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Conan the Wanderer by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague DeCamp, and Lin
Cater
==================================================================

CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION, by L Sprague de Camp 9

BLACK TEARS, by L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter 13

SHADOWS IN ZAMBOULA, by Robert L Howard 48

THE DEVIL IN IRON, by Robert E. Howard 85

THE FLAME KNIFE, by Robert E Howard and L. Sprague de Camp 124

Pages 6 & 7: A map of the world of Conan in the Hyborian Age, based
upon notes and sketches by Robert E. Howard and upon previous maps by
P. Schuykr Miller, John D. Clark, David Kyle, and L. Sprague de Camp,
with a map of Europe and adjacent regions superimposed for reference.

[IMAGE][IMAGE]


Introduction
------------

Robert E. Howard (1906-36), the creator of Conan, was born in Peaster,
Texas, and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of
Texas. During his short life (which ended in suicide at the age of
thirty) Howard turned out a large volume of popular fiction: sport,
detective, Western, historical, adventure, science fiction, weird, and
ghost stories, besides his verse and his many fantasies. Of his several
series of heroic fantasies, the most popular have been the Conan
stories. Eighteen of these were published in Howard's lifetime; eight
others, from mere fragments and outlines to complete manuscripts, have
been found among his papers since 1950. The incomplete stories have
been completed by my colleague Lin Carter and myself.

In addition, in the early 1950s, I rewrote four unpublished Howard
manuscripts of Oriental adventure, with medieval and modem settings, to
convert them into Conan stories by changing names, deleting
anachronisms, and introducing a supernatural element. This did not
prove hard, since Howard's heroes are pretty much cut from the same
cloth, and the resulting stories are still about three-quarters or
four-fifths Howard.

Of these, the story The Flame Knife is the longest Howard originally
wrote it in 1934 as a 42,000-word novella of adventure in modern
Afghanistan, called "Three-Bladed Doom." The hero was Francis X.
Cordon, one of Howard's large fictional family of brawny, brawling
Irish adventurers and the hero of several published stories of Oriental
adventure. In "Three-Bladed Doom," the cult exposed by the hero is a
modern revival of the medieval Assassins. When the original version
failed to sell, Howard in 1935 rewrote it to a length of 24,000 words;
but that version likewise failed to find a market The story showed the
influence of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. The present collaborative
version, with 31,000 words, is intermediate in length between Howard's
two original versions.

Carter and I have also written several pastiches, based upon hints in
Howard's notes and letters, to fill up gaps in the saga. "Black Tears,"
in the present volume, is one of these.

All these stories belong to a sub-genre of imaginative fiction that
connoisseurs call "heroic fantasy," or, sometimes,
"swordplay-and-sorcery fiction." Such a story is laid in an imaginary
ancient or medieval setting—perhaps this world as it is supposed to
have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or on
another planet, or in another dimension—where magic works and modern
technology has not yet been discovered. Examples of the genre—outside
the Conan stories—are E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, J. R. R.
Tolkien's trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Fletcher Pratt's The Well of
the Unicorn, and Fritz Leiber's stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
When well done, stories of this kind provide the purest fun of fiction
of any kind.

Of the several larger-than-life characters who stride through Howard's
pages, Conan the Cimmerian is his hero of heroes. Conan lived, loved,
and moved in Howard's imaginary Hyborian Age, about twelve thousand
years ago, between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginnings of
recorded history. A gigantic barbarian adventurer from the bleak,
backward northern land of Cimmeria,

Conan brawled and battled his way across half the world of his time,
wading through rivers of gore and overcoming foes both natural and
supernatural to become, at last, king of the mighty Hyborian kingdom of
Aquilonia.

Arriving as a raw, hulking, lawless youth in the kingdom of Zamora (see
the map), Conan for a few years made a precarious living there and in
the neighboring lands as a thief. Tiring 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 over a woman with a superior officer, Conan
fled from Turan. After an unsuccessful try at treasure-hunting in
Zamora and a brief visit to his Cimmerian homeland, he embarked upon
the career of mercenary soldier in the Hyborian kingdoms. Circumstances
—violent as usual—made him a pirate along the coasts of Kush, with a
Shemitish she-pirate, Belit, as his partner and a crew of bloodthirsty
black corsairs. After Belit was slain, he became the chief of a black
tribe, then served as a mercenary in Shem and among the most southerly
Hyborian nations.

Later still, Conan appeared as a leader among the kozaki, a horde of
outlaws who roamed the steppes between the Hyborian lands and Turan. He
captained a pirate craft on the great inland Sea of Vilayet.

While serving as captain of the royal guard of Queen Taramis of
Khauran, Conan was captured by the queen's enemies, who crucified him.
When a vulture flew down to try to peck his eyes out, Conan bit the
bird's head off. (You can't have a tougher hero than that.) Olgerd
Vladislav, Zaporoskan leader of a band of Zuagirs, the nomadic,
desert-dwelling eastern Shemites, happened upon Conan at this juncture
and rescued him—for his own purposes—from the cross. When friction
arose between Conan and Olgerd, the hard-bitten Cimmerian ruthlessly
ousted Olgerd from the leadership of the band, which—after overthrowing
the enemies of Queen Taramis and restoring her to her throne—he led off
eastward to plunder the Turanians. At that point, the present story
begins.

Because of legal complications, it was not possible to publish the
books of Lancer Books' present Conan series in chronological order. A
total of eleven or twelve books are planned, of which more than half
have already been published. When the series is complete, this will be
the fourth volume, following Conan the Freebooter and preceding Conan
the Adventurer. A list of the volumes of the series in chronological
order is given on the page before the title page of this volume.

Readers who wish to know more about Conan, Howard, or heroic fantasy in
general are referred to two periodicals and one book. One periodical is
Amra, published by George H. Scithers, Box 9120, Chicago, 111, 60690;
this is the organ of the Hyborian Legion, a loose group of admirers of
heroic fantasy and of the Conan stories in particular. The other
periodical is The Howard Collector published by Glenn Lord, literary
agent for the Howard estate, Box 775, Pasadena, Texas, 77501; this is
devoted to articles, stories, and poems by and about Howard. The book
is The Conan Reader, by the present writer, published by Jack L.
Chalker, 5111 Liberty Heights Ave., Baltimore, Md, 21207; this consists
of articles on Howard, Conan, and heroic fantasy previously published
in Amra, I also listed many works by Howard and sword-and-sorcery
stories by other writers in my introduction to the volume Conan of the
present series.

L. Sprague de Camp

After the events narrated in "A Witch Shall Be Born" (in Conan the
Freebooter), Conan leads his band of Zuagirs eastward to raid the
cities and caravans of the Turanians. He is about thirty-one years old
at his time and at the height of his physical powers. He spends,
altogether, nearly two years with the desert Shemites, first as Olgerd
lieutenant and then as their sole chieftain. But the fierce and
energetic King Yezdigerd reacts swiftly to Conan's pinpricks; he sends
out a strong force to entrap him.


Black Tears
-----------

1. The Jaws of the Trap.

The noonday sun blazed down from the fiery dome of the sky. The harsh,
dry sands of Shan-e-Sorkh, the Red Waste, baked in the pitiless blaze
as in a giant oven. Naught moved in the still air; the few thorny
shrubs that crowned the low, gravel-strewn hills, which rose in a wall
at the edge of the Waste, stirred not.

Neither did the soldiers who crouched behind them, watching the trail.

Here some primeval conflict of natural forces had riven a cleft through
the escarpment Ages of erosion had widened this cleft, but it still
formed a narrow pass between steep slopes—a perfect site for an ambush.

The troop of Turanian soldiery had lain hidden atop the hills all
through the hot morning hours. Sweltering in their tunics of chain and
scale mail, they crouched on sore hams and aching knees. Cursing under
his breath, their captain, the Amir Boghra Khan, endured the long,
uncomfortable vigil with them. His throat was as dry as sun-baked
leather; within his mail, his body stewed. In this accursed land of
death and blazing sun, a man could not even sweat comfortably; the
desiccated desert air greedily drank up every drop of moisture, leaving
one as dry as the withered tongue of a Stygian mummy.

Now the amir blinked and rubbed his eyes, squinting against the glare
to see again that tiny flash of light. A forward scout, concealed
behind a dune of red sand, caught the sun in his mirror and flashed a
signal toward his chief, hidden atop the hills.

Now a cloud of dust could be seen. The portly, black-bearded Turanian
nobleman grinned and forgot his discomfort. Surely his traitorous
informant had truly earned the bribe it took to buy him!

Soon, Boghra Khan could discern the long line of Zuagir warriors, robed
in flowing white khalats and mounted on slender desert steeds. As the
band of desert marauders emerged from the cloud of dust raised by the
hoofs of their horses, the Turanian lord could even make out the dark,
lean, hawk-faced visages of his quarry, framed by their flowing
headdresses—so clear was the desert air and so bright the sun.
Satisfaction seethed through his veins like red wine of Aghrapur from
young King Yezdigerd's private cellars.

For years, now, this outlaw band had harried and looted towns and
trading posts and caravan stations along the borders of Turan—first
under that blackhearted Zaporoskan rogue, Olgerd Vladislav; then, a
little more than a year ago, by his successor, Conan. At last, Turanian
spies in villages friendly to the outlaw band had found a corruptible
member of that band—one Vardanes, not a Zuagir but a Zamorian. Vardanes
had been a blood brother to Olgerd, whom Conan had overthrown, and was
hungry for vengeance against the stranger who had usurped the
chieftainship.

Boghra thoughtfully tugged his beard. The Zamorian traitor was a
smiling, laughing villain, dear to a Turanian heart Small, lean, lithe,
and swaggering, handsome and reckless as a young god, Vardanes was an
amusing drinking companion and a devilish fighter but as cold-hearted
and untrustworthy as an adder.

Now the Zuagirs were passing through the defile. And there, at the head
of the outriders, rode Vardanes on a prancing black mare. Boghra Khan
raised a hand to warn his men to be ready. He wanted to let as many as
possible of the Zuagirs enter the pass before closing the trap upon
them. Only Vardanes was to be allowed through. The moment he was beyond
the walls of sandstone, Boghra brought his hand down with a chopping
motion.

"Slay the dogs!" he thundered, rising.

A hail of hissing arrows fell slanting through the sunlight like a
deadly rain. In a second, the Zuagirs were a turmoil of shouting men
and bucking horses. Flight after flight of arrows raked them. Men fell,
clutching at feathered shafts, which sprouted as by magic from their
bodies. Horses screamed as keen barbs gashed their dusty flanks.

Dust rose in a choking cloud, veiling the pass below. So thick it
became that Boghra Khan halted his archers for a moment, lest they
waste their shafts in the murk. And that momentary twinge of thrift was
his undoing. For out of the clamor rose one deep, bellowing voice,
dominating the chaos.

"Up the slopes and at them!"

It was the voice of Conan. An instant later, the giant form of the
Cimmerian himself came charging up the steep slope on a huge, fiery
stallion. One might think that only a fool or a madman would charge
straight up a steep slope of drifting sand and crumbling rock into the
teeth of his foe, but Conan was neither. True, he was wild with
ferocious lust for revenge, but behind his grim, dark face and
smouldering eyes, like blue flames under scowling black brows, the
sharp wit of a seasoned warrior was at work. He knew that often the
only road through an ambush is the unexpected.

Astonished, the Turanian warriors let bows slacken as they stared.
Clawing and scrambling up the steep slopes of the sides of the pass,
out of the dust-clouded floor of the defile, came a howling mob of
frenzied Zuagirs, afoot and mounted, straight at them. In an instant
the desert warriors—more numerous than the amir had expected— came
roaring over the crest, scimitars flashing, cursing and shrieking
bloodthirsty war cries.

Before them all came the giant form of Conan. Arrows had ripped his
white khalat, exposing the glittering black mail that clad his
lion-thewed torso. His wild, unshorn mane streamed out from under his
steel cap like a tattered banner, a chance shaft had torn away his
flowing kaffia. On a wild-eyed stallion, he was upon them like some
demon of myth. He was armed not with the tulwar of the desert folk but
with a great, cross-hilted western broadsword—his favorite among the
many weapons of which he was master. In his scarred fist, this length
of whirling, mirror-bright steel cut a scarlet path through the
Turanians. It rose and fell, spraying scarlet droplets into the desert
air. At every stroke it clove armor and flesh and bone, smashing in a
skull here, lopping a limb there, hurling a third victim mangled and
prone with ribs crushed in.

By the end of a short, swift half-hour it was all over. No Turanians
survived the onslaught save a few who had fled early—and their leader.
With his robe torn away and his face bloody, the limping and disheveled
amir was led before Conan, who sat on his panting steed, "wiping the
gore from his steel with a dead man's khalat.

Conan fixed the wilted lordling with a scornful glance, not unmixed
with sardonic humor.

"So, Boghra, we meet again!" he growled.

The amir blinked with disbelief. "You!" he gasped.

Conan chuckled. A decade before, as a wandering young vagabond, the
Cimmerian had served in the mercenaries of Turan. He had left King
Yildiz's standards rather hurriedly over a little matter of an
officer's mistress—so hurriedly, in fact, that he had failed to settle
a gambling wager with the same amir who stood astonished before him
now. Then, as the merry young scion of a noble house, Boghra Khan and
Conan had been comrades in many an escapade from gaming table to
drinking shop and bawdy house. Now, years older, the same Boghra gaped
up, crushed in battle by an old comrade whose name he had somehow never
connected with that of the terrible leader of the desert tribesmen.

Conan raked him with narrowing eyes. "You were awaiting us here,
weren't you?" he growled.

The amir sagged. He did not wish to give information to the outlaw
leader, even if they were old drinking companions. But he had heard too
many grim tales of the Zuagirs' bloody methods of wringing information
from captives. Fat and soft from years of princely living, the Turanian
officer feared he could not long keep silent under such pressure.

Surprisingly, his cooperation was not needed. Conan had seen Vardanes,
who had curiously requested the post of advance scout that morning,
spur ahead through the further end of the pass just before the trap had
been sprung.

"How much did you pay Vardanes?" Conan demanded suddenly.

"Two hundred silver shekels…" the Turanian mumbled. Then he broke off,
astonished at his own indiscretion. Conan laughed.

"A princely bribe, eh? That smiling rogue—like every Zamorian,
treacherous to the bottom of his rotten black heart! He's never
forgiven me for unseating Olgerd." Conan broke off, leveling a
quizzical glance at the bowed head of the amir. He grinned, not
unkindly. "Nay, berate yourself not, Boghra. You did not betray your
military secrets; I tricked you out of them. You can ride back to
Aghrapur with your soldierly honor intact."

Boghra lifted his head with astonishment. "You will let me live?" he
croaked.

Conan nodded. "Why not? I still owe you a bag of gold from that old
wager, so let me settle the debt this way. But next time, Boghra, have
a care how you set traps for wolves. Sometimes you catch a tiger!"

2. The Land of Ghosts.

Two days of hard riding through the red sands of Shan-e-Sorkh, and
still the desert marauders had not caught up with the traitor. Thirsty
for the sight of Vardanes' blood, Conan pressed his men hard. The cruel
code of the desert demanded the Death of Five Stakes for the man who
betrayed his comrades, and Conan was determined to see the Zamorian pay
that price.

On the evening of the second day, they made camp in the shelter of a
hillock of parched sandstone, which thrust up from the rust-colored
sands like the stump of some ruined ancient tower. Conan's hard face,
burnt almost black by the desert sun, was lined with fatigue. His
stallion panted at the edge of exhaustion, slobbering through frothy
lips as he set the water bag to the animal's muzzle. Behind him, men
stretched weary legs and aching arms. They watered the horses and lit a
campfire to keep the wild desert dogs away. He heard the creak of ropes
as saddlebags disgorged tents and cooking equipment.

Sand crunched under a sandaled heel behind him. He turned to see the
lined, bewhiskered face of one of his lieutenants. This was Gomer, a
sloe-eyed, hook-nosed Shemite with greasy, blue-black ringlets escaping
from the folds of his headdress.

"Well?" growled Conan as he rubbed down the tired stallion with long,
slow strokes of a stiff brush.

The Shemite shrugged. "He's still making a straight path to the
southwest," he said. "The black-hearted devil must be made of iron."

Conan laughed harshly. "His mare may be iron, but not Vardanes. He's
flesh and blood, as you shall see when we spread him out to the stakes
and slit his guts for the vultures!"

Gomer's sad eyes were haunted by a vague fear. "Conan, will you not
give over this quest? Each day takes us deeper into this land of sun
and sand, where only vipers and scorpions can live. By Dagon's tail,
unless we turn back, we shall leave our bones here to bleach forever!"

"Not so," grunted the Cimmerian. "If any bones are left to bleach here,
they'll be Zamorian. Don't fret, Gomer; we'll catch up to the traitor
yet. Tomorrow, perhaps. He can't keep up this pace forever."

"Nor can we!" Gomer protested. He paused, feeling Conan's smoldering
blue gaze searching his face.

"But that's not all that's eating at your heart, is it?" demanded
Conan. "Speak up, man. Out with it!"

The burly Shemite shrugged eloquently. "Well, no. I —the men feel—" His
voice trailed away.

"Speak, man or I'll kick it out of you!"

"This—this is the Makan-e-Mordan!" Gomer burst out "I know. I've heard
of this 'Place of Ghosts' before. So what? Are you afraid of old
crones' fables?"

Gomer looked unhappy. "They are not just fables, Conan. You are no
Zuagir; you do not know this land and its tenors, as do we who have
long dwelt in the wilderness. For thousands of years, this land has
been a cursed and haunted place, and with every hour that we ride, we
go deeper into this evil land. The men fear to tell you, but they are
half mad with terror."

"With childish superstition, you mean," snarled Conan. "I know they've
been quaking in their boots over legends of ghosts and goblins. I've
heard stories of this country, too, Gomer. But they are only tales to
frighten babes, not warriors! Tell your comrades to beware. My wrath is
stronger than all the ghosts that ever died!"

"But, Conan!"

Conan cut him off with a coarse word. "Enough of your childish night
fears, Shemite! I have sworn by Crom and Mitra that I will have the
blood of that Zamorian traitor or die trying! And if I have to scatter
a little Zuagir blood along the way, I'll not scruple to do so. Now
cease yammering and come share a bottle with me. My throat's as dry as
this blasted desert, and all this talk dries it out the more."

Clapping Gomer on the shoulder, Conan strode away toward the campfire,
where the men were unpacking stores of smoked meat, dried figs and
dates, goat cheese, and leathern bottles of wine.

But the Shemite did not rejoin the Cimmerian at once. He stood long,
gazing after the swaggering chieftain he had followed for nearly two
years, ever since they had found Conan crucified near the walls of
Khauran. Conan had been a guard captain in the service of Queen Taramis
of Khauran until her throne was usurped by the witch Salome, leagued
with Constantius the Falcon, the Kothic voivode of the Free Companies.

When Conan, realizing the substitution, took his stand with Taramis and
was defeated, Constantius had him crucified outside the city. By
chance, Olgerd Vladislav, chief of the local band of Zuagir outlaws,
had come riding by and had cut Conan down from his cross, saying that
if he survived his wounds he might join their band. Conan not only
survived but also proved so able a leader that in time he ousted Olgerd
from the band, which he had led from this day to this.

But this was the end of his leadership. Gomer of Akkharia sighed
deeply. Conan had ridden before them for the last two days, sunk in his
own grim lust for revenge. He did not realize the depth of the passion
in the hearts of the Zuagirs. Gomer knew that, although they loved
Conan, their superstitious terrors had driven them to the brink of
mutiny and murder. To the scarlet gates of Hell they might follow the
Cimmerian—but no further into the Land of Ghosts.

The Shemite idolized his chieftain. But, knowing that no threat would
swerve the Cimmerian from the path of vengeance, he could think of but
one way to save Conan from the knives of his own men. From a pocket in
his white khalat he withdrew a small, stoppered phial of green powder.
Secreting it in his palm, he rejoined Conan by the campfire, to share a
bottle of wine with him.

3. Invisible Death.

When Conan awoke, the sun was high. Heat waves shimmered across the
barren sands. The air was hot and still and dry, as if the heavens were
an inverted brazen bowl heated to incandescence.

Conan staggered to his knees and clutched his throbbing brow. His
aching skull felt as if he had been clubbed.

He lurched to his feet and stood swaying. Through bleary eyes, squinted
against the glare, he looked slowly about him. He was alone in this
cursed, waterless land.

He croaked a curse on the superstitious Zuagirs. The entire troop had
decamped, taking with them all the gear, the horses, and the
provisions. Two goatskin water bags lay beside him. These, his mail
shirt and khalat, and his broadsword were all that his erstwhile
comrades had left him.

He fell to his knees again and pulled the stopper from one of the water
bags. Swirling the lukewarm fluid about, he rinsed the vile taste from
his mouth and drank sparingly, reluctantly replacing the stopper before
his fiery thirst was half assuaged. Although he longed to up-end the
bag over his aching head, reason asserted its dominance. If he were
lost in this sandy waste, every drop would be needed for survival.

Through the blinding headache and the groggy state of his wits, he
could see what must have occurred. His Zuagirs were more fearful of
this dubious realm than he had supposed, despite Gomer's warnings. He
had made a serious—perhaps a fatal—error. He had underestimated the
power of superstition over his desert warriors and overestimated his
power to control and dominate them. With a dull groan, Conan cursed his
own arrogant, bull-headed pride. Unless he learned better, it might
some day be the death of him.

And perhaps this was the day. He took a long, stony look at his
chances. They seemed slim. He had water for two days on short
rations—three, if he would risk madness by limiting his intake further.
No food and no horse, which meant he must wend afoot.

Well then, on he would go. But whither? The obvious answer was: back
the way he had come. But there were arguments against that course. Of
these, the most eloquent was that of distance. They had ridden for two
days after leaving the last water hole. A man on foot could travel at
best at only half the speed of a horse. For him, then, to return by the
route they had come would mean he must travel for at least two full
days without any water at all…

Conan rubbed his jaw reflectively, trying to forget the throbbing in
his skull and to cudgel some sense out of his groggy wits. Retracing
his steps would not be the best idea, for he knew there was no water
closer than four days' march away.

He looked ahead, where the trail of the fleeing Vardanes stretched
straight from this place to the horizon.

Perhaps he should continue to follow the Zamorian. While the path led
into unknown country, the mere fact that the land was unknown was in
its favor. An oasis might lie just beyond the nearest dunes. It was
hard to reach a sensible decision under such circumstances, but Conan
resolved upon what seemed the wiser course. Girding his khalat about
his mailed form and slinging his sword across his shoulders, he strode
off along Vardanes' track, the water bags slapping against his back.

The sun hung forever in a sky of burning brass. It blazed down like a
fiery eye in the brow of some colossal cyclops, gazing upon the tiny,
slow-moving figure that trudged across the baking surface of the
crimson sands. It took forever for the afternoon sun to glide down the
vast, empty curve of the sky, to die on the flaming funeral pyre of the
west Then purple evening stole on shadowy wings across the vault of the
heavens, and a trace of blessed coolness crept across the dunes, with
soft shadows and a light breeze.

By then, Conan's leg muscles were beyond pain. Fatigue had numbed the
ache in them, and he stumbled forward on limbs like stone columns
animated by sorcery.

His great head was bowed on his massive chest He plodded on numbly,
needing rest but driven by the knowledge that now, in the coolness of
evening, he could make the most distance with the least discomfort.

His throat was caked with dust; his swarthy visage was dusted brick-red
with a mask of desert sand. He had drunk a mouthful an hour ago and
would drink no more until it became so dark that he could no longer see
to follow Vardanes' trail.

His dreams that night were turgid and confused, filled with shaggy
nightmare figures with one glaring eye in their bestial brows, who beat
his naked body with whips of red-hot chain.

When he blinked awake, he found the sun already high and another hot
day before him. It was agony to rise. Every muscle throbbed as if tiny
needles had been thrust deep into his tissues. But rise he did, to
drink lightly and go forward.

Soon he lost track of time, but still the tireless engine of his will
drove him on, step after staggering step. His mind wandered away into
shadowy bypaths of delusion. But still he held three thoughts before
him: to follow the trail of hoofprints, to save water stringently, and
to stay on his feet. If once he fell, he knew he would be unable to
rise again. And if he fell during the scorching day, his bones would
desiccate and whiten amidst these scarlet wastes for ages to come.

4. The Deathless Queen.

Vardanes of Zamora halted at the crest of the hills and stared down at
a sight so strange that it struck him dumb. For five days, since the
botched ambush against the Zuagirs had rebounded upon the Turanians, he
had ridden like a madman, scarcely daring to snatch an hour or two of
rest for himself and his mare. A terror so great that it robbed the
very manhood from within him goaded him on.

Well did he know the vengeance of the desert outlaws. His imagination
was filled with sickening scenes of the price the grim avengers would
exact from his body if ever he fell into their hands. Thus, when he saw
that the ambush had failed, he had galloped straight out into the
desert. He knew that devil, Conan, would flay the traitor's name from
Boghra Khan and then would come howling on his heels with a
bloodthirsty mob of Zuagirs. Nor would they easily give up the quest of
their treacherous former comrade.

His one slim chance had been to head out into the trackless reaches of
Shan-e-Sorkh. Although Vardanes was a city-bred Zamorian of culture and
sophistication, the fortunes of his age had flung him in with the
desert outlaws, and he knew them well. He knew they dreaded the very
name of the Red Waste and that their savage imaginations peopled it
with every monster and devil ever dreamed of. Why the desert tribesmen
feared the Red Waste so terribly he neither knew nor cared, so long as
their fear would keep them from following him very far into that deadly
desert.

But they had not turned back. His lead on them was so slight that, day
after day, he could see the clouds of dust raised by the Zuagir
horsemen behind him. He pressed ahead with every moment, eating and
drinking in the saddle and pushing his mount to the verge of exhaustion
in order to widen that narrow gap.

After five days, he knew not whether they were still on his track; but
soon it mattered little. He had exhausted the food and water for
himself and his mare and pressed on in the faint hope of finding a
water hole in this endless waste.

His horse, caked with dry mud where desert dust had stuck to lathered
sides, staggered forward like a dead thing driven by a sorcerer's will.
Now it was near to death. Seven times this day it had fallen, and only
the lash of the whip had driven it to its feet again. Since it could no
longer support his weight, Vardanes walked, leading it by its rein.

The Red Waste had taken a fearful toll of Vardanes himself. Once
handsome as a laughing young god, he was now a gaunt, sunblackened
skeleton. Bloodshot eyes glared through matted, stringy locks. Through
cracked, swollen lips he mumbled mindless prayers to Ishtar, Set,
Mitra, and a score of other deities. As he and his trembling steed
lurched to the crest of yet another row of dunes, he looked down and
saw a lush green valley, dotted with clumps of emerald-green date
palms.

Amid this fertile vale lay a small, walled city of stone. Bulging domes
and squat guard towers rose above a stuccoed wall, wherein was set a
great gate whose polished bronzen hinges redly reflected the sun.

A city in this scorching waste? A lush valley of cool, green trees and
soft lawns and limped lotus pools, in the heart of this bleak
wilderness? Impossible!

Vardanes shuddered, shut his eyes, and licked his cracked lips. It must
be a mirage, or a phantom of his disordered wits! Yet a shard of
half-forgotten lore, gleaned from his youthful studies long ago, came
back to him. It was a fragment of legend called Akhlat the Accursed.

He strove to recover that thread of memory. It had been in an old
Stygian book, which his Shemite tutor kept locked in a sandalwood
chest. Even as a bright-eyed lad, Vardanes had been blessed or cursed
with greed, curiosity, and nimble fingers. One dark night, he had
picked that lock and pored with mingled awe and loathing through the
portentous pages of that dark grimoire of elder necromancy. Penned in a
spidery hand on pages of dragon parchment, the text described strange
rites and ceremonies. The pages crawled with cryptic hieroglyphs from
elder kingdoms of sorcerous evil, like Acheron and Lemuria, which had
flourished and fallen in time's dawn.

Among the pentacle-crowded pages had been fragments of some dark
liturgy designed to draw down undying demon-things from dark realms
beyond the stars, from the chaos that ancient mages said reigned beyond
the borders of the cosmos. One of these liturgies contained cryptic
references to "devil-cursed and demon-haunted Akhlat in the Red Waste,
where power-mad sorcerers of yore called down to this earthly sphere a
Demon from Beyond, to their unending sorrow … Akhlat, where the Undying
One rules with a hand of horror to this very day… doomed, accursed
Akhlat, which the very gods spurned, transforming all the realm round
about into a burning waste …"

Vardanes was still sitting in the sand by the head of his panting mare
when grim-faced warriors seized him and bore him down from the ring of
stony hills that encircled the city—down into the garden valley of date
palms and lotus pools—down to the gates of Akhlat the Accursed.

5. The Hand of Zillah.

Conan roused slowly, but this time it was different. Before, his
awakening had been painful, prying gummed lids open to squint at the
fiery sun, hoisting himself slowly erect to stagger forward across
broiling sands.

This time he awoke easily, with a blissful sensation of repletion and
comfort. Silken pillows lay beneath his head. Thick awnings with
tasseled fringes kept the sun from his body, which was clean and naked
save for a fresh loincloth of white linen.

He sprang instantly to full alertness, like an animal whose survival in
the wild depends upon this ability. He stared about with unbelieving
eyes. His first thought was that death had claimed him at last and that
his spirit had been borne beyond the clouds to the primitive paradise
where Crom, the god of his people, sat enthroned amid a thousand
heroes.

Beside his silken couch lay a silver ewer, filled with fresh, clear
water.

Moments later, Conan lifted his dripping face from the ewer and knew
that whatever paradise he was in, it was real and physical. He drank
deep, although the state of his throat and mouth told him that he was
no longer racked with the burning thirst of his desert trek. Some
caravan must have found him and borne him to these tents for healing
and succor. Looking down, Conan saw that his limbs and torso had been
washed clean of desert dust and smeared with soothing salve. Whoever
his rescuers might be, they had fed and cherished him while he raved
and slumbered his way toward recovery.

He peered around the tent. His great broadsword lay across an ebony
chest. He padded toward it on silent feet, like some wary jungle
cat—then froze as he heard the tinkle of a warrior's harness behind
him.

The musical sound, however, came from no warrior but from a slim,
fawn-eyed girl who had just entered the tent and stood staring. Dark,
shining hair fell unbound to her waist, and tiny silver bells were
threaded through these tresses. Thence had come the faint tinkle.

Conan took in the girl in one swift glance: young, scarcely more than a
child, slim and lovely, with a pale body that gleamed enticingly
through gauzy veils. Jewels glistened on her slim, white hands. From
the golden bangles on her brow and the look of her large, dark eyes,
Conan guessed her to be of some folk akin to the Shemites.

"Oh!" she cried. "You are too weak to stand! You must rest some more to
regain your strength." Her language was a dialect of Shemitish, full of
archaic forms but close enough to the Shemitish that Conan knew for him
to understand.

"Nonsense, girl, I'm fit enough," he replied in the same tongue. "Was
it you who tended me here? How long since you found me?"

"Nay, strange lord, 'twas my father. I am Zillah the daughter of Enosh,
a lord of Akhlat the Accursed. We found your body amid the everlasting
sands of the Waste three days past," she replied, veiling her eyes with
silken lashes.

Gods! he thought, but this was a fair wench. Conan had seen no woman in
weeks, and he frankly studied the swelling contours of her lithe body,
scarcely hidden by the gauzy veils. A trace of scarlet rose to her
cheeks.

"So your pretty hand tended me, eh, Zillah?" he said. "My thanks to you
and your sire for this mercy. I was close enough to death, I'll
warrant. How did you chance upon me?" He strove without success to
recall any city by the name of Akhlat the Accursed, although he thought
he knew every city of the southern deserts, by repute if not by an
actual visit.

"It was not by chance; indeed, we came in search of you," said Zillah.

Conan's eyes narrowed as his nerves tingled to the sense of danger.
Something in the sudden hardening of his grim, impassive face told the
girl that he was a man of swift animal passions, a dangerous man unlike
the soft, milda townsmen she had known.

"We meant you no harm!" she protested, lifting one slim hand
defensively. "But follow me, sir, and my sire will explain all things
to you."

For a moment, Conan stood tense, wondering if Vardanes had set these
people on his trail. The silver he had carried off from the Turanians
should be enough to buy the souls of half a hundred Shemites.

Then he relaxed, deliberately calming the blood lust that rose within
him. He took up his sword and slung the baldric over his shoulder.

"Then take me to this Enosh, lass," he said calmly. "I would hear his
tale."

She led him from the chamber. Conan squared his naked shoulders and
padded after her.

6. The Thing from Beyond.

Enosh was poring over a wrinkled, time-faded scroll in a high-backed
chair of black wood, as Zillah conducted Conan into his presence. This
part of the tent was hung with dark purple cloth; thick carpets muffled
the tread of their feet On a coiling stand composed of intertwined
serpents of glinting brass, a black minor of curious design reposed.
Eery lights flickered in its ebon depths.

Enosh rose and greeted Conan with courtly phrases. He was a tall,
elderly man, lean but straight His pate was covered with a headdress of
snowy linen, his face was lined with age and creased with thought, and
his dark eyes were weary with ancient sorrow.

He bade his guest be seated and commanded Zillah to bring wine. When
the formalities were over, Conan asked abruptly: "How did you come to
find me, O shaykh?"

Enosh glanced at the black mirror. "Whilst I am no fell sorcerer, my
son, I can make use of some means not altogether natural."

"How is it that you were looking for me?"

Enosh lifted a thin, blue-veined hand to quiet the warrior's
suspicions. "Be patient, my friend, and I will explain all," he said in
his quiet, deep-toned voice. Reaching to a low tabouret, he set aside
his scroll and accepted a silver cup of wine.

When they had drunk, the old man began his tale: "Ages ago, a wily
sorcerer of this land of Akhlat conceived of a plot against the ancient
dynasty that had ruled in this place since the fall of Atlantis," he
said slowly. "With cunning words, he made the people think their
monarch —a weak, self-indulgent man—was their foe, and the people rose
and trampled the foolish king into the mire. Setting himself up as a
priest and prophet of the Unknown Gods, the sorcerer pretended to
divine inspiration. He averred that one of the gods would soon descend
to earth to rule over Akhlat the Holy—as it was called—in person."

Conan snorted. "You Akhlatim, it seems, are no less gullible than the
other nations I have seen."

The old man smiled wearily. "It is always easy to believe what one
wishes to be true. But the plan of this black sorcerer was more
terrible than any could dream. With vile and nameless rites, he
conjured into this plane of existence a demoness from Outside, to serve
as goddess to the people. Retaining his sorcerous control over this
being, he presented himself as the interpreter of her divine will.
Struck with awe, the people of Akhlat soon groaned beneath a tyranny
far worse than that which they had suffered from the old dynasty."

Conan smiled wolfishly. "I have seen that revolutions often throw up
worse governments than those they replace."

"Perhaps. At any rate, this one did. And in time matters became even
grimmer; for the sorcerer lost control over the demoniac Thing he had
summoned down from Beyond, and it destroyed him and ruled in his place.
And it rules to this very day," he concluded softly.

Conan started. "The creature is immortal, then? How long ago was this?"

"More years have passed than these wastes have grains of sand," said
Enosh. "And still the goddess rules supreme in sad Akhlat The secret of
her power is such that she leaches the life force from living
creatures. All this land about us was once green and fair, lush with
date palms along the streams and grassy hills whereon the fat herds
pastured. Her vampiric thirst for life has drained the land dry, save
for the valley wherein the city of Akhlat stands. That she has spared,
for without living things to drain to dry, lifeless husks, she cannot
sustain herself on this plane of being."

"Crom!" whispered Conan, draining his wine cup.

For centuries, now," Enosh continued, "this land has been transformed
into a dead and sterile waste. Our young go to slake the dark thirst of
the goddess, as do the beasts of our flocks. She feeds daily. Each day
she chooses a victim, and each day they dwindle and lessen. When she
attacks one victim incessantly, day after day, he may last but a few
days or he may linger half a moon. The strongest and bravest endure for
as many as thirty days before she exhausts their store of life force
and must begin on the next."

Conan fondled the hilt of his sword. "Crom and Mitra, man, why have you
not slain this thing?"

The old man wearily shook his head. "She is invulnerable, unkillable,"
he said softly. "Her flesh is composed of matter drawn to her and held
together by the goddess's unconquerable will. An arrow or a sword could
but wound that flesh: it is a trifling matter for her to repair the
injury. And the life force she drinks from others, leaving them dry
husks, gives her a terrible store of inner strength from which to
remold her flesh anew."

"Bum the thing," Conan growled. "Burn the palace down about her head,
or cut her into little pieces for the flames of a bonfire to devour!"

"No. She shields herself with dark powers of hellish magic. Her weapon
transfixes into paralysis all she looks upon. As many as a hundred
warriors have crept into the J Black Temple, determined to end this
grim tyranny. Naught was left of them but a living forest of motionless
men, who served in turn as human banquets for the insatiable monster."

Conan stirred restlessly. 'Tis a wonder that any of you still dwell in
this accursed land!" he rumbled. "How has this damnable leech not
drained every last human being in this valley dry long since? And why
have you not bundled your belongings and fled from this demon-haunted
place?"

"In truth, very few of us are left; she consumes us and our beasts
faster than their natural increase can make up the loss. For ages, the
demoness sated her lust with the minute life force of growing green
things, sparing the people. When the land became a waste, she fed first
upon our flocks and then from our slaves and finally from the Akhlatim
themselves. Soon we shall be gone, and Akhlat will be one vast city of
death. Nor can we leave the land, for the power of the goddess holds us
within narrow bounds, beyond which we cannot stray."

Conan shook his head, his unshorn mane brushing his bare, bronzed
shoulders. "It is a tragic tale you tell, old man. But why do you
repeat it to me?"

"Because of an ancient prophecy," said Enosh gently, picking up the
worn and wrinkled scroll from the tabouret.

"What prophecy?"

Enosh partly unrolled the scroll and pointed to lines of writing of a
form so old that Conan could not read it, although he could manage the
written Shemitish of his own time. "That in the fullness of time," said
Enosh, "when our end was near, the Unknown Cods, whom our ancestors
turned away from to worship the demoness, would relent of their wrath
and send a liberator, who should overthrow the goddess and destroy her
evil power. You, Conan of Cimmeria, are that savior…"

7. Hall of the Living Dead.

For days and nights, Vardanes lay in a dank dungeon cell beneath the
Black Temple of Akhlat. He yelled and pleaded and wept and cursed and
prayed, but the dull-eyed, cold-faced, bronze-helmed guardsmen paid him
no heed, save to tend to his bodily needs. They would not answer his
questions. Neither would they submit to bribery, which much astonished
him. A typical Zamorian, Vardanes could hardly conceive of men who did
not lust for wealth, yet these strange men with their antique speech
and old-fashioned armor were so little covetous of the silver he had
rung from the Turanians in payment for his betrayal that they even let
his coin-filled saddle bags lie undisturbed in a comer of his cell.

They tended him well, however, bathing his haggard body and soothing
his blisters with salves. And they fed him sumptuously with fine roast
fowl, rich fruits, and sweetmeats. They even gave him wine. Having
known other gaols in his time, Vardanes realized how extraordinary this
was. Could, they, he wondered uneasily, be fattening him for slaughter?

Then, one day, guards came to his cell and brought him forth. He
assumed he was at last to appear before some magistrate to answer
whatever absurd charges his accusers might make. Confidence welled up
within him. Never had he known a magistrate whose mercy could not be
purchased with the silver in those fat saddle bags!

But, instead of to a judge or suffete, he was led by dark and winding
ways before a mighty door of greened bronze, which loomed in front of
him like the gate of Hell itself. Triply locked and barred was this
portal, and strong enough to withstand an army. With nervous hands and
taut faces, the warriors unfastened the great door and thrust Vardanes
within.

