their hands. The girl went backward, walking like an
automaton, and Khemsa reeled drunkenly after her, hands vainly
outstretched, groaning, slobbering in his pain, his feet moving heavily
Like dead things.

On the very brink she paused, standing stiffly, her heels on the edge,
and he fell on his knees and crawled whimpering toward her, groping for
her, to drag her back from destruction. And just before his clumsy
fingers touched her, one of the wizards laughed, like the sudden,
bronze note of a bell in Hell. The girl reeled suddenly and, consummate
climax of exquisite cruelty, reason and understanding flooded back into
her eyes, which flared with awful fear. She screamed, clutched wildly
at her lover's staining hands, and then, unable to save herself, fell
headlong with a moaning cry.

Khemsa hauled himself to the edge and stared over, haggardly, his lips
working as he mumbled to himself. Then he turned and stared for a long
minute at his torturers, with wide eyes that held no human light And
then with a cry that almost burst the rocks, he reeled up and came
rushing toward them, a knife lifted in his hand.

One of the Rakhshas stepped forward and stamped his foot, and as he
stamped, there came a rumbling that grew swiftly to a grinding roar.
Where his foot struck, a crevice opened in the solid rock that widened
instantly. Then, with a deafening crash, a whole section of the ledge
gave way. There was a last glimpse of Khemsa, with arms wildly upflung,
and then he vanished amidst the roar of the avalanche that thundered
down into the abyss.

The four looked contemplatively at the ragged edge of rock that formed
the new rim of the precipice, and then turned suddenly. Conan, thrown
off his feet by the shudder of the mountain, was rising, lifting
Yasmina. He seemed to move as slowly as his brain was working. He was
befogged and stupid. He realized that there was desperate need for him
to lift the Devi on the black stallion, and ride like the wind, but an
unaccountable sluggishness weighted his every thought and action.

And now the wizards had turned toward him; they raised their arms, and
to his horrified sight, he saw their outlines fading, dimming, becoming
hazy and nebulous, as a crimson smoke billowed around their feet and
rose about them. They were blotted out by a sudden whirling cloud—and
then he realized that he too was enveloped in a blinding crimson
mist—he heard Yasmina scream, and the stallion cried out like a woman
in pain. The Devi was torn from his arm, and as he lashed out with his
knife blindly, a terrific blow like a gust of storm wind knocked him
sprawling against a rock. Dazedly he saw a crimson conoid cloud
spinning up and over the mountain slopes. Yasmina was gone, and so were
the four men in black. Only the terrified stallion shared the ledge
with him.

7. On to Yimsha

As mists vanish before a strong wind, the cobwebs vanished from Conan's
brain. With a searing curse he leaped into the saddle and the stallion
reared neighing beneath him. He glared up the slopes, hesitated, and
then turned down the trail in the direction he had been going when
halted by Khemsa's trickery. But now he did not ride at a measured
gait. He shook loose the reins and the stallion went like a
thunderbolt; as if frantic to lose hysteria in violent physical
exertion. Across the ledge and around the crag and down the narrow
trail threading the great steep they plunged at breakneck speed. The
path followed a fold of rock, winding interminably down from tier to
tier of striated escarpment, and once, far below, Conan got a glimpse
of the ruin that had fallen—a mighty pile of broken stone and boulders
at the foot of a gigantic cliff.

The valley floor was still far below him when he reached a long and
lofty ridge that led out from the slope like a natural causeway. Out
upon this he rode, with an almost sheer drop on either hand. He could
trace ahead of him the trail he had to follow; far ahead it dropped
down from the ridge and made a great horseshoe back into the river bed
at his left hand. He cursed the necessity of traversing those miles,
but it was the only way. To try to descend to the lower lap of the
trail here would be to attempt the impossible. Only a bird could get to
the riverbed with a whole neck.

So he urged on the wearying stallion, until a clink of hoofs reached
his ears, welling up from below. Pulling up short and reining to the
lip of the cliff, he stared down into the dry river-bed that wound
along the foot of the ridge. Along that gorge rode a motley
throng—bearded men on half-wild horses, five hundred strong, bristling
with weapons. And Conan shouted suddenly, leaning over the edge of the
cliff, three hundred feet above them.

At his shout they reined back, and five hundred bearded faces were
tilted up toward him; a deep, clamorous roar filled the canyon. Conan
did not waste words.

"I was riding for Ghor!" he roared. "I had not hoped to meet you dogs
on the trail. Follow me as fast as your nags can push! I'm going to
Yimsha, and———"

"Traitor!" The howl was like a dash of ice-water In his face.

"What?" He glared down at them, jolted speechless. He saw wild eyes
blazing up at him, faces contorted with fury, fists brandishing blades.

"Traitor!" they roared back, wholeheartedly. "Where are the seven
chiefs held captive in Peshkhauri?"

"Why, in the governor's prison, I suppose," he answered.

A bloodthirsty yell from a hundred throats answered him, with such a
waving of weapons and a clamor that he could not understand what they
were saying. He beat down the din with a bull-like roar, and bellowed:
"What devil's play is this? Let one of you speak, so I can understand
what you meant."

A gaunt old chief elected himself to this position, shook his tulwar at
Conan as a preamble, and shouted accusingly: "You would not let us go
raiding Peshkhauri to rescue. our brothers!"

"No, you fools!" roared the exasperated Cimmerian. "Even if you'd
breached the wall, which is unlikely, they'd have hanged the prisoners
before you could reach them."

"And you went alone to traffic with the governor!" yelled the Afghuli,
working himself into a frothing frenzy.

"Well?"

"Where are the seven chiefs?" howled the old chief, making his tulwar
into a glimmering wheel of steel about his head. "Where are they?
Dead!"

"What!" Conan nearly fell off his horse in his surprise.

"Aye, dead!" five hundred bloodthirsty voices assured him.

The old chief brandished his arms and got the floor again. They were
not hanged!" he screeched. "A Wazuli in another cell saw them die! The
governor sent a wizard to slay them by craft!"

"That must be a lie," said Conan. "The governor would not dare. Last
night I talked with him———"

The admission was unfortunate. A yell of hate and accusation split the
skies.

"Aye! You went to him alone! To betray us! It is no lie. The Wazuli
escaped through the doors the wizard burst in his entry, and told the
tale to our scouts whom he met in the Zhaibtr. They had been sent forth
to search for you, when you did not return. When they heard the
Wazuli's tale, they returned with all haste to Ghor, and we saddled our
steeds and girt our swords!"

"And what do you fools mean to do?" demanded the Cimmerian.

"To avenge our brothers!" they howled. "Death to the Kshatriyas! Slay
him, brothers, he is a traitor!"

Arrows began to rattle around him. Conan rose in his stirrups, striving
to make himself heard above the tumult, and then, with a roar of
mingled rage, defiance, and disgust, he wheeled and galloped back up
the trail. Behind him and below him the Afghulis came pelting, mouthing
their rage, too furious even to remember that the only way they could
reach the height whereon he rode was to traverse the river-bed in the
other direction, make the broad bend, and follow the twisting trail up
over the ridge. When they did remember this, and turned back, their
repudiated chief had almost reached the point where the ridge joined
the escarpment.

At the cliff he did not take the trail by which he had descended, but
turned off on another, a mere trace along a rock-fault, where the
stallion scrambled for footing. He had not ridden far when the stallion
snorted and shied back from something lying in the trail. Conan stared
down on the travesty of a man, a broken, shredded, bloody heap that
gibbered and gnashed splintered teeth.

Only the dark gods that rule over the grim destinies of wizards know
how Khemsa dragged his shattered body from beneath that awful cairn of
fallen rocks and up the steep slope to the trail.

Impelled by some obscure reason, Conan dismounted and stood looking
down at the ghastly shape, knowing that he was witness of a thing
miraculous and opposed to nature. The Rakhsha lifted his gory head, and
his strange eyes, glazed with agony and approaching death, rested on
Conan with recognition.

"Where are they?" It was a racking croak not even remotely resembling a
human voice.

"Gone back to their damnable castle on Yimsha," grunted Conan. "They
took the Devi with them."

"I will go!' muttered the man. "I will follow them! They killed Gitara;
I will kill them—the acolytes, the Four of the Black Circle, the Master
himself! Kill—kill them all!" He strove to drag his mutilated frame
along the rock, but not even his indomitable will could animate that
gory mass longer, where the splintered bones hung together only by torn
tissue and ruptured fiber.

"Follow them!" raved Khemsa, drooling a bloody slaver. "Follow!"

"I'm going to," growled Conan. "I went to fetch my Afghulis, but
they've turned on me. I'm going on to Yimsha alone. I'll have the Devi
back if I have to tear down that damned mountain with my bare hands. I
didn't think the governor would dare kill my headmen, when I had the
Devi, but it seems he did. I'll have his head for that. She's no use to
me now as a hostage, but———"

"The curse of Yizil on them!" gasped Khemsa. "Go! I —Khemsa—am dying.
Wait—take my girdle."

He tried to fumble with a mangled hand at his tatters, and Conan,
understanding what he sought to convey, bent and drew from about his
gory waist a girdle of curious aspect.

"Follow the golden vein through the abyss," muttered Khemsa. "Wear the
girdle. I had it from a Stygian priest It will aid you, though it
failed me at last. Break the crystal globe with the four golden
pomegranates. Beware of the Master's transmutations—I am going to
Citara—she is waiting for me in Hell—aie, ya Shelos yar!" And so he
died.

Conan stared down at the girdle. Hie hair of which it was woven was not
horsehair. He was convinced that it was woven of the thick black
tresses of a woman. Set in the thick mesh were tiny jewels such as he
had never seen before. The buckle was strangely made, in the form of a
golden serpent head, flat, wedge-shaped, and scaled with curious art A
strong shudder shook Conan as he handled it, and he turned as though to
cast it over the precipice; then he hesitated, and finally buckled it
about his waist, under the Bakhariot girdle. Then he mounted and pushed
on.

The sun had sunk behind the crags. He climbed the trail in the vast
shadow of the cliffs that was thrown out like a dark blue mantle over
valleys and ridges far below. He was not far from the crest when,
edging around the shoulder of a jutting crag, he heard the clink of
shod hoofs ahead of him. He did not rum back. Indeed, so narrow was the
path that the stallion could not have wheeled his great body upon it He
rounded the jut of the rock and came upon a portion of the path that
broadened somewhat A chorus of threatening yells broke on his ear, but
his stallion pinned a terrified horse hard against the rock, and Conan
caught the arm of the rider in an iron grip, checking the lifted sword
in midair.

"Kerim Shah I" muttered Conan, red glints smoldering luridly in his
eyes. The Turanian did not struggle; they sat their horses almost
breast to breast, Conan's fingers locking the other's sword arm. Behind
Kerim Shah filed a group of lean Irakzai on gaunt horses. They glared
like wolves, fingering bows and knives, but rendered uncertain because
of the narrowness of the path and the perilous proximity of the abyss
that yawned beneath them.

"Where is the Devi?" demanded Kerim Shah.

"What's it to you, you Hyrkanian spy?" snarled Conan.

"I know you have her," answered Kerim Shah. "I was on my way northward
with some tribesmen when we were ambushed by enemies in Shalizah Pass.
Many of my men were slain, and the rest of us harried through the hills
like jackals. When we had beaten off our pursuers, we turned westward,
toward Amir Jehun Pass, and this morning we came upon a Wazuli
wandering through the hills. He was quite mad, but I learned much from
his incoherent gibberings before he died. I learned that he was the
sole survivor of a band which followed a chief of the Afghulis and a
captive Kshatriya woman into a gorge behind Khurum village. He babbled
much of a man in a green turban whom the Afghuli rode down, but who,
when attacked by the Wazulis who pursued, smote them with a nameless
doom what wiped them out as a gust of wind-driven fire wipes out a
cluster of locusts.

"How that one man escaped, I do not know, nor did he; but I knew from
his maunderings that Conan of Ghor had been in Khunim with his royal
captive. And as we made our way through the hills, we overtook a naked
Golzai girl bearing a gourd of water, who told us a tale of having been
stripped and ravished by a giant foreigner in the garb of an Afghuli
chief, who, she said, gave her garments to a Vendhyan woman who
accompanied him. She said you rode westward."

Kerim Shah did not consider it necessary to explain that he had been on
his way to keep his rendezvous with the expected troops from Secunderam
when he found his way barred by hostile tribesmen. The road to Gurashah
valley through Shalizah Pass was longer than the road that wound
through Amir Jehun Pass, but the latter traversed part of the Afghuli
country, which Kerim Shah had been anxious to avoid until he came with
an army. Barred from the Shalizah road, however, he had turned to the
forbidden route, until news that Conan had not yet reached Afghulistan
with his captive had caused him to turn southward and push on
recklessly in the hope of overtaking the Cimmerian in the hills.

"So you had better tell me where the Devi is," suggested Kerim Shah.
"We outnumber you—"

"Let one of your dogs nock a shaft and I'll throw yon over the cliff,"
Conan promised. "It wouldn't do you any good to kill me, anyhow. Five
hundred Afghulis are on my trail, and if they find you've cheated them,
they'll flay you alive. Anyway, I haven't got the Devi She's in the
hands of the Black Seers of Yimsha."

"Tarim! swore Kerim Shah softly, shaken out of his poise for the first
time. "Khemsa—"

"Khemsa's dead," grunted Conan. "His masters sent him to Hell on a
landslide. And now get out of my way. I'd be glad to kill you if I had
the time, but I'm on my way to Yimsha."

"I'll go with you," said the Turanian abruptly.

Conan laughed at him. "Do you think I'd trust you, you Hyrkanian dog?"

"I don't ask you to," returned Kerim Shah. "We both want the Devi. You
know my reason; King Yezdigerd desires to add her kingdom to his
empire, and herself in his seraglio. And I knew you, in the days when
you were a hetman of the kozak steppes; so I know your ambition is
wholesale plunder. You want to loot Vendhya, and to twist out a huge
ransom for Yasmina. Well, let us for the time being, without any
illusion about each other, unite our forces, and try to rescue the Devi
from the Seers. If we succeed, and live, we can fight it out to see who
keeps her."

Conan narrowly scrutinized the other for a moment, and then nodded,
releasing the Turanian's arm. "Agreed; what about your men?"

Kerim Shah turned to the silent Irakzai and spoke briefly: "This chief
and I are going to Yimsha to fight the wizards. Will you go with us, or
stay here to be flayed by the Afghulis who are following this man?"

They looked at him with eyes grimly fatalistic. They were doomed and
they knew it—had known it ever since the singing arrows of the ambushed
Dagozai had driven them back from the pass of Shalizah. The men of the
lower Zhaibar had too many reeking blood-feuds among the crag-dwellers.
They were too small a band to fight their way back through the hills to
the villages of the border, without the guidance of the crafty
Turanian. They counted themselves as dead already, so they made the
reply that only dead men would make: "We will go with thee and die on
Yimsha."

"Then in Crom's name let us be gone," grunted Conan, fidgeting with
impatience as he stared into the blue gulfs of the deepening twilight
"My wolves were hours behind me, but we've lost a devilish lot of
time."

Kerim Shah backed his steed from between the black stallion and the
cliff, sheathed his sword and cautiously turned the horse. Presently
the band was filing up the path as swiftly as they dared. They came out
upon the crest nearly a mile east of the spot where Khemsa had halted
the Cimmerian and the Devi. The path they had traversed was a perilous
one, even for hillmen, and for that reason Conan had avoided it that
day when carrying Yasmina, though Kerim Shah, following him, had taken
it supposing the Cimmerian had done likewise. Even Conan sighed with
relief when the horses scrambled up over the last rim. They moved like
phantom riders through an enchanted realm of shadows. The soft creak of
leather, the clink of steel marked their passing, then again the dark
mountain slopes lay naked and silent in the starlight.

8. Yasmina Knows Stark Terror

Yasmina had time but for one scream when she felt herself enveloped in
that crimson whirl and torn from her protector with appalling force.
She screamed once, and then she had no breath to scream. She was
blinded, deafened, rendered mute and eventually senseless by the
terrific rushing of the air about her. There was a dazed consciousness
of dizzy height and numbing speed, a confused impression of natural
sensations gone mad, and then vertigo and oblivion.

A vestige of these sensations clung to her as she recovered
consciousness; so she cried out and clutched wildly as though to stay a
headlong and involuntary flight. Her fingers closed on soft fabric, and
a relieving sense of stability pervaded her. She took cognizance of her
surroundings.

She was lying on a dais covered with black velvet This dais stood in a
great, dim room whose walls were hung with dusky tapestries across
which crawled dragons reproduced with repellent realism. Floating
shadows merely hinted at the lofty ceiling, and gloom that lent itself
to illusion lurked in the comers. There seemed to be neither windows
nor doors in the walls, or else they were concealed by the nighted
tapestries. Where the dim light came from, Yasmina could not determine.
The great room was a realm of mysteries, of shadows, and shadowy shapes
in which she could not have sworn to observe movement, yet which
invaded her mind with a dim and formless terror.

But her gaze fixed itself on a tangible object On another, smaller dais
of jet, a few feet away, a man sat cross legged, gazing contemplatively
at her. His long black velvet robe, embroidered with gold thread, fell
loosely about him, masking his figure. His hands were folded in his
sleeves. There was a velvet cap upon his head. His face was calm,
placid, not unhandsome, his eyes lambent and slightly oblique. He did
not move a muscle as he sat regarding her, nor did his expression alter
when he saw she was conscious.

Yasmina felt fear crawl like a trickle of ice-water down her supple
spine. She lifted herself on her elbows and stared apprehensively at
the stranger.

"Who are you?" she demanded. Her voice sounded brittle and inadequate.

"I am the Master of Yimsha." The tone was rich and resonant, like the
mellow notes of a temple bell.

"Why did you bring me here?" she demanded.

"Were you not seeking me?"

"If you are one of the Black Seers—yes!" she answered recklessly,
believing that he could read her thoughts anyway.

He laughed softly, and chills crawled up and down her spine again.

"You would turn the wild children of the hills against the Seen of
Yimsha!" he smiled. "I have read it in your mind, princess. Your weak,
human mind, filled with petty dreams of hate and revenge."

"You slew my brother!" A rising tide of anger was vying with her fear;
her hands were clenched, her lithe body rigid. "Why did you persecute
him? He never harmed you. The priests say the Seers are above meddling
in human affairs. Why did you destroy the king of Vendhya?"

"How can an ordinary human understand the motives of a Seer?" returned
the Master calmly. "My acolytes in the temples of Turan, who are the
priests behind the priests of Tarim, urged me to bestir myself in
behalf of Vezdigerd. For reasons of my own, I complied. How can I
explain my mystic reasons to your puny intellect? You could not
understand."

"I understand this: my brother died!" Tears of grief and rage shook in
her voice. She rose upon her knees and stared at him with wide blazing
eves, as supple and dangerous in that moment as a she-panther.

"As Yezdigerd desired," agreed the Master calmly. "For a while it was
my whim to further his ambitions."

"Is Yezdigerd your vassal?" Yasmina tried to keep the timbre of her
voice unaltered. She had felt her knee pressing something hard and
symmetrical under a fold of velvet Subtly she shifted her position,
moving her hand under the fold.

"Is the dog that licks up the offal in the temple yard the vassal of
the god?" returned the Master.

He did not seem to notice the actions she sought to dissemble.
Concealed by the velvet, her fingers closed on what she knew was the
golden hilt of a dagger. She bent her head to hide the light of triumph
in her eyes.

"I am weary of Yezdigerd," said the Master. "I have turned to other
amusements—ha!"

With a fierce cry Yasmina sprang like a jungle cat, stabbing
murderously. Then she stumbled and slid to the floor, where she
cowered, staring up at the man on the dais. He had not moved; his
cryptic smile was unchanged. Tremblingly she lifted her hand and stared
at it with dilated eyes. There was no dagger in her fingers; they
grasped a stalk of golden lotus, the crushed blossoms drooping on the
bruised stem.

She dropped it as if it had been a viper, and scrambled away from the
proximity of her tormentor. She returned to her own dais, because that
was at least more dignified for a queen than groveling on the floor at
the feet of a sorcerer, and eyed him apprehensively, expecting
reprisals.

But the Master made no move.

"All substance is one to him who holds the key of the cosmos," he said
cryptically. "To an adept nothing is immutable. At will, steel blossoms
bloom in unnamed gardens, or flower-swords flash in the moonlight."

"You are a devil," she sobbed.

"Not I!" he laughed. "I was born on this planet, long ago. Once I was a
common man, nor have I lost all human attributes in the numberless eons
of my adeptship. A human steeped in the dark arts is greater than a
devil. I am of human origin, but I rule demons. You have seen the Lords
of the Black Circle—it would blast your soul to hear from what far
realm I summoned them and from what doom I guard them with ensorcelled
crystal and golden serpents.

"But only I can rule them. My foolish Khemsa thought to make himself
great—poor fool, bursting material doors and hurtling himself and his
mistress through the air from hill to hill. Yet if he had not been
destroyed, his power might have grown to rival mine."

He laughed again. "And you, poor, silly thing! Plotting to send a hairy
hill chief to storm Yimsha! It was such a jest that I myself could have
designed, had it occurred to me, that you should fall into his hands.
And I read in your childish mind an intention to seduce by your
feminine wiles to attempt your purpose, anyway.

"But for all your stupidity, you are a woman fair to look upon. It is
my whim to keep you for my slave."

Hie daughter of a thousand proud emperors gasped with shame and fury at
the word.

"You dare not!"

His mocking laughter cut her like a whip across her naked shoulders.

"The king dares not trample a worm in the road? Little fool, do you not
realize that your royal pride is no more to me than a straw blown on
the wind? I, who have known the kisses of the queens of Hell! You have
seen how I deal with a rebel!"

Cowed and awed, the girl crouched on the velvet-covered dais. The light
grew dimmer and more phantom like. The features of the Master became
shadowy. His voice took on a newer tone of command.

"I will never yield to you!" Her voice trembled with fear but it
carried a ring of resolution.

"You will yield," he answered with horrible conviction. 'Tear and pain
shall teach you. I will lash you with horror and agony to the last
quivering ounce of your endurance, until you become as melted wax to be
bent and molded in my hands as I desire. You shall know such discipline
as no mortal woman ever knew, until my slightest command is to you as
the unalterable will of the gods. And first, to humble your pride, you
shall travel back through the lost ages, and view all the shapes that
have been you. Aie, yil la khosa!"

At these words the shadowy room swam before Yasmina's affrighted gaze.
The roots of her hair prickled her scalp, and her tongue clove to her
palate. Somewhere a gong sounded a deep, ominous note. The dragons on
the tapestries glowed like blue fire, and then faded out The Master on
his dais was but a shapeless shadow. The dim light gave way to soft,
thick darkness, almost tangible, that pulsed with strange radiations.
She could no longer see the Master. She could see nothing. She had a
strange sensation that the walls and ceiling had withdrawn immensely
from her.

Then somewhere in the darkness a glow began, like a firefly that
rhythmically dimmed and quickened. It grew to a golden ball, and as it
expanded its light grew more intense, flaming whitely. It burst
suddenly, showering the darkness with white sparks that did not
illumine the shadows. But like an impression left in the gloom, a faint
luminance remained, and revealed a slender dusky shaft shooting up from
the shadowy floor. Under the girl's dilated gaze it spread, took shape;
stems and broad leaves appeared, and great black poisonous blossoms
that towered above her as she cringed against the velvet A subtle
perfume pervaded the atmosphere. It was the dread figure of the black
lotus that had grown up as she watched, as it grows in the haunted,
forbidden jungles of Khitai.