As the door clanged shut behind him, the Zamorian found himself in a
magnificent hall of polished marble. It was drowned in deep, purple
gloom and thick with dust On every hand lay tokens of unrepaired decay,
of untended neglect He went forward curiously.

Was this a great throne room, or the transept of some colossal temple?
It was hard to say. The most peculiar thing about the vast, shadowy
hall, other than the neglect from which it had evidently long suffered,
was the statuary that stood about its floor in clusters. A host of
puzzling questions rose within Vardanes' troubled brain.

The first mystery was the substance of the statues. Whereas the hall
itself was builded of sleek marble, the statues were made of some dull,
lifeless, porous gray stone that he could not identify. Whatever the
stuff was, it was singularly unattractive. It looked like dead wood
ash, though hard as dry stone to the touch.

The second mystery was the amazing artistry of the unknown sculptor,
whose gifted hands had wrought these marvels of art They were lifelike
and detailed to an incredible degree: every fold of garment or drapery
hung like real cloth; every tiny strand of hair was visible. This
astonishing fidelity was carried even to the postures. No heroic
groupings, no monumental majesty was visible in these graven images of
dull-gray, plasterlike material. They stood in lifelike poses, by the
score and the hundred. They were scattered here and there with no
regard for order. They were carved in the likeness of warriors and
nobles, youths and maidens, doddering grandsires and senile hags,
blooming children and babes in arms.

The one disquieting feature held in common by all was that each figure
bore on its stony features an expression of unendurable terror.

Before long, Vardanes heard a faint sound from the depths of this dark
place. Like the sound of many voices it was, yet so faint that he could
make out no words. A weird diapason whispered through this forest of
statues. As Vardanes drew nearer, he could distinguish the strains of
sound that made up the whole: slow, heart-rending sobs, faint, agonized
moans; the blurred babble of prayers; croaking laughter; monotonous
curses. These sounds seemed to come from half a hundred throats, but
the Zamorian could see no source for them. Although he peered about, he
could see naught in all this place but himself and the thousands of
statues.

Sweat trickled down his forehead and his lean cheeks. A nameless fear
arose within him. He wished from the depths of his faithless heart that
he were a thousand leagues from this accursed temple, where voices of
invisible beings moaned, sobbed, babbled, and laughed hideously.

Then he saw the golden throne. It stood in the midst of the hall,
towering above the heads of the statues. Vardanes' eyes fed hungrily on
the luster of gold. He edged through the stony forest toward it.

Something was propped up on that rich throne—the shriveled mummy of
some long-dead king? Withered hands were clasped over a sunken breast
From throat to heel, the thin body was wrapped in dusty cerements. A
thin mask of beaten gold, worked in the likeness of a woman of
unearthly beauty, lay over the features.

A twinge of greed quickened Vardanes' panting breath. He forgot his
fears, for, between the brows of that golden mask, a tremendous black
sapphire glowed like a third eye. It was an astounding gem, worth a
prince's ransom.

At the foot of the throne, Vardanes stared covetously at the golden
mask. The eyes were carved as if closed in slumber. Sweet and beautiful
slept the drowsy, full-lipped mouth in that lovely golden face. The
huge, dark sapphire flashed with sultry fires as he reached for it.

With trembling fingers, the Zamorian snatched the mask away. Beneath it
lay a brown, withered face. The cheeks had fallen in; the flesh was
hard, dry, and leathery. He shuddered at the malevolent expression on
the features of that death's head.

Then it opened its eyes and looked at him.

He staggered back with a scream, the mask falling from nerveless
fingers to clatter against the marble pave. The dead eyes in the
skull-face leered into his own. Then the Thing opened its third eye…

8. The Face of the Gorgon.

Conan padded through the hall of gray statues on naked feet, prowling
the dusty, shadow-haunted aisles like some great jungle cat. Dim light
slowed along the keen edge of the mighty broadsword in his huge,
capable fist His eyes glared from side to side and the hackles bristled
upon his nape. This place stank of death; the reek of fear lay heavy in
the still air.

How had he ever let old Enosh talk him into this foolish venture? He
was ho redeemer, no destined liberator, no holy man come from the gods
to free Akhlat from the deathless curse of the demoness. His only
purpose was one of red revenge.

But the wise old shaykh had spoken many words, and his eloquence had
persuaded Conan to undertake this perilous mission. Enosh had pointed
out two facts that convinced even the hard-bitten barbarian. One was
that, once within this land, Conan was bound there by black magic and
could not leave until the goddess was slain. The other was that the
Zamorian traitor was immured beneath the Black Temple of the goddess,
soon to face the doom that would, if not averted, destroy them all.

So Conan had come by secret underground ways, which Enosh had shown
him. He had emerged from a hidden portal in the wall of this vast,
gloomy hall, for Enosh knew when Vardanes was to go before the goddess.

Like the Zamorian, Conan also noted the marvelous realism of the gray
statues; but, unlike Vardanes, he knew the answer to this riddle. He
averted his eyes from the expressions of horror on the stone faces
about him.

He, too, heard the mournful wailing and crying. As he drew nearer to
the center of the mighty hypostyle hall, the sobbing voices became
clearer. He saw the golden throne and the withered thing upon it, and
he crept toward the lustrous chair on silent feet.

As he approached, a statue spoke to him. The shock almost unmanned him.
His flesh crawled, and sweat started from his brow.

Then he saw the source of the cries, and his heart pounded with
revulsion. For those about the throne were not yet dead. They were
stone up to the neck, but the heads still lived. Sad eyes rolled in
despairing faces, and dry lips prayed that he would bury his sword in
the living brains of these almost—but not completely—petrified beings.

Then he heard a scream, in Vardanes' well-known voice. Had the goddess
slain his enemy before he could wreak his vengeance? He sprang forward
to the side of the throne.

There a terrible sight met his eyes. Vardanes stood before the throne,
eyes popping and lips working feverishly. The rasp of stone caught
Conan's ear, and he looked at Vardanes' legs. Where the Zamorian's feet
touched the floor, a gray pallor crept slowly up them. Before Conan's
gaze, the warm flesh whitened. The gray tide had reached Vardanes'
knees; but, even as Conan watched, the flesh of the upper legs was
transmuted into ashen-gray stone. Vardanes strained to walk but could
not His voice rose in a shriek, while his eyes glared at Conan with the
naked fear of a trapped animal.

The thing on the throne laughed a low, dry cackle. As Conan watched,
the dead, withered flesh of her skeletal arms and wrinkled throat
swelled and became smooth; it flushed from dead, leathery brown to the
warm flesh tones of life. With every vampiric draught of vital energy
that the Gorgon drained from Vardanes' body, her own body became imbued
with life.

"Crom and Mitra!" breathed Conan.

With every atom of her mind focused on the half-petrified Zamorian, the
Gorgon paid Conan no heed. Now her body was filling out. She bloomed; a
soft rondure of hip and thigh stretched the dull cerements. Her woman's
breasts swelled, straining the thin fabric. She stretched firm,
youthful arms. Her moist, crimson mouth opened in another peal of
laughter—this time, the musical, voluptuous laughter of a full-bodied
woman.

The tide of petrification had crept to Vardanes' loins. Conan did not
know whether she would spare Vardanes with the semi-petrification of
those near the throne or whether she would drain him to the dregs. He
was young and vital; his life force must have been a robust vintage to
the vampire goddess.

As the stony tide swept up to the Zamorian's panting breast, he uttered
another scream—the most awful sound that Conan had ever heard from
human lips. Conan's reaction was instinctive. Like a striking panther,
he leaped from his place of concealment behind the throne. Light caught
the edge of his blade as he swung it.

Vardanes' head jumped from its trunk and fell with a meaty smack to the
marble floor.

Shaken by the impact, the body toppled and fell. It crashed to the
floor, and Conan saw the petrified legs crack and splinter. Stony
fragments scattered, and blood welled from the cracks in the petrified
flesh.

So died Vardanes the traitor. Even Conan could hot tell whether he
struck from lust for revenge, or whether a merciful impulse to end the
torment of a helpless creature had prompted the blow.

Conan turned to the goddess. Without meaning to, he instinctively
raised his eyes to hers.

9. The Third Eye.

Her face was a mask of inhuman loveliness; her soft, moist lips were as
full and crimson as ripe fruit Glossy, ebon hair tumbled across
shoulders of glowing pearl, to fall in tides of silken night through
which thrust the round moons of her breasts. She was beauty incarnate—
save for the great dark orb between her brows.

The third eye met Conan's gaze and riveted him fast. This oval orb was
larger than any organ of human vision. It was not divided into pupil,
iris, and white as are human eyes; it was all black. His gaze seemed to
sink into it and become lost in endless seas of darkness. He stared
rapt, the sword forgotten in his hand. The eye was as black as the
lightless seas of space between the stars.

Now he seemed to stand at the brink of a black, bottomless well, into
which he toppled and fell. Down, down through ebon fogs he fell,
through a vast, cold abyss of utter darkness. He knew that, if he did
not soon turn his eyes away, he would be forever lost to the world.

He made a terrible effort of will. Sweat stood out on his brow; his
muscles writhed like serpents beneath his bronzed skin. His deep chest
heaved.

The Gorgon laughed—a low, melodious sound with cold, cruel mockery in
it. Conan flushed, and rage rose within him.

With a surge of will, he tore his eyes from that black orb and found
himself staring at the floor. Weak and dizzy, he swayed on his feet. As
he fought for the strength to stand erect, he glanced at those feet.
Thank Crom, they were still of warm flesh, not cold, ashen stone! The
long moment he had stood ensorcelled by the Gorgon's gaze had been only
a brief instant, too short for the stony tide to have crept up his
flesh.

The Gorgon laughed again. With his shaggy head bowed, Conan felt tie
tug of her will. The muscles of his corded neck swelled in his effort
to keep his head bent away.

He was still looking down. Before him, on the marble pave, lay the thin
golden mask with the huge sapphirine gem set in it to represent the
third eye. And suddenly, Conan knew.

This time, as his glance rose, his sword swung with it. The flashing
blade clove the dusty air and caught the mocking face of the
goddess—slashing the third eye in twain.

She did not move. With her two normal eyes of surpassing beauty, she
stared silently at the grim warrior, her face blank and white. A change
swept over her.

From the ruin of the Gorgon's third eye, dark fluid ran down the face
of inhuman perfection. Like black tears, the slow dew fell from the
shattered organ.

Then she began to age. As the dark fluid ran from the riven orb, so the
stolen life force of aeons drained from her body. Her skin darkened and
roughened into a thousand wrinkles. Withered dewlaps formed beneath her
chin. Glowing eyes became lusterless and milky.

The superb bosom sagged and shrank. Sleek limbs became scrawny. For a
long moment, the dwarfed, withered form of a tiny woman, incredibly
senile, tottered on the throne. Then flesh rotted to papery scraps and
mouldering bones. The body collapsed, spilling across the pavement in a
litter of leathery fragments, which crumbled as Conan watched to a
colorless, ashy powder.

A long sigh went through the hall. It darkened briefly as if the
passage of half-transparent wings dimmed the obscure light. Then it was
gone, and with it the brooding air of age-old menace. The chamber
became just a dusty, neglected old room, devoid of supernatural
terrors.

The statues slept forever now in graves of eternal stone. As the Gorgon
passed from this dimension, so her spells snapped, including those that
had held the living dead in a grisly semblance of life. Conan turned
away, leaving the empty throne with its litter of dust and the broken,
headless statue of what had once been a bold, high-spirited Zamorian
fighting man.

"Stay with us, Conan!" Zillah pleaded in her low, soft voice. "There
will be posts of high honor for a man such as you in Akhlat, now that
we are freed of the curse."

He grinned hardly, sensing something more personal in her voice than
the desire of a good citizen to enlist a worthy immigrant in the cause
of civic reconstruction. At the probing gaze of his hot, male eyes, she
flushed in confusion.

Lord Enosh added his gentle voice to the pleadings of his daughter.
Conan's victory had lent new youth and vigor to the elderly man. He
stood straight and tall, with a new firmness in his step and a new
command in his voice. He offered the Cimmerian wealth, honors,
position, and a place of power in the newborn city. Enosh had even
hinted that he would look with favor upon Conan as a son-in-law.

But Conan, knowing himself ill-suited to the life of placid, humdrum
respectability they held out to him, refused all offers. Courtly
phrases did not spring readily to the lips of one whose years had been
spent on the field of battle and in the wine shops and joy houses of
the world's cities. But, with such tact as his blunt, barbaric nature
could muster, he turned aside his hosts' pleas.

"Nay, friends," he said. "Not for Conan of Cimmeria the tasks of peace.
I should too soon become bored, and when boredom strikes, I know of but
few cures: to get drunk, to pick a fight, or to steal a girl. A fine
sort of citizen I should make for a city that now seeks peace and quiet
to recover its strength!"

"Then whither will you go, O Conan, now that the magical barriers are
dissolved?" asked Enosh.

Conan shrugged, ran a hand through his black mane, and laughed. "Crom,
my good sir, I know not! Luckily for me, the goddess's servants fed and
watered Vardanes' horse. Akhlat, I see, has no horses—only donkeys—and
a great lout like me would look like a fool, jogging along on a sleepy
little ass with my toes dragging in the dust!

"I think I'll bend my path to the southeast. Somewhere yonder lies the
city of Zamboula, which I have never been. Men say it is a rich city of
fleshpots and revelry, where the wine all but flows free in the
gutters. I've a mind to taste the joys of Zamboula, to see what
excitement it has to offer."

"But you need not leave us a beggar!" Enosh protested. "We owe you
much. Let us give you what little gold and silver we have for your
labors."

Conan shook his head. "Keep your treasure, shaykh. Akhlat is no rich
metropolis, and you will need your money when the merchants' caravans
begin to arrive again from across the Red Waste. And now that my water
bags are full and I've provisions aplenty, I must be off. This time, I
shall make the journey through the Shan-e-Sorkh in comfort."

With a last, brisk farewell, he swung into the saddle and cantered up
out of the valley. They stood looking after him, Enosh proudly, but
Zillah with tears on her cheeks. Soon he was out of sight.

As he reached the top of the dunes, Conan halted the black mare for a
last look at Akhlat. Then he rode off into the Waste. Perhaps he had
been a fool not to accept their small store of treasure. But there was
plenty in Vardanes' saddle bags, which he reached behind him to thump.
He grinned. Why squabble over a few shekels like a greasy tradesman? It
does a man good, once in a while, to be virtuous. Even a Cimmerian!

Conan duly arrives in Zamboula, where he swiftly dissipates the small
fortune he brings with him in a colossal debauch. A week of guzzling,
gorging, roistering, whoring, and gambling reduce him once more to
destitution.


Shadows in Zamboula
-------------------

1. A Drum Begins

"Peril hides in the house of Aram Baksh!"

The speaker's voice quivered with earnestness and his lean,
black-nailed fingers clawed at Conan's mightily-muscled arm as he
croaked his warning. He was a wiry, sunburnt man with a straggling
black beard, and his ragged garments proclaimed him a nomad. He looked
smaller and meaner than ever in contrast to the giant Cimmerian with
his black brows, broad chest, and powerful limbs. They stood in a
corner of the Sword Makers' Bazaar, and on either side of them flowed
past the many-tongued, many-colored stream of the Zamboulan streets,
which are exotic, hybrid, flamboyant, and clamorous.

Conan pulled his eyes back from following a bold-eyed, red-lipped
Ghanara whose short slit skirt bared her brown thigh at each insolent
step, and frowned down at his importunate companion.

"What do you mean by peril?" he demanded.

The desert man glanced furtively over his shoulder before replying, and
lowered his voice.

"Who can say? But desert men and travelers have slept in the house of
Aram Baksh and never been seen or heard of again. What became of them?
He swore they rose and went their way—and it is true that no citizen of
the city has ever disappeared from his house. But no one saw the
travelers again, and men say that goods and equipment recognized as
theirs have been seen in the bazaars. If Aram did not sell them, after
doing away with their owners, how came they there?"

"I have no goods," growled the Cimmerian, touching the shagreen-bound
hilt of the broadsword that hung at his hip. "I have even sold my
horse."

"But it is not always rich strangers who vanish by night from the house
of Aram Baksh!" chattered the Zuagir. "Nay, poor desert men have slept
there—because his score is less than that of the other taverns—and have
been seen no more. Once a chief of the Zuagirs whose son had thus
vanished complained to the satrap, Jungir Khan, who ordered the house
searched by soldiers."

"And they found a cellar full of corpses?" asked Conan in good-humored
derision.

"Nay! They found naught! And drove the chief from the city with threats
and curses! But"—he drew closer to Conan and shivered—"something else
was found! At the edge of the desert, beyond the houses, there is a
clump of palm trees, and within that grove there is a pit. And within
that pit have been found human bones, charred and blackened! Not once,
but many times!"

"Which proves what?" grunted the Cimmerian.

"Aram Baksh is a demon! Nay, in this accursed city which Stygians built
and which Hyrkanians rule—where white, brown, and black folk mingle
together to produce hybrids of all unholy hues and breeds—who can tell
who is a man, and who a demon in disguise? Aram Baksh is a demon in the
form of a man! At night he assumes his true guise and carries his
guests off into the desert, where his fellow demons from the waste meet
in conclave."

"Why does he always carry off strangers?" asked Conan skeptically.

"The people of the city would not suffer him to slay their people, but
they care naught for the strangers who fall into his hands. Conan, you
are of the West, and know not the secrets of this ancient land. But,
since the beginning of happenings, the demons of the desert have
worshipped Yog, the Lord of the Empty Abodes, with fire-fire that
devours human victims.

"Be warned! You have dwelt for many moons in the tents of the Zuagirs,
and you are our brother! Go not to the house of Aram Baksh!"

"Get out of sight!" Conan said suddenly. "Yonder comes a squad of the
city watch. If they see you they may remember a horse that was stolen
from the satrap's stable—"

The Zuagir gasped and moved convulsively. He ducked between a booth and
a stone horse trough, pausing only long enough to chatter: "Be warned,
my brother! There are demons in the house of Aram Baksh!" Then he
darted down a narrow alley and was gone.

Conan shifted his broad sword-belt to his liking and calmly returned
the searching stares directed at him by the squad of watchmen as they
swung past. They eyed him curiously and suspiciously, for he was a man
who stood out even in such a motley throng as crowded the winding
streets of Zamboula. His blue eyes and alien features distinguished him
from the Eastern swarms, and the straight sword at his hip added point
to the racial difference.

The watchmen did not accost him but swung on down the street, while the
crowd opened a lane for them. They were Pelishtim, squat, hook-nosed,
with blue-black beards sweeping their mailed breasts—mercenaries hired
for work the ruling Turanians considered beneath themselves, and no
less hated by the mongrel population for that reason.

Conan glanced at the sun, just beginning to dip behind the flat-topped
houses on the western side of the bazaar, and hitching once more at his
belt, moved off in the direction of Aram Baksh's tavern.

With a hillman's stride he moved through the ever-shifting colors of
the streets, where the ragged tunics of whining beggars brushed against
the ermine-trimmed khalats of lordly merchants, and the pearl-sewn
satin of rich courtesans. Giant black slaves slouched along, jostling
blue-bearded wanderers from the Shemitish cities, ragged nomads from
the surrounding deserts, traders and adventurers from all the lands of
the East.

The native population was no less heterogeneous. Here, centuries ago,
the armies of Stygia had come, carving an empire out of the eastern
desert Zamboula was but a small trading town then, lying amidst a ring
of oases, and inhabited by descendants of nomads. The Stygians built it
into a city and settled it with their own people, and with Shemite and
Kushite slaves. The ceaseless caravans, threading the desert from east
to west and back again, brought riches and more mingling of races. Then
came the conquering Turanians, riding out of the East to thrust back
the boundaries of Stygia, and now for a generation Zamboula had been
Turan's westernmost outpost, ruled by a Turanian satrap.

The babel of a myriad tongues smote on the Cimmerian's ears as the
restless pattern of the Zamboulan streets weaved about him—cleft now
and then by a squad of clattering horsemen, the tall, supple warriors
of Turan, with dark hawk-faces, clinking metal, and curved swords. The
throng scampered from under their horses' hoofs, for they were the
lords of Zamboula. But tall, somber Stygians, standing back in the
shadows, glowered darkly, remembering their ancient glories. The hybrid
population cared little whether the king who controlled their destinies
dwelt in dark Khemi or gleaming Aghrapur. Jungir Khan ruled Zamboula,
and men whispered that Nafertari, the satrap's mistress, ruled Jungir
Khan; but the people went their way, flaunting their myriad colors in
the streets, bargaining, disputing, gambling, swilling, loving, as the
people of Zamboula have done for all the centuries its towers and
minarets have lifted over the sands of the Kharamun.

Bronze lanterns, carved with leering dragons, had been lighted in the
streets before Conan reached the house of Aram Baksh. The tavern was
the last occupied house on the street, which ran west. A wide garden,
enclosed by a wall, where date palms grew thick, separated it from the
houses farther east. To the west of the inn stood another grove of
palms, through which the street, now become a road, wound out into the
desert. Across the road from the tavern stood a row of deserted huts,
shaded by straggling palm trees and occupied only by bats and jackals.
As Conan came down the road, he wondered why the beggars, so plentiful
in Zamboula, had not appropriated these empty houses for sleeping
quarters. The lights ceased some distance behind him. Here were no
lanterns, except the one hanging before the tavern gate: only the
stars, the soft dust of the road underfoot, and the rustle of the palm
leaves in the desert breeze.

Aram's gate did not open upon the road but upon the alley which ran
between the tavern and the garden of the date palms. Conan jerked
lustily at the rope which dangled from the bell beside the lantern,
augmenting its clamor by hammering on the iron-bound teakwood gate with
the hilt of his sword. A wicket opened in the gate, and a black face
peered through.

"Open, blast you," requested Conan. "I'm a guest. I've paid Aram for a
room, and a room I'll have, by Crom!"

The black craned his neck to stare into the starlit road behind Conan;
but he opened the gate without comment and closed it again behind the
Cimmerian, locking it and bolting it. The wall was unusually high; but
there were many thieves in Zamboula, and a house on the edge of the
desert might have to be defended against a nocturnal nomad raid. Conan
strode through a garden, where great pale blossoms nodded in the
starlight, and entered the taproom, where a Stygian with the shaven
head of a student sat at a table brooding over nameless mysteries, and
some nondescripts wrangled over a game of dice in a corner.

Aram Baksh came forward, walking softly, a portly man, with a black
beard that swept his breast, a jutting hooknose, and small black eyes
which were never still.

"You wish food?" he asked. "Drink?"

"I ate a joint of beef and a loaf of bread in the suk," grunted Conan.
"Bring me a tankard of Ghazan wine— I've got just enough left to pay
for it." He tossed a copper coin on the wine-splashed board.

"You did not win at the gaming tables?"

"How could I, with only a handful of silver to begin with? I paid you
for the room this morning, because I knew I'd probably lose. I wanted
to be sure I had a roof over my head tonight I notice nobody sleeps in
the streets in Zamboula. The very beggars hunt a niche they can
barricade before dark. The city must be full of a particularly
bloodthirsty brand of thieves."

He gulped the cheap wine with relish and then followed Aram out of the
taproom. Behind him the players halted their game to stare after him
with a cryptic speculation in their eyes. They said nothing, but the
Stygian laughed, a ghastly laugh of inhuman cynicism and mockery. The
others lowered their eyes uneasily, avoiding one another's glance. The
arts studied by a Stygian scholar are not calculated to make him share
the feelings of a normal human being.

Conan followed Aram down a corridor lighted by copper lamps, and it did
not please him to note his host's noiseless tread. Aram's feet were
clad in soft slippers and the hallway was carpeted with thick Turanian
rugs; but there was an unpleasant suggestion of stealthiness about the
Zamboulan.

At the end of the winding corridor, Aram halted at a door, across which
a heavy iron bar rested in powerful metal brackets. This Aram lifted
and showed the Cimmerian into a well-appointed chamber, the windows of
which, Conan instantly noted, were small and strongly set with twisted
bars of iron, tastefully gilded. There were rugs on the floor, a couch,
after the Eastern fashion, and ornately carven stools. It was a much
more elaborate chamber than Conan could have procured for the price
nearer the center of the city—a fact that had first attracted him,
when, that morning, he discovered how slim a purse his roisterings for
the past few days had left him. He had ridden into Zamboula from the
desert a week before.

Aram had lighted a bronze lamp, and he now called Conan's attention to
the two doors. Both were provided with heavy bolts.

"You may sleep safely tonight, Cimmerian," said Aram, blinking over his
bushy beard from the inner doorway.

Conan grunted and tossed his naked broadsword on the couch.

"Your bolts and bars are strong; but I always sleep with steel by my
side."

Aram made no reply; he stood fingering his thick beard for a moment as
he stared at the grim weapon. Then silently he withdrew, dosing the
door behind him. Conan shot the bolt into place, crossed the room,
opened the opposite door, and looked out. The room was on the side of
the house that faced the road running west from the city. Hie door
opened into a small court that was enclosed by a wall of its own. The
end walls, which shut it off from the rest of the tavern compound, were
high and without entrances; but the wall that flanked the road was low,
and there was no lock on the gate.

Conan stood for a moment in the door, the glow of the bronze lamp
behind him, looking down the road to where it vanished among the dense
palms. Their leaves rustled together in the faint breeze; beyond them
lay the naked desert Far up the street, in the other direction, lights
gleamed and die noises of the city came faintly to him. Here was only
starlight, the whispering of the palm leaves, and beyond that low wall,
the dust of the road and the deserted huts thrusting their flat roofs
against the low stars. Somewhere beyond the palm groves a drum began.

The garbled warnings of the Zuagir returned to him, seeming somehow
less fantastic than they had seemed in the crowded, sunlit streets. He
wondered again at the riddle of those empty huts. Why did the beggars
shun them? He turned back into the chamber, shut the door, and bolted
it.

The light began to flicker, and he investigated, swearing when he found
the palm oil in the lamp was almost exhausted. He started to shout for
Aram, then shrugged his shoulders and blew out the light. In the soft
darkness he stretched himself fully clad on the couch, his sinewy hand
by instinct searching for and closing on the hilt of his broadsword.
Glancing idly at the stars framed in the barred windows, with the
murmur of the breeze through the palms in his ears, he sank into
slumber with a vague consciousness of the muttering drum, out on the
desert—the low rumble and mutter of a leather-covered drum, beaten with
soft, rhythmic strokes of an open black hand…

2. The Night Skulkers

It was the stealthy opening of a door which awakened the Cimmerian. He
did not awake as civilized men do, drowsy and drugged and stupid. He
awoke instantly, with a dear mind, recognizing the sound that had
interrupted his sleep. Lying there tensely in the dark he saw the outer
door slowly open. In a widening crack of starlit sky he saw framed a
great black bulk, broad, stooping shoulders, and a misshapen head
blocked out against the stars.

Conan felt the skin crawl between his shoulders. He had bolted that
door securely. How could it be opening now, save by supernatural
agency? And how could a human being possess a head like that outlined
against the stars? All the tales he had heard in the Zuagir tents of
devils and goblins came back to bead his flesh with clammy sweat. Now
the monster slid noiselessly into the room, with a crouching posture
and a shambling gait; and a familiar scent assailed the Cimmerian's
nostrils, but did not reassure him, since Zuagir legendry represented
demons as smelling like that.

Noiselessly Conan coiled his long legs under him; his naked sword was
in his right hand, and when he struck it was as suddenly and
murderously as a tiger lunging out of the dark. Not even a demon could
have avoided that catapulting charge. His sword met and clove through
flesh and bone, and something went heavily to the floor with a
strangling cry. Conan crouched in the dark above it, sword dripping in
his hand. Devil or beast or man, the thing was dead there on the floor.
He sensed death as any wild thing senses it. He glared through the
half-open door into the starlit court beyond. The gate stood open, but
the court was empty.

Conan shut the door but did not bolt it. Groping in the darkness he
found the lamp and lighted it. There was enough oil in it to burn for a
minute or so. An instant later he was bending over the figure that
sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood.

It was a gigantic black man, naked but for a loin cloth. One hand still
grasped a knotty-headed bludgeon. The fellow's kinky wool was built up
into hornlike spindles with twigs and dried mud. This barbaric coiffure
had given the head its misshapen appearance in the starlight Provided
with a clue to the riddle, Conan pushed back the thick red lips and
grunted as he stared down at teeth filed to points.

He understood now the mystery of the strangers who had disappeared from
the house of Aram Baksh; the riddle of the black drum thrumming out
there beyond the palm groves, and of that pit of charred bones—that pit
where strange meat might be roasted under the stars, while black beasts
squatted about to glut a hideous hunger. The man on the floor was a
cannibal slave from Darfar.

There were many of his kind in the city. Cannibalism was not tolerated
openly in Zamboula. But Conan knew now why people locked themselves in
so securely at night, and why even beggars shunned the open alley and
doorless ruins. He grunted in disgust as he visualized brutish black
shadows skulking up and down the nighted streets, seeking human
prey—and such men as Aram Baksh to open the doors to them. The
innkeeper was not a demon; he was worse. The slaves from Darfar were
notorious thieves; there was no doubt that some of their pilfered loot
found its way into the hands of Aram Baksh. And in return he sold them
human flesh.

Conan blew out the light, stepped to the door and opened it, and ran
his hand over the ornaments on the outer side. One of them was movable
and worked the bolt inside. The room was a trap to catch human prey
like rabbits. But this time, instead of a rabbit, it had caught a
saber-toothed tiger.

Conan returned to the other door, lifted the bolt, and pressed against
it. It was immovable, and he remembered the bolt on the other side.
Aram was taking no chances either with his victims or the men with whom
he dealt Buckling on his sword belt, the Cimmerian strode out into the
court, closing the door behind him. He had no intention of delaying the
settlement of his reckoning with Aram Baksh. He wondered how many poor
devils had been bludgeoned in their sleep and dragged out of that room
and down the road that ran through the shadowed palm groves to the
roasting pit.

He halted in the court. The drum was still muttering, and he caught the
reflection of a leaping red glare through the groves. Cannibalism was
more than a perverted appetite with the black men of Darfar; it was an
integral element of their ghastly cult. The black vultures were already
in conclave. But whatever flesh filled their bellies that night, it
would not be his.

To reach Aram Baksh, he must climb one of the walls which separated the
small enclosure from the main compound. They were high, meant to keep
out the man-eaters; but Conan was no swamp-bred black man; his thews
had been steeled in boyhood on the sheer cliffs of his native hills. He
was standing at the foot of the nearer wall when a cry echoed under the
trees.

In an instant Conan was crouching at the gate, glaring down the road.
The sound had come from the shadows of the huts across the road. He
heard a frantic choking and gurgling such as might result from a
desperate attempt to shriek, with a black hand fastened over the
victim's mouth. A close-knit clump of figures emerged from the shadows
beyond the huts and started down the road —three huge black men
carrying a slender, struggling figure between them. Conan caught the
glimmer of pale limbs writhing in the starlight, even as, with a
convulsive wrench, the captive slipped from the grasp of the brutal
fingers and came flying up the road, a supple young woman, naked as the
day she was born. Conan saw her plainly before she ran out of the road
and into the shadows between the huts. The blacks were at her heels,
and back in the shadows the figures merged and an intolerable scream of
anguish and horror rang out.

Stirred to red rage by the ghoulishness of the episode, Conan raced
across the road.

Neither victim nor abductors were aware of his presence until the soft
swish of the dust about his feet brought them about; and then he was
almost upon them, coming with gusty fury of a hill wind. Two of the
blacks turned to meet him, lifting their bludgeons. But they failed to
estimate properly the speed at which he was coming. One of them was
down, disemboweled, before he could strike, and wheeling catlike, Conan
evaded the stroke of the other's cudgel and lashed in a whistling
counter-cut. The black's head flew into the air; the headless body took
three staggering steps, spurting blood and clawing horribly at the air
with groping hands, and then slumped to the dust.

The remaining cannibal gave back with a strangled yell, hurling his
captive from him. She tripped and rolled in the dust, and the black
fled in panic toward the city. Conan was at his heels. Fear winged the
black feet, but before they reached the easternmost hut, he sensed
death at his back, and bellowed like an ox in the slaughter yards.

"Black dog of Hell!" Conan drove his sword between the dusky shoulders
with such vengeful fury that the broad blade stood out half its length
from the black breast. With a choking cry the black stumbled headlong,
and Conan braced his feet and dragged out his sword as his victim fell.

Only the breeze disturbed the leaves. Conan shook his head as a lion
shakes its mane and growled his unsatiated blood lust But no more
shapes slunk from the shadows, and before the huts the starlit road
stretched empty. He whirled at the quick patter of feet behind him, but
it was only the girl, rushing to throw herself on him and clasp his
neck in a desperate grasp, frantic from tenor of the abominable fate
she had just escaped.

"Easy, girl," he grunted. "You're all right How did they catch you?"

She sobbed something unintelligible. He forgot all about Aram Baksh as
he scrutinized her by the light of the stars. She was white, though a
very definite brunette, obviously one of Zamboula's many mixed breeds.
She was tall, with a slender, supple form, as he was in a good position
to observe. Admiration burned in his fierce eyes as he looked down on
her splendid bosom and her lithe limbs, which still quivered from
fright and exertion. He passed an arm around her flexible waist and
said, reassuringly: "Stop shaking, wench; you're safe enough."

His touch seemed to restore her shaken sanity. She tossed back her
thick, glossy locks and cast a fearful glance over her shoulder, while
she pressed closer to the Cimmerian as if seeking security in the
contact.

"They caught me in the streets," she muttered, shuddering. "Lying in
wait, beneath a dark arch—black men, like great, hulking apes! Set have
mercy on me! I shall dream of it!"

"What were you doing out on the streets this time of night?" he
inquired, fascinated by the satiny feel of her sleek skin under his
questing fingers.

She raked back her hair and stared blankly up into his face. She did
not seem aware of his caresses.

"My lover" she said. "My lover drove me into the streets. He went mad
and tried to kill me. As I fled from him I was seized by those beasts."

"Beauty like yours might drive a man mad," quoth Conan, running his
fingers experimentally through her glossy tresses.

She shook her head, like one emerging from a daze. She no longer
trembled, and her voice was steady.

"It was the spite of a priest—of Totrasmek, the high priest of Hanuman,
who desires me for himself—the dog!"

"No need to curse him for that," grinned Conan. "The old hyena has
better taste than I thought."

She ignored the bluff compliment. She was regaining her poise swiftly.

"My lover is a—a young Turanian soldier. To spite me, Totrasmek gave
him a drug that drove him mad. Tonight he snatched up a sword and came
at me to slay me in his madness, but I fled from him into the streets.
The Negroes seized me and brought me to this—what was that?"

Conan had already moved. Soundlessly as a shadow he drew her behind the
nearest hut, beneath the straggling palms. They stood in tense
stillness, while the low mutterings both had heard grew louder until
voices were distinguishable. A group of Negroes, some nine or ten, were
coming along the road from the direction of the city. The girl clutched
Conan's arm and he felt the terrified quivering of her supple body
against his.

Now they could understand the gutturals of the black men.

"Our brothers are already assembled at the pit," said one. "We have had
no luck. I hope they have enough for us."

"Aram promised us a man," muttered another, and Conan mentally promised
Aram something.

"Aram keeps his word," grunted yet another. "Many a man we have taken
from his tavern. But we pay him well. I myself have given him ten bales
of silk I stole from my master. It was good silk, by Set!"

The blacks shuffled past, bare splay feet scuffing up the dust, and
their voices dwindled down the road.

"Well for us those corpses are lying behind these huts," muttered
Conan. "If they look in Aram's death room they'll find another. Let's
begone."

"Yes, let us hasten!" begged the girl, almost hysterical again. "My
lover is wandering somewhere in the streets alone. The Negroes may take
him."

"A devil of a custom this is!" growled Conan, as he led the way toward
the city, paralleling the road but keeping behind the huts and
straggling trees. "Why don't the citizens clean out these black dogs?"

"They are valuable slaves," murmured the girl. "There are so many of
them they might revolt if they were denied the flesh for which they
lust The people of Zamboula know they skulk the streets at night, and
all are careful to remain within locked doors, except when something
unforeseen happens, as it did to me. The blacks prey on anything they
catch, but they seldom catch anybody but strangers. The people of
Zamboula are not concerned with the strangers that pass through the
city.

"Such men as Aram Baksh sell these strangers to the blacks. He would
not dare attempt such a thing with a citizen."

Conan spat in' disgust, and a moment later led his companion out into
the road which was becoming a street, with still, unlighted houses on
each side. Slinking in the shadows was not congenial to his nature.

"Where did you want to go?" he asked. The girl did not seem to object
to his arm about her waist.

"To my house, to rouse my servants," she answered. "To bid them search
for my lover. I do not wish the city —the priests—anyone—to know of his
madness. He^—he is a young officer with a promising future. Perhaps we
can drive this madness from him if we can find him."

"If we find him?" rumbled Conan. "What makes you think I want to spend
the night scouring the streets for a lunatic?"

She cast a quick glance into his face, and properly interpreted the
gleam in his blue eyes. Any woman could have known that he would follow
her wherever she led —for a while, at least. But being a woman, she
concealed her knowledge of that fact.

"Please," she began with a hint of tears in her voice, "I have no one
else to ask for help—you have been land——"

"All right!" he grunted. "All right! What's the young reprobate's
name?"

"Why—Alafdhal. I am Zabibi, a dancing-girl. I have danced often before
the satrap, Jungir Khan, and his mistress Nafertari, and before all the
lords and royal ladies of Zamboula. Totrasmek desired me and, because I
repulsed him, he made me the innocent tool of his vengeance against
Alafdhal. I asked a love potion of Totrasmek, not suspecting the depth
of his guile and hate. He gave me a drug to mix with my lover's wine,
and he swore that when Alafdhal drank it, he would love me even more
madly than ever and grant my every wish. I mixed the drug secretly with
my lover's wine. But having drunk, my lover went raving mad and things
came about as I have told you. Curse Totrasmek, the hybrid snake—
ahhh!"

She caught his arm convulsively and both stopped short They had come
into a district of shops and stalls, all deserted and unlighted, for
the hour was late. They were passing an alley, and in its mouth a man
was standing, motionless and silent His head was lowered, but Conan
caught the weird gleam of eery eyes regarding them unblinkingly. His
skin crawled, not with fear of the sword in the man's hand, but because
of the uncanny suggestion of his posture and silence. They suggested
madness. Conan pushed the girl aside and drew his sword.

"Don't kill him!" she begged. "In the name of Set, do not slay him! You
are strong—overpower him!"

"We'll see," he muttered, grasping his sword in his right hand and
clenching his left into a malletlike fist.

He took a wary step toward the alley—and with a horrible moaning laugh
the Turanian charged. As he came he swung his sword, rising on his toes
as he put all the power of his body behind the blows. Sparks flashed
blue as Conan parried the blade, and the next instant the madman was
stretched senseless in the dust from a thundering buffet of Conan's
left fist.

The girl ran forward.

"Oh, he is not—he is not——"

Conan bent swiftly, turned the man on his side, and ran quick fingers
over him.

"He's not hurt much," he grunted. "Bleeding at the nose, but anybody's
likely to do that, after a clout on the jaw. He'll come to after a bit,
and maybe his mind will be right In the meantime I'll tie his wrists
with his sword belt—so. Now where do you want me to take him?"

"Wait!" She knelt beside the senseless figure, seized the bound hands,
and scanned them avidly. Then, shaking her head as if in baffled
disappointment, she rose. She came close to the giant Cimmerian and
laid her slender hands on his arching breast Her dark eyes, like wet
black jewels in the starlight, gazed up into his.

"You are a man! Help me! Totrasmek must die! Slay him for me!"

"And put my neck into a Turanian noose?" he grunted.

"Nay!" The slender arms, strong as pliant steel, were around his corded
neck. Her supple body throbbed against his. "The Hyrkanians have no
love for Totrasmek. The priests of Set fear him. He is a mongrel, who
rules men by fear and superstition. I worship Set, and the Turanians
bow to Erlik, but Totrasmek sacrifices to Hanuman the accursed! The
Turanian lords fear his black arts and his power over the hybrid
population, and they hate him. Even Jungir Khan and his mistress
Nafertari fear and hate him. If he were slain in his temple at night,
they would not seek his slayer very closely."

"And what of his magic?" rumbled the Cimmerian.

"You are a fighting man," she answered. "To risk your life is part of
your profession."

"For a price," he admitted.

"There will be a price!" she breathed, rising on tiptoes, to gaze into
his eyes.

The nearness of her vibrant body drove a flame through his veins. The
perfume of her breath mounted to his brain. But as his arms closed
about her supple figure she avoided them with a lithe movement, saying:
"Wait! First serve me in this matter."

"Name your price." He spoke with some difficulty.

"Pick up my lover," she directed, and the Cimmerian stooped and swung
the tall form easily to his broad shoulder. At the moment he felt as if
he could have toppled over Jungir Khan's palace with equal ease. The
girl murmured an endearment to the unconscious man, and there was no
hyprocrisy in her attitude. She obviously loved Alafdhal sincerely.
Whatever business arrangement she made with Conan would have no bearing
on her relationship with Alafdhal. Women are more practical about these
things than men.

"Follow me!" She hurried along the street, while the Cimmerian strode
easily after her, in no way discomforted by his limp burden. He kept a
wary eye out for black shadows skulking under arches but saw nothing
suspicious. Doubtless the men of Darfar were all gathered at the
roasting pit. The girl turned down a narrow side street and presently
knocked cautiously at an arched door.

Almost instantly a wicket opened in the upper panel, and a black face
glanced out. She bent close to the opening, whispering swiftly. Bolts
creaked in their sockets, and the door opened. A giant black man stood
framed against the soft glow of a copper lamp. A quick glance showed
Conan the man was not from Darfar. His teeth was unfiled and his kinky
hair was cropped close to his skull. He was from the Wadai.

At a word from Zabibi, Conan gave the limp body into the black's arms
and saw the young officer laid on a velvet divan. He showed no signs of
returning consciousness. The blow that had rendered him senseless might
have felled an ox. Zabibi bent over him for an instant, her fingers
nervously twining and twisting. Then she straightened and beckoned the
Cimmerian.

The door closed softly, the locks clicked behind them, and the closing
wicket shut off the glow of the lamps. In the starlight of the street
Zabibi took Conan's hand. Her own hand trembled a little.

"You will not fail me?"

He shook his maned head, massive against the stars.

"Then follow me to Hanuman's shrine, and the gods have mercy on our
souls!"

Along the silent streets they moved like phantoms of antiquity. They
went in silence. Perhaps the girl was thinking of her lover lying
senseless on the divan under the copper lamps or was shrinking with
fear of what lay ahead of them in the demon-haunted shrine of Hanuman.
The barbarian was thinking only of the woman moving so supplely beside
him. The perfume of her scented hair was in his nostrils, the sensuous
aura of her presence filled his brain and left room for no other
thoughts.

Once they heard the clank of brass-shod feet, and drew into the shadows
of a gloomy arch while a squad of Pelishti watchmen swung past There
were fifteen of them; they marched in close formation, pikes at the
ready, and the rearmost men had their broad, brass shields slung on
their backs, to protect them from a knife stroke from behind. The
skulking menace of the black maneaters was a threat even to armed men.

As soon as the clang of their sandals had receded up the street, Conan
and the girl emerged from their hiding place and hurried on. A few
moments later, they saw the squat, flat-topped edifice they sought
looming ahead of them.

The temple of Hanuman stood alone in the midst of a broad square, which
lay silent and deserted beneath the stars. A marble wall surrounded the
shrine, with a broad opening directly before the portico. This opening
had no gate or any sort of barrier.

"Why don't the blacks seek their prey here?" muttered Conan. "There's
nothing to keep them out of the temple."

He could feel the trembling of Zabibi's body as she pressed close to
him.

"They fear Totrasmek, as all in Zamboula fear him, even Jungir Khan and
Nafertari. Come! Come quickly, before my courage flows from me like
water!"

The girl's fear was evident, but she did not falter. Conan drew his
sword and strode ahead of her as they advanced through the open
gateway. He knew the hideous habits of the priests of the East and was
aware that an invader of Hanuman's shrine might expect to encounter
almost any sort of nightmare horror. He knew there was a good chance
that neither he nor the girl would ever leave the shrine alive, but he
had risked his life too many times before to devote much thought to
that consideration.

They entered a court paved with marble which gleamed whitely in the
starlight. A short flight of broad marble steps led up to the pillared
portico. The great bronze doors stood wide open as they had stood for
centuries. But no worshippers burnt incense within. In the day men and
women might come timidly into the shrine and place offerings to the
ape-god on the black altar. At night the people shunned the temple of
Hanuman as hares shun the lair of the serpent.

Burning censers bathed the interior in a soft, weird glow that created
an illusion of unreality. Near the rear wall, behind the black stone
altar, sat the god with his gaze fixed for ever on the open door,
through which for centuries his victims had come, dragged by chains of
roses. A faint groove ran from the sill to the altar, and when Conan's
foot felt it, he stepped away as quickly as if he had trodden upon a
snake. That groove had been worn by the faltering feet of the multitude
of those who had died screaming on that grim altar.

Bestial in the uncertain light, Hanuman leered with his carven mask. He
sat, not as an ape would crouch, but cross-legged as a man would sit,
but his aspect was no less simian for that reason. He was carved from
black marble, but his eyes were rubies, which glowed red and lustful as
the coals of hell's deepest pits. His great hands lay upon his lap,
palms upward, taloned fingers spread and grasping. In the gross
emphasis of his attributes, in the leer of his satyr-countenance, was
reflected the abominable cynicism of the degenerate cult which deified
him.

The girl moved around the image, making toward the back wall, and when
her sleek flank brushed against a carven knee, she shrank aside and
shuddered as if a reptile had touched her. There was a space of several
feet between the broad back of the idol and the marble wall with its
frieze of gold leaves. On either hand, flanking the idol, an ivory door
under a gold arch was set in the wall.

Those doors open into each end of a hair pin-shaped corridor," she said
hurriedly. "Once I was in the interior of the shrine—once!" She
shivered and twitched her slim shoulders at a memory both terrifying
and obscene. "The corridor is bent like a horseshoe, with each horn
opening into this room. Totrasmek's chambers are enclosed within the
curve of the corridor and open into it. But there is a secret door in
this wall which opens directly into an inner chamber——"

She began to run her hands over the smooth surface, where no crack or
crevice showed. Conan stood beside her, sword in hand, glancing warily
about him. The silence, the emptiness of the shrine, with imagination
picturing what might lie behind that wall, made him feel like a wild
beast nosing a trap.

"Ah!" The girl had found a hidden spring at last; a square opening
gaped blackly in the wall. Then: "Set!" she screamed, and even as Conan
leaped toward her, he saw that a great misshapen hand had fastened
itself in her hair. She was snatched off her feet and jerked headfirst
through the opening. Conan, grabbing ineffectually at her, felt his
fingers slip from a naked limb, and in an instant she had vanished and
the wall showed blank as before. Only from beyond it came briefly the
muffled sounds of a struggle, a scream, faintly heard, and a low laugh
that made Conan's blood congeal in his veins.

3. Black Hands Gripping

With an oath the Cimmerian smote the wall a terrific blow with the
pommel of his sword, and the marble cracked and chipped. But the hidden
door did not give way, and reason told him that doubtless it had been
bolted on the other side of the wall. Turning, he sprang across the
chamber to one of the ivory doors.

He lifted his sword to shatter the panels, but on a venture tried the
door first with his left hand. It swung open easily, and he glared into
a long corridor that curved away into dimness under the weird light of
censers similar to those in the shrine. A heavy gold bolt showed on the
jamb of the door, and he touched it lightly with his finger tips. The
faint warmness of the metal could have been detected only by a man
whose faculties were akin to those of a wolf. That bolt had been
touched —and therefore drawn—within the last few seconds. The affair
was taking on more and more of the aspect of a baited trap. He might
have known Totrasmek would know when anyone entered the temple.

To enter the corridor would undoubtedly be to walk into whatever trap
the priest had set for him. But Conan did not hesitate. Somewhere in
that dim-lit interior Zabibi was a captive, and, from what he knew of
the characteristics of Hanuman's priests, he was sure that she needed
help badly. Conan stalked into the corridor with a pantherish tread,
poised to strike right or left.

On his left, ivory, arched doors opened into the corridor, and he tried
each in turn. All were locked. He had gone perhaps seventy-five feet
when the corridor bent sharply to the left, describing the curve the
girl had mentioned. A door opened into this curve, and it gave under
his hand.

He was looking into a broad, square chamber, somewhat more clearly
lighted than the corridor. Its walls were of white marble, the floor of
ivory, the ceiling of fretted silver. He saw divans of rich satin,
gold-worked footstools of ivory, a disk-shaped table of some massive,
metal-like substance. On one of the divans a man was reclining, looking
toward the door. He laughed as he met the Cimmerian's startled glare.

This man was naked except for a loin cloth and high-strapped sandals.
He was brown-skinned, with close-cropped black hair and restless black
eyes that set off a broad, arrogant face. In girth and breadth he was
enormous, with huge limbs on which the great muscles swelled and
rippled at each slightest movement His hands were the largest Conan had
ever seen. The assurance of gigantic physical strength colored his
every action and inflection.

"Why not enter, barbarian?" he called mockingly, with an exaggerated
gesture of invitation.

Conan's eyes began to smolder ominously, but he trod warily into the
chamber, his sword ready.

"Who the devil are you?" he growled.

"I am Baal-pteor," the man answered. "Once, long ago and in another
land, I had another name. But this is a good name, and why Totrasmek
gave it to me, any temple wench can tell you."

"So you're his dog!" grunted Conan. "Well, curse your brown hide,
Baal-pteor, where's the wench you jerked through the wall?"

"My master entertains her!" laughed Baal-pteor. "Listen!"

From beyond a door opposite the one by which Conan had entered there
sounded a woman's scream, faint and muffled in the distance.

"Blast your soul!" Conan took a stride toward the door, then wheeled
with his skin tingling. Baal-pteor was laughing at him, and that laugh
was edged with menace that made the hackles rise on Conan's neck and
sent a red wave of murder-lust driving across his vision.

He started toward Baal-pteor, the knuckles on his swordhand showing
white. With a swift motion the brown man threw something at him—a
shining crystal sphere that glistened in the weird light.

Conan dodged instinctively, but, miraculously, the globe stopped short
in midair, a few feet from his face. It did not fall to the floor. It
hung suspended, as if by invisible filaments, some five feet above the
floor. And as he glared in amazement, it began to rotate with growing
speed. And as it revolved it grew, expanded, became nebulous. It filled
the chamber. It enveloped him. It blotted out furniture, walls, the
smiling countenance of Baal-pteor. He was lost in the midst of a
blinding bluish blur of whirling speed. Terrific winds screamed past
Conan, tugging at him, striving to wrench him from his feet, to drag
him into the vortex that spun madly before him.

With a choking cry Conan lurched backward, reeled, felt the solid wall
against his back. At the contact the illusion ceased to be. The
whirling, titanic sphere vanished like a bursting bubble. Conan reeled
upright in the silver-ceilinged room, with a gray mist coiling about
his feet, and saw Baal-pteor lolling on the divan, shaking with silent
laughter.

"Son of a slut!" Conan lunged at him. But the mist swirled up from the
floor, blotting out that giant brown form. Groping in a rolling cloud
that blinded him, Conan felt a rending sensation of dislocation—and
then room and mist and brown man were gone together. He was standing
alone among the high reeds of a marshy fen, and a buffalo was lunging
at him, head down. He leaped aside from the ripping scimitar-curved
horns and drove his sword in behind the foreleg, through ribs and heart
And then it was not a buffalo dying there in the mud, but the
brown-skinned Baal-pteor. With a curse Conan struck off his head; and
the head soared from the ground and snapped beastlike tusks into his
throat. For all his mighty strength he could not tear it loose—he was
choking—strangling; then there was a rush and roar through space, the
dislocating shock of an immeasurable impact, and he was back in the
chamber with Baal-pteor, whose head was once more set firmly on his
shoulders, and who laughed silently at him from the divan.

"Mesmerism!" muttered Conan, crouching and digging his toes hard
against the marble.

His eyes blazed. This brown dog was playing with him, making sport of
him! But this mummery, this child's play of mists and shadows of
thought, it could not harm him. He had but to leap and strike and the
brown acolyte would be a mangled corpse under his heel. This time he
would not be fooled by shadows of illusion—but he was.

A blood-curdling snarl sounded behind him, and he wheeled and struck in
a flash at the panther crouching to spring on him from the
metal-colored table. Even as he struck, the apparition vanished and his
blade clashed deafeningly on the adamantine surface. Instantly he
sensed something abnormal. The blade stuck to the table! He wrenched at
it savagely. It did not give. This was no mesmeristic trick. The table
was a giant magnet He gripped the hilt with both hands, when a voice at
his shoulder brought him about, to face the brown man, who had at last
risen from the divan.

Slightly taller than Conan and much heavier, Baal-pteor loomed before
him, a daunting image of muscular development. His mighty arms were
unnaturally long, and his great hands opened and closed, twitching
convulsively. Conan released the hilt of his imprisoned sword and fell
silent, watching his enemy through slitted lids.

"Your head, Cimmerian!" taunted Baal-pteor. "I shall take it with my
bare hands, twisting it from your shoulders as the head of a fowl is
twisted! Thus the sons of Kosala offer sacrifice to Yajur. Barbarian,
you look upon a strangler of Yota-pong. I was chosen by the priests of
Yajur in my infancy, and throughout childhood, boyhood, and youth I was
trained in the art of slaying with the naked hands—for only thus are
the sacrifices enacted. Yajur loves blood, and we waste not a drop from
the victim's veins. When I was a child they gave me infants to
throttle; when I was a boy I strangled young girls; as a youth, women,
old men, and young boys. Not until I reached my full manhood was I
given a strong man to slay on the altar of Yota-pong.

"For years I offered the sacrifices to Yajur. Hundreds of necks have
snapped between these fingers——" he worked them before the Cimmerian's
angry eyes. "Why I fled from Yota-pong to become Totrasmek's servant is
no concern of yours. In a moment you will be beyond curiosity. The
priests of Kosala, the stranglers of Yajur, are strong beyond the
belief of men. And I was stronger than any. With my hands, barbarian, I
shall break your neck!"

And like the stroke of twin cobras, the great hands closed on Conan's
throat. The Cimmerian made no attempt to dodge or fend them away, but
his own hands darted to the Kosalan's bull-neck. Baal-pteor's black
eyes widened as he felt the thick cords of muscles that protected the
barbarian's throat With a snarl he exerted his inhuman strength, and
knots and lumps and ropes of thews rose along his massive arms. And
then a choking gasp burst from him as Conan's fingers locked on his
throat. For an instant they stood there like statues, their faces masks
of effort, veins beginning to stand out purply on their temples.
Conan's thin lips drew back from his teeth in a grinning snarl.
Baal-pteor's eyes were distended; in them grew an awful surprise and
the glimmer of fear. Both men stood motionless as images, except for
the expanding of their muscles on rigid arms and braced legs, but
strength beyond common conception was warring there—strength that might
have uprooted trees and crushed the skulls of bullocks.

The wind whistled suddenly from between Baal-pteor's parted teeth. His
face was growing purple. Fear flooded his eyes. His thews seemed ready
to burst from his arms and shoulders, yet the muscles of the
Cimmerian's thick neck did not give; they felt like masses of woven
iron cords under his desperate fingers. But his own flesh was giving
way under the iron fingers of the Cimmerian which ground deeper and
deeper into the yielding throat muscles, crushing them in upon jugular
and windpipe.

The statuesque immobility of the group gave way to sudden, frenzied
motion, as the Kosalan began to wrench and heave, seeking to throw
himself backward. He let go of Conan's throat and grasped his wrists,
trying to tear away those inexorable fingers.

With a sudden lunge Conan bore him backward until the small of his back
crashed against the table. And still farther over its edge Conan bent
him, back and back, until his spine was ready to snap.

Conan's low laugh was merciless as the ring of steel.

"You fool!" he all but whispered. "I think you never saw a man from the
West before. Did you deem yourself strong, because you were able to
twist the heads off civilized folk, poor weaklings with muscles like
rotten string? Hell! Break the neck of a wild Cimmerian bull before you
call yourself strong. I did that, before I was a full-grown man—like
this!"

And with a savage wrench he twisted Baal-pteor's head around until the
ghastly face leered over the left shoulder, and the vertebrae snapped
like a rotten branch.

Conan hurled the flopping corpse to the floor, turned to the sword
again, and gripped the hilt with both hands, bracing his feet against
the floor. Blood trickled down his broad breast from the wounds
Baal-pteor's finger nails had torn in the skin of his neck. His black
hair was damp, sweat ran down his face, and his chest heaved. For all
his vocal scorn of Baal-pteor's strength, he had almost met his match
in the inhuman Kosalan. But without pausing to catch his breath, he
exerted all his strength in a mighty wrench that tore the sword from
the magnet where it clung.

Another instant and he had pushed open the door from behind which the
scream had sounded, and was looking down a long straight corridor,
lined with ivory doors. Hie other end was masked by a rich velvet
curtain, and from beyond that curtain came the devilish strains of such
music as Conan had never heard, not even in nightmares. It made the
short hairs bristle on the back of his neck. Mingled with it was the
panting, hysterical sobbing of a woman. Grasping his sword firmly, he
glided down the corridor.

4. Dance, Girl, Dance!

When Zabibi was jerked head-first through the aperture which opened in
the wall behind the idol, her first, dizzy, disconnected thought was
that her time had come. She instinctively shut her eyes and waited for
the blow to fall. But instead she felt herself dumped unceremoniously
onto the smooth marble floor, which bruised her knees and hip. Opening
her eyes, she stared fearfully around her, just as a muffled impact
sounded from beyond the wall. She saw a brown-skinned giant in a loin
cloth standing over her, and, across the chamber into which she had
come, a man sat on a divan, with his back to a rich black velvet
curtain, a broad, fleshy man, with fat white hands and snaky eyes. And
her flesh crawled, for this man was Totrasmek, the priest of Hanuman,
who for years had spun his slimy webs of power throughout the city of
Zamboula.

"The barbarian seeks to batter his way through the wall," said
Totrasmek sardonically, "but the bolt will hold."

The girl saw that a heavy golden bolt had been shot across the hidden
door, which was plainly discernible from this side of the wall. Hie
bolt and its sockets would have resisted the charge of an elephant.

"Go open one of the doors for him, Baal-pteor," ordered Totrasmek.
"Slay him in the square chamber at the other end of the corridor."

The Kosalan salaamed and departed by the way of a door in the side wall
of the chamber. Zabibi rose, staring fearfully at the priest, whose
eyes ran avidly over her splendid figure. To this she was indifferent.
A dancer of Zamboula was accustomed to nakedness. But the cruelty in
his eyes started her limbs to quivering.

"Again you come to me in my retreat, beautiful one," he purred with
cynical hypocrisy. "It is an unexpected honor. You seemed to enjoy your
former visit so little, that I dared not hope for you to repeat it. Yet
I did all in my power to provide you with an interesting experience."

For a Zamboulan dancer to blush would be an impossibility, but a
smolder of anger mingled with the fear in Zabibi's dilated eyes.

"Tat pig! You know I did not come here for love of you."

"No," laughed Totrasmek, "you came like a fool, creeping through the
night with a stupid barbarian to cut my throat. Why should you seek my
life?"

"You know why!" she cried, knowing the futility of trying to dissemble.

"You are thinking of your lover," he laughed. "The fact that you are
here seeking my life shows that he quaffed the drug I gave you. Well,
did you not ask for it? And did I not send what you asked for, out of
the love I bear you?"

"I asked you for a drug that would make him slumber harmlessly for a
few hours," she said bitterly. "And you —you sent your servant with a
drug that drove him mad!

I was a fool ever to trust you. I might have known your protestations
of friendship were lies, to disguise your hate and spite."

"Why did you wish your lover to sleep?" he retorted. "So you could
steal from him the only thing he would never give you—the ring with the
jewel men call the Star of Khorala—the star stolen from the queen of
Ophir, who would pay a roomful of gold for its return. He would not
give it to you willingly, because he knew that it holds a magic which,
when properly controlled, will enslave the hearts of any of the
opposite sex. You wished to steal it from him, fearing that his
magicians would discover the key to that magic and he would forget you
in his conquests of the queens of the world. You would sell it back to
the queen of Ophir, who understands its power and would use it to
enslave me, as she did before it was stolen."

"And why did you want it?" she demanded sulkily.

"I understand its powers. It would increase the power of my arts."

"Well," she snapped, "you have it now!"

"I have the Star of Khorala? Nay, you err."

"Why bother to lie?" she retorted bitterly. "He had it on his finger
when he drove me into the streets. He did not have it when I found him
again. Your servant must have been watching the house, and have taken
it from him, after I escaped him. To the devil with it! I want my lover
back sane and whole. You have the ring; you have punished us both. Why
do you not restore his mind to him? Can you?"

"I could," he assured her, in evident enjoyment of her distress. He
drew a phial from among his robes. "This contains the juice of the
golden lotus. If your lover drank it, he would be sane again. Yes, I
will be merciful. You have both thwarted and flouted me, not once but
many times; he has constantly opposed my wishes. But I will be
merciful. Come and take the phial from my hand."

She stared at Totrasmek, trembling with eagerness to seize it, but
fearing it was but some cruel jest She advanced timidly, with a hand
extended, and he laughed heartlessly and drew back out of her reach.
Even as her lips parted to curse him, some instinct snatched her eyes
upward. From the gilded ceiling four jade-hued vessels were falling.
She dodged, but they did not strike her. They crashed to the floor
about her, forming the four corners of a square. And she screamed, and
screamed again. For out of each ruin reared the hooded head of a cobra,
and one struck at her bare leg. Her convulsive movement to evade it
brought her within reach of the one on the other side and again she had
to shift like lightning to avoid the flash of its hideous head.

She was caught in a frightful trap. All four serpents were swaying and
striking at foot, ankle, calf, knee, thigh, hip, whatever portion of
her voluptuous body chanced to be nearest to them, and she could not
spring over them or pass between them to safety. She could only whirl
and spring aside and twist her body to avoid the strokes, and each time
she moved to dodge one snake, the motion brought her within range of
another, so that she had to keep shifting with the speed of light She
could move only a short space in any direction, and the fearful hooded
crests were menacing her every second. Only a dancer of Zamboula could
have lived in that grisly square.

She became, herself, a blur of bewildering motion. Hie heads missed her
by hair's breadths, but they missed, as she pitted her twinkling feet,
flickering limbs, and perfect eye against the blinding speed of the
scaly demons her enemy had conjured out of thin air.

Somewhere a thin, whining music struck up, mingling with the hissing of
the serpents, like an evil night wind blowing through the empty sockets
of a skull. Even in the flying speed of her urgent haste she realized
that the darting of the serpents was no longer at random. They obeyed
the grisly piping of the eery music. They struck with a horrible
rhythm, and perforce her swaying, writhing, spinning body attuned
itself to their rhythm. Her frantic motions melted into the measures of
a dance compared to which the most obscene tarantella of Zamora would
have seemed sane and restrained. Sick with shame and terror Zabibi
heard the hateful mirth of her merciless tormenter.

"The Dance of the Cobras, my lovely one!" laughed Totrasmek. "So
maidens danced in the sacrifice to Hanuman centuries ago—but never with
such beauty and suppleness. Dance, girl, dance! How long can you avoid
the fangs of the Poison People? Minutes? Hours? You will weary at last.
Your swift, sure feet will stumble, your legs falter, your hips slow in
their rotations. Then the fangs will begin to sink deep into your ivory
flesh———"

Behind him the curtain shook as if struck by a gust of wind, and
Totrasmek screamed. His eyes dilated and his hands caught convulsively
at the length of bright steel which jutted suddenly from his breast.

The music broke off short. The girl swayed dizzily in her dance, crying
out in dreadful anticipation of the flickering fangs—and then only four
wisps of harmless blue smoke curled up from the floor about her, as
Totrasmek sprawled headlong from the divan.

Conan came from behind the curtain, wiping his broad blade. Looking
through the hangings he had seen the girl dancing desperately between
four swaying spirals of smoke, but he had guessed that their appearance
was very different to her. He knew he had killed Totrasmek.

Zabibi sank down on the floor, panting, but even as Conan started
toward her, she staggered up again, though her legs trembled with
exhaustion.

The phial!" she gasped. "The phial!"

Totrasmek still grasped it in his stiffening hand. Ruthlessly she tore
it from his locked fingers and then began frantically to ransack his
garments.

"What the devil are you looking for?" Conan demanded.

"A ring—he stole it from Alafdhal. He must have, while my lover walked
in madness through the streets. Set's devils!"

She had convinced herself that it was not on the person of Totrasmek.
She began to cast about the chamber, tearing up divan covers and
hangings and upsetting vessels.

She paused and raked a damp lock of hair out of her eyes.

"I forgot Baal-pteor!"

"He's in Hell with his neck broken," Conan assured her.

She expressed vindictive gratification at the news, but an instant
later swore expressively.

"We can't stay here. Ifs not many hours until dawn. Lesser priests are
likely to visit the temple at any hour of the night, and if we're
discovered here with his corpse, the people will tear us to pieces. The
Turanians could not save us."

She lifted the bolt on the secret door, and a few moments later they
were in the streets and hurrying away from the silent square where
brooded the age-old shrine of Hanuman.

In a winding street a short distance away, Conan halted and checked his
companion with a heavy hand on her naked shoulder.

"Don't forget there was a price——-"

"I have not forgotten!" She twisted free. "But we must go to—to
Alafdhal first!"

A few minutes later the black slave let them through the wicket door.
The young Turanian lay upon the divan, his arms and legs bound with
heavy velvet ropes. His eyes were open, but they were like those of a
mad dog, and foam was thick on his lips. Zabibi shuddered.

"Force his jaws open!" she commanded, and Conan's iron fingers
accomplished the task.

Zabibi emptied the phial down the maniac's gullet. The effect was like
magic. Instantly he became quiet Hie glare faded from his eyes; he
stared up at the girl in a puzzled way, but with recognition and
intelligence. Then he fell into a normal slumber.

"When he awakes he will be quite sane," she whispered, motioning to the
silent slave.

With a deep bow he gave into her hands a small leathern bag and drew
about her shoulders a silken cloak. Her manner had subtly changed when
she beckoned Conan to follow her out of the chamber.

In an arch that opened on the street, she turned to him, drawing
herself up with a new regality.

"I must now tell you the truth," she said. "I am not Zabibi. I am
Nafertari. And he is not Alafdhal, a poor captain of the guardsmen. He
is Jungir Khan, satrap of Zamboula."

Conan made no comment; his scarred, dark countenance was immobile.

"I lied to you because I dared not divulge the truth to anyone," she
said. "We were alone when Jungir Khan went mad. None knew of it but
myself. Had it been known that the satrap of Zamboula was a madman,
there would have been instant revolt and rioting, even as Totrasmek
planned, who plotted our destruction.

"You see now how impossible is the reward for which you hoped. The
satrap's mistress is not—cannot be for you. But you shall not go
unrewarded. Here is a sack of gold."

She gave him the bag she had received from the slave.

"Go now, and when the sun is up come to the palace. I will have Jungir
Khan make you captain of his guard. But you will take your orders from
me, secretly. Your first duty will be to march a squad to the shrine of
Hanuman, ostensibly to search for clues of the priests slayer; in
reality to search for the Star of Khorala. It must be hidden there
somewhere. When you find it, bring it to me. You have my leave to go
now."

He nodded, still silent, and strode away. The girl, watching the swing
of his broad shoulders, was piqued to note that there was nothing in
his bearing to show that he was in any way chagrined or abashed.

When he had rounded a corner, he glanced back, and then changed his
direction and quickened his pace. A few moments later he was in the
quarter of the city containing the Horse Market. There he smote on a
door until from the window above a bearded head was thrust to demand
the reason for the disturbance.

"A horse," demanded Conan. "The swiftest steed you have."

"I open no gates at this time of night," grumbled the horse trader.

Conan rattled his coins.

"Dog's son knave! Don't you see I'm white, and alone? Come down, before
I smash your door!"

Presently, on a bay stallion, Conan was riding toward the house of Aram
Baksh.

He turned off the road into the alley that lay between the tavern
compound and the date-palm garden, but he did not pause at the gate. He
rode on to the northeast comer of the wall, then turned and rode along
the north wall, to halt within a few paces of the northwest angle. No
trees grew near the wall, but there were some low bushes. To one of
these he tied his horse and was about to climb into the saddle again,
when he heard a low muttering of voices beyond the comer of the wall.

Drawing his foot from the stirrup he stole to the angle and peered
around it. Three men were moving down the road toward the palm groves,
and from their slouching gait he knew they were Negroes. They halted at
his low call, bunching themselves as he strode toward them, his sword
in his hand. Their eyes gleamed whitely in the starlight Their brutish
lust shone in their ebony faces, but they knew their three cudgels
could not prevail against his sword, just as he knew it.

"Where are you going?" he challenged.

"To bid our brothers put out the fire in the pit beyond the groves,"
was the sullen, guttural reply. "Aram Baksh promised us a man, but he
lied. We found one of our brothers dead in the trap-chamber. We go
hungry this night."

"I think not," smiled Conan. "Aram Baksh will give you a man. Do you
see that door?"

He pointed to a small, iron-bound portal set in the midst of the
western wall.

"Wait there. Aram Baksh will give you a man."

Backing warily away until he was out of reach of a sudden bludgeon
blow, he turned and melted around the northwest angle of the wall.
Reaching his horse he paused to ascertain that the blacks were not
sneaking after him, and then he climbed into the saddle and stood
upright on it, quieting the uneasy steed with a low word. He reached
up, grasped the coping of the wall and drew himself up and over. There
he studied the grounds for an instant The tavern was built in the
southwest comer of the enclosure, the remaining space of which was
occupied by groves and gardens. He saw no one in the grounds. The
tavern was dark and silent, and he knew all the doors and windows were
barred and bolted.

Conan knew that Aram Baksh slept in a chamber that opened into a
cypress-bordered path that led to the door in the western wall. Like a
shadow he glided among the trees, and a few moments later he rapped
lightly on the chamber door.

"What is it?" asked a .rumbling, sleepy voice from within.

"Aram Baksh!" hissed Conan. "The blacks are stealing over the wall!"

Almost instantly the door opened, framing the tavern-keeper, naked but
for his shirt, with a dagger in his hand.

He craned his neck to stare into the Cimmerian's face.

"What tale is this—you!

Conan's vengeful fingers strangled the yell in his throat. They went to
the floor together and Conan wrenched the dagger from his enemy's hand.
The blade glinted in the starlight, and blood spurted. Aram Baksh made
hideous noises, gasping and gagging on a mouthful of blood. Conan
dragged him to his feet and again the dagger slashed, and most of the
curly beard fell to the floor.

Still gripping his captive's throat—for a man can scream incoherently*
even with his tongue slit—Conan dragged him out of the dark chamber and
down the cypress-shadowed path, to the iron-bound door in the outer
wall. With one hand he lifted the bolt and threw the door open,
disclosing the three shadowy figures which waited like black vultures
outside. Into their eager arms Conan thrust the innkeeper.

A horrible, blood-choked scream rose from the Zamboulan's throat, but
there was no response from the silent tavern. The people there were
used to screams outside the wall. Aram Baksh fought like a wild man,
his distended eyes turned frantically on the Cimmerian's face. He found
no mercy there. Conan was thinking of the scores of wretches who owed
their bloody doom to this man's greed.

In glee the Negroes dragged him down the road, mocking his frenzied
gibberings. How could they recognize Aram Baksh in this half-naked,
bloodstained figure, with the grotesquely shorn beard and
unintelligible babblings? Hie sounds of the struggle came back to
Conan, standing beside the gate, even after the clump of figures had
vanished among the palms.

Closing the door behind him, Conan returned to his horse, mounted, and
turned westward, toward the open desert, swinging wide to skirt the
sinister belt of palm groves. As he rode, he drew from his belt a ring
in which gleamed a jewel that snared the starlight in a shimmering
iridescence. He held it up to admire it, turning it this way and that
The compact bag of gold pieces clinked gently at his saddle bow, like a
promise of the greater riches to come.

"I wonder what she'd say if she knew I recognized her as Nafertari and
him as Jungir Khan the instant I saw them," he mused. "I knew the Star
of Khorala, too. There'll be a fine scene if she ever guesses that I
slipped it off his finger while I was tying him with his sword belt But
they'll never catch me, with the start I'm getting."

He glanced back at the shadowy palm groves, among which a red glare was
mounting. A chanting rose to the night, vibrating with savage
exultation. And another sound mingled with it, a mad incoherent
screaming, a frenzied gibbering in which no words could be
distinguished. The noise followed Conan as he rode westward beneath the
paling stars.

Leaving Zamboula, Conan rides westward with the Star of Khorala into
the meadowlands of Shem. Whether he reaches Ophir with it and claims
his roomful of gold or whether he loses it to some thief or light lady
along the road, there is no record. At any rate, the proceeds cannot
have lasted him very long. He pays another short visit to his native
Cimmeria, finding old friends dead and old ways duller than ever. When
word comes that the kozaki have regained their old vigor and are making
King Yezdigerd's life as unhappy as possible, Conan takes his horse and
his sword back to the harrying of Turan.

Although the northlander arrives all but empty-handed, he has old
friends both among the kozaki and among the Red Fellowship of Vilayet
Sea. Presently, sizeable contingents from both groups of outlaws are
operating under his command and finding the pickings better than ever.


The Devil in Iron
-----------------

Chapter One

The fisherman loosened his knife in its scabbard. The gesture was
instinctive, for what he feared was nothing a knife could slay, not
even the saw-edged crescent blade of the Yuetshi that could disembowel
a man with an upward stroke. Neither man nor beast threatened him in
the solitude which brooded over the castellated isle of Xapur.

He had climbed the cliffs, passed through the jungle that bordered
them, and now stood surrounded by evidences of a vanished state. Broken
columns glimmered among the trees, the straggling lines of crumbling
walls meandered off into the shadows, and under his feet were broad
paves, cracked and bowed by roots growing beneath.

The fisherman was typical of his race, that strange people whose origin
is lost in the gray dawn of the past, and who have dwelt in their rude
fishing huts along the southern shore of the Sea of Vilayet since time
immemorial. He was broadly built, with long, apish arms and a mighty
chest, but with lean loins and thin, bandy legs. His face was broad,
his forehead low and retreating, his hair thick and tangled. A belt for
a knife and a rag for a loin cloth were all he wore in the way of
clothing.

That he was where he was proved that he was less dully incurious than
most of his people. Men seldom visited Xapur. It was uninhabited, all
but forgotten, merely one among the myriad isles which dotted the great
inland sea. Men called it Xapur, the Fortified, because of its ruins,
remnants of some prehistoric kingdom, lost and forgotten before the
conquering Hyborians had ridden southward. None knew who reared those
stones, though dim legends lingered among the Yuetshi which half
intelligibly suggested a connection of immeasurable antiquity between
the fishers and the unknown island kingdom.

But it had been a thousand years since any Yuetshi had understood the
import of these tales; they repeated them now as a meaningless formula,
a gibberish framed to their lips by custom. No Yuetshi had come to
Xapur for a century. The adjacent coast of the mainland was
uninhabited, a reedy marsh given over to the grim beasts that haunted
it The fisher's village lay some distance to the south, on the
mainland. A storm had blown his frail fishing craft far from his
accustomed haunts and wrecked it in a night of flaring lightning and
roaring waters on the towering cliffs of the isle. Now, in the dawn,
the sky shone blue and clear; the rising sun made jewels of the
dripping leaves. He had climbed the cliffs to which he had clung
through the night because, in the midst of the storm, he had seen an
appalling lance of lightning fork out of the black heavens, and the
concussion of its stroke, which had shaken the whole island, had been
accompanied by a cataclysmic crash that he doubted could have resulted
from a riven tree.

A dull curiosity had caused him to investigate; and now he had found
what he sought, and an animal-like uneasiness possessed him, a sense of
lurking peril.

Among the trees reared a broken domelike structure, built of gigantic
blocks of the peculiar ironlike green stone found only on the islands
of Vilayet. It seemed incredible that human hands could have shaped and
placed them, and certainly it was beyond human power to have overthrown
the structure they formed. But the thunderbolt had splintered the
ton-heavy blocks like so much glass, reduced others to green dust, and
ripped away the whole arch of the dome.

The fisherman climbed over the debris and peered in, and what he saw
brought a grunt from him. Within the ruined dome, surrounded by stone
dust and bits of broken masonry, lay a man on a golden block. He was
clad in a sort of skirt and a shagreen girdle. His black hair, which
fell in a square mane to his massive shoulders, was confined about his
temples by a narrow gold band. On his bare, muscular breast lay a
curious dagger with a jeweled pommel, a shagreen-bound hilt, and a
broad, crescent blade. It was much like the knife the fisherman wore at
his hip, but it lacked the serrated edge and was made with infinitely
greater skill.

The fisherman lusted for the weapon. The man, of course, was dead; had
been dead for many centuries. This dome was his tomb. The fisherman did
not wonder by what art the ancients had preserved the body in such a
vivid likeness of life, which kept the muscular limbs full and
unshrunken, the dark flesh vital. The dull brain of the Yuetshi had
room only for his desire for the knife with its delicate, waving lines
along the dully gleaming blade.

Scrambling down into the dome, he lifted the weapon from the man's
breast As he did so, a strange and terrible thing came to pass. The
muscular, dark hands knotted convulsively, the lids flared open,
revealing great, dark, magnetic eyes, whose stare struck the startled
fisherman like a physical blow. He recoiled, dropping the jeweled
dagger in his perturbation. The man on the dais heaved up to a sitting
position, and the fisherman gaped at the full extent of his size, thus
revealed. His narrowed eyes held the Yuetshi, and in those slitted orbs
he read neither friendliness nor gratitude; he saw only a fire as alien
and hostile as that which burns in the eyes of a tiger.

Suddenly the man rose and towered above him, menace in his every aspect
There was no room in the fisherman's dull brain for fear, at least for
such fear as might grip a man who has just seen the fundamental laws of
nature defied. As the great hands fell to his shoulders, he drew his
saw-edged knife and struck upward with the same motion. The Wade
splintered against the stranger's corded belly as against a steel
column, and then the fisherman's thick neck broke like a rotten twig in
the giant hands.

Chapter Two

Jehungir Agha, lord of Khawarizm and keeper of the coastal border,
scanned once more the ornate parchment scroll with its peacock seal and
laughed shortly and sardonically.

"Well?" bluntly demanded his counselor Ghaznavi.

Jehungir shrugged his shoulders. He was a handsome man, with the
merciless pride of birth and accomplishment.

"The king grows short of patience," said he. "In his own hand he
complains bitterly of what he calls my failure to guard the frontier.
By Tarim, if I cannot deal a blow to these robbers of the steppes,
Khawarizm may own a new lord."

Ghaznavi tugged his gray-shot beard in meditation. Yezdigerd, king of
Turan, was the mightiest monarch in the world. In his palace in the
great port city of Aghrapur was heaped the plunder of empires. His
fleets of purple-sailed war galleys had made Vilayet an Hyrkanian lake.
The dark-skinned people of Zamora paid him tribute, as did the eastern
provinces of Koth. The Shemites bowed to his rule as far west as
Shushan. His armies ravaged the borders of Stygia in the south and the
snowy lands of the Hyperboreans in the north. His riders bore torch and
sword westward into Brythunia and Ophir and Corinthia, even to the
borders of Nemedia. His gilt-helmeted swordsmen had trampled hosts
under their horses' hoofs, and walled cities went up in flames at his
command. In the glutted slave markets of Aghrapur, Sultanapur,
Khawarizm, Shahpur, and Khorusun, women were sold for three small
silver coins—blonde Brythunians, tawny Stygians, dark-haired Zamorians,
ebon Kushites, olive-skinned Shemites.