The broad leaves were murmurous with evil life. The blossoms bent
toward her like sentient things, nodding serpent-like on pliant stems.
Etched against soft, impenetrable darkness, it loomed over her,
gigantic, blackly visible in some mad way. Her brain reeled with the
drugging scent and she sought to crawl from the dais. Then she dung to
it as it seemed to be pitching at an impossible slant She cried out
with terror and clung to the velvet, but she felt her fingers
ruthlessly torn away. There was a sensation as of all sanity and
stability crumbling and vanishing. She was a quivering atom of
sentiency driven through a black, roaring, icy void by a thundering
wind that threatened to extinguish her feeble flicker of animate hie
like a candle blown out in a storm.

Then there came a period of blind impulse and movement, when the atom
that was she mingled and merged with myriad other atoms of spawning
life in the yeasty morass of existence, molded by formative forces
until she emerged again a conscious individual, whirling down an
endless spiral of lives.

In a mist of terror she relived all her former existences, recognized
and was again all the bodies that had carried her ego throughout the
changing ages. She bruised her feet again over the long, weary road of
life that stretched out behind her into the immemorial Past Back beyond
the dimmest dawns of time she crouched shuddering in primordial
jangles, hunted by slavering beasts of prey. Skin-clad, she waded
thigh-deep in rice-swamps, battling with squawking waterfowl for the
precious grains. She labored with the oxen to drag the pointed stick
through the stubborn soil, and she crouched endlessly over looms in
peasant huts.

She saw walled cities burst into flame, and fled screaming before the
slayers. She reeled naked and bleeding over burning sands, dragged at
the slaver's stirrup, and she knew the grip of hot, fierce hands on her
writhing flesh, the shame and agony of brutal lust She screamed under
the bite of the lash, and moaned on the rack; mad with terror she
fought against the hands that forced her head inexorably down on the
bloody block.

She knew the agonies of childbirth, and the bitterness of love
betrayed. She suffered all the woes and wrongs and brutalities that man
has inflicted on woman throughout the eons; and she endured all the
spite and malice of woman for woman. And like the flick of a fiery whip
throughout was the consciousness she retained of her Devi-ship. She was
all the women she had ever been, yet in her knowing she was Yasmina.
This consciousness was not lost in the throes of reincarnation. At one
and the same time she was a naked slave-wench groveling under the whip,
and the proud Devi of Vendhya. And she suffered not only as the
slave-girl suffered, but as Yasmina, to whose pride the whip was like a
white-hot brand.

Life merged into life in flying chaos, each with its burden of woe and
shame and agony, until she dimly heard her own voice screaming
unbearably, like one long-drawn cry of suffering echoing down the ages.

Then she awakened on the velvet-covered dais in the mystic room.

In a ghostly gray light she saw again the dais and the cryptic robed
figure seated upon it. The hooded head was bent, the high shoulders
faintly etched against the uncertain dimness. She could make out no
details clearly, but the hood, where the velvet cap had been, stirred a
formless uneasiness in her. As she stared, there stole over her a
nameless fear that froze her tongue to her palate—a feeling that it was
not the Master who sat so silently on that black dais.

Then the figure moved and rose upright; towering above her. It stooped
over her and the long arms in their wide black sleeves bent about her.
She fought against them in speechless fright, surprised by their lean
hardness. The hooded head bent down toward her averted face. And she
screamed, and screamed again in poignant fear and loathing. Bony arms
gripped her lithe body, and from that hood looked forth a countenance
of death and decay—features like rotting parchment on a moldering
skull.

She screamed again, and then, as those champing, grinning jaws bent
toward her lips, she lost consciousness…

9. The Castle of the Wizards

The sun had risen over the white Himelian peaks. At the foot of a long
slope, a group of horsemen halted and stared upward. High above them a
stone tower poised on the pitch of the mountainside. Beyond and above
that gleamed the walls of a greater keep, near the line where the snow
began that capped Yimsha's pinnacle. There was a touch of unreality
about the whole—purple slopes pitching up to that fantastic castle,
toy-like with distance, and above it the white glistening peak
shouldering the cold blue.

"Well leave the horses here," grunted Conan. That treacherous slope is
safer for a man on foot Besides, they're done."

He swung down from the black stallion which stood with wide-braced legs
and drooping head. They had pushed hard throughout the night, gnawing
at scrap from saddle-bags, and pausing only to give the horses the
rests they had to have.

"That first tower is held by the acolytes of the Black Seers" said
Conan. "Or so men say; watch-dogs for their masters—lesser sorcerers.
They won't sit sucking their thumbs as we climb this slope."

Kerim Shah glanced up the mountain, then back the way they had come;
they were already far up on Yimsha's side, and a vast expanse of lesser
peaks and crags spread out beneath them. Among those labyrinths the
Turanian sought in vain for a movement of color that would betray men.
Evidently the pursuing Afghulis had lost their chiefs trail in the
night.

"Let us go, then."

They tied the weary horses in a clump of tamarisk and without further
comment turned up the slope. There was no cover. It was a naked
incline, strewn with boulders not big enough to conceal a man. But they
did conceal something else.

The party had not gone fifty steps when a snarling shape burst from
behind a rock. It was one of the gaunt savage dogs that infested the
hill villages, and its eyes glared redly, its jaws dripped foam. Conan
was leading, but it did not attack him. It dashed past him and leaped
at Kerim Shah. The Turanian leaped aside, and the great dog flung
itself upon the Irakzai behind him. The man yelled and threw up his
arm, which was torn by the brute's fangs as it bore him backward, and
the next instant half a dozen tulwars were hacking at the beast Yet not
until it was literally dismembered did the hideous creature cease its
efforts to seize and rend its attackers.

Kerim Shah bound up the wounded warrior's gashed arm, looked at him
narrowly, and then turned away without a word. He rejoined Conan, and
they renewed the climb in silence.

Presently Kerim Shah said: "Strange to find a village dog in this
place."

"There's no offal here," grunted Conan.

Both turned their heads to glance back at the wounded warrior toiling
after them among his companions. Sweat glistened on his dark face and
his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Then both
looked again at the stone tower squatting above them.

A slumberous quiet lay over the uplands. The tower showed no sign of
life; nor did the strange pyramidal structure beyond it But the men who
toiled upward went with the tenseness of men walking on the edge of a
crater. Kerim Shah had unslung the powerful Turanian bow that killed at
five hundred paces, and the Irakzai looked to their own lighter and
less lethal bows.

But they were not within bow-shot of the tower when something shot down
out of the sky without warning, h passed so close to Conan that he felt
the wind of the rushing wings, but it was an Irakzai who staggered and
fell, blood jetting from a severed jugular. A hawk with wings like
burnished steel shot up again, blood' dripping from the scimitar-beak,
to reel against the sky as Kerim Shah's bowstring twanged. It dropped
like a plummet, but no man saw where it struck the earth.

Conan bent over the victim of the attack, but the man was already dead.
No one spoke; useless to comment on the fact that never before had a
hawk been known to swoop on a man. Red rage began to vie with
fatalistic lethargy in the wild souls of the Irakzai. Hairy fingers
nocked arrows and men glared vengefully at the tower whose very silence
mocked them.

But the next attack came swiftly. They all saw it—a white puffball of
smoke that tumbled over the tower-rim and came drifting and rolling
down the slope toward them. Others followed it They seemed harmless,
mere woolly globes of cloudy foam, but Conan stepped aside to avoid
contact with the first. Behind him one of the Irakzai reached out and
thrust his sword into the unstable mass. Instantly a sharp report shook
the mountainside. There was a burst of blinding flame, and then the
puffball had vanished, and of the too-curious warrior remained only a
heap of charred and blackened bones. The crisped hand still gripped the
ivory sword-hilt, but the blade was gone—melted and destroyed by that
awful heat. Yet men standing almost within reach of the victim had not
suffered except to be dazzled and half blinded by the sudden flare.

"Steel touches it off," grunted Conan. "Look out— here they come!"

The slope above them was almost covered by the billowing spheres. Kerim
Shah bent his bow and sent a shaft into the mass, and those touched by
the arrow burst like bubbles in spurting flame. His men followed his
example and for the next few minutes it was as if a thunderstorm raged
on the mountain slope, with bolts of lightning striking and bursting in
showers of flame. When the barrage ceased, only a few arrows were left
in the quivers of the archers.

They pushed on grimly, over soil charred and blackened, where the naked
rock had in places been turned to lava by the explosion of those
diabolical bombs.

Now they were almost within arrowflight of the silent tower, and they
spread their line, nerves taut, ready for any horror that might descend
upon them.

On the tower appeared a single figure, lifting a ten-foot bronze horn.
Its strident bellow roared out across the echoing slopes, like the
blare of trumpets on Judgment Day. And it began to be fearfully
answered. The ground trembled under the feet of the invaders, and
rumblings and grindings welled up from the subterranean depths.

The Irakzai screamed, reeling like drunken men on the shuddering slope,
and Conan, eyes glaring, charged recklessly up the incline, knife in
hand, straight at the door that showed in the tower-wall. Above him the
great horn roared and bellowed in brutish mockery. And then Kerim Shah
drew a shaft to his ear and loosed.

Only a Turanian could have made that shot. The bellowing of the horn
ceased suddenly, and a high, thin scream shrilled in its place. The
green-robed figure oh the tower staggered, clutching at the long shaft
which quivered in its bosom, and then pitched across the parapet. The
great horn tumbled upon the battlement and hung precariously, and
another robed figure rushed to seize it, shrieking in horror. Again the
Turanian bow twanged, and again it was answered by a death-howl. The
second acolyte, in falling, struck the horn with his elbow and blocked
it clattering over the parapet to shatter on the rocks far below.

At such headlong speed had Conan covered the ground that before the
clattering echoes of that fall had died away, he was hacking at the
door. Warned by his savage instinct, he gave back suddenly as a tide of
molten lead splashed down from above. But the next instant he was back
again, attacking the panels with redoubled fury. He was galvanized by
the fact that his enemies had resorted to earthly weapons. The sorcery
of the acolytes was limited. Their necromantic resources might well be
exhausted.

Kerim Shah was hurrying up the slope, his hillmen behind him in a
straggling crescent. They loosed as they ran, their arrows splintering
against the walls or arching over the parapet.

The heavy teak portal gave way beneath the Cimmerian's assault, and he
peered inside warily, expecting anything. He was looking into a
circular chamber from which a stair wound upward. On the opposite side
of the chamber a door gaped open, revealing the outer slope— and the
backs of half a dozen green-robed figures in full retreat.

Conan yelled, took a step into the tower, and then native caution
jerked him back, just as a great block of stone fell crashing to the
floor where his foot had been an instant before. Shouting to his
followers, he raced around the tower.

The acolytes had evacuated their first line of defense. As Conan
rounded the tower he saw their green robes twinkling up the mountain
ahead of him. He gave chase, panting with earnest blood-lust, and
behind him Kerim Shah and the Irakzai came pelting, the latter yelling
like wolves at the flight of their enemies, their fatalism momentarily
submerged by temporary triumph.

The tower stood on the lower edge of a narrow plateau whose upward
slant was barely perceptible. A few hundred yards away, this plateau
ended abruptly in a chasm, which had been invisible farther down the
mountain. Into this chasm the acolytes apparently leaped without
checking their speed. Their pursuers saw the green robes flutter and
disappear over the edge.

A few moments later they themselves were standing on the brink of the
mighty moat that cut them off from the castle of the Black Seers. It
was a sheer-walled ravine that extended in either direction as far as
they could see, apparently girdling the mountain, some four hundred
yards in width and five hundred feet deep. And in it, from rim to rim,
a strange, translucent mist sparkled and shimmered.

Looking down, Conan grunted. Far below him, moving across the
glimmering floor, which shone like burnished silver, he saw the forms
of the green-robed acolytes. Their outline was wavering and indistinct,
like figures seen under deep water. They walked in single file, moving
toward the opposite wall.

Kerim Shah nocked an arrow and sent it singing downward. But when it
struck the mist that filled the chasm it seemed to lose momentum and
direction, wandering widely from its course.

"If they went down, so can we!" grunted Conan, while Kerim Shah stared
after his shaft in amazement "I saw them last at this spot———"

Squinting down he saw something shining like a golden thread across the
canyon floor far below. The acolytes seemed to be following this
thread, and there suddenly came to him Khemsa's cryptic words-—"Follow
the golden vein!" On the brink, under his very hand as he crouched, he
found it, a thin vein of sparkling gold running from an outcropping of
ore to the edge and down across the silvery floor. And he found
something else, which had before been invisible to him because of the
peculiar refraction of the light The gold vein followed a narrow ramp
which slanted down into the ravine, fitted with niches for hand and
foot hold.

"Here's where they went down," he grunted to Kerim Shah. "They're no
adepts, to waft themselves through the air! We'll follow them———"

It was at that instant that the man who had been bitten by the mad dog
cried out horribly and leaped at Kerim Shah, foaming and gnashing his
teeth. The Turanian, quick as a cat on his feet, sprang aside and the
madman pitched head-first over the brink. The others rushed to the edge
and glared after him in amazement The maniac did not fall plummetlike.
He floated slowly down through the rosy haze like a man sinking in deep
water. His limbs moved like a man trying to swim, and his features were
purple and convulsed beyond the contortions of his madness. Far down at
last on the shining floor his body settled and lay still.

"There's death in that chasm" muttered Kerim Shah, drawing back from
the rosy mist that shimmered almost at his feet "What now, Conan?"

"On!" answered the Cimmerian grimly. "Those acolytes are human; if the
mist doesn't kill diem, it won't kill me."

He hitched his belt, and his hands touched the girdle Khemsa had given
him; he scowled, then smiled bleakly. He had forgotten that girdle; yet
thrice had death passed him by to strike another victim.

The acolytes had reached the farther wall and were moving up it like
great green flies. Letting himself upon the ramp, he descended warily.
The rosy cloud lapped about his ankles, ascending as he lowered
himself. It reached his knees, his thighs, his waist, his armpits. He
felt it as one feels a thick heavy fog on a damp night With it lapping
about his chin he hesitated, and then ducked under. Instantly his
breath ceased; all air was shut off from him and he felt his ribs
caving in on his vitals. With a frantic effort he heaved himself up,
fighting for life. His head rose above the surface and he drank air in
great gulps.

Kerim Shah leaned down toward him, spoke to him, but Conan neither
heard nor heeded. Stubbornly, his mind fixed on what the dying Khemsa
had told him, the Cimmerian groped for the gold vein, and found that he
had moved off it in his descent. Several series of handholds were
niched in the ramp. Placing himself directly over the thread, he began
climbing down once more. The rosy mist rose about him, engulfed him.
Now is head was under, but he was still drinking pure air. Above him he
saw his companions staring down at him, their features blurred by the
haze that shimmered over his head. He gestured for them to follow and
went down swiftly, without waiting to sec whether they complied or not.

Kerim Shah sheathed his sword without comment and followed, and the
Irakzai, more fearful of being left alone than of the terrors that
might lurk below, scrambled after him. Each man clung to the golden
thread as they saw the Cimmerian do.

Down the slanting ramp they went to the ravine floor and moved out
across the shining level, treading the gold vein like rope-walkers. It
was as if they walked along an invisible tunnel through which air
circulated freely. They felt death pressing in on them above and on
either hand, but it did not touch them.

The vein crawled up a similar ramp on the other wall up which the
acolytes had disappeared, and up it they went with taut nerves, not
knowing what might be waiting for them among the jutting spun of rock
that ranged the lip of the precipice.

It was the green-robed acolytes who awaited them, with knives in their
hands. Perhaps they had reached the limits to which they could retreat.
Perhaps the Stygian girdle about Conan's waist could have told why
their necromantic spells had proven so weak and so quickly exhausted.
Perhaps it was a knowledge of death decreed for failure that sent them
leaping from among the rocks, eyes glaring and knives glittering,
resorting in their desperation to material weapons.

There among the rocky fangs on the precipice lip was no war of wizard
craft. It was a whirl of blades, where real steel bit and real blood
spurted, where sinewy arms dealt forthright blows that severed
quivering flesh, and men went down to be trodden under foot as the
fight raged over them.

One of the Irakzai bled to death among the rocks, but the acolytes were
down—slashed and hacked asunder or hurled over the edge to float
sluggishly down to the silver floor that shone so far below.

Then the conquerors shook blood and sweat from their eyes, and looked
at one another. Conan and Kerim Shah still stood upright and four of
the Irakzai.

They stood among the rocky teeth that serrated the precipice brink, and
from that spot" a path wound up a gentle slope to a broad stair,
consisting of half a dozen steps, a hundred feet across, cut out of a
green jade-like substance. They led up to a broad stage or roofless
gallery of the same polished stone, and above it rose, tier upon tier,
the castle of the Black Seers. It seemed to have been carved out of the
sheer stone of the mountain. The architecture was faultless, but
unadorned. The many casements were barred and masked with curtains
within. There was no sign of life, friendly or hostile.

They went up the path in silence, and warily as men treading the lair
of a serpent. The Irakzai were dumb, like men marching to a certain
doom. Even Kerim Shah was silent. Only Conan seemed unaware what a
monstrous dislocating and uprooting of accepted thought and action
their invasion constituted, what an unprecedented violation of
tradition. He was not of the East; and he came of a breed who fought
devils and wizards as promptly and matter-of-factly as they battled
human foes.

He strode up the shining stairs and across the wide green gallery
straight toward the great golden-bound teak door that opened upon it.
He cast but a single glance upward at the higher tiers of the great
pyramidal structure towering above him. He reached a hand for the
bronze prong that jutted like a handle from the door—then checked
himself, grinning hardly. The handle was made in the shape of a
serpent, head lifted on arched neck; and Conan had a suspicion that
that metal head would come to grisly life under his hand.

He struck it from the door with one blow, and its bronze clink on the
glassy floor did not lessen his caution. He flipped it aside with his
knife-point, and again turned to the door. Utter silence reigned over
the towers. Far below them the mountain slopes fell away into a purple
haze of distance. The sun glittered on snow-clad peaks on either hand.
High above, a vulture hung like a black dot in the cold blue of the
sky. But for it, the men before the gold-bound door were the only
evidence of life, tiny figures on a green jade gallery poised on the
dizzy height, with that fantastic pile of stone towering above them.

A sharp wind off the snow slashed them, whipping their tatters about
Conan's long knife splintering through the 'teak panels roused the
startled echoes. Again and again he struck, hewing through polished
wood and metal bands alike. Through the sundered ruins he glared into
the interior, alert and suspicious as a wolf. He saw a broad chamber,
the polished stone walls untapestried, the mosaic floor uncarpeted.
Square, polished ebon stools and a stone dais formed the only
furnishings. The room was empty of human life. Another door showed in
the opposite wall.

"Leave a man on guard outside," grunted Conan. "I'm going in."

Kerim Shah designated a warrior for that duty, and the man fell back
toward the middle of the gallery, bow in hand. Conan strode into the
castle, followed by the Turanian and the three remaining Irakzai. The
one outside spat, grumbled in his beard, and started suddenly as a low
mocking laugh reached his ears.

He lifted his head and saw, on the tier above him, a tall, black-robed
figure, naked head nodding slightly as he stared down. His whole
attitude suggested mockery and malignity. Quick as a flash the Irakzai
bent his bow and loosed, and the arrow streaked upward to strike full
in the black-robed breast. The mocking smile did not alter. The Seer
plucked out the missile and threw it back at the bowman, not as a
weapon is hurled, but with a contemptuous gesture. The Irakzai dodged,
instinctively throwing up his arm. His fingers closed on the revolving
shaft.

"Then he shrieked. In his hand the wooden shaft suddenly writhed. Its
rigid outline became pliant, melting in his grasp. He tried to throw it
from him, but it was too late. He held a living serpent in his naked
hand, and already it had coiled about his wrist and its wicked
wedge-shaped head darted at his muscular arm. He screamed again and his
eyes became distended, his features purple. He went to his knees shaken
by an awful convulsion, and then lay still.

The men inside had wheeled at his first cry. Conan took a swift stride
toward the open doorway, and then halted short, baffled. To the men
behind him it seemed that he strained against empty air. But though he
could see nothing, there was a slick, smooth, hard surface under his
hands, and he knew that a sheet of crystal had been let down in the
doorway. Through it he saw the Irakzai lying motionless on the glassy
gallery, an ordinary arrow sticking in his arm.

Conan lifted his knife and smote, and the watchers were dumbfounded to
see his blow checked apparently in midair, with the loud clang of steel
that meets an unyielding substance. He wasted no more effort. He knew
that not even the legendary tulwar of Amir Khurum could shatter that
invisible curtain.

In a few words he explained the matter to Kerim Shah, and the Turanian
shrugged his shoulders. "Well, if our exit is barred, we must find
another. In the meanwhile our way lies forward, does it not?"

With a grunt the Cimmerian turned and strode across the chamber to the
opposite door, with a feeling of treading on the threshold of doom. As
he lifted his knife to shatter the door, it swung silently open as if
of its own accord. He strode into a great hall, flanked with tall
glassy columns. A hundred feet from the door began the broad jade-green
steps of a stair that tapered toward the top like the side of a
pyramid. What lay beyond that stair he could not tell. But between him
and its shimmering foot stood a curious altar of gleaming black jet
Four great golden serpents twined their tails about this altar and
reared their wedge-shaped heads in the air, facing the four quarters of
the compass like the enchanted guardians of a fabled treasure. But on
the altar, between the arching necks, stood only a crystal globe filled
with a cloudy smoke-like substance, in which floated four golden
pomegranates.

The sight stirred some dim recollection in his mind; then Conan heeded
the altar no longer, for on the lower steps of the stair stood four
black-robed figures. He had not seen them come. They were simply there,
tall, gaunt, their vulture-heads nodding in unison, their feet and
hands hidden by their flowing garments.

One lifted his arm and the sleeve fell away revealing his hand—and it
was not a hand at all. Conan halted in mid-stride, compelled against
his will. He had encountered a force differing subtly from Khemsa's
mesmerism, and he could not advance, though he felt it in his power to
retreat if he wished. His companions had likewise halted, and they
seemed even more helpless than he, unable to move in either direction.

The Seer whose arm was lifted beckoned to one of the Irakzai, and the
man moved toward him like one in a trance, eyes staring and fixed,
blade hanging in limp fingers. As he pushed past Conan, the Cimmerian
threw an arm across his breast to arrest him. Conan was so much
stronger than the Irakzai that in ordinary circumstances he could have
broken his spine between his hands. But now the muscular arm was
brushed aside like a straw and the Irakzai moved toward the stair,
treading jerkily and mechanically! He reached the steps and knelt
stiffly, proffering his blade and bending his head. The Seer took the
sword. It flashed as he swung it up and down. The Irakzai's head
tumbled from his shoulders and thudded heavily on the black marble
floor. An arch of blood jetted from the severed arteries and the body
slumped over and lay with arms spread wide.

Again a malformed hand lifted and beckoned, and another Irakzai
stumbled stiffly to his doom. The ghastly drama was re-enacted and
another headless form lay beside the first.

As the third tribesman clumped his way past Conan to his death, the
Cimmerian, his veins bulging in his temples with his efforts to break
past the unseen barrier that held him, was suddenly aware of allied
forces, unseen, but waking into life about him. This realization came
without warning, but so powerfully that he could not doubt his
instinct. His left hand slid involuntarily under his Bakhariot belt and
closed on the Stygian girdle. And as he gripped it he felt new strength
flood his numbed limbs; the will to live was a pulsing white-hot fire,
matched by the intensity of his burning rage.

The third Irakzai was a decapitated corpse; and the hideous finger was
lifting again when Conan felt the bursting of the invisible barrier. A
fierce, involuntary cry burst from his lips as he leaped with the
explosive suddenness of pent-up ferocity. His left hand gripped the
sorcerer's girdle as a drowning man grips a floating log, and the long
knife was a sheen of light in his right. The men on the steps did not
move. They watched calmly, cynically; if they felt surprise they did
not show it. Conan did not allow himself to think what might chance
when he came within knife-reach of them. His blood was pounding in his
temples, a mist of crimson swam before his sight. He was afire with the
urge to kill—to drive his knife deep into flesh and bone, and twist the
blade in blood and entrails.