Yet, while his swift horsemen overthrew armies far from his frontiers,
at his very borders an audacious foe plucked his beard with a
red-dripping and smoke-stained hand.

On the broad steppes between the Sea of Vilayet and the borders of the
easternmost Hyborian kingdoms, a new race had sprung up in the past
half-century, formed originally of fleeing criminals, broken men,
escaped slaves, and deserting soldiers. They were men of many crimes
and countries, some born on the steppes, some fleeing from the kingdoms
in the West They were called kozak, which means wastrel.

Dwelling on the wild, open steppes, owning no law but their own
peculiar code, they had become* a people capable even of defying the
Grand Monarch. Ceaselessly they raided the Turanian frontier, retiring
in the steppes when defeated; with the pirates of Vilayet, men of much
the same breed, they harried the coast, preying off the merchant ships
which plied between the Hyrkanian ports.

"How am I to crush these wolves?" demanded Jehungir. "If I follow them
into the steppes, I run the risk either of being cut off and destroyed,
or of having them elude me entirely and burn the city in my absence. Of
late they have been more daring than ever."

"That is because of the new chief who has risen among them," answered
Ghaznavi. "You know whom I mean."

"Aye!" replied Jehungir feelingly. "It is that devil Conan; he is even
wilder than the kozaks, yet he is crafty as a mountain lion."

"It is more through wild animal instinct than through intelligence,"
answered Ghaznavi. "The other kozaks are at least descendants of
civilized men. He is a barbarian. But to dispose of him would be to
deal them a crippling blow."

"But how?" demanded Jehungir. "He has repeatedly cut his way out of
spots that seemed certain death for him. And, instinct or cunning, he
has avoided or escaped every trap set for him."

"For every beast and for every man there is a trap he will not escape,"
quoth Chaznavi. "When we have parleyed with the kozaks for the ransom
of captives, I have observed this man Conan. He has a keen relish for
women and strong drink. Have your captive Octavia fetched here."

Jehungir clapped his hands, and an impassive Kushite eunuch, an image
of shining ebony in silken pantaloons, bowed before him and went to do
his bidding. Presently he returned, leading by the wrist a tall,
handsome girl, whose yellow hair, clear eyes, and fair skin identified
her as a pure-blooded member of her race. Her scanty silk tunic, girded
at the waist, displayed the marvelous contours of her magnificent
figure. Her fine eyes flashed with resentment and her red lips were
sulky, but submission had been taught her during her captivity. She
stood with hanging head before her master until he motioned her to a
seat on the divan beside him. Then he looked inquiringly at Chaznavi.

"We must lure Conan away from the Kozaks" said the counselor abruptly.
"Their war camp is at present pitched somewhere on the lower reaches of
the Zaporoska River—which, as you well know, is a wilderness of reeds,
a swampy jungle in which our last expedition was cut to pieces by those
masterless devils."

"I am not likely to forget that," said Jehungir wryly.

"There is an uninhabited island near the mainland," said Ghaznavi,
"known as Xapur, the Fortified, because of some ancient ruins upon it.
There is a peculiarity, about it which makes it perfect for our
purpose. It has no shoreline but rises sheer out of the sea in cliffs a
hundred and fifty feet tall. Not even an ape could negotiate them. Hie
only place where a man can go up or down is a narrow path on the
western side that has the appearance of a worn stair, carved into the
solid rock of the cliffs.

"If we could trap Conan on that island, alone, we could hunt him down
at our leisure, with bows, as men hunt a lion."

"As well wish for the moon," said Jehungir impatiently. "Shall we send
him a messenger, bidding him climb the cliffs and await our coming?"

"In effect, yes!" Seeing Jehungir's look of amazement, Ghaznavi
continued: "We will ask for a parley with the kozaks in regard to
prisoners, at the edge of the steppes by Fort Ghori. As usual, we will
go with a force and encamp outside the castle. They will come, with an
equal force, and the parley will go forward with the usual distrust and
suspicion. But this time we will take with us, as if by casual chance,
your beautiful captive." Octavia changed color and listened with
intensified interest as the counselor nodded toward her. "She will use
all her wiles to attract Conan's attention. That should not be
difficult. To that wild reaver, she should appear a dazzling vision of
loveliness. Her vitality and substantial figure should appeal to him
more vividly than would one of the doll-like beauties of your
seraglio."

Octavia sprang up, her white fists clenched, her eyes blazing and her
figure quivering with outraged anger.

"You would force me to play the trollop with this barbarian?" she
exclaimed. "I will not! I am no market-block slut to smirk and ogle at
a steppes robber. I am the daughter of a Nemedian lord———"

"You were of the Nemedian nobility before my riders carried you off,"
returned Jehungir cynically. "Now you are merely a slave who will do as
she is bid."

"I will not!" she raged.

"On the contrary," rejoined Jehungir with studied cruelty, "you will. I
like Ghaznavi's plan. Continue, prince among counselors."

"Conan will probably wish to buy her. You will refuse to sell her, of
course, or to exchange her for Hyrkanian prisoners. He may then try to
steal her, or take her by force—though I do not think even he would
break the parley truce. Anyway, we must be prepared for whatever he
might attempt.

"Then, shortly after the parley, before he has time to forget all about
her, we will send a messenger to him, under a flag of truce, accusing
him of stealing the girl and demanding her return. He may kill the
messenger, but at least he will think that she has escaped.

"Then we will send a spy—a Yuetshi fisherman will do —to the kozak
camp, who will tell Conan that Octavia is hiding on Xapur. If I know my
man, he will go straight to that place."

"But we do not know that he will go alone," Jehungir argued.

"Does a man take a band of warriors with him, when going to a
rendezvous with a woman he desires?" retorted Ghaznavi. "The chances
are all that he will go alone. But we will take care of the other
alternative. We will not await him on the island, where we might be
trapped ourselves, but among the reeds of a marshy point, which juts
out to within a thousand yards of Xapur. If he brings a large force,
we'll beat a retreat and think up another plot If he comes alone or
with a small party, we will have him. Depend upon it, he will come,
remembering your charming slave's smiles and meaning glances."

"I will never descend to such shame!" Octavia was wild with fury and
humiliation. "I will die first!"

"You will not die, my rebellious beauty," said Jehungir, "but you will
be subjected to a very painful and humiliating experience."

He clapped his hands, and Octavia paled. This time it was not the
Kushite who entered, but a Shemite, a heavily muscled man of medium
height with a short, curled, blue-black beard.

"Here is work for you, Gilzan," said Jehungir. Take this fool, and play
with her awhile. Yet be careful not to spoil her beauty."

With an inarticulate grunt the Shemite seized Octavia's wrist, and at
the grasp of his iron fingers, all the defiance went out of her. With a
piteous cry she tore away and threw herself on her knees before her
implacable master, sobbing incoherently for mercy.

Jehungir dismissed the disappointed torturer with a gesture, and said
to Ghaznavi: "If your plan succeeds, I will fill your lap with gold."

Chapter Three

In the darkness before dawn, an unaccustomed sound disturbed the
solitude that slumbered over the reedy marshes and the misty waters of
the coast. It was not a drowsy waterfowl nor a waking beast. It was a
human who struggled through the thick reeds, which were taller than a
man's head.

It was a woman, had there been anyone to see, tail, and yellow-haired,
her splendid limbs molded by her draggled tunic. Octavia had escaped in
good earnest, every outraged fiber of her still tingling from her
experience in a captivity that had become unendurable.

Jehungir's mastery of her had been bad enough; but with deliberate
fiendishness Jehungir had given her to a nobleman whose name was a
byword for degeneracy even in Khawarizm.

Octavia's resilient flesh crawled and quivered at her memories.
Desperation had nerved her climb from Jelal Khan's castle on a rope
made of strips from torn tapestries, and chance had led her to a
picketed horse. She had ridden all night, and dawn found her with a
foundered steed on the swampy shores of the sea. Quivering with the
abhorrence of being dragged back to the revolting destiny planned for
her by Jelal Khan, she plunged into the morass, seeking a hiding place
from the pursuit she expected. When the reeds grew thinner around her
and the water rose about her thighs, she saw the dim loom of an island
ahead of her. A broad span of water lay between, but she did not
hesitate. She waded out until the low waves were lapping about her
waist; then she struck out strongly, swimming with a vigor that
promised unusual endurance.

As she neared the island, she saw that it rose sheer from the water in
castlelike cliffs. She reached them at last but found neither ledge to
stand on below the water, nor to cling to above. She swam on, following
the curve of the cliffs, the strain of her long flight beginning to
weight her limbs. Her hands fluttered along the sheer stone, and
suddenly they found a depression. With a sobbing gasp of relief, she
pulled herself out of the water and clung there, a dripping white
goddess in the dim starlight.

She had come upon what seemed to be steps carved in the cliff. Up them
she went, flattening herself against the stone as she caught the faint
clack of muffled oars. She strained her eyes and thought she made out a
vague bulk moving toward the reedy point she had just quitted. But it
was too far away for her to be sure in the darkness, and presently the
faint sound ceased and she continued her climb. If it were her
pursuers, she knew of no better course than to hide on the island. She
knew that most of the islands off that marshy coast were uninhabited.
This might be a pirate's lair, but even pirates would be preferable to
the beast she had escaped.

A vagrant thought crossed her mind as she climbed, in which she
mentally compared her former master with the kozak chief with whom—by
compulsion—she had shamelessly flirted in the pavilions of the camp by
Fort Ghori, where the Hyrkanian lords had parleyed with the warriors of
the steppes. His burning gaze had frightened and humiliated her, but
his cleanly elemental fierceness set him above Jelal Khan, a monster
such as only an overly opulent civilization can produce.

She scrambled up over the cliff edge and looked timidly at the dense
shadows which confronted her. The trees grew close to the cliffs,
presenting a solid mass of blackness. Something whirred above her head
and she cowered, even though realizing it was only a bat.

She did not like the looks of those ebony shadows, but she set her
teeth and went toward them, trying not to think of snakes. Her bare
feet made no sound in the spongy loam under the trees.

Once among them, the darkness closed frighteningly about her. She had
not taken a dozen steps when she was no longer able to look back and
see the cliffs and the sea beyond. A few steps more and she became
hopelessly confused and lost her sense of direction. Through the
tangled branches not even a star peered. She groped and floundered on,
blindly, and then came to a sudden halt.

Somewhere ahead there began the rhythmical booming of a drum. It was
not such a sound as she would have expected to hear in the time and
place. Then she forgot it as she was aware of a presence near her. She
could not see, but she knew that something was standing beside her in
the darkness.

With a stifled cry she shrank back, and as she did so, something that
even in her panic she recognized as a human arm curved about her waist
She screamed and threw all her supple young strength into a wild lunge
for freedom, but her captor caught her up like a child, crushing her
frantic resistance with ease. The silence with which her frenzied pleas
and protests were received added to her terror as she felt herself
being carried through the darkness toward the distant drum, which still
pulsed and muttered.

Chapter Four

As the first tinge of dawn reddened the sea, a small boat with a
solitary occupant approached the cliffs. The man in the boat was a
picturesque figure. A crimson scarf was knotted about his head; his
wide silk breeches, of flaming hue, were upheld by a broad sash, which
likewise supported a scimitar in a shagreen scabbard. His gilt-worked
leather boots suggested the horseman rather than the seaman, but he
handled his boat with skill. Through his widely open white silk shirt
showed his broad, muscular breast, burned brown by the sun.

The muscles of his heavy, bronzed arms rippled as he pulled the oars
with an almost feline ease of motion. A fierce vitality that was
evident in each feature and motion set him apart from common men; yet
his expression was neither savage nor somber, though the smoldering
blue eyes hinted at ferocity easily wakened. This was Conan, who had
wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possessions
than his wits and his sword, and who had carved his way to leadership
among them.

He paddled to the carven stair as one familiar with his environs and
moored the boat to a projection of the rock. Then he went up the worn
steps without hesitation. He was keenly alert, not because he
consciously suspected hidden danger, but because alertness was a part
of him, whetted by the wild existence he followed.

What Ghaznavi had considered animal intuition or some sixth sense was
merely the razor-edged faculties and savage wit of the barbarian. Conan
had no instinct to tell him that men were watching him from a covert
among the reeds of the mainland.

As he climbed the cliff, one of these men breathed deeply and
stealthily lifted a bow. Jehungir caught his wrist and hissed an oath
into his ear. "Fool! ill you betray us? Don't you realize he is out of
range? Let him get upon the island. He will go looking for the girl. We
will stay here awhile. He may have sensed our presence Or guessed our
plot He may have warriors hidden somewhere. We will wait. In an hour,
if nothing suspicious occurs, we'll row up to the foot of the stair and
wait him there. If he does not return in a reasonable time, some of us
will go upon the island and hunt him down. But I do not wish to do that
if it can be helped. Some of us are sure to die if we have to go into
the bush after him. I had rather catch him descending the stair, where
we can feather him with arrows from a safe distance."

Meanwhile, the unsuspecting kozak had plunged into the forest. He went
silently in his soft leather boots, his gaze sifting every shadow in
eagerness to catch sight of the splendid, tawny-haired beauty of whom
he had dreamed ever since he had seen her in the pavilion of Jehungir
Agha by Fort Ghori. He would have desired her even if she had displayed
repugnance toward him. But her cryptic smiles and glances had fired his
blood, and with all the lawless violence which was his heritage he
desired that white-skinned, golden-haired woman of civilization.

He had been on Xapur before. Less than a month ago, he had held a
secret conclave here with a pirate crew. He knew that he was
approaching a point where he could see the mysterious ruins which gave
the island its name, and he wondered if he would find the girl hiding
among them. Even with the thought, he stopped as though struck dead.

Ahead of him, among the trees, rose something that his reason told him
was not possible. It was a great dark green wall, with towers rearing
beyond the battlements.

Conan stood paralyzed in the disruption of the faculties which
demoralizes anyone who is confronted by an impossible negation of
sanity. He doubted neither his sight nor his reason, but something was
monstrously out of joint. Less than a month ago, only broken ruins had
showed among the trees. What human hands could rear such a mammoth pile
as now met his eyes, in the few weeks which had elapsed? Besides, the
buccaneers who roamed Vilayet ceaselessly would have learned of any
work going on on such stupendous scale and would have informed the
kozaks.

There was no explaining this thing, but it was so. He was on Xapur, and
that fantastic heap of towering masonry was on Xapur, and all was
madness and paradox; yet it was all true.

He wheeled to race back through the jungle, down the carven stair and
across the blue waters to the distant camp at the mouth of the
Zaporoska. In that moment of unreasoning panic, even the thought of
halting so near the inland sea was repugnant. He would leave it behind
him, would quit the armed camps and the steppes and put a thousand
miles between him and the blue, mysterious East where the most basic
laws of nature could be set at naught, by what diabolism he could not
guess.

For an instant, the future fate of kingdoms that hinged on this
gay-clad barbarian hung in the balance, It was a small thing that
tipped the scales—merely a shred of silk hanging on a bush that caught
his uneasy glance. He leaned to it, his nostrils expanding, his nerves
quivering to a subtle stimulant. On that bit of torn cloth, so faint
that it was less with his physical faculties than by some obscure
instinctive sense that he recognized it, lingered the tantalizing
perfume that he connected with the sweet, firm flesh of the woman he
had seen in Jehungir's pavilion. The fisherman had not lied, then; she
was here! Then in the soil he saw a single track in the loam, the track
of a bare foot, long and slender, but a man's, not a woman's, and sunk
deeper than was natural. The conclusion was obvious; the man who made
that track was carrying a burden, and what should it be but the girl
the kozak was seeking?

He stood silently facing the dark towers that loomed through the trees,
his eyes slits of blue balefire. Desire for the yellow-haired woman
vied with a sullen, primordial rage at whoever had taken her. His human
passion fought down his ultra-human fears, and dropping into the
stalking crouch of a hunting panther, he glided toward the walls,
taking advantage of the dense foliage to escape detection from the
battlements.

As he approached, he saw that the walls were composed of the same green
stone that had formed the ruins, and he was haunted by a vague sense of
familiarity. It was as if he looked upon something he had never before
seen but had dreamed of or pictured mentally. At last he recognized the
sensation. The walls and towers followed the plan of the ruins. It was
as if the crumbling lines had grown back into the structures they
originally were.

No sound disturbed the morning quiet as Conan stole to the foot of the
wall, which rose sheer from the luxuriant growth. On the southern
reaches of the inland sea, the vegetation was almost tropical. He saw
no one on the battlements, heard no sounds within. He saw a massive
gate a short distance to his left and had no reason to suppose that it
was not locked and guarded. But he believed that the woman he sought
was somewhere beyond that wall, and the course he took was
characteristically reckless.

Above him, vine-festooned branches reached out toward the battlements.
He went up a great tree like a cat; and reaching a point above the
parapet, he gripped a thick limb with both hands, swung back and forth
at arm's length until he had gained momentum, and then let go and
catapulted through the air, landing catlike on the battlements.
Crouching there, he stared down into the streets of a city.

The circumference of the wall was not great, but the number of green
stone buildings it contained was surprising. They were three or four
stories in height, mainly flat-roofed, reflecting a fine architectural
style. The streets converged like the spokes of a wheel into an
octagon-shaped court in the center of the town, which gave upon a lofty
edifice, which, with its domes and towers, dominated the whole city. He
saw no one moving in the streets or looking out of the windows, though
the' sun was already coming up. The silence that reigned there might
have been that of a dead and deserted city. A narrow stone stair
ascended the wall near him; down this he went.

Houses shouldered so closely to the wall that, halfway down the stair,
he found himself within arm's length of a window and halted to peer in.
There were no bars, and the silk curtains were caught back with satin
cords. He looked into a chamber whose walls were hidden by dark velvet
tapestries. The floor was covered with thick rugs, and there were
benches of polished ebony and an ivory dais heaped with furs.

He was about to continue his descent, when he heard the sound of
someone approaching in the street below. Before the unknown person
could round a corner and see him on the stair, he stepped quickly
across the intervening space and dropped lightly into the room, drawing
his scimitar. He stood for an instant statuelike; then, as nothing
happened, he was moving across the rugs toward an arched doorway, when
a hanging was drawn aside, revealing a cushioned alcove from which a
slender, dark-haired girl regarded him with languid eyes.

Conan glared at her tensely, expecting her momentarily to start
screaming. But she merely smothered a yawn with a dainty hand, rose
from the alcove, and leaned negligently against the hanging which she
held with one hand.

She was undoubtedly a member of a white race, though her skin was very
dark. Her square-cut hair was black as midnight, her only garment a
wisp of silk about her supple hips.

Presently she spoke, but the tongue was unfamiliar to him, and he shook
his head. She yawned again, stretched lithely and, without any show of
fear or surprise, shifted to a language he did understand, a dialect of
Yuetshi which sounded strangely archaic.

"Are you looking for someone?" she asked, as indifferently as if the
invasion of her chamber by an armed stranger were the most common thing
imaginable.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"I am Yateli," she answered languidly. "I must have feasted late last
night, I am so sleepy now. Who are you?"

"I am Conan, a hetman among the kozaks," he answered, watching her
narrowly. He believed her attitude to be a pose and expected her to try
to escape from the chamber or rouse the house. But, though a velvet
rope that might be a signal cord hung near her, she did not reach for
it.

"Conan," she repeated drowsily. "You are not a Dagonian. I suppose you
are a mercenary. Have you cut the heads off many Yuetshi?"

"I do not war on water rats!" he snorted.

"But they are very terrible," she murmured. "I remember when they were
our slaves. But they revolted and burned and slew. Only the magic of
Khosatral Khel has kept them from the walls——" She paused, a puzzled
look struggling with the sleepiness of her expression. "I forgot," she
muttered. "They did climb the wall, last night. There was shouting and
fire, and people calling in vain on Khosatral." She shook her head as
if to clear it "But that cannot be," she murmured, "because I am alive,
and I thought I was dead. Oh, to the devil with it!"

She came across the chamber, and taking Conan's hand, drew him to the
dais. He yielded in bewilderment and uncertainty. The girl smiled at
him like a sleepy child; her long silky lashes drooped over dusky,
clouded eyes. She ran her fingers through his thick black locks as if
to assure herself of his reality.

"It was a dream," she yawned. "Perhaps it's all a dream. I feel like a
dream now. I don't care. I can't remember something—I have
forgotten—there is something I cannot understand, but I grow so sleepy
when I try to think. Anyway, it doesn't matter."

"What do you mean?" he asked uneasily. "You said they climbed the walls
last night? Who?"

"The Yuetshi. I thought so, anyway. A cloud of smoke hid everything,
but a naked, bloodstained devil caught me by the throat and drove his
knife into my breast Oh, it hurt! But it was a dream, because see,
there is no scar.** She idly inspected her smooth bosom, and then sank
upon Conan's lap and passed her supple arms about his massive neck. "I
cannot remember," she murmured, nestling her dark head against his
mighty breast. "Everything is dim and misty. It does not matter. You
are no dream. You are strong. Let us live while we can. Love me!"

He cradled the girl's glossy head in the bend of his heavy arm and
kissed her full red lips with unfeigned relish.

"You are strong," she repeated, her voice waning. "Love me—love—" The
sleepy murmur faded away; the dusky eyes closed, the long lashes
drooping over the sensuous cheeks; the supple body relaxed in Conan's
arms.

He scowled down at her. She seemed to partake of the illusion that
haunted this whole city, but the firm resilience of her limbs under his
questing fingers convinced him that he had a living human girl in his
arms, and not the shadow of a dream. No less disturbed, he hastily laid
her on the furs upon the dais. Her sleep was too deep to be natural. He
decided that she must be an addict of some drug, perhaps like the black
lotus of Xuthal.

Then he found something else to make him wonder. Among the furs on the
dais was a gorgeous spotted skin, whose predominant hue was golden. It
was not a clever copy, but the skin of an actual beast. And that beast,
Conan knew, had been extinct for at least a thousand years; it was the
great golden leopard which figures so prominently in Hyborian legendry,
and which the ancient artists delighted to portray in pigments and
marble.

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Conan passed through the archway into
a winding corridor. Silence hung over the house, but outside he heard a
sound which his keen ears recognized as something ascending the stair
on the wall from which he had entered the building. An instant later he
was startled to hear something land with a soft but weighty thud on the
floor of the chamber he had just quitted. Turning quickly away, he
hurried along the twisting hallway until something on the floor before
him brought him to a halt.

It was a human figure, which lay half in the hall and half in an
opening that obviously was normally concealed by a door, which was a
duplicate of the panels of the wall. It was a man, dark and lean, clad
only in a silk loincloth, with a shaven head and cruel features, and he
lay as if death had struck him just as he was emerging from the panel.
Conan bent above him, seeking the cause of his death, and discovered
him to be merely sunk in the same deep sleep as the girl in the
chamber.

But why should he select such a place for his slumbers? While
meditating on the matter, Conan was galvanized by a sound behind him.
Something was moving up the corridor in his direction. A quick glance
down it showed that it ended in a great door, which might be locked.
Conan jerked the supine body out of the panel entrance and stepped
through, pulling the panel shut after him. A dick told him it was
locked in place. Standing in utter darkness, he heard a shuffling tread
halt just outside the door, and a faint chill trickled along his spine.
That was no human step, nor that of any beast he had ever encountered.

There was an instant of silence, then a faint creak of wood and metal.
Putting out his hand he felt the door straining and bending inward, as
if a great weight were being steadily borne against it from the
outside. As. he reached for his sword, this ceased and he heard a
strange, slobbering mouthing that prickled the short hairs on his
scalp. Scimitar in hand, he began backing away, and his heels felt
steps, down which he nearly tumbled. He was in a narrow staircase
leading downward.

He groped his way down in the blackness, feeling for but not finding,
some other opening in the walls. Just as he decided that he was no
longer in the house, but deep in the earth under it, the steps ceased
in a level tunnel.

Chapter Five

Along the black, silent tunnel Conan groped, momentarily dreading a
fall into some unseen pit; but at last his feet struck steps again, and
he went up them until he came to a door on which his fumbling fingers
found a metal catch. He came out into a dim and lofty room of enormous
proportions. Fantastic columns marched about the mottled walls,
upholding a ceiling, which, at once translucent and dusky, seemed like
a cloudy midnight sky, giving an illusion of impossible height. If any
light filtered in from the outside, it was curiously altered.

In a brooding twilight, Conan moved across the bare green Boot. The
great room was circular, pierced on one side by the great, bronze
valves of a giant door. Opposite this, on a dais against the wall, up
to which led broad curving steps, there stood a throne of copper, and
when Conan saw what was coiled on this throne, he retreated hastily,
lifting his scimitar.

Then, as the thing did not move, he scanned it more closely and
presently mounted the glass steps and stared down at it It was a
gigantic snake, apparently carved of some jadelike substance. Each
scale stood out as distinctly as in real life, and the iridescent
colors were vividly reproduced. The great wedge-shaped head was half
submerged in the folds of its trunk; so neither the eyes nor jaws were
visible. Recognition stirred in his mind. This snake was evidently
meant to represent one of those grim monsters of the marsh, which in
past ages had haunted the reedy edges of Vilayet's southern shores.
But, like the golden leopard, they had been extinct for hundreds of
years. Conan had seen rude images of them, in miniature, among the idol
huts of the Yuetshi, and there was a description of them in the Book of
Skelos, which drew on prehistoric sources.

Conan admired the scaly torso, thick as his thigh and obviously of
great length, and he reached out and laid a curious hand on the thing.
And as he did so, his heart nearly stopped. An icy chill congealed the
blood in his veins and lifted the short hair on his scalp. Under his
hand there was not the smooth, brittle surface of glass or metal or
stone, but the yielding, fibrous mass of a living thing. He felt cold,
sluggish life flowing under his fingers.

His hand jerked back in instinctive repulsion. Sword shaking in his
grasp, horror and revulsion and fear almost choking him, he backed away
and down the glass steps with painful care, glaring in awful
fascination at the grisly thing that slumbered on the copper throne. It
did not move.

He reached the bronze door and tried it, with his heart in his teeth,
sweating with fear that he should find himself locked in with that
slimy horror. But the valves yielded to his touch, and he glided
through and closed them behind him.

He found himself in a wide hallway with lofty, tapestried walls, where
the light was the same twilight gloom. It made distant objects
indistinct, and that made him uneasy, rousing thoughts of serpents
gliding unseen through the dimness. A door at the other end seemed
miles away in the illusive light. Nearer at hand, the tapestry hung in
such a way as to suggest an opening behind it, and lifting it
cautiously he discovered a narrow stair leading up.

While he hesitated he heard, in the great room he had just left, the
same shuffling tread he had heard outside the locked panel. Had he been
followed through the tunnel? He went up the stair hastily, dropping the
tapestry in place behind him.

Emerging presently into a twisting corridor, he took the first doorway
he came to. He had a twofold purpose in his apparently aimless
prowling: to escape from the building and its mysteries, and to find
the Nemedian girl who, he felt, was imprisoned somewhere in this
palace, temple, or whatever it was. He believed it was the great domed
edifice in the center of the city, and it was likely that here dwelt
the ruler of the town, to whom a captive woman would doubtless be
brought.

He found himself in a chamber, not another corridor, and was about to
retrace his steps, when he heard a voice which came from behind one of
the walls. There was no door in that wall, but he leaned close and
heard distinctly. And an icy chill crawled slowly along his spine. The
tongue was Nemedian, but the voice was not human. There was a
terrifying resonance about it, like a bell tolling at midnight.

"There was no life in the Abyss, save that which was incorporated in
me," it tolled. "Nor was there light, nor motion, nor any sound. Only
the urge behind and beyond life guided and impelled me on my upward
journey, blind, insensate, inexorable. Through ages upon ages, and the
changeless strata of darkness I climbed——"

Ensorcelled by that belling resonance, Conan crouched forgetful of all
else, until its hypnotic power caused a strange replacement of
faculties and perception, and sound created the illusion of sight Conan
was no longer aware of the voice, save as far-off rhythmical waves of
sound. Transported beyond his age and his own individuality, he was
seeing the transmutation of the being men called Khosatral Khel which
crawled up from Night and the Abyss ages ago to clothe itself in the
substance of the material universe.

But human flesh was too frail, too paltry to hold the terrific essence
that was Khosatral Khel. So he stood up in the shape and aspect of a
man, but his flesh was not flesh; nor the bone, bone; nor blood, blood.
He became a blasphemy against all nature, for he caused to live and
think and act a basic substance that before had never known the pulse
and stir of animate being.

He stalked through the world like a god, for no earthly weapon could
harm him, and to him a century was like an hour. In his wanderings he
came upon a primitive people inhabiting the island of Dagonia, and it
pleased him to give this race culture and civilization, and by his aid
they built the city of Dagon and they abode there and worshipped him.
Strange and grisly were his servants, called from the dark corners of
the planet where grim survivals of forgotten ages yet lurked. His house
in Dagon was connected with every other house by tunnels through which
his shaven-headed priests bore victims for the sacrifice.

But after many ages, a fierce and brutish people appeared on the snores
of the sea. They called themselves Yuetshi, and after a fierce battle
were defeated and enslaved, and for nearly a generation they died on
the altars of Khosatral.

His sorcery kept them in bonds. Then their priest, a strange, gaunt man
of unknown race, plunged into the wilderness, and when he returned he
bore a knife that was of no earthly substance. It was forged of a
meteor, which flashed through the sky like a flaming arrow and fell in
a far valley. The slaves rose. Their saw-edged crescents cut down the
men of Dagon like sheep, and against that unearthly knife the magic of
Khosatral was impotent. While carnage and slaughter bellowed through
the fed smoke that choked the streets, the grimmest act of that grim
drama was played in the cryptic dome behind the great daised chamber
with its copper throne and its walls mottled like the skin of serpents.

From that dome, the Yuetshi priest emerged alone. He had not slain his
foe, because he wished to hold the threat of his loosing over the heads
of his own rebellious subjects. He had left Khosatral lying upon the
golden dais with the mystic knife across his breast for a spell to hold
him senseless and inanimate until doomsday.

But the ages passed and the priest died, the towers of deserted Dagon
crumbled, the tales became dim, and the Yuetshi were reduced by plagues
and famines and war to scattered remnants, dwelling in squalor along
the seashore.

Only the cryptic dome resisted the rot of time, until a chance
thunderbolt and the curiosity of a fisherman lifted from the breast of
the god the magic knife and broke the spell. Khosatral Khel rose and
lived and waxed mighty once more. It pleased him to restore the city as
it was in the days before its fall. By his necromancy he lifted the
towers from the dust of forgotten millenniums, and the folk which had
been dust for ages moved in life again.

But folk who have tasted of death are only partly alive. In the dark
corners of their souls and minds, death still lurks unconquered. By
night the people of Dagon moved and loved, hated and feasted, and
remembered the fall of Dagon and their own slaughter only as a dim
dream; they moved in an enchanted mist of illusion, feeling the
strangeness of their existence but not inquiring the reasons therefor.
With the coming of day, they sank into deep sleep, to be roused again
only by the coming of night, which is akin to death.

All this rolled in a terrible panorama before Conan's consciousness as
he crouched beside the tapestried wall. His reason staggered. All
certainty and sanity were swept away, leaving a shadowy universe
through which stole hooded figures of grisly potentialities. Through
the belling of the voice, which was like a tolling of triumph over the
ordered laws of a sane planet, a human sound anchored Conan's mind from
its flight through spheres of madness. It was the hysterical sobbing of
a woman.

Involuntarily he sprang up.

Chapter Six

Jehungir Agha waited with growing impatience in his boat among the
reeds. More than an hour passed, and Conan had not reappeared.
Doubtless he was still searching the island for the girl he thought to
be hidden there. But another surmise occurred to the Agha. Suppose the
hetman had left his warriors near by, and that they should grow
suspicious and come to investigate his long absence? Jehungir spoke to
the oarsmen, and the long boat slid from among the reeds and glided
toward the carven stairs.

Leaving half a dozen men in the boat, he took the rest, ten mighty
archers of Khawarizm, in spired helmets and tiger-skin cloaks. Like
hunters invading the retreat of the lion, they stole forward under the
trees, arrows on string. Silence reigned over the forest except when a
great green thing that might have been a parrot swirled over their
heads with a low thunder of broad wings and then sped off through the
trees. With a sudden gesture, Jehungir halted his party, and they
stared incredulously at the towers that showed through the verdure in
the distance.

"Tarim!" muttered Jehungir. "The pirates have rebuilt the nuns!
Doubtless Conan is there. We must investigate this. A fortified town
this close to the mainland!— Come!"

With renewed caution, they glided through the trees.

The game had altered; from pursuers and hunters they had become spies.

And as they crept through the tangled growth, the man they sought was
in peril more deadly than their filigreed arrows.

Conan realized with a crawling of his skin that beyond the wall the
belling voice had ceased. He stood motionless as a statue, his gaze
fixed on a curtained door through which he knew that a culminating
horror would presently appear.

It was dim and misty in the chamber, and Conan's hair began to lift on
his scalp as he looked. He saw a head and a pair of gigantic shoulders
grow out of the twilight doom. There was no sound of footsteps, but the
great dusky form grew more distinct until Conan recognized the figure
of a man. He was clad in sandals, a skirt, and a broad shagreen girdle.
His square-cut mane was confined by a circle of gold. Conan stared at
the sweep of the monstrous shoulders, the breadth of swelling breast,
the bands and ridges and clusters of muscles on torso and limbs. The
face was without weakness and without mercy. The eyes were balls of
dark fire. And Conan knew that this was Khosatral Khel, the ancient
from the Abyss, the god of Dagonia.

No word was spoken. No word was necessary. Khosatral spread his great
arms, and Conan, crouching beneath them, slashed at the giant's belly.
Then he bounded back, eyes blazing with surprise. The keen edge had
rang on the mighty body as on an anvil, rebounding without cutting.
Then Khosatral came upon him in an irresistible surge.

There was a fleeting concussion, a fierce writhing and intertwining of
limbs and bodies, and then Conan sprang clear, every thew quivering
from the violence of his efforts; blood started where the grazing
fingers had torn the skin. In that instant of contact, he had
experienced the ultimate madness of blasphemed nature; no human flesh
had bruised his, but metal animated and sentient; it was a body of
living iron which opposed his.

Khosatral loomed above the warrior in the gloom. Once let those great
fingers lock and they would not loosen until the human body hung limp
in their grasp. In that twilit chamber it was as if a man fought with a
dream-monster in a nightmare.

Flinging down his useless sword, Conan caught up a heavy bench and
hurled it with all his power. It was such a missile as few men could
even lift On Khosatral's mighty breast it smashed into shreds and
splinters. It did not even shake the giant on his braced legs. His face
lost something of its human aspect, a nimbus of fire played about his
awesome head, and like a moving tower he came on.

With a desperate wrench Conan ripped a whole section of tapestry from
the wall and whirling it, with a muscular effort greater than that
required for throwing the bench, he flung it over the giant's head. For
an instant Khosatral floundered, smothered and blinded by the clinging
stuff that resisted his strength as wood or steel could not have done,
and in that instant Conan caught up his scimitar and shot out into the
corridor. Without checking his speed, he hurled himself through the
door of the adjoining chamber, slammed the door, and shot the bolt.

Then as he wheeled, he stopped short, all the blood in him seeming to
surge to his head. Crouching on a heap of silk cushions, golden hair
streaming over her naked shoulders, eyes blank with terror, was the
woman for whom he had dared so much. He almost forgot the horror at his
heels until a splintering crash behind him brought him to his senses.
He caught up the girl and sprang for the opposite door. She was too
helpless with fright either to resist or to aid him. A faint whimper
was the only sound of which she seemed capable.

Conan wasted no time trying the door. A shattering stroke of his
scimitar hewed the lock asunder, and as he sprang through to the stair
that loomed beyond it, he saw the head and shoulders of Khosatral crash
through the other door. The colossus was splintering the massive panels
as if they were of cardboard.

Conan raced up the stair, carrying the big girl over one shoulder as
easily as if she had been a child. Where he was going he had no idea,
but the stair ended at the door of a round, domed chamber. Khosatral
was coming up the stair behind them, silently as a wind of death, and
as swiftly.

The chamber's walls were of solid steel, and so was the door. Conan
shut it and dropped in place the great bars with which it was
furnished. The thought struck him that this was Khosatral's chamber,
where he locked himself in to sleep securely from the monsters he had
loosed from the Pits to do his bidding.

Hardly were the bolts in place when the great door shook and trembled
to the giant's assault Conan shrugged his shoulders. This was the end
of the trail. There was no other door in the chamber, nor any window.
Air, and the strange misty light, evidently came from interstices in
the dome. He tested the nicked edge of his scimitar, quite cool now
that he was at bay. He had done his volcanic best to escape; when the
giant came crashing through that door, he would explode in another
savage onslaught with his useless sword, not because he expected it to
do any good, but because it was his nature to die fighting. For the
moment there was no course of action to take, and his calmness was not
forced or feigned.

The gaze he turned on his fair companion was as admiring and intense as
if he had a hundred years to live. He had dumped her unceremoniously on
the floor when he turned to close the door, and she had risen to her
knees, mechanically arranging her streaming locks and her scanty
garment. Conan's fierce eyes glowed with approval as they devoured her
thick golden hair, her clear, wide eyes, her milky skin, sleek with
exuberant health, the firm swell of her breasts, the contours of her
splendid hips.

A low cry escaped her as the door shook and a bolt gave way with a
groan.

Conan did not look around. He knew the door would hold a little while
longer.

They told me you had escaped," he said. "A Yuetshi fisher told me you
were hiding here. What is your name?"

"Octavia," she gasped mechanically. Then words came in a rush. She
caught at him with desperate fingers. "Oh Mitral what nightmare is
this? The people—the dark-skinned people—one of them caught me in the
forest and brought me here. They carried me to—to that—that thing. He
told me—he said—am I mad? Is this a dream?"

He glanced at the door which bulged inward as if from the impact of a
battering-ram.

"No," he said; "it's no dream. That hinge is giving way. Strange that a
devil has to break down a door like a common man; but after all, his
strength itself is a diabolism."

"Can you not kill him?" she panted. "You are strong."

Conan was too honest to lie to her. "If a mortal man could kill him,
he'd be dead now," he answered. "I nicked my blade on his belly."

Her eyes dulled. "Then you must die, and I must—oh, Mitra!" she
screamed in sudden frenzy, and Conan caught her hands, fearing that she
would harm herself. "He told me what he was going to do to me!" she
panted. "Kill me! Kill me with your sword before he bursts the door!"

Conan looked at her, and shook his head.

"I'll do what I can," he said. "That won't be much, but it'll give you
a chance to get past him down the stair. Then run for the cliffs. I
have a boat tied at the foot of the steps. If you can get out of the
palace, you may escape him yet. The people of this city are all
asleep."

She dropped her head in her hands. Conan took up his scimitar and moved
over to stand before the echoing door. One watching him would not have
realized that he was waiting for a death he regarded as inevitable. His
eyes smoldered more vividly; his muscular hand knotted harder on his
hilt; that was all.

The hinges had given under the giant's terrible assault, and the door
rocked crazily, held only by the bolts. And these solid steel bars were
buckling, bending, bulging out of their sockets. Conan watched in an
almost impersonal fascination, envying the monster his inhuman
strength.

Then, without warning, the bombardment ceased. In the stillness, Conan
heard other noises on the landing outside—the beat of wings, and a
muttering voice that was like the whining of wind through midnight
branches. Then presently there was silence, but there was a new feel in
the air. Only the whetted instincts of barbarism could have sensed it,
but Conan knew, without seeing or hearing him leave, that the master of
Dagon no longer stood outside the door.