Another dozen strides would carry him to the steps where the sneering
demons stood. He drew his breath deep, his fury rising redly as his
charge gathered momentum. He was hurtling past the altar with its
golden serpents when like a levin-flash there shot across his mind
again as vividly as if spoken in his external ear, the cryptic words of
Khemsa: "Break the crystal ball!"

His reaction was almost without his own volition. Execution followed
impulse so spontaneously that the greatest sorcerer of the age would
not have had time to read his mind and prevent his action. Wheeling
like a cat from his headlong charge, he brought his knife crashing down
upon the crystal. Instantly the air vibrated with a peal of terror,
whether from the stairs, the altar, or the crystal itself he could not
tell. Hisses filled his ears as the the golden serpents, suddenly
vibrant with hideous life, writhed and smote at him. But he was fired
to the speed of a maddened tiger. A whirl of steel sheared through the
hideous trunks that waved toward him, and he smote the crystal sphere
again and yet again. And the globe burst with a noise like a
thunder-clap, raining fiery shards on the black marble, and the gold
pomegranates, as if released from captivity, shot upward toward the
lofty roof and were gone.

A mad screaming, bestial and ghastly, was echoing through the great
hall. On the steps writhed four black-robed figures, twisting in
convulsions, froth dripping from their livid mouths. Then with one
frenzied crescendo of inhuman ululation they stiffened and lay still,
and Conan knew that they were dead. He stared down at the altar and the
crystal shards. Four headless golden serpents still coiled about the
altar, but no alien life now animated the dully gleaming metal.

Kerim Shah was rising slowly from his knees, whither he had been dashed
by some unseen force. He shook his head to clear the ringing from his
ears.

"Did you hear that crash when you struck? It was as if a thousand
crystal panels shattered all over the castle as that globe burst. Were
the souls of the wizards imprisoned in those golden balls?—Ha!"

Conan wheeled as Kerim Shah drew his sword and pointed.

Another figure stood at the head of the stair. His robe, too, was
black, but of richly embroidered velvet, and there was a velvet cap on
his head. His face was calm, and not unhandsome.

"Who the devil are you?" demanded Conan, staring up at him, knife in
hand.

"I am the Master of Yimsha!" His voice was like the chime of a temple
bell, but a note of cruel mirth ran through it.

"Where is Yasmina?" demanded Kerim Shah.

The Master laughed down at him.

"What is that to you, dead man? Have you so quickly forgotten my
strength, once lent to you, that you come armed against me, you poor
fool? I think I will take your heart, Kerim Shah!"

He held out his hand as if to receive something, and the Turanian cried
out sharply like a man in mortal agony. He reeled drunkenly, and then,
with a splintering of bones, a rending of flesh and muscle, and a
snapping of mail-links, his breast burst outward with a shower of
blood, and through the ghastly aperture something red and dripping shot
through the air into the Master's out' stretched hand, as a bit of
steel leaps to the magnet. The Turanian slumped to the floor and lay
motionless, and the Master laughed and hurled the object to fall before
Conan's feet—a still-quivering human heart.

With a roar and a curse Conan charged the stair. From Khemsa's girdle
he felt strength and deathless hate flow into him to combat the
terrible emanation of power that met him on the steps. The air filled
with a shimmering steely haze through which he plunged like a swimmer,
head lowered, left arm bent about his face, knife gripped low in his
right hand. His half-blinded eyes, glaring over the crook of his elbow,
made out the hated shape of the Seer before and above him, the outline
wavering as a reflection wavers in disturbed water.

He was racked and tom by forces beyond his comprehension, but he felt a
driving power outside and beyond his own lifting him inexorably upward
and onward, despite the wizard's strength and his own agony.

Now he had reached the head of the stairs, and the Master's face
floated in the steely haze before him, and a strange fear shadowed the
inscrutable eyes. Conan waded through the mist as through a surf, and
his knife lunged upward like a live tiling. The keen point ripped Ate
Master's robe as he sprang back with a low cry. Then before Conan's
gaze, the wizard vanished—simply disappeared like a burst bubble, and
something long and undulating darted up one of the smaller stain that
led up to left and right from the landing.

Conan charged after it, up the left-hand stair, uncertain as to just
what he had seen whip up those steps, but in a berserk mood that
drowned the nausea and horror whispering at the back of his
consciousness.

He plunged out into a broad corridor whose uncarpeted floor and
untapestried walls were of polished jade, and something long and swift
whisked down the corridor ahead of him, and into a curtained door. From
within the chamber rose a scream of urgent terror. The sound lent wings
to Conan's flying feet, and he hurtled through the curtains and
headlong into the chamber within.

A frightful scene met his glare. Yasmina cowered on the farther, edge
of a velvet-covered dais, screaming her loathing and horror, an arm
lifted as if to ward off attack, while before her swayed the hideous
head of a giant serpent, shining neck arching up from dark-gleaming
coils. With a choked cry Conan threw his knife.

Instantly the monster whirled and was upon him like the rush of wind
through tall grass. The long knife quivered in its neck, point and a
foot of blade showing on one side, and the hilt and a hand's-breadth of
steel on the other, but it only seemed to madden the giant reptile. The
great head towered above the man who faced it, and then darted down,
the venom-dripping jaws gaping wide. But Conan had plucked a dagger
from his girdle and he stabbed upward as the head dipped down. The
point tore through the lower jaw and transfixed the upper, pinning them
together. The next instant, the great trunk had looped itself about the
Cimmerian as the snake, unable to use its fangs, employed its remaining
form of attack.

Conan's left arm was pinioned among the bone-crushing folds, but his
right was free. Bracing his feet to keep upright, he stretched forth
his hand, gripped the hilt of the long knife jutting from the serpent's
neck, and tore it free in a shower of blood. As if divining his purpose
with more than bestial intelligence, the snake writhed and knotted,
seeking to cast its loops about his right hand. But with the speed of
light the long knife rose and fell, shearing half-way through the
reptile's giant trunk.

Before he could strike again, the great, pliant loops fell from him and
the monster dragged itself across the floor, gushing blood from its
ghastly wounds. Conan sprang after it, knife lifted, but his vicious
swipe cut empty air as the serpent writhed away from him and struck its
blunt nose against a paneled screen of sandalwood. One of the panels
gave inward and the long, bleeding barrel whipped through it and was
gone.

Conan instantly attacked the screen. A few blows rent it apart and he
glared into the dim alcove beyond. No horrid shape coiled there; there
was blood on the marble floor, and bloody tracks led to a cryptic
arched door. Those tracks were of a man's bare feet…

"Conan!" He wheeled back into the chamber just in time to catch the
Devi of Vendhya in his arms as she rushed across the room and threw
herself upon him, catching him about the neck with a frantic clasp,
half hysterical with terror and gratitude and relief.

His wild blood had been stirred to its uttermost by all that had
passed. He caught her to him in a grasp that would have made her wince
at another time, and crushed her lips with his. She made no resistance;
the Devi was drowned in the elemental woman. She closed her eyes and
drank in his fierce, hot, lawless kisses with all the abandon of
passionate thirst. She was panting with his violence when he ceased for
breath, and glared down at her lying limp in his mighty arms.

"I knew you'd come for me," she murmured. "You would not leave me in
this den of devils."

At her words, recollection of their environment came to him suddenly.
He lifted his head and listened intently.

Silence reigned over the castle of Yimsha, but it was a silence
impregnated with menace. Peril crouched in every corner, leered
invisibly from every hanging.

We'd better go while we can," he muttered. "Those cots were enough to
kill any common beast—or man—but a wizard has a dozen lives. Wound one,
and he writhes away like a crippled snake to soak up fresh venom from
some source of sorcery."

He picked up the girl and, carrying her in his arms like a child, he
strode out into the gleaming jade corridor and down the stairs, nerves
tautly alert for any sign or sound.

"I met the Master" she whispered, clinging to him and shuddering. "He
worked his spells on me to break my will. The most awful was a
moldering corpse which seized me in its arms—I fainted then and lay as
one dead, I do not know how long. Shortly after I regained
consciousness I heard sounds of strife below, and cries, and then that
snake came slithering through the curtains—ah!" She shook at the memory
of that horror. "I knew somehow that it was not an illusion, but a real
serpent that sought my life."

"It was not a shadow, at least," answered Conan cryptically. "He knew
he was beaten, and chose to slay you rather than let you be rescued."

"What do you mean, he?" she asked uneasily, and then shrank against
him, crying out, and forgetting her question. She had seen the corpses
at the foot of the stairs. Those of the Seen were not good to look at;
as they lay twisted and contorted, their hands and feet exposed to
view, and at the sight Yasmina went livid and hid her face against
Conan's powerful shoulder.

10. Yasmina and Conan

Conan passed through the hall quickly enough, traversed the outer
chamber, and approached the door that let upon the gallery. Then he saw
the floor sprinkled with tiny, glittering shards. The crystal sheet
that had covered the doorway had been shivered to bits, and he
remembered the crash that had accompanied the shattering of the crystal
globe. He believed that every piece of crystal in the castle had broken
at that instant, and some dim instinct or memory of esoteric lore
vaguely suggested the truth of the monstrous connection between the
Lords of the Black Circle and the golden pomegranates. He felt the
short hair bristle chilly at the back of his neck and put the matter
hastily out of his mind.

He breathed a deep sigh of relief as he stepped out upon the green jade
gallery. There was still the gorge to cross, but at least he could see
the white peaks glistening in the sun, and the long slopes falling away
into the distant blue hazes.

The Irakzai lay where he had fallen, an ugly blotch on the glassy
smoothness. As Conan strode down the winding path, he was surprised to
note the position of the sun. It had not yet passed its zenith; and yet
it seemed to him that hours had passed since he plunged into the castle
of the Black Seers.

He felt an urge to hasten, not a mere blind panic, but an instinct of
peril growing behind his back. He said nothing to Yasmina, and she
seemed content to nestle her dark head against his arching breast and
find security in the clasp of his iron arms. He paused an instant on
the brink of the chasm, frowning down. The haze which danced in the
gorge was no longer rose-hued and sparkling. It was smoky, dim,
ghostly, like the life-tide that flickered thinly in a wounded man. The
thought came vaguely to Conan that the spells of magicians were more
closely bound to their personal beings than were the actions of common
men to the actors.

But far below, the floor shone like tarnished silver, and the gold
thread sparkled undimmed. Conan shifted Yasmina across his shoulder,
where she lay docilely, and began the descent. Hurriedly he descended
the ramp, and hurriedly he fled across the echoing floor. He had a
conviction that they were racing with time, that their chances of
survival depended upon crossing that gorge of horrors before the
wounded Master of the castle should regain enough power to loose some
other doom upon them.

When he toiled op the farther ramp and came oat upon the crest, he
breathed a gusty sigh of relief and stood Yasmina upon her feet.

"You walk from here," he told her, "ifs downhill all the way."

She stole a glance at the gleaming pyramid across the chasm; it reared
up against the snowy slope like the citadel of silence and immemorial
evil.

"Are you a magician, that you have conquered the Black Seers of Yimsha,
Conan of Ghor?" she asked, as they went down the path, with his heavy
arm about her supple waist.

"It was a girdle Khemsa gave me before he died," Conan answered. "Yes,
I found him on the trail. It is a curious one, which I'll show you when
I have time. Against some spells it was weak, but against others it was
strong, and a good knife is always a hearty incantation."

"But if the girdle aided you in conquering the Master," she argued,
"why did it not aid Khemsa?"

He shook his head. "Who knows? But Khemsa had been the Master's slave;
perhaps that weakened its magic. He had no hold on me as he had on
Khemsa. Yet I can't say that I conquered him. He retreated, but I have
a feeling that we haven't seen the last of him. I want to put as many
miles between us and his lair as we can."

He was further relieved to find horses tethered among the tamarisks as
he had left them. He loosed them swiftly and mounted the black
stallion, swinging the girl up before him. The others followed,
freshened by their rest.

And what now?" she asked. "To Afghulistan?"

"Not just now!" He grinned hardly. "Somebody— maybe the governor—killed
my seven headmen. My idiotic followers think I had something to do with
it, and unless I am able to convince them otherwise, they'll hunt me
like a wounded jackal."

Then what of me? If the headmen axe dead, I am useless to you as a
hostage. Will you slay me to avenge them?"

He looked down at her, with eyes fiercely aglow, and laughed at the
suggestion.

"Then let us ride to the border," she said.. "You'll be safe from the
Afghulis there———"

"Yes, on a Vindhyan gibbet."

"I am. queen of Vendhya," she reminded him with a touch of her old
imperiousness. "You have saved my life. You shall be rewarded."

She did not intend it as it sounded, but he growled in his throat, ill
pleased.

"Keep your bounty for your city-bred dogs, princess! If you're a queen
of the plains, I'm chief of the hills, and not one foot toward the
border will I take you!"

"But you would be safe———" she began bewilderedly.

"And you'd be the Devi again," he broke in. "No, girl; I prefer you as
you are now—a woman of flesh and blood, riding on my saddle bow."

"But you can't keep me!" she cried. "You can't———"

"Watch and see!" he advised grimly.

"But I will pay you a vast ransom———"

"Devil take your ransom!" he answered roughly, his arms hardening about
her supple figure. "The kingdom of Vendhya could give me nothing I
desire half so much as I desire you. I took you at the risk of my neck;
if your courtiers want you back, let them come up the Zhaibar and fight
for you."

"But you have no followers now!" she protested. "You are hunted! How
can you preserve your own life, much less mine?"

"I still have friends in the hills," he answered. "There is a chief of
the Khurakzai who will keep you safely while I bicker with the
Afghulis. If they will have none of me, by Crom! I will ride northward
with you to the steppes of the kozaki. I was a hetman among the Free
Companions before I rode southward. I'll make you a queen on the
Zaporoska River!"

"But I can not!" she objected. "You must not hold me——

"If the idea's so repulsive," he demanded, "why did you yield your lips
to me so willingly?"

"Even a queen is human," she answered, coloring. "But because I am a
queen, I must consider my kingdom. Do not carry me away into some
foreign country. Come back to Vendhya with me!"

"Would you make me your king?" he asked sardonically.

"Well, there are customs———" she stammered, and he interrupted her with
a hard laugh.

"Yes, civilized customs that won't let you do as you wish. You'll marry
some withered old king of the plains, and I can go my way with only the
memory of a few kisses snatched from your lips. Ha!"

"But I must return to my kingdom!" she repeated helplessly.

"Why?" he demanded angrily. "To chafe your rump on gold thrones, and
listen to the plaudits of smirking, velvet-skirted fools? Where is the
gain? Listen: I was born in the Cimmerian hills where the people are
all barbarians. I have been a mercenary soldier, a corsair, a kozak,
and a hundred other things. What king has roamed the countries, fought
the battles, loved the women, and won the plunder that I have?

"I came into Ghulistan to raise a horde and plunder the kingdoms to the
south—your own among them. Being chief of the Afghulis was only a start
If I can conciliate them, I'll have a dozen tribes following me within
a year. But if I can't, I'll ride back to the steppes and loot the
Turanian borders with the kozaki. And you'll go with me. To the devil
with your kingdom; they fended for themselves before you were born."

She lay in his arms looking up at him, and she felt a tug at her
spirit, a lawless, reckless urge that matched his own and was by it
called into being. But a thousand generations of sovereignship rode
heavy upon her. "I can't! I can't!" she repeated helplessly.

"You haven't any choice," he assured her. "You—what the devil!"

They had left Yimsha some miles behind them, and were riding along a
high ridge that separate two deep valleys. They had just topped a steep
crest where they could gaze down into the valley on their right hand.
And there a running fight was in progress. A strong wind was blowing
away from them, carrying the sound from their ears, but even so the
clashing of steel and thunder of hoofs welled up from far below.

They saw the glint of the sun on lancetip and spired helmet. Three
thousand. mailed horsemen were driving before them a ragged band of
turbaned riders, who fled snarling and striking like fleeing wolves.

"Turanians!" muttered Conan. "Squadrons from Secunderam. What the devil
are they doing here?"

"Who are the men they pursue?" asked Yasmina. "And why do they fall
back so stubbornly? They can not stand against such odds."

"Five hundred of my mad Afghulis," he growled, scowling down into the
vale. "They're in a trap, and they know it."

The valley was indeed a curl-de-sac at the end. It narrowed to a
high-walled gorge, opening out further into a round bowl, completely
rimmed with lofty, unscalable walls.

The turbaned riders were being forced into this gorge, because there
was nowhere else for them to go, and they went reluctantly, in a shower
of arrows and a whirl of swords. The helmeted riders harried them, but
did not press in too rashly. They knew the desperate fury of the
tribes, and they knew too that they had their prey in a trap from which
there was no escape. They had recognized the hillmen as Afghulis, and
they wished to hem them in and force a surrender. They needed hostages
for the purpose they had in mind.

Their emir was a man of decision and initiative. When he reached
Curashah valley, and found neither guides nor emissary waiting for him,
he pushed on, trusting to his own knowledge of the country. All the way
from Secunderam there had been fighting, and tribesmen were licking
their wounds in many a crag-perched village. He knew there was a good
chance that neither he nor any of his helmeted spearmen would ever ride
through the gates of Secunderam again, for the tribes would all be up
behind him now, but he was determined to carry oat his orders— which
were to take Yasmina Devi from the Afghulis at all costs, and to bring
her captive to Secunderam or, if confronted by impossibility, to strike
off her head before he himself died.

Of all this, of course, the watchers on the ridge were not aware. But
Conan fidgeted with nervousness.

"Why the devil did they get themselves trapped?" he demanded of the
universe at large. "I know what they're doing in these parts—they were
hunting me, the dog! Poking into every valley—and found themselves
penned in before they knew it. The poor fools! They're making a stand
in the gorge, but they can't hold out for long. When the Turanians have
pushed them back into the bowl, they'll slaughter them at their
leisure."

The din welling up from below increased in volume and intensity. In the
strait of the narrow gut, the Afghulis, fighting desperately, were for
the time holding their own against the mailed riders, who could not
throw their whole weight against them.

Conan scowled darkly, moved restlessly, fingering his hilt, and finally
spoke bluntly: "Devi, I must go down to them. I'll find a place for you
to hide until I come back to you. You spoke of your kingdom—well, I
don't pretend to look on those hairy devils as my children, but after
all, such as they are, they're my henchmen. A chief should never desert
his followers, even if they desert him first They think they were right
in kicking me out—Hell, I won't be cast off! I'm still chief of the
Afghulis, and I'll prove it! I can climb down on foot into the gorge."

"But what of me?" she queried. "You carried me away forcibly from my
people; now will you leave me to die in the hills alone while you go
down and sacrifice yourself uselessly?"

His veins swelled with the conflict of his emotions.

"That's right," he muttered helplessly. "Crom knows what I can do."

She turned her head slightly, a curious expression dawning on her
beautiful face. Then:

"listen!" she cried. "Listen!"

A distant fanfare of trumpets was borne faintly to their ears. They
stared into the deep valley on the left, and caught a glint of steel on
the farther side. A long line of lances and polished helmets moved
along the vale, gleaming in the sunlight.

"The riders of Vendhya!" she cried exultingly.

"There are thousands of them!" muttered Conan. "It has been long since
a Kshatriya host has ridden this far into the hills."

"They are searching for me!" she exclaimed. "Give me your horse! I will
ride to my warriors! The ridge is not so precipitous on the left, and I
can reach the valley floor. Go to your men and make them hold out a
little longer. I will lead my horsemen into the valley at the upper end
and fall upon the Turanians! We will crush them in the vise! Quick,
Conan! Will you sacrifice your men to your own desire?"

The burning hunger of the steppes and the wintry forests glared out of
his eyes, but he shook his head and swung off the stallion, placing the
reins in her hands.

"You win!" he grunted. "Ride like the devil!"

She wheeled away down the left-hand slope, and he ran swiftly along the
ridge until he reached the long ragged cleft that was the defile in
which the fight raged. Down the rugged wall he scrambled like an ape,
clinging to projections and crevices, to fall at last, feet first, into
the melee that raged in the mouth of the gorge. Blades were whickering
and clanging about him, horses rearing and stamping, helmet plumes
nodding among turbans that were stained crimson.

As he hit, he yelled like a wolf, caught a gold-worked rein, and
dodging the sweep of a scimitar, drove his long knife upward through
the rider's vitals. In another instant be was in the saddle, yelling
ferocious orders to the Afghulis. They stared at him stupidly for an
instant; then as they saw the havoc his steel was wreaking among their
enemies, they fell to their work again, accepting him without comment.
In that inferno of licking blades and spurting blood there was no time
to ask or answer questions.

The riders in their spired helmets and gold-worked hauberks swarmed
about the gorge mouth, thrusting and slashing, and the narrow defile
was packed and jammed with horses and men, the warriors crushed breast
to breast, stabbing with shortened blades, slashing murderously when
there was an instant's room to swing a sword. When a man went down he
did not get up from beneath the stamping, swirling hoofs. Weight and
sheer strength counted heavily there, and the chief of the Afghulis did
the work of ten. At such times accustomed habits sway men strongly, and
the warriors, who were used to seeing Conan in their vanguard, were
heartened mightily, despite their distrust of him.

But superior numbers counted too. The pressure of the men behind forced
the horsemen of Turan deeper and deeper into the gorge, in the teeth of
the flickering tulwars. Foot by foot the Afghulis were shoved back,
leaving the defile-floor carpeted with dead, on which the riders
trampled. As he hacked and smote like a man possessed, Conan had time
for some chilling doubts—would Yasmina keep her word? She had but to
join her warriors, turn southward, and leave him and his band to
perish.

But at last, what seemed centuries of desperate battling, in the valley
outside there rose another sound above the clash of steel and yells of
slaughter. And then with a burst of trumpets that shook the walls, and
rushing thunder of hoofs, five thousand riders of Vendhya smote the
hosts of Secunderam.

That stroke split the Turanian squadrons asunder, shattered, tore, and
rent them and scattered their fragments all over the valley. In an
instant the surge had ebbed back out of the gorge, there was a chaotic,
confused swirl of fighting, horsemen wheeling and smiting singly and in
clusters, and then the emir went down with a Kshatriya lance through
his breast, and the riders in their spired helmets turned their horses
down the valley, spurring like mad and seeking to slash a way through
the swarms which had come upon them from the rear. As they scattered in
flight, the conquerors scattered in pursuit, and all across the valley
floor, and up on the slopes near the mouth and over the crests streamed
the fugitives and the pursuers. The Afghulis, those left to ride,
rushed out of the gorge and joined in the harrying of their foes,
accepting the unexpected alliance as unquestionably as they had
accepted the return of their repudiated chief.

The sun was sinking toward the distant crags when Conan, his garments
hacked to tatters and the mail under them reeking and clotted with
blood, his knife dripping and crusted to the hilt, strode over the
corpses to where Yasmina Devi sat her horse among her nobles on the
crest of the ridge, near a lofty precipice.

"You kept your word, Devi!" he roared. "By Crom, though, I had some bad
seconds down in that gorge—look out!

Down from the sky swooped a vulture of tremendous size with a thunder
of wings that knocked men sprawling from their horses.

The scimitar-like beak was slashing for the Devi's soft neck, but Conan
was quicker—a short run, a tigerish leap, the savage thrust of a
dripping knife, and the vulture voiced a horribly human cry, pitched
sideways and went tumbling down the cliffs to the rocks and river a
thousand feet below. As it dropped, its black wings thrashing the air,
it took on the semblance, not of a bird, but of a black-robed human
body that fell, arms in wide black sleeves thrown abroad.

Oman turned to Yasmina, his red knife still in his hand, his blue eyes
smoldering, blood oozing from wounds on his thickly-muscled arms and
thighs.

"You are the Devi again," he said, grinning fiercely at the
gold-clasped gossamer robe she had donned over her hill-girl attire,
and awed not at all by the imposing array of chivalry about him. "I
have you to thank for the lives of some three hundred and fifty of my
rogues, who are at least convinced that I didn't betray them. You have
put my hands on the reins of conquest again."

"I still owe you my ransom," she said, her dark eyes glowing as they
swept over him. "Ten thousand pieces of gold I will pay you———"

He made a savage, impatient gesture, shook the blood from his knife and
thrust it back in its scabbard, wiping his hands on his mail.

"I will collect your ransom in my own way, at my own time," he said. "I
will collect it in your palace at Ayodhya, and I will come with fifty
thousand men to see that the scales are fair."

She laughed, gathering her reins into her hands. "And I will meet you
on the shores of the Jhumda with a hundred thousand!"

His eyes shone with fierce appreciation and admiration as, stepping
back, he lifted his hand with a gesture that was like the assumption of
kingship, indicating that her road was clear before her.


The Slithering Shadow
---------------------

When his plans for welding the hill tribes into a single army fail,
Conan rides back through Hyrkania and Turan, avoiding King Yezdigerd's
patrols and sharing the tents of his former kozak companions. Big wan
rage in the West and, scenting greener pastures and larger loot, Conan
returns to the Hyborian kingdoms. Almuric, prince of Koth, has rebelled
against the hated King Strabonus. He has raised a formidable army from
far and wide, and Conan signs up with him. Strabonus' neighbors,
however, come to his aid. The rebel cause fads, and Almuric's motley
army is driven south. They cut their way through the lands of Shem, the
borders of Stygia, and into the grasslands of Kush. Here they are run
down and wiped out by the combined black and Stygian forces at the edge
of the southern desert Conan is one of the few survivors.

Chapter One

The desert shimmered in the heat waves. Conan the Cimmerian stared out
over the aching desolation and involuntarily drew the back of his
powerful hand over his blackened lips. He stood like a bronze image in
the sand, apparently impervious to the murderous sun, though his only
garment was a silk loin-cloth, girdled by a wide gold-buckled belt from
which hung a saber and a broad-bladed poniard. On his cleancut limbs
were evidences of scarcely healed wounds.

At his feet rested a girl, one white arm clasping his knee, against
which her blond head drooped. Her white skin contrasted with his hard,
bronzed limbs; her short silken tunic, low-necked and sleeveless,
girdled at the waist, emphasized rather than concealed her lithe
figure.

Oman shook his head, blinking. The sun's glare half blinded him. He
lifted a small canteen from his belt and shook it, scowling at the
faint splashing within.

The girl moved wearily, whimpering.

"Oh, Conan, we shall die here! I am so thirsty!"

The Cimmerian growled wordlessly, glaring truculently at the
surrounding waste, with outthrust jaw, and blue eyes smoldering
savagely from under his black tousled mane, as if the desert were a
tangible enemy.

He stooped and put the canteen to the girl's lips.

"Drink until I tell you to stop, Natala," he commanded.

She drank with little panting gasps, and he did not check her. Only
when the canteen was empty did she realize that he had deliberately
allowed her to drink all their water supply, little enough that it was.

Tears sprang to her eyes. "Oh, Conan," she wailed, wringing her hands,
"why did you let me drink it all? I did not know—now there is none for
you!"

"Hush," he growled. "Don't waste your strength in weeping."

Straightening, he threw the canteen from him.

"Why did you do that?" she whispered.

He did not reply, standing motionless, his fingers closing slowly about
the hilt of his saber. He was not looking at the girl; his fierce eyes
seemed to plumb the mysterious purple hazes of the distance.

Endowed with all the barbarian's ferocious love of life and instinct to
live, Conan the Cimmerian yet knew that he had reached the end of his
trail. He had not come to the limits of his endurance, but he knew
another day under the merciless sun in those waterless wastes would
bring him down. As for the girl, she had suffered enough. Better a
quick, painless sword-stroke than the lingering agony that faced him.
Her thirst was temporarily quenched; it was a false mercy to let her
suffer until delirium and death brought relief. Slowly he slid the
saber from its sheath.

He halted suddenly, stiffening. Far out on the desert to the south,
something glimmered through the heat waves.

At first he thought it a phantom, one of the mirages which had mocked
and maddened him in that accursed desert. Shading his sun-dazzled eyes,
he made out spires and minarets, and gleaming walls. He watched it
grimly, waiting for it to fade and vanish. Natala had ceased to sob;
she struggled to her knees and followed his gaze.

"Is it a city, Conan?" she whispered, too fearful to hope: "Or is it
but a shadow?"

The Cimmerian did not reply for a space. He closed and opened his eyes
several times; he looked away, then back. The city remained where he
had first seen it.

"The devil knows," he grunted. "Ifs worth a try, though."

He thrust the saber back in its sheath. Stooping, he lifted Natala in
his mighty arms as though she had been an infant. She resisted weakly.

"Don't waste your strength carrying me, Conan," she pleaded. "I can
walk."

"The ground gets rockier here," he answered. "You would soon wear your
sandals to shreds," glancing at her soft green footwear. "Besides, if
we are to reach that city at all, we must do it quickly, and I can make
better time this way."

The chance for life had lent fresh vigor and resilience to the
Cimmerian's steely thews. He strode out across the sandy waste as S he
had just begun the journey. A barbarian of barbarians, the vitality and
endurance of the wild were his, granting him survival where civilized
men would have perished.

He and the girl were, so far as he knew, the sole survivors of Prince
Almuric's army, that mad motley horde which, following the defeated
rebel prince of Koth, swept through the lands of Shem like a
devastating sandstorm and drenched the outlands of Stygia with blood.
With a Stygian host on its heels, it had cut its way through the blade
kingdom of Kush, only to be annihilated on the edge of the southern
desert Conan likened it in his mind to a great torrent, dwindling
gradually as it rushed southward, to run dry at last in the sands of
the naked desert The bones of its members—mercenaries, outcasts, broken
men, outlaws—lay strewn from the Kothic uplands to the dunes of the
wilderness.

From that final slaughter, when the Stygians and the Kushites closed in
on the trapped remnants, Conan had cut his way clear and fled on a
camel with the girl. Behind them the land swarmed with enemies; the
only way open to them was the desert to the south. Into those menacing
depths they had plunged.

The girl was a Brythunian, whom Conan had found in the slave-market of
a stormed Shemite city, and appropriated. She had had nothing to say in
the matter, but her new position was so far superior to the lot of any
Hyborian woman in the Shemitish seraglio, that she accepted it
thankfully. So she had shared in the adventures of Almuric's damned
horde.

For days they had fled into the desert; pursued so far by Stygian
horsemen that when they shook off the pursuit; they dared not turn
back. They pushed on, seeking water, until the camel died. Then they
went on foot For the past few days their suffering had been intense.
Conan had shielded Natala all he could, and the rough life of the camp
had given her more stamina and strength than the average woman
possesses; but even so, she was not far from collapse.

The sun beat fiercely on Conan's tangled black mane. Waves of dizziness
and nausea rose in his brain, but he set his teeth and strode on
unwaveringly. He was convinced that the city was a reality and not a
mirage. What they would find there he had no idea. The inhabitants
might be hostile. Nevertheless it was a fighting chance, and that was
as much as he had ever asked.

The sun was nigh to setting when they halted in front of the massive
gate, grateful for the shade. Conan stood Natala on her feet; and
stretched his aching arms. Above them the walls towered some thirty
feet in height; composed of a smooth, greenish substance that shone
almost like glass. Conan scanned the parapets, expecting to be
challenged, but saw no one. Impatiently he shouted, and banged on the
gate with his saber-hilt, but only the hollow echoes mocked him. Natala
cringed close to him, frightened by the silence. Conan tried the
portal, and stepped back, drawing his saber, as it swung silently
inward. Natala stifled a cry.

"Oh,look,Conan!"

Just inside the gate lay a human body. Conan glared at it narrowly,
then looked beyond it. He saw a wide open expanse, like a court,
bordered by the arched doorways of houses composed of the same greenish
material as the outer walls. These edifices were lofty and imposing,
pinnacled with shining domes and minarets. There was no sign of life
among them. In the center of the court rose the square curb of a well,
and the sight stung Conan, whose mouth felt caked with dry dust. Taking
Natala's wrist he drew her through the gate, and closed it behind them.

"Is he dead?" she whispered, shrinkingly indicating the man who lay
limply before the gate. Hie body was that of a tall powerful
individual, apparently in his prime; the skin was yellow, the eyes
slightly slanted; otherwise the man differed little from the Hyborian
type. He was clad in high-strapped sandals and a tunic of purple silk,
and a short sword in a cloth-of-gold scabbard hung from his girdle.
Conan felt his flesh. It was cold. There was no sign of life in the
body.

"Not a wound on him," grunted the Cimmerian, "but he's dead as Almuric
with forty Stygian arrows in him. In Crom's name, let's see to the
well! If there's water in it, we'll drink, dead men or no."

There was water in the well, but they did not drink of it. Its level
was a good fifty feet below the curb, and there was nothing to draw it
up with. Conan cursed blackly, maddened by the sight of the stuff just
out of his reach, and turned to look for some means of obtaining it.
Then a scream from Natala brought him about.

The supposedly dead man was rushing upon him, eyes blazing with
indisputable life, his short sword gleaming in his hand. Conan cursed
amazedly, but wasted no time in conjecture. He met the hurtling
attacker with a slashing cut of his saber that sheared through flesh
and bone. The fellow's head thudded on the flags; the body staggered
drunkenly, an arch of blood jetting from the severed jugular; then it
fell heavily.

Conan glared down, swearing softly.

"This fellow is no deader now than he was a few minutes agone. Into
what madhouse have we strayed?"

Natala, who had covered her eyes with her hands at the sight, peeked
between her fingers and shook with fear.

"Oh, Conan, will the people of the city not kill us, because of this?"

"Well," he growled, "this creature would have killed us if I hadn't
lopped off his head."

He glanced at the archways that gaped blankly from the green walls
above them. He saw no hint of movement, heard no sound.

"I don't think any one saw us," he muttered. "I'll hide the evidence——"

He lifted the limp carcass by its swordbelt with one hand, and,
grasping the head by its long hair in the other, he half carried, half
dragged the ghastly remnants over to the well.

"Since we can't drink this water," he gritted vindictively, "I'll see
that nobody else enjoys drinking it Curse such a well, anyway!" He
heaved the body over the curb and let it drop, tossing the head after
it A dull splash sounded far beneath.

"There's blood on the stones," whispered Natala.

There'll be more unless I find water soon," growled the Cimmerian, his
short store of patience about exhausted. The girl had almost forgotten
her thirst and hunger in her fear, but not Conan.

"Well go into one of these doors," he said. "Surely we'll find people
after awhile."

"Oh, Conan!" she wailed, snuggling up as close to him as she could.
"I'm afraid! This is a city of ghosts and dead men! Let's go back into
the desert! Better to die there, than to face these terrors!"

"Well go into the desert when they throw us off the walls," he snarled.
"There's water somewhere in this city, and I'll find it, if I have to
kill every man in it."

"But what if they come to life again?" she whispered.

"Then I'll keep killing them until they stay dead!" he snapped. "Come
on I That doorway is as good as another! Stay behind me, but don't run
unless I tell you to."

She murmured a faint assent and followed him so closely that she
stepped on his heels, to his irritation. Dusk had fallen, filling the
strange city with purple shadows. They entered the open doorway, and
found themselves in a wide chamber, the walls of which were hung with
velvet tapestries, worked in curious designs. Floor, walls and ceiling
were of the green, glassy stone, the walls decorated with gold
frieze-work. Fun and satin cushions littered the floor. Several
doorways let into other rooms. They passed through, and traversed
several chambers, counterparts of the first. They saw no one, but the
Cimmerian grunted suspiciously.

"Some one was here not long ago. This couch is still warm from contact
with human body. That silk cushion bears the imprint of some one's
hips. Then there's a faint scent of perfume lingering in the air."

A weird, unreal atmosphere hung over all. Traversing this dim, silent
palace was like an opium dream. Some of the chambers were unlighted,
and these they avoided. Others were bathed in a soft, weird light that
seemed to emanate from jewels set in the walls in fantastic designs.
Suddenly, as they passed into one of these illumined chambers, Natala
cried out and clutched her companion's arm. With a curse he wheeled,
glaring for an enemy, bewildered because he saw none.

"What's the matter?" he snarled. "If you ever grab my sword-arm again,
I'll skin you. Do you want me to get my throat cut? What were you
yelling about?"

"Look there," she quavered, pointing.

Conan grunted. On a table of polished ebony stood golden vessels,
apparently containing food and drink. The room was unoccupied.

"Well, whoever this feast is prepared for," he growled, "he'll have to
look elsewhere tonight."

"Dare we eat it, Conan?" ventured the girl nervously. "The people might
come upon us, and———"

"Lir an mannanam mac lir!" he swore, grabbing her by the nape of her
neck and thrusting her into a gilded chair at the end of the table with
no great ceremony. "We starve and you make objections! Eat!"

He took the chair at the other end and, seizing a jade goblet, emptied
it at a gulp. It contained a crimson wine-like liquor of a peculiar
tang, unfamiliar to him, but it was like nectar to his parched gullet
His thirst allayed, he attacked the food before him with rare gusto. It
too was strange to him; exotic fruits and unknown meats. The vessels
were of exquisite workmanship, and there were golden knives and forks
as well. These Conan ignored, grasping the meat-joints in his fingers
and tearing them with his strong teeth. The Cimmerian's table manners
were rather wolfish at any time. His civilized companion ate more
daintily, but just as ravenously. It occurred to Conan that the food
might be poisoned, but the thought did not lessen his appetite; he
preferred to die of poisoning rather than starvation.

His hunger satisfied, he leaned back with a deep sigh of relief. That
there were humans in that silent city was evidenced by the fresh food,
and perhaps every dark corner concealed a lurking enemy. But he felt no
apprehension on that score, having a large confidence in his own
fighting ability. He began to feel sleepy, and considered the idea of
stretching himself on a nearby couch for a nap.

Not so Natala. She was no longer hungry and thirsty, but she felt no
desire to sleep. Her lovely eyes were very wide indeed as she timidly
glanced at the doorways, boundaries of the unknown. The silence and
mystery of the strange place preyed on her. The chamber seemed larger,
the table longer than she had first noticed, and she realized that she
was farther from her grim protector than she wished to be. Rising
quickly, she went around the table and seated herself on his knee,
glancing nervously at the arched doorways. Some were lighted and some
were not, and it was at the unlighted ones she gazed longest.

"We have eaten, drunk, and rested," she urged. "Let us leave this
place, Conan. It's evil. I can feel it."

"Well, we haven't been harmed so far," he began, when a soft but
sinister rustling brought him about Thrusting the girl off his knee he
rose with the quick ease of a panther, drawing his saber, facing the
doorway from which the sound had seemed to come. It was not repeated,
and he stole forward noiselessly, Natala following with her heart in
her mouth. She knew he suspected peril. His outthrust head was sunk
between his giant shoulders, he glided forward in a half crouch, like a
stalking tiger. He made no more noise than a tiger would have made.

At the doorway he halted, Natala peering fearfully from behind him.
There was no light in the room, but it was partially illuminated by the
radiance behind them, which streamed across it into yet another
chamber. And in this chamber a man lay on a raised dais. The soft light
bathed him, and they saw he was a counterpart of the man Conan had
killed before the outer gate, except that his garments were richer, and
ornamented with jewels which twinkled in the uncanny light Was he dead,
or merely sleeping? Again came that faint sinister sound, as if some
one had thrust aside a hanging. Conan drew back, drawing the clinging
Natala with him. He clapped his hand over her mouth just in time to
check her shriek.

From where they now stood, they could no longer see the dais, but they
could see the shadow it cast on the wall behind it. And now another
shadow moved across the wall: a huge shapeless black blot Conan felt
his hail prickle curiously as he watched. Distorted though it might be,
he felt that he had never seen a man or beast which cast such a shadow.
He was consumed with curiosity, but some instinct held him frozen in
his tracks. He heard Natala's quick panting gasps as she stared with
dilated eyes. No other sound disturbed the tense stillness. The great
shadow engulfed that of the dais. For a long instant only its black
bulk was thrown on the smooth wall. Then slowly it receded, and once
more the dais was etched darkly against the wall. But the sleeper was
no longer upon it.

An hysterical gurgle rose in Natala's throat, and Conan gave her an
admonitory shake. He was aware of an iciness in his own veins. Human
foes he did not fear; anything understandable, however grisly, caused
no tremors in his broad breast But this was beyond his ken.

After awhile, however, his curiosity conquered his uneasiness, and he
moved out into the unlighted chamber again, ready for anything. Looking
into the other room, he saw it was empty. The dais stood as he had
first seen it, except that no bejeweled human lay thereon. Only on its
silken covering shone a single drop of blood, like a great crimson gem.
Natala saw it and gave a low choking cry, for which Conan did not
punish her. Again he felt the icy hand of fear. On that dais a man had
lain; something had crept into the chamber and carried him away. What
that something was, Conan had no idea, but an aura of unnatural horror
hung over those dim-lit chambers.

He was ready to depart Taking Natala's hand, he turned back, then
hesitated. Somewhere back among the chambers they had traversed, he
heard the sound of a footfall. A human foot, bare or softly shod, had
made that sound, and Conan, with the wariness of a wolf, turned quickly
aside. He believed he could come again into the outer court, and yet
avoid the room from which the sound had appeared to come.

But they had not crossed the first chamber on their new route, when the
rustle of a silken hanging brought them about suddenly. Before a
curtained alcove stood a man eying them intently.

He was exactly like the others they had encountered: tall, well-made,
clad in purple garments, with a jeweled girdle. There was neither
surprise nor hostility in his amber eyes. They were dreamy as a
lotus-eater's. He did not draw the short sword at his side. After a
tense moment he spoke, in a far-away detached tone, and a language his
hearers did not understand.

On a venture Conan replied in Stygian, and the stranger answered in the
same tongue: "Who are you?"

"I am Conan, a Cimmerian," answered the barbarian. This is Natala, of
Brythunia. What city is this?"

"The man did not at once reply. His dreamy, sensuous gaze rested on
Natala, and he drawled, "Of all my rich visions, this is the strangest!
O, girl of the golden locks, from what far dreamland do you come? From
Andarra, or Tothra, or Kuth of the star-girdle?"

"What madness is this?" growled the Cimmerian harshly, not relishing
the man's words or manner.

The other did not heed him.

"I have dreamed more gorgeous beauties," he murmured; "lithe women with
hair dusky as night, and dark eyes of unfathomed mystery. But your skin
is white as milk, your eyes are clear as dawn, and there is about you a
freshness and daintiness alluring as honey. .Come to my couch, little
dream-girl!"

He advanced and reached for her, and Conan struck aside his hand with a
force that might have broken his arm. The man reeled back, clutching
the numbed member, his eyes clouding.

"What rebellion of ghosts is this?" he muttered. "Barbarian, I command
ye—begone! Fade! Dissipate! Fade! Vanish!"

"I vanish your head from your shoulders!" snarled the infuriated
Cimmerian, his saber gleaming in his hand. "Is this the welcome you
give strangers? By Crom, I'll drench these hangings in blood!"

The dreaminess had faded from the other's eyes, to be replaced by a
look of bewilderment.

"Thog!" he ejaculated. "You are real! Whence come you? Who are you?
What do you in Xuthal?"

"We came from the desert," Conan growled. "We wandered into the city at
dusk, famishing. We found a feast set for some one, and we ate. I have
no money to pay for it In my country no starving man is denied food,
but you civilized people must have your recompense— if you are like all
I ever met. We have done no harm and we were just leaving. By Crom, I
do not like this place where dead men rise and sleeping men vanish into
the bellies of shadows!"

The man started violently at the last comment, his yellow face turning
ashy.

"What do you say? Shadows? Into the bellies of shadows?"

"Well," answered the Cimmerian cautiously, "whatever it is that takes a
man from a sleeping-dais and leaves only a spot of blood."

"You have seen? You have seen?" The man was shaking like a leaf; his
voice cracked on the high-pitched note.

"Only a man sleeping on a dais, and a shadow that engulfed him,"
answered Conan.

The effect of his words on the other was horrifying. With an awful
scream the man turned and rushed from the chamber. In his blind haste
he caromed from the side of the door, righted himself, and fled through
the adjoining chambers, still screaming at the top of his voice.
Amazed, Conan stared after him, the girl trembling as she clutched the
giant's arm. They could no longer see the flying figure, but they still
heard his frightful screams, dwindling in the distance, and echoing as
from vaulted roofs. Suddenly one cry, louder than the others, rose and
broke short, followed by blank silence.

"Crom!

Conan wiped the perspiration from his forehead with a hand that was not
entirely steady.

"Surely this is a city of the mad! Let's get out of here, before we
meet other madmen!"

"It is all a nightmare!" whimpered Natala. "We are dead and damned! We
died out on the desert and are in Hell! We are disembodied spirits—ow!"
Her yelp was induced by a resounding spank from Conan's open hand.

"You're no spirit when a pat makes you yell like that," he commented,
with the grim humor which frequently manifested itself at inopportune
times. "We are alive, though we may not be if we loiter in this
devil-haunted pile. Come!"

They had traversed but a single chamber when again they stopped short.
Some one or something was approaching. They faced the doorway whence
the sounds came, waiting for they knew not what Conan's nostrils
widened, and his eyes narrowed. He caught the faint scent of the
perfume he had noticed earlier in the night A figure framed itself in
the doorway. Conan swore under his breath; Natala's red lips opened
wide.

It was a woman who stood there staring at them in wonder. She was tall,
lithe, shaped like a goddess; clad in a narrow girdle crusted with
jewels. A burnished mass of night-black hair set off the whiteness of
her ivory body. Her dark eyes, shaded by long dusky lashes, were deep
with sensuous mystery. Conan caught his breath at her beauty, and
Natala stared with dilated eyes. The Cimmerian had never seen such a
woman; her facial outline was Stygian, but she was not dusky-skinned
like the Stygian women he had known; her limbs were like alabaster.

But when she spoke, in a deep rich musical voice, it was in the Stygian
tongue.

"Who are you? What do you in Xuthal? Who is that girl?"

"Who are you?" bluntly countered Conan, who quickly wearied of
answering questions.

"I am Thalis the Stygian," she replied. "Are you mad, to come here?"

"I've been thinking I must be," he growled. "By Crom, if I am sane, I'm
out of place here, because these people are all maniacs. We stagger in
from the desert, dying of thirst and hunger, and we come upon a dead
man who tries to stab me in the back. We enter a palace, rich and
luxuriant, yet apparently empty. We find a meal set, but with no
feasters. Then we see a shadow devour a sleeping man———" he watched her
narrowly and saw her change color slightly. "Well?"

"Well what?" she demanded, apparently regaining control of herself.

"I was just waiting for you to run through the rooms howling like a
wild woman," he answered. "The man I told about the shadow did."

She shrugged her slim ivory shoulders. "That was the screams I heard,
then. Well, to every man his fate, and it's foolish to squeal like a
rat in a trap. When Thog wants me, he will come for me."

"Who is Thog?" demanded Conan suspiciously.

She gave him a long appraising stare that brought color to Natala's
face and made her bite her small red lip.

"Sit down on that divan and I will tell you," she said. "But first tell
me your names."

"I am Conan, a Cimmerian, and this is Natala, a daughter of Brythunia,"
he answered. "We are refugees of an army destroyed on the borders of
Kush. But I am not desirous of sitting down, where black shadows might
steal up on my back."

With a lithe musical laugh, she seated herself, stretching out her
supple limbs with studied abandon.

"Be at ease," she advised. "If Thog wishes you, he will take you,
wherever you are. The man you mentioned, who screamed and ran—did you
not hear him give one great cry, and then fall silent? In his frenzy,
he must have run full into that which he sought to escape. No man can
avoid his fate."