He glared through a crack that had been started in the steel of the
portal. The landing was empty. He drew the warped bolts and cautiously
pulled aside the sagging door. Khosatral was not on the stair, but far
below he heard the clang of a metal door. He did not know whether the
giant was plotting new deviltries or had been summoned away by that
muttering voice, but he wasted no time in conjectures.

He called to Octavia, and the new note in his voice brought her up to
her feet and to his side almost without her conscious volition.

"What is it?" she gasped.

"Don't stop to talk!" He caught her wrist "Come on!" The chance for
action had transformed him; his eyes blazed, his voice crackled. "The
knife!" he muttered, while almost dragging the girl down the stair in
his fierce haste. "The magic Yuetshi blade! He left it in the dome!

I——" his voice died suddenly as a clear mental picture sprang up before
him. That dome adjoined the great room where stood the copper
throne—sweat started out on his body. The only way to that dome was
through that room with its copper throne and the foul thing that
slumbered in it.

But he did not hesitate. Swiftly they descended the stair, crossed the
chamber, descended the next stair, and came into the great dim hall
with its mysterious hangings. They had seen no sign of the colossus.
Halting before the great bronze-valved door, Conan caught Octavia by
her shoulders and shook her in his intensity.

Listen!" he snapped. "I'm going into the room and fasten the door.
Stand here and listen; if Khosatral comes, call to me. If you hear me
cry out for you to go, ran as though the Devil were on your heels—which
he probably will be. Make for that door at the other end of the halt
because I'll be past helping you. I'm going for the Yuetshi knife!"

Before she could voice the protest her lips were framing, he had slid
through the valves and shut them behind him. He lowered the bolt
cautiously, not noticing that it could be worked from the outside. In
the dim twilight his gaze sought that grim copper throne; yes, the
scary brute was still there, filling the throne with its loathsome
coils. He saw a door behind the throne and knew that it led into the
dome. But to reach it he must mount the dais, a few feet from the
throne itself.

A wind blowing across the green floor would have made more noise than
Conan's slinking feet. Eyes glued on the sleeping reptile he reached
the dais and mounted the glass steps. The snake had not moved. He was
reaching for the door…

The bolt on the bronze portal clanged and Conan stifled an awful oath
as he saw Octavia come into the room. She stared about, uncertain in
the deeper gloom, and he stood frozen, not daring to shout a warning.
Then she saw his shadowy figure and ran toward the dais, crying: "I
want to go with you! I'm afraid to stay alone—oh! She threw up her
hands with a terrible scream as for the first time she saw the occupant
of the throne. The wedge-shaped head had lifted from its coils and
thrust out toward her on a yard of shining neck.

Then with a smooth, flowing motion, it began to ooze from the throne,
coil by coil, its ugly head bobbing in the direction of the paralyzed
girl.

Conan cleared the space between him and the throne with a desperate
bound, his scimitar swinging with all his power. And with such blinding
speed did the serpent move that it whipped about and met him in full
midair, lapping his limbs and body with half a dozen coils. His
half-checked stroke fell futilely as he crashed down on the dais,
gashing the scaly trunk but not severing it.

Then he was writhing on the glass steps with fold after slimy fold
knotting about him, twisting, crushing, killing him. His right arm was
still free, but he could get no purchase to strike a killing blow, and
he knew one blow must suffice. With a groaning convulsion of muscular
expansion that bulged his veins almost to bursting on his temples and
tied his muscles in quivering, tortured knots, he heaved up on his
feet, lifting almost the full weight of that forty-foot devil.

An instant he reeled on wide-braced legs, feeling his ribs caving in on
his vitals and his sight growing dark, while his scimitar gleamed above
his head. Then it fell, shearing through the scales and flesh and
vertebrae. And where there had been one huge, writhing cable, now there
were horribly two, lashing and flopping in the death throes. Conan
staggered away from their blind strokes. He was sick and dizzy, and
blood oozed from his nose. Groping in a dark mist he clutched Octavia
and shook her until she gasped for breath.

"Next time I tell you to stay somewhere," he gasped, "you stay!"

He was too dizzy even to know whether she replied. Taking her wrist
like a truant schoolgirl, he led her around the hideous stumps that
still looped and knotted on the floor. Somewhere, in the distance, he
thought he heard men yelling, but his ears were still roaring so that
he could not be sure.

The door gave to his efforts. If Khosatral had placed the snake there
to guard the thing he feared, evidently he considered it ample
precaution. Conan half expected some other monstrosity to leap at him
with the opening of the door, but in the dimmer light he saw only the
vague sweep of the arch above, a dully gleaming block of gold, and a
half-moon glimmer on the stone.

With a gasp of gratification, he scooped it up and did not linger for
further exploration. He turned and fled across the room and down the
great hall toward the distant door that he felt led to the outer air.
He was correct. A few minutes later he emerged into the silent streets,
half carrying, half guiding his companion. There was no one to be seen,
but beyond the western wall there sounded cries and moaning wails that
made Octavia tremble. He led her to the southwestern wall and without
difficulty found a stone stair that mounted the rampart. He had
appropriated a thick tapestry rope in the great hall, and now, having
reached the parapet, he looped the soft, strong cord about the girl's
hips and lowered her to the earth. Then, making one end fast to a
merlon, he slid down after her. There was but one way of escape from
the island—the stair on the western cliffs. In that direction he
hurried, swinging wide around the spot from which had come the cries
and the sound of terrible blows.

Octavia sensed that grim peril lurked in those leafy fastnesses. Her
breath came pantingly and she pressed close to her protector. But the
forest was silent now, and they saw no shape of menace until they
emerged from the trees and glimpsed a figure standing on the edge of
the cliffs.

Jehungir Agha had escaped the doom that had overtaken his warriors when
an iron giant sallied suddenly from the gate and battered and crushed
them into bits of shredded flesh and splintered bone. When he saw the
swords of his archers break on that manlike juggernaut, he had known it
was no human foe they faced, and he had fled, hiding in the deep woods
until the sounds of slaughter ceased. Then he crept back to the stair,
but his boatmen were not waiting for him.

They had heard the screams, and presently, waiting nervously, had seen,
on the cliff above them, a blood-smeared monster waving gigantic arms
in awful triumph. They had waited for no more. When Jehungir came upon
the cliffs, they were just vanishing among the reeds beyond earshot.
Khosatral was gone—had either returned to the city or was prowling the
forest in search of the man who had escaped him outside the walls.

Jehungir was just preparing to descend the stairs and depart in Conan's
boat, when he saw the hetman and the girl emerge from the trees. The
experience which had congealed his blood and almost blasted his reason
had not altered Jehungir's intentions toward the kozak chief. The sight
of the man he had come to kill filled him with gratification. He was
astonished to see the girl he had given to Jelal Khan, but he wasted no
time on her. Lifting his bow he drew the shaft to its head and loosed.
Conan crouched and the arrow splintered on a tree, and Conan laughed.

"Dog!" he taunted. "You can't hit me! I was not born to die on
Hyrkanian steel! Try again, pig of Turan!"

Jehungir did not try again. That was his last arrow. He drew his
scimitar and advanced, confident in his spired helmet and close-meshed
mail. Conan met him halfway in a blinding whirl of swords. The curved
blades ground together, sprang apart, circled in glittering arcs that
blurred the sight which tried to follow them. Octavia, watching, did
not see the stroke, but she heard its chopping impact and saw Jehungir
fall, blood spurting from his side where the Cimmerian's steel had
sundered his mail and bitten to his spine.

But Octavia's scream was not caused by the death of her former master.
With a crash of bending boughs, Khosatral Khel was upon them. The girl
could not flee; a moaning cry escaped her as her knees gave way and
pitched her groveling to the sward.

Conan, stooping above the body of the Agha, made no move to escape.
Shifting his reddened scimitar to his left hand, he drew the great
half-blade of the Yuetshi. Khosatral Khel was towering above him, his
arms lifted like mauls, but as the blade caught the sheen of the sun,
the giant gave back suddenly.

But Conan's blood was up. He rushed in, slashing with the crescent
blade. And it did not splinter. Under its edge, the dusky metal of
Khosatral's body gave way like common flesh beneath a cleaver. From the
deep gash flowed a strange ichor, and Khosatral cried out like the
dirging of a great bell. His terrible arms flailed down, but Conan,
quicker than the archers who had died beneath those awful flails,
avoided their strokes and struck again and yet again. Khosatral reeled
and tottered; his cries were awful to hear, as if metal were given a
tongue of pain, as if iron shrieked and bellowed under torment.

Then, wheeling away, he staggered into the forest; he reeled in his
gait, crashed through bushes, and caromed off trees. Yet though Conan
followed him with the speed of hot passion, the walls and towers of
Dagon loomed through the trees before the man came within dagger-reach
of the giant.

Then Khosatral turned again, flailing the air with desperate blows, but
Conan, fired to berserk fury, was not to be denied. As a panther
strikes down a bull moose at bay, so he plunged under the bludgeoning
arms and drove the crescent blade to the hilt under the spot where a
human's heart would be.

Khosatral reeled and fell. In the shape of a man he reeled, but it was
not the shape of a man that struck the loam. Where there had been the
likeness of a human face, there was no face at all, and the metal limbs
melted and changed… Conan, who had not shrunk from Khosatral living,
recoiled blenching from Khosatral dead, for he had witnessed an awful
transmutation; in his dying throes Khosatral Khel had become again the
thing that had crawled up from the Abyss millenniums gone. Gagging with
intolerable repugnance, Conan turned to flee the sight; and he was
suddenly aware that the pinnacles of Dagon no longer glimmered through
the trees. They had faded like smoke—the battlements, the crenellated
towers, the great bronze gates, the velvets, the gold, the ivory, and
the dark-haired women, and the men with their shaven skulls. With the
passing of the inhuman intellect which had given them rebirth, they had
faded back into the dust which they had been for ages uncounted. Only
the stumps of broken columns rose above crumbling walls and broken
paves and shattered dome. Conan again looked upon the ruins of Xapur as
he remembered them.

The wild Hetman stood like a statue for a space, dimly grasping
something of the cosmic tragedy of the fitful ephemera called mankind
and the hooded shapes of darkness which prey upon it Then as he heard
his voice called in accents of fear, he started, as one awakening from
a dream, glanced again at the thing on the ground, shuddered and turned
away toward the cliffs and the girl that waited there.

She was peering fearfully under the trees, and she greeted him with a
half-stifled cry of relief. He had shaken off the dim monstrous visions
which had momentarily haunted him, and was his exuberant self again.

"Where is he?" she shuddered.

"Gone back to Hell whence he crawled," he replied cheerfully. "Why
didn't you climb the stair and make your escape in my boat?"

"I wouldn't desert———" she began, then changed her mind, and amended
rather sulkily, "I have nowhere to go. The Hyrkanians would enslave me
again, and the pirates would———"

"What of the kozaks?" he suggested.

"Are they better than the pirates?" she asked scornfully. Oman's
admiration increased to see how well she had recovered her poise after
having endured such frantic terror. Her arrogance amused him.

"You seemed to think so in the camp by Ghori," he answered. "You were
free enough with your smiles then."

Her red lip curled in disdain. "Do you think I was enamored of you? Do
you dream that I would have shamed myself before an ale-guzzling,
meat-gorging barbarian unless I had to? My master—whose body lies
there-forced me to do as I did."

"Oh!" Conan seemed rather crestfallen. Then he laughed with
undiminished zest "No matter. You belong to me now. Give me a kiss."

"You dare ask———" she began angrily, when she felt herself snatched off
her feet and crushed to the hetman's muscular breast. She fought him
fiercely, with all the supple strength of her magnificent youth, but he
only laughed exuberantly, drunk with the possession of this splendid
creature writhing in his arms.

He crushed her struggles easily, drinking the nectar of her lips with
all the unrestrained passion that was his, until the arms that strained
against them melted and twined convulsively about his massive neck.
Then he laughed down into the clear eyes, and said: "Why should not a
chief of the Free People be preferable to a city-bred dog of Turan?"

She shook back her tawny locks, still tingling in every nerve from the
fire of his kisses. She did not loosen her arms from his neck. "Do you
deem yourself an Agha's equal?" she challenged.

He laughed and strode with her in his arms toward the stars. "You shall
judge," he boasted. "I'll burn Khawarizm for a torch to light your way
to my tent."

Conan may or may not have made good his boast to burn Jehungir's city
of Khawarizm, but in any event he builds his combined kozak and pirate
raiders into so formidable a threat that King Yezdigerd calls off his
march of empire to crush them. The Turanian forces are ordered back
from the frontiers and in one massive assault succeed in breaking up
the kozak host. Some survivors ride east into the wilds of Hyrkania,
others west to join the Zuagirs in the desert. With a sizeable band,
Conan retreats southward through the passes of the Ilbars Mountains to
take service as light cavalry in the army of one of Yezdigerd's
strongest rivals, Kobad Shah, king of Iranistan.


The Flame Knife
---------------

1. Knives in the Dark

The scuff of swift and stealthy feet in the darkened doorway warned the
giant Cimmerian. He wheeled to see a tall figure lunging at him from
the black arch. It was dark in the alley, but Conan glimpsed a fierce,
bearded face and the gleam of steel in a lifted hand, even as he
avoided the blow with a twist of his body. The knife ripped his tunic
and glanced along the shirt of light chain mail he wore beneath it
Before the assassin could recover his balance, the Cimmerian caught his
arm and brought his massive fist down like a sledge hammer on the back
of the fellow's neck. The man crumpled to earth without a sound.

Conan stood over him, listening with tense expectancy. Up the street,
around the next comer, he caught the shuffle of sandaled feet, the
muffled clink of steel. These sinister sounds told him the nighted
streets of Anshan were a deathtrap. He hesitated, half-drew the
scimitar at his side, then shrugged and hurried down the street. He
swerved wide of the dark arches that gaped in the walls that lined it.

He turned into a wider street and a few moments later rapped softly on
a door, above which burned a bronze lantern. The door opened almost
instantly. Conan stepped inside, snapping:

"Lock the door!"

The massive Shemite who had admitted the Cimmerian shot home the heavy
bolt and turned, tugging his curled blue-black beard as he inspected
his commander.

"Your shirt is gashed, Conan!" he rumbled.

"A man tried to knife me," answered Conan. "Others followed."

The Shemite's black eyes blazed as he laid a broad, hairy hand on the
three-foot Ilbarsi knife that jutted from his hip. "Let us sally forth
and slay the dogs!" he urged.

Conan shook his head. He was a huge man, much taller than the Shemite,
but for all his size he moved with the lightness of a cat His thick
chest, corded neck, and square shoulders spoke of primordial strength,
speed, and endurance.

"Other things come first" he said. "They're enemies of Balash, who knew
I quarreled with the king tonight."

"You did!" cried the Shemite. "This is dark news indeed. What said the
king?"

Conan picked up a flagon of wine and gulped down half of it. "Oh, Kobad
Shah is mad with suspicion," he said. "Now it's our friend Balash. The
chiefs enemies have poisoned the king against him; but then, Balash is
stubborn. He won't come in and surrender as Kobad demands, saying Kobad
means to stick his head on a pike. So Kobad ordered me to take the
kozaki into the Ilbars Mountains and bring back Balash—all of him if
possible, but his head in any case."

"And?"

"I refused."

"You did?" said the Shemite in an awed whisper.

"Of course! What do you think I am? I told Kobad Shah how Balash and
his tribe saved us when we got lost in the Ilbars in the middle of
winter, on our ride south from the Vilayet Sea. Most hillmen would have
wiped us out. But the fool wouldn't listen. He began shouting about his
divine right and the insolence of low-born barbarians and such stuff.
One more word and I'd have stuffed his imperial turban down his
throat."

"You did not strike the king?" said the Shemite.

"Nay, though I felt like it Crom! I can't understand the way you
civilized men crawl on your bellies before any copper-riveted ass who
happens to sit on a jeweled chair with a bauble on his head."

"Because these asses can have us flayed or impaled at a nod. Now, we
must flee from Iranistan to escape the king's wrath."

Conan finished the wine and smacked his lips. "I think not; hell get
over it He knows his army is not what it was in his grandsire's time,
and we're the only light horse he can count on. But that still leaves
our friend Balash. I'm tempted to ride north to warn him."

"Alone, Conan?"

"Why not? You can give it out that I'm sleeping off a debauch for a few
days until—"

A light knock on the door made Conan cut off his sentence. He glanced
at the Shemite, stepped to the door, and growled:

"Who's there?"

"It is I, Nanaia," said a woman's voice.

Conan stared at his companion. "Do you know any Nanaia, Tubal?"

"Not I. It must be some trick."

"Let me in," said the voice.

"We shall see," muttered Conan, his eyes blazing a volcanic blue in the
lamplight. He drew his scimitar and laid a hand on the bolt, while
Tubal, knife drawn, took his place on the other side of the door.

Conan snapped the bolt and whipped open the door. A veiled figure
stepped across the threshold, then gave a little shriek and shrank back
at the sight of the gleaming blades poised on muscular arms.

Conan's blade darted out so that its tip touched the back of the
visitor. "Enter, my lady," he rambled in barbarously accented
Iranistani.

The woman stepped forward. Conan slammed the door and shot home the
bolt "Is anybody with you?"

"N-nay, I came alone…"

Conan's left arm shot out with the speed of a serpent's strike and
ripped the veil from the woman's face. She was tall, lithe, young, and
dark, with black hair and finely-chiseled features.

"Now, Nanaia, what is this all about?" he said.

"I am a girl from the king's seraglio—"

Tubal gave a long whistle. "Now we are in for it."

"Go on, Nanaia," said Conan.

"Well, I have often seen you through the lattice behind the throne,
when you were closeted with Kobad. It is the king's pleasure to let his
women watch him at his royal business. We are supposed to be shut out
of this gallery when weighty matters are discussed, but tonight
Xathrita the eunuch was drunk and failed to lock the door between the
gallery and the women's apartments. I stole back and heard your bitter
speech with the king.

"When you had gone, Kobad was very angry. He called in Hakhamani the
informer and bade him quietly murder you. Hakhamani was to make it look
like an accident."

"If I catch Hakhamani, I'll make him look like an accident," gritted
Conan. "But why all this delicacy? Kobad is no more backward than most
kings about shortening or lengthening the necks of people he likes
not."

"Because the king wants to keep the services of your kozaki, and if
they knew he had slain you they would revolt or ride away."

"And why did you bring me this news?"

She looked at him from large dark melting eyes. "I perish in the harem
from boredom. With hundreds of women, the king has no time for me. I
have admired you through the screen ever since you took service here
and hope you will take me with you. Anything is better than the
suffocating monotony of this gilded prison, with its everlasting gossip
and intrigue. I am the daughter of Kujala, chief of the Gwadiri. We are
a tribe of fishermen and mariners, far to the south among the Islands
of Pearl. I have steered my own ship through a typhoon, and such
indolence drives me mad."

"How did you get out of the palace?"

"A rope and an unguarded old window with the bars broken away… But that
is not important. Will you take me?"

"Send her back," said Tubal in the lingua franca of the kozaki: a
mixture of Zaporoskan, Hyrkanian, and other tongues. "Or better yet,
cut her throat and bury her in the garden. He might let us go unharmed,
but he'd never let us get away with the wench. Let him find that you
have run off with one of his concubines and he'll overturn every stone
in Iranistan to find you."

The girl evidently did not understand the words but quailed at the
menace of the tone.

Conan grinned wolfishly. "On the contrary. The thought of slinking out
of the country with my tail between my legs makes my guts ache. But if
I can take something like this along for a trophy—well, so long as we
must leave anyway…" He turned to Nanaia. "You understand that the pace
will be fast, the going rough, and the company not so polite as you're
used to?"

"I understand."

"And furthermore," he said with narrowed eyes, "that I command
absolutely?"

"Aye."

"Good. Wake the dog-brothers, Tubal; we ride as soon as they can stow
their gear and saddle up."

Muttering his forebodings, the Shemite strode into an inner chamber and
shook a man sleeping on a heap of carpets. "Awaken, son of a long line
of thieves. We ride northward."

Hattusas, a slight, dark Zamorian, sat up yawning. "Whither?"

"To Kushaf in the Ilbars Mountains, where we wintered, and where the
rebel dog Balash will doubtless cut all our throats," growled Tubal.

Hattusas grinned as he rose. "You have no love for the Kushafi, but he
is Conan's sworn friend."

Tubal scowled as he stalked out into the courtyard and through the door
that led to the adjacent barrack. Groans and curses came from the
barrack as the men were shaken awake.

Two hours later, the shadowy figures that lurked about Conan's house
shrank back into the shadows as the gate of the stable yard swung open
and the three hundred Free Companions clattered out in double file,
leading pack mules and spare horses. They were men of all nations, the
remnants of the band of kozaki whom Conan had led south from the
steppes around the Vilayet Sea when King Yezdigerd of Turan had
gathered a mighty army and broken the outlaw confederacy in an all-day
battle. They had arrived in Anshan ragged and half-starved. Now they
were gaudy in silken pantaloons and spired helmets of Iranistani
pattern, and loaded down with weapons.

Meanwhile in the palace, the king of Iranistan brooded on his throne.
Suspicion had eaten into his troubled soul until he saw enemies
everywhere, within and without For a time he had counted on the support
of Conan, the leader of the squadron of mercenary light horse. The
northern savage might lack the suave manners of the cultivated
Iranistani court, but he did seem to have his own barbarian code of
honor. Now, however, he had flatly refused to carry out Kobad Shah's
order to seize the traitor Balash…

The king glanced at the curtain masking an alcove, absently reflecting
that the wind must be rising, since the tapestry swayed a little. His
eyes swept the gold-barred window and he went cold. The light curtains
there hung motionless. Yet the hangings over the alcove had stirred…

Though short and fat, Kobad Shah did not lack personal courage. As he
sprang, seized the tapestries, and tore them apart, a dagger in a dark
hand licked from between them and smote him full in the breast He cried
out as he went down, dragging his assailant with him. The man snarled
like a wild beast his dilated eyes glaring madly. His dagger ribboned
the king's robe, revealing the mail shirt that stopped his first
thrust.

Outside, a deep shout echoed the king's shrill yells for help. Booted
feet pounded in the corridor. The king had grasped his attacker by
throat and knife wrist but the man's stringy muscles were like knotted
steel cords. As they rolled on the floor, the dagger, glancing from the
links of the mail shirt, fleshed itself in arm, thigh, and hand. Then,
as the bravo heaved the weakening ruler under him, grasped his throat
and lifted the knife again, something flashed in the lamplight like a
jet of blue lightning. The murderer collapsed, his head split to the
teeth.

"Your majesty! Sire!" It was Gotarza, the towering captain of the royal
guard, pale under his long black beard. As Kobad Shah sank down on a
divan, Gotarza began ripping strips from the hangings to bind his
wounds.

"Look!" gasped the king, pointing. His face was livid; his hand shook.
"The knife! By Asura, the knife!"

It lay glinting by the dead man's hand—a curious weapon with a wavy
blade shaped like a flame. Gotarza started and swore under his breath.

"The flame knife!" panted Kobad Shah. "The same weapon that struck at
the King of Vendhya and the King of Turan!"

"The mark of the Hidden Ones," muttered Gotarza, uneasily eyeing the
ominous symbol of the terrible cult.

The noise had roused the palace. Men were running down the corridors,
shouting to know what had happened.

"Shut the door!" exclaimed the king. "Admit no one but the major-domo
of the palace!"

"But we must have a physician, your majesty," protested the officer.
"These wounds will not slay of themselves, but the dagger might have
been poisoned."

"No, fetch no one! Whoever he is, he might be in the service of my
foes. Asura! The Yezmites have marked me for doom!" The experience had
shaken the king's courage. "Who can fight the dagger in the dark, the
serpent underfoot, the poison in the wine cup? There is that western
barbarian, Conan—but no, not even he is to be trusted, now that he has
defied my commands… Let the major-domo in, Gotarza." When the officer
admitted the stout official, the king asked: "What news, Bardiya?"

"Oh, sire, what has happened? It is—"

"Never mind what has happened to me. I see by your eyes you have news.
What know you?"

"The kozaki have ridden forth from the city with Conan, who told the
guard at the North Gate they were on their way to take Balash as you
commanded."

"Good. Perhaps the fellow has repented his insolence. What else?"

"Hakhamani the informer caught Conan on his way home, but Conan slew
one of his men and escaped."

"That is just as well. Call off Hakhamani until we know what Conan
intends by this foray. Anything more?"

"One of your women, Nanaia the daughter of Kujala, has fled the palace.
We found the rope by which she escaped."

Kobad Shah gave a roar. "She must have gone with Conan! It is too much
to have been pure chance! And he must be connected with the Hidden Ones
too! Else why should they strike at me just after I have quarreled with
him? He must have gone straight from my presence to send the Yezmite to
slay me. Gotarza, turn out the royal guard. Ride after the kozaki and
bring me Conan's head, or your own shall answer for it! Take at least
five hundred men, for the barbarian is fierce and crafty and not to be
trifled with."

As Gotarza hurried from the chamber, the long groaned: "Now, Bardiya,
fetch a leech. My veins are afire. Gotarza was right; the dagger must
have been envenomed."

Three days after his hurried departure from Anshan, Conan sat
cross-legged in the trail where it looped over the rock ridge to follow
the slope down to the village of Kushaf.

"I would stand between you and death," he said to the man who sat
opposite him, "as you did for me when your hill wolves would have
massacred us."

The man tugged his purple-stained beard reflectively. He was broad and
powerful, with gray-flecked hair and a broad belt bristling with knife
and dagger hilts. He was Balash, chief of the Kushafi tribesmen and
overlord of Kushaf and its neighboring villages. But he spoke modestly:

"The gods favor you! Yet what man can pass the spot of his death?"

"A man can either fight or flee, and not sit on a rock like an apple in
a tree, waiting to be picked. If you want to take a long chance of
making your peace with the king, you can go to Anshan—"

"I have too many enemies at court. In Anshan, the king would listen to
their lies and hang me up in an iron cage for the kites to eat Nay, I
will not go!"

"Then take your people and find another abode. There are places in
these hills where not even the king could follow you."

Balash glanced down the rocky slope to the cluster of mud-and-stone
towers that rose above the encircling wall. His thin nostrils expanded,
and into his eyes came a dark flame like that of an eagle surveying its
eyrie.

"Nay, by Asura! My clan has held Kushaf since the days of Bahram. Let
the king rule in Anshan; this is mine!"

"The king will likewise rule in Kushaf," grunted Tubal, squatting
behind Conan with Hattusas the Zamorian.

Balash glanced in the other direction where the trail disappeared to
the east between jutting crags. On these crags, bits of white cloth
were blown out by the wind, which the watchers knew were the garments
of archers and javelin men who guarded the pass day and night.

"Let him come," said Balash. "We hold the passes."

"He'll bring ten thousand men, in heavy armor, with catapults and other
siege gear," said Conan. "He'll burn Kushaf and take your head back to
Anshan."

"That will happen which will happen," said Balash.

Conan fought down a rising anger at the fatalism of these people. Every
instinct of his strenuous nature was a negation of this inert
philosophy. But, as they seemed to be deadlocked, he said nothing but
sat staring at the western crags where the sun hung, a ball of fire in
the sharp, windy blue.

Balash dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand and said: "Conan,
there is something I would show you. Down in yonder ruined hut outside
the wall lies a dead man, whose like was never seen in Kushaf. Even in
death, he is strange and evil. I think he is no natural man at all, but
a demon. Come."

He led the way down the slope to the hovel, explaining: "My warriors
came upon him lying at the base of a cliff, as if he had fallen or been
thrown from the top. I made them bring him here, but he died on the
way, babbling in a strange tongue. They deem him a demon, with good
cause.

"A long day's journey southward, among mountains so wild and barren not
even a goat could dwell among them, lies the country we call
Drujistan."

"Drujistan!" echoed Conan. "Land of demons, eh?"

"Aye! An evil region of black crags and wild gorges, shunned by wise
men. It seems uninhabited, yet men dwell there—men or devils. Sometimes
a man is slain or a child or woman stolen from a lonely trail, and we
know it is their work. We have followed and glimpsed shadowy figures
moving through the night, but always the trail ends against a blank
cliff, through which only a demon could pass. Sometimes we hear drums
echoing among the crags, or the roaring of the fiends. It is a sound to
turn men's hearts to ice. The old legends say that among these
mountains, thousands of years ago, the ghoul-king Ura built the magical
city of Yanaidar, and that the deadly ghosts of Ura and his hideous
subjects still haunt the ruins. Another legend tells how, a thousand
years ago, a chief of the Ilbarsi hillmen settled in the ruins and
began to repair them and make the city his stronghold; but in one night
he and his followers vanished, nor were they ever seen again."

They reached the ruined hut, and Balash pulled open the sagging door. A
moment later, the five men were bending over a figure sprawled on the
dirt floor.

It was a figure alien and incongruous: that of a stocky man with broad,
square, flat features, colored like dark copper, and narrow, slanting
eyes—an unmistakable son of Khitai. Blood clotted the coarse black hair
on the back of his head, and the unnatural position of his body told of
shattered bones.

"Has he not the look of an evil spirit?" asked Balash.

"He's no demon, whether he was a wizard in life or not," answered
Conan. "He's a Khitan, from a country far to the east of Hyrkania,
beyond mountains and deserts and jungles so vast you could lose a dozen
Iranistans in them. I rode through that land when I soldiered for the
king of Turan. But what this fellow is doing here I cannot say—"

Suddenly his blue eyes blazed and he tore the bloodstained tunic away
from the squat throat A stained woolen shirt came into view, and Tubal,
looking over Conan's shoulder, grunted explosively. On the shirt,
worked in thread so crimson it might at first glance have been mistaken
for a splash of blood, appeared a curious emblem: a human fist grasping
a hilt from which jutted a knife with a wavy blade.

The flame knife!" whispered Balash, recoiling from that symbol of death
and destruction.

All looked at Conan, who stared down at the sinister emblem, trying to
recapture a vague train of associations it roused—dim memories of an
ancient and evil cult, which used that symbol. Finally he said to
Hattusas:

"When I was a thief in Zamora, I heard rumors of a cult called the
Yezmites that used such a symbol. You're a Zamorian; what know you of
this?"

Hattusas shrugged. "There are many cults whose roots go back to the
beginnings of time, to the days before the Cataclysm. Often rulers have
thought they had stamped them out, and often they have come to life
again. The Hidden Ones or Sons of Yezm are one of these, but more I
cannot tell you. I meddle not in such matters."

Conan spoke to Balash: "Can your men guide me to where you found this
man?"

"Aye. But it is an evil place, in the Gorge of Ghosts, on the borders
of Drujistan, and—"

"Good. Everybody get some sleep. We ride at dawn."

"To Anshan?" asked Balash.

"No. To Drujistan."

"Then you think—?"

"I think nothing—yet."

"Will the squadron ride with us?" asked Tubal. "The horses are badly
worn."

"No, let the men and horses rest. You and Hattusas shall go with me,
together with one of Balash's Kushafis for a guide. Codrus commands in
my absence, and if there's any trouble as a result of my dogs' laying
hands on the Kushafi women, tell him he is to knock their heads in."

2. The Black Country

Dusk mantled the serrated skyline when Conan's guide halted. Ahead, the
rugged terrain was broken by a deep canyon. Beyond the canyon rose a
forbidding array of black crags and frowning cliffs, a wild, haglike
chaos of broken black rock.

"There begins Drujistan," said the Kushafi. "Beyond that gorge, the
Gorge of Ghosts, begins the country of horror and death. I go no
farther."

Conan nodded, his eyes picking out a trail that looped down rugged
slopes into the canyon. It was a fading trace of the ancient road they
had been following for many miles, but it looked as though it had often
been used of late.

Conan glanced around. With him were Tubal, Hattusas, the guide—and
Nanaia the girl. She had insisted on coming because, she said, she
feared to be separated from Conan among all these wild foreigners,
whose speech she could not understand. She had proved a good traveling
companion, tough and uncomplaining, though of volatile and fiery
disposition.

The Kushafi said: "The trail is well-traveled, as you see. By it the
demons of the black mountains come and go. But men who follow it do not
return."

Tubal jeered. "What need demons with a trail? They fly with wings like
bats!"

"When they take the shape of men they walk like men," said the Kushafi.
He pointed to the jutting ledge over which the trail wound. "At the
foot of that slope we found the man you called a Khitan. Doubtless his
brother demons quarreled with him and cast him down."

"Doubtless he tripped and fell," grunted Conan. "Khitans of the desert
are unused to climbing, their legs being bowed and weakened by a life
in the saddle. Such a one would easily stumble on a narrow trail."

"If he was a man, perhaps," said the Kushafi. "But— Asura!"

All but Conan jumped, and the Kushafi snatched at his bow, glaring
wildly. Out over the crags, from the south, rolled an incredible
sound—a strident, braying roar, which vibrated among the mountains.

"The voice of the demons!" cried the Kushafi, jerking the rein so that
his horse squealed and reared. "In the name of Asura, let us be gone!
It's madness to remain!"

"Go back to your village if you're afraid," said Conan. "I'm going on."
In truth, the hint of the supernatural made the Cimmerian's nape
prickle too, but before his followers he did not wish to admit this.

"Without your men? It is madness! At least send back for your
followers."

Conan's eyes narrowed like those of a hunting wolf. "Not this time. For
scouting and spying, the fewer the better. I think I'll have a look at
this land of demons; I could use a mountain stronghold." To Nanaia he
said: "You had better go back, girl."

She began to weep. "Do not send me away, Conan! The wild mountaineers
will ravish me."

He glanced down her long, well-muscled figure. "Anyone who tried it
would have a task. Well, come on then, and do not say I didn't warn
you."

The guide wheeled his pony and kicked it into a run, calling back:
"Balash will weep for you! There will be woe in Kushaf! Aie! Ahai!

His lamentations died away amidst the clatter of hoofs on stone as the
Kushafi, flogging his pony, topped a ridge and vanished.

"Run, son of a noseless dam!" yelled Tubal. "Well brand your devils and
drag them to Kushaf by their tails!" But he fell silent the instant the
victim was out of hearing.

Conan spoke to Hattusas: "Have you ever heard a sound like that?"

The lithe Zamorian nodded. "Yes, in the mountains of the devil
worshipers."

Conan lifted his reins without comment. He, too, had heard the roar of
the ten-foot bronze trumpets that blared over the bare black mountains
of forbidden Pathenia, in the hands of shaven-headed priests of Erlik.

Tubal snorted like a rhinoceros. He had not heard those trumpets, and
he thrust his horse in ahead of Hattusas so as to be next to Conan as
they rode down the steep slopes in the purple dusk. He said roughly:
"Now that we have been lured into this country of devils by treacherous
Kushafi dogs who will undoubtedly steal back and cut your throat while
you sleep, what have you planned?"

It might have been an old hound growling at his master for patting
another dog. Conan bent his head and spat to hide a grin. "We'll camp
in the canyon tonight. The horses are too tired for struggling through
these gulches in the dark. Tomorrow we shall explore.

"I think the Hidden Ones have a camp in that country across the gorge.
The hills hereabouts are but thinly settled. Kushaf is the nearest
village, and it's a hard day's ride away. Wandering clans stay out of
these parts for fear of the Kushafis, and Balash's men are too
superstitious to explore across the gorge. The Hidden Ones, over there,
could come and go without being seen. I know not just what we shall do;
our destiny is on the knees of the gods."

As they came down into the canyon, they saw that the trail led across
the rock-strewn floor and into the mouth of a deep, narrow gorge, which
debouched into the canyon from the south. The south wall of the canyon
was higher than the north and more sheer. It swept up in a sullen
rampart of solid black rock, broken at intervals by narrow gorge
mouths. Conan rode into the gulch into which the trail wound and
followed it to the first bend. He found that this bend was but the
first of a succession of kinks. The ravine, running between sheer walls
of rock, writhed and twisted like the track of a serpent and was
already filled with darkness.

"This is our road tomorrow," said Conan. His men nodded silently as he
led them back to the main canyon, where some light still lingered. The
clang of their horses' hoofs on the flint seemed loud in the sullen
silence.

A few score of paces west of the trail ravine, another, narrower gulch
opened into the canyon. Its rocky floor showed no sign of any trail,
and it narrowed so rapidly that Conan thought it ended in a blind
alley.

Halfway between these ravine mouths, near the north wall, a tiny spring
bubbled up in a natural basin of age-hollowed rock. Behind it, in a
cavelike niche in the cliff, dry wiry grass grew sparsely. There they
tethered the weary horses. They camped at the spring, eating dried meat
and not risking a fire, which might be seen by hostile eyes.

Conan divided his party into two watches. Tubal he placed on guard west
of the camp, near the mouth of the narrower ravine, while Hattusas had
his station close to the mouth of the eastern ravine. Any hostile band
coming up or down the canyon, or entering it from either ravine, would
have to pass these vigilant sentries.

Darkness came swiftly in the canyon, seeming to flow in waves down the
black slopes and ooze out of the mouths of the ravines. Stars blinked
out, cold, white, and impersonal. Above the invaders brooded the great
dusky bulks of the broken mountains. Conan fell asleep wondering idly
what grim spectacles they had witnessed since the beginning of time.

The razor-keen perceptions of the barbarian had never been dulled by
Conan's years of contact with civilization. As Tubal approached him to
lay a hand on his shoulder, Conan awoke and rose to a crouch, sword in
hand, before the Shemite even had a chance to touch him.

"What is it?" muttered Conan.

Tubal squatted beside him, gigantic shoulders bulking dimly in the
gloom. Back in the shadow of the cliffs, the unseen horses moved
restlessly. Conan knew that peril was in the air even before Tubal
spoke:

"Hattusas is slain and the girl is gone! Death is creeping upon us in
the dark!"

"What?"

"Hattusas lies near the mouth of the ravine with his throat cut. I
heard the sound of a rolling pebble from the mouth of the eastern
ravine and stole thither without rousing you, and lo, there lay
Hattusas in his blood. He must have died silently and suddenly. I saw
no one and heard no further sound in the ravine. Then I hastened back
to you and found Nanaia gone. The devils of the hills have slain one
and snatched away the other without a sound. I sense that Death still
skulks here. This is indeed the Gorge of Ghosts!"

Conan crouched silently on one knee, straining eyes and ears into the
darkness. That the keen-sensed Zamorian should have died and Nanaia
been spirited away without the sound of a struggle smacked of the
diabolical.

"Who can fight devils, Conan? Let us mount and ride—"

"Listen!"

Somewhere a bare foot scuffed the rock floor. Conan rose, peering into
the gloom. Men were moving out there in the darkness. Shadows detached
themselves from the black background and slunk forward. Conan drew a
dagger with his left hand. Tubal crouched beside him, gripping his
Ilbarsi knife, silent and deadly as a wolf at bay.

The dim-seen line moved in slowly, widening as it came. Conan and the
Shemite fell back a few paces to have the rock wall at their backs and
keep themselves from being surrounded.

The rush came suddenly, bare feet slapping softly over the rocky floor,
steel glinting dully in the dim starlight Conan could make out but few
details of their assailants —only the bulks of them, and the shimmer of
steel. He struck and parried by instinct and feel as much as by sight.

He killed the first man to come within sword reach. Tubal sounded a
deep yell at the discovery that his foes were human after all and
exploded in a burst of berserk ferocity. The sweep of his heavy,
three-foot knife was devastating. Side by side, with the wall at their
backs, the two companions were safe from attack on Tear or flank.

Steel rang sharp on steel and blue sparks flew. There rose the ugly
butcher-shop sound of blades cleaving flesh and bone. Men screamed or
gasped death gurgles from severed throats. For a few moments a huddled
knot writhed and milled near the rock wall. The work was too swift and
blind and desperate to allow consecutive thought. But the advantage lay
with the men at bay. They could see as well as their attackers; man for
man they were stronger; and they knew that when they struck their steel
would flesh itself only in hostile bodies. The others were handicapped
by their numbers; for, the knowledge that they might kill a companion
with a blind stroke must have tempered their frenzy.