Conan grunted noncommittally, but he sat down on the edge of a couch,
his saber across his knees, his eyes wandering suspiciously about the
chamber. Natala nestled against him, clutching him jealously, her legs
tucked up under her. She eyed the stranger woman with suspicion and
resentment She felt small and dust-stained and insignificant before
this glamorous beauty, and she could not mistake the look in the dark
eyes which feasted on every detail of the bronzed giant's physique.

"What is this place, and who are these people?" demanded Conan.

This city is called Xuthal; it is very ancient It is built over an
oasis, which the founders of Xuthal found in their wanderings. They
came from the east, so long ago that not even their descendants
remember the age."

"Surely there are not many of them; these palaces seem empty."

"No; and yet more than you might think. Hie city is really one great
palace, with every building inside the walls closely connected with the
others. You might walk among these chambers for hours and see no one.
At other times, you would meet hundreds of the inhabitants."

"How is that?" Conan inquired uneasily; this savored too strongly of
sorcery for comfort.

"Much of the time these people lie in sleep. Their dream-life is as
important—and to them as real—as their waking life. You have heard of
the black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages
they have cultivated it, until, instead of death, its juice induces
dreams, gorgeous and fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of
their time. Their lives are vague, erratic, and without plan. They
dream, they wake, drink, love, eat, and dream again. They seldom finish
anything they begin, but leave it half completed and sink back again
into the slumber of the black lotus. That meal you found —doubtless one
awoke, felt the urge of hunger, prepared the meal for himself, then
forgot about it and wandered away to dream again."

"Where do they get their food?" interrupted Conan. T saw no fields or
vineyards outside the city. Have they orchards and cattle-pens within
the walls?"

She shook her head. "They manufacture their own food out of the primal
elements. They are wonderful scientists, when they are not drugged with
their dream-flower. Their ancestors were mental giants, who built this
marvelous city in the desert, and though the race became slaves to
their curious passions, some of their wonderful knowledge still
remains. Have you wondered about these lights? They are jewels, fused
with radium. You rub them with your thumb to make them glow, and nib
them again, the opposite way, to extinguish them. That is but a single
example of their science. But much they have forgotten. They take
little interest in waking life, choosing to lie most of the time in
death-like sleep."

"Then the dead man at the gate———" began Conan.

"Was doubtless slumbering. Sleepers of the lotus are like the dead.
Animation is apparently suspended. It is impossible to detect the
slightest sign of life. The spirit has left the body and is roaming at
will through other, exotic worlds. The man at the gate was a good
example of the irresponsibility of these peoples' lives. He was
guarding the gate, where custom decrees a watch be kept, though no
enemy has ever advanced across the desert In other parts of the city
you would find other guards, generally sleeping as soundly as the man
at the gate."

Conan mulled over this for a space.

"Where are the people now?"

"Scattered in different parts of the city; lying on couches, on silken
divans, in cushion-littered alcoves, on fur-covered daisies; all wrapt
in the shining veil of dreams."

Conan felt the skin twitch between his massive shoulders. It was not
soothing to think of hundreds of people lying cold and still throughout
the tapestried palaces, their glassy eyes turned unseeingly upward. He
remembered something else.

"What of the thing that stole through the chambers and carried away the
man on the dais?"

A shudder twitched her ivory limbs.

That was Thog, the Ancient, the god of Xothal, who dwells in the sunken
dome in the center of the city. He has always dwelt in Xuthal. Whether
he came here with the ancient founders, or was here when they built the
city, none knows. But the people of Xuthal worship him. Mostly he
sleeps below the city, but sometimes at irregular intervals he grows
hungry, and then he steals through the secret corridors and the dim-lit
chambers, seeking prey. Then none is safe."

Natala moaned with terror and clasped Oman's mighty neck as if to
resist an effort to drag her from her protector's side.

"Crom!" he ejaculated, aghast. "You mean to tell me these people lie
down calmly and sleep, with this demon crawling among them?"

"It is only occasionally that he is hungry," she repeated. "A god must
have his sacrifices. When I was a child in Stygia the people lived
under the shadow of a priest. None ever knew when he or she would be
seized and dragged to the altar. What difference whether the priests
give a victim to the gods, or the god comes for his own victim?"

"Such is not the custom of my people," Conan growled, "nor of Natala's
either. The Hyborians do not sacrifice humans to their god, Mitra, and
as for my people—by Crom, I'd like to see a priest try to drag a
Cimmerian to the altar! There'd be blood spilt, but not as the priest
intended."

"You are a barbarian," laughed Thalis, but with a glow in her luminous
eyes. "Thog is very ancient and very terrible."

"These folk must be either fools or heroes," grunted Conan, "to lie
down and dream their idiotic dreams, knowing they might awaken in his
belly."

She laughed. They know nothing else. For untold generations Thog has
preyed on them. He has been one of the factors which have reduced their
numbers from thousands to hundreds. A few more generations and they
will be extinct, and Thog must either fare forth into the world for new
prey, or retire to the underworld whence he came so long ago.

"They realize their ultimate doom, but they are fatalists, incapable of
resistance or escape. Not one of the present generation has been out of
sight of these walls. There is an oasis a day's march to the south—I
have seen "it on the old maps their ancestors drew on parchment— but no
man of Xuthal has visited it for three generations, much less made any
attempt to explore the fertile grasslands which the maps show lying
another day's march beyond it. They are a fast-fading race, drowned in
lotus-dreams, stimulating their waking hours by means of the golden
wine which heals wounds, prolongs life, and invigorates the most sated
debauchee.

"Yet they cling to life, and fear the deity they worship. You saw how
one went mad at the knowledge that Thog was roving the palaces. I have
seen the whole city screaming and tearing its hair, and running
frenziedly out of the gates, to cower outside the walls and draw lots
to see which would be bound and flung back through the arched doorways
to satisfy Thog's lust and hunger. Were they not all slumbering now,
the word of his coming would send them raving and shrieking again
through the outer gates.

"Oh, Conan!" begged Natala hysterically. "Let us flee!"

"In good time," muttered Conan, his eyes burning on Thalis' ivory
limbs. "What are you, a Stygian woman, doing here?"

"I came here when a young girl," she answered, leaning lithely back
against the velvet divan, and intertwining slender fingers behind her
dusky head. "I am the daughter of a king, no common woman, as you can
see by my skin, which is as white as that of your little blonde there.
I was abducted by a rebel prince, who, with an army of Kushite bowmen,
pushed southward into the wilderness, searching for a land he could
make his own. He and all his warriors perished in the desert, but one,
before he died, placed me on a camel and walked beside it until he
dropped and died in his tracks. The beast wandered on, and I finally
passed into delirium from thirst and hunger, and awakened in this city.
They told me I had been seen from the walls, early in the dawn, lying
senseless beside a dead camel. They went forth and brought me in and
revived me with their wonderful golden wine. And only the sight of a
woman would have led them to have ventured that far from their walls.

"They were naturally much' interested in one, especially the men. As I
could not speak their language, they learned to speak mine. They are
very quick and able of intellect; they learned my language long before
I learned theirs. But they were more interested in me than in my
language. I have been, and am, the only thing for which a man of them
will forego his lotus-dreams for a space."

She laughed wickedly, flashing her audacious eyes meaningly at Conan.

"Of course the women are jealous of me," she continued tranquilly.
'They are handsome enough in their yellow-skinned way, but they are
dreamy and uncertain as the men, and these latter like me not only for
my beauty, but for my reality. I am no dream! Though I have dreamed the
dreams of the lotus, I am a normal woman, with earthly emotions and
desires. With such these moon-eyed yellow women can not compare.

"That is why it would be better for you to cut that girl's throat with
your saber, before the men of Xuthal waken and catch her. They will p.
it her through paces she never dreamed of! She is too sort to endure
what I have thrived on. I am a daughter of Luxur, and before I had
known fifteen summers I had been led through the temples of Derketo,
the dusky goddess, and had been initiated into the mysteries. Not that
my first year in Xuthal were years of unmodified pleasure! The people
of Xuthal have forgotten more than the priestesses of Derketo ever
learned.

They live only for sensual joys. Dreaming or waking, their lives are
filled with exotic ecstasies, beyond the ken of ordinary men."

"Damned degenerates!" growled Conan.

"It is all in the point of view," smiled Thalis lazily.

"Well," he decided, "we're merely wasting time. I can see this is no
place for ordinary mortals. We'll be gone before your morons awake, or
Thog comes to devour us. I think the desert would be kinder."

Natala, whose blood had curdled in her veins at Thalis' words,
fervently agreed. She could speak Stygian only brokenly, but she
understood it well enough. Conan stood up, drawing her up beside him.

"If you'll show us the nearest way out of this city," he grunted, "well
take ourselves off." But his gaze lingered on the Stygian's sleek limbs
and ivory breasts.

She did not miss his look, and she smiled enigmatically as she rose
with the lithe ease of a great lazy cat.

"Follow me," she directed and led the way, conscious of Conan's eyes
fixed on her supple figure and perfectly poised carriage. She did not
go the way they had come, but before Conan's suspicions could be
roused, she halted in a wide ivory-chased chamber, and pointed to a
tiny fountain which gurgled in the center of the ivory floor.

"Don't you want to wash your face, child?" she asked Natala. "It is
stained with dust, and there is dust in your hair."

Natala colored resentfully at the suggestion of malice in the Stygian's
faintly mocking tone, but she complied, wondering miserably just how
much havoc the desert sun and wind had wrought on her complexion—a
feature for which women of her race were justly noted. She knelt beside
the fountain, shook back her hair, slipped her tunic down to her waist,
and began to lave not only her face, but her white arms and shoulders
as well.

"By Crom!" grumbled Conan, "a woman will stop to consider her beauty,
if the devil himself were on her heels. Haste, girl; you'll be dusty
again before we've got out of sight of this city. And Thalis, I'd take
it kindly if you'd furnish us with a bit of food and drink."

For answer Thalis leaned herself against him, slipping one white arm
about his bronzed shoulders. Her sleek naked flank pressed against his
thigh and the perfume of her foamy hair was in his nostrils.

"Why dare the desert?" she whispered urgently. "Stay here I I will
teach you the ways of Xuthal. I will protect you. I will love you! You
are a real man: I am sick of these moon-calves who sigh and dream and
wake, and dream again. I am hungry for the hard, clean passion of a man
from the earth. The blaze of your dynamic eyes makes my heart pound in
my bosom, and the touch of your iron-thewed arm maddens me.

"Stay here! I will make you king of Xuthal! I will show you all the
ancient mysteries, and the exotic ways of pleasure! I———" She had
thrown both arms about his neck and was standing on tiptoe, her vibrant
body shivering against his. Over her ivory shoulder he saw Natala,
throwing back her damp tousled hair, stop short, her lovely eyes
dilating, her red lips parting in a shocked O. With an embarrassed
grunt, Conan disengaged Thalis' clinging arms and put her aside with
one massive arm. She threw a swift glance at the Brythunian girl and
smiled enigmatically, seeming to nod her splendid head in mysterious
cogitation.

Natala rose and jerked up her tunic, her eyes blazing, her lips pouting
sulkily. Conan swore under his breath. He was no more monogamous in his
nature than the average soldier of fortune, but there was an innate
decency about him that was Natala's best protection.

Thalis did not press her suit. Beckoning them with her slender hand to
follow, she turned and walked across the chamber. There, dose to the
tapestried wall, she halted suddenly. Conan, watching her, wondered if
she had heard the sounds that might be made by a nameless monster
stealing through the midnight chambers, and his skin crawled at the
thought.

"What do you hear?" he demanded.

"Watch that doorway," she replied, pointing.

He wheeled, sword ready. Only the empty arch of the entrance met his
gaze. Then behind him sounded a quick faint scuffling noise, a
half-choked gasp. He whirled. Thalis and Natala had vanished. The
tapestry was settling back in place, as if it had been lifted away from
the wall. As he gaped bewilderedly, from behind that tapestried wall
rang a muffled scream in the voice of the Brythunian girl.

Chapter Two

When Conan turned, in compliance with Thalis' request, to glare at the
doorway opposite, Natala had been standing just behind him, close to
the side of the Stygian. The instant the Cimmerian's back was turned,
Thalis, with a pantherish quickness almost incredible, clapped her hand
over Natala's mouth, stifling the cry she tried to give. Simultaneously
the Stygian's other arm was passed about the blond girl's supple waist,
and she was jerked back against the wall, which seemed to give way as
Thalis' shoulder pressed against it. A section of the wall swung
inward, and through a slit that opened in the tapestry Thalis slid with
her captive, just as Conan wheeled back.

Inside was utter blackness as the secret door swung to again. Thalis
paused to fumble at it for an instant, apparently sliding home a bolt,
and as she took her hand from Natala's mouth to perform this act, the
Byrthunian girl began to scream at the top of her voice. Thalis' laugh
was like poisoned honey in the darkness.

"Scream if you will, little fool. It will only shorten your life."

At that Natala. ceased suddenly, and cowered shaking in every limb.

"Why did you do this?" she begged. "What are you going to do?"

"I am going to take you down this corridor for a short distance,"
answered Thalis, "and leave you for one who will sooner or later come
for you."

"Ohhhhhh!" Natala's voice broke in a sob of terror. "Why should you
harm me? I have never injured you!"

"I want your warrior. You stand in my way. He desires me—I could read
the look in his eyes. But for you, he would be willing to stay here and
be my king. When you are out of the way, he will follow me."

"He will cut your throat," answered Natala with conviction, knowing
Conan better than Thai is did.

"We shall see," answered the Stygian coolly from the confidence of her
power over men. "At any rate, you will not know whether he stabs or
kisses me, because you will be the bride of him who dwells in darkness.
Come!"

Half mad with terror, Natala fought like a wild thing, but it availed
her nothing. With a lithe strength she would not have believed possible
in a woman, Thalis picked her up and carried her down the black
corridor as if she had been a child. Natala did not scream again,
remembering the Stygian's sinister words; the only sounds were her
desperate quick panting and Thalis' soft taunting lascivious laughter.
Then the Brythunian's fluttering hand closed on something in the dark—a
jeweled dagger-hilt jutting from Thalis' gem-crusted girdle. Natala
jerked it forth and struck blindly and with all her girlish power.

A scream burst from Thalis' lips, feline in its pain and fury. She
reeled, and Natala slipped from her relaxing grasp, to bruise her
tender limbs on the smooth stone floor. Rising, she scurried to the
nearest wall and stood there panting and trembling, flattening herself
against the stones. She could not see Thalis, but she could hear her.
The Stygian was quite certainly not dead. She was cursing in a steady
stream, and her fury was so concentrated and deadly that Natala felt
her bones tum to wax, her blood to ice.

"Where are you, you little she-devil?" gasped Thalis.

"Let me get my fingers on you again, and I'll———" Natala grew
physically sick as Thalis described the bodily injuries she intended to
inflict on her rival. The Stygian's choice of language would have
shamed the toughest courtesan in Aquilonia.

Natala heard her groping in the dark, and then a light sprang up.
Evidently whatever fear Thalis felt of this black corridor was
submerged in her anger. The light came from one of the radium gems
which adorned the walls of Xuthal. This Thalis had rubbed, and now she
stood bathed in its reddish glow: a light different from that which the
others had emitted. One hand was pressed to her side and blood trickled
between the fingers. But she did not seem weakened or badly hurt, and
her eyes blazed fiendishly. What little courage remained to Natala
ebbed away at sight of the Stygian standing limned in that weird glow,
her beautiful face contorted with a passion that was no less than
hellish. She now advanced with a pantherish tread, drawing her hand
away from her wounded side, and shaking the blood drops impatiently
from her fingers. Natala saw that she had not badly harmed her rival.
The blade had glanced from the jewels of Thalis' girdle and inflicted a
very superficial flesh-wound, only enough to rouse the Stygian's
unbridled fury. "Give me that dagger, you fool!" she gritted, striding
up to the cowering girl.

Natala knew that she ought to fight while she had the chance, but she
simply could not summon up the courage. Never much of a fighter, the
darkness, violence, and horror of her adventure had left her limp,
mentally and physically. Thalis snatched the dagger from her lax
fingers and threw it contemptuously aside.

"You little slut!" she ground between her teeth, slapping the girl
viciously with either hand. "Before I drag you down the corridor and
throw you into Thog's jaws, I'll have a little of your blood myself!
You would dare to knife me—well, for that audacity you shall pay!"

Seizing her by the hair, Thalis dragged her down the corridor a short
distance, to the edge of the circle of light A metal ring showed in the
wall, above the level of a man's head. From it depended a silken cord.
As in a nightmare Natala felt her tunic being stripped from her, and
the next instant Thalis had jerked up her wrists and bound them to the
ring, where she hung, naked as the day she was born, her feet barely
touching the floor. Twisting her head, Natala saw Thalis unhook a
jewel-handled whip from where it hung on the wall, near the ring. The
lashes consisted of seven round silk cords, harder yet more pliant than
leather thongs.

With a hiss of vindictive gratification, Thalis drew back her arm, and
Natala shrieked as the cords curled across her loins. The tortured girl
writhed, twisted and tore agonizedly at the thongs which imprisoned her
wrists. She had forgotten the lurking menace her cries might summon,
and so apparently had Thalis. Every stroke evoked screams of anguish.
The whippings Natala had received in the Shemite slave-markets paled to
insignificance before this. She had never guessed the punishing power
of hard-woven silk cords. Their caress was more exquisitely painful
than any birch twigs or leather thongs. They whistled venomously as
they cut the air.

Then, as Natala twisted her tear-stained face over her shoulder to
shriek for mercy, something froze her cries. Agony gave place to
paralyzing horror in her beautiful eyes.

Struck by her expression, Thalis checked her lifted hand and whirled
quick as a cat. Too late! An awful cry rang from her lips as she swayed
back, her arms upflung. Natala saw her for an instant, a white figure
of fear etched against a great black shapeless mass that towered over
her; then the white figure was whipped off its feet, the shadow receded
with it, and in the circle of dim light Natala hung alone, half
fainting with terror.

From the black shadows came sounds, incomprehensible and
blood-freezing. She heard Thalis' voice pleading frenziedly, but no
voice answered. There was no sound except the Stygian's panting voice,
which suddenly rose to screams of agony, and then broke in hysterical
laughter, mingled with sobs. This dwindled to a convulsive panting, and
presently this too ceased, and a silence more terrible hovered over the
secret corridor.

Nauseated with horror, Natala twisted about and dared to look fearfully
in the direction the black shape had carried Thalis. She saw nothing,
but she sensed an unseen peril, more grisly than she could understand.
She fought against a rising tide of hysteria. Her bruised wrists, her
smarting body were forgotten in the teeth of this menace which she
dimly felt threatened not only her body, but her soul as well.

She strained her eyes into the blackness beyond the rim of the dim
light, tense with fear of what she might see. A whimpering gasp escaped
her lips. The darkness was taking form. Something huge and bulky grew
up out of the void. She saw a giant misshapen head emerging into the
light At least she took it for a head, though it was not the member of
any sane or normal creature. She saw a great toad-like face, the
features of which were as dim and unstable as those of a specter seen
in a mirror of nightmare. Great pools of light that might have been
eyes blinked at her, and she shook at the cosmic lust reflected there.
She could tell nothing about the creature's body. Its outline seemed to
waver and alter subtly even as she looked at it; yet its substance was
apparently solid enough. There was nothing misty or ghostly about it.

As it came toward her, she could not tell whether it walked, wriggled,
flew, or crept Its method of locomotion was absolutely beyond her
comprehension. When it had emerged from the shadows she was still
uncertain as to its nature. The light from the radium gem did not
illumine it as it would have illumined an ordinary creature. Impossible
as it seemed, the being seemed almost impervious to the light Its
details were still obscure and indistinct, even when it halted so near
that it almost touched her shrinking flesh. Only the blinding,
toad-like face stood out with any distinctness. The tiling was a blur
in the sight, a black blot of shadow that normal radiance would neither
dissipate nor illuminate.

She decided she was mad, because she could not tell whether the being
looked up at her or towered above her. She was unable to say whether
the dim, repulsive face blinked up at her from the shadows at her feet,
or looked down at her from an immense height. But if her sight
convinced her that whatever its mutable qualities, it was yet composed
of solid substance, her sense of feel further assured her of that fact.
A dark tentacle-like member slid about her body, and she screamed at
the touch of it on her naked flesh. It was neither warm nor cold, rough
nor smooth; it was like nothing that had ever touched her before, and
at its caress she knew such fear and shame as she had never dreamed of.
All the obscenity and salacious infamy spawned in the muck of the
abysmal pits of life seemed to drown her in seas of cosmic filth. And
in that instant she knew that whatever form of life this thing
represented, it was not a beast.

She began to scream uncontrollably, the monster tugged at her as if to
tear her from the ring by sheer brutality; then something crashed above
their heads, and a form hurtled down through the air to strike the
stone floor.

Chapter Three

When Conan wheeled to see the tapestry settling back in place and to
hear Natala's muffled cry, he hurled himself against the wall with a
maddened roar. Rebounding from the impact that would have splintered
the bones of a lesser man, he ripped away the tapestry, revealing what
appeared to be a blank wall. Beside himself with fury he lifted his
saber as though to hew through the marble, when a sudden sound brought
him about, eyes blazing.

A score of figures faced him, yellow men in purple tunics, with short
swords in their hands. As he turned, they surged in on him with hostile
cries. He made no attempt to conciliate them. Maddened at the
disappearance of his sweetheart, the barbarian reverted to type.

A snarl of bloodthirsty gratification hummed in his bull-throat as he
leaped, and the first attacker, his short sword overreached by the
whistling saber, went down with his brains gushing from his split
skull. Wheeling like a cat; Conan caught a descending wrist on his
edge, and the hand gripping the short sword flew into the air
scattering a shower of red drops. But Conan had not paused or
hesitated. A pantherish twist and shift of his body avoided the
blundering rush of two yellow swordsmen, and the blade of one, missing
its objective, was sheathed in the breast of the other.

A yell of dismay went up at this mischance, and Conan allowed himself a
short bark of laughter as he bounded aside from a whistling cut and
slashed under the guard of yet another man of Xuthal. A long spurt of
crimson followed his singing edge and the man crumpled screaming, his
belly-muscles cut through.

The warriors of Xuthil howled like mad wolves. Unaccustomed to battle,
they were ridiculously slow and clumsy compared to the tigerish
barbarian whose motions were blurs of quickness possible only to steel
thews knit to a perfect fighting brain. They floundered and stumbled,
hindered by their own numbers; they struck too quick or too soon, and
cut only empty air. He was never motionless or in the same place an
instant; springing, sidestepping, whirling, twisting, he offered a
constantly shifting target for their swords, while his own curved blade
sang death about their ears.

But whatever their faults, the men of Xuthal did not lack courage. They
swarmed about him yelling and hacking, and through the arched doorways
rushed others, awakened from their slumbers by the unwonted clamor.

Conan, bleeding from a cut on the temple, cleared a space for an
instant with a devastating sweep of his dripping saber, and cast a
quick glance about for an avenue of escape. At that instant he saw the
tapestry on one of the walls drawn aside, disclosing a narrow stairway.
On this stood a man in rich robes, vague-eyed and blinking, as if he
had just awakened and had not yet shaken the dusts of slumber from his
brain. Conan's sight and action were simultaneous;

A tigerish leap carried him untouched through the hemming ring of
swords, and he bounded toward the stair with the pack giving tongue
behind him. Three men confronted him at the foot of the marble steps,
and he struck them with a deafening clash of steel. There was a
frenzied instant when the blades flamed like summer lightning; then the
group fell apart and Conan sprang up the stair. The oncoming horde
tripped over three writhing forms at its foot: one lay face-down in a
sickening welter of blood and brains; another propped himself on his
hands, blood spurting blackly from his severed throat veins; the other
howled like a dying dog as he clawed at the crimson stump that had been
an arm.

As Conan rushed up the marble stair, the man above shook himself from
his stupor and drew a sword that sparkled frostily in the radium light.
He thrust downward as the barbarian surged upon him. But as the point
sang toward his throat, Conan ducked deeply. The blade slit the skin of
his back, and Conan straightened, driving his saber upward as a man
might wield a butcher-knife, with all the power of his mighty
shoulders.

So terrific was his headlong drive that the sinking of the saber to the
hilt into the belly of his enemy did not check him. He caromed against
the wretch's body, knocking it sidewise. The impact sent Conan Clashing
against the wall; the other, the saber torn through his body, fell
headlong down the stair, ripped open to the spine from groin to broken
breastbone. In a ghastly mess of streaming entrails the body tumbled
against the men rushing up the stairs, bearing them back with it.

Half stunned, Conan leaned against the wall an instant, glaring down
upon them; then with a defiant shake of his dripping saber, he bounded
up the steps.

Coming into an upper chamber, he halted only long enough to see that it
was empty. Behind him the horde was yelling with such intensified
horror and rage, that he knew he had killed some notable man there on
the stair, probably the king of that fantastic city.

He ran at random, without plan. He desperately wished to find and
succor Natala, who he was sure needed aid badly; but harried as he was
by all the warriors in Xuthal, he could only run on, trusting to luck
to elude them and find her. Among those dark or dimly lighted upper
chambers he quickly lost all sense of direction, and it was not strange
that he eventually blundered into a chamber into which his foes were
just pouring.

They yelled vengefully and rushed for him, and with a snarl of disgust
he turned and fled back the way he had come. At least he thought it was
the way he had come. But presently, racing into a particularly ornate
chamber, he was aware of his mistake. All the chambers he had traversed
since mounting the stair had been empty. This chamber had an occupant,
who rose up with a cry as he charged in.

Conan saw a yellow-skinned woman, loaded with jeweled ornaments but
otherwise nude, staring at him with wide eyes. So much he glimpsed as
she raised her hand and jerked a silken rope hanging from the wall.
Then the floor dropped from under him, and all his steel-trap
coordination could not save him from the plunge into the black depths
that opened beneath him.

He did not fall any great distance, though it was far enough to have
snapped the leg bones of a man not built of steel springs and
whalebone.

He hit cat-like on his feet and one hand, instinctively retaining his
grasp on his saber hilt. A familiar cry rang in his ears as he
rebounded on his feet as a lynx rebounds with snarling bared fangs. So
Conan, glaring from under his tousled mane, saw the white naked figure
of Natala writhing in the lustful grasp of a black nightmare shape that
could have only been bred in the lost pits of hell.

Hie sight of that awful shape alone might have frozen the Cimmerian
with fear. In juxtaposition to his girl, the sight sent a red wave of
murderous fury through Conan's brain. In a crimson mist he smote the
monster.

It dropped the girl, wheeling toward its attacker, and the maddened
Cimmerian's saber, shrilling through the air, sheared clear through the
black viscous bulk and rang on the stone floor, showering blue sparks.
Conan went to his knees from the fury of the blow; the edge had not
encountered the resistance he had expected. As he bounded up, the thing
was upon him.

It towered above him like a clinging black cloud. It seemed to flow
about him in almost liquid waves, to envelop and engulf him. His madly
slashing saber sheared through it again and again, his ripping poniard
tore and rent it; he was deluged with a slimy liquid that must have
been its sluggish blood. Yet its fury was nowise abated.

He could not tell whether he was slashing off its members or whether he
was cleaving its bulk, which knit behind the slicing blade. He was
tossed to and fro in the violence of that awful battle, and had a dazed
feeling that he was fighting not one, but an aggregation of lethal
creatures. The thing seemed to be biting, clawing, crushing and
clubbing him all at the same time. He felt fangs and talons rend his
flesh; flabby cables that were yet hard as iron encircled his limbs and
body, and worse than all, something like a whip of scorpions fell again
and again across his shoulders, back and breast, tearing the skin and
filling his veins with a poison that was like liquid fire.

They had rolled beyond the circle of light, and it was in utter
blackness that the Cimmerian battled. Once he sank his teeth,
beast-like, into the flabby substance of his foe, revolting as the
stuff writhed and squirmed like living rubber from between his iron
jaws.

In that hurricane of battle they were rolling over and over, farther
and rather down the tunnel. Conan's brain reeled with the punishment he
was taking. His breath came in whistling gasps between his teeth. High
above him he saw a great toad-like face, dimly limned in an eery glow
that seemed to emanate from it! And with a panting cry that was half
curse, half gasp of straining agony, he lunged toward it, thrusting
with all his waning power. Hilt-deep the saber sank, somewhere below
the grisly face, and a convulsive shudder heaved the vast bulk that
half enveloped the Cimmerian. With a volcanic bunt of contraction and
expansion, it tumbled backward, rolling now with frantic haste down the
corridor. Conan went with it, bruised, battered, invincible, hanging on
like a bulldog to the hilt of his saber which he could not withdraw,
tearing and ripping at the shuddering bulk with the poniard in his left
hand, goring it to ribbons.

The thing glowed all over now with a weird phosphorous radiance, and
this glow was in Conan's eyes, blinding him, as suddenly the heaving,
billowing mass fell away from beneath him, the saber tearing loose and
remaining in his locked hand. This hand and arm hung down into space,
and far below him the glowing body of the monster was rushing downward
like a meteor. Conan dazedly realized that he lay on the brink of a
great round well, the edge of which was slimy stone. He lay there
watching the hurtling glow dwindling and dwindling until it vanished
into a dark shining surface that seemed to surge upward to meet it. For
an instant a dimming witchfire glimmered in those dusky depths; then it
disappeared, and Conan lay staring down into the blackness of the
ultimate abyss from which no sound came.

Chapter Four

Straining vainly at the silk cords which cut into her wrists, Natala
sought to pierce the darkness beyond the radiant circle. Her tongue
seemed frozen to the roof of her mouth. Into that blackness she had
seen Conan vanish, locked in mortal combat with the unknown demon, and
the only sounds that had come to her straining ears had been the
panting gasps of the barbarian, the impact of struggling bodies, and
the thud and rip of savage blows. These ceased and Natala swayed
dizzily on her cords, half fainting.

A footstep roused her out of her apathy of horror, to see Conan
emerging from the darkness. At the sight she found her voice in a
shriek which echoed down the vaulted tunnel. The manhandling the
Cimmerian had received was appalling to behold. At every step he
dripped blood. His face was skinned and bruised as if he had been
beaten with a bludgeon. His lips were pulped, and blood oozed down his
face from a wound in his scalp.

There were deep gashes in his thighs, calves and forearms, and great
bruises showed on his limbs and body from impacts against the stone
floor. But his shoulders, back and upper-breast muscles had suffered
most The flesh was bruised, swollen and lacerated, the skin hanging in
loose strips, as if he had been lashed with wire whips.

"Oh, Conan!" she sobbed. "What has happened to you?"

He had no breath for conversation, but his smashed lips writhed in what
might have been grim humor as he approached her. His hairy breast,
glistening with sweat and blood, heaved with his panting. Slowly and
laboriously he reached up and cut her cords, then fell back against the
wall and leaned there, his trembling legs braced wide. She scrambled up
from where she had fallen and caught him in a frenzied embrace, sobbing
hysterically.

"Oh, Conan, you are wounded unto death! Oh, what shall we do?"

"Well," he panted, "you can't fight a devil out of Hell and come off
with a whole skin!"

"Where is It?" she whispered. "Did you kill it?"

"I don't know. It fell into a pit It was hanging in bloody shreds, but
whether it can be killed by steel I know not."

"Oh, your poor back!" she wailed, wringing her hands.

"It lashed me with a tentacle," he grimaced, swearing as he moved. "It
cut like wire and burned like poison. But it was its damnable squeezing
that got my wind. It was worse than a python. If half my guts are not
mashed out of place, I'm much mistaken."

"What shall we do?" she whimpered.

He glanced up. The trap was closed. No sound came from above.

"We can't go back through the secret door," he muttered. "That room is
full of dead men, and doubtless warriors keep watch there. They must
have thought my doom sealed when I plunged through the floor above, or
else they dare not follow me into this tunnel.—Twist that radium gem
off the wall.—As I groped my way back up the corridor I felt arches
opening into other tunnels. Well follow the first we come to. It may
lead to another pit, or to the open air. We must chance it We can't
stay here and rot."

Natala obeyed, and holding the tiny point of light in his left hand and
his bloody saber in his right, Conan started down the corridor. He went
slowly, stiffly, only his animal vitality keeping him on his feet There
was a blank glare in his bloodshot eyes, and Natala saw him
involuntarily lick his battered lips from time to time. She knew his
suffering was ghastly, but with the stoicism of the wilds he made no
complaint.

Presently the dim light shone on a black arch, and into this Conan
turned. Natala cringed at what she might see, but the light revealed
only a tunnel similar to that they had just left.

How far they went she had no idea, before they mounted a long stair and
came upon a stone door, fastened with a golden bolt.

She hesitated, glancing at Conan. The barbarian was swaying on his
feet, the light in his unsteady hand flinging fantastic shadows back
and forth along the wall.

"Open the door, girl," he muttered thickly. "The men of Xuthal will be
waiting for us, and I would not disappoint them. By Crom, the city has
not seen such a sacrifice as I will make!"

She knew he was half delirious. No sound came from beyond the door.
Taking the radium gem from his bloodstained hand, she threw the bolt
and drew the panel inward. The inner side of a cloth-of-gold tapestry
met her gaze and she drew it aside and peeked through, her heart in her
mouth. She was looking into an empty chamber in the center of which a
silvery fountain tinkled.

Conan's hand fell heavily on her naked shoulder.

"Stand aside, girl," he mumbled. "Now is the feasting of swords."

"There is no one in the chamber" she answered. "But there is water———"

"I hear it." He licked his blackened lips. "We will drink before we
die."

He seemed blinded. She took his darkly stained hand and led him through
the stone door. She went on tiptoe, expecting a rush of yellow figures
through the arches at any instant.

"Drink while I keep watch," he muttered.

"No, I am not thirsty. Lie down beside the fountain and I will bathe
your wounds."

"What of the swords of Xuthal?" He continually raked his arm across his
eyes as if to clear his blurred sight.

"I hear no one. All is silent."

He sank down gropingly and plunged his face into the crystal jet,
drinking as if he could not get enough. When he raised his head there
was sanity in his bloodshot eyes and he stretched his massive limbs out
on the marble floor as she requested, though he kept his saber in his
hand, and his eyes continually roved toward the archways. She bathed
his torn flesh and bandaged the deeper wounds with strips torn from a
silk hanging. She shuddered at the appearance of his back; the flesh
was discolored, mottled and spotted black and blue and a sickly yellow,
where it was not raw. As she worked she sought frantically for a
solution to their problem. If they stayed where they were, they would
eventually be discovered. Whether the men of Xuthal were searching the
palaces for them, or had returned to their dreams, she could not know.

As she finished her task, she froze. Under the hanging that partly
concealed an alcove, she saw a hand's breadth of yellow flesh.

Saying nothing to Conan, she rose and crossed the chamber softly,
grasping his poniard. Her heart pounded suffocatingly as she cautiously
drew aside the hanging. On the dais lay a young yellow woman, naked and
apparently lifeless. At her hand stood a jade jar nearly full of
peculiar golden-colored liquid. Natala believed it to be the elixir
described by Thalis, which lent vigor and vitality to the degenerate
Xuthal. She leaned across the supine form and grasped the vessel, her
poniard poised over the girl's bosom. The latter did not wake.

With the jar in her possession, Natala hesitated, realizing it would be
the safer course to put the sleeping girl beyond the power of waking
and raising an alarm. But she could not bring herself to plunge the
Cimmerian poniard into that still bosom, and at last she drew back the
hanging and returned to Conan, who lay where she had left him,
seemingly only partly conscious.

She bent and placed the jar to his lips. He drank, mechanically at
first, then with a suddenly aroused interest To her amazement he sat up
and took the vessel from her hands. When he lifted his face, his eyes
were clear and normal. Much of the drawn haggard look had gone from his
features, and his voice was not the mumble of delirium.

"Crom! Where did you get this?"

She pointed. "From that alcove, where a yellow hussy is sleeping."

He thrust his muzzle again into the golden liquid.

"By Crom," he said with a deep sigh, "I feel new life and power rush
like wildfire through my veins. Surely this is the very elixir of
Life!"

He rose, picking up his saber.

"We had best go back into the corridor," Natala ventured nervously. "We
shall be discovered if we stay here long. We can hide there until your
wounds heal———"

"Not I!" he grunted. "We are not rats, to hide in dark burrows. We
leave this devil-city now, and let none seek to stop us."

"But your wounds!" she wailed.

"I do not feel them," he answered, "It may be a false strength this
liquor has given me, but I swear I am aware of neither pain nor
weakness."

With sudden purpose he crossed the chamber to a window she had not
noticed. Over his shoulder she looked out. A cool breeze tossed her
tousled locks. Above was the dark velvet sky, clustered with stars.
Below them stretched a vague expanse of sand.

"Thalis said the city was one great palace," said Conan. "Evidently
some of the chambers are built like towers on the wall. This one is.
Chance has led us well."

"What do you mean?" she asked, glancing apprehensively over her
shoulder.

"There is a crystal jar on that ivory table," he answered. Till it with
water and tie a strip of that torn hanging about its neck for a handle
while I rip up this tapestry."

She obeyed without question, and when she turned from her task she saw
Conan rapidly tying together the long tough strips of silk to make a
rope, one end of which he fastened to the leg of the massive ivory
table.

"We'll take our chance with the desert," said he. "Thalis spoke of an
oasis a day's march to the south, and grasslands beyond that. If we
reach the oasis we can rest until my wounds heal. This wine is like
sorcery. A little while ago I was little more than a dead man; now I am
ready for anything. Here is enough silk left for you to make a garment
of."

Natala had forgotten her nudity. The mere fact caused her no qualms,
but her delicate skin would need protection from the desert sun. As she
knotted the silk length about her supple body, Conan turned to the
window and with a contemptuous wrench tore away the soft gold bars that
guarded it. Then, looping the loose end of the silk rope about Natala's
hips, and cautioning her to hold on with both hands, he lifted her
through the window and lowered her the thirty-odd feet to the earth.
She stepped out of the loop and, drawing it back up, he made fast the
vessels of water and wine, and lowered them to her. He followed them,
sliding down swiftly, hand over hand.

As he reached her side, Natala gave a sigh of relief. They stood alone
at the foot of the great wall, the paling stars overhead and the naked
desert about them. What perils yet confronted them she could not know,
but her heart sang with joy because they were out of that ghostly,
unreal city.

"They may find the rope," grunted Conan, slinging the precious jars
across his shoulders, wincing at the contact with his mangled flesh.
"They may even pursue us, but from what Thalis said, I doubt it. That
way is south," a bronze muscular arm indicated their course; "so
somewhere in that direction lies the oasis. Come!"

Taking her hand with a thoughtfulness unusual for him, Conan strode out
across the sands, suiting his stride to the shorter legs of his
companion. He did not glance back at the silent city, brooding dreamily
and ghostily behind them.

"Conan," Natala ventured finally, "when you fought the monster, and
later, as you came up the corridor, did you see anything of—of Thalis?"

He shook his head. "It was dark in the corridor; but it was empty."

She shuddered. "She tortured me—yet I pity her."

"It was a hot welcome we got in that accursed city," he snarled. Then
his grim humor returned. "Well, they'll remember our visit long enough,
I'll wager. There are brains and guts and blood to be cleaned off the
marble tiles, and if their god still lives, he carries more wounds than
I. We got off light, after all: we have wine and water and a good
chance of reaching a habitable country, though I look as if I'd gone
through a meat-grinder, and you have a sore———"

"Ifs all your fault," she interrupted. "If you had not looked so long
and admiringly at that Stygian cat———"

"Crom and his devils!" he swore. "When the oceans drown the world,
women will take time for jealousy. Devil take their conceit! Did I tell
the Stygian to fall in love with me? After all, she was only human!"


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.

Chapter One

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
south-west, 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.

Chapter Two

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 star-shine 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. Honor—" (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-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. Thai 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.

Chapter Three

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!"

Chapter Four

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 love-making
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…"

Chapter Five

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! Cods, 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.


The Pool of the Black One
-------------------------

Conan makes his way across the southern grasslands of the black
kingdoms. Here he is known of old, and Amra the Lion has no difficulty
in making his way to the coast, which he had ravaged in his days with
Belit But Belit is now only a memory on the Black Coast. The ship that
eventually heaves in sight off the head-land where Conan sits whetting
his sword is manned by pirates of the Baracka Isles, off the coast of
Zingara. They, too, have heard of Conan and welcome his sword and
experience. He is in his middle thirties when he joins the Barachan
pirates, with whom he remains for a considerable time. To Conan,
however, accustomed as he is to the tightly organized armies of the
Hyborian kings, the organization of the Barachan bands appears so loose
that there is small opportunity to rise to leadership and its rewards.
Slipping out of an unusually tight spot in the pirate rendezvous at
Tortage, he finds that the alternative to a slit throat lies in an
attempt to swim the Western Ocean. This he does with complete
confidence and perfect aplomb.


Into the west, unknown of man,
Ships have sailed since the world began.
Read, if you dare, what Skelos wrote,
With dead hands fumbling his silken coat;
And follow the ships through the wind-blown wrack—
Follow the ships that come not back.

Chapter One

Sancha, once of Kordava, yawned daintily, stretched her supple limbs
luxuriously, and composed herself more comfortably on the
ermine-fringed silk spread on the carack's poop-deck. That the crew
watched her with burning interest from waist and forecastle she was
lazily aware, just as she was also aware that her short silk kirtle
veiled little of her voluptuous contours from their eager eyes.
Wherefore she smiled insolently and prepared to snatch a few more winks
before the sun, which was just thrusting his golden disk above the
ocean, should dazzle her eyes.

But at that instant a sound reached her ears unlike the creaking of
timbers, thrum of cordage, and lap of waves. She sat up, her gaze fixed
on the rail, over which, to her amazement, a dripping figure clambered.
Her dark eyes opened wide, her red lips parted in an O of surprise. The
intruder was a stranger to her. Water ran in rivulets from his great
shoulders and down his heavy arms. His single garment—a pair of bright
crimson silk breeks— was soaking wet, as was his broad gold-buckled
girdle and the sheathed sword it supported. As he stood at the rail,
the rising sun etched him like a great bronze statue. He ran his
fingers through his streaming black mane, and his blue eyes lit as they
rested on the girl.

"Who are you?" she demanded. "Whence did you come?"

He made a gesture toward the sea that took in a whole quarter of the
compass, while his eyes did not leave her supple figure.

"Are you a merman, that you rise up out of the sea?" she asked,
confused by the candor of his gaze, though she was accustomed to
admiration.

Before he could reply, a quick step sounded on the boards, and the
master of the carack was glaring at the stranger, fingers twitching at
a sword-hilt.

"Who the devil are you, sirrah?" this one demanded in no friendly tone.

"I am Conan," the other answered imperturbably. Sancha pricked up her
ears anew; she had never heard Zingaran spoken with such an accent as
the stranger spoke it.

"And how did you get aboard my ship?" The voice grated with suspicion.

"I swam."

"Swam!" exclaimed the master angrily. "Dog, would you jest with me? We
are far beyond sight of land. Whence do you come?"

Conan pointed with a muscular brown arm toward the east, banded in
dazzling gold by a lifting sun.

"I came from the Islands."

"Oh!" The other regarded him with increased interest. Black brows drew
down over scowling eyes, and the thin lip lifted unpleasantly.

"So you are one of those dogs of the Barachans."

A faint smile touched Conan's lips.

"And do you know who I am?" his questioner demanded.

"This ship is the Wastrel; so you must be Zaporavo."

"Aye!" It touched the captain's grim vanity that the man should know
him. He was a tall man, tall as Conan, though of leaner build. Framed
in his steel morion, his face was dark, saturnine, and hawk-like,
wherefore men called him the Hawk. His armor and garments were rich and
ornate, after the fashion of a Zingaran grandee. His hand was never far
from his sword-hilt.

There was little favor in the gaze he bent on Conan. Little love was
lost between the Zingaran renegades and the outlaws who infested the
Baracha Islands off the southern coast of Zingara. These men were
mostly sailors from Argos, with a sprinkling of other nationalities.
They raided the shipping, and harried the Zingaran coast towns, just as
the Zingaran buccaneers did, but these dignified their profession by
calling themselves Freebooters, while they dubbed the Barachans
pirates. They were neither the first nor the last to gild the name of
thief.

Some of these thoughts passed through Zaporavo's mind as he toyed with
his sword-hilt and scowled at his uninvited guest. Conan gave no hint
of what his own thoughts might be. He stood with folded arms as
placidly as if upon his own deck; his lips smiled and his eyes were
untroubled.

"What are you doing here?" the Freebooter demanded abruptly.

"I found it necessary to leave the rendezvous at Tortage before
moonrise last night," answered Conan. "I departed in a leaky boat, and
rowed and bailed all night. Just at dawn I saw your topsails, and left
the miserable tub to sink, while I made better speed in the water."

"There are sharks in these waters," growled Zaporavo, and was vaguely
irritated by the answering shrug of the mighty shoulders. A glance
toward the waist showed a screen of eager faces staring upward. A word
would send them leaping up on the poop in a storm of swords that would
overwhelm even such a fighting-man as the stranger looked to be.

"Why should I burden myself with every nameless vagabond the sea casts
up?" snarled Zaporavo, his look and manner more insulting than his
words.

"A ship can always use another good sailor," answered the other without
resentment. Zaporavo scowled, knowing the truth of that assertion. He
hesitated, and doing so, lost his ship, his command, his girl, and his
life. But of course he could not see into the future, and to him Conan
was only another wastrel, cast up, as he put it, by the sea. He did not
like the man; yet the fellow had given him no provocation. His manner
was not insolent, though rather more confident than Zaporavo liked to
see.

"You'll work for your keep," snarled the Hawk. "Get off the poop. And
remember, the only law here is my will."

The smile seemed to broaden on Conan's thin lips. Without hesitation
but without haste he turned and descended into the waist He did not
look again at Sancha, who, during the brief conversation, had watched
eagerly, all eyes and ears.

As he came into the waist the crew thronged about him —Zingarans, all
of them, half naked, their gaudy silk garments splashed with tar,
jewels glinting in earrings and dagger-hilts. They were eager for the
time-honored sport of baiting the stranger. Here he would be tested,
and his future status in the crew decided. Up on the poop Zaporavo had
apparently already forgotten the stranger's existence, but Sancha
watched, tense with interest. She had become familiar with such scenes,
and knew the baiting would be brutal and probably bloody.

But her familiarity with such matters was scanty compared to that of
Conan. He smiled faintly as he came into the waist and saw the menacing
figures pressing truculently about him. He paused and eyed the ring
inscrutably, his composure unshaken. There was a certain code about
these things. If he had attacked the captain, the whole crew would have
been at this throat, but they would give him a fair chance against the
one selected to posh the brawl.

The man chosen for this duty thrust himself forward— a wiry brute, with
a crimson sash knotted about his head like a turban. His lean chin
jutted out, his scarred face was evil beyond belief. Every glance, each
swaggering movement was an affront. His way of beginning the baiting
was as primitive, raw, and crude as himself.

"Baracha, eh?" he sneered. "That's where they raise dogs for men. We of
the Fellowship spit on 'em—like this!"

He spat in Conan's face and snatched at his own sword.

The Barachan's movement was too quick for the eye to follow. His
sledge-like fist crunched with a terrible impact against his
tormentor's jaw, and the Zingaran catapulted through the air and fell
in a crumpled heap by the rail.