Conan ducked a sword before he realized he had seen it swinging. His
return stroke grated against mail; instead of hacking through it he
slashed at an unprotected thigh and brought the man down. As he engaged
the next man, the fallen one dragged himself forward and drove a knife
at Conan's body, but Conan's own mail stopped it, and the dagger in
Conan's left hand found the man's throat. Men spurted their blood on
him as they died.

Then the rush ebbed. The attackers melted away like phantoms into the
darkness, which was becoming less absolute. The eastern rim of the
canyon was lined with a faint silvery fire that marked the moonrise.

Tubal gave tongue like a wolf and charged after the retreating figures,
the foam of blood lust flecking his beard. He stumbled over a corpse
and stabbed savagely downward before he realized it was a dead man.
Then Conan grabbed his arm. He almost dragged the mighty Cimmerian off
his feet as he plunged and snorted like a lassoed bull.

"Wait, fool!" snarled Conan. "Do you want to ran into a trap?"

Tubal subsided to a wolfish wariness. Together they glided after the
vague figures, which disappeared into the mouth of the eastern ravine.
There the pursuers halted, peering warily into the black depths.
Somewhere far down it, a dislodged pebble rattled on the stone. Conan
tensed like a suspicious panther.

"The dogs still flee," muttered Tubal. "Shall we follow?"

Conan shook his head. With Nanaia a captive, he could not afford to
throw his life away by a mad rush into the well of blackness, where
ambushes might make any step a march of death. They fell back to the
camp and the frightened horses, which were frantic with the stench of
fresh-spilt blood.

"When the moon rises high enough to flood the canyon with light," said
Tubal, "they will shoot us with arrows from the ravine."

"We must take the chance," grunted Conan. "Maybe they are poor shots."

They squatted in the shadow of the cliffs in silence as the moonlight,
weird and ghostly, grew in the canyon, and boulder, ledge, and wall
took shape. No sound disturbed the brooding quiet. Then, by the waxing
light, Conan investigated the four dead men left behind by the
attackers. As he peered from face to bearded face, Tubal exclaimed:

"Devil-worshipers! Sabateans!"

"No wonder they could creep like cats," muttered Conan. In Shem he had
learned of the uncanny stealth of the people of that ancient and
abominable cult, which worshiped the Golden Peacock in the nighted
domes of accursed Sabatea. "What are they doing here? Their homeland is
in Shem. Let's see—Ha!"

Conan opened the man's robe. There on the linen jerkin that covered the
Sabatean's thick chest appeared the emblem of a hand gripping a
flame-shaped dagger. Tubal ripped the tunics from the other three
corpses. Each displayed the fist and knife. He said:

"What sort of cult is this of the Hidden Ones, that draws men from Shem
and Khitai, thousands of miles asunder?"

"That's what I mean to find out," answered Conan. They squatted in the
shadow of the cliffs in silence. Then Tubal rose and said:

"What now?"

Conan pointed to dark splotches on the bare rock floor, which the
moonlight now made visible. "We can follow that trail."

Tubal wiped and sheathed his knife, while Conan wound around his waist
a coil of thin, strong rope with a three-pointed iron hook at one end.
He had found such a rope useful in his days as a thief. The moon had
risen higher, drawing a silver thread along the middle of the ravine.

Through the moonlight, they approached the mouth of the ravine. No
bowstring twanged; no javelin sighed through the night air; no furtive
figures flitted among the shadows. The blood drops speckled the rocky
floor; the Sabateans must have carried grim wounds away with them.

They pushed up the ravine, afoot, because Conan believed their foes
were also afoot Besides, the gulch was so narrow and rugged that a
horseman would be at a disadvantage in a fight.

At each bend they expected an ambush, but the trail of blood drops led
on, and no figures barred their way. The blood spots were not so thick
now, but they were enough to mark the way.

Conan quickened his pace, hoping to overtake the Sabateans. Even though
the latter had a long start, their wounds and their prisoner would slow
them down. He thought Nanaia must still be alive, or they would have
come upon her corpse.

The ravine pitched upward, narrowing, then widened, descended, bent,
and came out into another canyon running east and west. This was a few
hundred feet wide. The bloody trail ran straight across to the sheer
south wall and ceased.

Tubal grunted. "The Kushafi dogs spoke truth. The trail stops at a
cliff that only a bird could fly over."

Conan halted, puzzled. They had lost the trace of the ancient road in
the Gorge of Ghosts, but this was undoubtedly the way the Sabateans had
come. He raised his eyes up the wall, which rose straight for hundreds
of feet Above him, at a height of fifteen feet, jutted a narrow ledge,
a mere outcropping a few feet wide and four or five paces long. It
seemed to offer no solution, but halfway up to the ledge he saw a dull
smear on the rock of the wall.

Uncoiling his rope, Conan whirled the weighted end and sent it soaring
upward. The hook bit into the rim of the ledge and held. Conan went up
it, clinging to the thin, smooth strand, as swiftly as most men would
have climbed a ladder. As he passed the smear on the stone he confirmed
his belief that it was dried blood, such as might have been made by a
wounded man climbing or being hauled up to the ledge.

Tubal, below, fidgeted and tried to get a better view of the ledge, as
if fearing it were peopled with unseen assassins. But the shelf lay
bare when Conan pulled himself over the edge.

The first thing he saw was a heavy bronze ring set in the stone above
the ledge, out of sight from below. The metal was polished by usage.
More blood was smeared along the rim of the ledge. The drops led across
the ledge to the sheer wall, which showed much weathering at that point
Conan saw something else: the blurred print of bloody fingers on the
rock of the wall. He studied the cracks in the rock, then laid his hand
over the bloody hand print and pushed. A section of the wall swung
smoothly inward. He was staring into the door of a narrow tunnel, dimly
lit by the moon somewhere at the far end.

Wary as a stalking leopard, he stepped into it. At once he heard a
startled yelp from Tubal, to whose view it seemed that he had melted
into solid rock. Conan emerged head and shoulders to exhort his
follower to silence and then continued his investigation.

The tunnel was short; moonlight poured into it from the other end,
where it opened into a cleft. The cleft ran straight for a hundred feet
and made an abrupt bend, like a knife-cut through solid rock. The door
through which he had entered was an irregular slab of rock hung on
heavy, oiled bronze hinges. It fitted perfectly into its aperture, its
irregular shape making the cracks appear to be merely natural seams in
the cliff.

A rope ladder of heavy rawhide was coiled just inside the tunnel mouth.
Conan returned to the ledge outside with this, made it fast to the
bronze ring, and let it down. While Tubal swung up in a frenzy of
impatience, Conan drew up his own rope and coiled it around his waist
again.

Tubal swore strange Shemitic oaths as he grasped the mystery of the
vanishing trail. He asked: "But why was not the door bolted on the
inside?"

"Probably men are coming and going constantly, and a man might be in a
hurry to get through from the outside without having to shout to be let
in. There was little chance of its being discovered; I should not have
found it but for the blood marks."

Tubal was for plunging instantly into the cleft, but Conan had become
wary. He had seen no sign of a sentry but did not think a people so
ingenious in hiding the entrance to their country would leave it
unguarded.

He hauled up the ladder, coiled it back on its shelf, and closed the
door, plunging that end of the tunnel into darkness. Commanding the
unwilling Tubal to wait for him, he went down the tunnel and into the
cleft.

From the bottom of the cleft, an irregular knife-edge of starlit sky
was visible, hundreds of feet overhead. Enough moonlight found its way
into the cleft to serve Conan's catlike eyes.

He had not reached the bend when a scuff of feet beyond it reached him.
He had scarcely concealed himself behind a broken outcrop of rock,
split away from the side wall, when the sentry came. He came in the
leisurely manner of one who performs a perfunctory task, confident of
his own security. He was a squat Khitan with a face like a copper mask.
He swung along with the wide roll of a horseman, trailing a javelin.

He was passing Conan's hiding place when some instinct brought him
about in a flash, teeth bared in a startled snarl, spear whipping up
for a cast or a thrust Even as he turned, Conan was upon him with the
instant uncoiling of steel-spring muscles. As the javelin leaped to a
level, the scimitar lashed down. The Khitan dropped like an ox, his
round skull split like a ripe melon.

Conan froze to immobility, glaring along the passage. As he heard no
sound to indicate the presence of any other guard, he risked a low
whistle which brought Tubal headlong into the cleft The Shemite grunted
at the sight of the dead man.

Conan stooped and pushed back the Khitan's upper lip, showing the
canine teeth filed to points. "Another son of Erlik, the Yellow God of
Death. There is no telling how many more may be in this defile. We'll
drag him behind these rocks."

Beyond the bend, the long, deep defile ran empty to the next kink. As
they advanced without opposition, Conan became sure that the Khitan was
the only sentry in the cleft.

The moonlight in the narrow gash above them was paling into dawn when
they came into the open at last. Here the defile broke into a chaos of
shattered rock. The single gorge became half a dozen, threading between
isolated crags and split-off rocks, as a river splits into separate
streams at its delta. Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone
stood up like gaunt ghosts in the pale predawn light.

Threading their way among these grim sentinels, the adventurers
presently looked out upon a level, rock-strewn floor that stretched
three hundred paces to the foot of a cliff. The trail they had
followed, grooved by many feet in the weathered stone, crossed the
level and twisted a tortuous way up the cliff on ramps cut in the rock.
But what lay on top of the cliffs they could not guess. To right and
left, the solid wall veered away, flanked by broken pinnacles.

"What now, Conan?" In the gray light, the Shemite looked like a
mountain goblin surprised out of his cave by dawn.

"I think we must be close to—listen!"

Over the cliffs rolled the blaring reverberation they had heard the
night before, but now much nearer: the strident roar of the giant
trumpet.

"Have we been seen?" wondered Tubal, fingering his knife.

Conan shrugged. "Whether we have or not, we must see ourselves before
we try to climb that cliff. Here!"

He indicated a weathered crag, which rose like a tower among its lesser
fellows. The comrades went up it swiftly, keeping its bulk between them
and the opposite cliffs. The summit was higher than the cliffs. Then
they lay behind a spur of rock, staring through the rosy haze of the
rising dawn.

"Pteor!" swore Tubal.

From their vantage point, the opposite cliffs assumed their real nature
as one side of a gigantic mesalike block, which rose sheer from the
surrounding level, four to five hundred feet high. Its vertical sides
seemed unscalable, save where the trail had been cut into the stone.
East, north, and west it was girdled by crumbling crags, separated from
the plateau by the level canyon floor, which varied in width from three
hundred paces to half a mile. On the south, the plateau abutted on a
gigantic bare mountain, whose gaunt peaks dominated the surrounding
pinnacles.

But the watchers gave but little attention to this topographical
formation. Conan had expected, at the end of the bloody trail, to find
some sort of rendezvous: a cluster of horsehide tents, a cavern,
perhaps even a village of mud and stone nestling on a hillside.
Instead, they were looking at a city, whose domes and towers glistened
in the rosy dawn like a magical city of sorcerers stolen from some
fabled land and set down in this wilderness.

"The city of the demons!" cried Tubal. "It is enchantment and sorcery!"
He snapped his fingers to ward off evil spells.

The plateau was oval, about a mile and a half long from north to south
and somewhat less than a mile from east to west. The city stood near
its southern end, etched against the dark mountain behind it. A large
edifice, whose purple dome was shot with gold, gleamed in the dawn. It
dominated the flat-topped stone houses and clustering trees.

The Cimmerian blood in Conan's veins responded to the somber aspect of
the scene, the contrast of the gloomy black crags with the masses of
green and the sheens of color in the city. The city awoke forebodings
of evil. The gleam of its purple, gold-traced dome was somehow
sinister. The black, crumbling crags formed a fitting setting for it.
It was like a city of ancient, demonic mystery, rising with an evil
glitter amidst ruin and decay.

"This must be the stronghold of the Hidden Ones," muttered Conan.
"Who'd have thought to find a city like this in an uninhabited
country?"

"Not even we can fight a whole city/' grunted Tubal.

Conan fell silent while he studied the distant view. The city was not
so large as it had looked at first glance. It was compact but unwalled;
a parapet around the edge of the plateau furnished its defense. The two
and three-storey houses stood among surprising groves and
gardens—surprising because the plateau looked like solid rock without
soil for growing things. He reached a decision and said:

"Tubal, go back to our camp in the Gorge of Ghosts. Take the horses and
ride to Kushaf. Tell Balash I need all his swords, and bring the kozaki
and the Kushafis through the cleft and halt them among these defiles
until you get a signal from me, or know I'm dead."

"Pteor devour Balash! What of you?"

"I go into the city."

"You are mad!"

"Worry not, my friend. It is the only way I can get Nanaia out alive.
Then we can make plans for attacking the city. If I live and am at
liberty, I shall meet you here; otherwise, you and Balash follow your
own judgment."

"What do you want with this nest of fiends?"

Conan's eyes narrowed. "I want a base for empire. We cannot stay in
Iranistan nor yet return to Turan. In my hands, who knows what might
not be made of this impregnable place? Now get along."

"Balash loves me not. He'll spit in my beard, and then I'll kill him
and his dogs will slay me."

"He'll do no such thing."

"He will not come."

"He would come through Hell if I sent for him."

"His men will not come; they fear devils."

"They'll come when you tell them the devils are but men."

Tubal tore his beard and voiced his real objection to leaving Conan.
"The swine in that city will flay you alive!"

"Nay, I'll match guile with guile. I shall be a fugitive from the wrath
of the king, an outlaw seeking sanctuary." Tubal abandoned his argument
Grumbling in his beard, the thick-necked Shemite clambered down the
crag and vanished into the defile. When he was out of sight; Conan also
descended and walked toward the cliffs.

3. The Hidden Ones

Conan reached the foot of the cliffs and began mounting the steep road
without having seen any human being. The trail wound interminably up a
succession of ramps, with low, massive, cyclopean walls along the outer
edges. This was no work of Ilbarsi hillmen; it looked ancient and as
strong as the mountain itself.

For the last thirty feet, the ramps gave way to a flight of steep steps
cut in the rock. Still no one challenged Conan. He passed through a
line of low fortification along the edge of the mesa and came upon
seven men squatting over a game.

At the crunch of Conan's boots on the gravel, the seven sprang to their
feet, glaring wildly. They were Zuagirs— desert Shemites, lean,
hawk-nosed warriors with fluttering kaffias over their heads and the
hilts of daggers and scimitars protruding from their sashes. They
snatched up the javelins they had laid beside them and poised them to
throw.

Conan showed no surprise, halting and eyeing them tranquilly. The
Zuagirs, as uncertain as cornered wildcats, merely glared.

"Conan!" exclaimed the tallest of the Zuagirs, his eyes ablaze with
fear and suspicion. "What do you here?"

Conan ran his eyes over them all and replied: "I seek your master."

This did not seem to reassure them. They muttered among themselves,
moving their javelin arms back and forth as if to try for a cast. The
tall Zuagir's voice rose:

"You chatter like crows! This thing is plain: We were gambling and did
not see him come. We have failed in our duty. If it is known, there
will be punishment. Let us slay him and throw him over the cliff."

"Aye," agreed Conan. "Try it. And when your master asks: "Where is
Conan, who brought me important news?" say Lo, you did not consult with
us about his man, so we slew him to teach you a lesson!"

They winced at the irony. One growled: "Spear him; none will know."

"Nay! If we fail to bring him down with the first cast, he'll be among
us like a wolf among sheep."

"Seize him and cut his throat!" suggested the youngest of the band. The
others scowled so murderously at him that he fell back in confusion.

"Aye, cut my throat," taunted Conan, hitching the hilt of his scimitar
around within easy reach. "One of you might even live to tell of it!"

"Knives are silent," muttered the youngster. He was rewarded by a
javelin butt driven into his belly, which doubled him up gasping.
Having vented some of their spleen on their tactless comrade, the
Zuagirs grew calmer. The tall one asked Conan:

"You are expected?"

"Would I come otherwise? Does the lamb thrust his head unbidden into
the lion's maw?"

"Lamb!" The Zuagir cackled. "More like a gray wolf with blood on his
fangs."

"If there is fresh-spilt blood, it is but that of fools who disobeyed
their master. Last night, in the Gorge of Ghosts—"

"By Hanuman! Was it you the Sabatean fools fought?

They said they had slain a Vendhyan merchant and his servants in the
gorge."

So that was why the sentries were careless! For some reason the
Sabateans had lied about the outcome of the battle, and the Watchers of
the Road were not expecting pursuit.

"None of you was among them?" said Conan.

"Do we limp? Do we bleed? Do we weep from weariness and wounds? Nay, we
have not fought Conan!"

"Then be wise and make not their mistake. Will you take me to him who
awaits me, or will you cast dung in his beard by scorning his
commands?"

"The gods forbid!" said the tall Zuagir. "No order has been given us
concerning you. But if this be a lie, our master shall see to your
death, and if be not a lie, then we can have no blame. Give up your
weapons and we will take you to him."

Conan gave up his weapons. Ordinarily he would have fought to the death
before letting himself be disarmed, but now he was gambling for large
stakes. The leader straightened up the young Zuagir with a kick in the
rump, told him to watch the Stair as if his life depended on it; then
barked orders at the others.

As they closed around the unarmed Cimmerian, Conan knew their hands
itched to thrust a knife into his back. But he had sown the seeds of
uncertainty in their primitive minds, so that they dared not strike.

They started along the wide road that led to the city. Conan asked
casually: "The Sabateans passed into the city just before dawn?"

"Aye," was the terse reply.

They couldn't march fast," mused Conan. They had wounded men to carry,
and the girl, their prisoner, to drag."

One man began: "Why, as to the girl—"

The tall leader barked him to silence and turned a baleful gaze on
Conan. "Do not answer him. If he mocks us, retort not. A serpent is
less crafty. If we converse with him he'll have us beguiled ere we
reach Yanaidar."

Conan noted the name of the city, confirming the legend Balash had told
him. "Why mistrust me?" he demanded. "Have I not come with open hands?"

"Aye!" The Zuagir laughed mirthlessly. "Once I saw you come to the
Hyrkanian masters of Khorusun with open hands, but when you closed
those hands the streets ran red. Nay, Conan, I know you of old, from
the days when you led your outlaws over the steppes of Turan. I cannot
match my wits against yours, but I can keep my tongue between my teeth.
You shall not snare and blind me with words. I'll not speak; and if any
of my men answer you I will break his head."

"I thought I knew you," said Conan. "You are Antar the son of Adi. You
were a stout fighter."

The Zuagir's scarred face lighted at the praise. Then he recollected
himself, scowled, swore at one of his unoffending men, and marched
stiffly ahead of the party.

Conan strolled with the air of a man walking amidst an escort of honor,
and his bearing affected the warriors. By the time they reached the
city they were carrying their javelins on their shoulders instead of
poised for a thrust at Conan.

The secret of the plant life became apparent as they neared Yanaidar.
Soil, laboriously brought from distant valleys, had been used to fill
the many depressions pitting the surface of the plateau. An elaborate
system of deep, narrow irrigation-ditches, originating in some natural
water supply near the center of the city, threaded the gardens.
Sheltered by a ring of peaks, the plateau would present a milder
climate than was common in these mountains.

The road ran between large orchards and entered the city proper—lines
of flat-roofed stone houses fronting each other across the wide, paved
main street, each with an expanse of garden behind it. At the far end
of the street began a half-mile of ravine-gashed plain separating the
city from the mountain that frowned above and behind it. The plateau
was like a great shelf jutting out from the massive slope.

Men working in the gardens or loitering along the street stared at the
Zuagirs and their captive. Conan saw Iranistanis, Hyrkanians, Shemites,
and even a few Vendhyans and black Kushites. But no Ilbarsis; evidently
the mixed population had no connection with the native mountaineers.

The street widened into a suk closed on the south side by a broad wall,
which enclosed the palatial building with the gorgeous dome.

There was no guard at the massive, bronze-barred, gold-worked gates,
only a gay-clad Negro who bowed deeply as he opened the portals. Conan
and his escort came into a broad courtyard paved with colored tile, in
the midst of which a fountain bubbled and pigeons fluttered. East and
west, the court was bounded by inner walls, over which peeped the
foliage of more gardens. Conan noticed a slim tower, which rose as high
as the dome itself, its lacy tile work gleaming in the sunlight.

The Zuagirs marched across the court until they were halted on the
pillared portico of the palace by a guard of thirty Hyrkanians,
resplendent in plumed helmets of silvered steel, gilded corselets,
rhinoceros-hide shields, and gold-chased scimitars. The hawk-faced
captain of the guard conversed briefly with Antar the son of Adi. Conan
divined from their manner that no love was lost between the two.

Then the captain, who was addressed as Zahak, gestured with his slim
yellow hand, and Conan was surrounded by a dozen glittering Hyrkanians
and marched up the broad marble steps and through the wide arch whose
doors stood open. The Zuagirs, looking unhappy, followed.

They passed through wide, dimly-lit halls, from the vaulted and fretted
ceilings of which hung smoking bronze censers, while on either hand
velvet-curtained alcoves hinted at inner mysteries. Mystery and
intangible menace lurked in those dim, gorgeous halls.

Presently they emerged into a broader hallway and approached a
double-valved bronze door, flanked by even more gorgeously-clad
guardsmen. These stood impassively as statues while the Hyrkanians
strode by with their captive or guest and entered a semi-circular room.
Here dragon-worked tapestries covered the walls, hiding all possible
apertures except the one by which they had entered. Golden lamps hung
from an arched ceiling fretted with gold and ebony.

Opposite the great doorway stood a marble dais. On the dais stood a
great canopied chair, scrolled and carved like a throne, and on the
velvet cushions which littered the seat sat a slender figure in a
pearl-sewn robe. On the rose-colored turban glistened a great golden
brooch in the shape of a hand gripping a wavy-bladed dagger. The face
beneath the turban was oval, light-brown, with a small, pointed black
beard. Conan guessed the man to be from farther east, Vendhya or
Kosala. The dark eyes stared at a piece of carven crystal on a pedestal
in front of the man, a piece the size of Conan's fist, roughly
spherical but faceted like a great gem. It glittered with an intensity
not accounted for by the lights of the throne room, as if a mystical
fire burned in its depths.

On either side of the throne stood a giant Kushite. They were like
images carved of black basalt, naked but for sandals and silken
loincloths, with broad-tipped tulwars in their hands.

"Who is this?" languidly inquired the man on the throne in Hyrkanian.

"Conan the Cimmerian, my lord!" answered Zahak with a swagger.

The dark eyes quickened with interest, then sharpened with suspicion.
"How comes he into Yanaidar unannounced?"

The Zuagir dogs who watch the Stair say he came to them, swearing that
he had been sent for by the Magus of the Sons of Yezm."

Conan stiffened at that title, his blue eyes fixed with fierce
intensity on the oval face. But he did not speak. There was a time for
silence as well as for bold speech. His next move depended upon the
Magus' words. They might brand him as an impostor and doom him. But
Conan depended on the belief that no ruler would order him slain
without trying to learn why he was there, and the fact that few rulers
wholly trust their own followers.

After a pause, the man on the throne spoke: "This is the law of
Yanaidar: No man may ascend the Stair unless he makes the Sign so the
Watchers of the Stair can see. If he does not know the Sign, the Warder
of the Gate must be summoned to converse with the stranger before he
may mount the Stair. Conan was not announced. The Warder of the Gate
was not summoned. Did Conan make the Sign, below the Stair?"

Antar sweated, shot a venomous glance at Conan, and spoke in a voice
harsh with apprehension: "The guard in the cleft did not give warning.
Conan appeared upon the cliff before we saw him, though we were
vigilant as eagles. He is a magician who makes himself invisible at
will. We knew he spoke truth when he said you had sent for him,
otherwise he could not have known the Secret Way—"

Perspiration beaded the Zuagir's narrow forehead. The man on the throne
did not seem to hear his voice. Zahak struck Antar savagely in the
mouth with his open hand. "Dog, be silent until the Magus deigns to
command your speech!"

Antar reeled, blood starting down his beard, and looked black murder at
the Hyrkanian, but said nothing. The Magus moved his hand languidly,
saying:

"Take the Zuagirs away. Keep them under guard until further orders.
Even if a man is expected, the Watchers should not be surprised. Conan
did not know the Sign, yet he climbed the Stair unhindered. If they had
been vigilant, not even Conan could have done this. He is no wizard.
You may go. I will talk to Conan alone."

Zahak bowed and led his glittering swordsmen away between the silent
files of warriors lined on each side of the door, herding the shivering
Zuagirs before them. These turned as they passed and fixed their
burning eyes on Conan in a silent glare of hatred.

Zahak pulled the bronze doors shut behind them. The Magus spoke in
Iranistani to Conan: "Speak freely. These black men do not understand
Iranistani."

Conan, before replying, kicked a divan up before the dais and settled
himself comfortably on it, with his feet propped up on a velvet
footstool. The Magus showed no surprise that his visitor should seat
himself unbidden. His first words showed that he had had much dealings
with Westerners and had, for his own purposes, adopted some of their
directness. He said: "I did not send for you."

"Of course not. But I had to tell those fools something or else slay
them all."

"What do you want here?"

"What does any man want who comes to a nest of outlaws?"

"He might come as a spy."

Conan gave a rumbling laugh. "For whom?"

"How did you know the Road?"

"I followed the vultures; they always lead me to my goal."

"They should; you have fed them full often enough. What of the Khitan
who watched the cleft?"

"Dead; he wouldn't listen to reason."

"The vultures follow you, not you the vultures," commented the Magus.
"Why sent you no word to me of your coming?"

"By whom? Last night in the Gorge of Ghosts a band of your fools fell
upon my party, slew one, and carried another away. The fourth man was
frightened and fled, so I came on alone when the moon rose."

They were Sabateans, whose duty it is to watch the Gorge of Ghosts.
They did not know you sought me. They limped into the city at dawn,
with one dying and most of the others wounded, and swore they had slain
a rich Vendhyan merchant and his servants in the Gorge of Ghosts.
Evidently they feared to admit that they ran away leaving you alive.
They shall smart for their lie, but you have not told me why you came
here."

"For refuge. The King of Iranistan and I have fallen out."

The Magus shrugged. "I know about that Kobad Shah will not molest you
for some time, if ever. He was wounded by one of our agents. However,
the squadron he sent after you is still on your trail."

Conan felt the prickling at his nape that magic aroused in him. "Crom!
You keep up to date on your news."

The Magus gave a tiny nod towards the crystal. "A toy, but not without
its uses. However, we have kept our secret well. Therefore, since you
knew of Yanaidar and the Road to Yanaidar, you must have been told of
it by one of the Brotherhood. Did the Tiger send you?"

Conan recognized the trap. "I know no Tiger," he answered. "I need not
be told secrets; I learn them for myself. I came here because I had to
have a hiding place. I'm out of favor at Anshan, and the Turanians
would impale me if they caught me."

The Magus said something in Stygian. Conan, knowing he would not change
the language of their conversation without a reason, feigned ignorance.

The Magus spoke to one of the blacks, and that giant drew a silver
hammer from his girdle and smote a golden gong hanging by the
tapestries. The echoes had scarcely died away when the bronze doors
opened long enough to admit a slim man in plain silken robes, who bowed
before the dais—a Stygian from his shaven head. The Magus addressed him
as "Khaza" and questioned him in the tongue he had just tested on
Conan. Khaza replied in the same language.

"Do you know this man?" said the Magus.

"Aye, my lord."

"Have our spies included him in their reports?"

"Aye, my lord. The last dispatch from Anshan bore word of him. On the
night that your servant tried to execute the king, this man talked with
the king secretly an hour or so before the attack. After leaving the
palace hurriedly he fled from the city with his three hundred horsemen
and was last seen riding along the road to Kushaf. He was pursued by
horsemen from Anshan, but whether these gave up the chase or still seek
him I know not."

"You have my leave to go."

Khaza bowed and departed, and the Magus meditated for a space. Then he
lifted his head and said: "I believe you speak the truth. You fled from
Anshan to Kushaf, where no friend of the king would be welcome. Your
enmity toward the Turanians is well-known. We need such a man. But I
cannot initiate you until the Tiger passes on you. He is not now in
Yanaidar but will be here by tomorrow's dawn. Meanwhile I should like
to know how you learned of our society and our city."

Conan shrugged. "I hear the secrets the wind sings as it blows through
the branches of the dry tamarisks, and the tales the men of the
caravans whisper about the dung-fires in the serais."

"Then you know our purpose? Our ambition?"

"I know what you call yourselves." Conan, groping his way, made his
answer purposely ambiguous.

"Do you know what my title means?" asked the Magus.

"Magus of the Sons of Yezm—magician-in-chief of the Yezmites. In Turan
they say the Yezmites were a pre-Catastrophic race who lived on the
shores of the Vilayet Sea and practiced strange rites, with sorcery and
cannibalism, before the coming of the Hyrkanians, who destroyed the
last remnants of them."

"So they say," sneered the Magus. "But their descendants still dwell in
the hills of Shem."

"So I suspected," said Conan. "I've heard tales of them, but until now
I scorned them as legends."

"Aye! The world deems them legends—but since the Beginning of
Happenings the Fire of Yezm has not been wholly extinguished, though
for centuries it smoldered to glowing embers. The Society of the Hidden
Ones is the oldest cult of all. It lies behind the worship of Mitra,
Ishtar, and Asura. It recognizes no difference in race or religion. In
the ancient past its branches extended all over the world, from Crondar
to Valusia. Men of many lands and races belong and have belonged to the
society of the Hidden Ones. In the long, long ago the Yezmites were
only one branch, though from their race the priests of the cult were
chosen.

"After the Catastrophe, the cult reestablished itself. In Stygia,
Acheron, Koth, and Zamora were bands of the cult, cloaked in mystery
and only half-suspected by the races among which they dwelt But, as the
millennia passed, these groups became isolated and fell apart, each
branch going its separate way and each dwindling in strength because of
lack of unity.

"In olden days, the Hidden Ones swayed the destinies of empires. They
did not lead armies in the field, but they fought by poison and fire
and the flame-bladed dagger that bit in the dark. Their scarlet-cloaked
emissaries of death went forth to do the bidding of the Magus of the
Sons of Yezm, and kings died in Luxur, in Python, in Kuthchemes, in
Dagon.

"And I am a descendant of that one who was Magus of Yezm in the days of
Tuthamon, he whom all the world feared!" A fanatical gleam lit the dark
eyes. "Throughout my youth I dreamed of the former greatness of the
cult, into which I was initiated as a child. Wealth that flowed from
the mines of my estate made the dream a reality. Virata of Kosala
became the Magus of the Sons of Yezm, the first to hold the title in
five hundred years.

"The creed of the Hidden ones is broad and deep as the sea, uniting men
of opposing sects. Strand by strand I drew together and united the
separate branches of the cult: the Zugites, the Jhilites, the
Erlikites, the Yezudites. My emissaries traveled the world seeking
members of the ancient society and finding them—in teeming cities,
among barren mountains, in the silence of upland deserts. Slowly,
surely, my band has grown, for I have not only united all the various
branches of the cult but have also gained new recruits among the bold
and desperate spirits of a score of races and sects. All are one before
the Fire of Yezm; I have among my followers worshippers of Gullah, Set,
and Mitra; of Derketo, Ishtar, and Yun.

Ten years ago, I came with my followers to this city, then a crumbling
mass of ruins, unknown to the hillmen because their superstitious
legends made them shun this region. The buildings were crumbled stone,
the canals filled with rubble, and the groves grown wild and tangled.
It took six years to rebuild it Most of my fortune went into the labor,
for bringing material hither in secret was tedious and dangerous work.
We brought it out of Iranistan, over the old caravan route from the
South and up an ancient ramp on the western side of the plateau which I
have since destroyed. But at last I looked upon forgotten Yanaidar as
it was in the days of old.

"Look!"

He rose and beckoned. The giant blacks closed in on each side of the
Magus as he led the way into an alcove hidden behind a tapestry. They
stood in a latticed balcony looking down into a garden enclosed by a
fifteen-foot wall. This wall was almost completely masked by thick
shrubbery. An exotic fragrance rose from masses of trees, shrubs, and
blossoms, and silvery fountains tinkled. Conan saw women moving among
the trees, scantily clad in filmy silk and jewel-crusted velvet—slim,
supple girls, mostly Vendhyan, Iranistani, and Shemite. Men, looking as
if they were drugged, lay under the trees on silken cushions. Music
wailed melodiously.

"This is the Paradise Garden, such as was used by the Magi of old
times," said Virata, closing the casement and turning back into the
throne room. "Those who serve me well are drugged with the juice of the
purple lotus. Awakening in this garden with the fairest women of the
world to serve them, they think they are in truth in the heaven
promised for those who die serving the Magus." The Kosalan smiled
thinly. "I show you this because I will not have you 'Taste Paradise'
like these. You are not such a fool as to be duped so easily. It does
no harm for you to know these secrets. If the Tiger does not approve of
you, your knowledge will die with you; if he does, you have learned no
more than you would in any event as one of the Sons of the Mountain.

"You can rise high in my empire. I shall become as mighty as my
ancestor. Six years I prepared; then I began to strike. Within the last
four years, my followers have gone forth with poisoned daggers as they
went forth in the old days, knowing no law but my will, incorruptible,
invincible, seeking death rather than life."

"And your ultimate ambition?"

"Have you not guessed it?" The Kosalan almost whispered it, his eyes
wide and blank with fanaticism.

"Who wouldn't?" grunted Conan. "But I had rather hear it from you."

"I shall rule the world! Sitting here in Yanaidar, I shall control its
destinies! Kings on their thrones shall be but puppets dancing on my
strings. Those who disobey my commands shall die. Soon none will dare
disobey. Power will be mine. Power! Yajur! What is greater?"

Conan silently compared the Magus' boasts of absolute power with the
role of the mysterious Tiger who must decide Conan's fate. Virata's
authority was evidently not supreme after all.

"Where is the girl, Nanaia?" he demanded. "Your Sabateans carried her
away after they murdered my lieutenant Hattusas."

Virata's expression of surprise was overdone. "I know not to whom you
refer. They brought back no captive."

Conan was sure he was lying but realized it would be useless to press
the question further now. He thought of various reasons why Virata
should deny knowledge of the girl, all disquieting.

The Magus motioned to the black, who again smote the gong. Again Khaza
entered, bowing.

"Khaza will show you to your chamber," said Virata. There food and
drink will be brought you. You are not a prisoner; no guard will be
placed over you. But I must ask you not to leave your chamber
unescorted. My men are suspicious of outsiders, and until you are
initiated…" He let the sentence trail off into meaningful silence.

4. Whispering Swords

The impassive Stygian led Conan through the bronze doors, past the
files of glittering guards, and along a narrow corridor, which branched
off from the broad hallway. He conducted Conan into a chamber with a
domed ceiling of ivory and sandalwood and one heavy, brass-bound,
teakwood door. There were no windows; air and light came through
apertures in the dome. The walls were hung with rich tapestries; the
floor was hidden by cushion-strewn rugs.

Khaza bowed himself out without a word, shutting the door behind him.
Conan seated himself on a velvet divan. This was the most bizarre
situation he had found himself in during a life packed with wild and
bloody adventures. He brooded over the fate of Nanaia and wondered at
his next step.

Sandaled feet padded in the corridor. Khaza entered, followed by a huge
Negro bearing viands in golden dishes and a golden jug of wine. Before
Khaza close the door, Conan had a glimpse of the spike of a helmet
protruding from the tapestries before an alcove on the opposite side of
the corridor. Virata had lied when he said no guard would be placed to
watch him, which was no more than Conan expected.

"Wine of Kyros, my lord, and food," said the Stygian. "Presently a
maiden beautiful as the dawn shall be sent to entertain you."

"Good," grunted Conan.

Khaza motioned the slave to set down the food. He himself tasted each
dish and sipped liberally of the wine before bowing himself out. Conan,
alert as a trapped wolf, noted that the Stygian tasted the wine last
and stumbled a little as he left the chamber. When the door closed
behind the men, Conan smelled of the wine. Mingled with the bouquet of
the wine, so faint that only his keen barbarian nostrils could have
detected it, was an aromatic odor he recognized. It was that of the
purple lotus of the sullen swamps of southern Stygia, which induced a
deep slumber for a short or a long time depending on the quantity. The
taster had to hurry from the room before he was overcome. Conan
wondered if Virata meant to convey him to the Paradise Garden after
all.

Investigation convinced him that the food had not been tampered with,
and he fell to with gusto.

He had scarcely finished the meal, and was staring at the tray hungrily
as if in hope of finding something more to eat, when the door opened
again. A slim, supple figure slipped in: a girl in golden
breast-plates, a jewel-crusted girdle, and filmy silk trousers.

"Who are you?" growled Conan.

The girl shrank back, her brown skin paling. "Oh, sire, do not hurt me!
I have done nothing!" Her dark eyes were dilated with fear and
excitement; her words tumbled over one another, and her fingers
fluttered childishly.

"Who said anything about hurting you? I asked who you were."

"I—I am called Parasati."

"How did you get here?"

"They stole me, my lord, the Hidden Ones, one night as I walked in my
father's garden in Ayodhya. By secret, devious ways they brought me to
this city of devils, to be a slave with the other girls they steal out
of Vendhya and Iranistan and other lands." She hurried on. "I have
d-dwelt here for a month. I have almost died of shame! I have been
whipped! I have seen other girls die of torture. Oh, what shame for my
father, that his daughter should be made a slave of devil worshipers!"

Conan said nothing, but the red glint in his blue eyes was eloquent
Though his own career had been red-spattered with slaying and rapine,
towards women he possessed a rough, barbaric code of chivalry. Up till
now he had toyed with the idea of actually joining Virata's cult— in
hope of working up and making himself master of it, if need be by
killing those above him. Now his intentions crystallized on the
destruction of this den of snakes and the conversion of their lair to
his own uses. Parusati continued:

"Today the Master of the Girls came to send a girl to you to learn if
you had any hidden weapon. She was to search you while you lay in
drugged stupor. Then, when you awoke, she was to beguile you to learn
if you were a spy or a true man. He chose me for the task. I was
terrified, and when I found you awake all my resolution melted. Do not
slay me!"

Conan grunted. He would not have hurt a hair of her head, but he did
not choose to tell her so just yet Her terror could be useful.
"Parusati, do you know anything of a woman who was brought in earlier
by a band of Sabateans?"

"Yes, my lord! They brought her here captive to make another pleasure
girl like the rest of us. But she is strong, and after they reached the
city and delivered her into the hands of the Hyrkanian guards, she
broke free, snatched a dagger, and slew the brother of Zahak. Zahak
demanded her life, and he is too powerful even for Virata to refuse in
this matter."

"So that's why the Magus lied about Nanaia," muttered Conan.

"Aye, my lord. Nanaia lies in a dungeon below the palace, and tomorrow
she is to be given to the Hyrkanian for torture and execution."

Conan's dark face became sinister. "Lead me tonight to Zahak's sleeping
quarters," he demanded, his narrowed eyes betraying his deadly
intention.

"Nay, he sleeps among his warriors, all proven swordsmen of the
steppes, too many even for so mighty a fighter as you. But I can lead
you to Nanaia."

"What of the guard in the corridor?"

"He will not see us, and he will not admit anyone else here until he
has seen me depart."

"Well, then?" Conan rose to his feet like a tiger setting out on its
hunt.

Parusati hesitated. "My lord—do I read your mind rightly, that you
mean, not to join these devils, but to destroy them?"

Conan grinned wolfishly. "You might say accidents have a way of
happening to those I like not."

"Then will you promise not to harm me, and if you can to free me?"

"If I can. Now let's not waste more time in chatter. Lead on."

Parusati drew aside a tapestry on the wall opposite the door and
pressed on the arabesqued design. A panel swung inward, revealing a
narrow stair that slanted down into lightless depths.

"The masters think their slaves do not know their secrets," she
muttered. "Come."

She led the way into the stair, closing the panel after them. Conan
found himself in darkness that was almost complete, save for a few
gleams of light through holes in the panel. They descended until Conan
guessed that they were well beneath the palace and then struck a
narrow, level tunnel, which ran away from the foot of the stair.

"A Kshatriya who planned to flee Yanaidar showed me this secret way,"
she said. "I planned to escape with him. We hid food and weapons here.
He was caught and tortured, but died without betraying me. Here is the
sword he hid." She fumbled in a niche and drew out a blade, which she
gave to Conan.

A few moments later they reached an iron-bound door, and Parusati,
gesturing for caution, drew Conan to it arid showed him a tiny aperture
to peer through. He looked down a wide corridor, flanked on one side by
a blank wall in which showed a single ebon door, curiously ornate and
heavily bolted, and on the other by a row of cells with barred doors.
The other end of the corridor was not far distant and was closed by
another heavy door. Archaic hanging bronze lamps cast a mellow glow.

Before one of the cell doors stood a resplendent Hyrkanian in
glittering corselet and plumed helmet, scimitar in hand. Parusati's
fingers tightened on Conan's arm.

"Nanaia is in that cell," she whispered. "Can you slay the Hyrkanian?
He is a mighty swordsman."

With a grim smile, Conan tried the balance of the blade she had given
him—a long Vendhyan steel, light but well nigh unbreakable. Conan did
not stop to explain that he was master alike of the straight blades of
the West and the curved blades of the East, of the double-curved
Ilbarsi knife and the leaf-shaped broadsword of Shem. He opened the
secret door.

As he stepped into the corridor, Conan glimpsed the face of Nanaia
staring through the bars behind the Hyrkanian. The hinges creaked, and
the guard whirled catlike, lips drawn back in a snarl, and then
instantly came to the attack.

Conan met him halfway, and the two women witnessed a play of swords
that would have burned the blood of kings. The only sounds were the
quick soft shuffle and thud of feet, the slither and rasp of steel, and
the breathing of the fighters. The long, light blades flickered
lethally in the illusive light, like living things, parts of the men
who wielded them.

The hairline balance shifted. The Hyrkanian's lip curled in ferocious
recognition of defeat and desperate resolve to take his enemy into
death with him. A louder ring of Blades, a flash of steel—and Conan's
flickering blade seemed to caress his enemy's neck in passing. Then the
Hyrkanian was stretched on the floor, his neck half severed. He had
died without a cry.

Conan stood over him for an instant, the sword in his hand stained with
a thread of crimson. His tunic had been torn open, and his muscular
breast rose and fell easily. Only a film of sweat glistening there and
on his brow betrayed the strain of his exertions. He tore a bunch of
keys from the dead man's girdle, and the grate of steel in the lock
seemed to awaken Nanaia from a trance.

"Conan! I had given up hope, but you came. What a fight! Would that I
could have struck a blow in it!" The tall girl stepped forth lightly
and picked up the Hyrkanian's sword. "What now?"

"We shan't have a chance if we make a break before dark," said Conan.
"Nanaia, how soon will another guard come to relieve the man I killed?"

"They change the guard every four hours. His watch had just begun."

Conan turned to Parusati. "What time of day is it? I have not seen the
sun since early this morning."

The Vendhyan girl said: "It is well into the afternoon. Sundown should
be within four hours."

Conan perceived he had been in Yanaidar longer than he had realized.
"As soon as it's dark, we'll try to get away. We'll go back to my
chamber now. Nanaia shall hide on the secret stair, while Parusati goes
out the door and back to the girls' apartments."

"But when the guard comes to relieve this one," said Nanaia, "he'll see
I have escaped. You should leave me here till you're ready to go,
Conan."

"I dare not risk it; I might not be able to get you out then. When they
find you gone, maybe the confusion will help us. We'll hide this body."

He turned toward the curiously decorated door, but Parusati gasped:
"Not that way, my lord! Would you open the door to Hell?"

"What mean you? What lies beyond that door?"

"I know not. The bodies of executed men and women, and wretches who
have been tortured but still live, are carried through this door. What
becomes of them I do not know, but I have heard them scream more
terribly than they did under torture. The girls say a man-eating demon
has his lair beyond that door."

"That may be," said Nanaia. "But some hours ago a slave came through
here to hurl through that door something which was neither a man nor a
woman, though what it was I could not see."

"It was doubtless an infant," said Parusati with a shudder.

I'll tell you," said Conan. "We'll dress this body in your clothes and
lay it in the cell, with the face turned away from the door. You're a
big girl, and they will fit him. When the other guard comes, maybe
he'll think it is you, asleep or dead, and start looking for the guard
instead of you. The longer before they find you've escaped, the more
time we shall have."

Without hesitation, Nanaia slipped out of her jacket, whipped her shirt
off over her head, and dropped her trousers while Conan pulled the
clothes off the Hyrkanian. Parusati gave a gasp of shock.

"What's the matter, don't you know what a naked human being looks
like?" snarled Conan. "Help me with this/'

In a few minutes Nanaia was dressed in the Hyrkanian's garments, all
but the helmet and corselet She dabbed ineffectively at the blood that
soaked the upper part of the longsleeved coat while Conan dragged the
Hyrkanian, in Nanaia's clothes, into the cell. He turned the dead man's
face down and toward the wall so that its wisp of beard and mustache
should not show and pulled Nanaia's shirt up over the ghastly wound in
the neck. Conan locked the cell-door behind him and handed the keys to
Nanaia. He said:

"There's nothing we can do about the blood on the floor. I have no
definite plan for escaping the city yet. If I can't get away I'll kill
Virata—and the rest will be in Crom's hands. If you two get out and I
don't, try to go back along the trail and meet the Kushafis as they
come. I sent Tubal after them at dawn, so he should reach Kushaf after
nightfall, and the Kushafis should get to the canyon below the plateau
tomorrow morning."

They returned to the secret door, which, when closed, looked like part
of the blank stone wall. They traversed the tunnel and groped their way
up the stair.

"Here you must hide until the time comes," said Conan to Nanaia. "Keep
the swords; they'll do me no good until then. If anything happens to
me, open the panel-door and try to get away, with Parusati if she comes
for you."

"As you will, Conan." Nanaia seated herself cross-legged on the topmost
step.

When Conan and Parusati were back in the chamber, Conan said: "Go now;
if you stay too long, they may get suspicious. Contrive to return to me
here as soon as it is well dark. I think I'm to stay here till this
fellow Tiger returns. When you come back, tell the guard the Magus sent
you. I'll attend to him when we are ready to go. And tell them you saw
me drink this drugged wine, and that you searched me without finding
any arms."

"Aye, my lord! I will return after dark." The girl was trembling with
fear and excitement as she left.

Conan took up the winejug and smeared just enough wine on his mouth to
make a detectable scent Then he emptied the contents in a nook behind
the tapestries and threw himself on his divan as if asleep.

In a few moments the door opened again and a girl entered. Conan did
not open his eyes, but he knew it was a girl by the light rustle of her
bare feet and the scent of her perfume, just as he knew by the same
evidences that it was not Parusati returning. Evidently the Magus did
not place too much trust in any one woman. Conan did not believe she
had been sent there to slay him—poison in the wine would have been
enough—so he did not risk peering through slitted lids.

That the girl was afraid was evident by the quick tremor of her
breathing. Her nostrils all but touched his lips as she sniffed to
detect the drugged wine on his breath. Her soft hands stole over him,
searching for hidden weapons. Then with a sigh of relief she glided
away.

Conan relaxed. It would be hours before be could make any move, so he
might as well snatch sleep when he could.

His life and those of the girls depended on his being able to find or
make a way out of the city that night. In the meantime, he slept as
soundly as if he lay in the house of a friend.

5. The Mask Falls

Conan awoke the instant a hand touched the door to his room, and came
to his feet, fully alert, as Khaza entered with a bow. The Stygian
said:

"The Magus of the Sons of Yezm desires your presence, my lord. The
Tiger has returned."

So the Tiger had returned sooner than the Magus had expected! Conan
felt a premonitory tenseness as he followed the Stygian out of the
chamber. Khaza did not lead him back to the chamber where the Magus had
first received him. He was conducted through a winding corridor to a
gilded door before which stood a Hyrkanian swordsman. This man opened
the door, and Khaza hurried Conan across the threshold. The door closed
behind them. Conan halted.

He stood in a broad room without windows but with several doors. Across
the chamber, the Magus lounged on a divan with his black slaves behind
him. Clustered about him were a dozen armed men of various races:
Zuagirs, Hyrkanians, Iranistanis, Shemites, and even a
villainous-looking Kothian, the first Hyborian that Conan had seen in
Yanaidar.

But the Cimmerian spared these men only the briefest glance. His
attention was fixed on the man who dominated the scene. This man stood
between him and the Magus' divan, with the wide-legged stance of a
horseman. He was as tall as Conan, though not so massive. His shoulders
were broad; his supple figure hard as steel and springy as whalebone. A
short black beard failed to hide the aggressive jut of his lean jaw,
and grey eyes cold and piercing gleamed under his tall Zaporoskan fur
cap. Tight breeches emphasized his leanness. One hand caressed the hilt
of his jeweled saber; the other stroked his thin mustache.

Conan knew the game was up. For this was Olgerd Vladislav, a Zaporoskan
adventurer, who knew Conan too well to be deceived. He would hardly
have forgotten how Conan had forced him out of the leadership of a band
of Zuagirs and given him a broken arm as a farewell gift, less than
three years previously.

"This man desires to join us," said Virata.

The man they called the Tiger smiled thinly. "It would be safer to bed
with a leopard. I know Conan of old. He'll worm his way into your band,
turn the men against you, and run you through when you least expect
it."

The eyes fixed on the Cimmerian grew murderous. No more than the
Tiger's word was needed to convince his men.

Conan laughed. He had done what he could with guile and subtlety, and
now the game was up. He could drop the mask from the untamed soul of
the berserk barbarian and plunge into the bright madness of battle
without doubts or regrets.

The Magus made a gesture of repudiation. "I defer to your judgment in
these matters, Tiger. Do what you will; he is unarmed."

At the assurance of the helplessness of their prey, wolfish cruelty
sharpened the faces of the warriors. Edged steel slid into view. Olgerd
said:

"Your end will be interesting. Let us see if you are still as stoical
as when you hung on the cross in Khauran. Bind him, men—"

As he spoke, the Zaporoskan reached for his saber in a leisurely
manner, as if he had forgotten just how dangerous the black-haired
barbarian could be, what savage quickness lurked in Conan's massive
thews. Before Olgerd could draw his sword, Conan sprang and struck as a
panther slashes. The impact of his clenched fist was like that of a
sledge hammer. Olgerd went down, blood spurring from his jaw.

Before Conan could snatch the Zaporoskan's sword, the Kothian was upon
him. Only he had realized Conan's deadly quickness and ferocity, and
even he had not been swift enough to save Olgerd. But he kept Conan
from securing the saber, for he had to whirl and grapple as the
three-foot Ilbarsi knife rose above him. Conan caught the knife wrist
as it fell, checking the stroke in mid-air, the iron sinews springing
out on his own wrist in the effort. His right hand ripped a dagger from
the Kothian's girdle and sank it to the hilt under his ribs almost with
the same motion. The Kothian groaned and sank down dying, and Conan
wrenched away the long knife as he crumpled.

All this had happened in a stunning explosion of speed, embracing a
mere tick of time. Olgerd was down and the Kothian dying before the
others could get into action. When they did, they were met by the
yard-long knife in the hand of the most terrible knife fighter of the
Hyborian Age.

Even as Conan whirled to meet the rush, the long blade licked out and a
Zuagir went down, choking out his life through a severed jugular. A
Hyrkanian shrieked, disemboweled. A Stygian overreached with a
ferocious dagger lunge and reeled away, clutching the crimson-gushing
stump of a wrist.

Conan did not put his back to the wall this time. He sprang into the
thick of his foes, wielding his dripping knife murderously. They
swirled and milled about hint' He was the center of a whirlwind of
blades that flickered and lunged and slashed, and yet somehow missed
their mark again and again as he shifted his position constantly and so
swiftly that he baffled the eye which sought to follow him. Their
numbers hindered them; they cut thin air and gashed one another,
confused by his speed and demoralized by the wolfish ferocity of his
onslaught.

At such deadly close quarters, the long knife was more effective than
the scimitars and tulwars. Conan had mastered its every use, whether
the downward swing that splits a skull or the upward rip that spills
out a man's entrails.

It was butcher's work, but Conan made no false motion. He waded through
that melee of straining bodies and lashing blades like a typhoon,
leaving a red wake behind him.

The melee lasted only a moment. Then the survivors gave back, stunned
and appalled by the havoc wrought among them. Conan wheeled and located
the Magus against the farther wall between the stolid Kushites. Then,
even as his leg-muscles tensed for a leap, a shout brought him around.

A group of Hyrkanian guardsmen appeared at the door opening into the
corridor, drawing thick, double-curved bows to the chin, while those in
the room scurried out of the way. Conan's hesitation lasted no longer
than an eyeblink, while the archers' right arms, bulging with taut
muscles, drew back their bowstrings. In that flash of consciousness he
weighed his chances of reaching the Magus and killing him before he
himself died. He knew he would be struck in mid-leap by a half-dozen
shafts, driven by the powerful compound bows of the Hyrkanian deserts,
which slay at five hundred paces. Their force would tear through his
light mail shirt, and their impact alone would be enough to knock him
down.

As the commander of the squad of archers opened his mouth to cry
"Loose!", Conan threw himself flat on the floor. He struck just as the
archers' ringers released their bowstrings. The arrows whipped through
the air inches above his back, criss-crossing in their flight with a
simultaneous whistling screech.

As the archers reached back for the arrows in their quivers, Conan
drove his fists, still holding the knife and the dagger, downward with
such force that his body flew into the air and landed on its feet
again. Before the Hyrkanians would nock their second flight of arrows,
Conan was among them. His tigerish rush and darting blades left a trail
of writhing figures behind him. Then he was through the milling mob and
racing down the corridor. He dodged through rooms and slammed doors
behind him, while the uproar in the palace grew. Then he found himself
racing down a narrow corridor, which ended in a cul-de-sac with a
barred window.

A Himelian hillman sprang from an alcove, raising a pike. Conan came at
him like a mountain storm. Daunted by the sight of the blood-stained
stranger, the Himelian thrust blindly with his weapon, missed, drew it
back for another stab, and screamed as Conan, maddened with battle
lust, struck with murderous fury. The hillman's head jumped from his
shoulders on a spurt of crimson and thudded to the floor.

Conan lunged at the window, hacked once at the bars with his knife,
then gripped them with both hands and braced his legs. A heaving surge
of iron strength, a savage wrench, and the bars came away in his hands
with a splintering crash. He plunged through into a latticed balcony
overlooking a garden. Behind him, men were storming down the corridor.
An arrow swished past him. He dove at the lattice headfirst, the knife
extended before him, smashed through the flimsy material without
checking his flight, and landed catlike on his feet in the garden
below.

The garden was empty but for half a dozen scantily-clad women, who
screamed and ran. Conan raced toward the opposite wall, quartering
among the low trees to avoid the arrows that rained after him. A
backward glance showed the broken lattice crowded with furious faces
and arms brandishing weapons. Another shout warned him of peril ahead.

A man was running along the wall, swinging a tulwar.

The fellow, a dark, fleshily-built Vendhyan, had accurately judged the
point where the fugitive would reach the wall, but he himself reached
that point a few seconds too late. The wall was not higher than a man's
head. Conan caught the coping with one hand and swung himself up almost
without checking his speed. An instant later, on his feet on the
parapet, he ducked the sweep of the tulwar and drove his knife through
the Vendhyan's huge belly.

The man bellowed like an ox in pain, threw his arms about his slayer in
a death grip, and they went over the parapet together. Conan had only
time to glimpse the sheer-walled ravine which gaped below them. They
struck on its narrow lip, rolled off, and fell fifteen feet to crash to
the rocky floor. As they rushed downward, Conan turned in mid-air so
that the Vendhyan was under him when they hit, and the fat, limp body
cushioned his fall. Even so, it jolted the breath out of him.

6. The Haunter of the Gulches

Conan staggered to his feet empty-handed. As he glared about, a row of
turbaned and helmeted heads bobbed up along the wall. Bows appeared and
arrows were nocked.

A glance showed Conan that there was no cover within leaping distance.
Because of the steep angle at which the archers were shooting down at
him, there was little chance that he could escape by falling flat a
second time.

As the first bowstring twanged and the arrow screeched past him to
splinter on the rocks, Conan threw himself down beside the body of the
Vendhyan he had killed. He thrust an arm under the body and rolled the
dripping, still-warm carcass over on top of himself. As he did so, a
storm of arrows struck the corpse. Conan, underneath, could feel the
impacts as of a gang were pounding the body with sledge hammers. But
such was the girth of the Vendhyan that the shafts failed to pierce
through to Conan.

"Crom!" Conan exploded as an arrow nicked his calf.

The tattoo of impacts stopped as the Yezmites saw that they were merely
feathering the corpse. Conan gathered up the thick hairy wrists of the
body. He rolled to one side, so that the corpse fell squashily on to
the rock beside him; sprang to his feet, and heaved the corpse up on
his back. Now, as he faced away from the wall, the corpse still made a
shield. His muscles quivered under the strain, for the Vendhyan weighed
more than he did.

He walked away from the wall down the ravine. The Yezmites yelled as
they saw their prey escaping and sent another blast of arrows after
him, which struck the corpse again.

Conan slipped around the first buttress of rock and dropped the corpse.
The face and the front of the body were pierced by more than a dozen
arrows.

"If I had a bow, I'd show those dogs a thing or two about shooting!"
Conan muttered wrathfully. He peeked around the buttress.

The wall was crowded with heads, but no more arrows came. Instead,
Conan recognized Olgerd Vladislav's fur hat in the middle of the row.
Olgerd shouted:

"Do you think you've escaped? Ha ha! Go on; you'll wish you had stayed
in Yanaidar with my slayers. Farewell, dead man!"

With a brusque nod to his followers, Olgerd disappeared. The other
heads vanished from the wall too. Conan stood alone save for the corpse
at his feet.

He frowned as he peered suspiciously about him. He knew that the
southern end of the plateau was cut up into a network of ravines.
Obviously he was in one that ran out of that network just south of the
palace. It was a straight gulch, like a giant knife-cut, ten paces
wide, which issued from a maze of gullies straight toward the city,
ceasing abruptly at a sheer cliff of solid stone below the garden wall
from which he had fallen. This cliff was fifteen feet high and too
smooth to be wholly the work of nature.

The side walls at that end of the gulch were sheer, too, showing signs
of having been smoothed by tools. Across the rim of the wall at the end
and for fifteen feet out on each side ran a strip of iron with short,
knife-edged blades slanting down. He had missed them in his fall, but
anyone trying to climb over the wall would be cut to ribbons by them.
The bottom of the gulch sloped down away from the city so that beyond
the ends of the strips on the side walls, these walls were more than
twenty feet high. Conan was in a prison, partly natural, partly
man-made.

Looking down the ravine, he saw that it widened and broke into a tangle
of smaller gulches, separated by ridges of solid stone, beyond and
above which he saw the gaunt bulk of the mountain looming. The other
end of the ravine was not blocked, but he knew his pursuers would not
safeguard one end of his prison so carefully while leaving an avenue of
escape open at the other.

Still, it was not his nature to resign himself to whatever fate they
had planned for him. They evidently thought they had him safely
trapped, but others had thought that before.

He pulled the knife out of the Vendhyan's carcass, wiped off the blood,
and went down the ravine.

A hundred yards from the city wall, he came to the mouths of the
smaller ravines, chose one at random, and at once found himself in a
nightmarish labyrinth. Channels hollowed in the rock meandered
bafflingly through a crumbling waste of stone. For the most part they
ran north and south, but they merged, split, and looped chaotically. He
was forever coming to the ends of blind alleys; if he climbed the walls
to surmount them, it was only to descend into another equally confusing
branch of the network.

As he slid down one ridge, his heel crunched something that broke with
a dry crack. He had stepped upon the dried rib bones of a headless
skeleton. A few yards away lay the skull, crushed and splintered. He
began to stumble upon similar grisly relics with appalling frequency.
Each skeleton showed broken, disjointed bones and a smashed skull. The
elements could not have done that Conan went on warily, narrowly eyeing
every spur of rock and shadowed recess. In one spot there was a faint
smell of garbage, and he saw bits of melon rind and turnip lying about.
In one of the few sandy spots, he saw a partly-effaced track. It was
not the spoor of a leopard, bear, or tiger, such as he would have
expected in this country. It looked more like the print of a bare,
misshapen human foot.

Once he came upon a rough out-jut of rock, to which dung strands of
coarse gray hair that might have rubbed off against the stone. Here and
there, mixed with the taint of garbage, was an unpleasant, rank odor
that he could not define. It hung heavily in cavelike recesses where a
beast, or man, or demon might curl up to sleep.

Baffled in his efforts to steer a straight course through the stony
maze, Conan scrambled up a weathered ridge, which looked to be higher
than most. Crouching on its sharp crest, he stared out over the waste.
His view was limited except to the north, but the glimpses he had of
sheer cliffs rising above the spurs and ridges to east, west, and south
made him believe that they formed parts of a continuous wall, which
enclosed the tangle of gullies. To the north, this wall was split by
the ravine that ran to the outer palace garden.

Presently the nature of the labyrinth became evident At one time or
another, a section of that part of the plateau which lay between the
site of the present city and the mountain had sunk, leaving a great
bowl-shaped depression, and the surface of the depression had been cut
up into gullies by erosion over an immense period of time.

There was no use wandering about the gulches. Conan's problem was to
get to the cliffs that hemmed in the corrugated bowl and skirt them to
find if there was any way to surmount them, or any break in them
through which water falling on the bowl drained off. To the south he
thought he could trace the route of a ravine more continuous than the
others, and which ran more or less directly to the base of the mountain
whose sheer wall hung over the bowl. He also saw that, to reach this
ravine, he would save time by returning to the gulch below the city
wall and following another of the ravines that led into it, instead of
scrambling over a score of knife-edged ridges between him and the gully
he wished to reach.

Therefore he climbed down the ridge and retraced his steps. The sun was
swinging low as he reentered the mouth of the outer ravine and started
toward the gulch that, he believed, would lead him to his goal. He
glanced idly toward the cliff at the other end of the wider ravine —and
stopped dead.

The body of the Vendhyan was gone, though his tulwar still lay on the
rocks at the foot of the wall. Several arrows lay about as if they had
fallen out of the body when it was moved. A tiny gleam from the rocky
floor caught Conan's eye. He ran to the place and found that it was
made by a couple of silver coins.

Conan scooped up the coins and stared at them. Then he glared about
with narrowed eyes. The natural explanation would be that the Yezmites
had come out somehow to recover the body. But if they had, they would
probably have picked up the undamaged arrows and would hardly have left
money lying about.

On the other hand, if not the folk of Yanaidar, then who? Conan thought
of the broken skeletons and remembered Parusati's remark about the
"door to Hell." There was every reason to suspect that something
inimical to human beings haunted this maze. What if the ornate door in
the dungeon led out to this ravine?

A careful search disclosed the door whose existence Conan suspected.
The thin cracks that betrayed its presence would have escaped the
casual glance. On the side of the ravine, the door looked like the
material of the cliff and fitted perfectly. Conan thrust powerfully at
it, but it did not yield. He remembered its heavy, metal-bound
construction and stout bolts. It would take a battering ram to shake
that door. The strength of the door, together with the projecting
blades overhead, implied' that the Yezmites were taking no chances that
the haunter of the gulches might get into their city. On the other
hand, there was comfort in the thought that it must be a creature of
flesh and blood, not a demon against whom bolts and spikes would be of
no avail.

Conan looked down the gully toward the mysterious labyrinth, wondering
what skulking horror its mazes hid. The sun had not yet set but was
hidden from the bottoms of the gulches. Although vision was still
clear, the ravine was full of shadows.

Then Conan became aware of another sound: a muffled drumming, a slow
boom—boom—boom, as if the drummer were striking alternate beats for
marching men. There was something odd about the quality of the sound.
Conan knew the clacking hollow log-drums of the Kushites, the whirring
copper kettledrums of the Hyrkanians, and the thundering infantry drums
of the Hyborians, but this did not sound like any of these. He glanced
back at Yanaidar, but the sound did not seem to come from the city. It
seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere—from beneath his feet as
much as anything.

Then the sound ceased.

A mystical blue twilight hovered over the gulches as Conan reentered
the labyrinth. Threading among winding channels, he came out into a
slightly wider gully, which Conan believed was the one he had seen from
the ridge, which ran to the south wall of the bowl. But he had not gone
fifty yards when it split on a sharp spur into two narrower gorges.
This division had not been visible from the ridge, and Conan did not
know which branch to follow.

As he hesitated, peering along his alternative paths, he suddenly
stiffened. Down the right-hand ravine, a still narrower gulch opened
into it, forming a well of blue shadows. And in that well something
moved. Conan tensed rigidly as he stared at the monstrous, manlike
thing that stood in the twilight before him.

It was like ghoulish incarnation of a terrible legend, clad in flesh
and bone; a giant ape, as tall on its gnarled legs as a gorilla. It was
like the monstrous man-apes that hunted the mountains around the
Vilayet Sea, which Conan had seen and fought before. But it was even
larger; its hair was longer and shaggier, as of an arctic beast, and
paler, an ashen grey that was almost white.

Its feet and hands were more manlike than those of a gorilla, the great
toes and thumbs being more like those of man than of the anthropoid. It
was no tree-dweller but a beast bred on great plains and gaunt
mountains. The face was apish in general appearance, though the
nose-bridge was more pronounced, the jaw less bestial. But its manlike
features merely increased the dreadfulness of its aspect, and the
intelligence which gleamed from its small red eyes was wholly
malignant.

Conan knew it for what it was: the monster named in myth and legend of
the north—the snow ape, the desert man of forbidden Pathenia. He had
heard rumors of its existence in wild tales drifting down from the
lost, bleak plateau country of Loulan. Tribesmen had sworn to the
stories of a manlike beast, which had dwelt there since time
immemorial, adapted to the famine and bitter chill of the northern
uplands.

All this flashed through Conan's mind as the two stood facing each
other in menacing tenseness. Then the rocky walls of the ravine echoed
to the ape's high, penetrating scream as it charged, low-hanging arms
swinging wide, yellow fangs bared and dripping.

Conan waited, poised on the balls of his feet, craft and long knife
pitted against the strength of the mighty ape.

The monster's victims had been given to it broken and shattered from
torture, or dead. The semi-human spark in its brain, which set it apart
from the true beasts, had found a horrible exultation in the death
agonies of its prey. This man was only another weak creature to be torn
and dismembered, and his skull broken to get at the brain, even though
he stood up with a gleaming thing in his hand.

Conan, as he faced that onrushing death, knew his only chance was to
keep out of the grip of those huge arms, which could crush him in an
instant. The monster was swifter than its clumsy appearance indicated.
It hurled itself through the air for the last few feet in a giant
grotesque spring. Not until it was looming over him, the great arms
closing upon him, did Conan move, and then his action would have shamed
a striking leopard.

The talonlike nails only shredded his ragged tunic as he sprang clear,
slashing, and a hideous scream ripped echoing through the ridges. The
ape's right hand was half severed at the wrist. The thick mat of pale
hair prevented Conan's slash from altogether severing the member. With
blood spouting from the wound, the brute wheeled and rushed again. This
time its lunge was too lightning-quick for any human thews to avoid.

Conan evaded the disembowelling sweep of the great misshapen left hand
with its thick black nails, but the massive shoulder struck him and
knocked him staggering. He was carried to the wall with the lunging
brute, but even as he was swept back he drove his knife to the hilt in
the great belly and ripped up in desperation in what he thought was his
dying stroke.

They crashed together into the wall. The ape's great arm hooked
terrifyingly about Conan's straining frame. The scream of the beast
deafened him as the foaming jaws gaped above his head. Then they
snapped in empty air as a great shudder shook the mighty body. A
frightful convulsion hurled the Cimmerian clear, and he staggered up to
see the ape thrashing in its death throes at the foot of the wall. His
desperate upward rip had disembowelled it, and the tearing blade had
plowed up through muscle and bone to find the anthropoid's fierce
heart.

Conan's corded muscles were quivering as if from a long strain. His
iron-hard frame had resisted the terrible strength of the ape long
enough to let him come alive out of that awful grapple, which would
have torn a weaker man to pieces. But the terrific exertion had shaken
even him. His tunic had been ripped nearly off his body and some links
of the mail-shirt underneath were broken. Those horny-taloned fingers
had left bloody marks across his back. He stood panting as if from a
long run, smeared with blood, his own and the ape's.

Conan shuddered, then stood in thought as the red sun impaled itself on
a far peak. The pattern was becoming clear now. Broken captives were
thrown out to the ape through the door in the city wall. The ape, like
those that lived around the Sea of Vilayet, ate flesh as well as
fodder. But the irregular supply of captives would not satisfy the
enormous appetite of so large and active a beast. Therefore the
Yezmites must feed it a regular ration; hence the remains of melons and
turnips.

Conan swallowed, aware of thirst. He had rid the ravines of their
haunter, but he could still perish of hunger and thirst if he did not
find a way out of the depression. There was no doubt a spring or pool
somewhere in the waste, where the ape had drunk, but it might take a
month to find it.

Dusk masked the gullies and hung over the ridges as Conan moved off
down the right-hand ravine. Forty paces further, the left branch
rejoined its brother. As he advanced, the walls were more thickly
pitted with cave-like lairs, in which the rank scent of the ape hung
strongly. It occurred to him that there might be more than one of the
creatures, but that was unlikely, because the scream of the first as it
charged would have attracted any others.

Then the mountain loomed above him. The ravine he was following
shallowed until Conan found himself climbing up a bank of talus until
he stood at its apex and could look out over the depression to the city
of Yanaidar. He leaned against a smooth vertical cliff on which a fly
would hardly be able to find a foothold.

"Crom and Mitra!" he grumbled.

He jounced down the side of the fan of debris and struggled along the
base of the cliff to the edge of the bowl. Here the plateau dropped
sheerly away below. It was either straight up or straight down; there
was no other choice.

He could not be sure of the distance in the gathering darkness, but he
judged the bottom to be several times as far down as the length of his
rope. To make sure he uncoiled the line from around his waist and
dangled the grapnel on its end the full length of the rope. The hook
swung freely.

Next, Conan retraced his steps across the base of the cliff and kept on
going to the other side of the plateau. Here the walls were not quite
so steep. By dangling his rope he ascertained that there was a ledge
about thirty feet down, and from where it ran off and ended on the side
of the mountain among broken rocks there seemed to be a chance of
getting down by arduous climbing and sliding. It would not be a safe
routes—a misstep would send the climber bouncing down the rocky slope
for hundreds of paces—but he thought a strong girl like Nanaia could
make it.

He still, however, had to try to get back into Yanaidar. Nanaia was
still hidden in the secret stairway in Virata's palace—if she had not
been discovered. There was a chance that, by lurking outside the door
to Hell, he could get in when the Yezmite in charge of feeding the ape
opened the door to put out food. There was a chance that the men from
Kushaf, roused by Tubal, were on their way to Yanaidar.

In any case, Conan could only try. He shrugged a little and turned back
toward the city.

7. Death in the Palace

Conan groped his way back through the gulches until he came into the
outer ravine and saw the wall and the cliff at the other end. The
lights of Yanaidar glowed in the sky above the wall, and he could catch
the weird melody of whining citherns. A woman's voice was lifted in
plaintive song. He smiled grimly in the dark, skeleton-littered gorges
around him.

There was no food on the rocks before the door. He had no way of
knowing how often the brute had been fed or whether it would be fed at
all that night.

He must gamble, as he often had. The thought of what might be happening
to Nanaia maddened him with impatience, but he flattened himself
against the rock on the side against which the door opened and waited,
still as a statue.

An hour later, even his patience was wearing thin when there came a
rattle of chains, and the door opened a crack.

Someone was peering out to be sure the grisly guardian of the gorges
was not near before opening the door further. More bolts clanged, and a
man stepped out with a great copper bowl full of vegetables. As he set
it down, he sounded a weird call. And as he bent, Conan struck with his
knife. The man dropped, his head rolling off down the ravine.

Conan peered through the open door and saw that the lamplit corridor
was empty; the barred cells stood vacant He dragged the headless body
down the ravine and hid it among broken rocks.

Then he returned and entered the corridor, shut the door, and shot the
bolts. Knife in hand, he started toward the secret door that opened
into the tunnel that led to the hidden stair. If hiding in the secret
passage did not prove feasible, he might barricade himself and Nanaia
in this corridor and hold it until the Kushafis came—if they came.

Conan had not reached the secret door when the creak of a hinge behind
him made him whirl. The plain door at the opposite end was opening.
Conan sprinted for it as an armed man stepped through.

It was a Hyrkanian like the one Conan had slain earlier. As he sighted
Conan rushing upon him, his breath hissed between his teeth and he
reached for his scimitar.

With a leap Conan was upon him and drove him back against the closing
door with the point of his knife pricking the Hyrkanian's chest
"Silence!" he hissed.

The guard froze, pallor tinging his yellowish skin. Gingerly he drew
his hand away from his sword hilt and spread both arms in token of
surrender.

"Are there any other guards?" asked Conan.

"Nay, by Tarim! I am the only one."

"Where's the Iranistani girl, Nanaia?" Conan thought he knew where she
was but hoped to learn by indirection whether her escape had been
discovered and whether she Bad been recaptured.

"The gods know!" said the guard. "I was with the party of guards who
brought the Zuagir dogs to the dungeon and found our comrade in the
cell with his neck half sliced through and the wench gone. Such
shouting and rushing to and fro in the palace! But I was told off to
guard the Zuagirs, so I cannot tell more."

"Zuagirs?" said Conan.

"Aye, those who wrongly let you up the Stair. For that they will die
tomorrow."

"Where are they now?"

"In the other bank of cells, through yonder door. I have just now come
from them."

"Then turn around and march back through that door. No tricks!"

The man opened the door and stepped through as if he were treading on
naked razors. They came into another corridor lined with cells. At
Conan's appearance, there was a hiss of breath from two of these cells.
Bearded faces crowded the grilles and lean hands gripped the bars. The
seven prisoners glared silently at him with venomous hate in their
eyes. Conan dragged his prisoner in front of these cells and said:

"You were faithful minions; why are you locked up?"

Antar the son of Adi spat at him. "Because of you, out-land dog! You
surprised us on the Stair, and the Magus sentenced us to die even
before he learned you were a spy. He said we were either knaves or
fools to be caught off guard, so at dawn we die under the knives of
Zahak's slayers, may Hanuman curse him and you!"

"Yet you will attain Paradise," Conan reminded them, "because you have
faithfully served the Magus of the Sons of Yezm."

"May the dogs gnaw the bones of the Magus of Yezm!" replied one with
whole-hearted venom, and another said: "Would that you and the Magus
were chained together in Hell!" "We spit on his Paradise! It is all
lies and tricks with drugs!"

Conan reflected that Virata had fallen short of getting the allegiance
his ancestors boasted, whose followers gladly slew themselves at
command.

He had taken a bunch of keys from the guard and now weighed them
thoughtfully in his hand. The eyes of the Zuagirs fixed upon them with
the aspect of men in Hell who look upon an open door.

"Antar the son of Adi," he said, "your hands are stained with the blood
of many men, but when I knew you before, you did not violate your sworn
oaths. The Magus has abandoned you and cast you from his service. You
are no longer his men, you Zuagirs. You owe him nothing."

Antar's eyes were those of a wolf. "Could I but send him to Arallu
ahead of me, I should die happy!"

All stared tensely at Conan, who said: "Will you swear, each man by the
honor of his clan, to follow and serve me until vengeance is
accomplished, or death releases you from the vow?" He put the keys
behind him so as not to seem to flaunt them too flagrantly before
helpless men. "Virata will give you nothing but the death of a dog. I
offer you revenge and, at worst, a chance to die with honor."

Antar's eyes blazed and his sinewy hands quivered as they gripped the
bars. "Trust us!" he said.

"Aye, we swear!" clamored the men behind him. "Harken, Conan, we swear,
each by the honor of his clan!"

He was turning the key in the lock before they finished swearing. Wild,
cruel, turbulent, and treacherous these desert men might be by
civilized standards, but they had their code of honor, and it was close
enough to that of Conan's kin in far-distant Cimmeria so that he
understood it.

Tumbling out of the cell they laid hold of the Hyrkanian, shouting:
"Slay him! He is one of Zahak's dogs!"

Conan tore the man from their grasp and dealt the most persistent a
buffet that stretched him on the floor, though it did not seem to
arouse any particular resentment.

"Have done!" he growled. "This is my man, to do with as I like." He
thrust the cowering Hyrkanian before him down the corridor and back
into the other dungeon corridor, followed by the Zuagirs. Having sworn
allegiance, they followed blindly without questions. In the other
corridor, Conan ordered the Hyrkanian to strip. The man did, shivering
in fear of torture.

"Change clothes with him," was Conan's next command to Antar. As the
fierce Zuagir began to obey, Conan said to another man: "Step through
that door at the end of the corridor—"

"But the devil-ape!" cried the man addressed. "Hell tear me to pieces!"

"He's dead. I slew him with this. Outside the door, behind a rock,
you'll find a dead man. Take his dagger, and also fetch the sword
you'll see lying near there."

The desert Shemite gave Conan an awed glance and departed. Conan handed
his dagger to another Zuagir and the Hyrkanian's wavy-edged dagger to
still another. Others at his direction bound and gagged the guard and
thrust him through the secret door, which Conan opened, into the
tunnel. Antar stood up in the spired helmet, long-sleeved coat, and
silken trousers of the Hyrkanian. His features were oriental enough to
fool anyone who was expecting to see a Hyrkanian in that garb. Conan
meanwhile pulled Antar's kaffia over his own head, letting it hang well
down in front to hide his features.

"Two still unarmed," said Conan, running his eyes over them. "Follow
me."

He reentered the tunnel, stepped over the body of the bound guardsman,
and strode along the tunnel, past the peepholes and into the darker
stretch beyond. At the foot of the stair he halted.

"Nanaia!" he called softly. There was no response.

Scowling in the dark, Conan groped his way up the stair. There was no
sign of Nanaia, although at the top of the stair, just inside the
masked panel, he found the two swords he had left there earlier. Now
each of the eight men had a weapon of some sort.

A glance through a peephole in the masked panel showed the chamber
where Conan had slept to be empty. Conan opened the panel, a crack at
first, then all the way.

"They must have found the girl," he whispered to An-tar. "Where would
they take her if not back to the cells?"

"The Magus has girls who have committed faults chastised in his throne
room, where he gave you audience this morning."

"Then lead—what's that?"

Conan whirled at the sound of the slow drumming that he had heard
earlier, in the ravines. Again it seemed to come out of the earth. The
Zuagirs looked at one another, paling under their swarthy skins.

"None knows," said Antar with a visible shudder. "The sound started
months ago and since then has become stronger and comes more and more
often. The first time, the Magus turned the city upside down looking
for the source. When he found none he desisted and ordered that no man
should pay heed to the drumming or even speak of it. Gossip says he has
been busy of nights in his oratory, striving with spells and
divinations to learn the < source of the sound, but the gossip does not
say he has found anything."

The sound had ceased while Antar was speaking. Conan said: "Well, lead
me to this chamber of chastisement. The rest of you close up and walk
as if you owned the place, but quietly. We may fool some of the palace
dogs."

"Through the Paradise Garden would be the best way," said Antar. "A
strong guard of Stygians would be posted before the main door to the
throne room at night."