Conan turned toward the others. But for a slumbering glitter in his
eyes, his bearing was unchanged. But the baiting was over as suddenly
as it had begun. The seamen lifted their companion; his broken jaw hung
slack, his head lolled unnaturally.

"By Mitra, his neck's broken!" swore a black-bearded sea-rogue.

"You Freebooters are a weak-boned race," laughed the pirate. "On the
Barachas we take no account of such taps as that. Will you play at
sword-strokes, now, any of you? No? Then all's well, and we're friends,
eh?"

There were plenty of tongues to assure him that he spoke truth. Brawny
arms swung the dead man over the rail, and a dozen fins cut the water
as he sank. Conan laughed and spread his mighty arms as a great cat
might stretch itself, and his gaze sought the deck above. Sancha leaned
over the rail, red lips parted, dark eyes aglow with interest. The sun
behind her outlined her lithe figure through the light kirtle which its
glow made transparent Then across her fell Zaporavo's scowling shadow
and a heavy hand fell possessively on her slim shoulder. There were
menace and meaning in the glare he bent on the man in the waist; Conan
grinned back, as if at a jest none knew but himself.

Zaporavo made the mistake so many autocrats make; alone in somber
grandeur on the poop, he underestimated the man below him. He had his
opportunity to fall Conan, and he let it pass, engrossed in his own
gloomy ruminations. He did not find it easy to think any of the dogs
beneath his feet constituted a menace to him. He had stood in the high
places so long, and had ground so many foes underfoot, that he
unconsciously assumed himself to be above the machinations of inferior
rivals.

Conan, indeed, gave him no provocation. He mixed with the crew, lived
and made merry as they did. He proved himself a skilled sailor, and by
far the strongest man any of them had seen. He did the work of three
men, and was always first to spring to any heavy or dangerous task. His
mates began to rely upon him. He did not quarrel with them, and they
were careful not to quarrel with them. He gambled with them, putting up
his girdle and sheath for a stake, won their money and weapons, and
gave them back with a laugh. The crew instinctively looked toward him
as the leader of the forecastle. He vouchsafed no information as to
what had caused him to flee the Barachas, but the knowledge that he was
capable of a deed bloody enough to have exiled him from that wild band
increased the respect felt toward him by the fierce Freebooters. Toward
Zaporavo and the mates he was imperturbably courteous, never insolent
or servile.

The dullest was struck by the contrast between the harsh, taciturn,
gloomy commander, and the pirate whose laugh was gusty and ready, who
roared ribald songs in a dozen languages, guzzled ale like a toper,
and—apparently —had no thought for the morrow.

Had Zaporavo known he was being compared, even though unconsciously,
with a man before the mast, he would have been speechless with amazed
anger. But he was engrossed with his broodings, which had become
blacker and grimmer as the years crawled by, and with his vague
grandiose dreams; and with the girl whose possession was a bitter
pleasure, just as all his pleasures were.

And she looked more and more at the black-maned giant who towered among
his mates at work or play. He never spoke to her, but there was no
mistaking the candor of his gaze. She did not mistake it, and she
wondered if she dared the perilous game of leading him on.

No great length of time lay between her and the palaces of Kordava, but
it was as if a world of change separated her from the life she had
lived before Zaporavo tore her screaming from the flaming caravel his
wolves had plundered. She, who had been the spoiled and petted daughter
of the Duke of Kordava, learned what it was to be a buccaneer's
plaything, and because she was supple enough to bend without breaking,
she lived where other women had died, and because she was young and
vibrant with life, she came to find pleasure in the existence.

The life was uncertain, dream-like, with sharp contrasts of battle,
pillage, murder, and flight, Zaporavo's red visions made it even more
uncertain than that of the average Freebooter. No one knew what he
planned next. Now they had left all charted coasts behind and were
plunging further and further into that unknown, billowy waste
ordinarily shunned by seafarers, and into which, since the beginnings
of time, ships had ventured, only to vanish from the sight of man for
ever. All known lands lay behind them, and day upon day the blue,
surging immensity lay empty to their sight. Here there was no loot—no
towns to sack nor ships to burn. The men murmured, though they did not
let their murmurings reach the ears of their implacable master, who
tramped the poop day and night in gloomy majesty, or pored over ancient
charts and time-yellowed maps, reading in tomes that were crumbling
masses of worm-eaten parchment. At times he talked to Sancha, wildly it
seemed to her, of lost continents, and fabulous isles dreaming
unguessed amidst the blue foam of nameless gulfs, where horned dragons
guarded treasures gathered by pre-human kings, long, long ago.

Sancha listened, uncomprehending, hugging her slim knees, her thoughts
constantly roving away from the words of her grim companion back to a
clean-limbed bronze giant whose laughter was gusty and elemental as the
sea-wind.

So, after many weary weeks, they raised land to westward, and at dawn
dropped anchor in a shallow bay, and saw a beach which was like a white
ban4 bordering an expanse of gentle grassy slopes, masked by green
trees. The wind brought scents of fresh vegetation and spices, and
Sancha clapped her hands with glee at the prospect of adventuring
ashore. But her eagerness turned to sulkiness when Zaporavo ordered her
to remain aboard until he sent for her. He never gave any explanation
for his commands; so she never knew his reason, unless it was the
lurking devil in him that frequently made him hurt her without cause.

So she lounged sulkily on the poop and watched the men row ashore
through the calm water that sparkled like liquid jade in the morning
sunlight She saw them bunch together on the sands, suspicious, weapons
ready, while several scattered out through the trees that fringed the
beach. Among these, she noted, was Conan. There was no mistaking that
tall brown figure with its springy step. Men said he was no civilized
man at all, but a Cimmerian, one of those barbaric tribesmen who dwelt
in the gray mils of the far North, and whose raids struck terror in the
southern neighbors. At least, she knew that there was something about
him, some super-vitality or barbarism that set him apart from his wild
mates.

Voices echoed along the shore, as the silence reassured the buccaneers.
The clusters broke up, as men scattered along the beach in search of
fruit She saw them climbing and plucking among the trees, and her
pretty mouth watered. She stamped a little foot and swore with a
proficiency acquired by association with her blasphemous companions.

The men on shore had indeed found fruit, and were gorging on it finding
one unknown golden-skinned variety especially luscious. But Zaporavo
did not seek or eat fruit His scouts having found nothing indicating
men or beasts in the neighborhood, he stood staring inland, at the long
reaches of grassy slopes melting into one another. Then, with a brief
word, he shifted his sword-belt and strode in under the trees. His mate
expostulated with him against going alone, and was rewarded by a savage
blow in the mouth. Zaporavo had his reasons for wishing to go alone. He
desired to learn if this island were indeed that mentioned in the
mysterious Book of Skelos, whereon, nameless sages aver, strange
monsters guard crypts filled with hieroglyph-carven gold. Nor, for
murky reasons of his own, did he wish to share his knowledge, if it
were true, with any one, much less his own crew.

Sancha, watching eagerly from the poop, saw him vanish into the leafy
fastness. Presently she saw Conan, the Barachan, turn, glance briefly
at the men scattered up and down the beach; then the pirate went
quickly in the direction taken by Zaporavo, and likewise vanished among
the trees.

Sancha's curiosity was piqued. She waited for them to reappear, but
they did not. The seamen still moved aimlessly up and down the beach,
and some had wandered inland. Many had lain down in the shade to sleep.
Time passed, and she fidgeted about restlessly. The sun began to beat
down hotly, in spite of the canopy above the poop-deck. Here it was
warm, silent, draggingly monotonous; a few yards away across a band of
blue shallow water, the cool shady mystery of tree-fringed beach and
woodland-dotted meadow beckoned her. Moreover, the mystery concerning
Zaporavo and Conan tempted her.

She well knew the penalty for disobeying her merciless master, and she
sat for some time, squirming with indecision. At last she decided that
it was worth even one of Zaporavo's whippings to play truant, and with
no more ado she kicked off her soft leather sandals, slipped out of her
kirtle and stood up on the deck naked as Eve. Clambering over the rail
and down the chains, she slid into the water and swam ashore. She stood
on the beach a few moments, squirming as the sands tickled her small
toes, while she looked for the crew. She saw only a few, at some
distance up or down the beach. Many were fast asleep under the trees,
bits of golden fruit still clutched in their fingers. She wondered why
they should sleep so soundly, so early in the day.

None hailed her as she crossed the white girdle of sand and entered the
shade of the woodland. The trees, she found, grew in irregular
clusters, and between these groves stretched rolling expanses of
meadow-like slopes. As she progressed inland, in the direction taken by
Zaporavo, she was entranced by the green vistas that unfolded gently
before her, soft slope beyond slope, carpeted with green sward and
dotted with groves. Between the slopes lay gentle declivities, likewise
swarded. The scenery seemed to melt into itself, or each scene into the
other; the view was singular, at once broad and restricted. Over all a
dreamy silence lay like an enchantment.

Then she came suddenly onto the level summit of a dope, circled with
tall trees, and the dreamily faery-like sensation vanished abruptly at
the sight of what lay on the reddened and trampled grass. Sancha
involuntarily cried out and recoiled, then stole forward, wide-eyed,
trembling in every limb.

It was Zaporavo who lay there on the sward, staring sightlessly upward,
a gaping wound in his breast His sword lay near his nerveless hand. The
Hawk had made his last swoop.

It is not to be said that Sancha gazed on the corpse of her lord
without emotion. She had no cause to love him, yet she felt at least
the sensation any girl might feel when looking on the body of the man
who had been first to possess her. She did not weep or feel any need of
weeping, but she was seized by a strong trembling, her blood seemed to
congeal briefly, and she resisted a wave of hysteria.

She looked about her for the man she expected to see. Nothing met her
eyes but the ring of tall, thickly-leafed forest giants, and the blue
slopes beyond them. Had the Freebooter's slayer dragged himself away,
mortally wounded? No bloody tracks led away from the body.

Puzzled, she swept the surrounding trees, stiffening as she caught a
rustle in the emerald leaves that seemed not to be of the wind. She
went toward the trees, staring into the leafy depths.

"Conan?" Her call was inquiring; her voice sounded strange and small in
the vastness of silence that hid grown suddenly tense.

Her knees began to tremble as a nameless panic swept over her.

"Conan!" she cried desperately. "It is I—Sancha!

Where are you? Please, Conan———" Her voice faltered away. Unbelieving
horror dilated her brown eyes. Her red lips parted to an inarticulate
scream. Paralysis gripped her limbs; where she had such desperate need
of swift flight, she could not move. She could only shriek wordlessly.

Chapter Two

When Conan saw Zaporavo stalk alone into the woodland, he felt that the
chance he had watched for had come. He had eaten no fruit, nor joined
in the horseplay of his mates; all his faculties were occupied with
watching the buccaneer chief. Accustomed to Zaporavo's moods, his men
were not particularly surprised that their captain should choose to
explore an unknown and probably hostile isle alone. They turned to
their own amusement, and did not notice Conan when he glided like a
stalking panther after the chieftain.

Conan did not underrate his dominance of the crew. But he had not
gained the right, through battle and foray, to challenge th< captain to
a duel to the death. In these empty seas there had been no opportunity
for him to prove himself according to Freebooter law. The crew would
stand solidly against him if he attacked the chieftain openly..But he
knew that if he killed Zaporavo without their knowledge, the leaderless
crew would not be likely to be swayed by loyalty to a dead man. In such
wolf-packs only the living counted.

So he followed Zaporavo with sword in hand and eagerness in his heart,
until he came out onto a level summit, circled with tall trees, between
whose trunks he saw the green vistas of the slopes melting into the
blue distance.. In the midst of the glade Zaporavo, sensing pursuit,
turned, hand on hilt.

The buccaneer swore.

"Dog, why do you follow me?"

"Are you mad, to ask?" laughed Conan, coming swiftly toward his
erstwhile chief. His lips smiled, and in his blue eyes danced a wild
gleam.

Zaporavo ripped out his sword with a black curse, and steel clashed
against steel as the Barachan came in recklessly and wide open, his
blade singing a wheel of blue flame about his head.

Zaporavo was the veteran of a thousand fights by sea and by land. There
was no man in the world more deeply and thoroughly versed than he in
the lore of swordcraft. But he had never been pitted against a blade
wielded by thews bred in the wild lands beyond the borders of
civilization. Against his fighting-craft was matched blinding speed and
strength impossible to a civilized man. Conan's manner of fighting was
unorthodox, but instinctive and natural as that of a timber wolf. The
intricacies of the sword were as useless against his primitive fury as
a human boxer's skill against the onslaughts of a panther.

Fighting as he had never fought before, straining every last ounce of
effort to parry the blade that flickered like lightning about his head,
Zaporavo in desperation caught a full stroke near his hilt, and felt
his whole arm go numb beneath the terrific impact. That stroke was
instantly followed by a thrust with such terrible drive behind it that
the sharp point ripped through chainmail and ribs like paper, to
transfix the heart beneath. Zaporavo's lips writhed in brief agony,
but, grim to the last, he made no sound. He was dead before his body
relaxed on the trampled grass, where blood drops glittered like spilt
rubies in the sun.

Conan shook the red drops from his sword, grinned with unaffected
pleasure, stretched like a huge cat—and abruptly stiffened, the
expression of satisfaction on his face being replaced by a stare of
bewilderment He stood like a statue, his sword trailing in his hand.

As he lifted his eyes from his vanquished foe, they had absently rested
on the surrounding.trees, and the vistas beyond. And he had seen a
fantastic thing—a thing incredible and inexplicable. Over the soft,
rounded green shoulder of a distant slope had loped a tall black naked
figure, bearing on its shoulder an equally naked white form. The
apparition vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the watcher
gasping in surprise.

The pirate stared about him, glanced uncertainly back the way he had
come, and swore. He was nonplussed—a bit upset, if the term might be
applied to one of such steely nerves as his. In the midst of realistic,
if exotic surroundings, a vagrant image of fantasy and nightmare had
been introduced Conan doubted neither his eyesight nor his sanity. He
had seen something alien and uncanny, he knew; the mere fact of a black
figure racing across the landscape carrying a white captive was bizarre
enough, but this black figure had been unnaturally tall.

Shaking his head doubtfully, Conan started off in the direction in
which he had seen the thing. He did not argue the wisdom of his move;
with his curiosity so piqued, he had no choice but to follow its
promptings.

Slope after slope he traversed, each with its even sward and clustered
groves. The general trend was always upward, though he ascended and
descended the gentle inclines with monotonous regularity. The array of
rounded shoulders and shallow declivities was bewildering and
apparently endless. But at last he advanced up what he believed was the
highest summit on the island, and halted at the sight of green shining
walls and towers, which, until he had reached the spot on which he then
stood, had merged so perfectly with the green landscape as to be
invisible, even to his keen sight.

He hesitated, fingered his sword, then went forward, bitten by the worm
of curiosity. He saw no one as he approached a tall archway in the
curving wall, there was no door. Peering warily through, he saw what
seemed to be a broad open court, grass-carpeted, surrounded by a
circular wall of the green semi-translucent substance. Various arches
opened from it Advancing on the balls of his bare feet, sword ready, he
chose one of these arches at random, and passed into another similar
court. Over an inner wall he saw the pinnacles of strangely shaped
tower-like structures. One of these towers was built in, or projected
into the court in which he found himself, and a broad stair led up to
it, along the side of the wall. Up this he went, wondering if it were
all real, or if he were not in the midst of a black lotus dream.

At the head of the stair he found himself on a walled ledge, or
balcony, he was not sure which. He could now make out more details of
the towers, but they were meaningless to him. He realized uneasily that
no ordinary human beings could have built them. There was symmetry
about their architecture, and system, but it was a mad symmetry, a
system alien to human sanity. As for the plan of the whole town,
castle, or whatever it was intended for, he could see just enough to
get the impression of a great number of courts, mostly circular, each
surrounded by its own wall, and connected with the others by open
arches, and all, apparently, grouped about the cluster of fantastic
towers in the center.

Turning in the other direction from these towers, he got a fearful
shock, and crouched down suddenly behind the parapet of the balcony,
glaring amazedly.

The balcony or ledge was higher than the opposite wall, and he was
looking over that wall into another swarded court. The inner curve of
the further wall of that court differed from the others he had seen, in
that, instead of being smooth, it seemed to be banded with long lines
or ledges, crowded with small objects the nature of which he could not
determine.

However, he gave little heed to the wall at the time. His attention was
centered on the band of beings that squatted about a dark green pool in
the midst of the court. These creatures were black and naked, made like
men, but the least of them, standing upright, would have towered head
and shoulders above the tall pirate. They were rangy rather than
massive, but were finely formed, with no suggestion of deformity or
abnormality, save as their great height was abnormal. But even at that
distance Conan sensed the basic diabolism of their features.

In the midst, cringing and naked, stood a youth that Conan recognized
as the youngest sailor aboard the Wastrel. He, then, had been the
captive the pirate had seen borne across the grass-covered slope. Conan
had heard no sound of fighting—saw no bloodstains or wounds on the
sleek ebon limbs of the giants. Evidently the lad had wandered inland
away from his companions and been snatched up by a black man lurking in
ambush. Conan mentally termed the creatures black men, for lack of a
better term; instinctively he knew these tall ebony beings were not
men, as he understood the term.

No sound came to him. The blacks nodded and gestured to one another,
but they did not seem to speak— vocally, at least. One, squatting on
his haunches before the cringing boy, held a pipe-like thing in his
hand. This he set to his lips, and apparently blew, though Conan heard
no sound. But the Zingaran youth heard or felt, and cringed. He
quivered and writhed as if in agony; a regularity became evident in the
twitching of his limbs, which quickly became rhythmic. The twitching
became a violent jerking, the jerking regular movements. The youth
began to dance, as cobras dance by compulsion to the tune of the
fakir's fife. There was naught of zest or joyful abandon in that dance.
There was, indeed, abandon that was awful to see, but it was not
joyful. It was as if the mute tune of the pipes grasped the boy's
inmost soul with salacious fingers and with brutal torture wrung from
it every involuntary expression of secret passion. It was a convulsion
of obscenity, a spasm of lasciviousness— an exudation of secret hungers
framed by compulsion: desire without pleasure, pain mated awfully to
lust It was like watching a soul stripped naked, and all its dark and
unmentionable secrets laid bare.

Conan glared, frozen with repulsion and shaken with nausea. Himself as
cleanly elemental as a timber wolf, he was yet not ignorant of the
perverse secrets of rotting civilizations. He had roamed the cities of
Zamora, and known the women of Shadizar the Wicked. But he sensed here
a cosmic vileness transcending mere human degeneracy—a perverse branch
on the tree of Life, developed along lines outside human comprehension.
It was not at the agonized contortions and posturing of the wretched
boy that he was shocked, but at the cosmic obscenity of these beings
which could drag to light the abysmal secrets that sleep in the
unfathomed darkness of the human soul, and find pleasure in the brazen
flaunting of such things as should not be hinted at, even in restless
nightmares.

Suddenly the black torturer laid down the pipes and rose, towering over
the writhing white figure. Brutally grasping the boy by neck and
haunch, the giant up-ended him and thrust him head-first into the green
pool. Conan saw the white glimmer of his naked body amid the green
water, as the black giant held his captive deep under the surface. Then
there was a restless movement among the other blacks, and Conan ducked
quickly below the balcony wall, not daring to raise his head lest he be
seen.

After a while his curiosity got the better of him, and he cautiously
peered out again. The blacks were filing out of an archway into another
court. One of them was just placing something on a ledge of the further
wall, and Conan saw it was the one who had tortured the boy. He was
taller than the others, and wore a jeweled headband. Of the Zingaran
boy there was no trace. The giant followed his fellows, and presently
Conan saw them emerge from the archway by which he had gained access to
the castle of horror, and fled away across the green slopes, in the
direction from which he had come. They bore no arms, yet he felt that
they planned further aggression against the Freebooters.

But before he went to warn the unsuspecting buccaneers, he wished to
investigate the fate of the boy. No sound disturbed the quiet. The
pirate believed that the towers and courts were deserted save for
himself.

He went swiftly down the stair, crossed the court and passed through an
arch into the court the blacks had just quitted. Now he saw the nature
of the striated wall. It was banded by narrow ledges, apparently cut
out of the solid stone, and ranged along these ledges or shelves were
thousands of tiny figures, mostly grayish in color. These figures, not
much longer than a man's hand, represented men, and so cleverly were
they made that Conan recognized various racial characteristics in the
different idols, features typical of Zingarans, Argosseans, Ophireans,
and Kushite corsairs. These last were black in color, just as their
models were black in reality. Conan was aware of a vague uneasiness as
he stared at the dumb, sightless figures. There was a mimicry of
reality about them that was somehow disturbing. He felt of them
gingerly and could not decide of what material they were made. It felt
hie petrified bone; but he could not imagine petrified substance being
found in the locality in such abundance as to be used so lavishly.

He noticed that the images representing types with which he was
familiar were all on the higher ledges. The lower ledges were occupied
by figures the features of which were strange to him. They either
embodied merely the artists' imagination, or typified racial types long
vanished and forgotten.

Shaking his head impatiently, Conan turned toward the pool. The
circular court offered no place of concealment; as the body of the boy
was nowhere in sight, it must be lying at the bottom of the pool.

Approaching the placid green disk, he stared into the glimmering
surface. It was like looking through a thick green glass, unclouded,
yet strangely illusory. Of no great dimensions, the pool was round as a
well, bordered by a rim of green jade. Looking down, he could see the
rounded bottom—how far below the surface he could not decide. Bat the
pool seemed incredibly deep—he was aware of a dizziness as he looked
down, much as if he were looking into an abyss. He was puzzled by his
ability to see the bottom; but it lay beneath his gaze, impossibly
remote, illusive, shadowy, yet visible. At times he thought a faint
luminosity was apparent deep in the jade-colored depth, but he could
not be sure. Yet he was sure that the pool was empty except for the
shimmering water.

Then where in the name of Crom was the boy whom he had seen brutally
drowned in that pool? Rising, Conan fingered his sword, and gazed
around the court again. His gaze focused on a spot on one of the higher
ledges.

There he had seen the tall black place something—cold sweat broke
suddenly out on Conan's brown hide.

Hesitantly, yet as if drawn by a magnet, the pirate approached the
shimmering wall. Dazed by a suspicion too monstrous to voice, he glared
up at the last figure on that ledge. A horrible familiarity made itself
evident. Stony, immobile, dwarfish, yet unmistakable, the features of
of the Zingaran boy stared unseeingly at him. Conan recoiled, shaken to
his soul's foundations. His sword trailed in his paralyzed hand as he
glared, open-mouthed, stunned by the realization which was too abysmal
and awful for the mind to grasp.

Yet the fact was indisputable; the secret of the dwarfish images was
revealed, though behind that secret lay the darker and more cryptic
secret of their being.

Chapter Three

How long Conan stood drowned in dizzy cogitation, he never knew. A
voice shook him out of his gaze, a feminine voice that shrieked more
and more loudly, as if the owner of the voice were being borne nearer.
Conan recognized that voice, and his paralysis vanished instantly.

A quick bound carried him high up on the narrow ledges, where he clung,
kicking aside the clustering images to obtain room for his feet.
Another spring and a scramble, and he was clinging to the rim of the
wall, glaring over it. It was an outer wall; he was looking into the
green meadow that surrounded the castle.

Across the grassy level a giant black was striding, carrying a
squirming captive under one arm as a man might carry a rebellious
child. It was Sancha, her black hair falling in disheveled rippling
waves, her olive skin contrasting abruptly with the glossy ebony of her
captor. He gave no heed to her wrigglings and cries as he made for the
outer archway.

As he vanished within, Conan sprang recklessly down the wall and glided
into the arch that opened into the further court. Crouching there, he
saw the giant enter the court of the pool, carrying his writhing
captive. Now he was able to make out the creature's details.

The superb symmetry of body and limbs was more impressive at close
range. Under the ebon skin long, rounded muscles rippled, and Conan did
not doubt that the monster could rend an ordinary man limb from limb.
The nails of the fingers provided further weapons, for they were grown
like the talons of a wild beast. The face was a carven ebony mask. The
eyes were tawny, a vibrant gold that glowed and glittered. But the face
was inhuman; each line, each feature was stamped with evil-evil
transcending the mere evil of humanity. The thing was not a human—it
could not be; it was a growth of life from the pits of blasphemous
creation—a perversion of evolutionary development.

The giant cast Sancha down on the sward, where she groveled, crying
with pain and terror. He cast a glance about as if uncertain, and his
tawny eyes narrowed as they rested on the images overturned and knocked
from the wall. Then he stooped, grasped his captive by her neck and
crotch, and strode purposefully toward the green pool. And Conan glided
from his archway, and raced like a wind of death across the sward.

The giant wheeled, and his eyes flared as he saw the bronzed avenger
rushing toward him. In the instant of surprise his cruel grip relaxed,
and Sancha wriggled from his hands and fell to the grass. The taloned
hands spread and clutched, but Conan ducked beneath their swoop and
drove his sword through the giant's groin. The black went down like a
felled tree, gushing blood, and the next instant Conan was seized in a
frantic grasp as Sancha sprang up and threw her arms around him in a
frenzy of terror and hysterical relief.

He cursed as he disengaged himself, but his foe was already dead; the
tawny eyes were glazed, the long ebony limbs had ceased to twitch.

"Oh, Conan," Sancha was sobbing, clinging tenaciously to him, "what
will become of us? What are these monsters? Oh, surely this is Hell and
that was the Devil———"

Then Hell needs a new devil," the Barachan grinned fiercely. "But how
did he get hold of you? Have they taken the ship?"

"I don't know." She tried to wipe away her tears, fumbled for her
skirt, and then remembered that she wore none. "I came ashore. I saw
you follow Zaporavo, and I followed you both. I found Zaporavo—was—was
it you who " .

"Who else?" he grunted. "What then?"

"I saw a movement in the trees," she shuddered. "I thought it was you.
I called—then I saw that—that black thing squatting like an ape among
the branches, leering down at me. It was like a nightmare; I couldn't
run. All I could do was squeal. Then it dropped from the tree and
seized me—oh, oh, oh!" She hid her face in her hand, and was shaken
anew at the memory of the horror.

"Well, we've got to get out of here," he growled, catching her wrist
"Come on; we've got to get to the crew———"

"Most of them were asleep on the beach as I entered the woods," she
said.

"Asleep?" he exclaimed profanely. "What in the seven devils of Hell's
fire and damnation———"

"Listen!" She froze, a white quivering image of fright.

"I heard it!" he snapped. "A moaning cry! Wait!"

He bounded up the ledges again and, glaring over the wall, swore with a
concentrated fury that made even Sancha gasp. The black men were
returning, but they came not alone or empty-handed. Each bore a limp
human form; some bore two. Their captives were the Freebooters; they
hung slackly in their captor's arms, and but for an occasional vague
movement or twitching, Conan would have believed them dead. They had
been disarmed but not stripped; one of the blacks bore their sheathed
swords, a great armload of bristling steel. From time to time one of
the seamen voiced a vague cry, like a drunkard calling out in Scottish
sleep.

like a trapped wolf Conan glared about him. Three arches led out of the
court of the pool. Through the eastern arch the blacks had left the
court, and through it they would presumably return. He had entered by
the southern arch. In the western arch he had hidden, and had not had
time to notice what lay beyond it. Regardless of his ignorance of the
plan of the castle, he was forced to make his decision promptly.

Springing down the wall, he replaced the images with frantic haste,
dragged the corpse of his victim to the pool and cast it in. It sank
instantly and, as he looked, he distinctly saw an appalling
contraction—a shrinking, a hardening. He hastily turned away,
shuddering. Then he seized his companion's arm and led her hastily
toward the southern archway, while she begged to be told what was
happening.

"They've bagged the crew," he answered hastily. "I haven't any plan,
but well hide somewhere and watch. If they don't look in the pool, they
may not suspect our presence."

"But they'll see the blood on the grass!"

"Maybe they'll think one of their own devils spilled it," he answered.
"Anyway, well have to take the chance."

They were in the court from which he had watched the torture of the
boy, and he led her hastily up the stair that mounted the southern
wall, and forced her into a crouching position behind the balustrade of
the balcony; it was poor concealment, but the best they could do.

Scarcely had they settled themselves, when the blacks filed into the
court. There was a resounding clash at the foot of the stairs, and
Conan stiffened, grasping his sword. But the blacks passed through an
archway on the southwestern side, and they heard a series of thuds and
groans. The giants were casting their victims down on the sward. A
hysterical giggle rose to Sancha's lips, and Conan quickly clapped his
hand over her mouth, stifling the sound before it could betray them.

After awhile they heard the padding of many feet on the sward below,
and then silence reigned. Conan peered over the wall. The court was
empty. The blacks were once more gathered about the pool in the
adjoining court, squatting on their haunches. They seemed to pay no
heed to the great smears of blood on the sward and the jade rim of the
pool. Evidently bloodstains were nothing unusual. Nor were they looking
into the pool. They were engrossed in some inexplicable conclave of
their own; the tall black was playing again on his golden pipes, and
his companions listened like ebony statues.

Taking Sancha's hand, Conan glided down the stair, stooping so that his
head would not be visible above the wall. The cringing girl followed
perforce, staring fearfully at the arch that let into the court of the
pool, but through which, at that angle, neither the pool nor its grim
throng were visible. At the foot of the stair lay the swords of the
Zingarans. The clash they had heard had been the casting down of the
captured weapons.

Conan drew Sancha toward the southwestern arch, and they silently
crossed the sward and entered the court beyond. There the Freebooters
lay in careless heaps, mustaches bristling, earrings glinting. Here and
there one stirred or groaned restlessly. Conan bent down to them, and
Sancha knelt beside him, leaning forward with her hands on her thighs.

"What is that sweet cloying smell?" she asked nervously. "It's on all
their breaths."

"It's that damned fruit they were eating," he answered softly. "I
remember the smell of it. It must have been like the black lotus, that
makes men sleep. By Crom, they are beginning to awake—but they're
unarmed, and I have an idea that those black devils won't wait long
before they begin their magic on them. What chance will the lads have,
unarmed and stupid with slumber?"

He brooded for an instant, scowling with the intentness of his
thoughts; then he seized Sancha's olive shoulder in a grip that made
her wince.

"Listen! I'll draw those black swine into another part of the castle
and keep them busy for awhile. Meanwhile you shake these fools awake,
and bring their swords to them— it's a fighting chance. Can you do it?"

"I—I—don't know!" she stammered, shaking with terror, and hardly
knowing what she was saying.

With a curse Conan caught her thick tresses near her head and shook her
until the walls danced to her dizzy sight.

"You must do it!" he hissed. "It's our only chance!"

"I'll do my best!" she gasped, and with a grunt of commendation and an
encouraging slap on the back that nearly knocked her down, he glided
away.

A few moments later he was crouching at the arch that opened into the
court of the pool, glaring upon his enemies. They still sat about the
pool, but were beginning to show evidences of an evil impatience. From
the court where lay the rousing buccaneers he heard their groans
growing louder, beginning to be mingled with incoherent curses. He
tensed his muscles and sank into a pantherish crouch, breathing easily
between his teeth.

The jeweled giant rose, taking his pipes from his lips —and' at that
instant Conan was among the startled blacks with a tigerish bound. And
as a tiger leaps and strikes among his prey, Conan leaped and struck:
thrice his blade flickered before any could life a hand in defense;
then he bounded from among them and raced across the sward. Behind him
sprawled three black figures, their skulls split.

But though the unexpected fury of his surprise had caught the giants
off guard, the survivors recovered quickly enough. They were at his
heels as he ran through the western arch, their longs legs sweeping
them over the ground at headlong speed. However, he felt confident of
his ability to outfoot them at will; but that was not his purpose. He
intended leading them on a long chase, in order to give Sancha time to
rouse and arm the Zingarans.

And as he raced into the court beyond the western arch, he swore. This
court differed from the others he had seen. Instead of being round, it
was octagonal and the arch by which he had entered was the only
entrance or exit.

Wheeling, he saw that the entire band had followed him in; a group
clustered in the arch, and the rest spread out in a wide line as they
approached. He faced them, backing slowly toward the northern wall. The
line bent into a semicircle, spreading out to hem him in. He continued
to move backward, but more and more slowly, noting the spaces widening
between the pursuers. They feared lest he should try to dart around a
horn of the crescent, and lengthened their line to prevent it.

He watched with the calm alertness of a wolf, and when he struck it was
with the devastating suddenness of a thunderbolt—full at the center of
the,crescent The giant who barred his way went down cloven to the
middle of the breastbone, and the pirate was outside their dosing ring
before the blacks to right and left could come to their stricken
comrade's aid. The group at the gate prepared to receive his onslaught,
but Conan did not charge them. He had turned and was watching his
hunters without apparent emotion, and certainly without fear.

This time they did not spread out in a thin line. They had learned that
it was fatal to divide their forces against such an incarnation of
clawing, rending fury. They bunched up in a compact mass, and advanced
on him without undue haste, maintaining their formation.

Conan knew that if he fell foul of that mass of taloned muscle and
bone, there could be but one culmination. Once let them drag him down
among them where they could reach him with their talons and use their
greater body-weight to advantage, even his primitive ferocity would not
prevail. He glanced around the wall and saw a ledgelike projection
above a corner on the western side. What it was he did not know, but it
would serve his purpose. He began backing toward that corner, and the
giants advanced more rapidly. They evidently thought that they were
herding him into the corner themselves, and Conan found time to reflect
that they probably looked on him as a member of a lower order, mentally
inferior to themselves. So much the better. Nothing is more disastrous
than underrating one's antagonist.

Now he was only a few yards from the wall, and the blacks were closing
in rapidly, evidently thinking to pin him in the corner before he
realized his situation. The group at the gate had deserted their post
and were hastening to join their fellows. The giants half crouched,
eyes blazing like golden hell-fire, teeth glistening whitely, taloned
hands lifted as if to fend off attack. They expected an abrupt and
violent move on the part of their prey, but when it came, it took them
by surprise.

Conan lifted his sword, took a step toward them, then wheeled and raced
to the wall. With a fleeting coil and release of steel muscles, he shot
high in the air, and his straining arm hooked its fingers over the
projection. Instantly there was a rending crash and the jutting ledge
gave way, precipitating the pirate back into the court.

He hit on his back, which for all its springy sinews would have broken
but for the cushioning of the sward, and rebounding like a great cat,
he faced his foes. The dancing recklessness was gone from his eyes.
They blazed like blue balefire; his mane bristled, his thin lips
snarled. In an instant the affair had changed from a daring game to a
battle of life and death, and Conan's savage nature responded with all
the fury of the wild.

The blacks, halted an instant by the swiftness of the episode, now made
to sweep on him and drag him down. But in that instant a shout broke
the stillness. Wheeling, the giants saw a disreputable throng crowding
the arch. The buccaneers weaved drunkenly, they swore incoherently;
they were addled and bewildered, but they grasped their swords and
advanced with a ferocity not dimmed in the slightest by the fact that
they did not understand what it was all about.

As the blacks glared in amazement, Conan yelled stridently and struck
them like a razor-edged thunderbolt. They fell like ripe grain beneath
his blade, and the Zingarans, shouting with muddled fury, ran groggily
across the court and fell on their gigantic foes with bloodthirsty
zeal. They were still dazed; emerging hazily from drugged slumber, they
had felt Sancha frantically shaking them and shoving swords into their
fists, and had vaguely heard her urging them to some sort of action.
They had not understood all she said, but the sight of strangers, and
blood streaming, was enough for them.

In an instant the court was turned into a battleground which soon
resembled a slaughterhouse. The Zingarans weaved and rocked on their
feet, but they wielded their swords with power and effect, swearing
prodigiously, and quite oblivious to all wounds except those instantly
fatal. They far outnumbered the blacks, but these proved themselves no
mean antagonists. Towering above their assailants, the giants wrought
havoc with talons and teeth, tearing out men's throats, and dealing
blows with clenched fists that crushed in skulls. Mixed and mingled in
that melee, the buccaneers could not use their superior agility to the
best advantage, and many were too stupid from their drugged sleep to
avoid blows aimed at them. They fought with a blind wild-beast
ferocity, too intent on dealing death to evade it. The sound of the
hacking swords was like that of butchers' cleavers, and the shrieks,
yells and curses were appalling.

Sancha, shrinking in the archway, was stunned by the noise and fury;
she got a dazed impression of a whirling chaos in which steel flashed
and hacked, arms tossed, snarling faces appeared and vanished, and
straining bodies collided, rebounded, locked and mingled in a devil's
dance of madness.

Details stood out briefly, like black etchings on a background of
blood. She saw a Zingaran sailor, blinded by a great flap of scalp torn
loose and hanging over his eves, brace his straddling legs and drive
his sword to the hilt in a black belly. She distinctly heard the
buccaneer grunt as he struck, and saw the victim's tawny eyes roll up
in sudden agony as blood and entrails gushed out over the driven blade.
The dying black caught the blade with his naked hands, and the sailor
tugged blindly and stupidly; then a black arm' hooked about the
Zingaran's head, a black knee was planted with cruel force in the
middle of his back. His head was jerked back at a terrible angle, and
something cracked above the noise of the fray, like the breaking of a
thick branch. The conqueror dashed his victim's body to the earth—and
as he did, something like a beam of blue light flashed across his
shoulders from behind, from right to left. He staggered, his head
toppled forward on his breast, and thence, hideously, to the earth.

Sancha turned sick. She gagged and wished to vomit She made abortive
efforts to turn and flee from the spectacle, but her legs would not
work. Nor could she close her eyes. In fact, she opened them wide.
Revolted, repelled, nauseated, yet she felt the awful fascination she
had always experienced at sight of blood. Yet this battle transcended
anything she had ever seen fought out between human beings in port
raids or sea battles. Then she saw Conan.

Separated from his mates by the whole mass of the enemy, Conan had been
enveloped in a black wave of arms and bodies, and dragged down. Then
they would quickly have stamped the life out of him, but he had pulled
down one of them with him, and the black's body protected that of the
pirate beneath him. They kicked and tore at the Barachan and dragged at
their writhing comrade, but Conan's teeth were set desperately in his
throat, and the pirate clung tenaciously to his dying shield.

An onslaught of Zingarans caused a slackening of the press, and Conan
threw aside the corpse and rose, blood-smeared and terrible. The giants
towered above him like great black shadows, clutching, buffeting the
air with terrible blows. But he was as hard to hit or grapple as a
blood-mad panther, and at every turn or flash of his blade, blood
jetted. He had already taken punishment enough to kill three ordinary
men, but his bull-like vitality was undiminished.

His war cry rose above the medley of the carnage, and the bewildered
but furious Zingarans took fresh heart and redoubled their strokes,
until the rending of flesh and the crunching of bone beneath the swords
almost drowned the howls of pain and wrath.

The blacks wavered, and broke for the gate, and Sancha squealed at
their coming and scurried out of the way. They jammed in the narrow
archway, and the Zingarans stabbed and hacked at their straining backs
with strident yelps of glee. The gate was a shambles before the
survivors broke through and scattered, each for himself.

The battle became a chase. Across grassy courts, up shimmering stairs,
over the slanting roofs of fantastic towers, even along the broad
coping of the walls, the giants fled, dripping blood at each step,
harried by their merciless pursuers as by wolves. Cornered, some of
them turned at bay and men died. But the ultimate result was always the
same—a mangled black body twitching on the sward, or hurled writhing
and twisting from parapet or tower roof.

Sancha had taken refuge in the court of the pool, where she crouched,
shaking with terror. Outside rose a fierce yelling, feet pounded the
sward, and through the arch burst a red-stained black figure. It was
the giant who wore the gemmed headband. A squat pursuer was close
behind, and the black turned, at the very brink of the pool. In his
extremity he had picked up a sword dropped by a dying sailor, and as
the Zingaran rushed recklessly at him, he struck with the unfamiliar
weapon. The buccaneer dropped with his skull crushed, but so awkwardly
the blow was dealt, the blade shivered in this last surviving giant's
hand.

He hurled the hilt at the figures which thronged the arch, and bounded
toward the pool, his face a convulsed mask of hate. Conan burst through
the men at the gate, and his feet spurned the sward in his headlong
charge.

But the giant threw his great arms wide and from his lips rang an
inhuman cry—the only sound made by a black during the entire fight. It
screamed to the sky its awful hate; it was like a voice howling from
the pits. At the sound the Zingarans faltered and hesitated, But Conan
did not pause. Silently and murderously he drove at the ebon figure
poised on the brink of the pool.

But even as his dripping sword gleamed in the air, the black wheeled
and bounded high. For a flash of an instant they saw him poised in
midair above the pool; then with an earth-shaking roar, the green
waters rose and rushed up to meet him, enveloping him in a green
volcano.

Conan checked his headlong rush just in time to keep from toppling into
the pool, and he sprang back, thrusting his men behind him with mighty
swings of his arms. The green pool was like a geyser now, the noise
rising to deafening volume as the great column of water reared and
reared, blossoming at the crest with a great crown of foam.

Conan was driving his men to the gate, herding them ahead of him,
beating them with the flat of his sword; the roar of the water-spout
seemed to have robbed them of their faculties. Seeing Sancha standing
paralyzed, staring with wide-eyed terror at the seething pillar, he
accosted her with a bellow that cut through the thunder of the water
and made her jump out of her daze. She ran to him, arms outstretched,
and he caught her up under one arm and raced out of the court.

In the court which opened on the outer world, the survivors had
gathered, weary, tattered, wounded, and blood-stained, and stood gaping
dumbly at the great unstable pillar that towered momentarily nearer the
blue vault of the sky. Its green trunk was laced with white; its
foaming crown was thrice the circumference of its base. Momentarily it
threatened to burst and fall in an engulfing torrent, yet it continued
to jet skyward.

Conan's eyes swept the bloody, tattered group, and he cursed to see
only a score. In the stress of the moment he grasped a corsair by the
neck and shook him so violently that blood from the man's wounds
spattered all near them.

"Where are the rest?" he bellowed in his victim's ear.

That's all!" the other yelled back, above the roar of the geyser. "The
others were all killed by those black———"

"Well, get out of here!" roared Conan, giving him a thrust that sent
him staggering headlong toward the outer archway. "That fountain is
going to burst in a moment——"

"We'll all be drowned!" squawked a Freebooter, limping toward the arch.

"Drowned, Hell!" yelled Conan. "We'll be turned to pieces of petrified
bone! Get out, blast you!"

He ran to the outer archway, one eye on the green roaring tower that
loomed so awfully above him, the other on stragglers. Dazed with
blood-lust, fighting, and the thunderous noise, some of the Zingarans
moved like men in a trance. Conan hurried them up; his method was
simple. He grasped loiterers by the scruff of the neck, impelled them
violently through the gate, added impetus with a lusty kick in the
rear, spicing his urgings for haste with pungent comments on the
victim's ancestry. Sancha showed an inclination to remain with him, but
he jerked away her twining arms, blaspheming luridly, and accelerated
her movements with a tremendous slap on the posterior that sent her
scurrying across the plateau.

Conan did not leave the gate until he was sure all his men who yet
lived were out of the castle and started across the level meadow. Then
he glanced again at the roaring pillar looming against the sky,
dwarfing the towers, and he too fled that castle of nameless horrors.

The Zingarans had already crossed the rim of the plateau and were
fleeing down the slopes. Sancha waited for him at the crest of the
first slope beyond the rim, and there he paused for an instant to look
back at the castle. It was as if a gigantic green-stemmed and
white-blossomed flower swayed above the towers, the roar filled the
sky. Then the jade-green and snowy pillar broke with a noise like the
rending of the skies, and walls and towers were blotted out in a
thunderous torrent.

Conan caught the girl's hand, and fled. Slope after slope rose and fell
before them, and behind sounded Ac rushing of a river. A glance over
his straining shoulder showed a broad green ribbon rising and falling
as it swept over the slopes. The torrent had not spread out and
dissipated; like a giant serpent it flowed over the depressions and the
rounded crests. It held a consistent course— it was following them.

The realization roused Conan to a greater pitch of endurance. Sancha
stumbled and went to her knees with a moaning cry of despair and
exhaustion. Catching her up, Conan tossed her over his giant shoulder
and ran on. His breast heaved, his knees trembled; his breath tore in
great gasps through his teeth. He reeled in his gait. Ahead of him he
saw the sailors toiling, spurred on by the terror that gripped him.

The ocean burst suddenly on his view, and in his swimming gaze floated
the Wastrel, unharmed. Men tumbled into the boats helter-skelter.
Sancha fell into the bottom and lay there in a crumpled heap. Conan,
though the blood thundered in his ears and the world swam red to his
gaze, took an oar with the panting sailors.

With hearts ready to burst from exhaustion, they pulled for the ship.
The green river burst through the fringe of trees. Those trees fell as
if their stems had been cat away, and as they sank into the
jade-colored flood, they vanished. The tide flowed out over the beach,
lapped at the ocean, and the waves turned a deeper, more sinister
green.

Unreasoning, instinctive fear held the buccaneers, making them urge
their agonized bodies and reeling brains to greater effort; what they
feared they knew not, but they did know that in that abominable smooth
green ribbon was a menace to body and to soul. Conan knew, and as he
saw the broad line slip into the waves and stream •through the water
toward them, without altering its shape or course, he called up his
last ounce of reserve strength so fiercely that the oar snapped in his
hands.

But their prows bumped against the timbers of the Wastrel, and the
sailors staggered up the chains, leaving the boats to drift as they
would. Sancha went up on Conan's broad shoulder, hanging limp as a
corpse, to be dumped unceremoniously on to the deck as the Barachan
took the wheel, gasping orders to his skeleton of a crew.

Throughout the affair, he had taken the lead without question, and they
had instinctively followed him. They reeled about like drunken men,
fumbling mechanically at ropes and braces. The anchor chain,
unshackled, splashed into the water, the sails unfurled and bellied in
a rising wind. The Wastrel quivered and shook herself, and swung
majestically seaward. Conan glared shoreward; like a tongue of emerald
flame, a ribbon licked out on the water futilely, an oar's length from
the Wastrels keel. It advanced no further. From that end of the tongue,
his gaze followed an unbroken stream of lambent green across the white
beach, and over the slopes, until it faded in the blue distance.

The Barachan, regaining his wind, grinned at the panting crew. Sancha
was standing near him, hysterical tears coursing down her cheeks.
Conan's breeks hung in bloodstained tatters; his girdle and sheath were
gone, his sword, driven upright into the deck beside him, was notched
and crusted with red. Blood thickly clotted his black mane, and one ear
had been half torn from his head. His arms, legs, breast and shoulders
were bitten and clawed as if by panthers. But he grinned as he braced
his powerful legs, and swung on the wheel in sheer exuberance of
muscular might.

"What now?" faltered the girl.

"The plunder of the seas!" he laughed. "A paltry crew, and that chewed
and clawed to pieces, but they can work the ship, and crews can always
be found. Come here, girl, and give me a lass."

"A kiss?" she cried hysterically. "You think of kisses at a time like
this?"

His laughter boomed above the snap and thunder of the sails, as he
caught her up off her feet in the crook of one mighty arm, and smacked
her red lips with resounding relish.

"I think of life!" he roared. "The dead are dead, and what has passed
is done! I have a ship and a fighting crew and a girl with lips like
wine, and that's all I ever asked.

Lick your wounds, bullies, and break out a cask of ale. You're going to
work ship as she never was worked before. Dance and sing while you
buckle to it, damn you! To the Devil with empty seas! We're bound for
waters where the seaports are fat, and the merchant ships are crammed
with plunder!"