The corridor outside the chamber was empty. The Zuagirs took the lead.
With nightfall, the atmosphere of silence and mystery had thickened
over the palace of the Magus. Lights burned more dimly; shadows hung
thickly, and no breeze stole in to ruffle the dully shimmering
tapestries.

The Zuagirs knew the way well. A ragged-looking gang, with furtive feet
and blazing eyes, they stole swiftly along the dim, richly-decorated
hallways like a band of midnight thieves. They kept to passages little
frequented at that time of night. The party had encountered no one when
they came suddenly to a door, gilded and barred, before which stood two
giant black Kushites with naked tulwars.

The Kushites silently lifted their tulwars at the sight of the
unauthorized invaders; they were mutes. Eager to begin their vengeance,
the Zuagirs swarmed over the two blacks, the man with swords engaging
them while the others grappled and dragged them down and stabbed them
to death in a straining, sweating, swearing knot of convulsing effort
It was butchery, but necessary.

"Keep watch here," Conan commanded one of the Zuagirs. He threw open
the door and strode out into the garden, now empty in the starlight,
its blossoms glimmering whitely, its dense trees and shrubbery masses
of dusky mystery. The Zuagirs, now armed with the swords of the blacks,
swaggered after him.

Conan headed for the balcony, which he knew overhung the garden,
cleverly masked by the branches of trees. Three Zuagirs bent their
backs for him to stand upon. In an instant he had found the window from
which he and Virata had looked. The next instant he was through it,
making no more noise than a cat.

Sounds came from beyond the curtain that masked the balcony alcove: a
woman sobbing in terror and the voice of Virata.

Peering through the hanging, Conan saw the Magus lolling on the throne
under the pearl-sewn canopy. The guards no longer stood like ebon
images on either side of him. They were squatting before the dais in
the middle of the floor, whetting daggers and heating irons in a
glowing brazier. Nanaia was stretched out between them, naked,
spread-eagled on the floor with her wrists and ankles lashed to pegs
driven into holes in the floor. No one else was in the room, and the
bronze doors were closed and bolted.

"Tell me how you escaped from the cell," commanded Virata.

"No! Never!" She bit her lip in her struggle to keep her self-control.

"Was it Conan?"

"Did you ask for me?" said Conan as he stepped from the alcove, a grim
smile on his dark, scarred face.

Virata sprang up with a cry. The Kushites straightened, snarling and
reaching for weapons.

Conan sprang forward and drove his knife through the throat of one
before he could get his sword clear. The other lunged toward the girl,
lifting his scimitar to slay the victim before he died. Conan caught
the descending blow on his knife and, with a lightning riposte, drove
the knife to the hilt in the man's midriff. The Kushite's momentum
carried him forward against Conan, who crouched, placed his free hand
on the black's belly, and straightened, raising the Kushite over his
head. The Kushite squirmed and groaned. Conan threw him to one side to
fall with a heavy thump and expire.

Conan turned again to the Magus, who, instead of trying to flee, was
advancing upon him with a fixed, wide-eyed stare. His eyes developed a
peculiar luminous quality, which caught and held Conan's gaze like a
magnet.

Conan, straining forward to reach the wizard with his knife, felt as if
he were suddenly laden with chains, or as if he were wading through the
slimy swamps of Stygia where the black lotus grows. His muscles stood
out like lumps of iron. Sweat beaded his skin as he strained at the
invisible bonds.

Virata stalked slowly toward the Cimmerian, hands outspread before him,
making little rhythmic gestures with his fingers and never taking his
weird gaze from Conan's eyes. The hands neared Conan's throat. Conan
had a flash of foreboding that, with the help of his arcane arts, this
frail-looking man could snap even the Cimmerian's bullneck like a
rotten stick.

Nearer came the spreading hands. Conan strained harder than ever, but
the resistance seemed to increase with every inch the Magus advanced
toward him.

And then Nanaia screamed a long, high, piercing shriek, as of a soul
being flayed in Hell.

The Magus half-turned, and in that instant his eyes left Conan's. It
was as if a ton had been lifted instantly from Conan's back. Virata
snapped his gaze back to Conan, but the Cimmerian knew better than to
meet his eyes again. Peering through narrowed lids at the Magus' chest,
Conan made a disembowelling thrust with his knife. The attack met only
air as the Kosalan avoided it with a backward bound of superhuman
litheness, then turned and ran toward the door, crying:

"Help! Guard! To me!"

Men were yelling and hammering against the door on the far side. Conan
waited until the Magus' fingers were clawing at the bolts. Then he
threw the knife so that the point struck Virata in the middle of his
back and drove through his body, pinning him to the door like an insect
to a board.

8. Wolves at Bay

Conan strode to the door and wrenched out his knife, letting the body
of the Magus slip to the floor. Beyond the door the clamor grew, and
out in the garden the Zuagirs were bawling to know if he was safe and
loudly demanding permission to join him. He shouted to them to wait and
hurriedly freed the girl, snatching up a piece of silk from a divan to
wrap around her. She clasped his neck with a hysterical sob, crying:

"Oh, Conan, I knew you would come! They told me you were dead, but I
knew they could not slay you—"

"Save that till later," he said gruffly. Carrying the Kushites' swords,
he strode back to the balcony and handed Nanaia down through the window
to the Zuagirs, then swung down beside her.

"And now, lord?" said the Zuagirs, eager for more desperate work.

"Back the way we came, through the secret passage and out the door to
Hell."

They started at a run across the garden, Conan leading Nanaia by the
hand. They had not gone a dozen paces when ahead of them a clang of
steel vied with the din in the palace behind them. Lusty curses mingled
with the clangor, a door slammed like a clap of thunder, and a figure
came headlong through the shrubbery. It was the Zuagir they had left on
guard at the gilded door. He was swearing and wringing blood from a
slashed forearm.

"Hyrkanian dog? at the door!" he yelled. "Someone saw us kill the
Kushites and ran for Zahak. I sworded one in the belly and slammed the
door, but they'll soon have it down!"

"Is there a way out of this garden that does not lead through the
palace, Antar?" asked Conan.

"This way!" The Zuagir ran to the north wall, all but hidden in masses
of foliage. Across the garden they could hear the gilded door
splintering under the onslaught of the nomads of the steppes. Antar
slashed and tore at the fronds until he disclosed a cunningly-masked
door set in the wall. Conan slipped the hilt of his knife into the
chain of the antiquated lock and twisted the heavy weapon by the blade.
His muscles knotted: the Zuagirs watched him, breathing heavily, while
the clamor behind them grew. With a final heave Conan snapped the
chain.

They burst through into another, smaller garden, lit with hanging
lanterns, just as the gilded door gave way and a stream of armed
figures flooded into the Paradise Garden.

In the midst of the garden into which the fugitives had come stood the
tall, slim tower Conan had noticed when he first entered the palace. A
latticed balcony extended out a few feet from its second storey. Above
the balcony, the tower rose square and slim to a height of over a
hundred yards, then widened out into a walled observation platform.

"Is there another way out of here?" asked Conan.

"That door leads into the palace at a place not far from the stair down
to the dungeon," said Antar, pointing.

"Make for it, then!" said Conan, slamming the door behind him and
wedging it with a dagger. "That might hold it for a few seconds at
least."

They raced across the garden to the door indicated, but it proved to be
closed and bolted from the inside. Conan threw himself against it but
failed to shake it.

Vengeful yells reached a crescendo behind them as the dagger-wedged
door splintered inward. The aperture was crowded with wild faces and
waving arms as Zahak's men jammed there in their frantic eagerness.

The tower!" roared Conan. "If we can get in there…"

The Magus often made magics in the upper chamber," panted a Zuagir
running after Conan. "He let none other than the Tiger in that chamber,
but men say arms are stored there. Guards sleep below—"

"Come on!" bellowed Conan, racing in the lead and dragging Nanaia so
that she seemed to fly through the air. The door in the wall gave way
altogether, spilling a knot of Hyrkanians into the garden, falling over
one another in their haste. From the noise that came from every other
direction, it would be only a matter of minutes before men swarmed into
the Garden of the Tower from all its apertures.

As Conan neared the tower, the door in the base opened as five
bewildered guards came out They yelped in astonishment as they saw a
knot of men rushing upon them with teeth bared and eyes blazing in the
light of the hanging lanterns. Even as they reached for their blades,
Conan was upon them. Two fell to his whirling blade as the Zuagirs
swarmed over the remaining three, slashing and stabbing until the
glittering figures lay still in puddles of crimson.

But now the Hyrkanians from the Paradise Garden were racing towards the
tower too, their armor flashing and their accouterments jingling. The
Zuagirs stormed into the tower. Conan slammed the bronze door and shot
home a bolt that would have stopped the charge of an elephant, just as
the Hyrkanians piled up against the door on the outside.

Conan and his people rushed up the stairs, eyes and teeth gleaming, all
but one who collapsed halfway up from loss of blood. Conan carried him
the rest of the way, laid him on the floor, and told Nanaia to bandage
the ghastly gash made by the sword of one of the guards they had just
killed. Then he took stock of their surroundings. They were in an upper
chamber of the tower, with small windows and a door opening out on to
the latticed balcony. The light from the lanterns in the garden, coming
in little twinkles through the lattice and the windows, shone faintly
on racks of arms lining the walls: helms, cuirasses, bucklers, spears,
swords, axes, maces, bows, and sheaves of arrows. There were enough
arms here to equip a troop, and no doubt there were more in the higher
chambers. Virata had made the tower his arsenal and keep as well as his
magical oratory.

The Zuagirs chanted gleefully as they snatched bows and quivers from
the walls and went out on the balcony. Though several had minor wounds,
they began shooting through the holes in the lattice into the yelling
mob of soldiery swarming below.

A storm of arrows came back, clattering against the lattice-work and a
few coming through. The men outside shot at random, as they could not
see the Zuagirs in the shadow. The mob had surged to the tower from all
directions. Zahak was not in sight, but a hundred or so of his
Hyrkanians were, and a welter of men of a dozen other races. They
swarmed about the garden yelling like fiends.

The lanterns, swinging wildly under the impact of bodies stumbling
against the slender trees, lit a mass of twisted faces with white
eyeballs rolling madly upward. Blades flickered lightninglike all over
the garden. Bowstrings twanged blindly. Bushes and shrubs were shredded
underfoot as the mob milled and eddied. Thump! They had obtained a beam
and were using it as a ram against the door.

"Get those men with the ram!" barked Conan, bending the stiffest bow he
had been able to find in the racks.

The overhang of the balcony kept the besieged from seeing those at the
front end of the ram, but as they picked off those in the rear, those
in front had to drop the timber because of its weight Looking around,
Conan was astonished to see Nanaia, her sheet of silk wrapped around
her waist to make a skirt, shooting with the Zuagirs.

"I thought I told you—" he began, but she only said:

"Curse it, have you nothing I can use as a bracer? The bowstring is
cutting my arm to ribbons."

Conan turned away with a baffled sigh and resumed shooting his own bow.
He understood the celerity with which he and his men had been trapped
when he heard Olgerd Vladislav's voice lifted like the slash of a saber
above the clamor. The Zaporoskan must have learned of Virata's death
within minutes and taken instant command.

"They bring ladders," said Antar.

Conan peered into the dark. By the light of the bobbing lanterns he saw
three ladders coming towards the tower, each carried by several men. He
stepped into the armory and presently came out on the balcony again
with a spear.

A pair of men were holding the base of one ladder against the ground
while two more raised it by walking toward the tower holding the
ladder's uprights over their heads. The ends of the ladder crunched
against the lattice.

"Push it over! Throw it down!" cried the Zuagirs, and one started to
thrust his sword through the lattice.

"Back!" snarled Conan. "Let me take care of this!"

He waited until several men had swarmed up the ladder. The top man was
a burly fellow with an ax. As he swung the ax to hack away the flimsy
wooden latticework, Conan thrust his spear through one of the holes,
placed the point against a rung, and pushed. The ladder swayed back.
The men on it screamed, dropping their weapons to clutch at the rungs.
Down crashed the ladder and its* load into the front ranks of the
besiegers.

"Come! Here's another!" cried a Zuagir, and Conan hurried to another
side of the balcony to push over a second ladder. The third was only
half raised when arrows brought down two of the men raising it, so that
it fell back.

"Keep shooting," growled Conan, laying down his spear and bending the
great bow.

The continuous rain of arrows, to which they could make no effective
reply, wore down the spirits of the throng below. They broke and
scattered for cover, and the Zuagirs whooped with frantic glee and sent
long, arching flights of missiles after them.

In a few moments, the garden was empty except for the dead and dying,
though Conan could see the movement of men along the surrounding walls
and roofs.

Conan reentered the armory and climbed the stair. He passed through
several more rooms lined with arms, then came to the magical laboratory
of the Magus. He spared only a brief glance at the dusty manuscripts,
the strange instruments and diagrams, and climbed the remaining flight
to the observation platform.

From here he could take stock of their position. The palace, he now
saw, was surrounded by gardens except in front, where there was a wide
courtyard. All was enclosed by an outer wall. Lower, inner walls
separated the gardens somewhat like the spokes of a wheel, with the
high outer wall taking the place of the rim.

The garden in which they were at bay lay on the northwest side of the
palace, next to the courtyard, which was separated from it by a wall.
Another wall lay between it and the next garden to the west. Both this
garden and the Garden of the Tower lay outside the Paradise Garden,
which was half-enclosed by the walls of the palace itself.

Over the outer wall that surrounded the whole of the palace grounds,
Conan looked down on the roofs of the city. The nearest house was not
over thirty paces from the wall. Lights blazed everywhere, in the
palace, the gardens, and the adjacent houses.

The noise, the shouts and groans and curses and the clatter of arms,
died down to a murmur. Then Olgerd Vladislav's voice was raised from
behind the courtyard wall: "Are you ready to yield, Conan?"

Conan laughed at him. "Come and get us!"

"I shall—at dawn," the Zaporoskan assured him, "You're as good as dead
now."

"So you said when you left me in the ravine of the devil-ape, but I'm
alive and the ape is dead!"

Conan had spoken in Hyrkanian. A shout of anger and unbelief arose from
all quarters. Conan continued: "Do the Yezmites know that the Magus is
dead, Olgerd?"

"They know that Olgerd Vladislav is the real ruler of Yanaidar, as he
has always been. I know not how you slew the ape, nor how you got those
Zuagiri dogs out of their cells, but I'll have your skins hanging on
this wall before the sun is an hour high!"

Presently a banging and hammering sounded on the other side of the
courtyard, out of sight. Olgerd yelled: "Do you hear that, you
Cimmerian swine? My men are building a helepolis—a siege tower on
wheels, which will stop your shafts and shelter fifty men behind it At
dawn we'll push it up to the tower and swarm in. That will be your
finish, dog!"

"Send your men on in. Tower or no tower, we'll pick them off just as
fast."

The Zaporoskan replied with a shout of derisive laughter, and
thereafter there was no more parleying. Conan considered a sudden break
for freedom but abandoned the idea. Men clustered thickly behind every
wall around the garden, and such an attempt would be suicide. The
fortress had become a prison.

Conan admitted to himself that if the Kushafis did not appear on time,
he and his party were finished despite all his strength and speed and
ferocity and the help of the Zuagirs.

The hammering went on unseen. Even if the Kushafis came at sunrise,
they might be too late. The Yezmites would have to break down a section
of the garden wall to get the machine into the garden, but that would
not take long.

The Zuagirs did not share their leader's somber forebodings. They had
already wrought a glorious slaughter; they had a strong position, a
leader they worshiped, and an unlimited supply of missiles. What more
could a warrior desire?

The Zuagir with the sword cut died just as dawn was paling the lanterns
in the garden below. Conan stared at his pitiful band. The Zuagirs
prowled the balcony, peering through the lattice, while Nanaia slept
the sleep of exhaustion on the floor, wrapped in the silken sheet.

The hammering ceased. Presently, in the stillness, Conan heard the
creak of massive wheels. He could not yet see the juggernaut the
Yezmites had built, but he could make out the black forms of men
huddled on the roofs of the houses beyond the outer wall. He looked
further, over the roofs and clustering trees, toward the northern edge
of the plateau. He saw no sign of life, in the growing light, among the
fortifications that lined the rim of the cliffs. Evidently the guards,
undeterred by the fate of Antar and the original sentries, had deserted
their posts to join the fighting at the palace. But, as he watched,
Conan saw a group of a dozen men trudging along the road that led to
the Stair. Olgerd would not long leave that point unguarded.

Conan turned back toward his six Zuagirs, whose bearded faces looked
silently at him out of bloodshot eyes.

"The Kushafis have not come," he said. "Presently Olgerd will send his
slayers against us under cover of a great shield on wheels. They will
climb up ladders behind this shield and burst in here. We shall slay
some of them; then we shall die."

"As Hanuman has decreed," they answered. "We shall slay many ere we
die." They grinned like hungry wolves in the dawn and thumbed their
weapons.

Conan looked out and saw the storming machine rumbling across the
courtyard. It was a massive affair of beams and bronze and iron, on
oxcart wheels. At least fifty men could huddle behind it, safe from
arrows. It rolled toward the wall and halted. Sledge hammers began to
crash against the wall.

The noise awakened Nanaia. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, stared about,
and ran to Conan with a cry.

"Hush up. We'll beat them yet," he said gruffly, although he thought
otherwise. There was nothing he could do for her now but stand before
her in the last charge and perhaps spare one last merciful sword stroke
for her.

"The wall crumbles," muttered a lynx-eyed Zuagir, peering through the
lattice. "Dust rises under the hammers. Soon we shall see the workmen
who swing the sledges."

Stones toppled out of the weakened wall; then a whole section crashed
down. Men ran into the gap, picked up stones, and carried them away.
Conan bent the strong Hyrkanian bow he had been using and sent a long
arching shot at the gap. It skewered a Yezmite, who fell shrieking and
thrashing. Others dragged the wounded man out of the way and continued
clearing the passage. Behind them loomed the siege tower, whose crew
shouted impatiently to those toiling in the gap to hurry and clear the
way. Conan sent shaft after shaft at the crowd. Some bounced from the
stones, but now and then one found a human target. When the men
flinched at their task, Olgerd's whiplash voice drove them back to it.

As the sun rose, casting long shadows across the courts, the last
remains of the wall in front of the tower were shoveled out of the way.
Then, with a mighty creaking and groaning, the tower advanced. The
Zuagirs shot at it, but their arrows merely stuck in the hides that
covered its front. The tower was of the same height as the storey on
which they stood, with ladders going up its rear side. When it reached
the tower in the garden, the Yezmites would swarm up, rush across the
small platform on top, and burst through the flimsy lattice on to the
balcony on which Conan and his men crouched.

"You have fought well," he told them. "Let us end well by taking as
many Yezmite dogs with us as we can. Instead of waiting for them to
swarm in here, let us burst the lattice ourselves, charge out on to the
platform, and hurl the Yezmites off it Then we can slay those that
climb the ladders as they come up."

"Their archers will riddle us from the ground," said Antar.

Conan shrugged, his lip curling in a somber smile. "We can have some
fun in the meantime. Send the men to fetch pikes from the armory; for
this kind of push, a solid line of spears is useful. And there are some
big shields there; let those on the flanks carry these to protect the
rest of us."

A moment later Conan lined up the six surviving Zuagirs with pikes,
while he stood in front of them with a massive battle-ax, ready to chop
away the lattice and lead the charge on to the platform.

Nearer rolled the tower, the men huddled behind it shouting their
triumph.

Then, when the siege tower was hardly a spear's length from the
balcony, it stopped. The long trumpets blared, a great hubbub arose,
and presently the men behind the tower began running back through the
gap in the wall.

9. The Fate of Yanaidar

"Crom, Mitra, and Asura!" roared Conan, throwing down his ax. "The dogs
can't be running before they are even hurt!"

He strode back and forth on the balcony, trying to see what was
happening, but the bulk of the deserted siege tower blocked his view.
Then he dashed into the armory chamber and up the winding stair to the
observation platform.

Toward the north, he looked out over the roofs of Yanaidar along the
road that stretched out in the white dawn. Half a dozen men were
running along that road. Behind them, other figures were swarming
through the fortifications at the rim of the plateau. A fierce, deep
yelling came to the ears listening in the suddenly silent city. And in
the silence Conan again heard the mysterious drumming that had
disturbed him on previous occasions. Now, however, he did not care if
all the fiends of Hell were drumming under Yanaidar.

Balash!" he cried.

Again, the negligence of the guards of the Stair had helped him. The
Kushafis had climbed the unguarded Stair in time to slaughter the
sentries coming to mount guard there. The numbers swarming up on to the
plateau were greater than the village of Kushaf could furnish, and he
could recognize, even at this distance, the red silken breeches of his
own kozaki.

In Yanaidar, frozen amazement gave way to hasty action. Men yelled on
the roofs and ran about in the street. From housetop to housetop the
news of the invasion spread. Conan was not surprised, a few moments
later, to hear Olgerd's whiplash voice shouting orders.

Soon, men poured into the square from the gardens and court and from
the houses around the square. Conan glimpsed Olgerd, far down the
street amidst a glittering company of armored Hyrkanians, at the head
of which gleamed Zahak's plumed helmet After them thronged hundreds of
Yezmite warriors, in good order for tribesmen. Evidently Olgerd had
taught them the rudiments of civilized warfare.

They swung along as if they meant to march out on to the plain and meet
the oncoming horde in battle, but at the end of the street they
scattered, taking cover in the gardens and the houses on each side of
the street.

The Kushafis were still too far away to see what was going on in the
city. By the time they reached a point where they could look down the
street, it seemed empty. But Conan, from his vantage point, could see
the gardens at the northern end of the town clustered with menacing
figures, the roofs loaded with men with double-curved bows strung for
action. The Kushafis were marching into a trap, while he stood there
helpless. Conan gave a strangled groan.

A Zuagir panted up the stair and stood beside Conan, knotting a rude
bandage about a wounded wrist He spoke through his teeth, with which he
was tugging at the rag. "Are those your friends? The fools run headlong
into the fangs of death."

"I know," growled Conan.

"I know what will happen. When I was a palace guardsman, I heard the
Tiger tell his officers his plan for defense. See you that orchard at
the end of the street, on the east side? Fifty swordsmen hide there.
Across the road is a garden we call the Garden of the Stygian. There
too, fifty warriors lurk in ambush. The house next to it is full of
warriors, and so are the first three houses on the other side of the
street."

""Why tell me? I can see the dogs crouching in the orchard and on the
roofs/'

"Aye! Then men in the orchard and the garden will wait until the
Ilbarsis have passed beyond them and are between the houses. Then the
archers on the roofs will pour arrows down upon them, while the
swordsmen close in from all sides. Not a man will escape."

"Could I but warn them!" muttered Conan. "Come on, we're going down."

He leaped down the stairs and called in Antar and the other Zuagirs.
"We're going out to fight."

"Seven against seven hundred?" said Antar. "I am no craven, but—"

In a few words Conan told him what he had seen from the top of the
tower. "If, when Olgerd springs his trap, we can take the Yezmites in
the rear in turn, we might just be able to turn the tide. We have
nothing to lose, for if Olgerd destroys my friends he'll come back and
finish us."

"But how shall we be known from Olgerd's dogs?" persisted the Zuagir.
"Your reavers will hew us down with the rest and ask questions
afterwards."

"In here," said Conan. In the armory, he handed out silvered coats of
scale mail and bronze helmets of an antique pattern, with tall,
horsehair crests, unlike any he had seen in Yanaidar. "Put these on.
Keep together and shout 'Conan!" as your war-cry, and we shall do all
right." He donned one of the helms himself.

The Zuagirs grumbled at the weight of the armor and complained that
they were half blinded by the helmets, whose cheek plates covered most
of their faces.

"Put them on!" roared Conan. "This is a stand-up fight, no desert
jackal's slash-and-ran raid. Now, wait here until I fetch you."

He climbed back to the top of the tower. The Free Companions and the
Kushafis were marching along the road in compact companies. Then they
halted. Balash was too crafty an old wolf to rush headlong into a city
he knew nothing about A few men detached themselves from the mass and
ran towards the town to scout. They disappeared behind the houses, then
reappeared again, running back towards the main forces. After them came
a hundred or so Yezmites, running in ragged formation.

The invaders spread out into a battle line. The sun glinted on sheets
of arrows arching between the two groups. A few Yezmites fell, while
the rest closed with the Kushafis and the kozaki. There was an instant
of dusty confusion through which sparkled the whirl of blades. Then the
Yezmites broke and fled back towards the houses. Just as Conan feared,
the invaders poured after them, howling like blood-mad demons. Conan
knew the hundred had been sent out to draw his men into the trap.
Olgerd would never have sent such an inferior force to charge the
invaders otherwise.

They converged from both sides into the road. There, though Balash was
unable to check their headlong rush, he did at least manage to beat and
curse them into a more compact formation as they surged into the end of
the street.

Before they reached it, not fifty paces behind the last Yezmites, Conan
was racing down the stairs.

"Come on!" he shouted. "Nanaia, bolt the door behind us and stay herd."

Down the stair to the first storey they pelted, out the door, past the
deserted siege tower, and through the gap in the wall. Nobody barred
their way. Olgerd must have taken from the palace every man who could
bear arms.

Antar led them into the palace and out again through the front
entrance. As they emerged, the signal for the Yezmite attack was given
by a deafening roar of a dozen long bronze trumpets in the hands of
Olgerd's Hyrkanians. By the time they reached the street, the trap had
closed. Conan could see the backs of a mass of Yezmites struggling with
the invaders, filling the street from side to side, while archers
poured arrows into the mass from the roofs of the houses on either
side.

With a silent rush Conan led his little group straight into the rear of
the Yezmites. The latter knew nothing until the pikes of the Zuagirs
thrust them through the back. As the first victims fell, the desert
Shemites wrenched out their spears and thrust again and again, while in
the middle of the line Conan whirled his ax, splitting skulls and
lopping off arms at the shoulder. As the pikes broke or became jammed
in the bodies of the Yezmites, the Zuagirs dropped them and took to
their swords.

Such was the mad fury of Conan's onslaught that he and his little squad
had felled thrice their own number before the Yezmites realized they
were taken in the rear. As they looked around, the unfamiliar harness
and the shambles of mangled bodies made them give back with cries of
dismay. To their imaginations the seven madly slashing and chopping
attackers seemed like an army.

"Conan! Conan!" howled the Zuagirs.

At the cry, the trapped force roused itself. There were only two men
between Conan and his own force. One was thrust through by the kozak
facing him. Conan brought his ax down on the other's helmet so hard
that it not only split helm and head but also broke the ax handle.

In an instant of lull, when Conan and the Zuagirs faced the kozaki and
nobody was sure of the others' identity, Conan pushed his helmet back
so that his face showed.

"To me!" he bellowed above the clatter. "Smite them, dog-brothers!"

"It is Conan!" cried the nearest Free Companions, and the cry. was
taken up through the host.

"Ten thousand pieces of gold for the Cimmerian's head!" came the sharp
voice of Olgerd Vladislav.

The clatter of weapons redoubled. So did the chorus of cries, curses,
threats, shrieks, and groans. The battle began to break up into
hundreds of single combats and fights among small groups. They swirled
up and down the street, trampling the dead and wounded; they surged
into the houses, smashed furniture, thundered up and down stairs, and
erupted on to the roofs, where the Kushafis and kozaki made short work
of the archers posted there.

After that, there was no semblance of order or plan, no chance to obey
commands and no time to give them. It was all blind, gasping, sweating
butchery, hand-to-hand, with straining feet splashing through pools of
blood. Mingled inextricably, the heaving mass of fighters surged and
eddied up and down Yanaidar's main street and overflowed into the
alleys and gardens. There was little difference in the numbers of the
rival hordes. The outcome hung in the balance, and no man knew how the
general battle was going; each was too busy killing and trying not to
be killed to see what was going on around him,

Conan did not waste breath trying to command order out of chaos. Craft
and strategy had gone by the board; the fight would be decided by sheer
muscle and ferocity. Hemmed in by howling madmen, there was nothing for
him to do but split as many heads and spill as many guts as he could
and let the gods of chance decide the issue.

Then, as a fog thins when the wind strikes it, the battle began to
thin, knotted masses splitting and melting into groups and individuals.
Conan knew that one side or the other was giving way as men turned
their backs on the slaughter. It was the Yezmites who wavered, the
madness inspired by the drugs their leaders had given them beginning to
die out.

Then Conan saw Olgerd Vladislav. The Zaporoskan's helmet and cuirass
were dented and blood-splashed, his garments shredded, his corded
muscles quivering and knotting to the lightning play of his saber. His
gray eyes blazed and his lips wore a reckless smile. Three dead
Kushafis lay at his feet and his saber kept half a dozen blades in play
at once. Right and left of him corseleted Hyrkanians and slit-eyed
Khitans in lacquered leather smote and wrestled breast to breast with
wild Kushafi tribesmen.

Conan also saw Tubal for the first time, plowing through the wrack of
battle like a black-bearded buffalo as he glutted his wild-beast fury
in stupendous blows. And he saw Balash reeling out of the battle
covered with blood. Conan began beating his way through to Olgerd.

Olgerd laughed with a wild gleam in his eyes as he saw the Cimmerian
coming toward him. Blood streamed down Conan's mail and coursed in tiny
rivulets down his massive, sun-browned arms. His knife was red to the
hilt.

"Come and die, Conan!" shouted Olgerd. Conan came in as a kozak would
come, in a blazing whirl of action. Olgerd sprang to meet him, and they
fought as the kozaki fight, both attacking simultaneously, stroke
raining on stroke too swiftly for the eye to follow.

In a circle about them, the panting, blood-stained warriors ceased
their own work of slaughter to stare at the two leaders settling the
destiny of Yanaidar.

"Aie!" cried a hundred throats as Conan stumbled, losing contact with
the Zaporoskan blade.

Olgerd cried out ringingly and whirled up his sword. Before he could
strike, or even realize the Cimmerian had tricked him, the long knife,
driven by Conan's iron muscles, punched through his breastplate and
through the heart beneath. He was dead before he struck the ground,
tearing the blade out of the wound as he fell.

As Conan straightened to look around, there came a new outcry, somehow
different from what he would have expected to hear as his men set upon
the broken Yezmites. He looked up and saw a new force of armed men
clattering down the street in a solid, disciplined formation crushing
and brushing aside the knots of fighters in their way. As they came
close, Conan made out the gilded mail and nodding plumes of the
Iranistanian royal guard. At their head raged the mighty Gotarza,
striking with his great scimitar at Yezmite and kozak alike.

In a twinkling the whole aspect of the battle had changed. Some
Yezmites fled. Conan shouted: "To me, kozaki!" and his band began to
cluster around him, mixed with the Kushafis and some of the Yezmites.
The latter, finding Conan the only active leader against the new common
foe, fell in with the men with whom they had just been locked in a
death grapple, while along the front between the two masses, swords
flashed and more men fell.

Conan found himself facing Gotarza, who swept the field with blows that
would have felled small oaks. Conan's notched blade sang and flashed
too fast for the eye to follow, but the Iranistani was not behind him.
Blood from a cut on the forehead ran down the side of Gotarza's face;
blood from another flesh wound in Conan's shoulder crimsoned the front
of his mail. But still the blades whirled and clashed, neither finding
an opening in the other's guard.

Then the roar of battle rose in pitch to screams of pure terror. On all
sides, men began to leave the fight to ran for the road to the Stair.
The panic push drove Conan into a corps-ti-corps with Gotarza. Breast
to breast they strained and wrestled. Conan, opening his mouth to
shout, found it full of Gotarza's long black beard. He spat it out and
roared:

"What in Hell is going on, you palace-bred lap dog?"

"The real owners of Yanaidar have come back," shouted Gotarza. "Look,
swine!"

Conan risked a glance. From all sides, hordes of slinking gray shadows
with unblinking, soulless eyes and misshapen, doglike jaws swarmed, to
fasten upon any man they met, wherever a clawed but manlike hand could
find a hold, and begin to tear him apart and devour him on the spot Men
struck at them with the strength of maniacal terror, but their
corpselike skins seemed almost impervious to weapons. Where one fell,
three others leaped to take its place.

The ghouls of Yanaidar!" gasped Gotarza. "We must flee. Smite me not in
the back till we win clear, and I'll hold my hand from you. We can
settle our own score later."

The rush of fugitives bowled the two off their feet Conan felt human
feet on his back. With a tremendous effort he forced himself back on
his knees and then to his feet, striking out with fists and elbows to
clear enough space to breathe.

The rout flowed out northward along the road to the Stair, Yezmites,
kozaki, Kushafis, and Iranistanian guards all mixed together but
forgetting their three-cornered battle in the face of this subhuman
menace. Women and children mingled with the warriors. Along the flanks
of the rout swarmed the ghouls, like great gray lice, flowing over any
person who became momentarily separated from the rest. Conan, thrust
out to the edges of the crowd by the buffeting of the fugitives, came
upon Gotarza staggering under the attack of four ghouls. He had lost
his sword but gripped two by the throat, one with each hand, while a
third clung to his legs and a fourth circled around, trying to reach
his throat with its jaws.

A swipe of Conan's knife cut one ghoul in half; a second took off the
head of another. Gotarza hurled the others from him, and then they
swarmed over Conan, ripping and snapping with claws and fangs. For an
instant they almost pulled him down. He was dimly aware that Gotarza
had pulled one off him, thrown it to the ground, and was stamping on it
with a sticklike snapping of ribs. Conan broke his knife on another and
crushed the skull of a third with the hilt.

Then he was running on again with the rest. They poured through the
gate in the cyclopean wall, down the Stair, down the ramps, and out
across the floor of the canyon. The ghouls pursued them as far as the
gate, pulling down man after man. As the last fugitives jammed through
the gate, the ghouls fell back, scurrying along the road and into the
orchards to fall snarling upon the bodies over which little knots of
their own kind already snapped and fought.

In the canyon, men collapsed from weariness, lying down upon the rock
heedless of the proximity of their late foes or sitting with their
backs against boulders and crags. Most were wounded. All were
blood-spattered, disheveled, and bloodshot of eye, in ragged garments
and hacked and dented armor. Many had lost their weapons. Of the
hundreds of warriors who had gathered for the battle in Yanaidar in the
dawn, less than half emerged from the city. For a time the only sounds
were those of heavy breathing, the groans of the wounded, the ripping
of garments as men made them into crude bandages, and the occasional
clink of weapons on the rock as they moved about.

Though he had been fighting, running, and climbing most of the time
since the previous afternoon, Conan was one of the first on his feet.
He yawned and stretched, winced at the sting of his wounds, and stalked
about, caring for his own men and gathering them into a compact mass.
Of his squad of Zuagirs, he could find only three including Antar.
Tubal he found, but not Codrus.

On the other side of the canyon, Balash, sitting with his leg swathed
in bandages, ordered his Kushafis in a weak voice. Gotarza collected
his guardsmen. The Yezmites, who had suffered the heaviest losses,
wandered about like lost sheep, staring fearfully at the other
gathering groups.

"I slew Zahak with my own hands," explained Antar, "so they have no
high officer to rally them."

Conan strode over to where Balash lay. "How are you doing, old wolf?"

"Well enough, though I cannot walk unaided. So the old legends are true
after all! Every so often, the ghouls issue from chambers under
Yanaidar to devour any men so rash as to have taken up residence
there." He shuddered. "I do not think anybody will soon try to rebuild
the city again."

"Conan!" called Gotarza. "We have things to discuss."

"I'm ready," growled Conan. To Tubal he said: "Gather the men into
formation, with those least wounded and best armed on the outside."
Then he strode over the rock-littered canyon floor to a point halfway
between his group and Gotarza's. The latter came forward too, saying:

"I still have orders to fetch you and Balash back to Anshan, dead or
alive."

"Try it," said Conan.

Balash called from his sitting-place: "I am wounded, but if you try to
bear me off by force, my people will harry you through the hills till
not one lives."

"A brave threat, but after another battle you would not have enough
men," said Gotarza. "You know the other tribes would take advantage of
your weakness to plunder your village and carry off your women. The
king rules the Ilbars because the Ilbarsi tribes have never united and
never will."

Balash remained silent for a moment, then said: 'Tell me, Gotarza, how
did you find whither we had gone?"

"We came to Kushaf last night, and the prickle of a skinning knife
persuaded a boy of the village to tell us you had gone into Drujistan
and guide us on your trail.

In the light before dawn, we came up to that place where you climb a
cliff by a rope ladder, and the fools in their haste did not draw it up
after them. We bound the men you had left to guard your horses and came
up after you.

"But now to business. I have nought against either of you, but I have
sworn an oath by Asura to obey the commands of Kobad Shah, and I will
obey them while I can drew breath. On the other hand, it seems a shame
to begin a further slaughter when our men are so weary and so many
brave warriors have fallen."

"What had you in mind?" growled Conan.

"I thought you and I might settle the question by single combat. If I
fall, you may go your ways, as there will be none to stop you. If you
fall, Balash shall return to Anshan with me. You may be able to prove
your innocence at that," Gotarza added to the Kushafi chief. "The king
shall know of your part in ending the cult of the Hidden Ones."

"Not from what I know of Kobad's mad suspiciousness," said Balash. "But
I'll agree, as no city-bred Iranistani dog could worst Conan in such a
duel."

"Agreed," said Conan shortly, and turned back to his men. "Who has the
biggest sword?"

He hefted several and chose a long, straight one of Hyborian pattern.
Then he faced Gotarza. "Are you ready?"

"Ready," said Gotarza, and came on with a rush.

The two blades flashed and clanged in a whirl of steel, so fast that
the onlookers could not see clearly what was happening. The warriors
leaped, circled, advanced, retreated, and ducked decapitating slashes,
while the blades continued their din, never stopping for a second.
Slash— parry—thrust—cut—lunge—parry they went. Never in Yanaidar's
thousands of years had those crags looked down upon so magnificent a
display of swordsmanship.

"Hold!" cried a voice. Then, as the fight continued: "I said hold!"

Conan and Gotarza backed away from each other warily and turned to see
who was shouting.

"Bardiya!" cried Gotarza at the stout major-domo, who stood in the
notch of the gully that led to the cliff of the rope ladder. "What do
you here?"

"Cease your battle," said the Iranistani. "I have killed three horses
catching up with you. Kobad Shah has died of the poison on the flame
knife, and his son Arshak reigns. He has withdrawn all charges against
Conan and Balash and urges Balash to resume his loyal protection of the
northern frontier and Conan to return to his service. Iranistan will
need such warriors, as Yezdigerd of Turan, having dispersed the bands
of kozaki, is again sending his armies forth to ravage and subdue his
neighbors."

"If that's so," said Conan, "there will be rich pickings on the
Turanian steppe again, and I'm tired of the intrigues of your perfumed
court." He turned to his men. "Those who want to return to Anshan may
go; the rest ride north with me tomorrow."

"But what of us?" wailed a plumed Hyrkanian guard from Yanaidar. "The
Iranistanis will slay us out of hand. Our city is taken by ghouls, our
families are slaughtered, our leaders are slain. What will become of
us?"

"Those who like may come with me," said Conan indifferently. "The
others might ask Balash if he'll accept them. Many of the women of his
tribe will be looking for new husbands—Crom!"

Conan's roving eye had lighted on a group of women in which he
recognized Parusati. The sight reminded him of something he had
forgotten.

"What is it, Conan?" said Tubal.

"I forgot the wench, Nanaia. She's still in the tower. Now how in Hell
am I to get back to rescue her from the ghouls?"

"You needn't," said a voice. One of the surviving Zuagirs who had
followed Conan pulled off a bronze helmet, revealing Nanaia's features
as her black hair tumbled down her back.

Conan started, then laughed thunderously. "I thought I told you to
stay—oh, well, it's just as well you didn't." He kissed her loudly and
spanked her sharply. "One's for fighting beside us; the other's for
disobedience. Now come along. Rouse yourselves, dog-brothers; will you
sit on your fat behinds on these bare rocks until you starve?"

Leading the tall dark girl, he strode into the cleft that led to the
road to Kushaf.